The Historicity of ExperienceTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE sheet 1 of 363 [620791]
The Historicity of ExperienceTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 1 of 363
avant-garde &modernism studies
General EditorsMarjorie PerloffRainer RumoldConsulting EditorsPeter FenvesStephen FosterChristine FroulaFrançoise LionnetRobert von HallbergTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 2 of 363
The Historicityof Experience
Modernity, the Avant-Garde,and the Event
NorthwesternUniversity PressEvanstonIllinoisTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 3 of 363
Northwestern University PressEvanston, Illinois -Copyright © by Northwestern University Press.Published . All rights reserved.Printed in the United States of America --- (cloth)
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are availablefrom the Library of Congress.The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsof the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, .-.Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 4 of 363
Contents
Acknowledgments, viiIntroduction: The Avant-Garde as a Critique of Experience,
Part One. Rethinking the Experience of Modernity:Art, T echnology, and Sexual Difference
Reproducing History: Benjamin and Heidegger
on the Work of Art in Modernity,
Contestations of the Everyday: The Avant-Garde, Technology,
and the Critique of Aesthetics,
Sexuate Experience: Irigaray and the Poetics of Sexual Difference,
Part T wo. The Avant-Garde Moment in a T ransatlantic Frame:Poetics, Sexuality, and Revolution
Gertrude Stein’s Poetics of the Event:
Avant-Garde, the Ordinary, and Sexual Difference,
History and Revolution: Khlebnikov’s Futurist Revision
of Modern Rationality in Zangezi,
Part Three. From the Avant-Garde to Language Poets
How to Write the Everyday in Eastern Europe:
Miron Białoszewski’s ‘‘Minor’’ Poetry,
‘‘A Sounding of Uncertainty’’:
Susan Howe’s Poetic Gendering of History,
Beyond the Negative: An Afterword on the Avant-Garde, Notes, Bibliography, Index, Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 5 of 363
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Acknowledgments
I gratefully acknowledge here the support which this project received fromvarious institutions and individuals.The initial stage of my research for The
Historicity of Experience was funded by the National Endowment for the
Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. I also received a researchstipend from the Institute for Scholarship in Liberal Arts at the Universityof Notre Dame, which made possible extended work on this book duringthe summer of .
I am grateful to Marjorie Perloff and Jerry Bruns for their comments and
support of this project.Tom Butler helped me a great deal with editing andpreparing the manuscript for publication. I am especially indebted to EwaPłonowska Ziarek for her incisive comments, encouragement, and under-standing throughout the work on this book. Finally, I would like to thankmy editors at Northwestern, Susan Harris, Theresa Biancheri, and SusanBetz, for their generous advice and help with bringing this study into print.
Only one part of this book, in a slightly different version, was published
before in another publication: the first two sections of the chapter on Stein,which appeared in Sagetrieb , no. (). Sections of chapters and
were presented at the meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Exis-tential Philosophy and of the International Association for Philosophy andLiterature.
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Introduction
The Avant-Garde as a Critique of Experience
1
The Historicity of Experience rethinks modern experience by bringing
together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Mypurpose in introducing the avant-garde into the philosophical discussionof modernity is not to provide a new global theory of the avant-garde ora cultural-historical account of the diverse avant-garde movements but,rather, to explore, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the keyaspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, tem-porality, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience
i sl e s sab o o k about the avant-garde then a critique of experience through
the avant-garde. Reading the avant-garde in dialoguewith thework of someof the major critics of modernity—Heidegger, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Iri-garay—allows me to situate avant-garde poetry in the broader context ofthe ongoing polemics about modernity and to explore how avant-garde ‘‘ex-periments’’ bear critically upon the issue of modern experience and its tech-nological organization.
In his famous Baudelaire essay on the crisis of experience brought about
by technology,Walter Benjamin links the eclipse of the lyric to the changesin the structure of being in modernity. For Benjamin, the atrophy of a cer-tain kind of experience—of full presence or the aura—makes Baudelairea representative poet of the nineteenth century and possibly the last lyric
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poet. This Benjaminian diagnosis of the crisis of experience and its impacton poetry is reexamined in many divergent discussions of modernity: inHeidegger, Adorno, Foucault, Lyotard, Irigaray, and others. In this book,I propose to read the explosion of the avant-gardes at the beginning of thetwentieth century as yet another response to the crisis of the humanisticconcept of experience, a reaction which leads to a reappraisal of the verynature of poetry and technology. I approach the avant-garde not only as acontestation of the humanistic concept of experience and of its mediatingfunction between body and history, the personal and the cultural, but alsoas a radical redefinition of experience in the context of everydayness.
Against the position taken by Bürger and Huyssen that the avant-garde
is nowadays merely of historical interest, my book asserts that we have notyet properly articulated the critical import of the avant-garde for modernart and its continuing pivotal role for the current debates about the end ofmodernity. This so far unremarked importance of the avant-garde, I argue,lies in its radical refiguration of experience and temporality as an event.Such a notion of experience is always open to the future and transforma-tion, and, as such, irreducible to representations and significations given toit. This critique of experience breaks with the approaches adopted, for in-stance, by Felski, which still see experience in terms of consciousness andrepresentation.What is also new in myapproach is the claim that this avant-garde revision of experience through temporality has its correlate in thephilosophical critiques of modernity. In order to fully flesh out the impor-tance of the avant-garde aesthetics as a critique of experience, I developthe conception of experience as event through an engagement with think-ers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Lyotard. I concretize thisnew concept of modern experience in terms of a cluster of issues of pivotalimportance to modernity—technology, everydayness, history, gender, andaesthetics—and show how avant-garde poetry produces revisions in theseaspects of modern experience.
Since this refiguration of experience is inextricably connected with the
critique of aesthetics, crucial to my approach is Heidegger’s attempt to finda postaesthetic approach to the work of art. Heidegger’s importance forthinking about the radical aesthetics of the avant-garde lies in his definitionof art as the temporal event of unconcealment,which radicallydeparts fromthe dominant conceptions of modernist art: art for art’s sake, formalism,art as a sector of culture, artwork as a commodity. Through a reading ofHeidegger on art and technology, I develop this nonaesthetic understand-ing of art’s critical role in relation to history, everydayness, and modern
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technology. Such a liberation of the work of art from aesthetic categori-zations is also, I argue, at the heart of the avant-garde. This postaestheticunderstanding of the avant-garde poetry shows that, contrary to commonmisperceptions, the avant-garde does not exhaust itself in its negative orself-destructive impulse but reaches toward a new understanding of experi-ence and temporality.
The configuration of four poets, Stein, Khlebnikov, Białoszewski, and
H o w ei nt h es e c o n dp a r to f The Historicity of Experience allows me to dem-
onstrate the broad reach and the variety of forms that the avant-garderevision of experience and aesthetics take. The inclusion of the EasternEuropean poets in my study not only broadens the perspective beyond theWestern avant-garde but also illustrates the fact that one can detect thecommon threads of this new understanding of the relation between art andexperience even in such distinct articulations of the avant-garde as Futur-ism, language poetry, or the work of Stein. Showing that the avant-gardepoetry, which is usually elided from the philosophical discussions of mod-ernist aesthetics, should be at the very center of such critiques, The Histo-
ricity of Experience proposes a fundamental reconceptualization of the cur-
rent approaches to the avant-garde, and claims that the avant-garde offersus the most radical concept of experience, temporality, and aesthetics. Itis the radicality of this concept, together with its political, aesthetic, andethical implications, that makes the avant-garde critical for contemporarytheoretical reconsiderations of modernity.
I nt h efi r s tp a r to f The Historicity of Experience, I critique dominant ide-
ologies of experience and develop a radically different notion of experiencein terms of a scission between its everyday technological representation andits poetic disclosure. My argument is that Heidegger, Benjamin, and Iri-garay explore the ‘‘poetic’’ dimension of experience in order to revise andmodify our understanding of the everyday by emphasizing its historicaldimension and the role of alterity in its formation. I begin by looking atthe work of art in relation to modern experience, history, and language inthe context of the thought of Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Al-though many critics want to keep Benjamin and Heidegger apart, I believethat there are at least as manyaffinities between them as there are irreconcil-able differences. It is those similarities between Heidegger and Benjamin,especially in their critique of experience and technology, that provide thestarting point for myargument for breaking with the governing psychologi-cal or empirical models of experience and articulating a different, poietic,
notion of experience.
1Next, I consider Dadaism’s interest in technology
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and Heidegger’s conception of the two modalities of experience: technē and
poiēsis, in order to propose the notion of a poetic figuration of experience in
the work of art as a contestation of the technicization of the everyday. I ar-gue that the possibilityof thework of art, its contemporary significance, liesin the alternative configuration of experience: What such a ‘‘post-’’ or ‘‘non-aesthetic’’ art figures is the possibility of a poietic formation of experience.By developing Luce Irigaray’s idea of a new poetics necessary to rethinksexual difference and the gender inequality in everyday cultural practices,I radicalize my critique of experience and explore how the issue of sexualdifference complicates the poietic formation of experience.
By turning to avant-garde poetry in parts and , I focus on those forms
of poetic language which, using the resources of ordinary language, undodominant ideas of experience and everydayness. Much of contemporarythought, from Wittgenstein to analytic philosophy, on the one hand, andHeidegger, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, on the other, also gravitates aroundthe problematic of everydayness and ordinary language. However, if Witt-genstein’s work concerns itself largely with the description and analysis ofthe practices of ordinary discourse and ways in which their complexity ex-ceeds and modifies the parameters of logic and philosophical inquiry, Hei-degger and post-Heideggerian thought, by contrast, explore the poetic re-serve of language in order to ‘‘critique’’ the everyday and ordinary languageand disclose a different configuration of everydayexperience. I see that kindof effort to turn the everyday ‘‘against’’ itself, against its increasingly tech-nologically and scientifically determined manifestations, as a decisive char-acteristic of avant-garde poetry. In fact, this is how I define the ‘‘avant-gardeimpulse’’ for the purposes of my study: The avant-garde signifies a projectof rethinking and reinventing the everyday ‘‘poietically,’’ which questionsthe representation of the everyday within ordinary language practices andcommon knowledge, on the one hand, and the techno-scientific logic ofrepresentation,on the other. Avant-garde poetry reformulates and redesignsthe structures and vocabulary of everyday discourse in order to bring intolight what I call the poietic dimension of the everyday.
The word poietic does not signify here an aestheticization of the ordi-
nary, a simple flight from its ‘‘reality,’’ but, instead, an attempt to rethinkthe everyday through a reinvention or a ‘‘recreation,’’ as Gertrude Stein callsit, of poetic language. In view of the pervasive technicization of modern ex-perience, avant-garde poetry—precisely because of its fascination and pre-occupation with technology and its impact on ordinary life—provides thebest venue for the questioning of the techno-scientific modes of perception
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and their influence upon language and the logic of representation.This par-ticularapproach to the avant-garde allows me to situate the problem histori-cally—as an issue of the specifically modern representations of experienceand its relation to art—and yet proceed beyond the divisions and limita-tions that characterize the field of avant-garde ‘‘isms.’’ For this part of myanalysis I choose poetry that is rarely considered together with Continentalthought, anchoring my inquiry in the writings of Gertrude Stein; a Russianmodernist poet, Velimir Khlebnikov; a contemporary Polish poet, MironBiałoszewski; and an American language poet, Susan Howe. I read theirpoetry in terms of a reinvention of the everyday through the problematicof technology, history, and sexual difference.
I became engaged in this project for two sets of reasons. On the one
hand, I wanted to articulate a conception of the avant-gardework of art andpoetry that would underscore the difficult and complex ways in which thispoetics, against common misreadings, was not only connected to but, infact, redefined the problematic of experience and history in their ordinary,technological, and gendered dimensions. My book shows the significanceof Heidegger and post-Heideggerian thought for such a project, arguingthat, by critiquing aesthetics, these approaches begin to redefine modernexperience in view of the progressive technicization of the everyday. Thesecond set of reasons has to do with the still prevalent perception of EasternEuropean poetry largely within the narrowly understood political optics.Although there have been studies linking the language developments inthe twentieth-century American poetry with Western European literature,particularly that of France and Germany, not enough attention has as yetbeen given to their correlations with the avant-garde movements of East-ern Europe.
2By bringing contemporary poetry into a dialogue with the
critiques of representation in Continental philosophy, The Historicity of Ex-
perience hopes to demonstrate that the ongoing revision of language in the
avant-gardes across linguistic and national boundaries should play a criticalrole in the theoretical debates about modern experience.
2
Already in the early s Lyotard diagnosed as constitutive of the post-
modern condition the call to put an end to artistic and linguistic experi-mentation, a demand that has since become even more pronounced in thedebates about the significance of the avant-gardes. In ‘‘What is Postmod-ernism?’’ Lyotard describes postmodernism as a period of a ‘‘slackening’’ of
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aesthetic criteria and intellectual ‘‘experimentation,’’ a time when anxietyabout communication and the stability of representation gives rise to wide-spread practices of advocating various ec lectic forms of realist aesthetics,
supported by the need for communicational consensus and certainty ofmeaning. We are thus faced with a far-reaching demand to forget or sup-press the impulse of the avant-garde and the critical thought that devel-oped with it: ‘‘There is an irrefutable sign of this common disposition: itis that for all those writers nothing is more urgent than to liquidate theheritage of the avant-gardes.’’
3Lyotard charts two different responses that
prescribe ‘‘post’’ or ‘‘non’’-avant-garde functions to art. The first one, ofHabermasian provenance and Hegelian inspiration, postulates the com-pletion of the project of modernity by restoring a unity to the splinteredspheres of modern experience. In their capacity to provide links amongcognitive, ethical, and political discourses, art and aesthetic experience be-come enlisted in the service of the notion of a totalityof social life, restoringan organic unity of experience. The second response liquidates the impactof the avant-garde through ‘‘postmodern’’ eclecticism, an aesthetic whichLyotard calls ‘‘the degree zero of contemporary general culture’’ ( PC,).
Without openly presenting an anti-modernist or anti-avant-garde front,this aesthetic proclaims itself as an advance beyond modernist experimen-tation. In Lyotard’s view, though, it is nothing more than a form of ‘‘ex-tended’’ realism that accommodates all tendencies, and, in a surreptitiousfashion, installs money as the arbiter of taste: ‘‘But this realism of the ‘any-thing goes’ is in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, itremains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according tot h ep r o fi t st h e yy i e l d ’ ’( PC,).
Two interconnected judgments determine the critical, even negative,
attitude toward the avant-garde. On the one hand, there exists a wide-spread opinion that the avant-garde, in spite of the fact that its varioustechniques have been incorporated into and helped shape contemporarypopular culture, has failed both to transform the aesthetic sphere and toreintegrate art into social practice.
4The problem with this judgment is that
it often leaves uninterrogated the metaphysical assumptions about experi-ence, which underlie not only aesthetics and the organization of modernsocial life but also the concept of the divide between art and life and thepostulated goal of the transformation of the everyday. On the other hand,even when the ‘‘achievement’’ of the avant-garde is recognized, it is mostoften circumscribed, and, in a simultaneous gesture, deprived of impor-tance or even relevance, by the familiar qualification of its practices as an
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aesthetic of the experimental and the new, an aesthetic representative of theideologyof high modernism.To say in the postmodern moment that some-thing is experimental and new is as much as to foreclose any discussion ofits cultural impact, since the social and cultural reality of postmodernismseems to be predicated on the idea of the new,of a constant improvement ofproducts, services, and the quality of life. Already Adorno and Horkheimersuggested—an argument repeated by Jameson—that the uninterrogatedappeal of the new, which in fact repeats the same in the guise of novelty,
5
marks the absorption of avant-garde aesthetics into the mode of mass pro-duction characteristic of ‘‘late’’ liberal capitalism. This is why it is crucialto distinguish, as Lyotard demonstrates, between the new as novelty andinnovation, and the surprise or the unexpected opened by the event struc-ture of experience: ‘‘The occurrence, the Ereignis, h a sn o t h i n gt od ow i t h
thepetit frisson, the cheap thrill, the profitable pathos, that accompanies an
innovation.’’
6T h ee v e n tu n d o e s‘ ‘ t h ep r e s u m p t i o no ft h em i n dw i t hr e s p e c t
to time,’’ figuring experience as open-ended and excessive in relation to itsrepresentation. This temporal excess or incompletion, a certain untimeli-ness which always accompanies occurrence, unworks the privatization andsubjectivation of experience. What is each time ‘‘new’’ is the singularitywith which the event exceeds the bounds of representational thinking, andremains, in its occurrence, without essence.
In the United States, the ‘‘misconceptions’’ about the avant-garde are re-
inforced by the picture of modernism constructed by New Criticism,whichunderscores the aesthetic self-sufficiency of the text, a deep divide between‘‘high art’’ and ‘‘reality.’’ In this conception of literary modernity, the avant-garde becomes inscribed into the overall framework of modernist literatureand the prevalent autonomy aesthetics of high modernism. In this setting,anyattempt to interrogate avant-garde aesthetics becomes immediately sus-p e c t ,i fn o ta l r e a d yc o n v i c t e d ,o fad e s i r et oa e s t h e t i c i z e ,t oi m p o s ea n‘ ‘ a e s -thetic’’ structuring of perception upon the ‘‘real’’ experience of everydaysocial life. Such a charge, presupposing often the idea of a nondiscursiveexperience prior to oroutside of language, deeply misrecognizes the ‘‘avant-garde’’ impulse in modern art and poststructuralist critiques of modernity: arethinking of being in terms of an event,whose historicity undoes, togetherwith subject and essence, the idea of private aesthetic experience. Avant-garde art explicitly distances itself from the concept of aesthetic experienceas a separate, ‘‘higher’’ or ‘‘more essential’’ moment of experience; it has tobe kept distinct, therefore, from the aesthetics of autonomy characteristicof high modernism.
7It demands, instead, a rethinking of the very structure
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of experience apart from the notion of the subjective and the private, a radi-cal rethinking that can happen only through a reinvention of language, atransformation of the principles of discourse and representation. My studysuggests that avant-garde art activates and reinvents the interval betweenexperience and language: If there is a ‘‘content’’ to avant-garde art, a space‘‘proper’’ to its experimentation, it is precisely the complex interlacing ofexperience and language. Such a reconfiguration of this mutual bind in theaftermath of modernity, in the increasingly techno-scientific culture, formsthe texture of avant-garde art.
Many discussions which do recognize the importance of the avant-garde
and its difference from high modernism are, unfortunately, too often nar-rowly circumscribed in terms of overcoming the divide between art andlife.
8Such approaches adopt what seems to me an uninterrogated, causal
notion of transformation and posit art apart from everyday experience,which makes it difficult to see that the avant-garde contests such a consti-tution of the everyday not from the outside but from within the discursive‘‘production’’ of experience. These readings of avant-garde’s contestationof the autonomy of aesthetics often reduce avant-garde poetics to shocktechniques in various artistic media, techniques now already obsolete andcomfortably inscribed within mass culture, which has reappropriated theirshock value in order to reaffirm perception and culture, rather than to ques-tion it. This limited view predetermines the outcome of the discussion ofthe avant-garde as an issue of the past, a failed project, which can onlybe seen in terms of its historical relevance. Even Andreas Huyssen, whonuances the understanding of the avant-garde in relation to its influenceon American postmodernism, remarks in After the Great Divide that ‘‘[n]ot
only is the historical avantgarde a thing of the past, but it is also useless totry to revive it under any guise’’ (). Such an apodictic judgment excludesa priori any real reconsideration of the avant-garde impulse as a vital mo-ment in postwar art and prevents us from seeing how contemporary ‘‘avant-garde’’ art can have any relevance beyond the ripple effect of the innovativetechniques and transformative ambitions within mass culture.
9Instead of
trying to understand why the avant-garde impulse persists and what con-stitutes its unrecognized significance for postmodernism, such a version ofwhat Lyotard identifies as the demand to stop trying to be avant-garde de-clares the avant-garde dead and any attempt to rethink it as arbitrary anddevoid of importance for contemporary culture.
It is obvious that I agree with Lyotard that, in order to radicalize the
critique of modernity, it is indeed imperative to rethink the avant-garde.
10
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However, such an imperative will fail to produce much resonance unless wefirst change the parameters of the debate away from the predominant, butworn-out and no longer productive, oppositions: art/life, aesthetic experi-ments/external reality, aesthetic experience/action, and so on. Only then itwill be possible to show the ‘‘falseness’’ or simplification of the divide writ-ing/life in the context of the avant-garde and recognize that the reinven-tions of language produced by the avant-garde work not on an ‘‘aesthetic’’level (if by that we mean a separate domain of experience, abstracted fromthe everyday) but on the level of the texturing of experience, and pertainto the issue of how modernity constitutes itself through a techno-scientificunfolding of being. By bringing the avant-garde into a dialoguewith Conti-nental thought, we can move the discussion beyond the vexed issue of inte-gration/separation of art from what often goes under various names: every-day life, social practice, reality, experience, and so on. The binary opticsadopted in most discussions of the avant-garde is organized by an either/orlogic that fails to recognize the nuances of the differential relation betweenart and experience, which questions both sharp divides and false sublations.What is required to rephrase the questions usually addressed to avant-gardeworks is a rethinking of the very notion of experience in ways that allow usto see art as a site where experience materializes in its linguistic structures (Ideliberately bring here into play the two senses of matter: materiality andsignification, to underscore their nonbinary relation which structures ex-perience), as a space that remains both integral to experience and yet ‘‘apart’’from it, without ever being separated from it. To accomplish that, I bringtogether Continental thinkers—Benjamin, Heidegger, Lyotard, Irigaray—and suggest ways in which to rethink, first, experience in the historicity ofits event, and, second, the work of art in the active sense of (un)workingand retexturing experience. Though this may not be the entire answer tothe question of the integration of art and life, such a rethinking of experi-ence in terms of the event allows us to begin examining avant-garde artfrom the different location it takes up in experience: within its historicalfold, which holds experience in view of its nonself-identical and disjointedstructures of eventuation, and which keeps disarticulating the significationswhich experience assumes within cultural practices.
Against the premise that it is constructive only to discuss the ‘‘histori-
cal avant-garde,’’ I underscore the continuing ‘‘transformative’’ import ofthe critique of experience in the avant-garde. For that purpose, I discussboth examples of the avant-garde eruption in the s (Khlebnikov) andits continuation through high modernism (Stein) and the instances of its
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reactivation and transformation in Białoszewski and Howe, representatives,respectively, of Polish linguistic poetry in the s and American languagepoetry. I reexamine the avant-garde poetics as a contestation of the mod-ern practices in which the everyday is constituted as either technologicallydetermined and instrumentalized experience or as its apparent opposite:essentially private, socially and aesthetically isolated, sphere. Avant-gardeart is not simply about transforming the everyday through the interjec-tion of provocative and innovative aesthetic and perceptual practices intothe routine functioning of mass society. What strikes one in Tzara’s Dadamanifestoes is not so much the gap between art and everyday life but thesense that capitalism and bourgeois culture ‘‘extinguishes’’ life and beingitself: ‘‘Liberty: DADA DADA DADA; —the roar of contorted pains, the
interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks and irrelevan-
cies: LIFE.’’
11The predominant conception of rationality and instrumen-
talized experience ‘‘liquidates’’ being through the processes of homogeniza-tion and reification.The question, at least for Tzara, is not how to overcomethe divide between art and experience but how to rethink and contest ex-perience itself, how to address the historicity and inessentiality of each in-stant, its contradictoriness, which disappears in the increasingly techno-logical schema of being, and, finally, how to critique culture and societythrough such a revised, ‘‘dada’’ concept of experience. The new, techno-logically influenced, art—the ‘‘art’’ of Dada rather than the auratic art ofaesthetics—orients itself specifically toward exploring the critical poten-tial of the inessentiality of experience, of its nonsubstantive happening. Itdirects this impetus against representational and linguistic constants, andtheir foundational role in constructing the sphere of aesthetic and privateexperience as well as the techno-scientific calculus of being.
To assess the critical implications of this revision of experience, we have
to move beyond the optics of the art/life divide and the residues of Hegeliandialectics evident in it. Despite its efforts, this perspective cannot shakeoff the idea that art is something ‘‘added’’ to life, something ‘‘other’’ toeveryday experience, which has to be incorporated back into it. As otherto life, art needs justification and legitimation through its possible ‘‘prag-matic’’ value—its usefulness for transforming culture. This concept of artrepeats the Hegelian scenario of diremption and healing, the scenariowhichunderpins manycontemporaryaccounts of art: it is stilled in the negative byAdorno,
12or animated again, though certainly in different ways, by Haber-
mas, Bürger, and Huyssen. I argue that to open up a different perspective,we need to rethink experience in terms of its historicity, that is, in rela-
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tion to the ecstatic temporality opened up in the event of experience. Toillustrate this revised understanding of experience, I discuss Heidegger’sand Benjamin’s writings on aesthetics and technology against the backdropof Lyotard’s reading of the avant-garde, and supplement and revise theirapproach through Irigaray’s critique of the patriarchal morphology of ex-perience.
While Benjamin wrote on the avant-garde and Irigaray postulates a kind
of ‘‘avant-garde’’ poetics of thinking, Heidegger seems at first an unlikelycandidate to provide a constructive understanding of the avant-garde. Itis rarely remembered that Heidegger in fact wrote on Cézanne, Rimbaud,Klee, Chilida, but that itself is not enough to make his thought on art per-tinent to the avant-garde.What makes Heidegger important for rethinkingthe avant-garde is his discussion of technē andpoiēsis, especially his con-
ception of the event as poiēsis, which I adapt in order to flesh out avant-
garde’s critique of experience. I rethink Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis to
draw together strands from Benjamin’s idea of dialectical image, Irigaray’snotion of proximity, and Lyotard’s conception of the avant-garde as event.The event, then, becomes the prism for rethinking experience and his-tory through technology, sexual difference, and ordinary language. Sucha rereading has been made possible by recent nuanced interpretations ofthe Heideggerian corpus, by what Robert Bernasconi calls ‘‘Derrida’s Hei-degger,’’
13or, more broadly, a poststructuralist Heidegger, as well as by
the growing feminist engagement with Heidegger’s texts, especially Iri-garay’s critique. This resituating of Heidegger within the ongoing critiquesof metaphysics and modernity also opens up a new perspective upon ex-perience in which it becomes important to examine the confluences be-tween Heidegger and Benjamin.Where I move beyond these readings andthe debate between ‘‘hermeneutical’’ Heidegger and ‘‘deconstructive’’ Hei-degger, is in linking Heidegger’s call from ‘‘The Way to Language’’ for atransformation of our relation to language,
14at least to some extent against
Heidegger’s ‘‘intention,’’ with the avant-garde. Such a connection becomespossible and fruitful when we rethink Heidegger’s terms poiēsis andEreignis
through his critique of experience and technology.
The concept of event, which I develop through reading both Heideg-
gerian critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry, casts experience interms of its emergence: that is, as the twofold structure of simultaneouscoming into presence and withdrawal in which what is becomes measur-able and representable only at the expense of suppressing historicity. I showthat what Benjamin’s dialectical image, Heidegger’s Ereignis or ‘‘propria-
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tive event,’’15and Irigaray’s notion of proximity have in common are the
critical effects of the event. The event here is not a temporal punctualityor an instant of presence but, instead, a dynamic and open-ended field offorces, whose historicity prevents experience from closing into representa-tional constructs, psychic spaces, or lived instants. Historicity acts as a forceof temporal dislocation: It (de)organizes the dynamic field of the event insuch a way that its coming into presence never coincides with what is madepresent or opened up by it. Historicity both lets the event emerge into pres-ence and withholds (full) presence from it, keeping the event disjointedand incomplete. Experience here is, then, neither an experience of pres-ence nor an experience of absence (conceived as negation or lack) but anevent ‘‘within which that opposition [between presence and absence] arisesand which as such is not governed by it.’’
16It counters the metaphysical
understanding of experience in terms of presence, and should be placed,therefore, in quotation marks; such ‘‘experience’’ both opens up the spacesof experience, thought, and representation, and, through the working ofhistoricity, makes their closure impossible.The effects of these disjunctionsare not just a matterof negation or, as Lyotard suggests,of a negative presen-tation: that is, a ‘‘presentation’’ of the unpresentable, or the sublime. Theirimportance comes from how they trace the vectors of the most critical re-visions within modern experience. Benjamin’s dialectical image explodesh i s t o r i c i s m ’ sn o t i o no fh i s t o r y ,b e c a u s ei tc o v e r so v e rt h ef o r c eo fh i s t o -ricity, and renders the space of history representable as a series of consecu-tive presents. Irigaray’s idea of wonder reconceptualizes utopia as the excessof the event, which, disarticulating the logic of identity, opens up the pos-sibility of thinking sexual relations beyond the binary optics of samenessand difference. In Heidegger’s discussions of Ereignis, historicity marks a
difference between poiēsis and technology, a difference which reverberates
within the everyday and the experience of language.
The notion of the event juxtaposes the technological modality of reveal-
ing which predominates in modernity with what might be called a ‘‘poietic’’unfolding. I argue that, unlike technē, poiēsis retains the event in its his-
toricity, underscoring its irreducibility to the order of representation. His-toricity here is not an attribute of something that is seen as a product ofspecific historical circumstances or is thought in terms of an unstable andchanging historical context. It refers to a structural indetermination intrin-sic to ‘‘experience’’ as event, an irreducible excess or remainder which poiēsis
marks in what it unfolds, or historiality which renders history structurallyopen to change. Reworking Heidegger’s idea of poiēsis in the context of
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Marxism and psychoanalysis, Castoriadis explores the creative potential ofsuch indetermination for reimagining social and historical relations.
17Link-
ingpoiēsis to the ‘‘creativity’’ of history itself, to the rupture and reinvention
of social relations, Castoriadis, however, takes the aesthetic paradigm ofhistorical transformation for granted.
18I argue, instead, that the very idea
of aesthetics also has to be called into question to understand poiēsis as the
model of historical change. My analysis of the avant-garde allows us to pin-point the obverse side of the problem Castoriadis diagnoses: I show thatit is the reduction of art to the aesthetic paradigm, that is, the assimila-tion of art to an object of aesthetic experience, that obliterates historicityand temporality. The reason why we are disposed to forget historicity is theeclipse of the temporality of event not only in institutional structures butalso in the instituting of art as aesthetic object. My understanding of theavant-garde is based, then, on the notion of art that tries, through a critiqueof aesthetics, to recover poiēsis and bring it to bear upon the denial of the
temporality of experience. It is this specific critique of art and experiencethrough poiēsis which makes avant-garde art postaesthetic.
As I show in chapters and , rethinking experience as event does not
lead either to the privatization of experience or to the aestheticization ofsocial practice, but results in a rigorous questioning of the technologicalschematization of experience and its formative influence on the everyday. Iexplore Heidegger’s idea that technology as manufacturing and processinginto information becomes possible only because the actual in modernity isalways already revealed as a standing-reserve of, in principle, calculable andmeasurable resources. In this perspective, technology is not manufacturingor production but a modality of the revealing of the actual which under-lies modern techno-scientific reality. It organizes and constitutes reality interms of its availability and transparency as resource.
19Discussing the con-
ception of technology in Benjamin, Lyotard, and Heidegger, it becomesclear that the global transformation of what is into information as well asthe commodification of time and experience hinges upon the technologicalmode in which the modern world unfolds. As a result, experience loses thequality of an event irreducible to signification, becomes regulated, ordered,and compressed into information. What is particularly important for mystudy is that this technological structure of the actual dehistoricizes being,which, reduced to its existence as resource and turned into information,becomes a commodity in a rapidly expanding marketplace.
20Knowledge
undergoes a similar transformation: It becomes instrumentalized, reducibleto processable informational data, and subjected to the process of com-
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modification.21In the end, the actual finds itself structured without re-
mainder according to what Lyotard calls in The Postmodern Condition the
efficiency criterion.
As my readings of Benjamin, Heidegger, and Irigaray show, art is a site
where technology, as a modality of revealing constitutive of the modernworld, can be called into question and the reductive concepts of experienceand knowledge reconsidered.Where this approach matters is precisely withregard to how it undermines the dehistoricized notion of experience, whichforms the basis for structuring the world in terms of global availability asresource and information.The idea of the tension between technic and poi-etic unfolding opens up the possibility of seeing art as always already ‘‘in-tegral’’ to experience, reworking it, as it were, from within, because of art’s‘‘figuring’’
22of the event structure of being. In ‘‘The Origin of the Work
of Art,’’ Heidegger discerns in art the potential to displace the ordinary ex-perience of being and open thought to the possibility of questioning itstechnological determinations:
We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. Beings arefamiliar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless, the clearing is pervaded by aconstant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. Atbottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extraordinary. ( BW,)
What the work of art brings into a figure (Gestalt) is the concealment at
play in the distinction between the poietic and the technological, or, moreprecisely, the tendency of the technological to erase this difference and tocover over the role of the poietic in the formation of the everyday.
Although the problem of the everyday is usually associated with Hei-
degger’s discussions of the topic in Being and Time, that issue is not con-
fined to Heidegger’s early work. Often not thematized as such, this rework-ing of the everyday constitutes a vital undercurrent of all of Heidegger’swork: from the analyses of ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ to his discus-sion of the everydayness in ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ in the context of Hera-clitus, and, finally, to his late work on poetry, language, and technology.While it is true that those essays do not, at least on the surface, return tothe problematic of everydayness which Heidegger developed in Being and
Time, I would argue that Heidegger’s reflections on ‘‘poetic dwelling,’’ and
thus also on language, rework the concept of everyday experience throughthe tension between poetry and technicity. To the extent that Heidegger’swork identifies the everyday with the technological revealing—the analysesof average everydayness in Being and Time can be taken as forerunners of
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Heidegger’s later critique of technology—the displacement of the ordinaryin art can be read in terms of the difference between the poietic and thetechnological and as a questioning of the dominant ‘‘technological’’ con-cepts of experience. In other words, the distinction between the technic andpoietic modes of revealing, which runs through much of Heidegger’s latework (for example, ‘‘Poetically Man Dwells,’’ ‘‘The Thing,’’) corresponds,but also modifies and rearticulates, Heidegger’s critique of everydayness inBeing and Time in terms of authenticity and inauthenticity. In those late
essays, the focus is no longer on Dasein ’s being authentic or inauthentic
but, instead, on whether the human dwelling takes the shape of an ethos,in which beings are let be in their otherness. Yet these analyses still concernthemselves with the issue of everydayness and the critique of its inauthen-tic modes.
23Heidegger’s reflections on ethos give a different slant to the
problem of the everyday by exploring the possibility of transforming thetechnic mode of existence and opening up a dwelling in which relationalitywould be poietic.
Seeing art as folded into and constitutive of the work of experience offers
the possibility of rethinking experience in terms of poiēsis. This approach
negotiates art outside of the (metaphysical) constraints of the art/life oppo-sition and, moving art beyond the narrowly conceived notion of aesthet-ics and private aesthetic experience, fundamentally questions how we con-ceive and produce being in the modern technological era. It interrogates theincreasingly techno-scientific constitution of what it means to be, whichequates being with the capacity to be scientifically measured, produced, ormade available for consumption. Thinking the work performed by art inan active, historial (and not just historical) fashion, does not bridge but,instead, undermines the divide between art and experience, thought andpractice. Art does not ‘‘passively’’ represent experience or ‘‘actively’’ trans-form it—both views posit art as external to the everyday and thus a priorilimit, or even misconstrue, its work. I argue instead that, suspending theeveryday modes of perception and action, art activates—that is, activelyconstitutes—experience by responding to and ‘‘figuring’’ (in the sense ofGestalt )t h epoiēsis of the event.
Since the event both instantiates and escapes presence, it calls into ques-
tion the models of experience and knowledge based on the notions of sub-stantive existence and representational constants. What Derrida calls theeventness (événementialité) of the event, signifies the inconspicuous, sub-
jectless, and self-emptying historial structure through which experience un-folds into the signifying texture of the world. I argue that, even though
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the staging of this simple eventness renders art ‘‘weightless’’ and its work‘‘inconspicuous’’—that is, working without the support of concepts andrepresentational structures—one cannot underestimate the critical importof this lightness and uselessness of art’s figure.While technological reveal-ing circumscribes and cancels historicity, art’s figure reopens the questionof eventness ashistoricity: not as a question of historicism and of rewrit-
ing history but as the task of calling into question the effects of renderingexperience representable and commodified as resource.
The Historicity of Experience shows how avant-garde art infuses into its
figure, and continuously (re)produces in it, the disjunctions which histo-ricity marks in experience. The attentiveness in art to the historicity ofbeing, inscribed at the fringes of techno-scientific legibility of experience,marks a space where the structure and the boundaries of modernity comeinto question. Contrary to the statements of those who, like Habermas, seethe Heideggerian approach to art as esoteric and aestheticist, I argue thatart taken as event is not a scene of subjective contemplation or aestheticrelishing of poiēsis. Instead, poiēsis marks a space of critique in its proper
sense, that is, a space of a de-cision, of a differentiation and separation ofthe technological and the poetic. As such, it becomes a ‘‘thoughtful’’ actionof turning the historicity of experience against the metaphysical substan-tialization of being within the technological organization of life, in orderto call into question its effects on the constitution of the everyday. Sinceit cannot be represented, measured, or made available as a calculable andprocessable resource, the event is incommensurate with the technologicalstandards of being, it does not register as ‘‘real.’’
24As Foucault’s The Order
of Things suggests,25the notion of the event exposes the reductive concept
of experience in positivist social sciences, which dehistoricize ‘‘reality’’ andlimit it to empirical regularities and causal schema. It also takes to task theidea of historical experience as self-experience of society, for the event de-scribes experience not in terms of a self but as a field and an occurrence,which exceeds the space of consciousness or the symbolic realm of socialexperience.
26
Reconceiving ‘‘experience’’ as event has not only aesthetic but also so-
cial and even political implications. To articulate them, it is important tonote that the event’s historicity is never simply equivalent to avant-gardeutopianism, towhat Poggioli describes as the ‘‘prophetic and utopian phase,the arena of agitation and preparation for the announced revolution.’’
27
Such a moment of rupture, or a ‘‘futurist’’ manifestation, belongs, as Per-loff shows, to various avant-gardes of the early twentieth century and pro-
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duces ‘‘a short-lived but remarkable rapprochement between avant-gardeaesthetic, radical politics, and popular culture’’ ( FM,xvii). This futurist
rupture continues to reappear in more disillusioned, ironic, or ‘‘cool,’’ ver-sions throughout the twentieth century ( FM,xviii). The vital question for
understanding the critique of experience in the avant-garde’s critique is howone reads this, in Poggioli’s words, ‘‘futurist moment’’: whether it is definedwithin the linear schema of history as a future moment of fulfillment ofthe avant-garde’s dreams or whether the avant-garde rupture is perceivedto be itself a refiguration of temporality. I agree with Kristeva and Lyotardthat the avant-garde’s time is always within the present, but as a specificnoncoincidence of its works with the presence of meaning, as a ‘‘future an-terior.’’
28The avant-garde rupture dislocates the present and discloses it as
an event whose historicity marks a structural incompletion, opening thenow to the future. The futural dimension inheres in the present by virtueof a structural inscription, which renders the present disjointed, incapableof being self-identical. Any possibility of envisioning the future, utopian orotherwise, is contingent upon this futural inscription within the present.
The Historicity of Experience works, then, against the widespread senti-
ment that the avant-garde’s innovation and novelty has degenerated intoa tradition, into a repetition for its own sake, a form of aesthetic play; inother words, against the institutionalization of the avant-garde, when, asFerry puts it, ‘‘[t]he break with tradition itself becomes a tradition.’’
29In
Ferry’s reading, the avant-garde appears as determined above all by its pro-leptic and anticipatory character: It is untimely, in the sense of being inadvance of its historical moment, incomprehensible to its contemporaries,and it fulfills itself—and annihilates itself at the same moment—when itschallenge turns into tradition. I would argue that as long as it is caught inthis futural dialectics, the understanding of the avant-garde as proleptic orvisionary cancels the more complex radicality of its art. The proleptic read-ing of the avant-garde annuls precisely the ‘‘future anterior’’ effect of theavant-garde. It sees the avant-garde as a revolution in the aesthetic structuresand categories of knowledge, with which a future will catch up, rather thanseeing in it a questioning of the paradigm of knowledge, of the legibilityof experience produced by modernity. This approach remains especiallyproblematic with regard to understanding history, since reading the avant-garde as a prophetic vision of the future reduces the event to its dialecticalnotion and evacuates its historicity. As a result, history is read in terms ofa linearly conceived progression, and historicity of being is reduced to theinfinitely recuperable space of historicism. In the end, the proleptic reading
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domesticates the avant-garde by reinscribing it within the very schema oftime, history, and experience it critiques.
30The fact that we have become
comfortable with the avant-garde is, then, not necessarily a sign that it hasturned itself into a ‘‘tradition’’ or that it has failed to produce the future itpromised, but that, perhaps, we still do not read the avant-garde.
The dialectical reading of the avant-garde prolepsis—a reading it is only
fair to note is strongly encouraged by the futurist strand in the avant-gardeitself—covers over the fact that what matters for the avant-garde, and mat-ters in artistic but also political terms, is precisely that a certain ‘‘non-comprehensibility’’ of the event of experience becomes opposed to the pro-gressivist scenario of history. There is a very important difference betweenincomprehensibility that offers the possibility of being comprehended atsome point in the future, that is, recuperated with a change in the categoriesand practices of thought and knowing, and incomprehensibility as the flex-ible limit which historicity inscribes in representation. The latter is not dueto some deficiency or fault of the present, or to the necessarily limited his-
torical perspective available at any given point in time, but describes the
historial limit of representation as emerging—always and already ‘‘now’’—from the singular and irreducible event. This form of incomprehensibilityis the result precisely of the inessentiality of experience (that is, its with-drawal from essence and presence), of its irrecuperable (never made fullypresent or representable) historicity. It is not a matter of incomprehensionproduced by the advanced, ‘‘avant-garde’’ nature of the aesthetic at playin avant-garde works but of a historial limit to comprehension producedalways singularly as an effect of the event structure of experience.
The reduction of the event to the synchrony of meaning circumscribes
also its political signification. If as Virilio suggests, the irreducibility of theevent reflects the political dimension of experience,
31then reading the event
in dialectical terms forecloses the political significance of the avant-garde.The dialectical approach cancels the event as nonself-identical and readsthe dislocations produced by the historicity of experience as, in principle,recuperable. Such a reading of the avant-garde, as Lukács makes clear, para-doxically renders it always already ‘‘anachronistic’’:
32the avant-garde comes
‘‘true’’ only in the future which, retrospectively, validates the importance ofits past rupture. In this scenario, the political import of the avant-garde isread against and, indeed, inthe future, rather than in the historial limit it
marks to representation and meaning.This position in advance disconnectsthe avant-garde from the present, from its contemporaneity, rendering al-most a priori impossible the avant-garde’s purported reintegration into the
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social praxis, into the everyday. It is important to note here that the con-ventional understanding of politics as orienting and underwriting artisticactivity is reversed in the avant-garde: its politics rises from the implica-tions of exposing the historial limit to the coherence of meaning, and spillsoutward from the inessentiality of experience, which language cannot quiteregister. As Kristeva suggests, Russian futurism did not lose contact withthe historical situation as result of its challenge to the stability of linguisticstructures but, in fact, became receptive to its revolutionary potential: ‘‘itpaid strong attention to the explosion of the October revolution. It heardand understood the Revolution only because its present was dependent ona future’’ ( DL,). Reading the event of the avant-garde in terms of Hei-
degger’s Ereignis and Lyotard’s event, that is, as a radical de-essentialization
of happening, underscores this ‘‘other’’ political significance of the avant-garde: opened up and continuously renewed by the reworked language,which turns the inappropriable in experience against its ‘‘appropriations’’into presence and meaning, this other politics ‘‘exceeds’’ avant-garde’s ex-plicit political statements in manifestoes, proclamations, or artistic provo-cations.
3
In my readings of the avant-garde poetry, I make the distinction between
technē andpoiēsis into one of the frames for investigating how the avant-
garde reinvention of the everyday is contingent upon a double critique ofaesthetics and technology. While the avant-garde is too often unproblem-atically identified with fascination and uncritical acceptance of technologi-cal progress, with the one-sided belief in the emancipatory function of thetechnological means of reproduction, I suggest that this issue is fraught withtension in avant-garde art. The avant-garde certainly recognizes, and oftencelebrates, the rapidly intensifying technological determination of moder-nity, but it also raises the question of the limits of the metaphysical andrepresentational foundations of the modern. In The Inhuman, Lyotard ar-
ticulates the importance of the avant-gardes specifically in terms of sucha critique: ‘‘The avant-gardes get to work on the conditions of space andtime. Attempts which have been going on for a century without having fin-ished yet. This problematic makes it possible to resituate the real issue ofthe avant-gardes by putting them back in their real domain.They have beeninflexible witnesses to the crisis of these foundations of which theories ofcommunication and the new technologies are otheraspects, much less lucid
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ones than the avant-gardes’’ ( IN). If the real issue of the avant-garde is
thepoiēsis of the event irreducible to the calculus of space and time, then
the discussion of the ‘‘experience’’ of modernity and the problems it bringsto the foreground has to be inflected through this prism.
The second frame for my study is Irigaray’s critique of philosophical and
psychoanalytic figures of sexual difference, which rethinks the differencebetween the sexes in terms of an event of proximity. Avant-gardewriting hasalways played an important, perhaps even formative role in French femi-nism, especially in the work of Cixous (Joyce and Lispector) and Kristeva(Revolution in Poetic Language andDesire in Language ).
33Both Kristeva and
Irigaray extend and revise Heidegger’s approach to poetic language by in-scribing it within the problematics of sexuality and desire, absent in Hei-degger’s considerations. Kristeva underscores the revolutionary potentialmarked in the manner in which poetic language in Heidegger ‘‘grounds’’history and opens up the narrow notion of language code to bodily, sub-jective, and social inscriptions: ‘‘As to Heidegger, he retains currency, in
spite of everything, because of his attentiveness to language and ‘poetic lan-
guage’ as an opening up of beings; an openness that is checked but none-t h e l e s so c c u r s…a n do nw h i c h ,a sac o n s e q uence, ‘History’ is grounded’’
(DL,). She argues that poetic language, supplementing and transform-
ing normative structures of language and sociability with a sub- or trans-signification, eludes the order of the present and opens meaning to ‘‘animpossible time-to-come.’’ Such a ‘‘future anterior’’ modality ‘‘proper’’ topoetic language, constitutes the nucleus of historicity, and makes poetry‘‘the most appropriate historical discourse’’ ( DL,). It is Irigaray, though,
who rethinks in the most innovative way the proximity between the mor-phology of sexual difference and the morphology of language. She rewritesthe discursive grammarof modernity through sexual difference,opening upto radical questioning the structures of being and experience. Motivated inpart by a rethinking of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s critiques of aesthetics,Irigaray’s poetics of sexual difference owes much of its impetus to a criti-cal engagement with Heidegger’s understanding of technology, being, andpoetic thinking. Irigaray’s book on Heidegger, L’oubli de l’air, which pre-
cedes her proclamation of a new poetics of sexual difference in An Ethics of
Sexual Difference, ends with a rethinking of Heidegger’s understanding of
poetic language for a project of feminist ethics.
34It reappraises Heidegger’s
idea of poetic language as a site where the boundaries of linguistic, social,and economic structures are transformed and dissolved by the fluid and un-graspable proximity to the other. Irigaray provides a critical bridge between
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the epistemological and aesthetic questioning of representation undertakenby Continental thought and the feminist critique of the phallogocentricmorphology of culture and discourse. The confluence of these issues in Iri-garay’s work, their structuring role in her poetic/critical practice, make it asingularly important venue for the rethinking of the relation between theavant-garde refiguration of the event and sexual difference.
35
The third frame of my discussion is poetry itself: It takes the question of
everydayness into the regions of ordinary life in mass society where philo-sophical and theoretical reflections rarely dare to go. Rather than elaboratea global theory of the avant-garde or a historical account of various avant-garde orientations, I focus on four excellent examples of a radical poetic cri-tique of everydayexperience.The emphasis on close reading is strategic, be-cause it allows me to demonstrate the inadequacies of the currentlyavailablemodels of the avant-garde for reading these works. Whether based on theshock aesthetic, defamiliarization, collage, or the contestation of aestheti-cism, the dominant approaches presuppose notions of experience and theordinary, without critically examining their limitations. As I flesh out thekey aspects of the avant-garde critique of experience, I also underscore theirindividual constellations specific to each writer: temporality and revolution(Khlebnikov), the ordinary and sexual difference (Stein), the mundane andtechnology (Białoszewski), language and the gendering of history (Howe).This particular arrangement of readings is also meant to complicate theavant-garde critique of experience through the prism of sexual differenceand to bring Eastern European poetry into a dialogue with the philosophi-cal critiques of modernity.
The two chapters on Stein and Białoszewski point toward necessary
negotiations of the divide between high and lowart, between the poetic andthe ordinary, between artistic creation and mass culture. They resituate thediscussion of modern poetry as ‘‘integral’’ to the experience of modernityand avoid two different impasses that afflict theorizations of avant-gardeart. On the one hand, they leave behind the by now somewhat sterile ap-proach to the historical avant-garde of the s as a failed heroic effort tointegrate art into life, an idea that Adorno criticized as a regression fromthe aesthetic to the barbaric, and which, I would add, cannot avoid instru-mentalizing art. On the other hand, the reading of avant-garde poetry int e r m so ft h e poiēsis of the event lets us circumvent the impasses of Adorno’s
approach to modern art in terms of the negative of modern social reality,a negative that tends toward silence in the face of the triviality of modernculture.
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My detailed readings of the four poets develop Vattimo’s suggestion that
Heidegger’s critique of the aesthetic offers an alternative to the proliferatingideas of the end of art. In the chapter from The End of Modernity entitled
‘ ‘ T h eD e a t ho rD e c l i n eo fA r t , ’ ’V a t t i m od e fi n e st h r e ef o r m so ft h e‘ ‘ d e a t hof art’’ characteristic of aesthetic thought in the twentieth century: () re-integration into existence; () aestheticization of experience through massculture, where the common consensus is produced through instituting theaesthetic sense of sharing the same criteria; and () Adorno’s theory of theavant-garde as silence in response to the kitsch of modern culture. Againstthose three versions of the end or death of art, Vattimo proposes a Hei-deggerian approach to art, in which art is seen beyond aesthetics and itsfoundation in metaphysical thought, in terms of the setting-into-the-work-
of truth. Vattimo reads ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ as proclaiming
the inaugural significance of art. I would argue, however, that what is in-augurated in art is not simply the outlines of a historical world shared by apeople—where the world is understood as an open-ended nexus of referralsand significations: cultural, political, ideological, and so on—against whichexperience becomes meaningful and representable. Rather, what is inaugu-rated or reinvented in the work of art is the historicity of experience itself,which emerges on the edges of the shattering of the word which Heideggertraces in poetic language.
36
The chapters on Stein and Białoszewski also provide an important con-
trast to the tenor of solemnity, even a certain pathos, which appears in Hei-degger’s exploration of Hölderlin or Trakl, and is perhaps most evident inhis discussion of the shoes in van Gogh’s painting. I turn the critical importof the notion of poiēsis against the pathos lingering in Heidegger’s remarks
on poetry to demonstrate the pertinence of his questioning of technologyto the critique of everyday experience.
37The iconoclastic and often humor-
ous poetry of Stein and Białoszewski, openly ironic of the vestiges of pathosor nostalgia, provides such an alternative route, where the rethinking ofthe everyday takes place, as it were, from within the minutiae of everydayexperience and the ‘‘prosaic’’ idiom of ordinary language.
Situating Heidegger with regard to Benjamin’s critique of fascism and
the aestheticization of politics underscores and contextualizes the readingof Heidegger’s thought of the event as critical of the totalization of experi-ence, of the ordering of being into a standing-reserve of resources, whichHeidegger associates with technology. Obviously, Benjamin’s critique offascism provides a stark contrast to Heidegger’s endorsement of national
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socialism in the early s, and makes prominent the places where Hei-degger compromises the radicality of his thought to inscribe it into the re-flection on the historical importance of the fascist movement.
38But it also
allows us to nuance the reading of Heideggerand to underscore the fact thathis conception of historicity works against the closure of linguistic and so-cial structures. In my approach, Benjamin’s notion of reproducibility as thestructure of thework art becomes pivotal to thinking Heidegger’s idea of artas ‘‘reproducing’’ the historicity of experience. Benjamin’s preoccupationwith danger and responsibility in relation to historical experience allowsme, in turn, to focus precisely on those moments in Heidegger’s reflectionon art which, though most often unnoticed and unexplored, make it in-separable from the problematic of danger. As ‘‘Hölderlin and the Essenceof Poetry’’ makes clear, Heidegger regards danger as intrinsic to the verystructure of experience. Literally inscribed in the German word for experi-ence,Erfahrung, danger marks the historial structure of experience, which
always already collapses the open-ended event into the uniform and know-able spaces of representation. Juxtaposing Heidegger and Benjamin, I pointto these two kinds of danger: one inscribed in the structure of experienceand the other manifesting itself in specific historical circumstances.
The thought of Luce Irigaray, in turn, introduces the question of sexual
difference into the apparently gender-neutral event of experience. Irigaray’scritique of patriarchy is doubly important to my study: Irigaray not onlyrethinks experience through an ethics of sexual difference but ties this ethics
explicitly to remaking and radicalizing Heidegger’s idea of poetic thinking.In Irigaray’s work, the irreducibility of the event to the order of represen-tation becomes the mark of sexual difference, of the inflections of identitythrough the fluid proximity to the other (sex). The idea of the poiēsis of
event as linking the question of the historicity of experience with sexualdifference is explored further in the chapters on Stein and Howe.
The interworking frames I adopt in my study allow for a ‘‘positive’’ and
yet noninstrumental reading of the reworking of experience in the avant-garde. This approach to the event contests the limits of experience markedin technological revealing,which recognizes as being only what can be com-prehended and calculated as resource and information. It is in terms of theimplications of this reworking for the understanding of history, technology,and sexual difference that I propose to rethink experience in modernity.Within this broader philosophical-aesthetic critique, it becomes possible toread the continuing significance of the avant-garde: avant-garde not merely
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as a historical event from the recent past but as postaesthetic works, as art‘‘after’’ aesthetics, encoding a modality of thinking whose importance hasnot waned but, as Lyotard suggests, still increases.
The first three chapters of The Historicity of Experience lay out my ap-
proach to the question of the relation between experience and art at the endof modernity. The readings of Heidegger, Benjamin, and Irigaray developthe idea of poiēsis as a critique of the traditional understanding of experi-
ence. Chapter explores art and poiēsis with a view to several critical issues—
experience, reproducibility, danger—where, despite their many sharp dif-ferences, thewritings of Heideggerand Benjamin converge. Elaborating thenotion of Erfahrung in relation to Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s conceptions
of language allows me to flesh out the cognitive and aesthetic implicationsof experience as event and to show how the work of art stages the historic-ityof the everyday. I rethink thework of art in modernityas ‘‘postaesthetic,’’that is, as an active, quasi-performative event, which contests the idea thatart is an aesthetic object. Reading together Benjamin’s remarks about re-producibilityand Heidegger’s ‘‘The Origin of theWork of Art,’’ I argue thatthe work of art both is historical and itself stages or ‘‘makes’’ history, thatis, it reproduces (in its reception) an irreducible and irrecuperable distanceof its repetition as the ‘‘same’’ work. I suggest that such reproducibility in-scribed in art constitutes the postaesthetic poetics of the modern artwork.The approach I develop here makes it possible to critique both the aesthet-ics of private experience and the practices of the totalization of experiencethat lead to the aestheticization of social and political relations.
In chapter , I develop Heidegger’s notion of poiēsis as a critique of the
technological organization of experience in modernity. Breaking with in-strumental understanding of technology as a tool or a means at the disposalof human subjects, Heidegger explores the ‘‘ontological’’ status of tech-nology in modernity: The importance, but also the danger, of technologylies not only in the augmentation of technical means of production andreproduction, or in the proliferation of mass produced objects and the in-creasing instrumentalization and commercialization of the everyday; rather,technology in Heidegger’s sense of Technik pertains to the level of the struc-
turation of experience itself, to what Heidegger calls ‘‘technological reveal-ing.’’ It is only when being—that is, what it means to be—has been alwaysalready determined as ‘‘technological,’’ that is, disclosable, calculable, andavailable, that technology in the narrow sense of scientific progress, indus-trialization, technical means of production and communication, becomesthinkable. Amidst the technological understanding of being in terms of
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availability and resource, Heidegger looks for the possibility of opening upa reserve of a different modality of happening, which he explores under therubric of poiēsis. This critical opening provides parameters for thinking the
role of modern art, and its avant-garde impulse. I take up the understand-ing of the historicity of experience as event in the third chapter to pro-pose a reading of Irigaray’s critique of the patriarchal/metaphysical frameof experience through sexual difference. Irigaray’s calls for a new poeticsand ethics of sexual difference point toward the necessity of rethinking themorphology of experience and its articulation into socio-political relationswith a view to the sexuation of experience. Rereading technology and com-modification in terms of a desexualization of the space of experience anda canceling out of its materiality, Irigaray links historicity with the fluidtexturing of sexual difference.
The remainder of the book is divided into two parts which explore the
critique of experience in avant-garde poetics. Chapter offers a reading ofGertrude Stein’s work as paradigmatic of the avant-garde ‘‘poetics of event.’’Against the backdrop of Lyotard’s writings on the avant-garde and Hei-degger’s notion of poetic naming, I examine Stein’s interest in writing theEnglish language into a state that would allow her to circumvent the fixityand conventionalityof nouns and ‘‘namewithout using names.’’ Such a fluidnaming, focused on the indeterminacy of pronouns and connectives andthe ‘‘activeness’’ of verb structures, underscores the inessential texture ofexperience, which never becomes substantive and must be described ‘‘with-out names.’’ The two critical moments in the texturing and constructingof experience for Stein are everydayness and sexuality. Playing with thefeminization of the ordinary, especially of the domestic space, Stein’s idio-syncratic use of the English syntax opens up the routinized and familiarspheres of everyday experience and language to the unpredictable and shift-ing effects of historicity. Counteracting the generalizing effects of meaning,Stein’s writing in Tender Buttons or ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ underscores the in-
essentiality of experience, and connects this fluid texture to the rethinkingof the significations of femininity and sexual difference. I focus my dis-cussion, therefore, on how Stein’s thinking about ‘‘how to write’’ dependsupon figuring the ordinary and sexuality in terms of the event structure ofexperience.
The second modernist poet included in my discussion is a Russian cubo-
futurist,Velimir Khlebnikov, famous for his linguistic innovations and histheory of zaum (beyonsense), conceived as a poetic stratum of language
which, although not irrational, reaches beyond the rationalist boundaries
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of signification. Although Mayakovsky is probably the best known Russianavant-garde poet, it was Khlebnikov’s experimental poetry which, in spiteof his relatively short life (–), most influenced the development ofmodernist aesthetics in Russian literature and helped shape a distinctivelyRussian voice in the avant-garde, a voice which is best known in the Westthrough the abstract visual movements of suprematism and constructivism.Focusing mydiscussion of Khlebnikovon his late ‘‘supertale’’ Zangezi, Il i n k
his conception of zaumwith historicityand read his poetic experimentation
as recalibrating language to reflect the ‘‘essence-less’’ texture of experience.Creating new semantic planes and producing unexpected linguistic shiftsthrough modifications of Russian inflectional system, Khlebnikov negoti-ates his idea of ‘‘revolutionary’’ poetry as well as his approach to time andtechnology through the optics of zaum as reflection of the unstable, con-
stantly resignified, texture of experience.
The third part of The Historicityof Experience reappraises the questions of
everydayness, history, and sexual difference by focusing on two poets whosework has not been discussed within the theoretical debates about moder-nity: Howe and Białoszewski, representatives of American and Polish poeticorientations which, although quite distinct in their respective poetics, areknown under the same name: ‘‘language poetry.’’ The Polish ‘‘language’’or ‘‘linguistic’’ poetry (poezja lingwistyczna) is a phenomenon of the s
and s, and the name is used usually to refer to a relatively small groupof poets: Białoszewski, Karpowicz,Wirpsza, Baran ´czak.The American lan-
guage poetry, or ‘‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’’ poetry as it is often written, isa much larger movement, and numerous poets both on the East and theWest coasts are associated with it. I focus my discussion on the two mostimportant poets within those orientations, Miron Białoszewski and SusanHowe, whose poetries I find to be ‘‘postmodern’’ instances of avant-gardepoetics.
Chapter introduces to the English speaking audience Miron Białoszew-
ski, the most important representative of Polish language poets,whoseworkradically brings poetry down from its elevated stance and rhetoric and intotouch with the everydayand the ordinary byconcerning itself both with themost banal and mundane objects, events, and conversations and with theordinary and colloquial language. Białoszewski’s poetic and prose writingsonly recently (he died in ) have become influential both in literary andcritical circles in Poland, and, unfortunately, they are virtually unknown inthe United States.
39At a recent conference on Białoszewski at the Literary
Studies Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, his writings have been
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identified as the ‘‘other’’ orientation within the post- Polish poetry, analternative trend at least as important as the tradition of poetry writing as-sociated with the most prominent and internationally known contempo-
rary Polish poets: Miłosz, Herbert, Zagajewski, Szymborska.
40Thus, there
is now talk in Polish literary circles about the tradition of Miłosz and the‘‘tradition’’ of Białoszewski, and this seems to be a most propitious time tofinally introduce Białoszewski into the discussions of contemporary poetryin the West. My discussion of Białoszewski centers on the reciprocal ques-tioning of the everyday through literary language and of poetic languagethrough the mundaneness of ordinary life: His poetry articulates the avant-garde impulse as the writing of the inessential ‘‘plainness’’ of everyday ex-perience and of the singular contours of its apparently routine and unre-markable events.
Fragments of everydayness and elements of mass culture as the frame-
work of modern life serve not as a subtext or context of Białoszewski’swork but as its text.This does not mean that Białoszewski merely records
the everyday as transparent and familiar. As is the case with all the poetsincluded in this study, his poetic project calls into question the aestheticparameters of writing in order to open a site where everyday objects andevents would appear ‘‘anew’’ in their historial occurrence. I emphasize thepersistent irony with which Białoszewski dismantles the divide betweenhigh and lowculture and its role in exposing various mystifications of poeticlanguage, on the one hand, and everydayness, on the other. In the end, thefiction of an immediate and familiar ordinary disappears in Białoszewskitogether with the idea of an ‘‘aesthetic’’ experience of poetry and poeticlanguage. Best complementing the chapter on Stein, this chapter exploresthe challenge which Białoszewski’s poetry of unabashed ordinariness posesfor our culturally inscribed understanding of the nature, the stakes, andthe values of literature. Białoszewski’s language, blending linguistic inven-tion with common speech, is the most radical example of the avant-gardeuse of ordinary language in the service of undoing and problematizing theworld of everyday experience and its ‘‘common sense.’’ My reading refor-mulates the notion of ‘‘minor literature’’ to show how Białoszewski, placinghis ‘‘mundane’’ and ‘‘minor’’ poetic sketches at the peripheries of Polish cul-ture (already marginal in the context of Western European culture), doublymarginalizes his work to effect a most radical critique and reinvention ofthe ordinary.
The final chapter examines what I call Howe’s poetics of linguistic sin-
gularities in terms of the role of gender and historicity in rethinking experi-
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ence. Focusing on Singularities and ‘‘The Liberties,’’ I argue that Howe’s
texts work as ‘‘soundings of uncertainty,’’ as poetic articulations of the un-certainty—of the intrinsically unst able and incomplete inscription of ex-
perience—that operates as the sub-text of history. The linguistic innova-tions and dislocations of Howe’s poetryattempt towork out a new legibilityof experience in its historicity—as an open-ended event, always ‘‘out-of-joint’’ with its discursive articulations—and propose a reading of sexualdifference as formative of such a morphology of experience. In this context,I also explore the questions of freedom and of the political as contingentupon this different legibility of experience, or, in other words, as relatedto the way in which Howe’s language registers the peculiar historicity ofhappening and its ‘‘scattering’’ (to paraphrase Singularities )e ff e c t sw i t h i n
experience.
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Part One : Rethinking the
Experience of Modernity
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1. Reproducing History
Benjamin and Heideggeron the Work of Art in Modernity
In the perspective of Benjamin’s work, the work of art in modernity—inthe age of rapidly intensifying technical reproducibility—finds itself, para-doxically, both in the face of unprecedented danger and within view of pre-viously unrecognized possibilities for radical cultural and political changeof art’s significance.The danger arising from the exponential increase in themeans of technical reproduction as well as from the overall impact of tech-nology upon experience remains twofold. On the one hand, art runs therisk of obsolescence, of becoming totally inconsequential, with its effectslimited in scope and actuality to the isolated moment in which a work ofart is seen, heard, or read. It is isolated in a double sense: within the punc-tual self-presence of its enactment, effectively separated from history andfrom other splintered zones of experience, and socially, to the extent that itremains identified with the absence of relevance and reference beyond thatof the individual’s ‘‘aesthetic’’ experience. Following the trajectory of thedisciplining of the human sensorium,
1art begins to operate like any other
‘‘lived moment’’—without historical, cultural, or political ‘‘memory,’’ it be-
comes a certain aesthetic Erlebnis. What’s more, the functions of the work
of art can be seen as limited to only being part of the sector of cultural ac-tivities and hence circumscribed by the reputed isolation of artistic activity,even though this sector is regulated discursively and institutionally muchlike the other ‘‘realms’’ of modern experience.
2
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T h eo t h e rm o m e n to fr i s kf o ra r ti sw h e nw h a ti sp e r c e i v e da sag r o w i n g
isolation, even alienation, of art from everyday life and ordinary commu-nicative practices can instigate the hypostasis of art into the model ordesignfor the totality of experience. From being just an aesthetic form of Erleb-
nis,art becomes transformed not only into a model of experience but into
the totalizing paradigm of experience as such, a metamorphosis signifyingthe aestheticization of all experience—aestheticized Erlebnis or experience
asthe aestheticization of life. This curious alliance of the lived moment—
an isolated instant with no apparent connection to other ‘‘experiences’’—with an aesthetic totality conceived as a myth or an archaic plentitude canassume the dangerous form of a totalitarian ideology, whose embodimentBenjamin saw in the practices of fascism. Promising redemption from thefragmenting and destabilizing effects of modern shock experience by takingrecourse to a collective, mythical, ‘‘reality,’’ fascism proffers in place of his-torical experience a perverse Gesamtkunstwerk, al i v i n ga r t w o r ko fan a t i o n
or a state.
3As it deploys the technological means of control and propaganda
together with the mythical sense of identity, fascism draws upon a collusionbetween aesthetic and technological models of the totalization of experi-ence. To the extent that in modernity art is regarded as merely a culturalactivity, artworks become part and parcel of the overall scheme of order-ability and calculation characteristic of modern society.
4In effect, the prac-
tices of production, distribution, and consumption of art become indistin-guishable from technological processes, making it possible, even desirable,not only to project the aesthetic patterning of experience uponthe entirety
of the already technologized social life but, in fact, to see this totality as
itself aesthetic. In hope of rediscovering or impressing beauty and mean-ing upon the technological regime of everyday life, the aestheticization ofpolitics mobilizes both technology and mythology to produce an aestheticform of life.
This twin predicament in which modern art finds itself—fragmenta-
tion of experience and its mythological recuperation—reflects, beside thehistorical conditions of artistic production, the tensions that crisscross thespectrum of modern experience: from the fragmentation or splintering ofeveryday life, attempts at political and social totalization, to the problemof thinking experience historically. The consideration of art in modernitypivots, therefore, upon understanding how artworks figure experience in itshistorical/historial dimensions and also upon recognizing how art partici-pates in the unfolding of history, in rendering, to paraphrase Benjamin, his-tory legible, that is, readable ashistory. I follow Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s
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reflections on art precisely to the extent that they both make their rethink-ing of the work of art the venue for the revision of experience and historybeyond the optics of fragmentation and totality. Although their works havevery different trajectories, which, in the context of Benjamin’s cursory re-mark in Passagen-Werk, may be regarded as incompatible, Benjamin and
Heidegger come close in locating in the work of art the blueprint for anunderstanding of experience and history outside the parameters of enlight-ened modernity, that is, in very general terms, outside the metaphysics ofthe subject and the historicist-progressivist concept of history.
My interest is less in pointing out both major differences and similarities
that exist between Benjamin and Heidegger
5than in exploring the ten-
sion between their projects to articulate how their reflections on the workof art in modernity offer us ways to revise the concepts of experience andhistory. What is rarely underscored in this context is that both Heideggerand Benjamin come to associate the work of art in modernity with the re-figuration of the metaphysical models of history and experience by way oftheir exploration of language, and, in particular, of the link between theconcept of language as event and the notion of the work performed by art.What marks their departure from aesthetics is that, for Benjamin and Hei-degger, art is not an object of aesthetic experience, but a certain work—inthe active, verbal sense that Heidegger gives to this word in ‘‘The Origino ft h eW o r ko fA r t ’ ’
6—precisely because it ‘‘works’’ experience and history,
that is, renders them legible as such. Art ceases to be a work in an organicsense, a unified object accessible to and judged by the aesthetic gaze.Trans-ferring the emphasis from the work as an object that is produced or createdto work in the sense of the working of art, of setting into work that takesp l a c ei na r t ,o p e n st h ed o o rt ot h ei d e at h a ta r tw o r k sb yu n w o r k i n gi t so w narticulations. For Heidegger, although the work is the Gestalt (the figure),
this figure works historically, that is, it refigures itself because the Gestalt
inscribes the historicity of the rift between the world and the earth. In otherwords, the work crosses into the unwork; the line between working andunworking becomes increasingly fine, like the corresponding play betweenconcealment and unconcealment. The work of art works p r e c i s e l yw h e ni t
draws attention to the dynamic field of the rift, its continued reemergenceas itself ‘‘an openness opened by itself’’ ( BW,), rather than a closed form
associated with an aesthetic object. The transformation of the ties to theeveryday which the work of art is supposed to effect is possible because theGestalt figures precisely its own recasting—the reforming and the rework-
ing that constitute the riftlike relation between the world and the earth. As
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the rift is brought into the figure, the openness it projects unworks the veryfixity of the figure through which the rift ‘‘presents’’ itself.
This simultaneous figuring and unworking describes the logic of lan-
guage, which Benjamin and Heidegger characterize in terms of a transla-tionlike movement through which experience constitutes itself as alwaysalready linguistic. Because art works likeandaslanguage—it unfolds the
world by transposing it into discourse—artworks stage being in its histo-rial character, rendering legible the historicity of the discursive constitutionof experience. To see art as working this way, and to recognize the criticalpotential of this work, it is necessary to move beyond aesthetic reflectioninto a post- or paraesthetic understanding of art.
7It is a matter of under-
standing how modern art works in paraesthetic manner and of fleshing outthe critical implications of the shift beyond aesthetics and aestheticism forthe understanding of modern experience. For both Benjamin and Heideg-ger, critiquing aesthetics and reading art post- or nonaesthetically requiresthe exploration of art within the constellation of language, experience, andh i s t o r y .T h ep r e fi x e s‘ ‘ p o s t ’ ’a n d / o r‘ ‘ n o n ’ ’a r el e s sa ni n d i c a t i o no fan e wera in the history of thought about art than a reflection of the necessity ofcircumventing the series of exclusions—of the aesthetic from the cognitiveand the practical—on which aesthetics is founded. This nonaesthetic ap-proach to art traces the way in which experience and history are inscribedin the very work that art performs, apart from the aporias of beauty/truth,sensible/intelligible, thought/action—that structure aesthetic thinking. Tot h i n ka r tn o n a e s t h e t i c a l l yi st or e c o g n i z ei t s work, that is, to discern how
its practices of unworking the boundaries of aesthetics refigure experienceand history through the prism of their discursive constitution.
T h ei m p o r t a n c eo ft h i sc r i t i q u ec a nb es e e ni nt h ef a c tt h a t ,i no r d e rf o r
the hypostasis of art into a totalizing regime of experience to take place, arthas to be thought in traditional aesthetic categories, that is, in accordancewith the metaphysics of the subject and its categorizations of aesthetic ex-perience. Paradoxically, then, the very metaphysics that has produced thedoctrine of art as an object of disengaged contemplation triggers also themechanism of its inversion—of the aestheticization of politics and life. Onthe one hand, the aesthetic understanding of the work renders art autono-mous, reflecting, perhaps reinforcing, the splintering of the zones of ex-perience in the way it assigns to art a separate, even alienated, sphere ofaesthetic sensibility. On the other hand, aesthetics, precisely to the extentthat it is underwritten by metaphysical conceptuality, holds out a promiseof recuperation, of a beyond—a Romantic blue yonder as Benjamin refers
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to it—which,when reclaimed,would assure the restitution of the fullness ofmeaning.This nostalgia and the temptation of an archaic, mythical plane—the halo or aura drawn around the notion of the aesthetic—conceals thepossibility of the transference, or projection, of the ‘‘total’’ aesthetic imageupon other spheres of experience. In spite of, or maybe because of, theseparation of the aesthetic, the auratic enchantment becomes the sign ofcompensation, the promise of much more than just aesthetic satisfaction.Notwithstanding his early optimism about technology, Benjamin’s focus atthe time of the rise of fascism on the possibilities of postauratic art reflectsthe fear that the dissipation of the work’s aura as a result of mass repro-duction and commodification may foster the transfer of the aura from thew o r ko fa r tt ot h et o t a l i t yo fs o c i a ll i f e .W ec a n ,i nf a c t ,s e et h et e n s i o n sb e -tween the punctuality of the moment and mythical recuperation at workin the paradoxes of the modernist artistic scene, of its extension from theavant-garde experimentalism to the aesthetics of high modernism. Apartfrom its reflection in the breadth of the aesthetic spectrum of modernism,this dual tendency is encoded in some of the most prominent modernistworks. In Eliot’s Waste Land or Joyce’s Ulysses, the aesthetics of fragmenta-
tion inscribes, often in a teasing manner, the promise of an explanatory andunifying mythical code, a playful, but still nostalgic, evocation of a beyond.The trajectory of Pound’s work, from ‘‘luminous details’’ to the project ofgathering and reconfiguring them into the master narrative of the Cantos, is
symptomatic of the fragmenting and unifying strains at work in modernistaesthetics.
A sa no ff s p r i n go fm e t a p h y s i c s ,a e s t h e t i c si si m p l i c a t e di nt h et e c h n o –
logical culture of modernity and its politics.This is why, although proceed-ing from different locations, both Heidegger and Benjamin undertake acritique of aesthetics, of the metaphysical categorization of art as a beauti-ful object, in order to expose, and perhaps avert, the twin danger implicitin the aesthetic framing of art. Taking into consideration the historical cor-relation between aesthetic categories and metaphysical underpinnings oftechnology, we can conclude that the dangers associated with the aestheti-cization of politics depend upon another ‘‘danger’’: the aestheticization ofart. In fact, it could be argued that it is specifically the aesthetic conceptu-alization of art that, by creating and delimiting the sphere of the aesthetic,makes room for aestheticism and, in the same gesture, for its inversion intothe aestheticization of lived experience. Aesthetics is not a term for a neu-tral, ‘‘objective,’’ reflection upon art; rather, aesthetic reflection is alreadyimplied in the larger philosophical and cultural framework, whose outline
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has been shaped by metaphysical conceptuality. To think the work of artas an aesthetic object is, in a sense, to aestheticize art, to make the workof art legible, or, as I will suggest, illegible, precisely to the extent that itcan be conceptualized, ‘‘forced,’’ under aesthetic rubrics. For only when thework of art is rendered aesthetic through the same conceptual operationsthat have made possible and implemented the progressive technologiza-tion of modern culture can a certain inverted equivalency emerge betweenthe work of art and the possibility of totalizing experience on the aestheticmodel. In other words, the philosophical, but also cultural, aestheticiz-ing of art becomes the prelude, the groundwork, as it were, for the inver-sion of the aesthetic paradigm into th e comprehensive, even totalizing,
design of experience. Perhaps the production of art as ‘‘aesthetic’’ createsa certain liability for culture which becomes visible in the period whenmodernity begins to increasingly understand itself through the technologi-cal paradigm it has generated. This is why it is in the critique or the ‘‘end’’of aesthetics, which both Heidegger and Benjamin make central to theirlate writings, that the dangers facing modern art become most palpable.By pushing aesthetics to its double limit—the isolation of aestheticism andits inverse or ‘‘double’’: totalizing aestheticization of experience—moder-nity can rethink art and perhaps activate its radical cultural possibilities,covered over and neutralized by aesthetics.While for Heidegger, this ques-tioning of aesthetics is designed to lead to the critique of the metaphysicalroots of modernity, in particular i ts ways of schematizing and regimenting
experience, for Benjamin, this critique is inseparable from the analysis ofthe specific historical situation of the s and s.
The locus for such a questioning of aesthetics, and, at the same time, the
site where the twin ‘‘dangers’’ of art for art’s sake and the aestheticizationof politics become legible, is the avant-garde. In the ambiguous experienceof the avant-garde art or, to be more exact, in the avant-garde’s question-ing of both aesthetic and everyday experience, modernity is brought faceto face with the ghosts of metaphysics haunting its technological presentand forced to confront the divide between mythical and historical formsof experience. Benjamin’s identification of the avant-garde, Surrealism inparticular, as the site where art, engaged critically with its own aestheticprovenance, comes close both to the paradigm of the aestheticization ofexperience and to a radical writing practice, opens the possibility of a post-aesthetic reading of art.
8Benjamin not only discerns in Surrealism a cri-
tique of aesthetic practice but recognizes it as a contestation of everydayexperience: ‘‘[A]nyone who has perceived that the writings of this circle
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are not literature but something else—demonstrations, watchwords, docu-ments, bluffs, forgeries, if you will, but at any rate not literature—will alsoknow, for the same reason, that the writings are concerned literally withexperiences, not with theories and still less with phantasms.’’
9Attempt-
ing to undo the notion of literature bequeathed to it by aesthetic cannons,Surrealism both promises liberation and revolution—a new, ‘‘nonaesthetic’’writing practice—and runs the risk of leaving this change only a prom-ise. To the extent that the surrealist practice of estrangement, of suffus-ing the ordinary with the marvelous, may become its own end, instead ofbeing a strategic move in what Benjamin refers to as ‘‘the dialectics of in-toxication,’’ Surrealism, and the avant-garde in general, courts the dangerof turning its work into yet another repetition of Romantic utopianism.(Re)producing the ‘‘literary absolute,’’ this new ‘‘Romanticism’’ may un-expectedly find itself in complicity with the effort to generate a modern-istGesamtkunstwerk and its ominous reflections: totalitarian ideology and
state. This possibility manifests itself in the idealization or deification oftechnology, often combined with the sympathy for fascist ideology, char-acteristic of some avant-garde ‘‘isms.’’ One can invoke here the example ofearly Italian Futurism, and Marinetti in particular, whose fascination withtechnological progress, with the machine as the model for art and action, iswell known.
10On the other hand, the political ambiguities that crisscross
the Russian avant-garde, cubo-futurism and its subsequent developmentinto suprematism and constructivism, confound and render problematicthe clear-cut distinction that Benjamin tries to maintain between the (‘‘fas-cist’’) aestheticization of politics and the (‘‘communist’’) politicization ofart.
11
The problematic status of this boundary between politicization and aes-
theticization testifies to the inadequacy of conceiving the political in art, orof art aspolitical, on the model of dialectical opposition. Politicization of
art cannot be just a reversal of the aestheticization of politics, or a reactionagainst the social and cultural isolationism of art for art’s sake, that wouldredeem the situation by reintegrating art into social practice still conceivedon the metaphysical models of presence and subjectivity. Before the ‘‘post-aesthetic’’ significations of art can be recognized, it is necessary to redefineart and literature outside of the province of aesthetics and its metaphysicalcategorizations of experience. This exigency becomes obvious in the con-text of the still dominant readings of modernist and avant-garde art in terms
of self-reflexive textuality and epistemological aporias. Regarding the ap-parent autotelism of modernist art as the confirmation of its divorce from,
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or worse, indifference to, everyday life practice, these interpretations seemodernism as largely a repetition, extension, or even intensification, of theaestheticist doctrine of the separateness of aesthetic experience. Because ittakes aesthetics to its limits, the avant-garde practice, when interpreted ac-cording to aesthetic categories, risks being collapsed into the ideology ofthe autonomy of art. At the same time, the transformative possibilities in-herent in the avant-garde can be activated only if we can show how suchart unreads aesthetics, and, in the process, account for the risk of trivializ-ing and isolating art and for the temptation to aestheticize experience, bothcharacteristic of the situation of modern art.
In his essay on Surrealism, Benjamin appears to consider this risk worth
taking. All the more so since for him at stake in the surrealist practice isthe question of experience, the very possibility of historical experience andof the experience ofhistory, which Benjamin considers threatened by the
emergence of mythical forms of thinking within technology.
12The danger
that materializes itself in the modern work of art is the absence of historicalexperience and its replacement by either the punctual experience of shockwithout memory or the compensatory recuperation of everyday Erlebnis
in the totality of myth. Heidegger’s work is remarkably consonant withBenjamin’s on this point, especially when it critiques, as in ‘‘The Origin ofthe Work of Art,’’ the aesthetic and cultural optics within which modernart functions as part of subjective, lived, experience, rather than as the his-torical index of its times. For Heidegger, the ‘‘sheer aesthetic mindedness’’(BW,) about art relegates it to the status of a sector of cultural activity,
therebyassigning to oblivion the enigmatic critical mode of revealing ordis-
closure of the world that takes place in the work of art. Contrasted with thew o r kp e r f o r m e db ya r ti st h et e c h n i cm o d a l i t yo ft h eu n v e i l i n go ft h i n g sin(to) their presence—what Heidegger qualifies as the ‘‘essence’’ of tech-nology: the enframing (Gestell) —which calculates and orders the world in
terms of its availability for use and processing; as a result, ‘‘reality’’ consti-tutes itself as a ‘‘standing-reserve’’ (Bestand). The experience of such a reality
transpires no longer even as the perception of its objectivity—characteristicof eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture and thought—but insteadas the exercise of mastery over its readiness for use and appropriation. ForHeidegger, the predominance of the calculative modes of thinking and theimpact of technology upon experience render other paradigms of experi-ence not only ‘‘irrational’’ but, in effect, ‘‘unreal.’’ Because the standing-
reserve disclosed through the activity of the enframing (Gestell) becomes
identified with the real, that is, with the only ‘‘experience’’ that is quantifi-
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able and thus ‘‘exists,’’ the Gestell as a totalizing form of explanation begins
to function not unlike myth, the all-encompassing and the all-decipheringnarrative of modern culture. This technic quantification of reality inscribesin its very structure an unprecedented degree of control and manipulationof the world as resource (human and nonhuman, natural and social), andproduces a constant threat of the erasure of alterity across the spectrumof experience: from the everyday and the aesthetic to the social and thepolitical.
Within this overall ordering of reality, experience, I argue, assumes the
punctual form of Erlebnis, of an instance of calculability and usage. At the
same time, though, this instant finds itself already connected to the net-work of computations, it functions as an already calculable point withinthe rationalistic matrix which globalizes reality into the order of availability.Experience comes to be channeled into two interconnected orders, bothof which erase history and historicity. The first order describes the punc-tual experience of the self-identical instant without historicity, whose self-presence becomes representable in terms of its calculation and availability.The second, higher and all embracing, order designates a mythlike total-ization of experience on the model of ultimate computation—a kind oftechnological ‘‘absolute knowledge.’’ Both founded on and enforcing theprinciple of representability, those interfacing orders of experience sche-matize being in terms of a calculable presence, computed and available atwill to the self-styled subject of history—humankind. In both cases whatis erased from the patterning of experience is its historicity; instead of con-stituting the modus of experience—of experience ashistory—history be-
c o m e sc o n s t r u c t e d ,a si tw e r e ,p o s tf a c t u m ,a st h el i n e a r i t yo fp r o g r e s so rthe uniform space of historicism. Both options offer the comfort of orderand calculability, at the expense, however, of erasing the historicity of ex-perience—of the event of its unfolding—whose excess of singularity marksits alterity against the scheme of computation.
For Heidegger art and, more specifically, its poetic medium or element,
when read nonaesthetically, figures a modality of thought alternative totechnology, a thinking that remains attentive specifically to the always sin-gular historicity of the event. Hence it is in art that the danger that tech-nology poses for experience by effacing its historicity manifests itself. Theparallel problems of inconsequentiality and aestheticization visible in mod-ern art reflect the risks that the technological comportment toward beingimplies for experience. I argue that at stake in technology’s impact uponart—in both the obsolescence of the lyrical and the intensification of the
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reproducibility inherent in the work of art13—is the question of history,
and, more specifically, of the historicity of the event versus history con-structed as a story or a narrative. At issue is the difference between, on theone hand, the ‘‘excessive’’ folds of historyas the quasi-transcendental condi-tion of experience that mark in each moment of presence an alterity whichneeds to be remembered without ever being recuperated, and, on the other,history composed as the uniform and infinitely recuperable space of his-toricism. In other words, at stake here is the easily collapsible distinctionbetween Geschichte andHistorie,
14w h i c hh o l d st h ek e yt ot h ep r o b l e mo f
otherness and difference, and its inscriptions in the space of history. Hei-degger and Benjamin would agree that it is art that bridges the questionof the effects of technology upon experience (being) and the possibility ofhistory as Geschichte. Restaging and remarking the historicity of the histori-
cal space, art opens the possibility of critiquing historicism by regardingexperience as an uncontainable, nontheorizable event, always excessive inrelation to its historical or political descriptions. But art can produce thisconstellation of experience (Erfahrung) and history (Geschichte) only when
it questions its own aesthetic framework, when it breaks with its positionwithin the hierarchy of cultural activities and critiques the metaphysicalprovenance of modern thinking about art. In other word, such a critiqueis possible only in art that stands at the end of aesthetics and history, anart ‘‘after aesthetics,’’ as I argue elsewhere.
15At the end of ‘‘Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,’’ Benjamin credits Baudelaire’s poetry with opening the venuefor thinking experience in modernity historically, as Erfahrung, against the
bearing of the punctuality of shock experience: ‘‘Having been betrayed bythese last allies of his, Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotentrage of someone fighting the rain or the wind. This is the nature of some-thing lived through [ Erlebnis ] to which Baudelaire has given the weight of
an experience [ Erfahrung ]’’ (I,–).Onlyartthat,likeBaudelaire’spoet,
discards its aura, can assume the task of both recognizing the traces of ex-perience and history within the accumulation of instants—the splinteredmap of modernity—and of reserving the prerogative of interrupting anyrecuperative totalization that this fragmentation may provoke.
Experience as Event
Even though the risks confronting modern art are historically condi-
tioned, idiomatic to modernity and its technological forms of reason, theyreflect the inscription of danger within the very structure of experience,
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whose markings become legible historically as a result of the highlightingof the reproducibility inherent in the work of art through the rapid de-velopment of the means of technical reproduction. Both Heidegger andBenjamin base their discussion of art and experience on a ‘‘literal’’ inscrip-tion of danger in the matrix of experience. Like the Latin peririinexperiri,
to undergo, the German Erfahrung (experience) keeps in play the correla-
tion between traversing and being on the way, on the one hand, and dangerand peril, on the other.
16The danger that interests Benjamin and Heideg-
ger is not only an experience of danger, of finding oneself face to face witha perilous situation or event, but rather danger as the experiencing itself,as the modality intrinsic to historical being. In the Heideggerian parlance,danger exists both on the ontic level, in the form of threatening and peril-ous historical circumstances, and on the ontological level—as the very mo-dality of experiencing, as the manner or the way in which one undergoesan experience.
Although ‘‘experience’’ (Erfahrung) is a term that is not too common in
Heidegger’s discourse and unusual in the Heidegger scholarship, it is tied inimportant ways to his understanding of thinking (Denken), and to the pos-
sibility of an event in which being unfolds in its very ‘‘essence’’/occurrence(Wesen). The use of the term ‘‘experience’’ in the context of Heidegger’s
thought demands caution, as Heidegger is openly critical of the empiri-cist and psychological understanding of experience, especially of the termErlebnis, or lived experience. However, when Heidegger does use the term
Erfahrung, it is precisely to call into question, as Bernasconi suggests,
17the
metaphysical understanding of experience and to reconceptualize it in re-lation to his most important terms: Ereignis, language, technology, danger,
and so on. For example, a series of poems from entitled ‘‘ Aus der Er-
fahrung des Denkens ’’ gives its title to the collection of Heidegger’s short
texts on poetry and art. This title suggests that thinking hinges on the mo-dality of experiencing, on how the ‘‘experience’’ of thinking unfolds. Moresignificant, Heidegger’s two most important essays on language, ‘‘ DasWesen
der Sprache ’’ and ‘‘ Der Weg zur Sprache, ’’ open with the question of what
it means to experience (erfahren) language as a way-making or an event.
18
Heidegger wants to ‘‘experience the way to language in terms of what tran-spires with the way while we are under way on it’’ ( BW,), so that lan-
guage may strike us in all its strangeness as a way to language: n o ta sam e a n s
of representation or a space of signification but as a saying, which is itselfthe most proper manner of occurring or propriating (‘‘ die eigenste Weise des
Ereignens ’’). But to ‘‘experience’’ language as ‘‘on the way to language,’’ that
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is, as a manner of propriating, experience itself has to have the character ofevent that lets what is into is own—it has to be ereignend. It is that sense of
being on the way, which at the same time brings forth and withdraws, pro-priates and dis- or de-propriates ( er-eignen andent-eignen ), which Heideg-
ger reinscribes in the word Erfahrung. Such ‘‘experience’’ is a nonsubjective
correspondence (Entsprechung) with the ‘‘saying’’ character of being, with
das Ereignis occurring (on) the way to language (where ‘‘occurring’’ has to
have both transitive and intransitive character).
Ereignis or propriative event is the term Heidegger introduces into his
discourse in mid-s as a way of rethinking the problematic of beingbeyond the ontico-ontological difference and outside of the metaphysicalstrictures and determinations of the word being. A ti t sm o s ts i m p l e , Ereig-
nisrefers to the very giving of what is, to the fact that such a giving takes
p l a c ei nt e r m so ft h eg i v e n n e s so ft i m ea n db e i n g :‘ ‘ Ereignis ereignet Sein
und Zeit ’’
19/‘‘Ereignis disposes/propriates being and time.’’ As this giving,
Ereignis reflects the empty subject of the German es gibt (there is). Even
though Ereignis has no essence or ground, it names the very force thanks to
which something unfolds and comes to be what it is. Heidegger transformsEreignis, an ordinary word for event in German, into a linguistic and philo-
sophical pun, exploiting the semantic possibilities inherent in the word,especially in its root eigen: own, proper. While -eignis refers to the com-
plex play of both ‘‘owning,’’ that is, coming to be what something prop-erly is, and dispropriation or ungrounding, the prefix erunderscores the
occurrence, the temporal character of this event. Ereignis n a m e st h e na n
occurring in which what comes to be is given into its own. But it is giveninto its own in a manner that also de-propriates, that is, in coming to bewhat it is, a being (Seiende) discloses the withdrawal of being (Sein) as the
nonground (Abgrund) of its being. As a propriative event, Ereignis is the
very movement, the way that decides or carries out this simultaneous pro-priation and de-propriation. In this sense, Ereignis is also a de-cision (Ent-
scheidung), a scission that carries out or disposes what is into its time and
being: ‘‘ Er-eignis ist Austrag. ’’
20This de-cision is the way in which the non-
ground or the abyss, namely ‘‘being’’ in its no longer metaphysical sense,is disposed (‘‘ Der Aus-trag trägt den Ab-grund, ’’ [B,]). It carries out and
(ap)propriates differences ‘‘over’’ the abyss (Abgrund), over the absence of
ground and essence, which characterizes the way it gives time and being.
Experience occurs as Erfahrung, and not Erlebnis, only as such an event
(Ereignis), that is, as this disposing or carrying out, which unfolds the very
site of differentiation and relationality. To experience would then mean to
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be on the way, in the very movement through which beings keep cominginto their own, each time anew into the singularity of their differences. Itwould be tantamount to remaining or standing in the temporalization ofthe propriating and dispropriating folds of Ereignis which draw out (aus-
tragen) and dispose the vectors and valencies of relations. Drawing relations
in the manner of propriation, the event releases and frees what is to be itsown. The movement of saying to language, Ereignis, disposes relations as a
bind that unbinds, that relates and propriates by way of freeing somethingto be properly what it is: ‘‘The Saying’s way-making movement to languageis the unbinding bond, the bond that binds by propriating’’ ( BW,).The
bind of relation here propriates, that is, frees and enables something to bewhat it is and to unfold into its own by way of relation to what is other.As such, Ereignis is the relation of all relations, the very scission or drawing
out of relationality: ‘‘For propriation—owning, holding, keeping to itself—is the relation of all relations’’ ( BW,). As the de-scission which carries
out/disposes all relationality, Ereignis lets beings come into their own, to re-
tain themselves only through differentiation and, at the same time, throughthe dispropriating ungrounding of time and being. For as it lets come intopresence, Ereignis withdraws and retains itself; it remains unsaid. This de-
propriating force with which Ereignis g i v e st i m ea n db e i n gb yw i t h h o l d i n g
itself constitutes the bind of relating, or, in other words, it draws out re-lations. In its withdrawal Ereignis releases and carries relations in the sense
that it de-cides them, that is, draws them out by separating and holdingbeings in relation to one another. As Austrag or decision, Ereignis draws out
relations and carries them in their abyssal, nongrounded occurrence. It thusdraws relations into what is ‘‘proper’’ for them: the Abgrund of the scission
of being and time. The emphasis in such experience falls upon the futuraltemporality of such a de-cision and the absence of ground which is ‘‘experi-enced’’ precisely as the movement of propriating.Thus, Heidegger’s notionofEreignis is an ‘‘instant’’ critique of subjectivist, empiricist, and essentialist
ideas of experience. It ungrounds their assumptions, disclosing the propri-ating(ereignend) force of the dispropriating (enteignend) abyss(Abgrund) of
being.To undergo such an experience, as ‘‘The Way to Language’’ suggests,is to experience the carrying out of the futural unfolding of being as an eventungrounded, ‘‘properly’’ drawn out and de-cisioned, in the dispropriatingtemporality of its giving.
In one of his Bremen lectures, entitled ‘‘Danger’’ (Die Gefahr), Heideg-
ger, playing on the etymological association of the Old High German fara
withGefahr andErfahrung, w r i t e sa b o u tt h en e e df o rt h i n k i n gt ot r a v e l (be-
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fahren) within the ‘‘zone of the dangerousness of danger’’ (‘‘die Zone dieser
Gefährlichkeit der Gefahr’’) in order to experience the unfolding of being
(‘‘um das Wesen des Seyns zu erfahren’’).21This typical instance of Heideg-
ger’s etymological and linguistic play demarcates the structural inscriptionof danger within the formation of experience. The danger in this case isthe forgetting of being within the technological enframing (the Gestell )o f
modern reality, and the journey refers to the ways or paths on which think-ing ‘‘experiences’’ the unfolding of being. For Heidegger, thinking happensat those moments when thought traverses the very dangerousness of dan-ger, that is, the zone in which being unfolds technologically. It is in thiszone of technological revealing, both through and against the enframing,that the occurrence of being (das Wesen des Seyns) can be ‘‘experienced.’’
Erfahrung points here to the limit of experience in its ordinary sense, to
that no doubt rare occasion when ‘‘experience’’ occurs as event, as Ereignis.
Just as Denken is nonsubjective in Heidegger, I use the word ‘‘experience’’
against its modern empiricist and psychological baggage.
22It is in this spe-
cific nonsubjective sense that a certain co-disposition23between the Ereig-
nisand the ‘‘experience’’ of being can take place. It suggests that being is
‘‘experienced’’ in its ‘‘essence’’ (Wesen) only when experience itself occurs
in a nontechnological, propriating manner as an event.
I read both Benjamin and Heidegger as linking the legibility of the peri-
lousness of experience to technology: Benjamin to shock experience andHeidegger to the ‘‘essence’’ of technology, or technicity, understood as theGestell (the enframing). Both look for ways of thinking this danger within
the figuration of experience (or being) in the work of art, that is, in relationto the specificity of the work that art performs. Perhaps most indicative inthis context is Benjamin’s invocation of the writings of the avant-garde as aform of constant awakening to the ‘‘dangerous structure’’ of experience, thepractice emblematized by the ringing of an alarm clock: ‘‘They [the Sur-realists] exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of analarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds’’ ( R,).
The motifs of awakening and unforgetting interwoven in Benjamin’s and
Heidegger’s work remind us that the perilous turn of experience, taken withthe rapid technologization of modern society, is not simply the punctu-ality and shock value of Erlebnis but, primarily, the disappearance or era-
sure of historicity and the event. It is not only auratic experience that isshattered by shock but the historicity at play in Erfahrung —the historical
indexing of the present.With the effacement of historicity, and of experi-ence as event, the present can all too easily be (mis)taken as presence—
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self-identical and impermeable to alterity. Invested with authenticity andpower, the present can either authorize itself as its own ground or transferthis authority onto a prehistoric, mythical origin, thereby making possiblea totalization of experience at the expense of otherness and difference. Ineither case, the discursive and political effects of the erasure of alterity inthe wake of the collapse of Erfahrung intoErlebnis become apparent.While
the punctuality of shock experience clearly spells out the absence of histori-cal memory, for Benjamin the most disquieting aspect of modernity lies inthe political transformation of this absence into a need for the recuperationof the ‘‘wholeness’’ of experience through reference to prehistory or myth.In late Heidegger, it is the matrix of calculation and ordering that becomesthe ultimate framework of reference, the technological horizon of intelli-gibility within which the differential modality of being becomes reducibleto the calculus of availability.
Experience and its textual figurations constitute a steady undercurrent
of Benjamin’s writings and in the s achieve a critical articulation in hisconception of history and time designed to unmask the heightened pres-ence of mythic consciousness in modern technological culture and com-bat its most pernicious manifestation—fascism. Benjamin’s preoccupationwith nineteenth-century culture, with the Paris arcades, with Baudelaire,Proust, and the avant-garde, functions as part of his project of articu-lating, through the changes in social and cultural conditions, the para-digm of modern(ist) experience. What interests me most is the relationthat Benjamin sketches between the transformation of experience and thechanges in art, in particular the decline of lyric poetryand the emergence ofavant-garde literary practice: ‘‘If conditions for a positive reception of lyricpoetry have become less favorable, it is reasonable to assume that only inrare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers.This may be due to a change in the structure of their experience’’ ( I,).
The cultural, literary, and philosophical diagnoses of this transmutation inthe conditions and, hence, also the structure of experience,which Benjaminlocates somewhere in the nineteenth century, follow the trajectory of thedifference, mutual exclusion but also, as I suggest, the interplay betweentwo forms or patterns of experience that describe the tensions crisscross-ing modernity: Erfahrung andErlebnis. My remarks here will be limited
to tracing this distinction between Erlebnis andErfahrung, fleshing out the
difference between the notions of history and temporality that are at workin these two forms, and, finally, examining the way this difference is tracedi nt h ew o r ko fa r t .
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Although Benjamin refers in general to experience as Erfahrung, it is im-
portant for tracing the complexity and ambiguity of his reflection uponmodernity to maintain a distinction between experience as a form of imme-diacy and self-presence (Erlebnis) and experience as a pattern of dislocation
and temporal distance (Erfahrung). I employ Erlebnis as an umbrella term
for all those instances in which experience is characterized by punctuality,self-coincidence, and closure. At the beginning of ‘‘Some Motifs in Baude-laire,’’ Benjamin associates these forms of experiencewith the conception oflived experience in Lebensphilosophie and Bergson’s notion of durée, indicat-
ing that their overarching characteristic lies in their immediacy and ‘‘lived,’’unreflected quality. In contrast, the Erfahrung -forms of experience are de-
fined specifically by the inscription of an unsublatable temporal distancein their very mode of occurring; they take place as already dislocated andnoncoincident. Erfahrung transpires as the opening of a distance, a disloca-
tion into time, and an irruption of history. This degree of noncoincidencecharacterizes not only thework of memoryand dreams,or the surrealist suf-fusion of the ordinary with the marvelous, that is, the sur-reality inflectingthe everyday world, but also, and primarily, historical thinking.This is whyin his polemics with Matière et mémoire Benjamin singles out the absence
of ‘‘any historical determination of memory’’ as the most significant factorplacing Bergson in the vicinity of Lebensphilosophie and its conception of
‘‘true’’ experience as Erlebnis.
Benjamin relates this understanding of experience as Erlebnis to the
heightened, though often concealed, presence of the mythic elements andarchaic consciousness in modern technological culture and to the politicaldangers rising from the totalization of experience implicit in this attitude:
Since the end of the last century, philosophy has made a series of at-tempts to lay hold of the ‘‘true’’ experience (der ‘‘wahren’’ Erfahrung) as
opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denaturedlife of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts underthe heading of a philosophy of life. Their point of departure, under-standably enough, was not man’s life in society.What they invoked waspoetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of myths. Dilthey’sbookD a sE r l e b n i su n dd i eD i c h t u n g represents one of the earliest of these
efforts which end with Klages and Jung; both made common cause withFascism. ( I,)
Regarding the mythic underpinnings of Erlebnis as possibly facilitating the
embrace or at least complacency with fascist ideology, Benjamin posits the
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necessity of historicist and materialist analysis as an antidote to the my-thologizing force of primal or archaic experience. The difference betweenthe fulfillment implicit in Erlebnis and the distance operating in Erfahrung
is replayed in the tensions running through Benjamin’s work: mythologyand history, dream and awakening, historicism and dialectical materialism,fascism and revolution.
The pivot of Benjamin’s thought, this difference is more complex than
it appears on the surface and often comes close to erasing the boundary be-tween the Erlebnis and the Erfahrung patterns of experience. Even though
Benjamin appears anxious to assure mutual exclusiveness of Erlebnis and
Erfahrung, the forms of experience associated with Erlebnis often incorpo-
rate in their occurrence the distance and disjunction characteristic of Er-
fahrung, while the latter is sometimes given by Benjamin the valency of a
‘‘true’’ or ‘‘whole’’ experience, evocative of the metaphysical ideas of clo-sure and self-identity. This ambivalence is due at least partly to the wideregister of examples that Benjamin procures for those two patterns of ex-perience, though it also reflects a structural ambiguity at work in Erlebnis.
Even though, or perhaps because, Erlebnis designates the punctuality of
shock experience, its correlate is the desire to reclaim fullness and closureof experience, an idealized plentitude which is most often placed at a dis-tance, at a remove from the splintered experience of the present. Dislocatedfrom the punctual present, this plentitude functions as either an archaic,mythic past, an origin that has degenerated into the alienated forms ofmodern life, or as a transcendental ideal, a future utopia—the ‘‘blue dream’’of Romanticism. In this case of what might be called Erlebnis at a distance,
the present functions merely as a distorted reflection of a ‘‘true’’ past or aharbinger of the plentitude to come. The experience of the present—re-garded as alienated, fragmented, and incomplete—becomes totally inade-quate with regard to the posited past or future fullness that haunts andexposes the lack and deficiencies of the present instant. In spite of the dis-junction, this pattern of experience envisions the eventuation of the prom-ised fullness, the realization of its closure, the recuperation of the alien-ated ideal. Whether it designates an archaic past or a future utopia, thedislocation in either case, unlike the structural dislocation operating in Er-
fahrung, may be redeemed and the promised immediacy restored. It has
only the status of an appearance, an immediacy lurking beneath or justbeyond everyday fragmentation and regimentation—the ‘‘natural’’ imme-diacy of common knowledge and the naturalness of the everyday. Thatis why Benjamin is so careful to prevent the dislocation in the Jetztzeit
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and in the surrealist writing practice from being collapsed into the para-digm of an ideal at a distance and read as another version of distancedfulfillment.
Heidegger’s critique of Lebensphilosophie and the forms of lived experi-
ence, its ties to organicism and biologism, makes up a long story, in fact anundercurrent of the project of rethinking existence and being in terms ofthe event (Ereignis).
24Though Heidegger is less explicit in linking this idea
of a distanced origin with myth, theway he deploys the notion of Erfahrung
in his writings is correlated with his critique of the uniformity and totaliz-ing scope of the calculative thought dominating the technological present.As long as we think technology instrumentally, we fail, Heidegger believes,to understand, and to ‘‘experience,’’ the extent to which enframing—thetechnological mode of disclosing the world—organizes modern reality. Re-garding technology instrumentally prevents ‘‘the question as to whether weactuallyexperience ourselves as the ones whose activities everywhere, publicand private, are challenged forth by enframing [ vom Ge-stell herausgefordert
ist]’’ (BW,).
25For Heidegger, it is the recognition of how experience
is ‘‘enframed’’ within modernity that may permit a questioning, perhapseven an unfastening, a release—in the sense of Gelassenheit —of the tech-
nological frame of being: ‘‘[W]hen we once open ourselves expressly to theessence of technology we find ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing
claim [ Anspruch ]’’ (BW,–). To be able to read the claim of Erfahrung
as a passage, a ‘‘perilous journey,’’ and to question the uniformity and im-mobility of Bestand —of the world as a resource at hand—it is necessary to
realize how technology has become the pattern of experience, the modalityof the world’s unfolding.This other, ‘‘freeing,’’ claim Heidegger mentions isthe work of art, in the double, objective and subjective sense of the genitive,that is, the historical poiēsis performed by art, which unfolds the legibility
of history.
The lessons of Heidegger and Benjamin could be encapsulated into a
call for attentiveness to the distances and disjunctions into which experi-ence unfolds and for thinking and keeping in play the event character ofexperience, its disjoining eventuation or traversal into presence. The newlegibility of experience in modernity signifies nothing other than the possi-bility of thinking experience nonmetaphysically, by attending, apart fromthe notions of subjectivity and presence, to the temporal translocation atwork in experience, which encrypts the possibility of history. In Heidegger,this translocation is marked by the excess, the always already, characteristicofEreignis. For Benjamin, it is the structure of Erfahrung as a historical ex-
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perience, whose emblematic representation is given in the dialectical imageand in the dislocation of the ‘‘now-time’’ (Jetztzeit).
This ‘‘new’’ legibilityof experience can be obtained only through a redefi-
nition of language beyond its ‘‘technological’’ determinations as a means ofcommunication and the circuitry for the flow of information. If Benjamin’searlieressays on technology, ‘‘TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Re-production’’ and ‘‘A Short History of Photography,’’ describe its potentiallyemancipatory effects, his later texts associate technology with the reduc-tion of experience and its eventual encapsulation in information. It is thislater Benjaminian attitude toward technology which strikes me as parallelto Heidegger’s reflection on the Gestell. Benjamin is very specific in singling
out information as one of the chief culprits in isolating experience into dis-crete moments: ‘‘The principles of journalistic information (freshness of thenews, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection betweenthe individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-upof the pages and the paper’s style ….A n o t h e rr e a s o nf o rt h ei s o lation of
information from experience is that the former does not enter ‘tradition’ ’’(I,–). Equally important is t he parallel recognition of the linguistic
determination of experience, which, in turn, renders ‘‘experience’’ prob-lematic as a metaphysical concept. In fact, the agreement about the alwaysalreadydiscursive form of experience,widespread in contemporarydebates,puts into question, even seems to disqualify, the very notion of experience.This is certainly the case if by experience one means some sort of a non- orprelinguistic sensation, an operation through which reality impresses itselfupon consciousness, which is already at work to ‘‘imagine’’ and representwhat it undergoes or ‘‘experiences.’’ Such experience immediately assumesfoundational functions, serving as a source or origin of meaning, a ‘‘signi-fication’’ prior to signification and language, which can be handily invokedas an authorizing moment and a corrective to the ‘‘excesses’’ of languageand the uncontrollable play of rhetoric. It would be advisable, therefore,to abandon the term ‘‘experience’’ altogether if it were not for the fact thatmuch of contemporary thought is too often misread as limited ‘‘simply’’to an analysis of language or textuality, with apparently no interest, andno bearing, upon ‘‘experience.’’ I keep, therefore, the word ‘‘experience’’—if only in quotation marks, requalified and critiqued—because it opens aspace for demonstrating that the textuality at work in post-Heideggerianthought is a way of remapping ‘‘experience’’ outside the grid of the founda-tional dichotomies of subject and object, presence and absence, experienceand language.
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This refiguration of experience transposes the boundary between being
and thought, existence and language, rendering ‘‘experience’’ indissociablefrom thought, indeed equivalent to a form of thinking: Denken orAndenken
in Heidegger, Eingedenken in Benjamin. In both cases, for Benjamin as well
as for Heidegger, Erfahrung a c q u i r e st h et e x t u r eo ft h i n k i n g ,i tb e a r st h e
imprint of the dislocation and excess characteristic of thought overflow-ing its articulations, its representationality. Perhaps the best illustration ofthis pattern is the way in which ‘‘experience’’ in Heidegger’s work is takenover and reworked through the notion of thinking (Denken). Because of
the metaphysical provenance of the concept of experience, of its virtual in-separability from the metaphysics of the subject, Heidegger’s critique of thephilosophy of life and its governing notion of Erlebnis institutes in place of
experience and its subject the modalityof ‘‘being-in-the-world’’ and the siteof its ‘‘thereness,’’ Dasein. In Heidegger’s later writings, what marks and re-
inscribes the shifting perimeterof being-in-the-world is thinking (Denken),
a poetic thinking within, but also of, Ereignis —the infold.
26In this con-
text, experience is no longer opposed, prior to, or different from thinking;it is not an encounter with the world through the senses, which serves asthe sensible basis for reflection and ratiocination. Instead, experience, re-figured as event, is a form of thinking which acts upon reality and effects it,‘‘lets it be,’’ through the act of transposing it into language. Being-in-the-
world has the form of thinking, whose most characteristic trait is attend-
ing to the always already completed transfer or translation of the world—its history—into language and discursive structures. For Heidegger beingmeans participating in the linguistic event (Ereignis) w h i c ho p e n saw o r l d
and history.
Redescribing experience as thinking, Heidegger disengages experience
from the pattern of passive receptivity and from the reactive model of con-sciousness, according to which the world inscribes or impresses its outlineupon the senses and, through them, upon thought. For Heidegger think-i n gi sb o t har e s p o n d i n g (Entsprechen) to the event of the world and an
active transmission or transposition of this event into language. Alwaysalready profiled in language, thinking is this ‘‘constellation of the truth’’(BW,) of the unconcealment of the world and history, the configura-
tion of thinking ( Denken ) whose modality of the middle voice escapes the
simple polarity of the active and the passive. Prior to the distinction be-tween practice and theory, the thinking Heidegger has in mind outlinest h ec o m p o r t m e n to f Dasein toward the world; its constellation continu-
ously reconfigures the patterns of engagement with what is, the modalities
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of being-in-the-world (‘‘experiencing’’), from which both theoretical re-flection and action derive. ‘‘Thinking does not become action only becauses o m ee ff e c ti s s u e sf r o mi to rb e c a u s ei ti sa p p l i e d .T h i n k i n ga c t si n s o f a ra sit thinks. Such action is presumably the simplest and at the same time thehighest, because it concerns the relation of Being to man’’ ( BW,). The
middle voice of such thinking, both guided by the unfolding of history andactively participating in it by shaping its articulation into language, breakswith the metaphysical polarization into theory and practice by recognizinghow the dynamic of experience is determined by language.
In Benjamin’s work the question of passivity and activity is broached
through the distinction between Erlebnis (the lived moment) and Erfahrung
(experience). Even though Erlebnis cannot be described simply in terms of a
passive reception of stimuli, consciousness fragmented by shock experienceappears to be rendered passive, overwhelmed by the punctuality of the in-stant, and incapable of (historical) experience beyond the scope of the livedmoment. Unlike Erlebnis, experience as Erfahrung requires the work of Ein-
gedenken, the attentiveness of thought to the possibility of the past emerg-
ing within and dislocating the present from the closure and isolation of the‘‘lived moment’’ and endowing it thus with the valency of historical experi-ence(Erfahrung). The Benjaminian modality of thinking as commemora-
tion or remembrance (Eingedenken) functions as the opening of history, the
inauguration of historical time and the possibility of historical experience.Brushing history against the grain, this form of remembrance unmasks his-tory as injustice, as the evolution of the means of exploitation: ‘‘There isno document of civilization which is not at the same time a document ofbarbarism’’ ( I,). To the extent that historical experience in Benjamin
has the structure of Eingedenken, of the constellation of the past and the
present, it marks the laborof the historian or the thinker to obtain ‘‘a uniqueexperience with the past’’ ( I,). However, the practice of Eingedenken
cannot be confused with activity that would remain at the discretion of asubject, since the irruption of the past within the present, the maturationof the past’s weak messianic force that makes possible the crystallization ofthe monad of Jetztzeit, can never be forced within the present. The activity
ofEingedenken consists above all in preparation, in getting thought ready to
register the flashing emergence of the unique experience with the past, anexperience that not only marks the past with the force of the present but,in the same gesture, dislodges the Erlebnis o ft h ep r e s e n ti n t ot h ei n t e r v a l ,
the in-thinking of experience (Erfahrung). Eingedenken functions as both
the constellation of this in-thinking, the configuration of the past’s infold
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into the present—the syncope of the now-time—and as the readiness toremember, to mark, this dislocation. For Benjamin, Eingedenken, blowing
open the present and unmasking its injustices, repays a debt to the past byrendering legible the failure of the past to read itself historically.
Language, the Most Innocentand Most Dangerous of Possessions
Writing poetry: ‘‘That most innocent of all occupations’’
—Hölderlin
Reading experience (Erfahrung) and thinking (Denken) i nt e r m so ft h e
event of history, that is, as already indexed historically, hinges upon the eti-ology of ‘‘human speech,’’ of language as a system of signs and an array ofdiscursive practices. To understand how either Benjamin’s or Heidegger’swork is invested in the notion of experience (Erfahrung) a st h es i t eo ft h e
articulation of danger, it is important to recognize a certain homology thattheir writings elaborate between language and experience. In fact, for boththinkers, their conceptions of experience are correlates of their approachto language. The perilous nature of experience—the constant possibility ofmisreading being in essentialist terms—is conditioned by the proclivity oflanguage to hide its own structure of translation and, in the process, to dis-semble the discursive status of experience. In both the Heideggerian and theBenjaminian projects, the idiosyncratic conceptions of language becomethe site of interrogating experience and, more specifically,of elucidating thediscursive constitution and working of experience. For Benjamin and Hei-degger, ‘‘experience’’ (Erfahrung) is marked by an unbridgeable distance, a
dislocation from presence, precisely to the extent that it occurs, as it were,‘‘into’’ words or text, replaying the translational dynamic of the languageevent.
We should start by remarking that the Benjaminian as well as the Hei-
deggerian approach to language differ quite distinctly from the Saussureanand the post-Saussurean models, which focus primarily on the relation be-tween langue andparole. Like the Saussurean model itself, its critiques,
putting in question the rigid demarcation between langue andparole
through the concepts of textuality and discursive practice, often leave un-examined or devote less attention to the relation between language and its‘‘other’’: reality, world, experience, and so on. This is the case, in particu-lar, with the effects that the inscription of the relation of language and its
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outside has on the representational optics itself, or, to be more precise, onwhether one opts for the representational paradigm at all. The recognitionthat reality and experience are constituted discursively, already as an inter-pretation, does not really modify the focus or the parameters of the inquirywhich center upon the play of signification and its cultural determinations.Predictably, those inquiries return sooner or later to the question of rep-resentation and referentiality, reconfirming the double optics of the Saus-surean model: the social and the referential.
If in Saussure the problem of reference, though implicit, remains largely
unexamined, both Benjamin and Heidegger propose models of languagethat might be called translational or transpositional. Since for those think-ers language works on the principle of transition and translocation, it can-n o tb ep r o p e r l yr e g a r d e da s either representational ornonrepresentational. I
read these approaches to language in terms of how they render the problemof representation secondary: They preempt, as it were, the issue of referen-
tiality of language by extending the notion of language to the very eventof manifestation, to phenomenality itself. To put it differently, they pro-pose a transpositional model of language in lieu of the paradigm of repre-sentation grounded upon the metaphysics of the subject. Representationis a derived, though necessary, phenomenon, an effect of the metaphysi-cal categorization of language as a means of representation and commu-nication. Underlying the problem of representationality is what Heideggerwould call a narrow understanding of language, which limits the event oflanguage to the human system of signification. Such a demarcation of lan-guage of and against the ‘‘material’’ or ‘‘sensible’’ reality reflects one of themost fundamental metaphysical oppositions: between the sensible and theintelligible. This metaphysical divide predetermines and displaces reflec-tion on language away from the question of its translational character toits representational function. Likewise, the question of reference can ariseonly when language is already regarded as separated, at least implicitly, fromthe ‘‘reality’’ or ‘‘experience’’ which it is, therefore, expected to describe andrepresent.
Against Saussure’s view, which, characteristically, neither Benjamin nor
Heidegger mention, their approaches can be seen as dissolving the doubleoptics that frame the Saussurean model and substituting for them a dy-namic design of language as a ‘‘way to language’’ (Heidegger) or ‘‘translat-ability’’ (Benjamin). The linguistic blueprint they elaborate demonstrateshow the work of language consists in transposing ‘‘reality’’—that is, theevent of manifestation that itself already constitutes a form of saying—
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into language (discourse, representation, conceptuality). In this view, theworld is not only thought and experienced within language, that is, asalways already transposed (translated) into language, but takes itself theform of a language event. The significance of the notion of translatabilityin the context of history and experience can be seen from the fact thatfor Benjamin translatability works as a structure of the work of art thatliberates it from the mythical connection to reality. As Gasché explains,‘‘[t]hanks to this structure thework of art raises itself above textual,weblike,and hence mythical interconnectedness to communicate that within it, lan-guage speaks, or that within it, a difference has been set forth.’’
27The possi-
bility of disentangling history and experience from the ‘‘danger’’ of readingin mythical terms is inscribed in the artwork’s translatability, in its ‘‘linguis-tic intention,’’ which draws attention to the distance and difference throughwhich reality transposes itself into language. It is interesting to note herethat in his summer course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘‘Der Ister,’’ Heideg-ger, taking a position markedly different from his statements from to, links the historical existence of a people precisely with the differenceand otherness inscribed in translation. Noting that a historical people cannever find its ‘‘essence’’ (Wesen) in their own language, Heidegger writes:
‘‘Ein geschichtliches Volk istnur aus der Zwiesprache seiner Sprache mit frem-
den Sprachen ’’ (‘‘A historical people isonly from the dialogue between its
language and foreign languages’’).
28Translation, especially the effects it has
on one’s own language, puts into question the ‘‘mythical’’ construction ofidentity, the connectedness constitutive of the sameness of essence.
Already in ‘‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’’ Benja-
min describes the linguistic event in terms of translation: ‘‘The translation[Übersetzung ] of the language of things into that of man’’ ( R,). The title
phrase ‘‘language as such’’ points beyond language conceived as a system ofsigns(langue) or discursive practice, and refers to the event (of language)
which institutes language in its narrow sense as a signifying or representa-tional system.The title designates not so much the play of signification (thehuman language or ‘‘naming’’) as the interval and the positioning of the‘‘language of man’’ vis-à-vis the ‘‘language of things.’’ ‘‘Language as such’’ istherefore a structuring that underlies and produces ‘‘human language,’’ thatunderscores the possibility and the precariousness of the (mis)translationimplied by the very dynamics of the event of language. Since for Benjaminthe language of things is not fully uttered or expressed, it is not yet spoken(or written),
29it finds itself in need of transcription into words; it must be
translated into discourse. Not yet signifiable, the linguistic being (sprach-
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licheWesen) of things requires transcription: ‘‘To whom does the lamp com-
municate itself [ mitteilen ] ?T h em o u n t a i n ?T h ef o x ?B u th e r et h ea n s w e ri s :
to man. This is not anthropomorphism. The truth of this answer is shownin knowledge and perhaps also in art’’ ( R,). The Benjaminian notion
of ‘‘language as such’’ indicates nothing other than the matrix of this tran-scription, itself unwritten and already erased by the results of the transla-tory operation: the orders of signification and representation. What com-municates itself across languages, in the translatability marked within eachlanguage and each text, is the ‘‘language as such,’’ that is, the translationalevent inaugurating discourse.
Considered in the context of Benjamin’s work, Heidegger’s idea of the
way to language, of language that occurs ‘‘on the way’’ to words (unterwegs
zur Sprache), prior to the systemic play of signs, can be taken to demon-
strate how the translational conception of language inflects the metaphysi-cal framework of linguistic and aesthetic speculation. Heidegger shows howthis linguistic translation determines the dynamics of experience and howits self-erasure allows for the refraction of Erfahrung into the lived moment.
Heidegger’s various encounters with language through the prism of poetryoscillate constantly around the problem of the self-effacing character ofthe language event, the necessary disappearance of the translational ‘‘way-making’’ in the play of signification: ‘‘Such way-making brings language(the essence of language) as language (the saying) to language (to the re-sounding word)’’ ( BW,). The Heideggerian insight into language pivots
upon the recognition of the already linguistic character of phenomenality,on the idea that manifestation is a form of a ‘‘showing saying’’: ‘‘The say-ing is by no means the supplementary linguistic expression of what shinesforth; rather all shining and fading depend on the saying that shows’’ ( BW,
). Here the saying (Sage), that is, phenomenality or the phenomenal
condition of the world, understood as the play that eventuates into pres-ence and absence ( Anwesen andAbwesen ), cannot be mistaken for the rep-
resentation of the substantive being of a thing, because it delineates thething’s emergence within the nexus or the jointure that is called world orhistory. In other words, the saying transcribes the trajectory of the thing’spropriation within the event (Ereignis) of language. Sagepoints beyond the
essence, the idea, or the representation of a thing, and marks what I wouldcall the thing’s ‘‘phenomenal scription,’’ that is, its tracing within the bi-nary logic of presence and absence. ‘‘The saying that rests on propriation[Ereignis ] is, as showing, the most proper mode of propriating. Propriation
is telling [ sagend ]’’ (BW,). Beyond the play of signfication, the saying
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constitutes the very unfolding and occurrence, the drawing out and de-ciding of propriation—the event as Ereignis. As an event that brings what
is into its own, that is, propriates, Ereignis occurs as saying, which means
that its very unfolding composes a relationality that is ‘‘telling,’’ that saysitself beyond and ‘‘prior to’’ the space of signification. We might say thattheSageconstitutes the linguistic coming into presence of the phenomenal,
what Benjamin hints at with his notion of ‘‘linguistic being’’ (sprachliche
Wesen). An-archic, without the point of origin, this linguistic manifesta-
tion precedes the quantification of the phenomenal in terms of materialityand intelligibility.With his notion of the way-making of language, Heideg-ger proposes to see phenomenality as a linguistic event, which resonates int h ep h r a s e‘ ‘ die Sprache spricht ’’: language languages. It is out of this spe-
cific linguistic formation of the phenomenal that the distinction betweenthe sensible and the intelligible arises.
The transposition through which language constitutes itself and effects
its emergence as ‘‘human speech,’’ as a set of discursive practices, remains forthe most part covered by the play of signification.This is especially the casein the information age, where ‘‘being’’ or ‘‘reality’’ seem to be increasinglydetermined by their informational (and, more often than not, sensational)value, and where language becomes identified solely with its functionality,with its pragmatic dimension of an informational relay.The self-veiling lan-guage dynamics, no longer recognizable in the communicational and in-formational uses of language, is registered, however, by art, in particular inthe poetic explorations of language which explicitly attend to the unfold-ing of language, its semantic and syntactical crystallizations. This is whyBenjamin and Heidegger devote so much reflection to the working of art,to its ‘‘poietics,’’ and to art’s ability to retain and expose the traces of thetranslational character of experience.
What is rarely noted in this context is that both Benjamin and Heideg-
ger inscribe their discussion of language and art in the problematic of thedangers facing history and thought at the end of modernity. The trajecto-ries by which they arrive at this issue is markedly different: Benjamin worksvery closely with his immediate historical context, elaborating the constel-lation of the notion of history as injustice, the revolutionary possibilities ofthe avant-garde writing practice, and resistance to fascist ideology; Heideg-ger, distancing in the late s his work from ideas close to the ideology ofnational socialism, projects his thought of the ontico-ontological differenceagainst the broader scheme of the history of metaphysics, often anchoringhis late remarks on art in the discussion of Hölderlin and poetry in the
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context of the dominance of technology and calculative thought.30What
Heidegger’s work shows is that the contestation of a specific risk or dangerdoes not necessarily coincide with the questioning of the conceptuality orthe framework that has produced the danger, and which, concealing the lin-guistic slip through which experience and history are constituted, itself be-comes the possibility of danger, of restaging danger repeatedly. Benjamin’sthought works in a different way, in a different direction, one might say:It extends its contestation of the specific historical circumstances of therise of fascism to the reflections on the risks inscribed in the very para-digm of enlightened modernity. Benjamin’s most poignant image linkinglanguage and danger is the alarm clock at the end of his essay on Surreal-ism: ‘‘They [the Surrealists] exchange, to a man, the play of human features[ihr Mienenspiel ] for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings
[anschlägt ] for sixty seconds’’ ( R,). If, as Benjamin’s notions of trans-
latability and Intention auf die Sprache attest, the work of poetry and art
consists in attending to the event of language, to the linguistic intentioninscribed in and sustaining each text, then art in the age of heightened re-producibility can be defined through its continual problematization of thetextual makeup of ‘‘experience.’’ This art, its avant-garde language, func-tions on the model of the alarm clock of Surrealism, ringing for sixty sec-onds in each minute.This Benjaminian image suggests that every sentence,even every word, has to be alarmed, ready to set off, to displace its ownmeaning the moment it is put down on the page. It points to a languagethat always alarms itself, undoing conventions, both literary and everyday,checking over its language games for the traces of what exceeds their prac-tice and remains other. Not only to avoid forgetting or erasing these marksbut, primarily, to amplify their disruptive force and turn writing againstlanguage into a gesture of exposing the textual, though also cultural andpolitical, effects of the discursive inscription of experience. Modern art haslanguage confront its own ‘‘alarming’’ face and never quite allows it to fallasleep or become lulled by its own playfulness. Perhaps that is indeed thepractice of the avant-garde and the reason why this practice, when consid-ered in the wide range of its implications, remains disquieting even beyondthe specificity of its historical and cultural locations.
What underlies Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism is a seldom underscored
connection in his thought between, on the one hand, language and trans-latability inscribed in the work of art and, on the other, the need for a con-ception of history as a constant ‘‘state of emergency,’’ which could inflectthinking into Eingedenken and thus keep the present open to the possibility
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of the emergence of the past and the dislocation produced by the releaseof its ‘‘weak’’ Messianic force: ‘‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches usthat the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but therule.We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with thisinsight’’ ( I, ) .I nt h i sv i e w , Eingedenken is not only a thinking ofa dan-
ger, of the perilous historical situation of emerging totalitarian ideologies,but also a thinking indanger of failing to be historical, of forgetting its own
historicity. This thinking takes place as a constellation of danger(s): of ex-perience and history but also of the work of art and language. If dangeris inscribed in experience as historicity ‘‘beyond’’ history, this inscriptionis a result of the fact that experience is always already an interpretation,itself in need of continuous rereading. In other words, it has to do withlanguage, with experience and history being possible only as their own in-terpretation, that is, as having their occurrence already circumscribed bysignification. Writing poetry, ‘‘that most innocent of all occupations,’’ asHölderlin remarks, seemingly divorced from the world of everyday praxis,from politics and the dangers of history, suddenly becomes a perilous andrisky enterprise, a politically charged undertaking, since language turns outto be ‘‘the most dangerous of possessions.’’ It becomes a matter of exam-ining the political meaning of legibility, of the very grounds upon whichpolitics becomes legible.
31
Benjamin’s alarm clock certainly rings differently than the ‘‘ringing of
stillness’’ (Geläut der Stille) with which Heidegger’s later texts describe
poetic language and thought. It strikes (anschlägt) rather than gently peal-
i n go rc h i m i n g ,e v o k i n gt h eg h o s t so ft h ep a s t ,t h ef a c e so ft h eo p p r e s s e d ,and the barbarism of history rather than the stillness or silence that inter-weaves linguistic articulations. As ‘‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’’suggests, this ringing becomes a reminder that history is a series of injus-tices, from which even the works of art and poetry are not immune: ‘‘[f]orwithout exception the cultural treasures [the historical materialist] surveyshave an origin which he cannot contemplatewithout horror.Theyowe theirexistence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have cre-ated them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries’’ ( I,).
While Heidegger’s texts may be read as allowing one to entertain the illu-sion that the ‘‘ringing of stillness’’ signifies aesthetic quietism (although Ido not think that this position is ultimately tenable), Benjamin’s forcefulpronunciations are directed at preventing the disruptive and critical impe-tus of this silence within the language of modern art from being misreadas an expression of either cognitive skepticism or aesthetic formalism.
32
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Critics like Habermas often hastily misread Heidegger’s pronounce-
ments on language and poetry as an escape to ‘‘the luminous heights of anesoteric, special discourse, which absolves itself of the restrictions of dis-cursive speech generally and is immunized by vagueness against any spe-cific objections.’’
33Yet, the linguistic stillness which is taken to unequivo-
cally pervade, even paralyze, Heidegger’s late work is clearly more complex,as it marks a revision of the very idea of action in terms of a response oflistening, which breaks free of the metaphysical trappings of experience.As Fynsk suggests, Habermas’s ‘‘narrative,’’ according to which Heideggerabandons political thinking and revolutionary activism after his disastrousengagement with national socialism and retreats into quietism, is incor-rect. In the context of Heidegger’s numerous remarks about the dangerat work in language, in metaphysical conceptuality, and in modern tech-nology, it is impossible to read this stillness simply as a mark of indifferenceand not, as may well be the case, the sign of how language itself downplays,masks, or effaces, the danger at work in its articulations. As is evidenced byHeidegger’s texts on language, ‘‘[t]he move from resoluteness to Gelassen-
heitinvolves a difficult rethinking of the will, but the ‘rigors’ of the her-
meneutic circle remain constant in Heidegger’s questioning’’ ( HTH, ).
Heidegger’s comments on language and its dangers, and his continued re-thinking of action beyond its metaphysical determinations—from ‘‘Letteron Humanism’’ to On the Way to Language —make untenable Habermas’s
position, which hears nothing else in the Geläut than Romantic esotericism
or the indifference of the aestheticist autotelism of art. Is the ringing inBenjamin and Heidegger—one of a technological gadget as an image ofradical writing practice, the otherof the ‘‘telling’’ silence of the poetic text—so unequivocally different? The everyday character of the object whoseimage Benjamin uses to describe the practice of the avant-garde indeed pro-vides a corrective to the overbearing rhetoric of later Heidegger, directingus back to the connection between artistic and everyday practice; but it alsoserves as a reminder that Heidegger’s own project involves above all the in-quiry into the everydayness of being and that his involvement with art andpoetic language should be considered in this light. The tension betweenBenjamin and Heidegger directs our attention to the question of the ar-ticulation of the danger inherent in the event of language: Can this dangerring silently? But maybe this question needs to be reversed: Perhaps silenceisa way that the danger (of language) can ring in writing, since ‘‘ampli-
fied’’ articulations of danger, and Benjamin is well aware of that, run therisk of collapsing into activism, into manifestoes and propagandistic writ-
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ing, so characteristic of some avant-gardisms. After all, since Benjamin’salarm clock is only an image, it always rings silently. On the opposite side ofthe spectrum of answers to this question lies quietistic indifference, which,when ascribed to Heidegger, leads to reducing his work on poetry to merelya theory of language, burying under this label its radical importance forexperience and history.
Notwithstanding the problems with Heidegger’s analysis, the stillness
he explores through poetic text is quite ‘‘telling,’’ with specific implicationsfor the modern, ‘‘technological,’’ conceptualization of experience and his-tory. Commenting in the second section of ‘‘Hölderlin and the Essenceof Poetry’’ on a Hölderlin fragment that includes the lines: ‘‘and thereforehas language, most dangerous of possessions [ der Güter Gefährlichstes ]b e e n
given to man,’’
34Heideggerconsiders language the initial possibilityof dan-
ger, its ‘‘ontological,’’ as it were, condition: ‘‘It is the danger of all dangers,because it creates [ schafft ] initially the possibility of a danger. Danger is
the threat to being [of obscuring being and hence history and experience]t h r o u g hb e i n g s ….I ti sl a n guage which first creates the manifest condi-
tions for menace and confusion to existence, and thus the possibility ofthe loss of existence, that is to say—danger’’ ( EB, ) .S i n c ei ti st h r o u g h
and as language that world and history unfold, language shapes the dis-closure and determines the historical dispositions of what is and its exis-tence. It is, therefore, both a danger and a good (ein Gut), the synchrony
of manifestation and deception, unconcealment and concealment, insightand error. Playing on the double valency of Gut(like the English ‘‘good’’
and ‘‘goods’’ or ‘‘possessions’’), Heidegger renders language both a treasure(another meaning of Gut) and a trap, a good with an inherent propensity
for metamorphosing into a tool for the erasure of alterityand the fulfillmentof the totalizing ambitions of thought, an instrument, we could say, of en-lightenment and of its double—cultural imperialism. Language is a play,innocent and dangerous at the same time, of its disclosive abilities and theconstant possibility of endangering what it discloses. This approach entailsthe recognition that language is not a neutral medium of communicationbut a mapping of the world, an unfolding of legibility, which, to the extentthat it obfuscates the historicity of its articulation, poses a threat to its ownpractices of disclosure. The implication of this erasure of historicity—thatis, of a continuous crisis, of a ceaseless decision, that marks language—isnot unlike Benjamin’s historical rule of the ‘‘state of emergency.’’
As the initial possibility of danger, both the disclosure and the dissem-
bling of historicity, language is characterized above all by the predilection
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for endangering itself, for obscuring its mechanism and appearing mostinnocent precisely at the moment when it poses most danger. ‘‘But lan-guage is not only the danger of dangers, but necessarily conceals in itself acontinual danger for itself’’ (‘‘ birgt in sich selbst für sich selbst notwendig eine
fortwährende Gefahr ’’) (EB,).
35This incessant danger inscribed in the
event of language achieves its historical determination in modernity in theinstrumentalization of language as information.The reduction of languageto the transparency of communicational tool, so idiomatic to modernityand its technological determination of reason, changes the valency of Gut
from that of a good to that of a Werkzeug —a tool or an instrument. This
commodification of language, as either a tool or a piece of information, dis-sembles and hides the fact that language affords the possibility of world andhistory: ‘‘Only where there is language, is there world, that is, the perpetu-ally altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibility,but also of commotion and arbitrariness,of decayand confusion’’ ( EB,).
For Heidegger, it is ‘‘the sphere of the action of poetry’’ ( EB,) to re-
sist this collapsing of language into an instrument of communication, toallow language to ‘‘language’’
36as the event that disposes the possibilities
for being (‘‘ dasjenige Ereignis, das über die höhste Möglichkeit des Menschen-
seins verfügt ’’ [EHD, ]). It is the business of poetry, therefore, to remain
attentive to the ‘‘good’’ character of language, to the danger that incessantlytraverses the event of language, and, in particular, to make sure that thedanger (Gefahr) inherent in the experience (Erfahrung) with language does
not disappear under the apparently innocent surface of linguistic trans-actions. The unequivocal ascription of innocence, of the intention of mere‘‘aesthetic play,’’ to writing already loses sight of the Gefahr inscribed in
Erfahrung and trivializes the workings of art beyond recognition.
To the extent that the work of art is structured by such a linguistic event,
it has a performative function within history, one of disclosing the ‘‘onto-logical’’ condition of danger and the singular forms it assumes in concretehistorical circumstances. Heidegger’s focus on the precarious conditions ofthe eventuation of being (Ereignis), on the constant slippage between Sein
andSeiende, may account for the (mis)reading of his analyses as an on-
tologization of danger, as an escape or a dissolution of any responsibilitythrough a gesture that makes danger ‘‘intrinsic’’ to language. It is certainlytrue that Heidegger, in a sharp distinction from Benjamin and his con-tinuous inscription of the current historical context, sets his reflections in abroader historico-philosophical framework of modern technology and ex-tends them to the ‘‘ontological’’ level of the historical determinations of the
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‘‘essence’’ of modern technology as the enframing, the Gestell. Benjamin’s
texts work on a double impulse: The philosophical and cultural reflection isceaselessly intertwined with the interpretation of the details of the histori-cal situation, which gives a unique performative dimension to Benjamin’sthought, an awareness of the quasi-interventionist character of his writingpractice. It would be a mistake, however, not to see Heidegger’s thoughtas itself performing a displacement of the conceptual and historical frame-work of modernity, although the general scope of his statements often ren-ders their performative edge less distinct, even creating the appearance ofindifference to historical detail. As Rebecca Comay remarks, noting Hei-degger’s problem, the ontic memory emphasized by Benjamin ‘‘would notbe inconsistent with the remembrance of the ontico-ontological difference:indeed the very finitude of that difference should have, strictly speaking,required precisely such attention to the specific differences that are thestuff of history. Such attentiveness would have easily redeemed Heideg-ger’s notion of ‘historicity’ from the sneering charge of ‘abstractness’ whichboth Adorno and Benjamin—not without some justice, but without realcause—were to insist on levelling.’’
37
InThe Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience, John Llewellyn demon-
strates that Heidegger’s work can be read through the optics of ‘‘onto-logical responsibility,’’ as specifically underscoring the demands of ‘‘re-sponsible’’ thinking, which the recognition of the differential working ofhistory dictates. Indeed, Heidegger’s ontological qualification of danger isconsistent, if not coextensive, with a thinking that incessantly questionsand reappraises its historical articulations, that works through the tensionbetween the ‘‘initial possibility of danger’’ and its specific historical andontic determinations; in other words, with a thinking that checks and cor-rects the way its own structures conceal or efface thought’s ‘‘most own’’dangerous mechanism.We have to remember that, for Heidegger, the his-torical specificity of modern thought trying to separate itself and questionits philosophical (metaphysical) provenance consists precisely in the rec-ognition of the difference or play between the ontic articulations and theconcealed ontological dimension of history. The recognition of this for-gotten tension, figured by the term ‘‘historicity,’’ is to provide a corrective tothe by-and-large calculative modes of thought by undercutting their total-izing practices in view of specific differences at play in history. Heidegger’sinsistence on keeping in play the ontico-ontological difference, on under-scoring its finitude, attempts to prevent the subsumption of differences intoa comprehensive narrative of history. The remembrance, the Andenken, of
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the ontological condition of danger, that is, of the constant erasure of theontico-ontological difference, does not efface the specificityof historical ar-ticulations or the singularity of dangers posed by history. On the contrary,it ‘‘guarantees,’’ as it were, this singularity by historicizing it, by inscrib-ing it in the very event of history; that is, by rendering historicity into thecondition of the singularity of experience. By exposing the danger at workin language, this thinking tries to ensure historical specificity against re-cuperation or completion. What is very im portant and often completely
overlooked in this Heideggerian view is that the ontic particularity by itselfcannot prevent thought from effacing the singularityof historical differences
by means of description. It is the inscription of historicity, the mark ofthe finitude of the ontico-ontological difference, that defers the closure ofthought and keeps it open, responsive, perhaps even responsible, to alterity.I would argue that it is precisely such ‘‘remembrance’’ of what Heideggercalls ‘‘the threat to being,’’ that is, of the forgetfulness of being’s historicity,that singularizes historical perils, or that, more specifically, allows thoughtnot to lose sight of their distinctiveness. Heidegger’s texts do not empha-size this point enough, or at least do not translate it into a detailed analysisof the historical circumstances of his own work. As one critic puts it, Hei-degger’s work in the s and s, through its critique of Nietzsche andmetaphysics as the manifestation of the will to power, ‘‘gives us importantand precise instruments for such a critique [of National Socialism], but hehimself does not employ them in such function, for his task situates itself‘else-where.’ ’’
38It remains a question towhat extent the ‘‘elsewhere’’ of Hei-
degger’s task—the rethinking and critique of the metaphysical ‘‘essence’’of thought in its historical manifestation as technology—stays within theperimeter of the philosophical enterprise, and thus within the metaphysi-cal project which Heidegger contests, or extends into the problematic of itsown historical context. Moreover, even this position will have to be submit-ted, though not here, to a further critique, because the recent appearanceof Heidegger’s unpublished texts from the years to demonstratehow central the critique of power is to Heidegger’s project of the critique ofmetaphysics. Besinnung ( f r o m t o ) , Die Geschichte des Seyns (from
to ), and Metaphysik und Nihilismus (its first part dates from
to ), all published within the last twoyears,offeran extensive critique ofpower.
39Even though they remain silent on the question of anti-Semitism,
these texts develop Heidegger’s ‘‘overcoming’’ of metaphysics in terms ofthe necessityof transforming relations away from powerand manipulability(Machenschaft). Central to this critique of power is Heidegger’s reformu-
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lation of being as event (Ereignis), which provides the vantage point from
which he critiques subjectivity, nationalism, and race, as well as the philo-sophical underpinnings of socialism, communism, and liberal democracy,showing how they remain part of modernity’s drive toward the maximal-ization of power.
40
In the context of Heidegger’s remarks on language and history, what
might be considered ‘‘dangerous’’ in the translatory linguistic event is itspropensity to self-erasure and concealment: Language covers its own tracks,effaces theway it has made intowords, and (re)presents itself as ‘‘present’’ inits significations. In effect, language tends to disguise the fact that its signi-fications are produced through displacement; it conceals the otherness andthe instability of meaning that are integral to its system of significations.Instituting the fiction of its own transparency, language disguises the dan-ger of the obliteration of difference and otherness, which remains necessaryfor the possibility of any closure of meaning. The danger which Heideg-ger sees as inextricable from the ‘‘good’’ side of language is the tendency toerase the play of concealment and unconcealment, of the true and the un-true, as the ‘‘proper’’ element of language.This dissembling of presence andmeaningfulness as the proper ‘‘work’’ of language spells out its own paradox,evident especially in how it conceals the fact that language, as a juncture ofthe manifestation of the world (phenomenality) and its linguistic saying,happens always as out-of-joint. As a translation without the original, lan-guage comes to be only a mistranslation, one which never coincides withitself, always distanced and without origin. Problematizing the notion oflanguage as a system or interplay of signs, both Benjamin and Heideggertreat language as an event of translation which has already completed itself,that is, has reached words and produced itself as meaning. The temporaltranslocation, the Heideggerian ‘‘ immer schon, ’’ manifests itself in the ef-
fraction of the present, in the distance and dislocation which mark the playof signification in relation to its ‘‘originating’’ translatory event.This distan-ciation persists emphatically as a nonorigin, it remains beyond the marginsof signification, beyond the retrievable continuum of the past.These mark-ings of alterity—the continuous reopening within language of a distanceor an infold without any point of origin—trace the historical indexing oflanguage: They inaugurate historyas the in-thinking, the memoration (Ein-
gedenken, Andenken) not of a past which once took place but rather of the
dehiscence which, spacing the past and the present, (re)opens history as aninterval. In Benjamin’s work, the translation in question refers to a trans-fer between the language of things (or the linguistic being of things) and
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the human languages, where the occurrence of this translocation describeswhat Benjamin calls first ‘‘the language as such’’ and later, in ‘‘The Task ofthe Translator,’’ ‘‘pure language.’’ For Heidegger, in turn, as On the Way to
Language makes amply evident, the event of language takes the shape of an
already breached way or path, a way-making (Bewëgung), which language
has traversed into words, utterances, and discursive practices.
41
For Benjamin pure language indicates the way in which the world un-
folds itself to us in any language. In each language, this unfolding takesplace in a different way, but as it always ‘‘intends’’ words, it inevitably leadsto translation into and through words. As the linguistic intention par excel-lence, pure language, for Benjamin, marks the contours of the unfoldingof language: ‘‘In this pure language—which no longer means or expressesanything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meantin all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally en-counter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished’’ ( I,).
Like Heidegger’s event of disclosure, Benjaminian pure language indicatesthat ‘‘language and revelation are one’’ (), that language is tantamount tothe disclosive eventuation of the world. To put it differently, the manifesta-tional saying, the linguistic phenomenalization of theworld, constitutes thescaffolding of experience; it determines the patterns of experiencing andregulates the occurrence and organization of ‘‘experience.’’ Pure languageworks beyond any specific system of signification, but, to the extent thatit always marks a specific language, it describes how this language works.Language discloses the ‘‘world truth,’’ that is, the ontological play of exis-tence, not directly in words but rather in ‘‘ Intention auf die Sprache, ’’ in the
way in which words always resonate the function of language: the openingu po faw o r l d .I ti si nt h i sp o i n t i n go fw o r d st o w a r dt h e‘ ‘ e s s e n c e , ’ ’t o w a r dthe working of language, that the work of unconcealment lies. ‘‘Truth,’’ ifwhat is at stake here can still be called by that name, is never said, never putin words, but is instead transmitted as the linguistic intention, indicated bythe word’s turn toward ‘‘pure’’ language.What the interval between ‘‘pure’’language and the signifying operations of each language demonstrates is thetrajectory of experience, the manner according to which experience tran-spires as a text, a form of language, an occurrence whose shape is alwaysalready discursive. In both Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s work, the concep-tion of language and its quasi-translative character hold the key to experi-ence and its historical constitution.We have to write ‘‘quasi,’’ since there isno ‘‘original,’’ no prelinguistic, ‘‘lived’’ reality or experience (Erlebnis) that
language ‘‘translates.’’ Translation here is the hardly detectable movement,
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the hesitation, between the identity and the difference of the world and/astext, of the phenomenal and its signification, which, marking the discur-sive constitution of experiencewith the historicityof its ‘‘translation,’’ keepsunworking the objectifying power of language.
Although Benjamin specifies that it is in translation rather than in the
poet’s work that ‘‘pure language’’—the event of language’s unfolding intowords—is figured,
42I would argue that much of the avant-garde writing,
especially poetry, attempts to inscribe in language, as a form of an intra-lingual translation, the trajectory of the unfolding of the phenomenal. Lit-erary texts themselves, poetry in particular, drawourattention to the ‘‘pure’’language—its translative intention—because they expose the mechanismof signification within a given language. In avant-garde writing, even with-out the benefit of translation, most of the textual play intends specificallythe working of the text’s language. For at stake in the avant-garde poetry isnothing other than the ‘‘intralingual’’ translation, the way-making of lan-guage, which the linguistic innovations characteristic of avant-garde prac-tice continuously put into play. On the one hand, we have the syntacticaland typographical experiments of Dada and Italian and Russian futurism,in particular, Khlebnikov’s explicit interest in figuring poetry as a multi-lingual translation of a ‘‘beyonsense’’ language (zaum) —that is, of a mani-
festation which takes the form of saying or scription—into the words of aspecific language.
43On the other, poets like Stein, Celan, or Białoszewski
must be understood as performing variations of intralingual translation, aseries of transpositions inside a language—English, German, or Polish—which inscribe in their texts the very movement of language’s articulationintowords and theways in which this movement disarticulates the meaningit produces.What defines poetry for them is precisely writing in ways whichforeground and register the translative modality of the language event, ef-faced in the largely propositional fashioning of discourse. Even though Hei-degger was apparently not interested in avant-garde works, his conceptionof the way of language—its traversal (Erfahrung) from the manifestational
saying (Sage) to discursive forms (Verlautbarung) —which is enacted within
poetic language, appears particularly suited to the exploration of the avant-garde’s predisposition for seeing language in terms of a translative event.
44
It is no surprise, therefore, that his work, especially the texts on poetry andlanguage, have become a major factor in shaping contemporary Americanavant-garde poetic movements, from thework of George Oppen to thewrit-ings of the ‘‘language’’ poets. Avant-garde writing practices emphasize whatboth Benjamin and Heidegger regard as a main linguistic precept; above
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all, language intends itself: ‘‘all language communicates itself. Or more pre-cisely: all language communicates itself initself’’ ( R,). However, neither
the‘‘Intention auf die Sprache ’’ nor ‘‘ Die Sprache spricht ’’ signifies linguistic
narcissism, the play of language for its own sake, so often mistakenly at-tributed to avant-garde writings. As soon as language is given its own spaceand is no longer confined to the compartment of a ‘‘means of communi-cation’’ assigned to it within the technological cultures, language exhibitsprecisely the ways in which the world gains its being, and becomes ‘‘real,’’through language:
Thus freed to its own open space, language can concern itself solely withitself alone. That resembles the talk one hears about egoistic solipsism.Yet language does not insist on itself, is not a self-mirroring that for-gets everything else because it is so enamored of itself. As the saying,the essence of language is the propriating showing that in fact disregardsitself in order to liberate what is shown into its own, into its appearance.(BW,–)
Seeing language as the event in which the world constitutes itself certainlydoes not mean that language is a prison house, somehow separating usfrom the ‘‘true’’ reality and rendering the concerns of everyday life second-ary and insignificant. On the contrary, because the world becomes presentthrough language, language has the valency of determining the world’s‘‘being’’ rather than separating us from it.
This insight can be rephrased in the following way: The world is insepa-
rable from language, its fabric is linguistic ‘‘before’’ it can be categorizedin terms of materiality and intelligibility. The blueprint for the way of (theworld into) language ‘‘decides’’ the world; it outlines—in the sense of auf-
reissen resonating throughout Heidegger’s work—and breaks open and de-
limits the configurations of experience, the daily life practice, and sets theregimen for its ordinary and specialized idioms. This blueprint functionsas the ‘‘negative’’ of the world: invisible, or unsaid, as Heidegger would putit, within the ‘‘positive,’’ discursive constitution of experience, it subtendsthe play of signification, within which the world constitutes itself as ‘‘ex-perienced.’’ Developing or writing this blueprint, attending to the itineraryof language and its intention, reframes the question of ‘‘experience,’’ andphrases it as a matter for and of language. This does not mean that lan-guage becomes the sole goal of such an inquiry, but, instead, that it consti-tutes the domain wherein world and experience, the real, come to pass. Forthe itinerary of language describes precisely the trajectory of ‘‘experience’’
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and/as thinking; it renders legible the contours of our involvement withthe world.The scope of the danger of language recognized by Hölderlin re-mains forgotten or hidden precisely when language is construed as separatefrom ‘‘reality’’ and its concern with its ‘‘intention’’ mistaken for an enclo-sure muffling the exigencies of everydayness. Such restrictive optics, how-ever, is part of language, precisely the evidence of its ‘‘dangerous ways,’’of the propensity for dissembling its ‘‘intention’’ and effacing language asevent. The manner in which the language event can be disregarded, be-come ‘‘invisible’’ to its own discursive articulations, underscores the role ofthe ideological and cultural formations in the shape that language takes,without, however, equating the event with its cultural appropriations. Theunbounded disposition of the linguistic event, the changeable, even vola-tile, design of its saying, inscribes the risk of appropriation in the very mo-ment of its articulation. Yet the language event of manifestation is neverreducible to the manner in which language becomes bound, both toward
words and bythem,within the historical discursive strictures which regulate
articulation.
The saying (die Sage) or the ‘‘Intention’’ precede the split between ma-
teriality and intelligibility, the split which dissembles the language eventby figuring the difference between the sensible and the intelligible as thecondition of signification, as the grounding of the distinction between thesignifier and the signified. Tantamount in effect to the enigmatic play ofphenomenality itself, the saying makes possible and regulates this ‘‘founda-tional’’ difference between the sensible and the intelligible, in effect produc-ing the possibility of cognition, intentionality, and the order of representa-tion: ‘‘We listen to language in such a way that we let it tell us its saying….[ W] efi n do u r s e l v e sc a u g h tu pi nah e a r i n gt h a t lets itself be told, ah e a r –
ing that embraces all apprehending and representing [ das alles Vernehmen
und Vorstellen ]’’ (BW,/UZS, ). To the extent that the saying regulates
representation, both makes possible and maps the representational divideswhich organize experience, the question of language becomes the questionof ‘‘the world’’: of the everyday, of life practice, and of its discursive regi-mentation. To follow the trajectory of language, its translative ‘‘slip,’’ is toreflect upon and contest everyday experience, and the figuration of practicein ordinary language. Reinscribing the event of language into its ostensiblyhomogeneous, fixed and static, ‘‘propositional’’ forms means rearticulat-ing experience, redrawing the patterns which experiencing follows in routeto presenting itself, to becoming present as experience. Turning language‘‘back’’ to face its own way into words, to keep its articulations open to the
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trace of its translation, means undoing and rearticulating the practice of‘‘experience’’ by exhibiting the features of its regulatory linguistic mecha-nism. For what describes the structure of experience, the dislocation thatconstitutes experiencing, is the ‘‘materialization’’ of language in its word-stage, that is, the process of language’s coming into words, its ‘‘languag-ing,’’ to recall Heidegger. ‘‘To experience’’ is to undergo the translocationinto words, to traverse the world’s, and history’s, unfolding into their dis-cursive map. ‘‘When we talk of ‘undergoing’ [ machen ] an experience, we
mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergohere means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and sub-m i tt oi t[ wir uns ihm fügen ]. It is this something itself that comes about,
comes to pass, happens [ es schickt sich, es fügt sich ]’’ (OWL, ). Heideg-
ger’s essays on language, ‘‘The Nature of Language’’ in particular, integrateexperience (Erfahrung) with the event of language: ‘‘to experience’’ means
to undergo—strictly speaking, to have already and always undergone—thetransposition of the phenomenal intowords. It signifies traveling (er-fahren)
the way of language and incurring the risks that mark manifestation asthe (b)reaching of words. In this context, experience becomes synonymouswith the ever fading interval of its own route,with the collapsing of its eventinto its comprehensible and ‘‘compressed’’ outcome. The disappearance ofthe event structure of experience in the grammar of enunciation simulta-neously marks the trail of history, the inauguration of historical ‘‘vision.’’What describes in the above fragment the course of experience, the ways inwhich it happens —sends, communicates, or transmits itself into words—is
the German word schicken, used by Heidegger most often to refer to the dis-
positions of history. Heidegger’s characteristic elaboration of terms whichdescribe the intersections of language, experience, and history— Ereignis,
Geschichtlichkeit, Erfahrung —attempts a revision of philosophical thought
in view of how the dispositions of history mark the working of language.The way language works, having always already (e)lapsed into its enun-ciations, sketches the destinations of history, the appearances of historicalexperience as it makes itself known in its discursive forms: as texts, in-terpretations, significations. The historical importance of ‘‘undergoing anexperience with language,’’ its significance with respect to the productionof history, consists in the performative effect of unworking the sedimen-tations of historical space. I argue that art, working on the principle of alanguage event, becomes the stage for the (re)production of the historicityof being, for the double movement of the appropriation and dispropriationof experience.
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History in the Artwork
In every true work of art, there is a place where, for one who removesthere, it blows like a cool wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows thatart, which has often been considered refractory to every relation withprogress, can provide its true definition. Progress has its seat not in thecontinuity of elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly newmakes itself felt for the first time with the sobriety of dawn.
—Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N
Language provides, one wants to say, writes, the blueprint of experience.
The work of transposition which language performs in unfolding the worldconstitutes the movement of experience. The excess of this linguistic eventover what is produced of it as ‘‘text’’—images,words, representations—thatis, over what is accessible as opened and made present by this event, at thesame time posits the identity of being and language and marks its incom-pleteness. Experience both takes the form of a text—it happens already asinterpretation—and exceeds the contingency of this articulation. It is thiseffraction that allows experience always to shock and dislocate, to bringabout a renegotiation of its textual ‘‘identity.’’
45What never registers as part
of historical experience and remains excluded from its moment in historyinscribes in an event the possibility of revising and revisiting its image, ofrereading its historical ‘‘reality.’’ As the withdrawal of ‘‘being’’ from ‘‘whatis,’’ this excess or alterity, available only as the mark of its erasure, illus-trates the workings of the linguistic event which inaugurates history.Whatinterests us here is the relation between this staging of history and the figu-ration of the linguistic event at the origin of the historical space within thework of art. The attention that Benjamin and Heidegger (especially in hislater essays) give to the role of art and poetry in the ‘‘crisis’’ of modernitynot only foregrounds the link between art and history but locates in thework of art the possibility of reconfiguring the paradigm of historical ex-perience. In fact, both Heidegger and Benjamin underscore the historicalvalency of the work performed by art, reading the linguistic event, or thepoetic provenance, of art in historical terms. The linguistic matrix of ex-perience which I have traced through the work of Benjamin and Heideggerbrings us, therefore, closer to understanding the relation between art andhistory.
At issue in showing the linguistic character of experience is the relation
between the place of the work of art in its specific historical context and theway in which historicity registers in the work performed by art. I explore
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this double inscription of history in art—as its historical context and as theparadigm of historical legibility at work in art—through the constellationof three terms: the event, the dialectical image, and reproducibility. As I ar-gue, it is the understanding of history as event—event both circumscribedand ruptured by historicity that remains excessive in regard to conceptualgrasp—that makes legible the tension encoded in Benjamin’s dialecticalimage. On the other hand, the reproducibility which, for Benjamin, de-fines the work of art in modernity prevents the misreading of the eventas simply punctual, a moment whose significance would be limited to thesingularity of its occurrence. The reproducibility which marks the eventfigured in the work of art renders its particularity historial, projecting itssignificance against the moment of its repetition. As Derrida would say,reproducibility inscribes the singularity of the event in a series, it ensures,through repetition, the historical force of the (re)produced singularity. Theconstellation of terms I propose suggests that, at the end of modernity, thework of art becomes of historical importance precisely to the extent thatit puts into play and unworks the concept of history operative both inand
asmodernity. In other words, its historical significance lies in its figuration
of history outside of the model of historicism which, in its linear and pro-gressivist scheme, reads the past as the consecutive stages in the making ofmodernity. One gets the sense from Heidegger’s work that the historicalspecificity of modern art is defined by its ability to inaugurate history inways which would resist modernity’s technological interpretation of beingand the uniformity of its historical space. Art can potentially enjoy such arole because the work it performs has itself the logic of the linguistic eventat the ‘‘origin’’ of history. In fact, art’s job could be described specificallyin terms of foregrounding the heterogeneity at work in this linguistic eventover and against the uniform picture that it becomes upon entering thepresent of representation. Contesting the role of the beautiful object out-side of the space of theoretical and practical cognition that modernity hasassigned to art through aesthetic theory becomes contingent upon the rec-ognition of the work performed by art. For Heidegger, the time of such artis ‘‘now,’’ that is, at the end of modernity and ‘‘after aesthetics,’’ providedwe can look at art postaesthetically and recognize its historical significanceprecisely in the way it refigures the historical space of modern technology.When Heidegger reminisces about the state of arts in ancient Greece, heactually seems to proleptically engage the opening that, as he hopes, post-aesthetic art could make in the world almost uniformly governed by theoffshoots of technological thinking: ‘‘The arts were not derived from the
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artistic. Artworks were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector ofcultural activity.’’
46Positioning aesthetics negatively vis-à-vis the supposed
state of Greek art, Heidegger’s text in fact looks for alternative models ofpoetic production.
Rather than reading this moment in Heidegger’s text historiographically,
I take this passage in terms of Benjamin’s dialectical image, in which thepast of Greek art would achieve legibility only at the moment when mod-ern aesthetics, modernity itself, reaches the time of reevaluation.To providethe context of my Benjaminian reading of this excerpt from Heidegger, letme quote here at length parts of Konvolut N, in which Benjamin explains
the workings of the dialectical image:
For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong toa particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at aparticular time. And, indeed, this acceding to ‘‘legibility’’ constitutes aspecific critical point in the movement at their interior ….I ti sn o tt h a t
what is past casts its light on what is present,or what is present its light onwhat is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been [ das Gewesene ]
comes together in a flash with the now [ der Jetzt ] to form a constellation.
In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation ofthe present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-beento the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural.
47
The what-has-been of the Greek preaesthetic functioning of art becomeslegible at the moment of the exhaustion of the aesthetic paradigm itself.This newly produced legibility, however, has a ‘‘dialectical’’ rather than em-pathic character, precisely to the extent that it becomes visible only againstthe image of the now—of the passage between modernity and its after-math. It is not just the past and the present that become legible, but rathertheir constellation. Instead of the temporal valency of continuity, this legi-bility constitutes itself as a tension between two heterogeneous momentsin which the recognition of the latency of the past critically dislocates thepresent from the possibility of closure.
What flashes in this Benjaminian constellation is legibility itself, the dan-
gerous condition of reading, which also constitutes the opening of history:‘‘The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recog-nizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous criticalmoment [ gefährlichen Moments ] on which all reading is founded’’ ( AP ,).
The tension that marks the dialectical images constitutes the legibility of
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history: it ‘‘makes’’ history—opens its distance—in the sense that it ren-ders history legible precisely as tension, interval, gap. This tension is boththe impetus and the moment (both meanings of Moment ) that opens his-
tory as the space of what Benjamin refers to as its own recognizability, themoment when, as Fynsk explains, history becomes readable as history,
48as
the differentiating impulse and the spacing of difference.The legibility pro-duced as the dialectical image is the interval, the translation between whathas been and the now, which, always already outside and beyond origin,marks the articulation of the linear space of history. Rephrasing some of theprevious statements, we might say that this legibility functions as a markerof relation—a sort of relationality itself—which renders events legible ashistory.The force that holds the constellation and thus ‘‘presents’’ history—that is, makes the relation between the has-been and the now readable ashistory—does not become properly present as a historical event. An ob-verse side of history, a story that is never told but makes telling possible,Benjaminian legibility or Heideggerian historicity marks each moment ofpresence as time out-of-joint, which prevents the closure of history into anarrative. It reminds us of the event character of the present, which is notreducible to the closure of presence or the continuum of linear progression.Although in the Passagen-Werk Benjamin summarily dismisses Heidegger’s
rethinking of history through the notion of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit),
his own ‘‘materialist historiography’’ in fact figures excess and alterity ina way resembling the inscription of historicity in the present.
49When a
past moment is ‘‘blasted out’’ of the continuity of history,50what matters
is not the image or the ‘‘truth’’ of the past but its excess over and above thepresent, its residue over the empathic thematization of the past within thepresent. In other words, what is recognized in the present is not the iden-tity of the past but its difference and remainder, which force the present‘‘out-of-joint.’’ As the historical index of the dialectical image, this remain-der functions not unlike Heidegger’s notion of Geschichtlichkeit, marking
a distance within the present that disallows the conflation of the now withpresence. The remainder of the past incessantly disarticulates the present,rendering the itinerary of its ‘‘experience’’ historical in the sense of present-ing experience as a paradoxical distance or displacement, as, at the sametime, equivalent to and out-of-joint with its discursive articulations. Theexchange that I stage between Benjamin and Heidegger is a two-way street:While Heidegger’s understanding of history enables us to recognize thequasi-transcendental character, as Fynsk suggests, of Benjamin’s ‘‘the his-
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torical index,’’51Benjamin’s insistence on the concreteness and ‘‘materi-
ality’’ of the past that flashes, within the dialectical image, into a constella-tion with the now provides a venue for thinking historicity.
Benjamin’s writings deploy the constellation of dialectical image as an
alternative to both reading the present in terms of punctuality and to mis-recognizing it in archaic, mythical images of unity. His work on the nine-teenth century aims at producing its constellation with modernism, inwhich the readability acquired by the nineteenth century becomes the criti-cal impetus that historicizes Benjamin’s present and renders it legible. Inthe Baudelaire essay, it is the obsolescence of the lyrical that makes possiblewhat Benjamin reads as the Baudelairean transformation of the punctualityof the lived moment into historical experience. The essay on Surrealismends with remarks on the political significance of the image sphere, of thehistory-making images to which the profane illumination characteristic ofsurrealist writings initiates us ( R,). These observations suggest a critical
role of art, specifically avant-garde works, in the production of the history-making images, that is, images which, rather than representing historicalreality, rework and realign the very space of experience.What is at stake inmodern art is the historicizing legibility itself, the paradigm of a new, his-torical thinking capable of keeping in view the constellational character ofhistorical space.
Benjamin’s juxtaposition of modernism and the nineteenth century pro-
duces the effect of displacement not unlike the one sought by Heideg-ger through invoking the nonaesthetic character of Greek art.
52Both ap-
proaches insist on the historical specificity of the moment in which such adisplacement in the framework of enlightened modernity could be effectedby a postaesthetic reading of art: the rapidly increasing technologizationof life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This moment, referredto by Heidegger as the culmination of metaphysics in calculative thought,is determined by technicity and its impact not only on the human senso-rium but, perhaps more important, on the practices of experience. In ‘‘TheWork of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’’ and ‘‘A Short His-tory of Photography,’’ Benjamin suggests that technological developmentof the means of mechanical reproduction can bring about a transformationin the notion of art. By placing the emphasis on reproduction, technologytransforms the tradition in which the work of art functions in terms of itsuniqueness; in effect, it undermines both the auratic characterof art and theaesthetic values of originality and genius.
53What is most significant about
this change is the recognition, through the artifice of aesthetic conceptu-
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ality, of reproducibility as the structure of the artwork, or better yet, as theparadigm of the work that art performs. As Samuel Weber has shown, byReproduzierbarkeit Benjamin means not mechanical reproduction but in-
stead the structure of reproducibility in art brought out or intensified by therapid development of the mechanisms of reproduction: It refers not ‘‘to theempirical fact of ‘reproduction,’ but to the possibility of being reproduced,
to reproducibility as a mode of being. However clumsy even in German thenounReproduzierbarkeit may be, it has the virtue of distinguishing between
a structural attribute and an empirical fact.’’
54
Although made more pronounced by historical circumstances, repro-
ducibilitydetermines the modalityof art’s existence: ‘‘In principle a work ofart has always been reproducible’’ ( I,). In effect, reproducibility defines
and delimits the work performed by art. ‘‘In other words,’’ as Eduardo Ca-dava explains, ‘‘technical reproduction is not an empirical feature of moder-nity, it is not an invention linked to the so-called modern era. Rather, it is astructural possibility within thework of art.’’
55As they have made the struc-
ture of reproducibility visible, the new technologies proffered by science—photography, film, video, CD—affect also the very structure of artisticproduction. Benjamin’s reflections on film explore the effects of workingreproducibility directly into the structure of art: of linking the work per-formed by art, especially its historical force, to reproducibility. It is nolonger a question of just reproducing individual works, but rather of recog-nizing that art operates through reproducibility: It works by reproducingitself as work.
For Heidegger, who searches in technology for an alternative to the cal-
culative paradigm of rationality, the manner in which technological ad-vancement highlights reproducibility as the mode of being of art wouldindirectly undermine technology’s hegemonic hold on the modern world.At issue for Heidegger are always new modes of thinking that can emergewithin the calculative matrix of technological rationality as alternative toit: ‘‘Thus the essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what weleast suspect, the possible rise of the saving power’’ ( BW,). Perhaps what
Heidegger calls, quoting Hölderlin, ‘‘the saving power’’ is nothing otherthan the emergence of reproducibility as the logic of the artwork, the logicwhich, I argue, when recognized in its linguistic, historical, and philosophi-cal implications, prompts a revision not only of the notion of art but also ofhistory.Taken as an excessive, ungraspable event, rather than as a successionof historical presents, history unfolds through distance and displacement,whose heterogeneity puts into question and unmasks the limits of con-
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ceiving history in terms of knowledge or narratives (of progress). The waythat the event (Ereignis) both opens history and disarticulates the concep-
tualizations of historical reality assigns historical force and significance tothe moments of rupture and epistemic uncertainty rather than to the narra-tive of intelligibility. My argument is that art’s structure of reproducibilityallows for such a repetition of the event figured in the work, which not onlyretains each time the singularity of the event but also gives this particularitya historical significance. Reproducing the event through historical distance,through the interval that makes history, art renders the event irreducible tothe punctual presence of the moment, in terms of which events are oftenmisread. Benjamin’s repeated attacks on historicist empathy aim preciselyat ascribing historical weight—one which would, in fact, keep unbalanc-ing historical accounts as such—to the instants of the dislocating tensionbetween the ‘‘then’’ and the ‘‘now.’’
To the extent that art ‘‘exists’’ by reproducing itself, by repeating its work,
it operates on the model of the linguistic event, which continuously putsinto play and restages the historical dislocation which makes art possible.
56
When it is interpreted, the work of art performs its own translation, a re-production of its work, both within andintoa different historical moment,
which presents the work as a certain form of ‘‘dialectical’’ image. For Hei-degger, the recognition of the nonaesthetic character of Greek art is con-tingent upon the possibility of inflecting the modern into the ‘‘postmod-ern,’’ and, in turn, opens the possibility of thinking art after aesthetics. ForGreek art to work ‘‘nonaesthetically’’ in the modern context, it has to re-work the aesthetic framework of modernity; to be within the modern andrework it into a different historica l moment—the postmodern (?). Derrida
has analyzed at length this double historical optics and the modalities ofreproducibility intrinsic to writing under the names of iteration and date.In ‘‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,’’ for example, Derrida shows how the date,as the singularity of the historical moment inscribed in the text, becomesthe paradoxical condition of the repetition, reproduction, or rereading ofthe work. Early in the text, he signals a distinction between the calendaricdate and the form of dating which inscribes reproducibility into the orga-nization of the poetic text: ‘‘[W]e will concern ourselves first of all with adating which is registered int h eb o d yo ft h ep o e m , inone of its parts, and
undera form which accords with the traditional code (forexample, ‘the thof February’), and then with a nonconventional, noncalendrical form ofdating, one which would merge entirely, without residue, with the generalorganization of the poetic text.’’
57This double form of dating at work in
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the text—the insertion of a particular date into the dating structure of thework, the reproducibility of the date of writing in the moment(s) of read-ing—orchestrates the work’s textuality. It both marks the singularity of thepoem’s creation and makes possible its repetition, its continued existencein reading.
What is repeated in the ‘‘afterlife’’ of the text is precisely the difference,
each time particular, from the singularity of its date; in other words, whatconditions the text’s repetition is the possibilityof its being different in whatit is, that is, of reading differently in various contexts as the ‘‘same’’ work.This repetition as difference, which, in Derrida’s words, ‘‘dates’’ the work,constitutes art, in its, as it were, ‘‘ontological’’ dimension as historial; his-torial, because the reproducibility which defines the work performed by artenacts oropens history.To the extent that reproducibilitycan be recognizedas the modality of art’s existence, art is, so to speak, history-in-the-making,that is, the existence of the work of art is always staged historically, as anirreducible and irrecuperable distance of its repetition as the ‘‘same’’ work.We could say that what the work of art does is precisely to restage not onlyits history of reading but also history asreading. Such reproducibility in-
scribed in art constitutes the ‘‘poetics’’ of the modern artwork, a poeticswhich resembles the dialectical image, the constellation of what has beenand the now, (re)produced as the work’s afterlife. As Benjamin remarks inThe Arcades Project [N, , ], ‘‘[h]istorical ‘understanding’ is to be grasped,
in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has beenrecognized in the analysis of the ‘afterlife of works,’ in the analysis of ‘fame,’is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general’’ ( AP ,).
There is no simple past or present of the work of art available through em-pathic insight or interpretation on the model of historicism. Rather, theinterval or the difference in the constellation of what has been and the nowconstitutes precisely the work that art performs. This differential constel-lation unfolds as a result of how art ‘‘performs’’ its figure—a postaestheticart, to be sure, not an object but an event whose poetics must be thoughtof not in terms of a poetic theory but, rather, as the work’s mode of being.The repetitive, reproducible character of the work’s afterlife constitutes thebasis of historical understanding. It enacts history, as it were, producingthe (dis)union and the (con)fusion of the text and its (repeated) ‘‘copy.’’ Itis also the condition of the legibility of the work of art, the possibility ofinterpretation and meaning which can never be foreclosed, for its modalitycoincides with the movement of history itself.
Artwork understood in this sense is not only madehistorically, situated
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within historical space, but also makes history, producing a different possi-
bilityof reading in historical terms.58Read in a particular historical context,
a work of art certainly ‘‘remakes’’ itself in this new setting, readjusts itselfto it, but it also ‘‘stages’’ history by historicizing the difference between thereading and what remains unread. How this remainder or residue destabi-lizes the reading, opening it to what makes it possible and yet cannot findplace within it, describes the historicizing character of reproducibility. AsHeidegger remarks at the end of ‘‘The Origin of theWork of Art,’’ ‘‘[a]r t…
is essentially historical [ wesenhaft geschichtlich ]. This means not simply that
a r th a sah i s t o r yi nt h ee x t r i n s i cs e n s et h a ti nt h ec o u r s eo ft i m ei t ,t o o ,a p -pears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passesawayand offers changing aspects for historiology. Art is history in the essen-tial sense that it grounds history’’ ( BW,).
59For Heidegger ‘‘grounding’’
does not mean that the work of art provides a foundation for history, a basiswhich would allow us to form and read historical narratives. Such a notionof the ground would be, in fact, ahistorical, and it would dehistoricize theunfolding of the world at work in art. Instead, the work of art ‘‘grounds’’history specifically as an event, which, by keeping in play its historicity, in-cessantly ungrounds its ‘‘historical reality,’’ together with its conceptual anddiscursive articulations. Paradoxically, the work of art ‘‘grounds,’’ or, I pre-f e rt ow r i t e ,u n f o l d s ,h i s t o r ya sh a v i n gn og r o u n d .
60For Heidegger, history
has no definable origin, no stable present, but eventuates in relation to itsunpresentable historicity, the illegible remainder of which undermines theessentialist and historicist conceptualizations of history. Reproducing itselfas an event, the work of art keeps opening history as the impossibility ofits own narrative. It grants history legibility, but this legibility is contin-gent upon the illegible residue of historicity. In other words, history be-comes readable as history—‘‘experienced’’ historically—not in its accounts,or the supplements and revisions continuously added to them, but whenthe remainder of these accounts, the historicity of the event, bears uponand disarticulates the stories which are said to constitute history. Of course,this does not mean that revisions of history are not important; they are, infact, critical, even though their significance does not necessarily extend toquestioning the very idea of history.
I interpret Heidegger’s idiosyncratic use of grounding as indicating that
the work of art, by keeping in play its reproducibility, renders the articu-lations of the world it produces contingent: inherently questionable, madeonly to be remade, and their form nothing more than the historical contextfor this remaking. At the same time that thework is determined historically,
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that is, inflected each time by a particular historical setting, it also opens itsworld as historial—this world is never simply present orclosed in its histori-cal reality but unfolds from an irrecuperable past which, itself outside theexpanse of historicism and cognition, keeps in question the historical andpolitical space of theworld it projects. It is less theworld itself than its inces-sant remaking which constitutes the work (re)produced in art. To groundhistory, in this context, means to keep in play the unmeasurable histori-cal distance—the interval of historicity—which reformulates the presentwithout allowing it the luxury of fulfillment. History here points beyondthe idea of singular moments which would keep adding themselves to a his-torical continuum according to the calculus of knowledge; rather, it refersto a series of uncontainable displacements which keep knowledge guess-ing as to the inadequacy of its formulations. History keeps itself not onlyata distance from the present but also asan indeterminate interval which
ungrounds the present, maintaining its historicity in play.
Let me illustrate this point by reference to Heidegger’s notion of pre-
serving (Bewahren) the work of art from ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’’
For Heidegger, the work of art after its creation returns to being at the mo-ments when it is ‘‘preserved,’’ that is, when it is allowed again to perform itswork: ‘‘Just as a work cannot be without being created, but is essentially inneed of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being withoutthose who preserve it’’ ( BW,). That art is a work means that it is deter-
mined by moments of its reception, when it again works its art, so to speak,bringing the then of its creation into a constellation with the now of preser-vation. This is why preserving is not a recovery of a meaning encoded intothe work at the moment of its creation but instead a displacement withinthe present, an opening of history, performed by the work’s modality ofbeing reproducible.
To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed tiestoworld and earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing,knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happen-ing in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is createdb et h ew o r kt h a ti ti s .T h i sl e t t i n gt h ew o r kb eaw o r kw ec a l lp r e s e r v -ing the work. It is only for such preserving that the work yields itself inits createdness as actual, which now means, present in the manner of awork. ( BW,)
As the German term Bewahren suggests, preserving means keeping or let-
t i n gt h ew o r kb e‘ ‘ t r u e ’ ’ (wahr) t oi t s e l f .F o raw o r kt ob ek e p tt r u et oi t s e l f ,
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i tm u s tc e a s et of u n c t i o na sab e a u t i f u lo b j e c t ,c a t e g o r i z e di nt e r m so fa e s -thetic pleasure and subjective experience, and, instead, be allowed to fore-ground the ways in which art provides historical legibility to the present. Itwould be a mistake to think that Heidegger’s term Bewahren intends some
transcendental or historical truth inscribed in art, because it points specifi-cally to art’s historial work, that is, to the way art underscores the historicityof the present. Let us recall here that historicity does not refer to historicalcontingency but to the dislocating effects of the event. Such an event ex-ceeds the idea of an origin or a foundation, yet it is ‘‘originary’’ in the strictsense of how it incessantly reinvents and reinscribes itself in its discursivearticulations.The ‘‘historical’’ work of art could be defined, then, as the tra-jectory of these repeated reenactments, which keep rewriting the discursivepresence of history, revising its significance and questioning the knowledgeit affords. The meaning the artwork projects when it is ‘‘preserved,’’ that is,allowed to do its work, differs according to the historical circumstances ofpreservation. It differs not because the artwork is somehow an infinite fontof meaning but, rather, because it works historically, projecting history asthe necessary reinvention of its discursive manifestations.
This is why Heidegger is quite emphatic in differentiating between aes-
thetic enjoyment or pleasure and letting art perform its work: ‘‘When worksare offered for sheer artistic enjoyment, this does not yet prove that theystand in preservation as works’’ ( BW, ) .I nf a c t ,t h ea r tb u s i n e s s ,a sH e i –
degger refers to it, interferes with the historial significance of art, with rec-ognizing the history-making which takes place in the artwork. By contrast,‘‘preserving’’ means letting the work find ‘‘a place from which it joins inshaping history’’ ().
61By reproducing itself through the difference of
preservation, the work of art keeps rendering experience historical, remark-ing its historicity. Preservation ‘‘does not drag it [the work] into the sphereof mere lived experience [ den Umkreis des blossen Erlebens ], and does not
degrade it to the role of a stimulator of such experience [ Erlebniserregers ].
Preserving thework does not reduce people to their private experiences, butbrings them into affiliation with the truth happening in the work’’ ().
62
Art (dis)places (einrücken) subjects within its historial work, transplanting
them outside of the sphere of privacy and aesthetic perception. It inscribesthe private within the differential matrix of history, transforming aestheticexperience into the experience of the historicity of being. The historiciz-ing effects of the reproducibility make manifest that what conditions theattention to specific differences which make up histories is the dislocatingmovement of history which, in advance, ‘‘always already,’’ affects its rep-
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resentations. ‘‘Preserving,’’ or keeping art ‘‘working,’’ means displacing thelived experience (Erlebnis) into its historical context, of reworking it into
Erfahrung and its ‘‘historical truth’’—the historial occurrence of being: ‘‘ das
geschichtliche Ausstehen des Da-seins aus dem Bezug zur Unverborgenheit ’’ ().
This historial structure of reproducibility evident in preservation must bedifferentiated from the idea of aestheticized history, of a cultural mytho-
poiēsis. Reproducibility questions such an aesthetic construction of reality
and connects art to the possibility of events unfolding in a historial manner,through the interruptions and discontinuities that ‘‘make’’ history.
To the extent that the history-making function of the work of art be-
comes legible in the context of the culmination of modernity in the tech-nological practice, it remains a contemporary issue. Situated historically,at the specific juncture of modernity and ‘‘postmodernity,’’ of aestheticsand its ‘‘after,’’ the postaesthetic art stakes its claim to historical signifi-cance precisely on the possibility of refiguring history. As a turning point inmodernity, such revision of history is entwined with the parallel critiquesof aesthetics and calculative thinking. Both Heidegger and Benjamin sawthe relation between history and technology in terms of a chance to alterthe conceptual underpinnings of enlightened modernity, though at firstin a radically different way. In the early s, Heidegger voiced his sup-port of national socialism, reading into it his own idea of the possibilityof overcoming technicity, before he realized that, like Ernst Jünger’s work,the fascist ideology proposed, in fact, a total mobilization of resources ina gesture that confirmed technicity as formative of relations in modernity,which transpire always in terms of power. Heidegger’s later work on art andtechnology allows us to discern in the aestheticizing qualities of this ges-ture of ‘‘total mobilization’’ the confirmation of art’s not infrequent com-pliance, even complacency, with the technological as a form of totalization.As we know now, in Besinnung, Heidegger submitted art to harsh criticism,
claiming, in the context of references to kitsch and propaganda art, thatart remained essentially complicit in the techno-metaphysical formation ofb e i n gi nt e r m so fp o w e r( B,–). He complained about the disappear-
a n c eo ft h e workof art and about the way in which art that was no longer
‘‘Kunst werk’’ (artwork) paraded the ‘‘essence of power’’ in the guise of the
beautiful. Such art represented the fulfillment of art’s metaphysical essence,manifested as art’s participation in the manipulative power over being, inthe overpowering ordering of beings into universal availability. Art misreadas an aesthetic alternative to technology, as an archaic image, to paraphraseBenjamin, in fact, provided the framework in which technological mobi-
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lization could be vindicated, proclaimed as more than just an exercise ofcalculative reason, namely, as an invocation of an archaic spirit of unity lostin the modern social and political life. Diametrically different from Hei-degger’s embrace of national socialism, Benjamin’s critique of fascism andits use of the aesthetic focused on mobilizing art toward political ends byundermining the auratic character of art and, thus, disqualifying its ritualor cultic functions.
63In Benjamin’s thought, the dissipation of the aura be-
comes requisite for the renegotiation of art’s historical importance, as thebearer of significations which put into question the paradigm of techno-logical reason and its practices of calculation so ingrained in contemporaryculture.
This demand, like the Surrealist alarm clock, continues to ring in con-
temporary debates about art and its postaesthetic possibilities. The issuesraised in these polemics, from the question of aesthetic experience andphilosophical quandaries about truth to political and cultural significanceof otherness, revolve around the conditions that would allow for an ‘‘en-gaged’’ reading of art, that is, for what I call here a nonaesthetic concept ofthe work performed by art and its ties to ‘‘experience’’ and ‘‘history.’’ Em-ploying some of the notions operative in later Heidegger and in Benjamin’sreflections on art at the ‘‘end’’ of modernity, I have proposed to begin ex-amining the nonaesthetic work performed by modern art through reflec-tion upon the relation among experience, language, and history.To be moreprecise, I argue that the performative linguistic poiēsis at work in art out-
lines the constellation of experience and history in terms of reinvention andreproduction. The constellation of the notions of the event, the dialecticalimage, and reproducibility in art works against both the punctuality of ex-perience and the temptation of a totalizing, mytho-poetic recuperation ofbeing. As it guards against the erasure of otherness in the totality of historyby interrupting, to paraphrase Nancy, its myth of unity, such postaestheticworkalso deploys the singularity of the event historically. Art presents its
work as an event that, intrinsically reproducible, keeps reworking its singu-larity in a way that gives such singularity historial significance. The work’ssingularity is never isolated or punctual but, instead, inscribes history inits very structure of reproducibility. To say that art (re)stages history meansthat it brings about the recognition of how the discursive formulations ofexperience are liable to continuous reinvention and reinscription in light oftheir historicity, a historicity, which, figured as an irrecuperable past or animmemorial other, forces the present to reappraise itself in relation to itspast and future. It compels the present to think of itself historically with-
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out lapsing into historicism. This recognition functions as the ‘‘historicalindex’’ of art, thanks to which art’s reproduction of its work amounts to(re)staging history and putting in play the legibility of being in historicalterms.The difference between the historical terms at work in this constella-tion and the truth-claims of historicism may well manifest the nonaestheticandhistorial, rather than historical, significance of art.
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Perhaps you will understand me better if I tell you that dada is a virginmicrobe that insinuates itself with the insistence of air into all the spacesthat reason hasn’t been able to fill with words or conventions.
—Tristan T zara, ‘‘Lecture on Dada’’
2. Contestations of the Everyday
The Avant-Garde, Technology,and the Critique of Aesthetics
Art is a commodity: This seems like a truism in the age of digital tech-nology, which makes the proliferation of various objects of consumption,be it art or popular culture, ‘‘instantaneous,’’ with cultural artifacts availableconstantly, and almost literally, at our fingertips. But even though art hasan exchange value and a market price, unlike objects, it has no ‘‘real’’ usevalue. It is use-less, becausewhat art accomplishes, how it works, exceeds any
quantification or calculative measure. Obviously, certain well-known cul-tural and educational uses can be ascribed to art, but the question remainsas to what extent they describe what takes place in art.To say that art is use-less usually implies that art remains sectioned off from the ‘‘real’’ world, orthat it becomes disconnected from experience, indifferent to it, or of noimportance for it. But here ‘‘use-less’’ indicates that the category of use, andhence use value, is incompatible with the artwork (taken in the active, ver-bal sense of work), incapable of quantifying or measuring what takes place
in art. As I argue in the previous chapter, the significance of art lies in theway in which it (re)figures experience, staging history—or the historicitywhich marks and disjoins historical time—by suspending the notion of aground, origin, or principle of history. In this chapter, I suggest that theconceptuality implied in the notions of use and use value, the technologicalframework in which usefulness becomes thinkable as such, in fact rendersthe work performed by art invisible, relegating it to the sphere of irreality or
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irrationality. As Heidegger puts it in his short note ‘‘ Das Wohnen des Men-
schen’’: ‘‘With regard to today’s reality, which understands itself in terms
of industrial or production society, and which itself produces itself and theresources it needs, the poet’s words easily empty themselves for everyoneinto mere fantasy. In social terms, poetry is understood as the productionof literature.’’
1B e c a u s et h ew o r kw h i c hr e p r o d u c e si t s e l fi na r te x c e e d st h e
category of usefulness, it fails to register as ‘‘real,’’ or to achieve the visibility,the character of actuality and presence—which is awarded to what can becalculated, known, and stored. This absence of measure constitutes boththe ‘‘flaw’’ and a certain advantage of art.
When in ‘‘The Origin of theWork of Art’’ Heidegger takes issuewith the
institution of the museum and the art market, he specifically questions howthe imposition of the use value upon art—making art ‘‘useful’’ for cultural,but also business, purposes: education, edification of the ‘‘soul,’’ the culti-vation of taste, or even entertainment—obscures the work ofart (‘‘work’’
taken here again in the double meaning of the genitive, both as an artworkand as the work performed by art):
Well, then, the works themselves stand and hang in collections and ex-hibitions. Yet are they here in themselves as the works they themselvesare, or are they not rather here as objects of the art industry? Worksmade available for public and private art appreciation. Official agenciesassume the care and maintenance of works. Connoisseurs and criticsbusy themselves with them. Art dealers supply the market. Art-historicalstudy makes theworks the objects of a science.Yet in all this busyactivitydo we encounter the work itself?
2
This double question about the conditions of the existence of art in themodern world and about the character of the work which occurs in/as artechoes throughout Heidegger’s texts on art and poetry, in particular in theimplications which the poetic occurrence of art has for a postmetaphysicalthought, whose possibility Heidegger’s work both opens and qualifies.Thisquestion also delineates the tension between technology, or technic think-ing, which determines the framework for the institutionalization of art andlegitimates the work of art as an object of the art industry, and the poeticwork performed by art, which both escapes and contests the aesthetic cate-gories which encapsulate the artwork as an aesthetic object. Differentiatingart from equipment, ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ discounts usefulnessand availability—the instrumentalizing categories that reflect the workingsof technic thought—as distorting the work of art. It thus echoes Kant’s
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concern for the ‘‘disinterested’’ character of the judgment of the beautiful,though in a different, nonsubjective, tonality. Reading Heidegger’s essayagainst Kant’s Critique of Judgment renders sharper the implications of Hei-
degger’s disavowal of the system of ideas which engender instrumentality—availability, resource, use, purpose, even, finally, the concept itself—whenit comes to thinking the work of art. If Kant’s insistence on the purpo-siveness without purpose as the determination of the beautiful grants au-tonomy or assigns a ‘‘proper’’ place to the judgment of taste, it still leavesthe concept as the governing principle of thought. Art becomes an instanceof symbolic hypotyposis, which presents concepts not schematically but ana-
logically, allowing reflection to transfer from an object of intuition to aconcept of practical reason, for which there is no suitable intuition.
3Aes-
thetic reflection serves as an analogy of the intuition of the supersensiblerealm of freedom, while art becomes the symbol of morality. In Heideg-ger’s case, however, the critique of the conceptuality of use extends to theconcept as such, and marks a displacement of the concept-based notion oftruth from its position as the center and the ground of thought in the nameof the aletheic play of concealment and unconcealment. Heidegger discon-nects art from usefulness to demonstrate the restricted scope and the deriva-tive character—in relation to the aletheic unfolding—of the philosophico-scientific truth (dare we say ‘‘technological’’ truth?) and to emphasize theneed to requalify truth as alethēia, an operation requisite for rethinking the
workof art.
In contrast with Kant’s reflection, where art symbolizes what it cannot
‘‘be,’’ always at an ‘‘analogical’’ remove from truth, ‘‘The Origin of theWorkof Art’’ attempts to break art free from the technic determinations of truth,and to show how the work of art unfolds history as the propriative event(Ereignis),
4effaced and distorted within the representational paradigm of
truth, based on the principle of correctness. Showing that art is useless, un-thinkable in terms of use, does not lead to restoring a symbolic functionfor art within the technological economy of presence, but, conversely, be-comes part of undermining the monopoly which the ‘‘technological’’ con-ceptuality of availability exercises within the modern world. We can, andobviously do, treat art in terms of usefulness, but at the price of reducingthe work of art to an object, respectively of artistic creation, aesthetic ex-perience, or art industry—an operation which, at least in Heidegger’s eyes,obscures, even undoes, the work which occurs in art. In the process, theworkofart—the unsettling effects of the displacement at the core of ex-
perience and history—is exchanged for the security and familiarity which
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comes with the idea that art can be grasped as an aesthetic object, a sectorof cultural activity, an educational and cultural resource.
This complex set of relations between technology, its everyday use and
impact on ordinary life, on the one hand, and the aesthetic treatment ofart, on the other, comes under scrutiny in avant-garde art, especially inthe ‘‘irreverent’’ play with both artistic conventions and everyday practicescharacteristic of Dadaist works and ‘‘provocations,’’ whose best examplesare Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. From Italian futurism and Dadaism toRussian cubo-futurism and constructivism, the avant-garde shows its fas-cination with technology, machinism, mass production, and their growinginfluence on daily modern experience. The defining moment of the avant-garde, especially in its early stages, is the reimagining of art specificallythrough the intersection of technologyand the everyday. As the avant-gardenegotiates and describes the impact of technology on modern experience,it also begins, I argue, to figure the progressive (con)fusion of the everydayand the technological. It comes to understand itself through its continuedengagement with everyday practice, specifically through considering theextent of the rationalization of the ordinary. On the one hand, such art be-comes captivated by the structuring and regulative presence of technologyin ordinary life, and, on the other, it sometimes contests the monopoly ofthe technological/scientific claim on experience.
Avant-garde art is an attempt to measure the extent to which the every-
daycoincides with the technological pattern of experience and, as I suggest,to open an alternative view of experience. My view is that the avant-gardekeeps restaging the event of experience—and experience as event—in orderto see if experience in the modern technological world indeed explains itself‘‘fully’’ in terms dictated by the metaphysical project of rationalization. Iam interested in how avant-garde works refuse to be confined within thenotion of an ‘‘art object’’ and produce themselves as events, in which ex-perience, no longer referable to a subject, is presented as interpretation, asa set of discursive operations, inseparable from the moment of its constitu-tion in the ‘‘technological’’ terms of presence, usefulness, or availability. Tothat effect, I read the avant-garde artwork as the event which figures bothhow experience happens as ‘‘technological’’ and how this technologizationreduces its very event—its excessive, poietic remainder—to the calculus of
presence and availability. Restaging itself as event, the work of art repro-duces the already accomplished technologization of experience, replayingthe point when experience becomes dehistoricized, constituted in terms ofwhat is present: available and measurable. By virtue of reproducing this
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moment, art also puts into play the invisible limit of this technologization,the boundary which remains unthought as long as experience remains de-ceptively transparent in its everydayness. In order to be able to read thislimit, we need to rethink the work performed by art postaesthetically, interms of historicity. Therefore, in my interpretation, art is ‘‘avant-garde’’to the extent to which it keeps unworking the technologization of experi-ence by showing how, in order to inscribe experience within the order ofrepresentation, it effaces historicity.
Another important preliminary point needs to be made concerning my
use of the term ‘‘everyday.’’ The turn to the everyday, to its commonplaceand banal objects, to the event of the uneventful, characteristic of much ofmodern art, can sometimes take the form of the flight from the technologi-cal ambience of modern experience, and become an attempt to reclaim theordinary which would somehow lie outside the domain of technocracy.This
‘‘romanticizing’’ of the ordinary, to use Cavell’s phrase, would try to recoverexperience as immediate and common, as a sphere of familiarity, whichwould provide a guarantee of communication and understanding. Moreoften, though, the turn to the banality of the everyday—from Duchamp’sready-mades to Warhol’s Campbell’s soup—discovers that the ordinary isalready thoroughly technologized. I am interested in this latter, ‘‘critical’’turn to the everyday, in how, exploring such art, we can begin to redefinethe everyday beyond the opposition of the ‘‘artificiality’’ of technologicalpractices and the constructed ‘‘immediacy’’ of the ordinary.
Marcel Duchamp’s focus on ordinary objects is a deliberate denigration
of art, a play on the high aesthetics stance, but it also initiates a reflectionon the degree to which everyday life is dominated by the idea of usefulnessand the actual objects of use.The ready-mades are obviously meant to shockthe public, to offend its aesthetic taste, to finally ridicule aesthetics itself,as Duchamp suggests in a letter to Hans Richter, in which he distances hisworks from pop art and from what he regards as the neo-dadaist attempts toaestheticize the banal.
5Indeed, if Duchamp’s ready-mades can be regarded
a sw o r k so fa r t ,i ti so n l yt ot h ee x t e n tt ow h i c ht h e yp r e c i s e l yu n w o r ka r t ,undoing not just the artistic traditions and aesthetic cannons but, aboveall, the very principle of conceptualizing art as aesthetic. Though Duchamp
himself was ready to end art, or at least to end withart, the provocation
figured in the ready-mades describes precisely the limit of aesthetic art,and points toward, albeit only half-seriously, ways of refiguring art ‘‘after’’aesthetics. In the context of Dadaism and early-twentieth-century art ingeneral, this limit of aesthetics has to do with the question of technology
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and the impact of technologization and mass production upon everydayexperience.
Just as much as they mock aesthetics, Duchamp’s ready-mades also pro-
duce a parody, even a subversion, of the use value and functionality. Forhow else are we to approach ‘‘The Fountain,’’ the urinal, which, when re-versed, put on its head, so to speak, loses its use value? It is precisely themoment of the disappearance of its use value as a mass-produced objectof everyday use that transforms the urinal into ‘‘art.’’ The urinal becomes awork, which, unworking the notion that the urinal is simply a use object,reproduces the interruption of the use mentality, of the everyday function-ality,which structures modern experience.The ‘‘fountain’’ is not equipmentout of order, like the broken hammer in Heidegger’s world, which drawsattention to the equipment’s falling out of use, its disuse or absence of use-fulness. Instead, it is a work, a deliberate transposition of usefulness intothe use-less, which makes us question how art works, and how, in order tothink its ‘‘work,’’ we need different parameters than the ones afforded bytechnic thought.
Fascinated by technology, Duchamp’s works and the Dadaist visual art
render visible the ‘‘operational center’’ of technic thought: technologicalrationality and its paradigm of representation, which orders the world bygradations of usefulness and availability. We can, then, read Dadaist art,often against itself, as an exposition, even an inversion, of the limits of thetechnological paradigm of thought. The great irony of Duchamp’s ready-mades is that technology, the engine of the modern world and the font ofprofit, cannot quite negotiate the curve of its own product, the urinal.Tech-nic thought ‘‘runs into the wall’’ in Duchamp’s ‘‘Fountain,’’ precisely be-cause there is no wall, since the urinal is removed from its framework, fromthe tiles covering the wall and the plumbing to which it should be fastenedin order to perform its intended function. Rendering mass-produced ob-jects dysfunctional, the ready-mades play with functionalityas the main de-terminant of modern experience and demonstrate to what extent aestheticsitself—the institutions of art and art market, and, finally, the understand-ing of art in terms of aesthetic experience—are implicated in the function-alist mentality. The technological thought can relate to Duchamp’s workby reading it in functional terms, by assigning his work a function withina new, ‘‘modern’’ aesthetics of the banal which it inaugurates. It can only‘‘buy’’ Duchamp’s ready-mades as a ‘‘new aesthetic,’’ as new artistic objectswhich, having offended the aesthetic taste, reform it, and, in the end, be-come again useful. Duchamp’s challenge to art, his ridicule of aesthetics,
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is neutralized and his (un)work is recuperated on another level, within anenlarged scope of a new aesthetics. An imaginary wall of a refashioned aes-thetics is added to ‘‘The Fountain,’’ and reframes the ready-made, bring-ing it back into the culture it has disturbed. As a cultural artifact, ‘‘TheFountain’’ is again a urinal, an object; it is no longer a work but insteada commodity, an expensive art object, which is again use-ful, both as anillustration of what it means to be avant-garde and as an investment of capi-tal for future profit. The imagined, and yet all too real, wall of aestheticthought, working, through the art industry—as a subsidiary of the techno-logical organization of society—covers the moment of conflict and hidesthe limit of the technic from view. Undisturbed, the aesthetic transactionsgo back to their smooth operations: we have a new aesthetic, perhaps moreresponsive to the technological conditions of modern life, more ‘‘contem-porary’’ but, in the end, an aesthetic which represents just another step inthe history of art. The avant-garde ‘‘dies,’’ or becomes part of the art mar-ket it attacked, and the limit of thinking which Duchamp inscribes on theslippery edges of the urinal becomes invisible—white.
In his retrospective book on Dadaism, Dada—Kunst und Antikunst,
Hans Richter claims that neither the urinal nor the bottle rack were ‘‘worksof art,’’ but instead jokes played on the notion of ‘‘high art’’ and aesthetics(DAA, ). And the joke is precisely on those who take the ready-mades
too seriously and approach them aesthetically in an endeavor to recuperatethem into the fold of art. Neither art nor anti-art, the ready-mades are un-artistic or postaesthetic. But precisely to the extent that the ready-mades areunartistic, they have to be taken seriously, as an earnest joke that, playing onthe limit of art and aesthetics, brings to the surface the foundations of aes-thetic experience. In addition to spatial reconfiguration, the transformationof the urinal into a ready-made involves also a renaming, a verbal manoeu-ver, which turns the urinal into ‘‘The Fountain.’’ The verbal componentof Duchamp’s ready-mades is more than a title, as it in effect ‘‘makes’’ thework what it is, amplifying the resonance of its anti-aesthetic gesture. Eventhough the ready-mades are visual works, their existence is circumscribedverbally, much more decisively than is the case with titles conventionallyaffixed to paintings or sculptures. It is in its laconic title, ‘‘The Fountain,’’that the inverted urinal begins to suggest the inversion of art and aestheticsand thus comes to realize its performative potential: It is an anti-aestheticevent which provokes a redefinition of what ‘‘work’’ and ‘‘art’’ would meanin a postaesthetic perspective. What happens, what manifests itself in thetransformation of the urinal into a ready-made is a relocation of the artistic
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‘‘inspiration’’: away from the aesthetic feeling and aesthetically pleasing ob-jects to the mundane and the banal. As Duchamp explains: ‘‘[T]he choiceof these ‘ready-mades’ was never dictated by aesthetic delectation’’ ( DAA,
). Through its mockery of the aesthetic standards for the sources of artis-tic and poetic inspiration, ‘‘The Fountain’’ poses the question central to mystudy: How are we to conceive of the artistic and the poetic in the contextof modern art? What is the ready-made urinal thefountain of—the poetic,
t h ea r t i s t i c ,t h eo r d i n a r y ?( O n en e e d st ok e e pi nm i n dt h ed e fi n i t i v ea r t i c l ein Duchamp’s title, its both apodictic and parodic valency.)
In the previous chapter, I suggested that a postaesthetic approach to art
i n v o l v e sar e d e fi n i t i o no ft h ew o r ki nt h ec o n t e x to ft h eh i s t o r i c i t yo fe x -perience. Reproducing the historicity of its own event as a work, art mani-fests the historial occurrence of experience and its linguistic production asalways already an interpretation. Duchamp’s ‘‘Fountain’’ brings into focustwo other aspects of this renegotiation of the work of art: the everyday andthe technological. Using mass produced objects of everyday application—bicycle wheels, bottle racks, shovels, and so on—the ready-mades place theavant-garde revolt against aesthetics within the framework of rethinkingthe everyday, and place the emphasis on how, in ordinary life, technologyaffects experience, dehistoricizing and turning it into resource, measurableaccording to the criterion of efficiency. In the face of Duchamp’s ready-mades we cannot escape asking the question about the relation betweenart and technology, and, especially, about the way this relation figures inthe problematic of the everyday: its production, experience, and interpre-tation. Duchamp’s ready-mades also introduce a change into the tonalityof the discussion of the work of art which I proposed in the context of thethought of Benjamin and Heidegger.The ironyand mockeryof Duchamp’swork, their impact upon aesthetic considerations within the avant-garde,recast the problematic introduced in the previous chapter without losingthe seriousness of the inquiry. The urinal-fountain explicitly parodies thehigh pose and the grandiloquence of the aesthetic dream of origin andpurity, ‘‘degrading’’ it to the sphere of the everyday, with its banal and evendistasteful aspects. At the same time that it aligns itself with Heidegger’sand Benjamin’s critiques of the unified, pure origin or source of experience,its pervasive and sometimes violent irony serves here to diffuse both thegrandiose tone lingering in Heidegger’s thought and the remnants of nos-talgia which envelops Benjamin’s writings, and which can sometimes cloudt h ec r i t i c a li m p o r to ft h e i rp r o j e c t s .
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The Ambiguous Provenance of Modern Art
‘‘Since machinery is the soul of the modern world, and since the genius
of machinery attains its highest expression in America, why is it not rea-sonable to believe that in America the art of the future will flower mostbrilliantly?’’
6This statement by Francis Picabia,one of the key figures in the
Dadaist movement, underscores an important,one is tempted to say ‘‘essen-tial,’’ link between modern art and technology. I use the term ‘‘essential’’in this context, because for Picabia the association of art with machinismis not just a matter of technology being the single most important factordetermining modern life but an illustration of the technological ‘‘essence’’of art. Apart from the proliferation of technology and mass-produced ob-jects or the omnipresence of machinery, at issue is the question of readingmodern being, or being in modernity, in technological terms. For Picabia,the machine both describes and determines the rhythm of everydayness,of ordinary life and social practice. It is, then, only logical—‘‘reasonable’’ isPicabia’s word—to expect that art should follow suit and adopt the spiritof machinism as the guiding principle of artistic creation. In fact, art ap-pears to have no choice left, since being, reality in its entirety, has cometo be defined by its machinistic ‘‘soul.’’ The claim articulated here followsFuturism’s visions of the reign of the machine, recalling Marinetti’s ‘‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,’’ where the poetic voice takesdictation from a propeller in a literary configuration which remakes thepoet’s subjectivity in the form of a new, modern and machinistic reality.
7As
the machine becomes the sign of modern life and its operation prescribesthe rhythm of experience, it also dictates the functions of art: its machinis-tic poetics, as well as the models for interpreting and understanding worksof art.
It is interesting to note, however, that in his praise of the machine Pica-
bia resorts to Romantic diction: He employs the metaphor of the soul andthe organic image of flowering to communicate the degree to which tech-nology suffuses being in the modern world. He appears to need this spiri-tualizing and romanticizing in order to emphasize the preponderance oftechnology in the modern world and its defining presence in ordinary life.By designating the machine ‘‘the soul of the modern world,’’ Picabia paintsa picture in which technology becomes both the shorthand for the pat-tern of modern experience and the vehicle for a totalizing description of theworld. In its characteristic exuberance and enthusiasm, Picabia’s statementidentifies the ‘‘brilliant’’ future of modern art with its dependence on tech-
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nology, with art’s total commitment to presenting the ‘‘soul of the modernworld’’ as machinistic and technological. Itself machinelike, the art of thefuture is to be approached through some sort of a techno-poetics, in whichthere would be no substantive difference between the artistic and the tech-nological, between the aesthetic experience and the technological every-day. This conflation of the aesthetic and the technological rendered in theimage of America, represents in the end a virtual incorporation of art intotechnology, an involution of the poetic into the technic without a remain-der. It would seem to confirm, in spite of Picabia’s elation, a Heideggeriansuspicion that art and technology have long co-existed in a ‘‘metaphysi-cal’’ alliance and that, contrary to the appearances of the incompatibility ofhigh aesthetics with technology, modern art’s commitment to the machinefinally brings into the open a deep-seated conformity between them. If wewanted to pursue this reading further, it would finally contest the Dada-ists’ belief that their revolution, at least in its enthusiastic espousal of tech-nology, was anti-art and anti-aesthetic, and instead demonstrate somethingcontrary: Namely, it would expose the apparently most anti-aesthetic state-ments about the machinist character of modern art as the confirmation ofan inherent association between aesthetics and technological thought, hid-den from viewand often rendered unrecognizable by the historical diversityof artistic movements and phenomena.
If art’s provenance is indeed identified with the technological, if there is
no poetic remainder over and above the technological understanding of theworld, then experience itself becomes analogous to and coextensive withtechnology: Experience of the modern world transpires on the model oftechnological relations of calculation, systematization, and instrumental-ization. The problem is double: Experience has come to be shaped tech-nologically, affected by the predominance of scientifically designed andproduced objects which structure the world and regulate its everyday com-merce, and, on the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult, perhapsimpossible, to conceive experience in any other terms. To experience theworld on a daily basis is to be in it and think it in a technological manner,through a relay of relations and connections which are increasingly fash-ioned on the model of calculation and scientific ordering. The standardof reality becomes technological: What cannot be measured, confirmed asexisting in accordance with the scientific definition of being, does not exist,it is simply not real. In this context, it becomes difficult not to think aboutart depicted by Picabia as an instrument in the technological illuminationand ordering of the world, as a subsidiary in the scientific mapping of ex-
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perience into knowledge. Art’s wager is to either slide into aestheticist lucu-brations without apparent connection to or importance for the ‘‘real’’ worldor to stake its future upon technology and enlist itself, more or less directly,in the cause of a world-wide web of calculations. The work of art can be-come obsolete, assigned to the realm of private and subjective experiencesor to mere fantasizing (zu blossen Phantasterei), as Heidegger puts it, or, on
the other hand, it can remain ‘‘real’’ by reproducing experience in terms ofa technological revealing, which dehistoricizes the event and reduces it tothe space of representation.
Yet the dilemma facing modern art is often misstated when we approach
it in terms of aesthetic experience, since the debate almost automaticallyfalls back upon the old and convenient opposition between aesthetic isola-tion and social integration. In fact, this manner of thinking about art formsan undercurrent of Picabia’s remark. Even most radical anti-aesthetic state-ments do not necessarily leave behind the aesthetic framework and oftenreconfirm the aesthetic optics, realigning art, albeit unwittingly, with thetechno-metaphysical project.This is why it is important to move the debatebeyond the question of how art becomes anti-aesthetic and revolts againstaesthetic traditions and prescriptions. I pose the problem of avant-garde artdifferently, in terms of how modern art positions itself vis-à-vis technologyand its figuration of experience. As such its implications reach beyond art orthe field of aesthetics and bear directly upon how we conceive of experienceand its historicity.
Picabia’s wager tells us as much about the state of modern art as it does
about the state of modern experience: Both are caught between technologyand unreality, both remain essentially determined by the technicized char-acter of being in modernity. Yet Picabia’s way of posing the question doesnot take into consideration theway in which Duchamp’s art orTzara’s mani-festoes render problematic the identification of the provenance of modernart with technology. Picabia’s projection of a brilliant future art aligned withthe machine opens up the question of the genesis of contemporary art, ofthe identification of its source with what might be called the technologi-cal organization of experience. But how are we in this context to think oftechnology, and, in particular, its (reductive?) relation to the historicity ofexperience? What forms does the technological experience of theworld takeand is its rhythm coextensive with the workings of art? How does the worldexperienced technologically appear in its ‘‘truth,’’ and what relation does itbear to what transpires in/as the work of art? To articulate the significanceof this confrontation of the avant-gardewith technology within the broader
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scope of the philosophical critique of modernity, I propose to reconsiderHeidegger’s reconceptualization of being in modernity in terms of the ten-sion between technicity (Technik) and art. With the exception of brief re-
marks about Klee or his comments on Cézanne and modern painting, Hei-degger did not show much interest in avant-garde art. However, his criticalrethinking of the relation between poiēsis andtechnē provides the best back-
ground for rethinking the avant-garde’s own complex relationship to tech-nology. This is the case because Heidegger proposes a unique reconceptu-alization of technicity beyond the idea of technology as industrialization orprocesses of production, and links such technicity with the problem of thedetermination of being in modernity. Heidegger’s discussion of technicityandpoiēsis allows us to recognize that the avant-garde, beyond its often dis-
cussed fascination with technology, becomes the scene of the questioningof whether modern art proceeds from the realm of the technological andfulfills itself, as Picabia suggests, in this affiliation, or whether it opens analternative poietic event of experience. Foregrounding technology’s satura-tion of ordinary life, avant-garde art repeatedly addresses itself to this spaceof decision, and even when it embraces technology as the essence of art, itrenders visible the conditions and implications of such a decision. I wouldargue that this ambiguity in relation to technology is even more importantthan the other quandary about the avant-garde—the often misstated ques-tion of self-referentiality and autotelism, which produces the impasse andthe continuing disagreement about the separation or integration of avant-garde art into the social practice.When we rethink the avant-garde throughthe problem of the technological formation of experience, the ‘‘formal’’ ex-periments of avant-garde art and literature appear in a different light: notas autotelic or aestheticist but as part of the refiguring of modern experi-ence. They are part of the effort both to reinvent the language of art andto force thought to reappraise the work performed by art in terms otherthan those of aesthetics. Moving beyond the issues of aesthetic formalismand social separation, which have dominated the debates about the avant-gardes, I frame my discussion in terms of how experience sets itself to workin art, of how historicity becomes articulated in the ‘‘innovative’’ languageof avant-garde poetry.
Heidegger’s writings on technology, art, and poetic language from the
s and s offer important insights into this question, in particularbecause they explore the possibility of a poietic remainder in the worldstructured in accordance with the techno-scientific formation of relationsand develop the significance of such a residue for future thought.The over-
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lapping of the problem of art with the question of experience and tech-nology, which I signaled through Picabia’s remark, constitutes the pivotof Heidegger’s reflection on the provenance of art and its importance forthe determination of thinking in his Athens lecture ‘‘ Die Herkunft der
Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens ’’ (‘‘The Provenance of Art and the
Determination of Thinking’’):
Is there today, after two and a half millennia, an art which commandsthe same exigency as did the art of ancient Greece? And if not, fromwhat region comes the exigency to which modern art, in all its domains,r e s p o n d s ?…T h em o d e sb yw h i c hw ed e t ermine reality in a scien-
tific world, and by the name ‘‘science,’’ we understand natural science,mathematical physics, emphasize something that is only toowell known.
By this means one is easily prompted to explain that the region from
which the requirement to which modern art responds is none other thanthe scientific world.
We hesitate to give our ascent.We remain in indecision.
8
In comparison with ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ dating from morethan thirty years earlier, Heidegger’s appraisal of art and its role in the mod-ern world appears here more cautious and circumspect, even skeptical. Still,even though Heidegger assumes a position similar to Picabia’s, noting thatcontemporary art appears to respond in the same modes of thinking bywhich science determines reality, he leaves open the possibility of anotherreading of art, one that in ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ he de-scribes as ‘‘poetic revealing’’ ( BW,). Identifying the danger present in
technology, beyond the threat of global annihilation or depletion of re-sources, with how the moderns think, or, rather, schematize experience andtheir relation to theworld in accordancewith the prevalent techno-scientificeconomy of being, Heidegger traces in art the possibility of respondingto the demands of the modern world in a poietic way, in the mode ofpoetic thought. Contrary to many misreadings which arise precisely at thisjuncture of Heidegger’s thought, such poetic thinking does not indicatea withdrawal from the world and its daily affairs into an aestheticized pri-vate realm but marks a possibility of letting experience happen as an eventwhose historicity inscribes the fluid yet irreducible significations of alteritywithin the very structure of experience. In this relation, thought becomesreconceived beyond the idea of representation or subjective reflection, andsignifies a ‘‘correspondence’’ (Entsprechen) which, responding to being, lets
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the world unfold, co-opens it, so that representation and reflection become
possible.
If Hegel’s judgment pronounces the death of art, Heidegger prefers to
leave this question undecided, perhaps even undecidable: a matter of con-tinuous requestioning, an issuewhich has to be decided overand overagain,perhaps with every instant a work of art reproduces its work, resetting towork the aletheic play of being. Contrary to Picabia’s opinion, for Hei-degger, if art follows the spreading technicism of contemporary culture,it already confirms its own death, its own irrelevance, rather than assurefor itself a ‘‘brilliant future.’’ Art remains alive precisely when it rendersthe technological economy of experience problematic, and, staging a break,marks an otherwise within the fold of calculative thought: ‘‘[b]ecause theessence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upontechnology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm thatis, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other,fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art’’ ( BW,). Confront-
ing technology, art has to wager its own existence on whether it can achievea break from the technic formation of being, and open it up so that thecritical force of history’s ‘‘inessentiality’’ can disjoin and reformulate therepresentational framing of experience.
On the surface, this line of thinking appears to unduly privilege art as a
site of radical critique and to ‘‘demonize’’ technology, casting it in the role ofan adversary. Yet such a positioning of art, however strategic it may appearin the context of the debates about aesthetics, is the result of the historicaldevelopment of art and the attendant critical discourses. Paradoxically, itis a certain aesthetic ideology, a version of aesthetics which perceives thework of art as a commodified object of private aesthetic experience, thatsets up the situation in which art can become a counter-discourse. Thisaesthetics also prepares the ground for a backlash against the isolation ofthe aesthetic sphere, for an aestheticizing political appropriation of art intothe symbol/ideal of a possible complete representation of social and politi-cal relations, which characterizes modernist political (mis)appropriationsof art. I locate Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics through the prism of theevent between the privatization of the aesthetic and the aestheticization ofthe social/political sphere, that is, I see in it resources for preventing both‘‘misreadings’’ by foregrounding as art’s Wesen, that is, as its modality of
being, the artwork’s continuous reinscription of its own historicity.
Art assumes a ‘‘critical’’ function as a result of the efforts to contain
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its performative reinterpretation of experience in the private, ‘‘aesthetic,’’sphere of existence.What gives art its critical force is the circumscription ofits work in aesthetic terms, which inscribes art into the metaphysical under-standing of being: Aesthetic experience becomes conceived on the modelof what might be called the ‘‘technic’’ parameters of being, or, when artexceeds such categorizations, its critical effects become effaced through agesture which assigns art to the ‘‘insignificant’’ and ‘‘unreal’’ domain of theirrational, to the sphere of private affects and perceptions. This ideology ofthe aesthetic imprints upon art the same binary categories of thought andthe protocols of conventional meaning through which metaphysics struc-tures experience: subject/object, private/public, aesthetic/social-political,rational/irrational. Heidegger’s assumption is that metaphysical conceptu-ality has quite successfully monopolized, through its technological ideal ofsystematized and calculable reality, various spheres of discourse: scientific,historical, political, philosophical, aesthetic. As he argues in the Nietzschelectures, already since Plato art has been historically resistant to this ‘‘pro-gressive’’ course of Western rationalization, and, if art is dead, as Hegelclaims, it is because it is incapable of offering an alternative to the tech-nological schematizations of experience. It is this Western, or as Nietzschewould have it, Socratic, ideology of art as explainable within the parametersof rationality that prepares the scene for the critique of aesthetics asaes-
thetics, that is, as the dominant way of conceptualizing art in modernity.Even if this fashion of perceiving and theorizing art is capable of transfor-mation and modification, it does not venture beyond the aesthetic limitsprescribed by Western rationality. My reading of Heidegger’s critique ofaesthetics underscores how art, performing the historicity of the event, re-vises the conventional understanding of the temporality of experience andhistory, which reduces the event to the measurement of time and the orderof representation. This approach renders problematic the idea that art canbe explained within the techno-metaphysical schema of experience, or, ina symmetrical gesture, disregarded as irrelevant because it seems unexplain-
able, without ‘‘meaning,’’ within the prescribed conventions of significa-tion. As ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ suggests, the inessential work
of art inaugurates, through the historicity of the event, the possibility ofdisplacing the metaphysical ground of customary relations to world andothers. Because of the historical extensions between metaphysical concep-tualityand aesthetics, this attempt to think of art otherwise than in aestheticterms also opens to interrogation the practices of constituting experienceand history in accordance with the techno-metaphysical schema of being.
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The Two Grammars of Experience
In Heidegger’s reflection on technology, we find the tension between
two ways of revealing that compose the experience of being in modernity.Heidegger employs the Greek terms of technē andpoiēsis to articulate and
describe this tension. In the following section, I explain the stakes of thisdistinction for rethinking the place of technology and art in the presentage and the importance that this approach holds for the recognition of thecritical potential of avant-garde art. Even though Heidegger himself doesnot tie his reflections to discussion of modern or avant-garde art, he tries toexplain in them the significance that art might still hold for the technologi-cal age. It is precisely this significance of art in relation to the technicizationof the everyday that the avant-garde also struggles to articulate.
While manyof Heidegger’s statements reflect an underlying uneasewith
the impact of techno-scientific thought on modern life and of the pro-gressive immersion of Western culture in technicism, his thought becomesmost interesting in its diagnosis of both the extent and the manner in whichtechnologyaffects experience and thought on the ontological level of being-in-the-world. Heidegger critiques the instrumental notion of technology,the idea that technology is a means at the disposal or under the control ofhumans, who ‘‘create’’ technology and claim mastery over it. This does notmean, however, that technology is something foreign or added to a ‘‘natu-ral’’ human mode of being but only that it has historically come to increas-ingly determine the constitution of experience and (human) being-in-the-
world. Technology inheres in and regulates the modern experience of the
world; it structures and determines the modes of representation throughwhich the world takes shape and becomes present to thought, entering thedomain of knowledge. If Heidegger repeatedly underscores the import ofglobal technology, identifying the second half of the twentieth century asthe era of the atomic bomb (Atomzeitalter), it is to draw attention to how
the laws of science and the patterns of technological development emergefrom the much older practices through which the power imbedded in mod-ern technology historically has come to decide the shape of experience andthought: ‘‘The power concealed in modern technology determines the re-lation of man to that which exists.’’
9In other words, Heidegger claims that
modernity is defined by how what is, becomes constituted, experienced,and understood ‘‘technologically.’’
InÜberlieferte Sprache und technische Sprache, Heidegger distances him-
self from the anthropological-instrumental concept of technology, accord-
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ing to which technology signifies a practical means, an instrument of im-plementing in daily life the findings of natural sciences. In order to fleshout his notion of technicity as distinct from the customary significationsof modern technology, Heidegger reverses the commonly held idea aboutthe relation between natural sciences and technology: natural science is notthe source of technology but, conversely, technicity constitutes the foun-dational principle of modern science: ‘‘ Nicht die Naturwissenschaft ist die
Grundlage der Technik, sondern die moderne Technik ist der tragende Grund-zug der modernen Naturwissenschaft. ’’
10To see natural science as the ori-
gin of technology is to circumscribe technology in terms of a vast array of‘‘man-made’’ technical products used daily in various areas of modern life.Heidegger, however, defines technology as a determining ground of knowl-edge, as the paradigm of knowing that has become dominant in Westerncultures.
As the modalityof knowing proper toWestern thought, technicity marks
the beginning of modernity and defines knowledge in terms of renderingthings and nature open to measuring and calculation. This technologicalmodality of revealing underpins the matrix of thought as rational calcu-lation, and in this capacity, sets up (gestellt) nature in terms of calculable
objectivity ( US,). As the Gestell, that is, as various modes of setting up
and making available, technology makes possible modern science, in thespecific sense that it ‘‘presents’’ nature as in ‘‘essence’’ calculable and mea-surable, that is, as prestructured and available for scientific discovery andappropriation. It is technology in this ‘‘fundamental’’ meaning that shapesthe modern world in the image of a grand resource and defines social andpolitical relations in terms of calculation and management of resources.Therole technology plays in the formation of experience is to inaugurate, and,in the same gesture, to foreclose, the differential emergence of the worldin terms of the opposition between resources, both ‘‘natural’’ and manu-factured, and the human mastery of the world secured through techno-logical means. Modern experience becomes technologized not as a resultof the omnipresence of technologically produced objects or the forms ofcalculation and regimentation of everyday life but by virtue of the technicschematization of experience which marks the beginning of modernity. Inthe modern world, technicity is both what occasions experience and whatdetermines its form and boundaries.
Technicity is understood as the mode of disclosing and perceiving things
which unfolds the techno-scientific picture of modern reality: ‘‘The reveal-ing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [ Herausfordern ], which
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puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can beextracted and stored as such’’ ( BW,). Heidegger describes the forms of
technic disclosure with a cluster of terms that emphasize the forceful, pene-trative, and unlocking strategies assumed in relation to nature and worldfrom the position of the power inherent in techno-scientific thought: set-ting upon (Stellen), ordering (Bestellen), challenging-forth (Herausfordern),
standing-reserve (Bestand).
11The umbrella term for the modes of technic
revealing, das Gestell (the enframing), expresses, in a concentrated fashion,
the meaning of technology conceived as constitutive of the very element ordomain of experience and thought: calculation, definition, orderability.
12
Heidegger’s reflection on technology allows us to make a distinction be-
tween techno-scientific progress and industrialism, on the one hand, andTechnik, which describes the patterning of experience, the unfolding of the
world in what might be called a ‘‘technic’’ manner,on the other.The technicdesignates here the underlying existential structure of modern experienceand its forms of representation: It reflects the ‘‘modern’’ proclivity for en-countering the world in the manner of a calculus, or a tabulation of differ-ences,which reveals being in its contemporary manifestations to be increas-ingly, and inherently, orderable and presentable as information. Presentingthe world as a schema of calculations convertible into the order of informa-tion, the technic predetermines being and thought, and, thus, channels andregulates the practices through which the world is experienced and repre-sented.What appears to worry Heidegger is that technological productionincreasingly obscures the ‘‘other’’ meaning of technology as revealing, andbecomes indistinguishable from the reality which it is supposed to describe:‘‘[T]he frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to suchan extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essenceof technology may unfold essentially in the propriative event of truth’’ ( BW,
). At this point the technological would no longer correspond to a his-torically determined constitution of being but would become interchange-able with the fiction of a ‘‘true’’ essence—it would lay claim to being the
truth of being.
I would argue that the problem of technology points beyond the total
scope of the techno-scientific image toward what makes such a global per-spective possible: the idea of basing the very nature of relating (humans/world; thought/nature, and so on) on the model of a forceful ordering anduniformity.Technicitydescribes above all the principle of relationality itself,the matrix of relating whose principle is based on the possibilityof measure-ment and calculation. This technologically conceived relationality, which
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constitutes the underlying paradigm of techno-scientific thought and thepractices of modern life, affects in advance—prescribes, as it were—thearticulations of difference, determining the scope of their socio-politicaland ethical implications.This type of relationality—the product of the his-torical development of the metaphysical tradition into scientific thought—regulates the entire spectrum of modern experience, dictating, in effect, themanner in which the world occurs: its technic modality of revealing.
13
By contrast with technicity and its modes of representation, I read Hei-
degger’s poietic revealing or poiēsis,14in terms of difference as alterity whose
play remains elusive for thought and comprehension. Difference read as theindex of alterity retains the unboundedness of its event (Ereignis), where
the fold of historicity renders the event already different from itself or fromany grasp or comprehension its articulation affords. This distinction be-tween difference conceived in terms of comprehension or calculation anddifference as the index of alterity reflects the tensions that mark modernexperience and provides another venue for the discussion of the historicityof the event described in chapter .
Conceiving of technicity in terms of relationality, that is, as predeter-
mining thevery shape of relations in the modern world, puts us in a positionto unpack Heidegger’s notion of poiēsis or poetic revealing and to develop its
implications for understanding the work of art. Just as Heidegger’s notionof technology refers to a force constitutive of how human beings relate towhat is, poiēsis is also thought on the same level: The poetic event of experi-
ence critiques the idea of a private aesthetic, the notion that art pertainsto an aestheticized region of being, separate from ‘‘real life’’ problems andconcerns. Poiēsis here refers to the historial force—the historicity of hap-
pening—which unfolds experience as ‘‘inessential’’ and disjoined. It alsoexposes the limits of technicity, showing how it effaces the historial aspectsof experience, saturates it with meaning and renders it commensurate withcalculative thought. If technology becomes synonymous with the forma-tion of experience in the contemporary world, the revelation of the ‘‘poetic’’character of the historicity of experience, the historial poiēsis of the world’s
coming into being, concerns directly the work performed by art, the workwhose postaesthetic scope falls outside of the realm of the aesthetic catego-rizations of art. In Heidegger’s words, ‘‘in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness(lauter Ästhetik) about art we no longer guard and preserve (bewahren) the
essential unfolding of art’’ ( BW,–); that is, we no longer recognize
art’s relation to experience and, instead, try to resolve all questions about
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art’s work within the binary scenario of the ‘‘aesthetics’’ of isolation versusthe ‘‘politics’’ of integration.
Heidegger’s term bewahren ties the preservation of the work of art, of
its figuration of historicity, to the possibility of opening, through a con-frontation with the ‘‘essence’’ of technology, a poietic organization of ex-perience. To reappraise the technic production of modern experience, toinflect the calculative relationality that (in)forms its practices, is to rethinkthe formation of thought and experience figured in the work of art. Thisformation Heidegger designates with the term ‘‘poetic’’: It bears the nameof poetry (Dichtung) or of poetic revealing. Though both technē andpoiēsis
are modes of revealing, of bringing-forth ( BW,), poetic unconcealment,
in contrast to the setting and framing (stellen) characteristic of technic re-
vealing, proceeds as letting-be. Since it is grammar that describes the matrixof relations obtaining within a language, I refer to technē andpoiēsis—two
interlinked variants of relatedness—as the technic and poietic grammars ofexperience, respectively. The interplay and contestation of those two pat-terns of relating makes up the interstices of experience, the grammar ofeveryday practices. Both modes constitute the play of alethēia; they negoti-
ate the ambiguous scission of the true and the untrue, but the upper handin disposing the relations which obtain within this play belongs to the tech-nic disclosure, to the enframing or the Gestell. Figuring a possible rupture
of the uniform framework of the Gestell, poiēsis indicates a narrow opening
marked by historicity, a sort of a grammatical lapsus, in which it may bepossible to renegotiate our understanding of the work of art through thelink between art’s poetic Gestalt and the poietic unfolding of experience.
In order to avoid an all too easy misunderstanding that this rethinking of
technology amounts to a form of aestheticization, I introduce a distinctionbetween the poetic and the poietic, between the poetic figure at work in artand the poietic historicity of experience. Although this difference is onlyimplicit in Heidegger’s thought, the way he recasts poiēsis and calibrates it
with art’s historico-philosophical role in the critique of modernity suggeststhatpoiēsis constitutes the structuring moment of experience—the texture
of the differential manifestation of theworld. Drawing a link between physis
andpoiēsis, Heidegger indicates that poiēsis delineates the workings of the
event of manifestation: ‘‘ Physis …t h ea rising of something from out of
itself, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiēsis in the highest sense’’
(BW,). Beyond craft, and artistic or poetic creation, poiēsis refers to the
historial character of the event, to the opening of the world, irreducible to
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subjective or private experiences. It is in this specific sense that I write aboutthepoietic event of experience and keep it differentiated from the poetic
configuration of the work of art, which ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’describes as Dichtung —poetry or the poetic domain of art: ‘‘All art, as the
letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence,
poetry’’ (BW,). The bifurcation of the notion of poetry into Poesie, the
genre of poetic writing, and Dichtung, the poetic element of art, opens the
door to rethinking art through its relation to poiēsis in the broad sense, that
is, with regard to the poietic structure of experience. The poietic as I havedefined it here is not limited to or reserved for art and poetry but delineatesinstead the structuration of experience. The poietic and the poetic remaindistinct, even though their linguistic and etymological proximity suggestsreference to the same structure of experience.While not all poetry and art ispoietic, the discourse at work in ‘‘poetic’’ art—its ‘‘poetics’’—registers in itsvery structure what I have termed the ‘‘poietics’’ of experience. In this con-text, ‘‘poetic art’’ becomes the site where the historial poiēsis of experience
marks itself against the dominant technicist formations of the everyday.
This kind of poiēsis does not just constitute a newaesthetic but revises the
notion of relation and produces a new relationality alternative to the figuresof relation which ground calculative thought. I develop this poietic related-ness in reference to Heidegger’s notion of nearness (Nähe), which in his late
works describes the complicated and shifting weave of relations within thepropriative event (Ereignis).
15Nähespecifies a type of relationality which, in
order to mark and yet preserve the alterity of the other within the relation,conceives the relating bind in terms of a proximity that ‘‘unbinds’’ or letsbe. Unlike difference, which remains calculable and representable withinthe binary optics of identity and difference, proximity binds by releasing.Relationality figured as nearness—which, as I show in the next chapter, isalso crucial to Irigaray’s critique of sexual difference—marks an attemptto think the very optics within which difference first becomes possible andrepresentable as difference.
Since measurable, graspable difference is the key parameter of repre-
sentational and calculative thought, the relationality implied in the notionof nearness figures an alternative to the technological relatedness, a poi-etic unfolding alternative to the technic mode of revealing. In other words,nearness conceived as the very element of relation, the middle (Mitte), so
to speak, where relating becomes possible in the first place, refers to thepoietic weave of relations which structures experience as event. This poi-etic relationality becomes thinkable only as an inflection or a torsion within
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the differential matrix of manifestation. What nearness figures is the verydistinction between difference as poiēsis and difference appropriated tech-
nologically, that is, difference conceived as the pivot of calculative thought.It marks the distinction within Ereignis between propriation as dispropria-
tion or depropriation (Ent-eignis) and the eventual appropriation into the
representational schema. This distinction keeps in play the critical effectsof the remainder which does not enter into the matrix of calculation andwhich excuses itself from the differential (re)presentation of the event.Thisremainder indicates the historicity of experience, a certain untimelinesswhich dislocates the event and which is marked in the irreducibility of thesignification of proximity to the representation of difference. I read Heideg-ger’s nearness as a poietically conceived relatedness, as a way of rethinkingtechnology and critiquing calculative thought, which would keep experi-ence in view of the irreducibility of its event. The problematic of nearnessand difference indicates how the technic and the poietic constitute two sidesof manifestation, whose identity and separation remain constantly at play.
The poietic reinvention of relationality involves rethinking the role that
the other and alterity play in thought and the ways in which otherness af-fects the formation of experience and everyday practice. To the extent thatthis relationality crystallizes relations in a nondeterminate, nonsaturatedway by letting the other remain other, it operates a different kind of tem-porality, one distinct from the binary temporality of presence and absence.Its time is historial and not simply historical, that is, it marks the temporaltorsion which has always alreadyopened the present, as noncoincident withitself, to the future. This poietic relationality does not concern itself withbringing into presence, and thus with representing, but with articulatingexperience as already dislocated, fissured: an Erfahrung, which, as I show
in chapter , constitutes itself by reinscribing its own historicity. By con-trast, technicity forms beings into relations of power, maintaining differ-ences only as an index of power, and thus effectively canceling them withinthe overall calculus of resources. Taken as historial andpoietic, experience
opens its social and aesthetic constructs to the inessentiality of the event,which remains incommensurate with experience constituted in terms ofpower, representation, and resource. Poietic relationality, both a mark ofalterity and a remainder of the historicity of the event, defines an attemptto conceive of relation on the pattern of proximity and inflection of differ-ence, where the differential matrix of thought, rather than being rigid orschematic in its calculation of differences, becomes pliant, adaptable to theindeterminateness of alterity.
16
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The Avant-Garde Poie ¯ sis
This reading of poiēsis constitutes the frame for my understanding of
the terms ‘‘poetry’’ and ‘‘poetics’’ in reading avant-garde poetry: Beyondtheir conventional reference to the genre of poetic writing or the aestheticcode regulating it, theydesignate, in a specific and limited way, the ‘‘poetic’’operations through which art registers and figures the poietics of experi-ence. As I demonstrated in chapter , this poietics functions as a critiqueof the dominant ideologies of experience and their grounding in the meta-physics of subjectivity. The link between this poietics of the event and thepoetic in art defines the postaesthetic or the avant-garde working of art.As my discussion of Duchamp’s ready-mades shows, this postaesthetics isat work in the historical avant-gardes but it also operates in contempo-rary poetry, manifesting itself in the poetic redefinitions of the relationbetween language, everydayness, and technology. This postaesthetic poiet-ics of experience defines the function of the avant-garde in my argument:The avant-gardes are historical, they belong to the epoch of technologi-cal thought and the critique of modernity, but the avant-garde workof art
is irreducible to any of the historical avant-garde ‘‘isms.’’ It describes thecontinuing critical rethinking of the poietic and the technological figura-tions of experience. If on the basis of the works of Heidegger and Benjaminwe regard language as a translative event, then avant-garde poetics replaysthe torsion of the poietic into the poetic, the configuration of the event ofmanifestation into the work performed by art. What is avant-garde aboutavant-garde art is its engagement with this specific language fold, whichtranscribes the poietic into the poetic Gestalt, or into the instant, as Tzara
calls it. The distinction between the poietic and the poetic, complement-ing the difference between technē andpoiēsis, clarifies how the poietic event
escapes the boundaries of aestheticization and questions the technologi-cal formation of experience. At issue is not an arbitrary choice of art as asafeguard against the domination of technology but the matter of openingwithin the technological forms of experience an alternative figuration ofErfahrung.
Calling the alternative to technology poiēsis, Heidegger is not at all sure
whether this distinction can still be meaningful, whether the poietic canmark a difference from the technological or whether, instead, it explainsitself fully within the fold of technology. The avant-garde, in particularDadaism, seems to be, bycontrast, a celebration of precisely that very possi-bility of art as a different, postaesthetic poiēsis. The tenor of avant-garde art,
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the frenetic pace of its linguistic and artistic innovations, stands in markedcontrast to Heidegger’s cautious meditative approach.While Heidegger in-vestigates the historical conditions in modernity under which such a trans-formation into a postaesthetic art could be possible, the avant-garde ad-vertises its works as the very stage where such transformation takes place.It is obvious that Heidegger would have had little patience for the ironywith which Dada questions and refashions the links between art and theeveryday, for the playful mundaneness of Duchamp’s ready-mades or theclowning meanders of Tzara’s manifestoes. And yet, underneath the cau-tious, almost skeptical look with which Heidegger regards contemporaryart and the bravado with which Dada dismisses the past and ridicules thep r e s e n ti ni t sw o r k s ,ac o m m o nt h r e a do fc o n c e r nw i t ht h ee v e n to fe x -perience connects these two, so different, approaches. In his insistence that‘ ‘ D a d ad o e sn o tm e a na n y t h i n g , ’ ’
17Tzara does not simply scandalize the
literary public and upset their expectations of meaningfulness and coher-ence. He also indicates that the level on which Dadaism wants to engagebeing reaches beyond the play of signification into the event structure of ex-perience which Dada attempts to release from the conventions of everydaybeing.
This kind of poiēsis becomes visible in Tzara’s various Dada manifes-
toes,which consistently, through their mazes of jokes, irony, and contradic-tions, draw the sign of equation between Dada and being: ‘‘ DADA DADA
DADA; —the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and
of all contradictions, freaks and irrelevancies: LIFE.’’
18The Dadaist attack
on bourgeois society, family, and state institutions, its anti-establishmentand anti-aesthetic stance, appears to be a result of attempts to renegotiatethe relation between art and being:
We must accelerate this quantity of life that spends itself so readily here,there, and everywhere. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life.Art does not have the celestial, general value that people are pleased toaccord it. Life is far more interesting. Dada boasts of knowing the exactproportion that is to be given to art; it introduces it with subtle, perfidi-ous means into the acts of everyday fantasy. And vice versa. In art, Dadabrings everything back to an initial, but relative, simplicity. ( SM,)
Art ‘‘going Dada’’ constitutes more than an aesthetic or artistic phenome-non because it concerns ‘‘LIFE,’’ that is, it sets out to reconceive relationsbetween artwork and world, literature and experience. Art (re)claims a por-tion ora layerof experience, a poietic dimension of historicity,which cannot
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be filled ‘‘with words or conventions,’’ and which opens the possibility of re-figuring art’s relation to the technological organization of experience.Whatremains to be investigated is ‘‘the exact proportion’’ to be given to art sothat its relation to experience can be renegotiated within the matrix of theeveryday and yet outside or beyond the framing opposition between theseparation/integration of art into social practice.
To release the Dada in being,Tzara demands specificallya break from the
futurist fascination with technology, a distancing from Marinetti’s attemptto replace literary sensibility with machinelike ‘‘feelings’’: ‘‘We declare thatthe motor car is a feeling that has cosseted us quite enough in the dilatori-ness of its abstractions, as have transatlantic liners, noises and ideas. Andwhile we put on a show of being facile, we are actually searching for thecentral essence of things, and are pleased if we can hide i t… ’ ’( SM,). For
Dada, which is ‘‘definitely against the future’’ ( SM,), what matters is not
the future that will one day become present but the instant, the event ofexperience in its futural temporality. It is the self-concealing rupture of theevent that Dadaism attempts to both reveal and conceal in the irony andcontradictions of its language.This ‘‘show of being facile’’ which Tzara putson in his poems and manifestos seeks precisely this hiding ‘‘central essenceof things’’—the instant or the event. To transpose experience into its di-mension of the event, Tzara constantly undermines logic and the principleof noncontradiction, creating a convoluted series of self-canceling asser-tions which lead his language beyond the discursive confines it inhabits.As he humorously puts it, ‘‘Even if logic were confirmed by the senses itwould still be an organic disease’’ ( SM,). Rather than the key to truth
and meaning, logic appears a sort of a degeneration of experience, whichcovers over with its machinery of rules and axioms the Dada event of being.Logic ‘‘infects’’ not simply language but experience itself, imperceptiblyaltering its fabric so that it appears intrinsically calculable and graspable—technic. What we can recognize within Dada’s ‘‘non-sense’’ and its ironiccrusade against logic, is precisely the tension between the technic and thepoietic unfolding of being. This is why Tzara wants to lead art to a statewhere ‘‘Beauty and Truth in art don’t exist’’ ( SM,), that is, to a state
where art, to the extent to which it escapes the techno-aesthetic categorieswhich obscure its work, begins to matter for experience precisely becauseart’s significance cannot be accommodated within the related schema oftruth-based cognition, aesthetic judgment, and social usefulness.
What emerges from Tzara’s pronouncements is a postaesthetic notion of
art, whose main impetus is less to propose a new aesthetic or even an anti-
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aesthetic than to attempt to altogether leave aesthetics to itself. Perhaps it istime to abandon aesthetics, theway Heidegger wanted to leave metaphysicsto itself in his late essay ‘‘Time and Being.’’ Since a simple overcomingof aesthetics is impossible (hence ‘‘postaesthetic’’ sounds a somewhat falsenote),we should probably talk about letting aesthetics cease to be so impor-tant and allowing art to reinvent a different set of exchanges with the world.Such a reinvention or reimaging puts into question the idea of returning toan orderly picture of art integrated into social practice, because this para-digm, which conceptualizes art in terms of its either outside or inside statuswith respect to the social sphere, effectively performs art’s incorporationinto the technical ordering of experience. To the extent that notions of so-cial practice as either a space structured technologically or its opposite, apretechnological realm immune from the reification of experience, are in-debted to the metaphysico-technological schema of being and increasinglyspeak this language, the wager implicit in Picabia’s remark about the tech-nological destiny of modern art rings false. Picabia frames the issues in away that predetermines the outcome of the discussion, making art spin be-tween the opposites of the autonomy of aestheticist art and the avant-gardedream of integration of art into social practice. By contrast, Duchamp’sready-mades and Tzara’s manifestoes suggest that the avant-garde critiquesthis entire opposition and tries to rethink art’s relation to experience beyondthe aesthetic dilemmas of separation and integration.
Picabia’s remark appears to resolve the tensions at play in Duchamp’s
ready-mades, locating art, without any remainder, within the fold of tech-nology, and, implicitly, extending the machinist domain over the entiretyof experience. The seemingly innocent and merely aesthetic query aboutthe provenance of art, and the issue of its residue or remainder over thetechnological, touches upon the problem of the structure of experience inmodernity. Its importance becomes immediately visible when we realizethat the tenuous possibility of a remainder above the technological configu-rations of experience—of art as the moment of the contestation of tech-nicity and the inauguration of an otherwise—becomes the placeholder foralterity. As Tzara notes, ‘‘[a]rt is a series of perpetual differences ….T h e
strength to transmute this succession of ever-changing notions into the in-
stant—that is the work of art’’ ( SM,). The precarious architectonics of
the work of art consists in holding together, both inan instant and asan in-
stant, a constellation of differences, a series of shifting images and notions,which open up a distance marking the historicity of experience. In effect,the constellation, not unlike Benjamin’s dialectical image, configures itself
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as a difference which holds the instant open toward what it no longer is (thepast) and what it is not yet (the future). Through this peculiar opening upof the event-ness of experience—the reproduced instant of displacement—art constitutes itself as its own remainder, as always above and beyond whati tc o m e st ob ei nt h ei n s t a n to fi t sw o r k .T ob ee x a c t ,t h ew o r k‘ ‘ p r o p e r ’ ’or idiomatic to art consists in constituting the instant, that particular ‘‘in-stantaneous’’ Gestalt, as Heidegger would say, as the moment of its own
undoing and reproduction, that is, as a ‘‘series of perpetual differences.’’
The understanding of experience as event has a direct bearing on the
problematic of the everyday, with which so much of avant-garde art con-cerns itself. In Tzara’s manifestoes, art transmutes the ever-shifting differ-ences into an instant, thus remarking the self-concealing historicity of theeveryday. As such, the instant points to the fold within the everyday: be-tween the routines, knowledges, and perceptions characteristic of the ordi-nary, underpinned and regulated by the ‘‘disease’’ of logic, and the instantin which the everyday shows its ironic Dada face. As in Dadaism, muchof the energy of contemporary art and modern thought is directed at re-thinking the everyday: from ordinary language, everyday practices, andbanal topics, to mundane events and prosaic situations. Both phenome-nology and ordinary language philosophy have made it the backbone oftheir philosophical practice to consider dimensions of the everyday, fromHusserl’s Lebenswelt, Heidegger’s everydayness, or Merleau-Ponty’s ‘‘prose
of the world,’’ to Wittgenstein’s language games and Cavell’s quests of theordinary, to name just a few.Twentieth-centuryart (from Duchamp’s ready-mades to Newman’s ‘‘abstract’’ paintings with their banal titles, ‘‘Here,’’‘‘Now,’’ and so on) to literature (from Gertrude Stein’s writings to Beckett’sprose and Białoszewski’s miniature poems and narratives) engage the mod-ern world by bringing art to the level of the ordinary and the mundane.What remains crucial to contemporary debates, however, is how one inter-prets the everyday: whether the ordinary signifies a realm of immediacy,givenness, and direct communication, or whether it itself becomes a matterof contestation and critique. Apart from differences in interpreting every-dayness, at issue here is the understanding of experience, of how its ‘‘poiet-ics’’ revise the familiar and ‘‘stable’’ significations of the everyday.
Heidegger’s conception of technicity (Technik) articulates a certain ‘‘uni-
versal’’ coding of the everyday which underwrites the plurality of represen-tational strategies and social practices. These heterogeneous forms of thelived differential do not escape, in Heidegger’s view, the fold of calculativethought, which reflects the technological determination of being intrinsic
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to modernity. For Heidegger, as much as for Duchamp, the lived differ-ential of the everyday has become determined by the enframing ‘‘essence’’of technology, and its practices have been synchronized with and becomeincreasingly indistinguishable from the technological patterning of experi-ence.When Heidegger refers to the ordinary as ‘‘reliable,’’ he indicates thedegree to which everydayness is indebted to technology and its modelsof grasping the world in terms of reliability and availability, the extent towhich the ordinary works on the principle of the technological represen-tation of being as ‘‘reliable.’’ Duchamp’s urinal or bicycle wheel, thoughcertainly operative in a very different tonality, likewise stand the ordinaryon its head, disconnecting everyday tools from their functional context and,thus, bringing into the open the invisible regulative force with which tech-nicity forms modern being. Tzara’s conception of art as the instant involvesa similar turn within the everyday, a ‘‘regeneration’’ from the ordinary logicof being, invisiblyconstructing and orchestrating the purported immediacyof experience. In other words, the concept of the ordinary as immediate, asa place of common knowledge or a sphere of prelinguistic experience, shel-tered from the influence of technology and mass culture, has to be calledinto question. The ordinary is already mediated, it is enframed technologi-cally and functions as a font of availability, as resource or Bestand.
19
The distinction between the ordinary and the poietics of everyday ex-
perience, which I locate in the workperformed by art, reveals a dehiscence,
a rift, within the very formation of the ordinary. The event estranges anddefamiliarizes the habitual, as in Brecht’s aesthetic or in Russian formalism,but it also emphasizes the simultaneously constitutive and de-constitutingrole of historicity, and underscores its ‘‘de-essentializing’’ impact upon ex-perience. In other words, the event marks the irreducibility of the everyday
to the ‘‘ready-made’’ significations of the ordinary. Williams’s early poetry or
thework of Objectivists comes to mind here. But perhaps the most interest-ing examples of unmaking the significations of the ordinary come in Stein’sTender Buttons and Białoszewski’s poems. While Tender Buttons playfully
dissolves labels and names into linguistic patchwork, Białoszewski’s poetrycontinuously resignifies the everyday and the trivial in a gesture that paro-dies both high poetic language and the sense that the everyday is just routineand ordinary. In such works, the indication of a fracture within the every-day—of the ambiguous interface of the technic and the poietic—is clearlydifferent from the familiar modernist gesture of escaping the dreary dailyexistence, a nostalgic poetic retreat from the vulgar and crass everydaynessinto its mystical and mysterious verso, an attitude which Henri Lefebvre in
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hisCritique of Everyday Life identifies with Surrealism.20The avant-garde
resignification of the everyday questions the idea of a mystical or esotericverso of everydayness as much as it interrogates the technicity which under-pins and regulates the modern ordinary. Distinct from the idea of the ordi-nary as immediate, as a sphere of familiarity and direct communication, thepoietics of experience questions the way in which the technic relatednesspervades the domain of ordinary life and language. Since the poietic signi-fication of the everyday is always mediated, paired with the technological,it effectively undercuts the common figures of the ordinary: self-presence,immediacy, common sense, and common knowledge. The poietic modelof relatedness, based on alterity and proximity rather than on the idea ofgraspable and assimilable difference, renders problematic the ‘‘ordinary’’relationality and its comforting sense of familiarity and transparency. Thedisplacement from the ‘‘ordinary’’ to the ‘‘poietics of everydayness’’ takesthe form of a critical incision, which, securing ‘‘an openness of beings,’’attempts to bring into language the ‘‘ungraspable’’ historicity of everydayexperience.
In this perspective, the poetic event as the workproper to art becomes
tantamount to a restaging or a reproduction of the linguistic torsion, thatis, to the translation which transcribes the poietic into the technic, in anattempt to prevent the erasure of their play and the establishment of a uni-vocally technic domain of experience. At stake in the reproducibility char-acteristic of the work of art is the possibility of modalizing the everydayinto different significations, of keeping in the ‘‘instant’’ of art the play be-tween the technic and the poietic inherent in the unfolding of the world.Near the end of ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ Heidegger triesto reproblematize the meaning of technē in order to render it polyvalent,
open to semantic possibilities which would exceed the meaning of tech-nology as enframing: ‘‘There was a time when it was not technology alonethat bore the name technē. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into
the splendor of radiant appearance was also called technē. …T h e poiēsis
of the fine arts was also called technē ’’ (BW,). The possibility of a post-
aesthetic reading of the work of art hinges upon the signification of technē,
that is, upon our ability to read technē as both identical to and yet as more
than, or other than, technicity. It depends upon the possibility of keepingalterity in play within the semiosis of technē, upon opening technicity to
the historicity marked in the poietic unfolding.
This way of approaching the problem of technicity and modern experi-
ence modifies the optics for our discussions of the avant-garde. The avant-
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garde preoccupation with technology is not simply a sign of their fascina-tion with and acceptance tout court of the technological age. As is clearly
the case in Khlebnikov’s work, the avant-garde also pushes technicity toits very limit, discovering in the process the proximity between the technicand the poietic. Khlebnikov’s ‘‘beyonsense’’ (zaum) takes both linguistic in-
vention and mathematical calculation into an uncharted language territory,where technicity reverses itself into a new form of poetic language whichregisters the poietic event of experience. In Khlebnikov or in Dadaism, thesignification of the work performed by art is tied to the question of whetherthe modern experience as technē understands and exhausts itself within the
‘‘essence’’ of technology or whether an other poietics of experience is atwork in it.This issue remains important beyond the confines of the debatesabout the avant-gardes, because what hinges upon the distinction betweenthe poietic and the technic is precisely the question of the aestheticizationof the political. A folding of poiēsis into technicity—the disappearance of
the difference between them—specifies a juncture between aesthetics andpolitics which produces the possibility of remythologizing the state and itspolitics.The equivalence between poiēsis and technicity has two interrelated
effects: On the one hand, it makes the everyday into a humdrum, repetitiveroutine, from which one seeks relief in the various forms of entertainment;on the other, it can render the ordinary auratic, to paraphrase Benjamin,and lead to aesthetic practices which mythologize the everyday. Reducingthe event to its ‘‘ready-made’’ significations, such equivalence collapses thehistoricity of happening into the uniform space of representation and neu-tralizes the disjoining which marks the structure of experience. The way inwhich the avant-garde artworks reopen within the everyday this fold be-tween the technic and the poietic bespeaks a larger political significancefor the avant-garde, which complicates the political commitments and en-dorsements explicitly adopted by the various movements.
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3. Sexuate Experience
Irigaray and the Poetics of Sexual Difference
The interrelated questions of gender inandofmodernity have become the
arena for critical reappraisals and contestations of what constitutes moder-nity itself—its cultural, political, philosophical, and literary manifestations.Within this optics the problem of the figuration, positioning, erasure, orstrategic appropriation of the feminine (for example, a certain reading ofthe largely male avant-garde in terms of writing the feminine) redoublesitself to reflect back upon modernityand open the issue of itsgender, that is,
of the role of gender in the very construction and self-perception of moder-nity. In what way is the problematic of gender and sexual difference alreadyinscribed in the production of modernity and how does it affect its variousmanifestations? To what extent can the reading of this inscription alter theoperative concepts of experience, thought, and language? In The Gender
of Modernity, Rita Felski argues for the necessity of a more nuanced and
complicated reading of modernity, beyond its readily available identifica-tions with masculine rationalization and production, on the one hand, andthe antithetical association of the modern with the irrational and the libidi-nal, ‘‘exemplified in the figure of the voracious female consumer,’’ on theother (–). At the same time, such a reading of the gender of moder-nity, Felski suggests, has to revise the predominant oppositional associationof the figures of the masculine and the feminine with high art and popu-lar or mass culture, respectively. If this way of redescribing modernity in-creasingly refines the picture of gender and its modern(ist) figurations, it
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still leaves unquestioned the foundational concepts of modernity’s culturaland intellectual project: experience, consciousness, technicity, temporality.To the extent that in the twentieth century modernity becomes indisasso-ciable from its own critique, the matter of gender constitutes precisely oneof the critical points where modernity, putting its own legacy into question,opens the door to a reinvention of gender(s) in relation to experience andwhere the rethinking of sexual difference becomes the conduit for concep-tualizing the transition into ‘‘postmodernity.’’ The crisis of modernity—thejudgment that modernity renders upon itself—marks the point at whichthe questioning of the metaphysical provenance of the modern calls for re-thinking everyday experience in the context of sexual difference, with theproviso that such a critique also puts into question the concepts of con-sciousness, representation, and time that underlie modernity.
To rethink the role of the avant-garde and its poietics of experience in the
critique of modernity, it becomes important, then, to examine the links be-tween the feminist critique of experience and the poetic work of language.For this reason, I look at the writings of Luce Irigaray, who explicitly tiesher rigorously and provocatively articulated critique of modernity to thetask of formulating a new poetics: a new language of thinking, which would
set the stage for the reappraisal of the role of sexual difference and genderin the very structuring of experience. Critical responses to Irigaray seldomfocus on the complexity of poetic thinking in her work as they try, in whatremains an important and necessary mo ve, to articulate the critical claims
and political accomplishments of her project. Interest in Irigaray’s style hascentered largely on her textual strategy of mimesis, which produces a de-familiarization of and provides the protocols for a different reading of thefeminine.
1Among most recent contributions to Irigaraycriticism, Elizabeth
Weed shifts the discussion of style from the defamiliarizing and disruptiveeffects of Irigarayan mimesis toward a ‘‘discursive positivity’’ of sexual dif-ference.
2Irigaray’s idiosyncratic language produces a ‘‘positive’’ mapping of
sexual relations, which moves beyond Lacan’s analysis of the nonexistenceof sexual relations and evokes ‘‘a different symbolic organization.’’
3Against
the privilege which much of the current U.S. feminist criticism gives to thethematizable and the intelligible as the necessary conditions for change oreffective intervention,Weed offers Irigaray ’s ‘‘style’’ as the arena where the
very conditions of intelligibility—including those of Irigaray’s own texts—are brought into question and refigured.
4
The fact that the poetic in Irigaray is rarely seen as central to her philo-
sophical and political critique seems to be a symptom of a broader distrust
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of aesthetics in current debates. Feminist criticism seems to be weary of theby now well-known, even worn out, aesthetics of écriture féminine, and re-
gards it with suspicion as a form of displacing political concerns into therealm of aesthetic experimentation. In the case of Irigaray, however, thepoetic cannot be confined to aesthetic categories or textual strategies, buthas to be reconceived as a sexuate mode of being and experience. More thana defamiliarizing strategy of interpretation, Irigarayan mimicry needs alsoto be read in terms of a critique of modernity and its reigning categories ofbeing and technology. It is only in recent critical assessments that Irigaray’swork has been considered more explicitly against the background of thephilosophical critiques of modernity, in particular, the thought of Heideg-ger, Levinas, and Derrida. Chanter’s benchmark Ethics of Eros presents Iri-
garay’s writings through a series of dialogues with key philosophical figuresin the Continental tradition—from Hegel and Nietzsche to Levinas andDerrida—as a chain of exchanges which influence and complicate Irigaray’scritique of the patriarchal discourse of modernity.
5Likewise, a recent vol-
ume of essays on Irigaray’s thought, Engaging with Irigaray, emphasizes for
the first time the critical role of Irigaray’s encounter with Heidegger’s workfor the formulation of her ideas about the ethics of sexual difference.
6Both
studies are immensely helpful in showing to what extent Irigaray’s revisionof the patriarchal logic of modernity borrows, radicalizes, and critiquesthe postmodern or poststructuralist idioms in which such reappraisals havebeen articulated.
Like Foucault, Irigaray continues Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s question-
i n go fa e s t h e t i c si nt h ec o n t e x to fr e t h i n k i n gb e i n g,i n fl e c t i n gi tt h r o u g ht h eproblematic of sexuate experience. To reassess the importance of Irigaray’sdeployment of the poetic, the decisive role it plays, first, in her question-ing of technology and the logic of commodification, and, second, in herremapping of sexual difference vis-à-vis the historicity of experience, I readIrigaray in the context of Heidegger’s redefinition of poiēsis, reconsidering
her poetics of sexual difference
7through the prism of das Ereignis, or the
propriative event.8The event tends,on the one hand, to become obfuscated
in the techno-calculative schema of being, even to be denied actuality andassigned to the irreal, and, on the other, to question the familiar modali-ties of signification and elicit a reinvention of language in the form of whatHeidegger calls ‘‘poetic thinking.’’ Reassessing the importance of Irigaray’sdeployment of aesthetics, my approach stresses specifically the doubly criti-
calrole of her poetics to the very constitution and aims of her project: First,
poetic thinking is significant, even pivotal, to Irigaray’s articulation of an
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ethics of sexual difference, and, second, this poetics becomes the bearer or‘‘performer’’ of the most radical insights of her critique.
Irigaray’s reinvention of the parameters of modern experience by means
of a critical reading of the erasures of sexual difference in Western thoughtcan, and, I argue, should be read in terms of a poetics, in part at least be-cause it explicitly sets out to revise thevery (patriarchal) syntax of thought. Iemphasize precisely these nodal points where Irigaray’s work presents itselfas a poetics, and I often proceed beyond Irigaray’s sketchy remarks on thisnew poetics in order to underscore the critical intersections between thepoietic unfolding of experience and the project of rethinking sexual differ-ence. Situating Irigaray in the context of Heidegger’s remarks on art andtechnology, I examine her work in terms of another venue for discerningthe complexity of art’s critical involvement in figuring modern experience.Irigaray’s remarks on the erasures of sexual difference in the context oftechnology and commodification provide the perspective in which I lookat how avant-garde poetics functions as a critique of the commodificationof art.
Keenly aware of the historical conditions of gender in/of modernity, Iri-
garay’s work moves within the broad philosophico-cultural perspective ofmetaphysical thought to diagnose the crisis of modernity as a critical junc-ture that opens both the possibility of rethinking ‘‘feminine experience’’and of revising the understanding of experience through what might be en-
visioned as the fluid and flexible poietics of sexual difference. For Irigaray,
the auto-critique of modernity, while itself not sufficiently radical for herpurposes, opens the space for a further creative rewriting within the opticsof sexual difference, of the metaphysical categories like being, experience,subjectivity, otherness, space, and time. Putting in question the manner inwhich philosophical, psychoanalytic, and cultural constructions of femi-ninity effectively serve the purpose of effacing sexual difference, Irigaray’sproject reinvents the feminine and sexual difference as catalysts for rewrit-ing experience. In a typically Irigarayan double gesture of mimicry—ofsimultaneously replaying and dislodging the inherently patriarchal logic ofWestern philosophical discourse—Irigaray both models her project uponand displaces Heidegger’s questioning of Being:
Sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue,of our age. According to Heidegger, each age has one issue to thinkthrough, and one only. Sexual difference is probably the issue in our timewhich could be our ‘‘salvation’’ if we thought it through. ( ESD, )
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This forceful articulation of the problem suggests that thought has come,historically and discursively, to a point where it faces both the opportunityand the necessity of reinventing itself specifically through the problematicof sexual difference. If modernity is to rethink itself, to indeed open thepossibility of a postmodernity, it needs not only to remap femininity but
also to reinvent discourse through sexual difference.
Recent Irigaray criticism has shown how the early dismissive readings of
Irigaray as an essentialist thinker
9misread her project either as reclaiming
an autonomous or essential femininity or as locating the feminine outsidethe masculine logic of modernity. Contrary to these mischaracterizations,Irigaray’s critique suggests that the contestations of modernityand its patri-archal logic do not go far enough to enable both a reinvention of language
through the problematic of sexual difference and a rethinking of the pivotalrole of sexual difference in the constitution of experience: a rethinking thatcould inscribe sexual difference into the very matrix of experiencing. ForIrigaray, the patriarchal figurations of sexual difference—where the femi-nine is erased, rendered esoteric, or identified with the prelinguistic imme-diacy of nature—effectively efface sexual difference from language and, atthe same time, from the discursive formation of experience. In other words,what is absent are the discursive practices that would allow experience toarticulate itself in a sexed or sexuate manner—to constitute, think, or ‘‘ex-perience’’ itself within sexual difference conceived otherwise than throughthe optics of the patriarchal logic of sense. Such a (dis)figuration of sexualdifference leaves its imprint upon experience in its everyday and mundanedimensions, which makes it necessary for the project of rethinking femi-ninity to extend beyond reclaiming everydayness or reinscribing it onto thecultural map of modernity. Instead, Irigaray’s project contests the ordinaryand opens up the possibility of a different approach to sexual difference andexperience, one that Irigaray imagines in terms of an ethics of sexual differ-ence. This reappraisal of the feminine—tantamount, in Irigaray’s view, tothe possibility of finally inaugurating sexual difference: its experience, lan-guage, and thought—is meant to refigure experience through the exchangesof proximity, where the feminine, historically and discursively the erased orthe appropriated other, would reformulate the very optics in which other-ness becomes capable of signifying. I show how Irigaray’s work, in additionto describing and theorizing female experience, offers resources for invent-ing such a new legibility of experience, with sexual difference as its fluid,poietic, matrix.
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The Matter of Proximity
One can read Irigaray’s work as both a transposition of the problems and
limitations of the differential economy of signification—signaled already,among others, by Heidegger’s work on difference and Levinas’s writings onalterity—into the problematic of sexual difference and as a further critiqueof the specular logic of difference from the perspective of the erasure ofthe sexuate character of experience produced by such a logic. Heidegger’squestioning of difference eventually effects a move away from the priorityof the ontico-ontological difference toward the question of Ereignis, lan-
guage, and nearness. A similar shift of emphasis is operative in the thoughtof Levinas, who progressively abandons the correlation between differenceand otherness in favor of the notions of nonindifference and proximity,which imprint ethical signification upon difference. In the context of Hei-degger’s and Levinas’s work on language and difference, it becomes clearthat the revision of otherness from its negative signification of absence orlack to the positive meaning of multiple differences may not be enough. Infact, Irigaray’s own work appears to continuously question the idea that theplayof the differential economyof meaning will everensure the distinctnessof the sexes and reflect a sexuate poietics of experience. Since difference isalways implicated in a possible return to sameness and in the cognitive ef-facement of the other, it becomes necessary to look for an alternative econ-omy of thought. As in Heidegger’s work, difference for Irigaray becomesinflected by proximity, the between or the interval. But since for Irigaraythe proximity is sexuate, this inflection acquires not only ethical but alsopolitical signification: Irigaray regards it as inaugurating the possibility ofreappraising the intellectual and cultural effects of the sexual ‘‘indifference’’of metaphysics.
Irigaray provisionally describes this new economy of thought through
the images of double syntax and two lips:
What a feminine syntax might be is not simple nor easy to state, be-cause in that ‘‘syntax’’ there would no longer be either subject or ob-ject, ‘‘oneness’’ would no longer be privileged, there would no longer beproper meanings, proper names, ‘‘proper’’ attributes ….I n s t e a d ,t h a t
‘‘syntax’’ would involve nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme formthat it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishmentof ownership, thus any form of appropriation.
10
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Like the double syntax, the two lips indicate an interplay that refuses theterms of difference and identity.The lips, both sexual organs and the organsof language are neither two distinct and different lips nor one, unified,‘‘same,’’ structure. Instead, what defines their specificity is their nearnessor proximity, which indicates an economy of exchange apart from differ-ence, identity, and sameness: ‘‘From that ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing thatupsets any opposition between here and there, from that endless embrace,from that ‘in the self’ and at the same time and same place in the other,and neither the one nor the other, neither the same nor its other, how is anidea to be had?’’
11This reserve prevents the two lips and the double syn-
tax of language from merging into one, as it makes it impossible for (theidea of ) the one to emerge and disallows the en-gendering of ‘‘one and thesame.’’ The excess and residue cannot be read in terms of difference, forthe proximity is so radical that it does not let difference and distinct iden-tities trace themselves. Its sense, its direction (un sens) is not cognitive but
instead ethical, and as such it refuses to fold back into the specular opticsof difference.
Both invoking and inflecting the issue of respect for otherness in Hei-
degger and Levinas, Irigaray conceives the ethical dimension of the relationto the other as an aspect of sexual difference. Challenging the Levinasiansupersession of sexuality and eros by ethics, and its requisite substitutionof ‘‘the son for the feminine,’’
12Irigaray puts in question the possibility of
difference without oroutside of sexual difference, and, hence, the possibility
of ethics outside of an ethics of sexual difference. ‘‘Questions to EmmanuelLevinas’’ begins with the paramount query: ‘‘Is there otherness outside ofsexual difference?’’ ( IR,). This rhetorical question sets the stage for a re-
sexualization of Levinas’s notion of proximity, which signifies ethically butin a carnal manner:
For Levinas, the distance is always maintained with the other in theexperience of love ….T h i sa utistic, egological, solitary love does not
correspond to the shared outpouring, to the loss of boundaries whichtakes place for both lovers when they cross the boundary of the skininto the mucous membranes of the body, leaving the circle which en-closes my solitude to meet in a shared space, a shared breath, aban-doning the relatively dry and precise outlines of each body’s solid ex-terior to enter a fluid universe where the perception of being two persons[de la dualité ] becomes indistinct, and above all, acceding to another
energy, neither that of the one nor that of the other, but an energy pro-
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duced together and as a result of the irreducible difference of sex. ( IR,
)
Irigarayan proximity is not one of absolute height and difference (as in Levi-nas’sTotality and Infinity ) or of the figure of the other under my skin—the
irrecusable vocative ‘‘me’’ before any positioning of ‘‘myself’’ as the subjectinOtherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence.
13Instead, proximity is a sexual
energy, a dynamic of ‘‘the irreducible difference of sex,’’ which itself fallsoutside of and, therefore, cannot be read according to the logic of differ-ence. Irigaray’s opening query to Levinas resituates the question of differ-ence within this new space of inscription figured as the ethical and carnalproximity of sexual difference. In other words, there seems to be no differ-ence ‘‘outside’’ proximity: the possibility of thinking and maintaining dif-f e r e n c eb e c o m e sc o n n e c t e dh e r et ot h eu n s t a b l ei n fl e c t i o no fd i ff e r e n c eb ythe ‘‘energy’’ of proximity. The porousness of boundaries signified by prox-imity—‘‘a fluid universe’’ of no precise outlines of the body and the energyof the encounter—serves as the ‘‘guarantee’’ of maintaining difference inplay.
As Irigaray demonstrates already in The Speculum, the specular dialec-
tic of representation, the effacing logic of specularization at work in textsranging from Plato through Hegel to Freud has implicitly structured ex-perience along the lines of sexual differentiation, only to erase this differ-ence in the elevated claim to universality, to the generalized, always ‘‘thesame,’’ form of experience. In a section of ‘‘Plato’s Hystera, ’’ aptly titled
‘‘The Misprision of Difference,’’ Irigaray illustrates the attempt to controlthe specular optics in the following way:
Being not simply a-sexuate or trans-sexuate. This is not to say that it ex-plicitly re-marks one sex, or the other. Rather it maintains the partitionwithout allowing itself to be cleaved by the difference at work there. ForBeing’s domination requires that whatever has been defined— within the
domain of sameness —as ‘‘more’’ (true, right, clear, reasonable, intelligible,
paternal, masculin e…)s h o u l dp r o g r e s s i v e l yw i no u to v e r its‘‘other,’’
its ‘‘different’’—its differing—and, when it comes right down to it, overits negative, its ‘‘less’’ (fantastic, harmful, obscure, ‘‘mad,’’ sensible, ma-t e r n a l ,f e m i n i n e…) .F i n a l l yt h efi c t i o nr eigns of a simple, indivisible,
ideal origin.
14
The misprision of difference appears here to be an inherent feature of thedifferential economy, making difference a sublatable, effaceable effect of the
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multiple reincarnations of the same. Differential economy produces differ-ence in order to annul it and deploy the very erasure in the service of itslogic of unification. This logic of sameness, produced at the price of thedouble gesture of a simultaneous sexuation and desexuation of experience,forecloses the space of its own inscription and renders it off-limits to sexualdifference. How effective this proscription has become is visible in the falseequation of the problematic of sexual differencewith reclaiming an autono-mous, natural, or prelinguistic form of femininity, that is, with positing anessentialist conception of the feminine. Assigning femininity to the ma-terial, the bodily, or the natural, only to reinscribe and efface it within theuniversal sameness of the spiritual—the self-reflective and totalizing logicof the true—the economy of specularization renders experience specularand speculative, pliant and heterogeneous only to the extent that it enables,or in fact ensures, the ‘‘eternal return of the same.’’
To expose and counteract the misprision of difference at thevery heart of
the specular economy of differentiation, Irigaray deploys the trope of prox-imity,which allows her to position sexual difference as an originary momentof differentiation and yet to read it precisely as an inflection of the differen-tial economy, located, as it were, ‘‘before’’ or ‘‘on the other side’’ of differ-ence. Proximity, which has to be read as neither one nor two, destabilizesthe logic of identity and difference, allowing experience, the body, or thefeminine, to constitute itself only in proximity to and through a constantexchange with its other: thought (or language), the spirit, the masculine.As the figure of relationality that occurs otherwise than through difference,proximity interrupts and inflects the differential logic from its dialecticaltrajectory of completion. Proximity keeps difference in play in spite of andagainst the dialectical pull of sublation precisely because it remains, as itwere, illegible to difference, refractory to its logic of separation and identity.It acquires the status of a passage, a between, never reducible either to thepolarity of two distinct moments or to the suture of unification. Signifiedin Irigaray’s work by the figures of lips that are ‘‘strangers to dichotomy,’’ bymucosity, angels, and the sensible transcendental, proximity figures sexualdifference as a ‘‘near-differential’’ modality of relating. Because of its modeof occurrence and its materialization as ‘‘neither one nor two,’’ proximity isneither predifferential nor nondifferential sensu stricto. Inflecting and curv-
ing the symmetrical exchanges of difference, proximity positions itself, un-imaginably as it were, ‘‘athwart’’ difference, deregulating the economy ofdifferentiation.
Irigaray’s rethinking of proximity emphasizes the double valency of the
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term in her work: On the one hand, proximity refigures the difference be-tween the sexes outside of the binary optics of difference as a nearness—as ‘‘neither one nor two’’—which cannot be properly signified within thespectrum of differential relations; on the other, proximity understood as aresignification of the relation between the sexes beyond the reach of thespeculum and the dialectic of mirrors produces a broader critique of dif-ference, an inflection in the differential economies of signification and re-lation. I read this constant overlaying of the two roles of proximity as anevent of double materialization, in which matter is taken as both materiality
and signification. This doubling allows us to rethink the split between thesensible and the intelligible as escaping and remarking the binary economyof speculative logic. The traditional division into matter and significationevidences gendering in accordance with the phallogocentric economy ofthought, in which matter becomes ‘‘signified’’ as feminine and inferior, andthe spiritual becomes coded as masculine. This sexualization of the divi-sion between matter and signification is deployed, however, only to be, Iri-garay shows, immediately effaced and speculatively reinscribed in the uni-versal, de-sexualized economy of thought. In order to expose this doublegesture and to rethink the sexual morphology of experience in a way thatcannot be effaced through the binary mechanics of difference and iden-tity, Irigaray proposes to see experience in terms of an event that ‘‘mat-ters’’ or ‘‘mat(t)erializes’’ as the unsettling and changing proximity betweenmateriality and signification. The double valency of matter—what I callhere the event of mat(t)erialization—reflects Irigaray’s revision of experi-ence through the prism of proximity, where matter is ‘‘neither one nor two,’’that is, where materiality can neither be separated from signification norcollapsed into its discursive construction. Reading the event of experiencein terms reminiscent of the feminine morphology of the two lips resignifiesmatteroutside of the patriarchal discourse of modernityand links it to prox-imity, Irigaray’s figure for the fluid and changing relation between the sexes.The dislocating and disruptive effects that the proximity of matter and sig-nification produces in the binary logic of separation operative in speculativethought become the places of the ‘‘originary’’ inscription of sexual differ-ence—inscriptions that resist the effacement mandated by ‘‘asexual’’ anduniversal economy of thought.
Irigaray’s insistence on maintaining the material inscription of sexual
difference against the dialectical logic that ‘‘dissolves’’ matter in its ‘‘spiri-tual’’ significations, thus superseding or denying it, an insistence whichconsistently deregulates and questions the specular legibility of experience,
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does not signify an essential (essentialist?) determination of experience bythe body. As Judith Butler remarks, ‘‘the body signified as prior to signifi-cation is an effect of signification’’ and the presumed mimetic or represen-tational status of language is, in fact, ‘‘productive, constitutive, one mighteven argue, performative ’’ with respect to the body.
15T h eb o d yn e i t h e r
stands for an unmarked, prelinguistic plentitude nor becomes reducible toa set of signifiers. As Butler illustrates it in ‘‘Bodies That Matter,’’ ‘‘mat-ter’’ (related to both mater andmatrix, and thus to the question of origi-
nation and reproduction) suggests an indissoluble link between materialityand signification, a constant tension that both differentiates the two sensesof matter—the two ways that it ‘‘matters’’—and effectively undercuts thepossibility of a decisive scission between them (). The occluded andopaque event of mat(t)erialization owes its ambiguity as much to the im-penetrability of matter as to the tenuous boundary between materializingand mattering. Read by Irigaray in terms of proximity, this event envelopsthe double signification of matter, and resignifies—literally, de-polarizes—one of the most pervasive effects of this signification: the division betweennature and culture.
To think of sexual difference it is not enough to conceive experience and
thought as embodied, and the body, in turn, as already constituted discur-sively. This optics needs to be reversed in order to recast experience asthe
originary fission into the material and the immaterial, into the sensible andthe intelligible.What I am proposing is that experience takes place as ‘‘mat-tering’’ in the double sense of the word. Two positions are put in questionhere: the idea that experience is originarily bodily, natural, and immediate,and, thus, somehow prelinguistic or precultural; and the approach in whichthe body is always discursively constituted and mapped in toto. Rather, ex-perience first unfolds and transpires as the rift into the material and the im-material, the body and the mind. Using Butler’s terminology, we could saythat experience in its always singular event performs the difference betweenthe material and the immaterial. In other words, the rift between matterand spirit does not ground experience, but, au contraire, is always already
an effect of the event, a sign that experience has taken place and articulateditself into the very dichotomy of materialization and signification. In thiscontext, the proximity of the lips—both the figure of female sex and the‘‘agent’’ of the refiguration of sexual difference itself, the inflection and the‘‘half-open’’ threshold of difference as such
16—begins to rewrite difference
and experience through the double: material and signified morphology ofthe feminine.
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Irigaray’s mimicry shows how the event of experience, when read along
the traditional lines of the feminization of matter and the spiritualizationof the masculine as the universal signifier for all people, separates rigidlythe feminine and the masculine: It incarnates them across the divide be-tween the sensible and the intelligible, only to reclaim and cancel this dif-ference within a higher claim of (spiritual) universality. Irigaray positionssexual difference as the erased (non)foundation of this logic of speculari-zation, and, therefore, as the unacknowledged element of experience theo c c l u s i o no fw h i c hh a sb e e nn e c e s s a r yf o rt h ec o n s t r u c t i o no ft h es p e c u -lar matrix of difference. To the extent that the effacement of sexual differ-ence—that is, its characteristic institution in a manner that always alreadyneutralizes the rift of this difference—ensures the efficacy of speculariza-tion, Irigaray’s reinscription of sexual difference undermines the economiesof experience produced and legitimized within the patriarchal discourse:economies based on the devaluation of matter, on the unified, ‘‘sexless’’morphology of experience, on the neutral subject of thought. Irigaray re-fashions this conventional patriarchal matrix, deploying the differencebetween the sexes on both sides of the divide, doubling the matterand mul-tiplying the significations, as it were, in a gesture that dislodges the femi-nine and the masculine from their fixed significations. Depolarized, boththe feminine and the masculine become reassigned and redoubled acrossthe matter/spirit, sensibility/intelligibility divide, as they both become the‘‘matter’’ of those differences. The feminine is no longer just the provinceof the material, the bodily, the natural, or the maternal. Instead, it figuresacross the conceptual and discursive oppositions, spelling out a proximity
between them that confounds the fixed economy of difference and distri-bution along polarized lines of sexual difference.The traditional tropes andpolarities of discourse are both used to figure sexual difference and, at thesame time, become themselves disfigured by it. Only through this doubleplay of figuring and disfigurement can sexual difference be resignified, re-materialized and remattered, into a practice of proximity that cannot co-incide with or be reabsorbed by the logic of polarity.
Remapping the crossings of matter—between the body and the mind,
between the material and the intelligible—with the feminine and the mas-culine, Irigaray reinscribes sexual difference into the practice of thought,making the proximity of the multiple exchanges characteristic of her figu-ration of sexual difference the very space of inscription for experience. Ex-perience as the event of the difference between the material and the intel-ligible is the matter of difference itself, that is, it signifies and materializes
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difference, through sexual difference. It ‘‘experiences’’ itself within the in-
flected optics of this proximity. This characteristic reinscription of differ-ence within the optics of proximity makes it possible for Irigaray’s thoughtto work parallel movements of projecting backward into the history, andunraveling the economy, of patriarchal discourse, on the one hand, andwriting (toward) the future of experience, where the morphology of experi-ence becomes articulated within the proximity of sexual difference, on theother.This double movement—the gesture of mimicry—forms the ‘‘avant-garde’’ moment of Irigaray’s work: a new space of inscription, sexed orsexually differentiated through the inflections of proximity, a space whereIrigaray’s writing projects itself almost literally avant la lettre of the patri-
archal discourse.
Technology and Sexual Difference
Irigaray’s reformulation of sexual difference as an event of proximity has
interesting, though rarely discussed, implications for the problematic oftechnology’s influence on modern experience. Reading Irigaray’s notion ofpoetics against the background of Heidegger’s remarks about technologyandpoiēsis, I place Irigaray’s poetics within the larger discussion of experi-
ence and technology and flesh out more concretely the critical implicationsof this poetics, often only intimated in Irigaray’s few direct remarks per-taining to it. I situate Irigaray’s poetics in terms of a double reading of theHeideggerian diagnosis of being within the twin fold of technology andart for two reasons: On the one hand, Heidegger’s approach to these prob-lems provides Irigaray with a nonmetaphysical space of inscription, withinwhich the figurations of femininity and sexual difference can be divestedof their logocentric determinations; on the other, the double axis of refor-mulation of experience (Erfahrung), technology and poetry, is rethought
through sexual difference—not only to advance a feminist critique of the
critique of metaphysics but also to bring forward the sexuate dimension ofexperience latent, as Irigaray suggests, in Heidegger’s reflection.
17
Heidegger defines technology beyond the notions of instrumental rea-
son and calculability, as a modality of revealing, a representational-calcula-tive comportment toward reality, constitutive of modernity: ‘‘The essenceof modern technology starts man upon the way of that revealing throughwhich the actual everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-
reserve’’ ( BW,). For Heidegger, technology, as either production pro-
cesses of industrialism or the rational, scientific, and commercialist world-
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view, results from the already ‘‘technological’’ unfolding of the world as astanding-reserve of resources (Bestand). The unfolding of the world into a
standing-reserve determines the regulatory parameters of representation astechno-scientific ones, rendering the representational scene into what Hei-degger refers to as the ‘‘enframing’’ [ Gestell ]: a manner of ‘‘unconcealment
in accordance with which nature presents itself as a calculable complex ofthe effects of forces [that] can indeed permit correct determinations’’ ( BW,
). The problem that Heidegger identifies with the enframing is that itcovers over, renders unreal or nonexisting, the modalities of being—specifi-cally unconcealment as poiēsis—that do not conform to the ‘‘technological’’
standards of representation, that is, modalities whose occurrence cannot berepresented in terms of ordering, availability, correct calculation: ‘‘Wherethis ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing.Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiēsis,
lets what presences come forth into appearance’’ ( BW,).
Irigaray’s approach to technology seems more conventional than Hei-
degger’s, as it primarily underscores the increasing mechanization of every-day life and the de-sexualizing effects of the gender neutral machine.There-fore, I rethink here Irigaray’s take on technology and, inflecting it throughHeidegger’s critique of the Gestell, e x t e n dh e rr e m a r k st ot h el e v e lo ft h e
structuring of experience as event. As Irigaray notes in ‘‘The Female Gen-der’’ from Sexes and Genealogies, ‘ ‘ W ea r ei nt h ep r o c e s so fp a s s i n gi n t o
another environment, which, for many people, replaces the natural one.For many of us today the technological milieu necessarily becomes thenormal, everyday environment.’’
18The historical environmental change re-
shapes the conditions and the milieu of experience, but it also leaves itsstamp upon the structure of experience, instituting the regime of the every-day based upon the repetitive operation of the machine. Experience in themodern world is increasingly structured as a repetitive machinelike rhythm,a rhythm that dominates and orders the inappropriable temporal and sexualcontours of experience. To the extent that Irigaray associates sexual differ-ence with alterity that ruptures its own presentation and remains foreignto its own presence, the technological modality of revealing, based on theneuter, mechanical rhythm of repetition, effaces both the sexual dimen-sion of nature and its becoming: ‘‘A machine has no sex. Nature, on theother hand, always has a sex. Obviously there are times when a machinemimics sex. And, moreover, machinery is more akin to one sex than theother, particularly in its status as tool’’ ( SG,), and ‘‘The machine is to
be trusted only if it repeats.When it ceases to be able to repeat, it is flawed,
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broken. Nature, on the other hand, does not repeat. It is in continuous be-coming’’ ( SG,). Keeping sexual difference as the ‘‘matter’’ of experience
turns, therefore, into the question of renegotiating the relation betweentechnology and ‘‘nature,’’ refashioned in the context of Irigaray’s writingson the elements. The trilogy on the elements ( Elemental Passions, Marine
Lover, andT h eF o r g e t t i n go fA i r ) reinscribes the materiality of the elemen-
tal—air, water, fire—into philosophical discourse, deliberately confusingthe boundary between the sensible and the intelligible and reclaiming thematerial from its abjected, ‘‘feminine’’ status. Such a reconstruction andrevaluation of the elemental as the repressed force of fluidity and disrup-tion—a poetic insinuation of nonpresence into the specular logic of same-ness—allows Irigaray to dismantle ‘‘the solid mechanics’’ of the phallogo-centric logic and put into question its determination of the technologicaldomain of experience.
I read the concept of nature which Irigaray invokes as a counter to tech-
nology along the lines of Heidegger’s rethinking of physis, which places the
emphasis upon the occurring of being and its temporal destructuration ofpresence. The way Irigaray weaves this idea into the conceptual web of herwork indicates that ‘‘nature’’ does not denote a pristine, pretechnologicalpresence, the immediacy or transparency of sensible experience, but servesthe purpose of renegotiating experience between the technological everydayand the elemental, poietic space occluded within modern culture. Irigaray’sstrategic mimicry of the patriarchal figuration of nature—its associationwith the feminine, the immediate, the fully present—dispropriates thesefigures in order to open a space of inscription for a new, nonmetaphysicalconceptualization of nature as a possible entry into the poetics of sexual dif-ference. I would suggest here that the most productive reading of Irigaray’sreinscription of the ‘‘natural’’ leads us to rethink Heidegger’s ‘‘translation’’ofphysis intoEreignis as the moment that opens modernity not only to
the possibilities of self-critique but to an even more radical reinscription ofsexual difference and materiality. This reinscription takes the form of ex-perience based on the feminine morphology of proximity—rather than onsublatable and specularizable difference—in which discursive articulationsof experience would preserve sexual markers.
Although Irigaray often focuses her remarks about technology on the
issue of the neutralization ordematerialization of gender in the mechanismsof production, the overall scope of her rethinking of Heidegger suggeststhat technology, as in Heidegger’s thought, can be taken to coincide withthe metaphysical underpinnings of experience.The question of technology
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is more than the conflict between nature and the machine, as it involvesexamining the effects that the technological structuring of experience hasupon sexual difference. Far from being an external addition to ‘‘natural’’ ex-perience, technologyconstitutes thevery matrix of experience: Its demandsproduce experience as a gender-neutral pattern, where sexual differentia-tion disappears in the face of the repetitiveness of production: ‘‘The humanspirit already seems subjugated to the imperatives of technology to thepoint of believing it possible to deny the difference of the sexes’’ ( SG,).
What troubles Irigaray most are the effects of the technological imperativesof uniformization and efficiency of production upon the sexual dimensionof experience, which functions as a reflection, in fact, an embodiment, ofthe patriarchal ideal of the neutral subject/locus of being. As experience as-sumes the repetitive structure of mechanical reproduction, sexual differencebecomes erased from it, since the permeable, shifting elemental significa-tions of proximity fall outside the horizon of technologically reproducibledifference. Sexual difference ceases to matter—in its double sense—withinthe general dialectics of the technological neutralization of experience.
Technology reconfirms and solidifies the effacement of sexual difference
as the basis of the metaphysical systems of thinking.The technological mo-dalityof the unfolding of theworld as a standing-reserve, constitutive of theexperience of high modernity, becomes historically and conceptually pos-sible because of the ostensible erasure of sexual markers from speculativethought. Reinscribing sexual difference requires, therefore, a new poeticsof thinking, which, in a manner parallel to Heidegger’s project, becomescapable of responding to the poietic event of experience foreclosed in thetechnological scenario. In the previous chapter, I developed Heidegger’sdiagnosis of modern experience in terms of the contestation of the every-day and the technological through a poietics of experience. This specificresignification of the poietic—where experience is seen as always dislo-cated, its occurrence disjointed and remarked by historicity—will serve asthe venue for my exploration of Irigaray’s poetics of sexual difference. ForHeidegger, the occlusion of the poietic modality of being—its represen-tation as irrational or unreal—surrenders the inscriptional space of beingalmost thoroughly to the powers of the technic mode of revealing. Sucha (re)presentation and (re)production of experience makes possible the ar-ticulation of the everyday as a sphere devoid of, even antithetical to, thepoietic modality of experience.What Heidegger categorizes as the techniceventuation of being institutes an effective separation between the every-day and the poietic, a division which, disconnecting the poietic, and with
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it poetry and art, from the ordinary, throws art into an impossible doublebind: The technological either renders the poetic a priori ineffectual, by
definition alienated from reality, or permits us to read poetic contestationsof the everyday only as forms of aestheticization, as venues for an artisticescape from praxis and the ‘‘real’’ concerns of day-to-day living.
For Irigaray, the rethinking of technology in relation to sexual difference
similarly requires a new ethical poetics of sexual difference which would beable to reimagine the relations between the sexes in a nonphallocratic man-ner: ‘‘Sexual difference would represent the advent of new fertile regionsas yet unwitnessed, at all events in the west. By fertility I am not referringsimply to the flesh or reproduction. No doubt for couples it would concernthe question of children and procreation, but it would also involve the pro-duction of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language; the creation ofan e w poetics ’’ (IR,).What is never underscored in critical responses to
Irigaray is that her ‘‘manifesto’’ for a new poetics of thinking and writingcomes on the heels of her underappreciated critique of Heidegger’s ques-tioning of being in L’oubli de l’air. Discovering another layerof forgetfulness
unmarked in Heidegger’s oeuvre —the erasure of the ‘‘maternal’’ air, of the
feminine and of sexual difference—Irigaray’s book on Heidegger suggeststhat the rethinking of sexual difference is inextricably intertwined with thereappraisal of the poetic and the technological.The contextualization of An
Ethics of Sexual Difference within Irigaray’s entire opus indicates that it is
indeed the thought of being, of the poetic unconcealment and the tech-nological determination of being, that opens the space for thinking sexualdifference in terms of proximities ‘‘that are strangers to dichotomy’’ ( IR,
).
19
Similarly to Heidegger’s rethinking of poiēsis, such a reinvention involves
refiguring experience, against the techno-scientific determination of exis-tence. Irigaray proposes this poetics of sexual difference as a contestationof both the culturally dominant logic of experience produced through themetaphysical ideal of sameness and the power relations instituted as the re-sult of the double gesture of sexualizing and desexualizing experience. Tothe extent that sameness becomes associated with a techno-philosophicallogic of thought capable of producing and sublating difference, Irigaraycalls on the notion of a poetics to disrupt the operations of this logic andeven to reinvent them so that the excluded or covered ‘‘feminine’’ signifi-cations—materiality, fluidity, proximity, ‘‘neither one nor two’’—reemergewithin discourse and remark sexual difference within the asexual space ofexperience. In the closing section of L’oubli de l’air, in a move reminiscent
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of Heidegger’s remark from ‘‘The Way to Language’’ about the necessityfor change in language as a prelude to the disclosure of the poietic dimen-sion of experience,
20Irigaray invokes the need for refashioning language in
a way that would abandon the traditional schema of signification. Shewritesabout the need to ‘‘abandon all calculation. All language [ langue ] and all
meaning already produced. In risk’’ ( IR,). This quotation is important
for at least two reasons. On the one hand, it makes clear that Irigaray’s cri-tique of language responds to the idea of language as a disembodied socialcode, a system of signs in play on the model of Saussure’s langue. In other
words, Irigaray leaves ample room for refashioning language into a poeticsof sexual difference,where the culturallyavailable and historically producedmeaning could be put in question and ‘‘exchanged’’ for a different map of‘‘sexed’’ experience and culture. On the other hand, the quotation links thepossibility of such a remapping of discourse to the abandonment of the cal-culative practices of technological culture. Such a double contextualizationof the problem of the poetics of sexual difference makes Irigaray’s ethicshinge upon a simultaneous contestation of both technological paradigmsof experience and their reflection in the discursive practices operative inmodernity.
T h el a s ts e c t i o no f L’oubli de l’air contains in its seven pages a web of allu-
sions and critical remarks, from Heidegger’s idea of the poet and Lacan’snotion of the imaginary to technology and commodification, which Iri-garay uses to weave a poetics of sexual difference. Characteristically for Iri-garay’s earlier work, L’oubli de l’air accomplishes most of its work through
a concatenation of questions, poetic images, and critical points, rather thanthrough a tightly woven discursive presentation. That is to say that Irigaraywrites her text asa poetics—a feminine andfeminist poetics—openly criti-
cal and disruptive of the argumentative and expository modes, codified bythe patriarchal tradition of philosophical and critical thought. Any nego-tiation of Irigaray’s work into a set of arguments incurs the necessary riskof forgetting and even effacing the very poetics that underpins and ani-mates her project—the poetics that questions the possibility and the stakesof maintaining the translatability of the poetic into the argumentative.Thisis an obvious point but, nonetheless, one all too often neglected in criticalencounters with Irigaray. For it is equally untenable to act as though Iri-garay’s ethics of sexual difference were not, first and foremost, a poetics, asit is to maintain that, because her work is ‘‘poetic,’’ it forecloses its own criti-cal potential, which even in some feminist projects seems to be arrogatedalmost exclusively—and in a patriarchal discursive gesture par excellence —
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to the clear, transparent, and ‘‘logical,’’ proseof argumentative discourse.
There is no room here to rehearse the problems inherent in the division intotheory and practice or the stylistic ramifications of this difference reflectedin the all too easy identification of ‘‘politically engaged’’ writing with a cer-tain style of presentation, which privileges ‘‘prosaic’’ transparency of lan-guage, logical coherence, and explicit invocation of the domain of politics,often to the exclusion of the attempts at revising the inscriptional space for
politics that, like Irigaray’s work, call for a new poetics. It has to be born inmind, however, that Irigaray’s project of sexuating experience isa poetics;
on the one hand, it reinscribes an ‘‘elemental,’’ poietic experiential domain,which is either effaced, like the feminine, in the ‘‘prosaic’’ logic of tech-nological modernity or safely contained within an aestheticized, irrational,space of inaction; on the other hand, it also reworks the specular logic of dif-ference into the nonsignifiable proximity of the other and resignifies sexualdifference into a new, nondichotomous morphology of experience.
It is more than fitting that L’oubli de l’air, which invokes Heidegger both
to situate Irigaray’s project within the broader critique of modernity and toresituate that very moment with respect to its blindness to, or at least inex-plicitness about, sexual difference,would end with a meditation on the poetand poetic language. Characteristically for Irigaray, this section mimics theviewpoint of the male poet, of the ‘‘he who risks’’ evocative of Heidegger’spoet of the poets: Hölderlin, in order to carry out simultaneous critiqueand redefinition of the poetic thinking proposed by Heidegger. Exposingthe co-dependence between speculative logic and the argumentative andpropositional language, Irigaray writes in a style that deliberately indulgesin accumulating questions and syntactically fragmented or inverted struc-tures in order to alter the morphology of representational space. Disruptingthe propositional either/or logic of patriarchal thought through its fluid dis-cursive proximities of ‘‘neither one nor two,’’ this Irigarayan morphologyof writing attempts to ‘‘resex’’ the poietic event of experience. It is alreadywithin this refigured morphology of discourse that Irigaray invokes and re-signifies the Levinasian sense of radical alterity: ‘‘Immediate perception inan openness barred by no consciousness. Native bonds, foreign to any re-flection. Being together before any face to face encounter in which evalua-tion is inaugurated ….N og eo m e t ry ,n oa cco u n t sh e r e . What opens up does
not stop in any direction. No waymarkers in this total risk’’ ( IR,–).
Irigaray suggests that the risk taken in the encounter with radical alterityallows for no road signs, no markers for the paths to choose; the exposurerequired becomes more radical than the listening to the saying of being,
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which, in Heidegger’s text, is always interspersed with Wegmarken, with
waymarkers. No decisive mapping, no alignment, no geometrical figura-tion is possible within the morphology of experience that refuses the binaryschema of speculative thought.
Part of Irigaray’s strategy consists in leaving Heidegger, Hölderlin, and
Levinas unnamed: unidentified yet intimated through a nexus of terms andimages evocative of their work. In this way, Heidegger, together with theunnamed figure of the male poet/philosopher, becomes both the point ofview enacted and inflected by Irigaray and the other addressed by her text.This performative inversion adopted by Irigaray—a mimicry that doublesand exchanges roles—constitutes one of the most important aspects of herproject. It marks the invention of a discursive practice which works throughthe nondichotomous exchanges, the in-betweens of roles and positions,rather than by establishing its own position, argument, or point of view.Irigaray’s texts deliberately prevent, or at least render highly problematic, a‘‘complete’’ identification of their argument, preferring instead to illustratetheir points by enacting the textual and conceptual plays. This fluid textu-ality not so much ‘‘argues for’’ as literally ‘‘writes’’ a new space of inscriptionfor sexual difference. This inscriptional space opens itself precisely in thepassages and reversals characteristic of Irigaray’s mimicry, in the proximi-ties between Heidegger’s poet and Irigaray’s poetics, between being and thealterity of the other, between the masculine and the feminine resignifiedoutside of the paradigm of negation and absence. The manner of writingwhich Irigaray adopts or, rather, invents, is crucial here. It goes beyond thematter of a style or mode of writing and shows that the mat(t)erialization ofexperience into the material and the intelligible itself has a ‘‘style,’’ a poeticenergy, which is not preserved in the argumentative-critical discourse. Thepoetics which Irigaray attempts to write exceeds the idea of an extraneousform or a device added to the critical ‘‘content’’ of her presentation, be-cause it resignifies the event of experience as fluid, ruptured by alterity, andimaginable only as the in-betweens and proximities rather than as represen-tational solids and discursive claims. If the ‘‘solid’’ spaces of representationbecome markers of the patriarchal logic that installs the masculine as theuniversal subject of experience, then the intervals and proximities of Iri-garay’s discourse reintroduce the feminine, and with it, sexual difference,onto the scene of representation.
One of the most important and remarkable features of Irigaray’s work is
her ability to reinvent philosophical and critical terms in ways that under-score precisely the proximity between the argumentative and the literary,
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that, in fact, render the very space of this interaction poetic. Irigaray’s writ-ing both makes an argument and presents a poetics in the same gesture, or,to put it differently, it makes its argument poetically. Although the strate-gies of allusion and playful indetermination constitute a vital moment ofIrigaray’s work, her poetics points beyond a ‘‘merely’’ poetic use of lan-guage. Irigaray’s poetics replays her point that the bifurcation of discourseinto the poetic and the philosophical (and subsequently into the techno-logical, informational discourse of modern culture) and the parallel attemptto control language, already at work in Platonic dialogues, effaces the poi-etic dimension of being. It covers over the fluid morphology of experiencewhich still reflects the ‘‘positive’’ significations of the feminine, quite differ-ent from its ‘‘negative’’ representations within the specular logic of same-ness.This is why Irigaray prefers to enact her points by rupturing discursivepractices and rendering fluid the boundaries between conceptual significa-tion and poetic reimagining:
It is lived, lavished without safeguards. Before the subject-object dis-tribution—that effect of the means useful to an imperialist will on thepart of man. The establishment of a market where nothing is deliveredwithout being introduced into a system of exchanges that blurs or erasestangible reality in a speculative spirituality. No one encountering or ap-prehending anything without coming before the court of a general cal-culation, whose reign is all the more imperative in that numbers do notappear there. So it is with love. ( IR,)
This paragraph is typical of Irigaray’s poetics, mixing together corner-stones of philosophical thought (the subject-object distribution), economic(un)realities, and the imperceptible workings of techno-scientific concep-tuality, with the issues of the materiality of experience, relations to alteritywithout safeguards, and love.
Already such a concatenation of various regimes of discourse and con-
ceptualities regarded as incommensurate or foreign to each other deregu-lates discursive regimentation and suggests an inscriptional space of ex-perience in advance of, avant la lettre, the already produced language and
signification: ‘‘[W]e abandon all calculation. All language and meaning al-ready produced. In risk’’ ( IR,). What Irigaray sets against the calculative
practices of ‘‘a speculative spirituality’’ and against the general regime of cal-culation that ‘‘condemns’’ experience to a certain techno-logic is the figureof love as the carnal incalculable par excellence —love that has no desire to
either calculate itself or to calibrate its relations to alterity.
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Risking and challenging the standards of meaningfulness and represen-
tationality, the poeticwork of language intrinsic to an ethics of sexual differ-ence resignifies the relations between the sexes on the model of an incalcu-lable, reciprocally inflected exchanges which exceed the ‘‘meaning alreadyproduced’’ and the standards of visibility regulating the desire to will, tok n o w ,o rt or e p r e s e n t :
From which there escapes the very content of desire. Unpredictable, un-c o e r c e a b l e .F r e eo fd o m i n a t i o n — i ni t s e l fo ri nt h eo t h e r ….Ac a l li na will that wills nothing, but abandons all resistance. Responds withoutknowledge or intention which give account of obedience to anything….Still innocent of appropriate(d) techniques. ( IR,)
Composed mostly of sentence fragments, this paragraph undercuts thepropositional logic of statements, the syntactical and rhetorical formulasthat enable the ‘‘calculation’’ of meaning and the assignation of stable, firm,and ‘‘knowable’’ discursive positions. With empty subject positions, eventhe assertive modalityof writing is turned inside out by Irigaray’s work, ren-dered ‘‘unassertive’’ and ‘‘incalculable.’’ The opening of syntactic structuresthrough fragmentation and incompletion, coupled with the prevalence ofquestions sequenced into entire sections of her texts, marks Irigaray’s non-propositional, unassertive modality of writing.
The nonassertive language of this poetics is mobilized by Irigaray specifi-
cally against the calculating logic of desire, which she regards as the primarystructuring force in the philosophical project of the West and, in particular,its modern incarnation: techno-scientific culture. Refashioning and sexingLevinas’s notion of desire as uncontainable excess, Irigarayadjusts the opticsof desire from lack and negation to the overflowing of proximity: ‘‘Ob-jective and subjective lose their limits. Each one and all ‘things’ resting inone another, spilling into one another, without limits’’ ( IR,). Desire no
longer signifies an absence to be filled, recuperated, or ‘‘calculated,’’ but anopenness to the proximity of the other within an elemental, differentiated,and sexed dimension of experience. The risk at issue in the last section ofL’oubli de l’air involves specifically opening thought beyond the ‘‘negative’’
economy of desire, and thus beyond the monological, ‘‘specular’’ desire atwork in economy and technology. With the volatile figure of ‘‘neither onenor two’’ lips marking the proximity of the feminine and the masculine,where they find themselves dependent upon yet excessive with respect totheir reciprocal determinations, Irigaray breaks the hold of negation and itsspeculative reversals over the articulation of experience. The prominence
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she assigns to sexual difference in the formation of experience disarticulatesthe uniformity characteristic of the technological morphology of experi-ence, where the notion of being as resource provides the standard whichrenders the inappropriable events of experience representable in terms ofproductionist logic. Irigaray’s poetics links the project of rethinking desireand sexual difference in terms of proximity to a wide-ranging critique ofcultural practices: from language, thought, and art to economy, politics,and technology. Her frequent critical remarks about productionist logicsuggest the importance of thinking about experience in a nonproductionistmanner in an attempt to disconnect it from the dominance of the techno-
economic logic, which forms experience in the image of production.
Risking the Specular Economy of Production:Women, Commodities, and Art
For Irigaray, both the economic operations of exchange and the techno-
logical paradigm of experience as production constitute the most pervasiveand wide-reaching modes of the deployment of ‘‘speculative spirituality.’’Both have their roots in the philosophical paradigm of the distribution ofbeing along the subject—object axis.Through her critique of the speculari-zation of experience, Irigaray attempts to inaugurate a nonspecular poiet-ics of experience, which approaches the bifurcation of ‘‘matter’’ as ‘‘priorto’’ the institution of the speculum and the dialectic of mirrors, that is,as the poietic ‘‘element’’ of experience which becomes covered over anddissembled within the subjectivist economy of being: ‘‘Before the subject-
object distribution—that effect of the means useful to an imperialist will on
t h ep a r to fm a n ’ ’( IR,). Redistributing experience outside the patriarchal
optics of the subject-object division, this poietics questions the very logicof distribution and the effects of domination it produces in the realms ofthought, economy, and technology.With the interrogation of the phallogo-centric logic of the philosophico- critical tradition undertaken in Irigaray’s
early readings of Freud, Hegel, and Plato comes also the examination ofthe spiritualizing logic of economic thought. Irigaray claims that economypresents and calculates the material conditions of production in a way thatinevitably dematerializes experience. L’oubli de l’air considers economy in
terms of ‘‘[t]he establishment of a market where nothing is delivered with-out being introduced into a system of exchanges that blurs orerases tangiblereality in a speculative spirituality’’ ( IR, ) .E c o n o m yw o r k sa sa ne x t e n –
sion of the technological thought, of the speculative logic of philosophy,
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dematerializing experience for the sake of obtaining a general calculus, ageneralized market where ‘‘being’’ can be calculated for the purposes of ex-change and profit. Irigaray tries to rethink here not only the ties betweenthe economic market and the technological calculus of being but the overalleconomy of experience—the very idea of experience as a certain economy,
which renders experience specularizable at the expense of its unrepresent-able dimensions, the feminine and sexual difference in particular. Wheneconomy opens the possibility of exchange and figures costs and profits, itdoes so by suppressing a cost that cannot be calculated or exchanged, a costthat ungrounds the very idea of calculation. To have an economy of experi-ence, Irigaray argues, is to already have exchanged tangible experience andthe mat(t)erializations of sexual difference for the profit of ‘‘knowing,’’ forthe infinitely marketable ‘‘speculative spirituality.’’
In Irigaray’s view, it is the commodification of women that, historically,
guarantees the stabilityof the social order,of the passage from nature to cul-ture. It does so precisely through the gesture of the demat(t)erialization ofexperience, that is, through the erasure of experience as the fractured ‘‘mat-ter,’’ as the nonbinary proximityof the sensible and the intelligible: ‘‘ In order
to become equivalent, a commodity changes bodies. A super-natural, meta-
physical origin is substituted for its material origin. Thus its body becomesa transparent body, pure phenomenality of value ’’ (TS,).The double logic
at work here renders women objects of exchange and prepares the groundfor the eventual sublation of sexual difference within the specular economyof experience. The passage to culture, equivalent to the institution of thehomosocial economy of experience, allows male subjects to maintain thecommerce of women without having to take into the account the doublegesture of sexualization and desexualization of experience, that is, withoutthinking experience as itself a matter of ‘‘exchanges’’ within the proximityof sexual difference: ‘‘A sociocultural endogamy would thus forbid com-merce withwomen. Men make commerce ofthem, but they do not enter
into any exchanges withthem’’ ( TS,). What makes exchanges as such
possible is the subject-object distribution of experience, a parceling of beingthat guarantees the essential sameness of the subjects of transactions. Thisdistribution conceives of the other as an object exchangeable for other ob-jects according to a calculus that always holds open the possibility of totallyspecularizing experience. The exchanges between the sexes figured as prox-imity would not only disrupt the homosocial commerce underscoring theuniformity of being but also resignify experience as itself outside economyand calculation: ‘‘Without worries, for without calculation. Foreign to ex-
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changes and business. Outside the market’’ ( IR,). The model of experi-
ence I see at work in ‘‘Sexual Difference’’ would open a poietic r e s e r v eo fe x –
perience, ‘‘free’’ from the logic of commodification and its ‘‘meta-physics.’’It would allow us to see experience as an event whose doubling ‘‘materiality’’remains irreducible to commodities and speculative values.
If a commodity is an entity whose exchange value supplements its ma-
teriality in a way that introduces the metaphysical dichotomies into thecommodity itself, then the speculardistance inscribed in commodities leadsin the end to the supersession of their materiality and to the satisfaction ofthe specular nature of desire: ‘‘The commodity, like the sign, suffers frommetaphysical dichotomies. Its value, its truth, lies in the social element.But this social element is added on to its nature, to its matter, and the so-cial subordinates it as a lesser value, indeed as nonvalue’’ ( TS,). The
exchange value of commodities, which is the representation of the needsand desires of the (male) subjects, codes experience with the male logicof desire. It makes it impossible to think of desire otherwise than as lackand negation, and excludes the figuring of experience as the proximity ofthe other (and her desires). In other words, commodification is a reflectionof the monological dynamic of desire, of a paradoxical desexualization ofexperience.What Irigaray presents in the form of the poetics of sexual dif-ference is an alternative reading of experience as an incalculable crossing ofdesires,which makes impossible the distribution of this proximityalong thesubject-object axis, and, therefore, preempts, as it were, the ‘‘production’’of the relation to an other in terms of a commodified object.
To the extent that art can be thought on the model of a poietics that
complicates and contests what we might call the techno-economic profileof being, Irigaray’s notion of poetics also opens a new context for thinkingof the relation of art, materiality, and sexual difference. If, as Irigaray claimsi n‘ ‘ W o m e no nt h eM a r k e t , ’ ’‘ ‘ [t]he economy of exchange—of desire—is man’s
business ’’ (TS, ), then the importance of art which ‘‘reproduces’’ experi-
ence as the event of double mat(t)erialization, and thus remarks sexual dif-ference, lies in reworking the economics of desire that underpins symboli-zation.Thus, art can be seen as a ‘‘work’’ that unworks the techno-economiclogic, remapping in the process the operations of desire. It is precisely forthis reason that the work performed in/by art needs to be seen in terms ofthe disruption of the logic of commodification and its effects on art. In thiscontext, I explore how the links between the logic of commodification, onthe one hand, and the traffic in women and the erasure of sexual difference,
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on the other, allow us to rethink the work of art vis-à-vis commodificationand sexual difference.
Transplanting into her work Heidegger’s unstable opposition between
technē andpoiēsis, Irigaray reorganizes the stakes of this opposition through
sexual difference and, in particular, through the ethical and political ‘‘risks’’i n v o l v e di nr e s p e c t i n gt h i sd i ff e r e n c e .T h efi n a ls e c t i o no f L’oubli de l’air
certainly draws out and emphasizes the ethical undertones of Heidegger’snotion of poetry, refocusing, however, the matter of poetic saying throughthe lens of sexual difference. In contrast to Heidegger, Irigaray’s poet ismuch more explicitly willing to risk the poetic saying for the other, for theother whose alterity is not only gendered and sexed but signified specifi-cally through these differences: ‘‘The only guide there being the call to theother. Whose breath subtly impregnates the air, like a vibration perceivedby those lost in love’’ ( IR,). What is risked for the sake of the sexed
other is not only the poetics but also the technological ‘‘infrastructure’’ ofexperience, its reliance on calculation, the market, economic computation,and exchange. Far from being limited to language, Irigaray’s poetics triesto break and revise ‘‘the foundation of the economic, social, and culturalorder that has been ours for centuries’’ ( TS,).This seemingly exorbitant
claim originates from Irigaray’s analysis of production, of the influence thatthe productionist logic animated by male desire has on the representationof experience: ‘‘[A]ll the systems of exchange that organize patriarchal soci-eties and all the modalities of productive work that are recognized, valued,a n dr e w a r d e di nt h e s es o c i e t i e sa r em e n ’ sb u s i n e s s ….T h ew o r kf o r c ei sthus always assumed to be masculine, and ‘products’ are objects to be used,objects of transaction of men alone’’ ( TS,). Irigaray suggests that experi-
ence is produced in ways that ‘‘mediate’’ it socially through the symbolicorder reflective of the male desire and consonant with the homosocial de-termination of culture. In short, through social mediation, the very para-digm of experience becomes coded in masculine terms, and the venues forunderstanding and articulating experience come to be determined throughthe subordination and devaluation of the ‘‘feminized’’ matter in relation tothe ‘‘standards’’ of specularization. The poetics suggested in ‘‘Sexual Dif-ference’’ would open the possibility of a sexuate ethics of experience byquestioning how the relations between production, commodification, andcalculation come to constitute the mapping of being in terms of the laborof male desire.
To the extent that the commodification of women becomes the model
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and the condition for economic exchanges, it also implies the paradigm foranalyzing the commodification of art—in terms both of privileging the ex-change value over the work performed by art and of evacuating the impor-tance of the materiality of the artwork. In this context, reinscribing sexualdifference and undercutting the exchanges based upon commodificationopens the possibilityof approaching art not through the binary understand-ing of matterand form but through the notion of double mat(t)erialization,where materiality and signification are understood in terms of their nondi-chotomous proximity within the event of experience.The link that Irigarayestablishes between commodification and femininity can, in turn, be in-verted in order to bring sexual difference to bear upon the poetics of modernart. The approach to art which can be developed from Irigaray’s writings isa result of two factors: the critique of commodification and of the modelof experience based on the specularity of male desire, on the one hand, andthe rethinking of the opposition between the sensible and the intelligiblethrough the poetics of the elements, on the other.
What Irigaray identifies as a necessary link in the logic of commodi-
fication is the abstraction from the materiality of experience, the distan-ciation from matter, the body, and the feminine: ‘‘when women are ex-changed, woman’s body must be treated as an abstraction ’’ (TS,). T o
paraphrase Marx, the production of a commodity involves a suppressionof coarse materiality, a gesture which replicates, Irigaray adds, the devalua-tion of matter/ mater/woman throughout discursive, philosophical, techno-
logical, and economic practices. The commodification of art replicates thisgesture of devaluation and erasure of the materiality of the work of art, ofwhat Heidegger describes as the thingly (dinghaft) character of artworks.
What is required to take art as a commodity and to invest it with exchangevalue is an abstraction from the work performed by art and from its in-scription in the materiality of the artwork. As I suggested in the first chap-ter, the increase in the means of mechanical reproduction characteristic ofart’s function in modernity leads to the widespread commodification of art.However, mechanical reproduction also draws our attention to reproduc-ibility as the modality of art’s being. To the extent that reproducibility canbe identified as the modality, the ‘‘element,’’ in which art ‘‘works,’’ the plas-ticity with which art reproduces its work disrupts the logic that enforcescommodification and places art within the arena of exchange and calcu-lation. Mechanical reproduction secures the possibility and provides themeans for a rapid commodification of artworks, but it also, paradoxically,counters this tendency by highlighting the ways in which the historicizing
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modality through which the work of art ‘‘reproduces’’ itself disrupts andcomplicates the investment of desire in commodities.
If the logic of commodification proceeds generally by abstraction from
the material existence of objects, from their function and their use value, inorder to codify the labor of desire as the new exchange value superimposedover the object, then what becomes subordinated and effaced in the caseo fa r ti st h ev e r yw o r kp e r f o r m e db ya r t w o r k s .W h e na r tb e c o m e sac o m -modity, what is devalued is the indisassociability of the work performed byart from its sensible existence, that is, from the manner in which the workas which art reproduces itself is ‘‘mattered,’’ conditioned and inextricablyintertwined with its material. Commodification of art involves, therefore,the abstraction from the way in which the restaging of the historial workof art literally figures through the materiality of art. The commodification
of artworks results in the occlusion of the material, experiential, and cul-tural conditions of the production and reproduction (reception) of art, con-ditions which, as I argued in the first chapter, all come into play and areconfigured in the specific historial work of art’s Gestalt. The emphasis on
the historicity of experience in the work of art becomes occluded and ‘‘ex-changed’’ for the objectification of the monological operations of desire,which, transforming an artwork into an object, disregards and covers overw h a ta r ti sa saw o r k .
The notions of use or exchange value do not appear in Heidegger’s analy-
sis of the poetic workings of art in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ butit can be shown nonetheless that the essay constructs an implicit argumentagainst the ‘‘appropriation’’ of art involved in the imposition of these valuesupon it. If Irigaray sees the use value as the moment of retention of thesensible substrate of the object against the pressure of abstraction into theexchange value, Heidegger’s discussion of the differences between work,thing, and equipment leaves little doubt that even the notion of use valueis already a form of the supersession of the materiality of things. Useful-ness and reliabilityassociated with equipment, in fact, constitute the equip-mental modality of being by occluding the materiality of the thing trans-formed into equipment: ‘‘[t]he ‘mere’ [thing], after all, means the removalof the character of usefulness and of being made. The mere thing is a sortof equipment, albeit equipment denuded of its equipmental being. Thing-being consists in what is then left over’’ ( BW,).The process of making or
producing equipment changes the constitution of the thing by inscribing itinto the dialectic of form and matter.What is already implicit in the matter-form structure, however, is the eventual subsumption of the material into
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the immaterial, of the sensible into the formal.This is why Heidegger quiteemphatically discards the matter-form structure as the optics for the dis-cussion of the thingly aspect of things, that is, their ‘‘materiality’’: ‘‘Matterand form are in no case original determinations of the thingness of the merething’’ ( BW, ) .I no t h e rw o r d s ,t h eu s ev a l u ei m p a r t e dt oat h i n gw h e n
it is made over into equipment is already part and parcel of the conceptualoperation that leads to the eventual devaluation of usefulness and its super-session by the exchange value. Usefulness functions already as an element ofthe economics of desire which desubstantializes entities and reinvests themwith the objectified forms of its own labor.
This is why ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ will seek to place the work
of art outside of the parameters set down by the ‘‘equipmental’’ economyof being. Early in the essay, Heidegger questions the generalized nature ofequipment which serves as the paradigm for the representation of being inthe technological age: ‘‘Because equipment takes an intermediate place be-tween mere thing and work, the suggestion is that nonequipmental beings—things and works and ultimately everything that is—are to be compre-hended with the help of the being of equipment (the matter-form struc-ture)’’ ( BW,). ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ links the poietic charac-
ter of art to the possibility of thinking materiality outside the moment ofits ‘‘forming,’’ that is, as materiality that escapes the logic of ‘‘dematerial-ization’’ and the negative valuation implied in the matter-form distinction.Although the work performed by art cannot be understood in terms of thethingly character, it makes possible a reformulation of the question of ma-teriality. ‘‘To be sure, the work’s work-character cannot be defined in termsof its thingly character, but as against that the question about the thing’sthingly character can be brought into the right course by way of a knowl-edge of the work’s work-character’’ ( BW,).What Heidegger suggests is
that the rethinking of thework of art outside of the parameters of aestheticsmakes possible a new appreciation of what perhaps can no longer be simplyconceived as the ‘‘materiality’’ of being. The reinvention of the work of artcharacteristic of modernity becomes thus associated with the problematicof ‘‘rematerializing’’ matter, of reinstituting experience within the doublefold of mat(t)erialization.
Insisting on the reinvention of the work of art outside of the matter-
form structure, Heidegger’s thought deliberately counters the effects ofcommodification; it provides the possibility of a very different ‘‘logic’’ ofart’s work, which exposes the conceptual underpinnings of commodifica-tion and presents ‘‘materiality’’ in a way that renders it resistant to the logic
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of commodification. Thinking in terms of both the use value and the ex-change value is predicated upon a certain conception of matter, which triesto nullify the work performed by art and the manner in which this work‘‘re-presents’’ things. Heidegger’s claim that the work performed by art hasto be conceived as poetic (as Dichtung ) can be read as opening the door
to rethinking being on a model alternative to the economics based uponthe matter-form duality and regulated by a techno-logic. Such poietics ofexperience remarks materiality in a way that derails the operations of themeta-physical conceptualityalready en route to dematerialization. It is prob-
ably most productive to see Heidegger’s effort to overcome metaphysics inthis specific context: as an attempt to inaugurate a thinking that would notbe subordinate to the dematerializing logic of meta-physics, that is, to thelogic the preempts the dual event of mat(t)erialization and represents it asan opposition only to specularize the relation in a reunifying gesture. Tocritique metaphysics is to think about experience outside this closure.
For Irigaray, the rethinking of the commodification of women entails
a critique of this very same ‘‘meta’’ gesture Heidegger identifies, but fromthe point of view of the ethics and politics of sexual difference. Irigaraysees the logic of commodification as reproducing the metaphysical gesturethat envelops and cancels materiality within the spirituality implied in the‘‘meta’’ of the metaphysical thought. Referring to the patriarchal charac-ter of the social order in Western cultures, Irigaray claims that ‘‘[t]his typeof social system can be interpreted as the practical realization of the meta-
physical. As the practical destiny of the metaphysical, it would also represent
itsmost fully realized form ’’ (TS,). She diagnoses an inseparable link be-
tween metaphysics and the social order it produces, a bond that makes hersee this social system as the ‘‘fulfillment’’ of metaphysical conceptuality.The critique of the specularization and effacement of sexual difference inmetaphysics is, then, directlyconnected to the questioning of the inherentlymeta-physical gestures of the social, economic, and political orders. If weextend Irigaray’s analysis to illustrate the link between the commodificationof women and the commodification of art, we can set the stage for explain-ing how the poietic and performative force of art refigures mat(t)erialityand sexual difference.
Implicit in Heidegger’s thought on art is the indispensability of the cri-
tique of commodification for the rethinking of the links between art andexperience. Irigaray’s work allows us to underscore the fact that such a re-thinking must account for the double erasure of sexual difference: from thelogic of commodification and from the poetics of the work of art. Think-
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ing of the work of art outside of the economy of exchange takes us alsobeyond the technological modalities of representation, into the new, andIrigaray would say ‘‘risky,’’ poietics of proximity. Irigaray’s own work pre-pares such an approach through the familiar double gesture of the critiqueof commodification and the inauguration of the poietics of sexual differ-ence.Where I connect Heidegger’s thought on art and Irigaray’s poetics ofsexual difference is through the ‘‘different’’ trace of mat(t)eriality implicitalready in Heidegger’s work, through its double fold prior to the inscriptionof the metaphysical chains of oppositions. For the remembrance of suchmat(t)erializations and their historicity can be said to be the very ‘‘work’’performed by art, the work, which, in Irigaray’s reading, entails a reworkingof the ways in which sexual difference in-forms experience.
Art ‘‘works’’ through a poietic dynamic rather than within the economy
of exchange that characterizes the operations of the social order.What ‘‘re-sists’’ the commodification of art in this approach is precisely the emphasison the fact that the work performed by art ‘‘materializes’’ outside of thesubject-object dichotomy, apart from the aesthetic appreciation of art. Ifthe commodification of women becomes disrupted by the inseparability ofmateriality and signification figured as the proximity of the lips, the ‘‘ma-teriality’’ of art does not, in turn, allow the work to be reduced to an art ob-ject and thus rendered appropriable as a value that can be exchanged apart,as it were, from the artwork and its material Gestalt. Because of how the
double materiality inscribes historicity, the work performed by art remainsexcessive and disruptive with regard to the economy of exchange. Perhapssuch a poietics should be thought in reference to what Irigaray terms the‘‘economy of abundance’’ ( TS,) as an alternative to the meta-physics of
exchange. Irigaray’s poetics of sexual difference indicates the possibility ofthe transformation of the social order, in which various relations, relation-ality itself, would be socialized nonmetaphysically: ‘‘Not by reproducing,by copying, the ‘phallocratic’ models that have the force of law today, butby socializing in a different way the relation to nature, matter, the body,language, and desire’’ ( TS,). This poietics—‘‘Foreign to exchanges and
business. Outside the market’’—is a rigorous critique of commodificationas the modern incarnation of the metaphysical logic; it draws attention tohow the operations and exchanges certified by such a logic turn art into anobject in the patriarchal economyof desire and coverover the critical effectsof art’s work, the possibilities it opens for resignifying experience throughsexual difference.
For Irigaray’s poet, the task becomes double: both a critique of tech-
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nologyand an inflection of the poetic saying through sexual difference.Thisdouble poetic task illustrates Irigaray’s move from Dasein, through Levi-
nas’s ethical other, gendered male in a replication of the homosocial bond,to a poetics of sexual difference which inflects both the Heideggerian andthe Levinasian positions in order to resignify the relation to the other ac-cording to gender differences. Realigning the relationship between poeticsand technology through the optics of sexual difference, Irigaray specifiesa new venue for thinking experience: a venue where Heidegger’s rethink-ing of technology and Levinas’s radical alterity are redeployed beyond theirintended scope and linked in ways that enable an alternative mapping of ex-perience in view of sexual difference which has become resignified throughthe double valency of ‘‘matter.’’ Irigaray’s investment in writing within this
poietics frames the philosophical, ethical, and political issues addressed byher work in terms of a certain poetics of thought and writing. It suggeststhat the project of rethinking modernity through the problematics of sexand gender involves placing the entire nexus of issues like experience, body,technology, and economy, with their ethical and political stakes, within thescope of the gendered poetics of discourse.
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Part Two : The Avant-Garde
Moment in aTransatlantic Frame
Poetics, Sexuality,and RevolutionTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 157 of 363
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4. Gertrude Stein’s Poetics of the Event
Avant-Garde, the Ordinary,and Sexual Difference
Gertrude Stein’s writings are most often discussed in two contexts: as partof the ‘‘experimental’’ tendencies of the avant-garde or with regard to thequestion of feminist/lesbian writing and politics. Estimations vary widelyin either case: from the acceptance of Stein as a precursor of contempo-rary ‘‘language writing,’’ to Stimpson’s reservations about Stein’s impor-tance to feminist/lesbian criticism, or Meese’s counterclaim that Stein fore-grounds lesbianism in her writing. Value judgments aside, these responsesindicate that Stein’s work poses the problem of the relation between thetwo ‘‘avant-gardes’’: on the one hand, the modernist textual practices andformal innovations and, on the other, the ‘‘avant-garde’’ of feminist writ-ing, with its critique of cultural formations, sexuality, and politics. Thesetwo avant-garde moments in Stein’s work illustrate the convergences be-tween avant-garde textual practices and a reconceptualization of experienceoutside of the parameters of patriarchal discourse. Raising the question ofStein’s avant-garde aesthetics in the context of feminist critiques of patri-archy and representations of sexual difference requires, nonetheless, twodisclaimers. On the one hand, considerations of modernist aesthetics arenow all too readily dismissed as a return to formalism or, worse, to theaestheticization of reality. On the opposite side, coupling aesthetics withfeminist critique evokes easy generalizations about sexual/textual politics,the idea of an equivalence between aesthetic subversion and political cri-
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tique posited in the wake of écriture féminine. At least since Toril Moi’s in-
cisive critique of the feminist reception of Woolf in Sexual/Textual Politics,
the connection between textual and sexual radicalism, as well as its politi-cal import, has become almost a cliché in many feminist debates, easilyacknowledged but not always carefully scrutinized.
Returning to the question of Stein’s poetics, I want to complicate and re-
vise the assumptions underlying both these arguments. I argue that Stein’savant-garde practice is never a matter of a formalist aesthetics, for it is en-gaged in remapping the very structure of experience, against the predomi-nant representational and linguistic practices, that is, against what Steincalls ‘‘patriarchal poetry.’’ Moi’s claim that an anti-humanist reading of theaesthetic categories invented by the patriarchal tradition would disclose‘‘the political nature of Woolf’s aesthetics,’’
1a l s oo p e n st h ed o o rf o ran e c –
essary rereading of Stein, whose textually far more radical work poses adaunting challenge to aesthetics. Employing similar parameters to those ofMoi, DeKoven’s study interprets Stein’s subversive ‘‘experimentalism’’ as acritique of patriarchal language and the systems of representation contin-gent upon it.
2My reading reinterprets this connection between sexuality
and textuality in terms of Stein’s poetics of the event, that is, her refigura-tion of the everyday as a fluid nexus of events whose historicity calls intoquestion the ideal of the stability and transparency of representational andgrammatical structures. Such a recoding of experience requires a rethinkingof language in order to expose and undermine a deep-seated bind betweenrepresentational thought and patriarchal grammar. I suggest that it is withinthis juncture between experience as event and experimental language thatwe can see how the issue of sexual difference and lesbianism in-forms Stein’swork, and does so in a literal sense: it ‘‘forms’’ and shapes the textuality ofher works, for instance, ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ or ‘‘Lifting Belly.’’ To gaugethe transformative effects of Stein’s writing, one has to map the connectionsbetween her reappraisal of the ordinary, the notion of experience as event,and the question of feminine identity and sexual difference. These threeinterrelated issues define the parameters of Stein’s avant-garde practice—they have to be considered jointly in order to recognize the place of Stein’spoetics within the avant-garde revision of the work of art.
The two avant-gardes mentioned above interlace in Stein’s text to pro-
duce certainly one of the most provocative articulations of experimentalpoetics offered by twentieth-century literature. In order to begin to under-stand Stein’s challenge to literature and aesthetics, it is necessary to describehow the textualityof her works reflects the relation of art to experience in its
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everyday temporal, bodily, and sexed dimensions. It is through the conflu-
ence of these issues that Stein’s work, sorely neglected by most theoreticaldiscussions of the avant-garde and modern aesthetics, becomes crucial toassessing the role of modern art and its relation to experience in the contextof the critique of modernity. In chapter , I underscored the importance ofthepoietics of sexual difference in Irigaray’s critique of technocratic patri-
archy and its discursive regimes. At the crucial junctures of her project,Irigaray links the possibility of rethinking sexuality and developing a newculture of sexual difference to a reinvention of language, to a creation of anew poetics of thought: ‘‘If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find ourbody’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story.’’
3
Irigaray’s poetics is a matter of transforming the morphology of discourse:from the one dictated by the patriarchal representations of sexual differenceto one reflective of a new, ‘‘ethical,’’ morphology of experience respectfulof alterity and sexual difference. This poetics rethinks experience througha nonpatriarchal economy of desire and sexual difference. As Irigaray re-marks, it becomes necessary to reimagine the imaginary in order to ‘‘write’’the diversityof feminine pleasure: ‘‘the geographyof her pleasure is far morediversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle,than is commonly imagined—in an imaginary rather too narrowly focusedon sameness’’ ( TS,).
It would be an oversimplification to claim that Stein’s work constructs a
similar sexuate poietics of experience, even though the issues of sexual dif-ference and lesbian desire are central to the textualityof her key works: fromTender Buttons through ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ to Ida.It
would be equally inadequate, however, to disregard the fact that Stein, evenwhen she does not explicitly treat sexuality or lesbianism, often writes itout as the question of language and literary code. Like other issues promi-nent in her work—experience, everydayness, naming—Stein’s understand-ing of sexuality is never simply declared or given but always communicatedthrough the forms of textuality she invents. As Karin Cope suggests, Stein’slesbianism is played out mainly in her subversions of linguistic and literarycodes: ‘‘For ‘the truth’ of Gertrude Stein’s lesbianism is certainly not dis-guised in any other way than in language, so if the manifestations of hersexuality look likelanguage, this should not be surprising.’’
4Similarly to
Irigaray’s poetics of sexual difference, it is Stein’s characteristic reinventionsof textuality that ‘‘perform’’ the most radical insights of her work. Theseinsights are rarely rendered thematic or communicated as content, but areoften produced by Stein’s practices of rearticulating experience through the
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reinvention of language: they are, strictly speaking, the effects of her wayof writing. Since her works become commentaries on the nature of textu-ality, thewriting becomes inseparable from thinking experience as an event,whose everydayness is marked by the historicity and incompleteness of itsh a p p e n i n g .S t e i n ’ st e x t sd on o ts om u c hc o m m e n to nt h eh i s t o r i c i t yt h a tmakes experience ‘‘inessential’’—that is, without an essence or the possi-
bility of ever becoming fully ‘‘present’’—as they render the event structureof experience into the structure of the text.
In Stein’s work, the thought of experience as an event links the question
of the representation of the ordinary with detaching experience from thepatriarchal framework of thought, as is the case, for example, in ‘‘Patriar-chal Poetry.’’ Stein’s writings connect the inessentiality of experience withthe fluid coding of sexual difference, with undercutting the rigid separationbetween femininity and masculinity installed by patriarchal modes of rep-resentation. In ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ such a writing out of sexual difference con-stitutes the texture of the work, the undecidable exchange between voice(s)that is/are, to invoke Irigaray, ‘‘neither one nor two.’’ As I will show later,the notorious question of identity, ‘‘twinning,’’ and recognition in Stein’swork is bound with the problem of sexual difference and experience. Stein’scomplicated relation to the feminism of her days notwithstanding,
5there is
an undeniable link between her ‘‘radical poetics’’ and her interest in shakingup ‘‘patriarchal poetry’’ and rethinking sexuality; in her case, sexual politicscoincides with the texture of writing.
Linking the questions of event, historicity, everydayness, and sexual dif-
ference, I see Stein’s writing as a preeminent locus for interrogating theconception of avant-garde poetics proposed in the first part of my book.Since Stein’s texts, through their various forms of textuality and language,reinvent experience as an event, they foreground the fashion in which avant-garde writing reworks the relation between aesthetics and experience. Herattempt to write without names forms one of the ways in which Stein triesto sidestep the structuring influence of metaphysical/patriarchal forms ofrepresentation, which operates already on the level of the linguistic consti-tution of relations. In order to show how these issues become interlaced inStein’s practice, I divide this chapter into three sections. The first one ex-amines Stein’s figuration of experience as event in the context of Lyotard’sdefinition of the avant-garde in terms of the question ‘‘Is it happening?’’and Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis. The second part investigates the relation
between the inessentiality of event and the radical refashioning of the ordi-n a r yp e r f o r m e db yS t e i n ’ s Tender Buttons and ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation.’’ The
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final section outlines the connection between textuality and sexual differ-ence and develops the Steinian morphologyof the text,which questions theidea of (re)constructing experience in terms of narrative coherence and rep-resentational clarity, preferring instead to figure being as an event of unrep-resentable proximity and destabilizing exchanges. Writing ‘‘Lifting Belly’’as a text that forms itself in terms of the body interacting and touching theother, a formation enacted through the touching and mixing of voices andwords, Stein makes the body into an event, an occurrence ‘‘embodying’’the historicity of experience. Event, everydayness, and sexuality all becomecritical elements of Steinian poetics, which I take to be a form of imagininga nonpatriarchal morphology of experience. Crucial to this project is thefact that Stein rewrites the relations constitutive of experience on the ele-mental linguistic level: relations betwee n words and syntactical rules. Her
writing is a continuous redoing of the elemental relations structuring ex-perience through, often literally, rewiring language circuits. The degree ofunfamiliarity generated by these operations is symptomatic of the radicalshift Stein’s texts offer in the way we think of the ‘‘work’’ performed by art.This shift marks the avant-garde moment of her writing.
The Event of the Avant-Garde
In his two essays on Barnett Newman’s painting, ‘‘The Sublime and the
Avant-Garde’’ and ‘‘Newman: The Instant,’’6Jean-François Lyotard defines
the avant-garde as the attempt to disclose the event-characterof thework ofart, as the effort to move beyond the limit of expression and, interruptingthe conventions of representation, to inscribe in art the instance of happen-ing. For Lyotard, the avant-garde coincides with the gesture of presentingt h eu n p r e s e n t a b l em o m e n to fa r t ,t h a ti s ,t h ee l u s i v eo p e n i n gf r o mw h i c hthe work of art emerges: ‘‘The avant-gardist attempt inscribes the occur-rence of a sensory now as what cannot be presented and which remains tobe presented in the decline of great representational painting’’ ( LR,).
The attentiveness to the performativity of the instant of the unfolding ofa world—to its becoming present—requires a departure from the systemof representation which has dominated both artistic sensibility and formsof expression. Unlike previous art and literature, Lyotard claims, avant-garde works no longer purport to represent the world or manifest its truth,whether real or ideal, but instead examine the occurrence of the world’s un-folding, the temporality of its constitution. The focus on the event and itstemporalitydisplaces our thinking about art and literature in terms of struc-
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ture and representation, accentuating instead the instability and heteroge-neity at play in the unfolding of language. In a sense, then, the avant-gardework of art locates itself ‘‘before’’ representation, signification, meaning,and truth, and preoccupies itself with the very ‘‘element’’ in which repre-senting and signifying become possible. I will argue that focusing on thiselement, its elusive ‘‘now,’’ which has remained unreflected upon withinartistic practice and aesthetic speculation, entails a radical questioning ofthevery idea of aesthetics, and a displacement of the forms of aesthetic cate-gorization and institutionalization of art and literature. This is true insofaras aesthetics and its institutional practice require the erasure of the hetero-geneous and singular character of the event in order to ensure the stabilityof the representational order and guarantee the transparency of meaning.
The avant-garde’s subversive, even transformative, potential vis-à-vis aes-
thetic tradition comes specifically from its preoccupation with the event-
character of experience and the impact that such a change of perspective
has upon thought and understanding.When juxtaposed with the aestheticideals of the presentation of truth (content) or of the mastery over artisticvision (form), the avant-garde’s preoccupation with the event may appeart ob e‘ ‘ w e a k , ’ ’i n t e r e s t e do n l yi nt h ea p p a r e n ts i m p l i c i t yo ft h ee v e n t ’ se l e -m e n t a r y‘ ‘ t h e r ei s . ’ ’Y e ti ti st h i ss i m p l i c i t yo ft h ee v e n t ,a sm a n i f e s t e di nthe minimalist poetics of Stein, Beckett, Białoszewski, or Coolidge, and acorrespondingly sharpened awareness of the erasure of singularity even atthe elemental—lexical, grammatical, syntactic—levels of the articulationof meaning, that puts in question the very practice of presenting artistictruth or producing comprehensive representations of reality. Paradoxically,the ‘‘poverty’’ associated with the indefiniteness and temporal unbounded-ness of an event provides the avant-garde with the room and the freedom todisplace not only artistic ideologies and conventions but also the very aes-thetic and cultural framework which has produced them.Though this issuelies beyond the scope of my discussion here, for Lyotard the performativityand radical singularity of an event is certainly not limited to aesthetics. Inthe context of Lyotard’s writings on ethics, politics, and justice, the event isalways implicated in the problematic of the absence of ultimate normativityand the necessity of judging without pregiven criteria.
7
Within the avant-garde, the challenge to artistic norms implies also the
undercutting of the linguistic, social, and cultural formations that haveserved as theirorigin and authorizing foundation.The avant-garde’s contes-tation of aesthetic art and its forms of institutionalization consists, there-fore, in producing postaesthetic art, in developing ways of thinking capable
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of replaying and reproducing the subversive unboundedness of the eventwith respect to the dominant discourses of knowledge, rationality, and aes-thetic sensibility. Hence the project that Lyotard identifies in ‘‘The Sublimeand the Avant-Garde’’ as ‘‘the avant-garde search for the artwork event’’(LR,) is an act of thinking that directs the unboundedness of the event
against the power of intelligence that would turn it into a thing or an objectthat can be represented, grasped, and understood:
Letting-go of all grasping intelligence and of its power, disarming it,recognizing that this occurrence of painting was not necessary and isscarcely foreseeable, a privation in the face of Is it happening? guarding
the occurrence ‘‘before’’ any defence, any illustration, and any commen-t a r y ,g u a r d i n gb e f o r eb e i n go no n e ’ sg u a r d ,b e f o r e‘ ‘ l o o k i n g ’ ’ (regarder)
under the aegis of now,this is the rigour of the avant-garde. ( LR,)
The rigor with which the avant-garde attends to the event is directed inparticularagainst the objectifying tendency in thought—its ‘‘grasping intel-ligence’’—and the way this predilection has shaped artistic practice: the-matic interests, aesthetic precepts, and institutional forms. This is why thisrigor realizes itself above all in the avant-garde exploration of language, re-garded—whether we are talking about the language of painting, music, ar-chitecture,or literature—as both thevehicle of and the means of subvertingthe aesthetic inheritance. Since such a consideration of the event means at-tending to the unfolding of experience and signification, its poetics has toconsider specifically how the play of language and meaning solidifies intostructures that make representation and comprehension possible.
What is at stake, then, in the avant-garde’s characteristic letting-go of
the grasping intelligence in favor of foregrounding the open-endedness ofthe event is a mode of thinking that attends precisely to the nonsubstantivecharacter of experience and its resistance to conceptual mastery. Movinglanguage toward the practice of such thinking of letting-be is the main pre-occupation of the later works of Heidegger, where his thought focuses onthe proximity between the poetic and the philosophical or on what he him-self refers to as ‘‘the neighborhood of poetry and thinking.’’
8In Heideg-
ger’s late texts, this proximity between poetry and thinking serves the pur-pose of highlighting the event (das Ereignis) as the most significant problem
that confronts contemporary thought. For in Heidegger the question of theevent describes not only the philosophical crisis of metaphysics but, andabove all, the historical predicament of technological culture, a culture inwhich the ways of objectifying and schematizing being cover over its event-
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character: ‘‘the work of modern technology reveals the actual as standing-
reserve (Bestand). ’’9As ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ argues,
such a schematization of being where all beings, including humans, areperceived as resources to be calculated and utilized, as ‘‘standing-reserve,’’deprives experience of its heterogeneity and hence of the power to putin question and displace the forms of objectification that culture imposesupon it. Calling the calculative schema of being regulating modern society‘‘technological,’’ Heidegger shows how our dominant form of thinking—measurement and computation—obscures, almost obliterates, the nonsub-stantive character of experience. To Heidegger
10this always singular event
of being has a poietic character, one of disclosing, letting-be, and opening,as opposed to the instrumentalization and objectification that are charac-teristic of the metaphysical/technological model of thought.
11One way to
think of experience as an event against the culturally dominant forms ofperception and calculative or systematic reasoning is to bring into language,often bydislocating and estranging it, the poietics of experience.This is whyin Heidegger’s work from s and s modern art, and poetry in par-ticular, offer resources for a critique of both the ‘‘technological’’ mentalitypervading modern society and art and aesthetics, to the extent that, liketechnology, they represent reality according to the principles of the meta-physics of the subject.
12Together with his work on poetry, Heidegger’s idio-
syncratic employment of language and philosophical terminology is moti-vated by the desire to disrupt these calculative and objectifying patternsof rationality and to accentuate the nonsubstantive moment of thinking—
its poietic space in which thought lets its object be ‘‘before’’ it proceeds tograsp and represent it.
In Heidegger’s view, poetic thinking is a response to the historical cir-
cumstances confronting modern society: the development of mass cultureand its progressive rationalization, together with the effects these processeshave had upon being. This aspect of Heidegger’s thought is similar toBenjamin’s or Adorno’s work on modernity and its continued instrumen-talization of experience. Faced with the cultural effects of modernity andits primary agent—calculative and systematic rationality—both Benjaminand Adorno turn to art for ways of disrupting the monological modelsof thought and experience operative in modern society.
13The historically
motivated thought of the event proposed by Heidegger requires that webegin thinking ‘‘between’’ poetry and philosophy, between the poietic andthe technic schema of experience.
Gertrude Stein is hardly ever mentioned in the context of the critiques
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of modernity and the so-called aesthetic turn of philosophy, even thoughher work, more than that of Mallarmé, Kafka, Joyce, or even Beckett, iscentrally engaged with the event, in part icular with its bearing upon literary
writing in relation to propositional (philosophical) discourse and ordinarylanguage.
14Lyotard is the only thinker who, against the backdrop of the
avant-garde, underscores Stein’s importance for confronting the limits ofmetaphysical thinking and language and for letting go of the power inher-ent in all grasping intelligence. In addition to devoting one of his notes inThe Differend to Stein, Lyotard singles out her work in ‘‘The Sublime and
the Avant-Garde’’ as exemplary for t he avant-gardist preoccupation with
the event: ‘‘In the determination of literary art this requirement with re-spect to the Is it happening? found one of its most rigorous realizations in
Gertrude Stein’s How to Write ’’ (LR, ) .E v e nt h o u g hL y o t a r dd o e sn o t
pursue this point about Stein, his remarks about the rigor with which avant-garde art and writing treat the event—the rigor that, by contrast with thephilosophical-scientific exactness which relies on conceptual clarity and ab-sence of contradictions, reflects the precision with which one attends tothe unfolding of words and language—suggests the manner in which wecan begin to articulate the importance of Stein’s writing to avant-gardepractices. What needs clarification above all is the extent to which Stein’sidiom—its characteristic disfiguration of grammar and syntax and subver-sion of the rules of literary writing—is a response to the event character ofexperience and its erasure from linguistic practices.
I am interested in how Stein’s unbounding of language, of the English
word order and the play of signification contingent upon it, together witha deliberate elision of nouns and nominal forms, leads her away from rep-resentational language to a ‘‘thinking’’ of the event, as, for example, thesection ‘‘A Vocabulary for Thinking’’ from How to Write suggests.
15Stein
d i r e c t st h i st h i n k i n go ft h ee v e n t ,o f‘ ‘ i n t e n s ee x i s t e n c e ’ ’a ss h ep u t si t ,against the patriarchal culture around her, challenging its standards throughher alternative literary practice. This Steinian ‘‘rewriting’’ of the Englishlanguage—her practice of ‘‘naming without names’’—becomes significantfor the critique of calculative rationality and its influence on everyday life.Above all, I want to explore how the inscription of ordinary language inStein’s work serves the purpose of subverting culturally and linguisticallycoded patterns of experience and thinking.
No matter how variable in style, Stein’s texts, from the repetitions and
incessant variations of the early prose to the increasingly indeterminate se-mantic field of her later poetic writings, are characterized by the rigor and
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exactitude with which they attend to the event of writing, language, andmeaning. Most important for our consideration, the playful rigor of Stein’swork is a direct result of her approach to the literary text as the event ofwriting—of the unfolding of the world and its meaning through the ‘‘gram-mars’’ of writing. How to Write is emblematic of this Steinian project, be-
cause there she explicitly articulates the insights into the writing processelaborated in her other works—from Tender Buttons to ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’
and ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation’’—into a poetics of the event.The basic premiseof this poetics is that the rules and conventions of grammar—as a reflec-tion of cultural practices and their dominant modes of representation—constrain the language field in a manner that, by nominalizing the eventinto an object of perception and identifying it with its represented con-tent, results in the erasure of what Stein refers to as ‘‘intense existence.’’ Tocounteract this power of nominalization, Stein claims in the first chapter ofHow to Write, ‘‘Saving the Sentence,’’ that sentences, as the basic units of
writing, have to be seen as the open-ended events of meaning: ‘‘A sentencehas wishes as an event’’ ( HTW, ), and, later on in ‘‘Sentences’’: ‘‘This is a
s e n t e n c ei fi ti sa ne v e n t ’ ’( HTW, ). Indeed, the whole of How to Write
is constructed in a way that specifically foregrounds the text as an event ofwriting/reading. Divided into sections that read like the table of contentsof a grammar book—sentences, paragraphs, grammar, narrative, and vo-cabulary— How to Write is composed mostly of fragments of sentences, cut
and intersected phrases, that explicitly subvert grammatical and syntacticalrules. Many chapters read as if they were composed of fragments of severalsentences, intersected and run together into discursive blocks that vacillatebetween being sentences and paragraphs.Writing her singular ‘‘narrative ofundermine’’ ( HTW, ), Stein successively undercuts, even explodes, syn-
tactical, grammatical, narrative, and discursive rules and conventions, in anapparent gesture of liberating the event of literary writing from linguisticand discursive (‘‘narrative’’) constraints.
16
The result is texts that both unfold and spend themselves in the event
of writing/reading, texts that are eminently performative.17Stein’s way of
writing deliberately makes it impossible for the reader to retain the text, toform an image or a memory on the basis of which one could claim to know,remember, or understand these works. Most of the time, there is no plot,no narrative development, no set of ideas or even an aesthetics or poeticss t r i c t l ys p e a k i n g ,b ym e a n so fw h i c ho n ec o u l dh o l do n t oaS t e i nt e x t .I nfact, as How to Write playfully indicates by undoing linear progression and
parodying argumentative reasoning, Stein refuses narrative and discursive
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emplotment as constricting the event of writing: ‘‘A reason for having re-fused a narrative for having refused a narrative for reason for reasons for re-fusing for reasons refusing narratives for reasons refusing narrative refusingfor reason refusing reason for refusing narrative for reason refusing narrativea reason for refusing for refusing narratives narratives for a reason’’ ( HTW,
). Instead, the reader’s relation to the text exhausts itself almost withoutr e s e r v ei nt h em o m e n to fr e a d i n g — i nt h e eventof the text. Reading Stein’s
writing, especially in the case of texts like ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation’’ or ‘‘Patri-archal Poetry,’’ one has the distinct impression that those texts are designedfor the reader to slide in and out of them, without being able to rememberwhat transpires in them or to reconstruct the text in one’s memory.
18Stein’s
literary idiom—its parodyof sequentialityand linearity, its subgrammaticaland subsyntactical ‘‘rules’’ of composition, its disavowal of nouns and thusof a conceptual apparatus—purposefully prevents the possibility of such areconstruction, forcing us to read the moment in which the text transpiresrather than to interpret or understand it.
This writing strategy allows Stein to focus many of her long poetic
texts, and the reader’s attention, away from the conventional nodes of writ-ing—content, plot, imagery, characters, and so on—and directly upon theprocess through which a text emerges and produces meaning. ‘‘Stanzas inMeditation,’’ a form of language meditation upon the unfolding of thepoetic text, places most emphasis upon the difference (and its erasure) be-tween the constituted text and the ‘‘space’’ within which the text is written,between the stanzas themselves and the event of writing:
For they can claim nothingNor are they willing to change which they haveOh yes I organise this. But not a victoryThey will spend or spell spaceFor which they have no shareAs so to succeed following.This is what there is to say.
19
In this one of the numerous moments of explicit self-commentary, ‘‘Stan-zas in Meditation’’ acknowledges that ‘‘what there is to say’’ is precisely theproto-linguistic space which words only spell and spend. In other words,this ‘‘semiotic’’ space, to borrow Kristeva’s term, is accessible only as tracedin words: It both marks (says) and spends itself in tracing upon words,grammar, and meaning.
20Even though Stein remarks ironically that she
(the I) organizes the text, what there is to say spells itself through the lan-
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guage play itself; it is not a matter of the victory of the subject or a unityof meaning but, conversely, of their rupture and displacement. The title ofStein’s text suggests the necessity and the difficulty of keeping in play thedistinction between text as object, with more or less determinable mean-ing/content, and the event of writing,with its unboundedness and repeatedruptures of constituted meaning. In ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’ the play, era-sure, and reemergence of this tenuous distinction make up the poetic textitself; with the text understood here as the tension between the disappear-ance of writing as the event and the constitution of poetry as an aestheticobject.
In the ‘‘Gertrude Stein Notice’’ from The Differend, Lyotard emphasizes
this tension in Stein’s texts, and, because of its irreducibility to narrativeframeworks or discursive commentary, correlates it with the Heideggeriannotions of the event, happening, and Being: ‘‘In Stein’s text, a phrase is onetime, an event, it happens.The anxiety that this will not start up again, thatBeing will come to a halt, distends the paragraphs.’’
21In an attempt to in-
scribe Stein in his Burkean-Heideggerian paradigm of the modern sublime,Lyotard seeks the motivation behind Stein’s literary idiom in the feeling ofanxiety and apprehension about Being, about the possibility of its comingto an end: not-being or death. However, I would argue that Stein’s preoccu-pation with the event follows a somewhat different trajectory, in which theanxiety about the event’s possible cessation gives way to the pleasure of itsoccurrence: ‘‘In the midst of writing there is merriment’’ ( YGS, ); or, in
‘‘Stanzas in Meditation’’: ‘‘They could have a pleasure as they chang e/…/
They will stop it as they lik e/…/L i k i n gi ta st h e y w i l l/…/N e a r l yo f t e n
after there is pleasure / In liking it now’’ ( YGS,) and ‘‘Should it be mine
as pause it is mine / That should be satisfying’’ ( YGS,). Apart from ex-
plicit references to pleasure and liking, Stein’s writing generates a sense ofenjoyment specifically through its patterns of repetition and its continu-ous undermining and putting in play of grammatical and logical rules. InStein’s texts, anxiety arises in the face of the impossibility of imposing thestrictures of understanding and interpretation upon them. When allowedto unfold in their own idiosyncratic way, Stein’s works can be more readilydescribed, as many critics have remarked, through playfulness, irony, plea-sure, perhaps even jouissance, reminiscent of écriture féminine.
22For even
though Stein subverts literary and linguistic conventions in order nearly tobring to words the unwritten or blank space from which language unfolds,her texts derive ironic,often perverse ‘‘pleasure’’ from the linguistic playandf r e e d o mt h e yi n d u c e .
23
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Bringing the poetic forward, onto the page, has to do in Stein with un-
doing conventional grammar and writing new, poietic, ‘‘grammars.’’ Stein
styles herself, especially through her ‘‘distaste’’ for and avoidance of nouns,as a grammarian in search of a grammarand a vocabulary fora thinking thatwould see the world in its ‘‘intense existence’’ as an event, rather than as astatic collection of things or entities: ‘‘I am a grammarian,’’ she explains inHow to Write (); section titles from How to Write, ‘‘Arthur A Grammar’’
and ‘‘A Grammarian,’’ and the title of the essay ‘‘Poetry and Grammar’’ beartestimony to Stein’s interest in playing with and undoing the grammati-cal by means of the poetic. In Stein’s work, the poetic becomes synony-mous with the intratextual space, so often evoked in ‘‘Stanzas in Medita-tion,’’ which, by withdrawing itself, both lets the text constitute itself andcontinuously holds open the possibility of its own reemergence and rup-ture of grammatical and discursive structures: ‘‘Or only once or not withn o ta so n l yn o to n c e/C o u l dt h e yc o m ew h e r et h e yw e r e/…/L e t t i n gonce make it spell which they do’’ ( YGS, ). Related indirectly to Hei-
degger’s thought of the event, Stein’s ‘‘language in meditation’’ exploresthe space of writing in which the text emerges. The sense of an always al-ready delayed grasp of the ‘‘immediacy’’ of the text, of the difficulty thatthought has attending to and ‘‘spelling’’ its own presence (‘‘Could theycomewhere they were’’) is produced in Stein’s work through the tension be-tween the structures of literary language and theircontinuallyerased poieticintratext.
In ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry,’’ Stein attempts to
bring this interplay directly to the surface of language: ‘‘For before let it be-f o r et ob eb e f o r es p e l lt ob eb e f o r et ob eb e f o r et oh a v et ob et ob ef o rb e f o r et ob et e l lt ob e… ’ ’( YGS, ). After the first paragraph of ‘‘Patriarchal
Poetry’’ announces Stein’s desire to unfasten and ‘‘carryaway’’ the structuresof patriarchal language, poetry, and culture, the second paragraph, quotedabove, begins to mark a space ‘‘before’’ words, before language has to spelland to be (as signification or representation), and thus to spell ‘‘to be.’’ Try-ing to retain the performative character of this linguistic occurrence, Steinavoids nouns and undoes grammatical strictures to give her language moreof a dynamic and an ever-shifting, protean, quality. The tireless repetitionand variation of the same phrases—for, before, let it, to be—combinedwith the absence of punctuation marks, creates the impression of languagein a melted state, free to combine and coalesce in ways unexpected, unac-ceptable, or even repressed by discursive practices. In order to spell whattranspires ‘‘before to be before to have to be’’—before language congeals
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into its historically and culturally authorized forms—Stein’s texts engage,as it were, in their own form of cryptography, in the continuous process oftransposing the space before words into the written text. As a form of intra-lingual or intratextual transposition, such writing aims to bring to wordsthe erased, unknown ‘‘language,’’ often sought by feminist critiques of aes-thetics—what DuPlessis provocatively calls the ‘‘Etruscan language.’’
24
‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ makes clear that it is in this poietic state or space
that language possesses its most disruptive potential, one that Stein’s textsinduce in order to subvert, put into question, and play with not only literaryor textual practices but alsowith the culture and society that have institutedthem. How to Write suggests that Stein’s reimagining of literary language
has as its specific purpose the development of a new mode of thinking thatwould overhaul traditional ways of conceiving the world in terms of rep-resentation and signification. In ‘‘Poetry and Grammar,’’ Stein proposes tosubvert literary practice, especially its predilection for nouns and their defi-nitional function, by means of writing as it were apart from substantivesand thus gaining access to the ‘‘intense existence’’ of things and the world:‘‘I had to feel anything and everything that for me was existing so intenselyt h a tIc o u l dp u ti td o w ni nw r i t i n ga sat h i n gi ni t s e l fw i t h o u ta ta l ln e c -essarily using its name.’’
25‘‘Intense existence’’ refers to things regarded in
terms of the event—as the ever-shifting matrix of relations reconstitutedinto the singularity of its occurrence—rather than as objects endowed withan essence and definable by means of nouns or substantives. The intensityStein has in mind describes the idiomatic character of each happening, theparticularity of its configuration and circumstances, which are lost in thegeneralityof linguistic naming. Existing intensely, that is, as always singularevents, things evade grammatical and semantic categories, and Stein’s writ-ing proposes to revise and adjust literary language accordingly. ‘‘Poetry andGrammar’’ offers then another way of formulating what in How to Write
takes the shape of the poetics of the event characteristic of the avant-garde’schallenge to aesthetics and focused on the unfolding of the world into lan-guage rather than on description, definition, and propositional statements.This difficult and elusive poetics has the task of finding what the last sectionofHow to Write describes as ‘‘a vocabulary for thinking.’’ This ‘‘vocabu-
lary’’ extends beyond lexical items and offers, in fact, a matrix for thinkingthe event that would be different from thinking in substantive forms: inconcepts, ideas, propositions, or, in short, in ‘‘nouns.’’
Reimagining thinking away from concepts and definitions, away from
its practices of nominalization/objectification, and toward its poetic form,
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makes Stein’s work central both to the avant-garde’s revision of aestheticsand to the critique of modernity and its cultural manifestations. The rele-vance of Stein’s writing is less in terms of specific representations, images,orcultural practices and more with respect to the very elements—linguistic,conceptual, iconic—that make up the order of representation. In Tender
Buttons, Stein’s implicit critique of the exclusion of domesticity and ordi-
nary language from high modernist art takes the form of undoing defini-tional and descriptive patterns in reference to everyday objects, utensils,meals, and living spaces.
26In ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry,’’ it is not the images of
femininity (with the exception of the sonnet) that Stein takes apart butinstead the discourse of patriarchal culture: objectification, definition, pos-session through cognition, erasure of difference, linear progression, propo-sitional forms of language. Stein often identifies these features with the‘‘poetry of nouns’’—the objectifying discourse characteristic of modernrationality—which, operating exclusively in terms of the name, the proper,property, identity, and substance, obliterates experience as event. Stein ap-pears to descend in her texts to this elemental level of engagement withlanguage in order to put her critique into play at the roots of language, as itwere, where it can most disconcert and call into question language practicesthat other radical discourses still have to follow, even if their ‘‘content’’ mayexplicitly disavow and criticize them. This elemental linguistic energy thatStein’s texts produce, her playfulness and irony, serve purposes that reachacross literary practice, into its cultural and social significance and into thecritical potential inherent in the social functions of art.
In ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry,’’ the declared literary, cultural, and, by extension,
philosophical aim is the resistance to patriarchal culture and its dominant‘‘poetry’’:
H o wd oy o ud oi t .Patriarchal Poetry might be withstood.Patriarchal Poetry at peace.Patriarchal Poetry a piece.Patriarchal Poetry in peace.Patriarchal Poetry in pieces.Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry at peace.Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry or pieces
of Patriarchal Poetry.
Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very prettily.
(YGS, )
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Ironically playing ‘‘piece(s)’’ against ‘‘peace,’’ Stein indicates the desire andthe possibility of withstanding Patriarchal Poetry and leaving it ‘‘in pieces’’rather than ‘‘in peace.’’ Although Stein’s poem makes clear that we have to‘‘return’’ to Patriarchal Poetry, since there is no easy exit from patriarchalforms of culture and writing, the trajectory of this return and the shape inwhich Patriarchal Poetry will find itself depends above all upon what kindof writing one performs and upon the use to which one puts language.
27
Works like ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ suggest that Stein’s literary practice
moves toward uncovering the link between elemental linguistic configura-tions and their potential to both identifyand explode the ‘‘patriarchal gram-mar’’ of the world: its matrix of the relations of difference, dependence,and power. As Stein indicates in How to Write, grammar holds the key to
the order of discourse and representation that the tradition seeks to repeatand perpetuate. The repetitiveness of grammar, its insistence on followingrules, reflects for Stein the cultural order that links stability with the figureof the fatherand with patriarchal power—the orderof sameness, repetition,and predictability that erases difference. Sections of ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’parody the connections between the orderliness of reason, military disci-pline, and the logical ordering of experience: ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry reason-ably. / Patriarchal Poetry which is what they did. / One Patriarchal Poetry. /Two Patriarchal Poetry. / Three Patriarchal Poetry. / One two three. / Onetwo three. / One Patriarchal Poetry. / Two Patriarchal Poetry. / Three Patri-archal Poetry’’ ( YGS, ) .T h i ss e n t i m e n ti sr e i n f o r c e di nt h el a s tl i n eo ft h e
text: ‘‘Patriarchal poetry and twice patriarchal poetry’’ ( YGS, ). Stein’s
linking of this repetitiveness and predictability of grammar with the centralrole of nouns in language suggests that the everyday itself is ‘‘patriarchal’’—structured and regulated by the hierarchical rules of representation that as-sure the dominance of the ‘‘more valuable’’ substantive forms of objectifiedknowledge.
At the same time, though, ‘‘Grammar is in our power’’ ( HTW, )—
it is open to revision, transformation, and rewriting, the operations thatStein’s texts continuously perform on their language and inherited conven-tions. Identifying the phallocratic complicity of traditional grammar withthe grammar of culture—‘‘Grammar is contained in fathe r… ’ ’( HTW,
)—Stein counters the hegemony of this ‘‘patriarchal poetry’’ by bring-ing to our attention the disruptive and transformative power of language,especially of its poietic space. In this gesture, she points out the pertinenceof the avant-garde revisions of aesthetics, even in their extreme, explora-tory articulations, to the critical and transformative forces within culture.
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Her writing allows us to identify the intersections of the ‘‘elementary’’ workthat avant-garde artists undertake on the discourses of art (for example,Malevich in painting, Khlebnikov, Beckett, or Białoszewski in literature)with the issues of power, domination, and cultural monopoly. One couldargue that it is texts like ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ that show that literature isnever, even at the apparent extreme of experimentation, purely formal or‘‘for its own sake’’ and demonstrate how such elemental and seemingly con-fined texts in fact recode cultural constructions through their very mode ofwriting.
‘‘Do Not Call It by the Name by Which It Is Known’’:
Rewriting the Everyday
Redefining literary practice, Stein’s project of dismantling and then re-
focusing language and writing through the prism of ‘‘naming withoutnouns’’ transforms our understanding of the ordinary. From The Making
of Americans to ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’ Stein explores and alters literary
perceptions of the everyday, often, as is the case in Tender Buttons, focusing
on its most mundane and feminized aspect—domesticity. As Stein herselfexplains, the strategy of stripping poetry of nouns results from the needto approach things in their everyday being, their ordinary, even mundane,particularity, rather than knowing and appropriating them objectively, sci-entifically, or philosophically. If for Heidegger the elusive occurrence ofthe event creates apprehension about the philosophical idiom and its cal-culative, systematizing tendencies, Stein’s idea of capturing in words the‘‘intense existence’’ of things inter twines avant-garde literary practice with
the exploration of ordinary language and its cultural conditions and func-tions. For Stein ‘‘intense existence’’ does not signify some elevated, poetizedstate—the aura of the extraordinary emanating from the art work—but,conversely, the quotidian, even the commonplace: ‘‘anything and every-thing.’’ However, rendering everydayness in terms of the event requires thesame kind of redefinition of the everydayand of ordinary language towhichStein’s work submits literary language. This revision gains urgency in viewof the fact that quotidian experience and its articulations in ordinary lan-guage are as much determined by the calculative rationality of the tech-nological and patriarchal culture as are the categorizations of experiencein specialized discourses, whether scientific, philosophical, or literary. ForStein, undoing the conventions of ordinary language is intertwined with thecritique of the patriarchal grammar of the everyday and becomes a requisite
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for recognizing and reinscribing in language the event structure of (every-day) experience.
Reading Stein’s revision of the everyday against Heidegger’s work on
poetic thinking and naming allows us to articulate better both the philo-sophical and the poetic contexts for Stein’s project of writing withoutnouns. This connection between the redefining of the poetic and the ordi-nary in both Stein and Heidegger has been often missed or at least de-
emphasized. It is rarely remembered that Heidegger’s turn to poetry con-
stitutes an alternative attempt to rethink everydayness, one that followsupon the realization that the philosophical categories that Heidegger ap-plied early on in his analysis of the everyday are themselves the result of thesame process of instrumentalization that has structured everyday reality.For Heidegger, poetic language, being the least instrumentalized genre ofdiscourse, is capable, therefore, of revising both the understanding of lan-guage and the practices of representation.
Heidegger counterposes the paradigm of experience at work in poetry
(Dichtung) —thinking as letting the world unfold and be in its difference
and otherness—to the technicization of experience in modern society andto its reflection in ordinary language and the calculative thought of socialsciences.The poietic, by which he refers not simply to literary language but,more broadly, to the unboundedness of experience approached as the event,is Heidegger’s wayof loosening the grip of technological rationalityon boththe organization and representation of being.What Heidegger calls ‘‘poeticthinking’’ involves, therefore, rethinking everyday experience and recog-nizing the performative singularity of the event—its poietic occurrence asopposed to its instrumental articulations within the regimen of calculativerationality. Because ‘‘metaphysical’’ thought, whether philosophical, scien-tific, or literary, is itself built upon the erasure of the ‘‘constant conceal-ment’’ ( BW,) at play in the everyday, it is incapable of rethinking the
ordinary outside of the parameters it has already internalized in its ownstructure of reasoning. To the extent that this rationality has determinedboth specialized and everyday forms of discourse, the regulative notions ofboth philosophical and ordinary thought—truth, representation, significa-tion—cannot register the ‘‘dissembling’’ in the ordinary. They overlook orerase its event-character, the fact that it constantly ruptures and overflowsthe forms of representation given to it—its ‘‘nouns.’’
In order to think the everyday as concealment and event, it is necessary
to disassemble its dominant representations in both formalized discoursesand ordinary speech as familiar, immediate, and common. This refigura-
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tion of the everyday is contingent upon the poietic, upon the ways in whichpoetic language exposes and undermines the restrictive conventionality ofboth specialized genres of discourse and ordinary speech. As Heidegger in-dicates in ‘‘The Way to Language,’’ ordinary or natural language is as muchimplicated in the metaphysical constructions of reality as the idiom of phi-losophy; the use of ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘ordinary’’ language provides only a falsesense of liberation from the strictures of calculative reasoning while comingnowhere near recognizing the concealment characteristic of the everyday:
For the ‘‘natural language’’ that perforce must be invoked here is positedfrom the outset as a language that, while not yet formalized, has alreadybeen ordained to formalization ….What is ‘‘natural’’ in language,whose
existence thewill to formalization finds itself compelled as it were to con-cede for the time being, is not experienced with a view to the originarynature of language. ( BW,)
Erased and nonexistent within the instrumental conception of languageas a means of representation and communication, this poietic moment oflanguage is capable of inscribing the event character of the everyday. Thispoietic moment both precedes and ruptures the formalizations of special-ized idioms and the apparent ‘‘informality’’ and ‘‘naturalness’’ of ordinarylanguage.
Similarly, Stein’s poetic writings employ ordinary language and everyday
situations, though often in a parodic way which Heidegger would probablyfind difficult to recognize and accept as poetry,
28in order to undermine
the literary representations of experience and to expose the ‘‘false’’ natu-ralness of the ordinary. The best example of this is Tender Buttons, where
Stein literally undoes ‘‘the poetry of nouns’’ and, parodying and deformingthe definitional mode of calculative thought, makes the quotidian signify‘‘intensely’’ in her journallike entries:
AL i t t l eB i to faT u m b l e r
A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of thesame color than could have been expected when all four were bought.This was the hopewhich made the six and seven have no use forany morep l a c e sa n dt h i sn e c e s s a r i l ys p r e a di n t on o t h i n g .S p r e a di n t on o t h i n g .
29
Set up as a catalogue of domesticity, a series of definitions of ordinary ob-jects, foods, and rooms, Tender Buttons immediately proceeds to dismantle
the categories and images according to which the everyday has been coded
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and constructed.30It is a text in which Stein attempts to ‘‘tenderize’’ nouns,
precisely in order to break away from the complacencyof ordinary languagewith the logic of representation and its ‘‘patriarchal grammar.’’
She defines the procedure for such writing as ‘‘looking at anything until
something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actualthing would come to be written’’ ( LA,). The entries turn out to be a
subversion of the very schema of definition, as they dispense with the gram-mar of predication and erase the boundaries between subjects and objects.As sentence fragments, repetitions, and gerunds take the place of ordinarysyntactic patterns, the focus of the text is transferred from the descriptionof objects in terms of their characteristics to a nexus of active, verbal re-lations in which things are sustained and exist. Instead of naming thingsand turning them into substantives, Stein unfolds fields of verbal energy inwhich things ‘‘exist intensely.’’ As she explains in ‘‘Poetry and Grammar,’’‘‘As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel whatis inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known. . . .And therefore and I say it again more and more one does not use nouns’’(LA,). The conspicuous limitation of the use of nouns in Stein’s later
texts and the prevalence of pronouns and modifiers with their indetermi-nate significations
31make the emphasis fall on the verbal and the adverbial
constructions, and thus on the event itself, on the happening or the occur-rence rather than on its subject or agent: ‘‘Once not. / Once and not. / Letit be remembered that at once and once. / Let it be remembered / It is notremembered’’ ( YGS, ).
Reinforced by the use of commonplace events and stories and the largely
quotidian vocabulary, this characteristic Steinian gesture redefines poeticlanguage and returns it to the everyday precisely by dismantling both thelanguage and the categories operative in the discourse of the ordinary. InTender Buttons, the definiteness and stability associated with things and
nouns, normally ensuring the clarity and efficiency of everyday commu-nication, give way to a chain of verbal associations which, as in the entryentitled ‘‘A Box,’’ undo the transparency of both ordinary objects and theirexpression in language: ‘‘Out of kindness comes redness and out of rude-ness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selec-tion comes painful cattle. So then the order is that a white way of beinground is something suggesting a pin and is it disappointing, it is not, it isso rudimentary to be analyzed and see a fine substance strangely, it is soearnest to have a green point not to red but to point again’’ ( TB,).
The ordinary appears to be as much a construct as the specialized dis-
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c o u r s e sf r o mw h i c hi tc l a i m si m m u n i t y ;i ti si nf a c tac o r o l l a r yo fm e t a -physical thought, determined by the same system of categories, values, andimages. The ordinary is never immediate, simple, or pure, because ordi-nary language already locks us into the noun, only on the obverse side ofit, as it were, from philosophical-scientific discourse. In other words, it isnot enough to return to ordinary language, to abandon the idiom of thepoetic tradition and reclaim the habits of everydaycommunication. Insteadit is necessary to disassemble both literary practice and the structures ofordinary language and to show their respective conventionalities. Osten-sibly returning to the discourse of the everyday, and repossessing its mostordinary and least ‘‘poetic’’ part—domesticity— Tender Buttons performs a
defamiliarization or demystification of the ordinary and its language, in anattempt to circumvent the oppositional logic that underlies the distinctionbetween the everyday and the extraordinary, between ordinary languageand specialized idioms.
To the extent that Stein’s critique of the noun has to do with singularity
and finitude, as opposed to the ‘‘infinite’’ envelope of generality, her idiomis often seen as underscoring the immediacy of the particular: ‘‘For Steinthe immediacy of language is not the immediacy of self-presence but theimmediacy of difference as measure.’’
32At the same time, this ‘‘immediacy
of difference’’ is, paradoxically, notable for its indeterminacy and abstract-ness. Mixing immediacyand concreteness with abstractness and indetermi-nacy, Stein manages to interweave and foreground both the singularizingand the generalizing tendencies of language, rendering immediate the ‘‘gen-eral’’ scope of the singularizing effects of difference. Making this tensionthe source of textual production, Stein inscribes into the very working ofher texts this par excellence philosophical problem. Her output then makesits own characteristic contribution to the problematic of the everyday andthe common: Stein’s everyday questions the ideas of common knowledgeand transparency of communication, and subverts them in the name of thefluid and heterogeneous character of experience and language.
One of the links between Stein’s work and feminist thought is precisely
this critique of common knowledge or knowledge of the commonplace,which are said to somehow return us to a sense of a ‘‘substantive,’’ even ifonly local, community.
33Stein’s articulation of the everyday explodes the
notion of common knowledge by turning her poetics of domesticity intothe arena for the problems of gender, femininity, and lesbianism. In hertexts the ordinary is precisely the locale where conflict, difference, other-ness, and oppression mark themselves. In other words, the local is the
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locus of difference: of sexual, gender, and language difference. ‘‘PatriarchalPoetry’’ associates the local with gender difference, with the feminine sub-verting the masculine (patriarchal) hegemony of sameness through the par-ody of its ‘‘mean’’ practices of erasing differences and imposing the unityof meaning: ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry is the same ./…/P atriarchal Poetry con-
nected with mean’’ ( YGS, ). ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ through the contrast be-
tween homosexual relationship and married life (‘‘Kiss my lips. She did. /Kiss my lips again she did’’ and ‘‘Lifting belly is so kind. / Darling wifie isso good. / Little husband would’’ [ YGS, and ]), emphasizes the differ-
ences in sexuality, the pleasures and dangers of lesbianism diverging fromthe dominant heterosexual culture: ‘‘Lifting belly is good. / Rest. / Arrest. /D oy o up l e a s em ./Id om o r et h a nt h a t ’ ’( YGS, –).
To maintain difference and heterogeneity on the ‘‘local’’ level, in Ten-
der Buttons, ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry,’’ the ordinary
and the domestic become a place for initiating a different language: thepoetic language ‘‘without names’’ as opposed to the language of communi-cation. It is as if Stein were trying to say that common knowledge is itself apatriarchal myth, one that erases the particularity of differences, especiallygender difference, not on the universal level but on the local one. Throughher idiomatic strategies of writing, her innovations and transformations oflanguage, Stein uses the ordinary and the domestic to undermine the mythof their familiarity and commonness. For in Stein’s texts it is in the com-monplace that difference, incomprehensibility, and indeterminacy arise. Inthese works, the ordinary vocabulary and everyday expressions lose theiraura of familiarity, as they become the very agent of critique and exposureto the unfamiliarand the other.To the extent that Stein’s is indeed the poet-ics of intense existence, the strangeness and unfamiliarity of her languageboth encode otherness and difference and keep the text open to them.
34
Without ever succumbing to the allure of the rhetoric of existentiality,
Stein’s work fits well in the context of the modern preoccupation with theordinary as a means of critiquing and displacing the traditional structuresand concerns of thought: Wittgenstein’s ordinary language games, Heideg-ger’s everydayness, Białoszewski’s poetryof the mundane, Cavell’s ordinary.Stein’s difference, though—the fact that the everyday in her work can beseen as both a poetic project and a feminist critique of culture—puts herwriting in a unique position to expose the cultural ramifications of the re-vision of the ordinary and to avoid the temptation to aestheticize it. It is in-deed vis-à-vis the issue of the ordinary and the common—the problematicthat seems to be gaining momentum as a response to the thought of differ-
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ence and multiplicity—that Stein’s poetics can be of particular significancefor current debates. If the ‘‘crisis’’ in philosophy—from Kierkegaard’s exis-tential concerns, Nietzsche’s ‘‘aesthetic’’ critique, to Heidegger’s thought ofeverydayness, Derrida’s exploration of the interplay between the singularand the general, and Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference—has been pre-cipitated by the issue of the everyday (existence) and the importation ofthe singular into the generalizing and universalizing idiom of thought, thenStein’s work, herattempts towrite the singularityof ‘‘intense existence,’’ canbe seen as a revision of the optics through which we approach the issue ofsingularity and commonality. Because of both her employment of ordinaryvocabulary and her express attention to language and meaning as event,S t e i n ’ st e x t sa p p e a rt ob eu n i q u e l yp r e d i s p o s e dt oe x p l o r et h es h i f t i n gl i n -guistic and textual boundaries between the singular and the general. Herextraordinary sensitivity to the workings of the differential matrix of lan-guage and her ability to free language from conceptual, grammatical, andsemantic constraints, coupled with her predilection for irony and playful-ness, give Stein the most room for distending language so that it can attendto the critical demands that the event of experience places upon thought.More than any other avant-garde writer, Stein shows that such a change inoptics is contingent upon linking the refiguration of the everyday with anavant-garde poetics, with a simultaneous undoing of literary idioms andordinary language.
‘‘A Measure of It All’’: Sexual Difference
and the Pleasure of the Text
The sense of the inessentiality of experience which lies behind the flu-
idity and indeterminateness of Stein’s language underscores the historicityof the everyday. Despite appearances of routine and ordinariness, every-day objects and occurrences in Stein’s texts remain open fields, withoutessences or names, indicating only the radius of their happening.These twofactors—the event structure of experience and the historicity of the every-day—determine the shape of Stein’s writings and, in effect, define the rela-tionship between art and experience. If Stein is ‘‘avant-garde,’’ in the sensemy study gives to this word, it is because her writings work out an alternativelinguistic matrix to reflect the ‘‘nameless’’ ways in which historicity opensup the constructedness of experience. The notorious fluidity of Stein’s lan-guage—fluidity that extends beyond the differential play of significationand the nonessential status of meaning to radical syntactic refigurations—
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is a mark of ‘‘intense relatedness’’ which characterizes experience for Stein.To reflect the intensity with which such relatedness de-essentializes thingsand incidents and emphatically renders them into events or happenings,Stein deforms the representational structures and aesthetic conventions byopening up the English syntax to various alternative and ‘‘ungrammatical’’configurations. As Judy Grahn puts it, Stein calls into question ‘‘our verybasic patterns of relationship, at the level of linguistic relationship.’’
35
The third element which informs Stein’s rethinking of experience as a
web of intense relations is sexual difference, and, in particular, the issueof feminine/lesbian identity. I mean ‘‘inform’’ here in a literal sense: sexualdifference forms Stein’s texts, constitutes their design and texture. ‘‘Lifting
Belly’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ show how femininity, no longer representedin accordance with patriarchal models of discourse but refigured throughlesbian relations, offers an alternative way of constructing the very idea ofrelationship. Placed outside the binary opposition between masculinity andfemininity, femininity in Stein becomes the basis for an economy of rela-tions that undercuts the binary logic of identity.The characteristic blendingof voices in ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ undoes the notion of the unity and discretenessof the self, and produces a text whose basic modality of relation reflects theintersecting and blurring of boundaries: a textual logic which departs fromthe norms of representation and becomes reminiscent of Irigaray’s poeticsof proximity.
Irigaray articulates her notion of proximity as an alternative mode of de-
scribing the relation of the self to the other, which eludes the dialectical sce-nario of identity formation. Irigaray’s objective is to reimagine the relationbetween self and other(s) in nonbinary terms, according to a feminine para-digm which, unlike the patriarchal logic of identity,would actually preservedifferences between the sexes instead offoreclosing or suppressing them in ahomosocial economy of experience. Since the oppositional logic of identityand difference serves to enforce the homogeneity and sameness of both ex-perience and language, only a radical reimagining of experience through aneconomy of proximity could break the hold that patriarchal discourse hason how we understand relation. Proximity, therefore, comes to signify theruptures effected within the logic of identity bya femininity which does notobey the rules of sameness and difference: ‘‘ S h ei sn e i t h e ro n en o rt w o . Rigor-
ously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. Sheresists all adequate definition. Further, she has no ‘proper’ name’’ ( TS,).
Refusing the properness of a name or a noun and the adequacy of definitionprescribed by representational logic, Irigarayan ‘‘she’’ undoes the clarityand
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comfort of oppositional and binary thinking: ‘‘As for woman, she touchesherself in and of herself without any need for mediation, and before thereis any way to distinguish activity from passivity ….T h u s ,w i t h i nh e r s e l f ,
she is already two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other’’(TS,). ‘‘She’’ folds the conceptual paradigms, which, obliterating sexual
difference, enable the production of a discursive regime that, through thesubtlety of dialectics and specular logic, infuses sameness into the hetero-geneous event of experience: ‘‘The same attractions and separations. Thesame difficulties, the same impossibility of making connections. The same…S a m e… Always the same’’ ( TS,).
What makes possible the avoidance of mediation, and hence of the in-
evitable dialectical assimilation, is the logic of proximity, which enables adiscourse which works without the familiar parameters of ‘‘either one ortwo.’’ The nonassimilational logic of ‘‘neither one nor two’’ suggests a dif-ferent mapping of relations, one no longer based on forging links betweendefinable and discrete elements. In ‘‘When Our Lips Speak Together,’’ thefigure of two lips speaking simultaneously and touching each other in anexchangewhich suspends both identityand difference signifies a space of re-lating which cannot be described within the representational regime of lan-guage. It is a modality of relating where neither identity nor difference mat-t e r ,t ot h ee x t e n tt h a to n ec a nn e v e ra s s e r te i t h e ro n eo rt h eo t h e r :t h ev e r yterms ‘‘one’’ and ‘‘other’’ cease to ‘‘mean’’ and be distinct. Instead, relatingtranspires as an event of proximity, according to a modality of exchangewhere economies of discrimination and definition have not yet taken hold:‘‘Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discriminations of identity, andthus all forms of property, impossible.Woman derives pleasure from whatisso near that she cannot have it, nor have herself. She herself enters into a
ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of iden-t i f y i n ge i t h e r .T h i sp u t si n t oq u e s t i o na l lp r e v a i l i n ge c o n o m i e s… ’ ’( TS,
). Nearness produces the pleasure of alterity, of ‘‘touching’’ (upon) theother without assimilating it, that is, it instigates the pleasure of the im-possibility of identity—of never completing or possessing oneself (or theother)—because of the other’s touch. Irigaray makes clear that proximityinvolves a rigorous yet fluid exchange, a ‘‘nearness so pronounced’’ that itrenders discrimination, in its many senses, impossible. It is a rigorous ex-change where one can neither possess oneself nor distinguish between one-self and the other. Yet proximity means also that one cannot assimilate orcancel the other, merge the one and the other into the same: It denies pos-sibility of representing human beings in terms of a plurality of discrete yet
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exchangeable, hence, the same, entities. In other words, the impossibilityof discrimination remains distinct from the possibility (or necessity) of in-discriminateness or sameness. The rigor Irigaray describes refers preciselyto a modality of relating which, without resorting to the terms of identityand difference, produces a relation of proximity.
The notion of proximity offers a feminist revision of the patriarchal/
metaphysical logic of relating.The nonassimilative and nondialectical econ-omy of relating epitomized in the figure of the two lips suggests, first andforemost, the possibility of a new syntax, a new ‘‘grammar’’ of thinking.Traces of the erasure of sexual difference and the exclusion of femininityinternal to the patriarchal economy of the same disturb the pretense ofachieving a total representation of experience and open the possibility oftransforming the masculine discourse from within. Indeed, Irigaray is quiteexplicit about the need to provide an alternative to the patriarchal grammarof discourse and representation, to construct, in other words, a new lan-guage: ‘‘If we don’t invent a language, if we don’t find our body’s language,it will have too few gestures to accompany our story’’ ( TS,). Articulated
in the argumentative layerof Irigaray’s texts, this demand is also reflected inthe styles and modalities of her writing, so evident for example, in ‘‘WhenOur Lips Speak Together’’ or L’oubli de l’air. My argument here is that a
similar bind between a nonbinary and nonassimilative model of relationand avant-garde poetic practice exists in the work of Stein. This link wouldmake Stein an often unacknowledged precursor to feminist revisions of thepatriarchal order of representation. More important, this insight helps usconstruct the context in which it becomes possible to flesh out in moredetail the links between sexual difference, lesbianism, and the radical tex-tuality of Stein’s works.
Since Stein’s relation to feminism and its cultural and political objec-
tives was complicated, if not conflicted, the debate about her place in thespectrum of feminist writing or about her importance for feminist critiqueis likely to continue for a long time. What should be emphasized in thesepolemics is the connection between sexualityand textuality in her work: theway in which her rethinking of relation on the basis of the proximity char-acteristic of lesbian sexuality feeds into how she constructs the matrix ofrelations that constitute ‘‘intense existence,’’ that is, her no longer ‘‘straight’’English or patriarchal grammar of the everyday. Objections to such an ap-proach, articulated, for instance, at the end of Stimpson’s ‘‘The Somagramsof Gertrude Stein,’’ have to be taken with a grain of salt: ‘‘[Stein’s] literarylanguage was neither ‘female,’ nor an unmediated return to signifiers freely
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wheeling in maternal space. It was instead an American English, with someFrench twists and a deep structure as genderless as an atom of platinum. Itcould bend to patriarchal pressures, or lash against them.’’
36The problem-
atic supposition of a deep structure aside, the claim to its genderless statuscasts Stein’s work as a recovery of a neutral core of language which can berefashioned and deployed according to one’s intentions. Yet there is noth-ing more striking about Stein’s writing then her attempt to play with anddeform the ‘‘deep structures’’ of American English, to unwork and de-orderthe principles of word order and syntactical relations.
The bind between metaphysical and patriarchal practices of represen-
tation and discursive structures is so deeply embedded in language thatit requires Stein to perform a kind of a playful rewiring of grammar: adouble move of unmasking the historically gendered linguistic practicesthat makes them repetitions of the same, and of recoding sexual differencesin ways that imprint themselves within language through a new grammarof writing. Stein’s works are clearlyabout finding,or inventing, language re-sources capable of undermining the metaphysical horizon of intelligibilityand questioning the accepted protocols of meaning. There is no a priorineed to regard either the structures called into question or the means em-ployed in the process of their dismantling in terms of a determinate andunchangeable essence: that is, as, in truth, either gendered or neutral. Yet,given the history of Western culture, Stein’s challenge to aesthetics andgrammar does become an anti-patriarchal gesture and the language strate-gies she employs, at least in ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry,’’ canbe described in terms of what Irigaray calls ‘‘feminine syntax.’’ As ‘‘Patri-archal Poetry’’ or the following excerpt from Everybody’s Autobiography in-
dicate, Stein seems well-aware of the patriarchal framework against whichshe has to work in order to literally bring into words the new economy ofrelating constitutive of intense existence: ‘‘The periods of the world’s his-tory that have always been the most dismal ones are the ones where fathersw e r el o o m i n ga n dfi l l i n gu pe v e r y t h i n g…p erhaps the twenty-first cen-
t u r y… will be a nice time when everybody forgets to be a father or to
have one.’’
37Both ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ make clear that
she also employs the subversive effects of a nonpatriarchal reading of sexualdifference and lesbian sexuality to unground the representational economyof experience.
Among Stein’s texts, ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ provides perhaps the most poignant
illustration of how the feminine paradigm of nonassimilative relation be-comes worked into the very texture of writing. As Chessman observes,
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‘‘Stein attempts both to call into her writing the female body and lovebetween women more directly than in Tender Buttons, and to avoid re-
producing the structures of representation in which the female has beenconstrained’’ ( PID,). Chessman suggests that, as an alternative to the
monological patriarchal structure of discourse, Stein adopts the model ofdialogic exchange. However, the idea of a dialogue implies an intersubjec-tive relation, an exchange between two discrete subjects willing to elabo-rate a common or shared space of interaction and intimacy. I would ar-gue that, in ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ Stein goes beyond dialogical conversation, both
conceptually and textually. The fabric of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ is not so muchwoven dialogically as it is constituted through a ‘‘pronounced’’ proximityof voice(s) that remain ‘‘neither one nor two,’’ and cannot therefore be de-scribed as either one voice or two distinctive voices in a dialogue. As Steinrefuses to give the sexual/textual intimacy underlying ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ stableor clear representations, she also makes the voice or voices involved in thecollaborative production of the text rupture the very texture of identityand dialogue. As the text indicates, ‘‘lifting belly’’ becomes quickly ‘‘mix-ing belly’’: ‘‘Mixing belly is so strange. / Lifting belly is so satisfying’’ ( YGS,
). The ‘‘confusion’’ of identity constitutes the basic text-generating de-vice in ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ suggesting not simply epistemological uncertaintyor representational crisis but a different modality of relating. The voice(s)remain indistinguishable because language in Stein arises out of the spaceof proximity free of the either/or logic, where relating takes place withoutthe discrimination of identity and property. The whole point of ‘‘LiftingBelly’’ seems to be the construction of a textuality within such an economyof exchange that would operatewithout a foundation in a determinate iden-tity or a representable difference, and, hence, without the requirement ofnouns, naming, and definition.The text arises out of the ‘‘touching’’ of onevoice against the other (itself?) and experience in it opens up through such‘‘intimacies’’ and exchanges, which remain unsystematizable and overflowthe parameters of the logic of identity.
Taking our cue from Ida,we can describe ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ in terms of a
characteristically ‘‘twinned’’ textuality.The echoes of this strategyof writingcan be found in other Stein texts, notably Many Many Women andIda.In
Many Many Women, after a series of repeated statements designed to con-
firm the existence of certain and discrete identities: ‘‘Each one is that onethe one that one is,’’ Stein suddenly reverses her position and demonstratesthat ‘‘one’’ is never without the ‘‘other’’: ‘‘That one being that one was oneneeding something,was one needing something to have been that one.That
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one being that one was one needing something to be that one. That one was
not that one ’’ (emphasis mine).38Logically speaking, the last sentence is a
contradiction. It comes as a sharp counter to the long, repetitive sequencesin which Stein parodies the patriarchal penchant for the reiteration of thesame. The text first plays along, albeit ironically, with the obsessive need toconfirm and reconfirm the possibility of ‘‘that one,’’ of a self-contained andsecure identity, only to defy (patriarchal) logic and indicate the possibilityof a nonassimilative relation where ‘‘that one is not that one.’’ Stein suggeststhat difference is neither assimilable nor representable, and, as such, can-not constitute the foundation for determinate identity. On the contrary,difference continuously ‘‘twins’’ identity, splits it up, making it neither onenor two. This alternative paradigm of relation is indicated already in thetext’s title, as Many Many Women exposes the impossibility of the patri-
archal ideal of a totalized representation of ‘‘the woman.’’ The notion of‘‘twinned’’ identity, ceaselessly recoded through the proximity of the other,frames also Stein’s late novel Ida:‘‘There was a baby born named Ida. Its
mother held it with her hands to keep Ida from being born but when thetime came Ida came. And as Ida came, with her came her twin, so there shewas Ida-Ida.’’
39O p e n i n gt h en o v e l ,t h es c e n eo fI d a ’ sb i r t hp r e s e n t sap a r a –
digm of the origin of identity. Ida’s identity does not come from a securefoundation of self-recognition, which would guarantee the presence of astable and contained self. Instead, her identity is always already twinned—it comes into being through the proximity of its ‘‘twin,’’ neither simply onenor two. The hyphenated and doubled name indicates the inflection of theself’s mirroring and replication in the other. This rupture of the protocolof self-recognition marks the extreme nearness involved in the relation ofIda-Ida. As I already indicated, this type of proximity underscores also thepeculiarities of the textuality of ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ whose rhythm is predicatedupon the ambivalent exchange between neither one nor two voices.
Unlike Tender Buttons or ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’ ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ com-
prises mostly full and regular sentences, clauses, or phrases.The use of rela-tively conventional, for Stein, syntax enhances specifically the sequencingand the interplay between the lines composing the text. Most of the poemis written in a way that allocates each separate and usually short line to onesentence or phrase, presumably spoken by one voice. Because most lines arequite short, the text creates the image of a continuous shuttling betweenpoints (voices) that remain indistinct and ungraspable. This constructionunderscores the fact that what matters in the poem is how the lines enterinto exchanges with one another: The text focuses itself on the interlink-
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ing of the voices, constantly raising the question of whether it is ‘‘spoken’’by one voice in conversation with itself or by two or more voices: ‘‘Liftingbelly. / What was it I said. / I can add that. / It’s not an excuse. / I do not likebites. / How lift it. / Not so high. / What a question. / I do not understanda b o u td u c k s ./D on o ty o u ./Id o n ’ tm e a nt oc l o s e ./N oo fc o u r s en o t ./D e a rm e .L i f t i n gb e l l y ./D e a rm e .L i f t i n gb e l l y ’ ’( YGS, ). The way this
typical passage is constructed leaves various interpretations open. At first,it seems that we have here one voice conversing with itself, reflecting an in-teriority of consciousness which associates freely and asks itself questions—in a word, a characteristic modernist literary practice. It could be the case,however, that the text comprises several discretevoices, each thinking alongdifferent lines. Finally, the passage can be read, especially toward its end,as an exchange between two voices. It is worth noting that the repetitionwhich closes this quote is a rare instance in ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ as though sug-gesting that Stein deliberately avoids the effects of mirroring and speculardialectics which often lead to totalization.
For the most part, ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ appears to be a mixture of sometimes
anxious and tense, sometimes very ordinary, but also joyous and pleasur-able, exchanges between twovoices. In the first part of the text, the interplaybetween the voices focuses on the tension between describing and praising‘‘lifting belly’’ and a clear resistance to even talking about it: ‘‘Lifting bellyis so satisfying. / Do not speak to me. / Of it. / Lifting belly is so sweet’’(YGS, ). The tabooed and unrepresentable subject of lesbian relations is
t h u so p e n l yi n t r o d u c e db yS t e i na st h es i t eo fc o n fl i c ta n dt h ec o n t e s t a t i o nof the social and discursive spaces of representation. In the subsequent sec-tions of ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ as the proximity between voices and the intimacyof exchanges intensifies, this conflict gives way to sexual and textual plea-s u r e ,t ot h er e l i s h i n go fl i f t i n gb e l l y :‘ ‘ L i f t i n gb e l l yf o rm e ./Ic a nn o tf o r g e tthe name. / Lifting belly for me. / Lifting belly again. / Can you be proudo fm e ./Ia m ./T h e nw es a yi t ./I nm i r a c l e s ’ ’( YGS, ).
One of the ‘‘miracles’’ of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ is that thevoices register without
‘‘exposing’’ the speakers, that is, the speakers remain unseen or unknown,never firmly distinguished or graspable in the rapid concatenation of lines.What this strategy questions is the priority allotted to visibility, or, to putit more precisely, the reliance of experience on vision, or on knowledge andunderstanding gained through seeing. This is by now a very familiar ges-ture of questioning the metaphysical and patriarchal privileging of seeingover other senses, an interrogation of the familiar trope equating visibilitywith knowledge, possession, and power. In Stein, this gesture of subverting
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the priority of seeing is produced through various forms of undercuttingliterary and grammatical conventions; in other words, rather than forminga thematic concern, it structures her textual practice.The fact that her textsare staged as ‘‘events’’ that exhaust themselves in the moment of readingunderscores precisely the impossibility of knowing or ‘‘possessing’’ themthrough interpretation. All these strategies can be factored into how Stein’swritings unwork the aesthetics of seeing, based on various forms of percep-tion reflected in the structure of representation and textual practices. Onecould say, therefore, that Stein’s works are not scopic, but use other sensesas models for their textuality. Certainly they undercut the prevalent scopiceconomy and its ways of signifying experience and sexual difference.
InThis SexWhich Is Not One, Irigarayassociates the undermining of visi-
bility and scopic economies with feminine pleasure: ‘‘Woman takes plea-sure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into a dominantscopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to bethe beautiful object of contemplation’’ ( TS,). And later: ‘‘Her sexuality,
always at least double, goes even further: it is p l u r a l …. Is this the way
texts write themselves/are written now?’’ ( TS,). Feminine sexuality and
pleasure exceed the order of visibility: Within the scopic economy they canonly signify through absence and, as Freud illustrates it, mean nothing. Inorder to give voice to this pleasure, a new mode of writing, a new type oftextuality is necessary. It seems hardly a coincidence that ‘‘Lifting Belly’’is about pleasure, about feminine and lesbian pleasure articulated throughtouch and hearing rather than through seeing: ‘‘Lifting belly is a miracle. / Ia mw i t hh e r ./L i f t i n gb e l l yt om e ./V e r yn i c e l yd o n e ./P o e t r yi sv e r yn i c e l ydone. / Can you say pleasure ./Ic a ne asily say please me. / You do. / Lift-
ing belly is precious’’ ( YGS,). Stein explicitly links the pleasure of sexual
intimacy (‘‘lifting belly’’) with textuality: ‘‘Poetry is very nicely done.’’ Theparallel between sexuality and textuality suggests that Stein’s text is basedon touching, its ‘‘sensible’’ texture is formed of senses other than seeing.
This is perhaps why both sound and grammatical junctures between
words and phrases play such a crucial role in Stein’s writing. Phonetic playsand the manner in which words link with and ‘‘touch’’ each other are clearlyinstances of pleasure: playful, ironic, and ‘‘belly well’’ at the same time.Since they so obviously undermine the ‘‘patriarchal poetry’’ of conventionalgrammar and ordered expression, these instances express textual pleasure,which in the case of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ is quite explicitly recoded as femininepleasure. A challenge to ‘‘seeing,’’ Stein’s language is one of listening and‘‘tactile’’ effects, which produce a different grammar, as suggested in How
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to Write, excessive and uncontainable within patriarchal grammar. This ex-
cess marks a reconceptualization of the textuality of experience: a movea w a yf r o mas c o p i ce c o n o m yt o w a r dat a c t i l eo n e .A sC h e s s m a np u t si t ,‘ ‘ Acontinuum emerges between a bodily intimacy and the ‘composing’ of thisw o r k…t h el i t eral touching of belly to belly enters into the writing’’ ( PID,
).
In ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ the female body—neither one nor two—and the les-
bian intimacy of touching bellies, give shape to the rhythm of writing, therhythm which operates on the principle of plurality: a plurality of the bodyand pleasures that, as Irigaray puts it, are ‘‘already two—but not divisibleinto one(s).’’ ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ continuously undercuts the idea of distinguish-able voices which could be ordered into a comprehensible conversation andf o l l o w st h er h y t h mo fp r o x i m i t i e sp r o d u c e db yt h et e x t .I tl i n k sS t e i n ’ sfamiliar textual practices from Tender Buttons or ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’
where objects and occurrences lose the shape of entities and becomewebs ofshifting relations, with the figuration of the female body. The link betweenthe proximities of the body and the nearness to the other(s) characteris-tic of the event structure of experience suggests that the female body andfeminine pleasure become the figures of Stein’s avant-garde poetics, andthe signs of perhaps the most radical ‘‘feminist’’ exposition of a deeply em-bedded correspondence between patriarchal representations of sexual dif-ference and the conventions of grammar and writing. At the same time, thispronounced cross between textuality and sexuality draws attention to thepossibility in Stein of articulating the body in terms of an event, radicallymarked by the historicity of its happening.
Thinking of the body as event, I want to call into question both the idea
that the body is a mute, passive substratum of experience and the notionthat it is entirely a historical product of social and discursive construction.Instead, I see the body in Stein as shaped by the event structure of experi-ence, influenced and effected by the ‘‘touching’’ of the other(s).The body in‘‘Lifting Belly’’ emerges and reshapes itself constantly through interactionwith the other, through events of pleasure, conflict, anxiety, celebration. InStein’s work, the event can be approached as signifying nonessentialism inthinking the relation between the sexes. It writes the body beyond the oppo-sition between biological essentialism and social construction, suggesting amuch more fluid and highly historicized bodily morphology. One momenti n‘ ‘ L i f t i n gB e l l y ’ ’i n d e e ds e e m st ob ea ni r o n i cc o m m e n ta b o u tt h ed e s i r efor essence: ‘‘Lifting belly waits splendidly. / For essence. / For essence too’’(YGS, ) .T h eq u e s t i o ni m p l i c i ti n‘ ‘ F o re s s e n c e ’ ’g e t sas a r c a s t i ca n s w e r ,
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which grants, somewhat reluctantly, a place to the desire for essences butclearly denies it priority. In the context of Stein’s preoccupation with ‘‘in-tense existence,’’ this curt exchange acquires considerable importance as atypically playful revision of the thought of essence into the thinking of theevent. The touching and mixing bellies, sentences, and phrases of ‘‘LiftingBelly’’ make the body the space of the inscription of experience as event,a text which ‘‘embodies’’ the historicity of happening. Apart from the his-torical character of the various cultural constructions of the body, we canalso talk about the historicity of the body in terms of the body itself beingan event which transpires according to an economy of proximity: as neitherone nor two. Already double—both past and future—but never divisibleinto one(s), the body in Stein is marked by the futurity of its exchangeswith exteriority, by the proximity to the other(s) marked in the relationsthat shape it without ever allowing it to grasp itself as ‘‘one.’’ This activesense of the body as event shaping itself through proximity to the other(s)is emphasized by the quick turns and rejoinders characteristic of ‘‘LiftingBelly.’’ The different modality of relating constitutive of the body is alsomarked by the suspension of conventional syntax which makes it difficultto grammatically order and parse long sequences of ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’:‘ ‘ L e th e rb el e th e rb el e th e rb et ob et ob es h yl e th e rb et ob el e th e rb et obe let her try’’ ( YGS, ). If we accept this ‘‘pleasurable’’ mapping of the
body as the source of the textual morphology of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ or ‘‘Patriar-chal Poetry,’’ then we have to agree with Meese that Stein is indeed insistentabout her lesbianism, though most often in subtle and textually complexways. For Stein, textual figurations of sexuality require radical displacementin the conventions of language, which, in their ordinary and everyday ex-pressions, duplicate the links between patriarchal representations of sexualdifference and the clarity and orderliness of grammar.
The textuality of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ is a counter to what Stein calls ‘‘patriar-
chal poetry,’’ because it presents a dynamic of the relation between self andother outside the dialectics of recognition and assimilation. It constructs a‘‘nonpatriarchal poetry,’’ a poetics which subverts the patriarchal economyof meaning and identity based on the paradigm of visibility as knowledge,and substitutes for it the model of relations based on the morphology ofproximity. ‘‘Between women’’ could be taken, then, as a model for non-patriarchal relations of difference and exchange, for an alternative mappingof sexuality. In her writings, Irigaray introduces proximity as the figure forfemale sexuality and pleasure and, later, extends this notion to open thepossibility of a nonpatriarchal representation of sexual difference marked
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by futurity and transformation. Her phrase ‘‘neither one nor two’’ becomesa critique of the identity paradigm, a questioning of differentiation anddialectical assimilation between consciousness and self-consciousness, theself and its other. The impossibility of ever being ‘‘one’’ and the ‘‘same’’illustrated by the two lips indicates a different paradigm of relations be-tween women: woman to (her)self, lover-lover, mother-daughter, sister-sister. What matters for Irigaray is that, as the figure for proximity, thelips allow us to think femininity and relations among women througha discursive practice that avoids the specular assimilations characteristicof metaphysical discourse. Beginning with the refiguration of autoeroticsand homoerotics outside the homosocial logic, Irigaray extends the ‘‘non-economy’’ of proximity to delineate the structure of sexual difference in afashion that would avoid collapsing it into the language of the same. Thisremodeled sexual difference proposes an ethics of sexual difference whichcuts across homo- and heterosexuality, circumventing binary oppositionsand maintaining differences through proximity ‘‘so pronounced’’ that dif-ference remains, even without discriminations of identity and property.
Even if there is no such progression in Stein’s writings, the textual mor-
phology of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ with its encoded lesbian sexuality does linkup with Stein’s revision of language and sexual difference in ‘‘PatriarchalPoetry.’’ Chronologically, ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ follows ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ ex-tending the idea of tactile textuality to reconfigure female sexuality and,with it, sexual difference. As much is at least suggested in ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’when Stein asserts that ‘‘Lifting belly is so a measure of it all’’ ( YGS, ).
Stein’s trope for the proximity of the other, lifting belly is also her figurefor the measure of experience, articulated in ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ through theevent of multiple and fluid exchanges. As the measure of experience, ‘‘lift-ing belly’’ is closely linked with historicity and the refiguration of every-dayness. Both ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ and ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ are about everydayexperiences: weather, current events, eating habits, emotional and sexualintimacy, and so on.Yet this very ‘‘comforting’’ everyday milieu is also ‘‘sub-versive,’’ because it questions patriarchal versions of experience and iden-tity, and, in the case of ‘‘Lifting Belly,’’ models the everyday experience onlesbian sexuality. Fashioning the body and the intimacy of sexual relationsin terms of event, Stein combines her refiguration of the ordinary with therethinking of experience and sexuality. The end of ‘‘Lifting Belly’’ signalsthis intersection, linking the moment of sexual release with writing and thej o yo fh a p p e n i n g :‘ ‘ L i f t i n gb e l l ye n o r m o u s l ya n dw i t hs o n g ./…/I nt h emidst of writing. / In the midst of writing there is merriment’’ ( YGS, ).
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The intersections between the three factors—experience as event, re-
vision of the ordinary, and sexuality—illustrate the complexity of Stein’spoetics of the event. It is a poetics informed by a desire to inscribe in lan-guage an attentiveness to the excessive ‘‘inessentiality’’ of happening, andto recode writing in ways that allow for the ‘‘unsuspected’’ pleasures ofcircumventing linguistic and literary conventions and expectations. Fromthe perspective of this poetics, even literary approaches to language appear‘‘ordinary,’’ ripe for a subversive play that attempts to tease out an alter-native matrix of thinking, that is, of thinking (like) ‘‘lifting belly’’: ‘‘I dothink lifting belly’’ ( YGS, ). I have illustrated some of the linguistic and
textual parameters and effects of Stein’s practice of ‘‘thinking lifting belly,’’identifying in them parallels between the revision of writing and experi-ence. Fleshing out the importance of this revision for the critique of moder-nity depends on a broader negotiation of the avant-garde in the context ofHeidegger’s and Irigaray’s radical rethinking of experience. Without suchnegotiations, Stein can be all too easily declared a writer of a disembodiedtextual space, with no obvious or immediate link to ‘‘external’’ reality or ex-perience; and this apparent disconnection only intensifies with Stein’s best,though also more difficult and experimental, texts. Mycontention is exactlythe opposite: It is precisely in texts such as ‘‘Patriarchal Poetry’’ or ‘‘Stanzasin Meditation’’ that Stein’s recoding of the structure of experience through‘‘subgrammatical’’ linguistic operations is most convincing and successful.
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5. History and Revolution
Khlebnikov’s Futurist Revisionof Modern Rationality in Zangezi
The work of Velimir Khlebnikov (–), still known outside Russiaprimarily in the Slavist circles,
1remains one of the most interesting ex-
amples of the characteristic avant-garde confluence between poetic/literaryinvention and fascination with science and technology. Much less knownthan Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov moved in the same avant-garde circles andwas often regarded as the most important poet to come out of the futur-ist movement in Russia. This opinion finds its justification in the versa-tility and inventiveness of Khlebnikov’s writings as well as in their extraor-dinary range of interests: from ornithology, geology, and mathematics tohistory and mythology.What makes Khlebnikov particularly important formy study of the affinities between avant-garde and technology is the factthat no other modernist poet is more seriously or explicitly engaged with apoetic project that relies so heavily on correlating poetic language and thescientific, mathematical idiom.This parallel is often echoed in Khlebnikov’scall for a ‘‘science of word creation’’: ‘‘If it turned out that there were lawsgoverning the simple bodies of the alphabet, identical for a whole family oflanguages, then a new universal language could be constructed for the entirefamily of peoples who spoke them—an express train bearing the mirror-ing words ‘New York-Moscow.’ ’’
2The poetic possibilities of language, the
new spaces they open for rethinking experience, depend upon understand-ing the inherent rationality of scientific conceptuality and its formative in-
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fluence upon the very conditions of representation and legibility of mod-ern experience. The intensity of Khlebnikov’s mathematical and biologicalstudies, his continued interest in explaining history through mathematicalequations and numbers, is perhaps best reflected in Zangezi’s monologuein Plane Six of Zangezi: A Supersaga in Twenty Planes: ‘‘Numbers, eternal
numbers, sound in the beyond; / I hear theirdistant conversation. Number /Calls to number; number calls me home.’’
3
In his obituary after Khlebnikov’s death, Mayakovsky wrote that Khleb-
nikov was almost impossible to read, not a ‘‘poet for consumers’’ but apoet for producers, for other writers.
4As Cooke suggests in his important
English language study, Velimir Khlebnikov, this less than congenial ap-
praisal from another futurist set the tone for an early reception of Khleb-nikov, known at the time mostly for his neologistic poem ‘‘Incantation byLaughter’’ and for his invention of beyonsense (zaumniy) language and
verse. With the publication of his Collected Works between and ,
many misconceptions about Khlebnikov’s work were dispelled, but it isonly more recently, especially in the s and s, that his writings havebegun to receive steady critical attention. Cooke’s book-length study andthe continuing publication by Harvard University Press of the translationof Khlebnikov’s Collected Works, which has made accessible a large and
growing body of Khlebnikov’s work, mark a critical change in the English-language reception of Khlebnikov.
Khlebnikov was a leading figure of Russian futurism, arguably its most
important poet, and a poetic and intellectual inspiration for the most radi-cal strand of Russian literary modernism known as cubo-futurism. Thecubo-futurists were a group of writers and artists which, in addition toKhlebnikov, included at various times the three Burliuk brothers (David,Nikolay, and Vladimir), Kruchonykh, Mayakovsky, Livshits, and Kamen-sky. The group first became known as Hylea, the Greek name of the partof Russia where the Burliuk family lived. Among its most important pro-grammatic collections and publications were Trap for Judges (), ‘‘A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste’’ (), and two short manifestoes, ‘‘The Wordas Such’’ and ‘‘The Letter as Such,’’ both co-authored by Khlebnikov andKruchonykh, who used the opportunity to call for a new art of writing inwhich a poem could be based entirely on one word.
5Khlebnikov’s poetry,
especially his emphasis on the word as such, was a response to the aestheticof Russian symbolism and its preoccupation with what transcended theword.What started as contributions to early futurist publications, becamea steady stream of poems, stories, plays, theoretical writings, mathematical
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calculations, and so-called supertales,which all culminated in Khlebnikov’slate masterpiece, Zangezi, printed in , shortly before his death. This
often ironic text, constructed in twenty language planes, presents Khlebni-kov’s theories of language, time, and history through his alter ego Zangezi.Because of Zangezi ’s importance in Khlebnikov’s oeuvre, its almost para-
digmatic status in relation to the characteristic futurist exploration of thepossibilities of language and signification, I make this text the linchpin ofmy analysis.
Dissatisfied with the label ‘‘futurism,’’ in part at least because of its asso-
ciation with Italian futurism, Khlebnikovcoined his own alternative, a Rus-sian neologism budetlyanstvo (from the word budet, it will be), a kind of a
domain of ‘‘what will be.’’ This region of budetspecifies a future time which
Khlebnikov imagines in his many ‘‘prophetic’’ texts about radio, future lan-guage, architecture, and so on, but it also refers, I suggest, to a certainfuturity inscribed in the structure of experience, to a nonsynchrony whichmarks language’s relation to meaning and presence. It is through the wordcreation and the exploration of the possibilities for ‘‘beyonsense’’ meaningin Russian that Khlebnikov’s writings open this space of futurity within thepresent. These efforts to open, and preserve as ‘‘beyonsense,’’ this futurityof experience must be read together with Khlebnikov’s preoccupation withscience and mathematical calculations, and yet also as a challenge to thetechnical organization of being in modernity.
Khlebnikov’s extravagant and idiosyncratic claims about mathematical
laws of historical development, repeatedly voiced in his essays and theoreti-cal writings, lead critics like Jean-Claude Lanne to read his work in termsof an ultrarationalist language: a poetic/literary language which, using sci-entific knowledge, becomes more rational than science itself.Together witha mathematical conception of time and history, such a language discoversthe essence of rationality itself.
6It is indeed possible to interpret Khlebni-
kov’s notorious quest for a numerical conception of history and for a poeticlanguage capable of rendering it in new words and syntax as fully explain-ablewithin the scientistic, techno-rational paradigm of modern experience.Khlebnikov’s inquiry would be, then, largely in agreement with Picabia’sstatement about the technological soul of modern art, which projects artas a reflection and development of the technological ‘‘essence’’ of being.However,when the emphasis is placed solelyon rendering history in mathe-matical formulas and the companion procedure of compressing languageinto a system of ‘‘most significant’’ syllables and letters of high semantic andcultural density, it is all too easy to forget Khlebnikov’s interrogation of the
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very limits of scientific rationality. These limits are tested and transgressedby a poetic language that specifically refigures the historicity of experienceas event beyond the rational. As the Russian term
заумsuggests, this is an
event beyond the parameters of sense and established meaning. Focusingon one of Khlebnikov’s last texts, Zangezi, I will argue that this other, and
sometimes self-ironic, strand, works against the overtly scientific and fre-quently pedagogical posture Khlebnikov assumes. As the ultimate prophet-scientist of nearly mythical proportions, Khlebnikov’s poet finds himselfin conflict with the uncontrollable, singular contours of experience, whichhe tries to master through poetic formulas, paradoxically approximating intheir scientific exactness the power of magical incantation. It is this con-testation over the poetic space between these two directions in his writingsthat makes Khlebnikov’s work so important to the question of poetry’s rolein understanding experience in modernity.
Perhaps the most poignant indication of this tendency to transgress
rationalityand invert it against itself is Khlebnikov’s description of the tem-porality of experience as an event by reference to an ‘‘impossible’’ num-berÖ
−, a number which indicates a temporal structure beyond the binary
opposition of presence and absence and points to a (non-)time that fallsoutside the scope of representation. This peculiar ‘‘nonorigin’’ dislocatesexperience, rendering it noncontemporaneous with itself. Because of thisnoncoincidence, experience finds itself always ‘‘out-of-joint’’ with the veryspace of representation. This form of experience, which both isandis not
representable, or becomes representable only as the impossibility of its ownpresentation, provides the fold or the scaffolding (
основа ) for thought—
the space of visibility where representation, even rationality itself, as a Rus-sian critic, Duganov, suggests, become possible.
7Against the idea of ratio-
nality and the speculative matrix of experience, the number Ö− functions
as the preeminent figure of the beyonsense language ( заум,zaum)a tw o r k
in Khlebnikov’s writings. I read it as the sign of a poetic rethinking of ex-perience that reaches beyond (
за/za) reason ( ум/um) toward a poietic, ‘‘be-
yonsense’’ configuration of experience. In order to open language to thepossibility of experience that unfolds as ‘‘beyonsense,’’ without at the sametime collapsing beyonsense into the irrational, I link the exploration of thepoietic (beyonsense) dimension of language with the historicity of eventand its political implications. In this context, I propose a different readingof Khlebnikov’s engagement with mathematics: as the sign of employingthe resources of science, and its paradigms of (re)presenting experience andbeing,within a poetic enterprise that opens an alternative event temporality
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of experience. Seeking parallels between scientific imagination and poeticwriting, Khlebnikov’s language inscribes what Heidegger calls the technicmodality of revealing—in which experience transpires as the ordering ofthe world into a standing-reserve at the willful disposal of the technologi-cal subject—into another ‘‘meaning’’ of experience, whose sense becomeslegible only at/as the limit of signification.
It is this tension between the idea of technology as the overall framework
of Khlebnikov’s work—a feature generally characteristic of futurist art—and an alternative interpretation whi ch sees techno-scientific rationality as
complicated and questioned by Khlebnikov’s poetry, that I would like to ex-plore here, placing a particular emphasis on the link between Khlebnikov’sunderstanding of language and historicity. I want to develop the links be-tween zaum and the conception of the event which takes shape inseparably
from language: that is, as both articulated, ‘‘presented,’’ into words anddislocated beyond the constancy of presence by this articulation. This ap-proach underscores the importance of the event for Khlebnikov’s concep-tion of historyand revolution, and allows us to think the historical relevanceof the poietic, or zaumniy, moment of experience. I understand historicity
here in terms of a fold of history, or as the ‘‘space-time’’ of historical occur-rences. It instantiates a dislocating movement of historialization, throughwhich being becomes history, and, as being, remains incompatible with theorder of representation. Historicity both makes it possible to read being ashistory and does not allow history to be conflated with the field of experi-ence. In the context of Khlebnikov’s writings, the task of poetry is to thinkhistoricity ‘‘beyonsense,’’ that is, as located at the limits of representationand the rational-calculative organization of being. Always on the edge ofhistory, historicity both inaugurates the event and withdraws, as it were, tothe reverse side of what becomes present and meaningful. I read Khlebni-kov’s conception of zaum as a form of the aesthetic critique of modernity,
in which his linguistic innovations amplify the effects of historicity withinsyntax and semantics. They reinscribe the ‘‘translation’’ of experience intolanguage by making historicity into the verso of sense, into a beyonsensefold of signification.
It is in the context of beyonsense that one should read Khlebnikov’s ‘‘fu-
turian’’ visions and consider how in his poetic experiment the very possi-bility of thinking future as revolution hinges upon historicity. One of theeffects of Khlebnikov’s decomposition of words into multiply signifying,often semantically overdetermined, syllables and letters is the inscriptionof noncoincidence and openness into the structure of experience. This in-
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scription is also reflected in how he subsequently recombines these lin-guistic elements into a different pattern of legibility. As a result, experi-ence loses ‘‘substance’’ and becomes detached from the constancy of thepresent, extracted from the uniform continuum of time.The way Khlebni-kov conditions legibility in linguistic noncoincidence and difference bothcomplicates the modernist gesture that renders interpretation problematicand locates in historicity the moment of the inscription of the future withinthe present. Khlebnikov’s work allows us to clarify the relation between thehistoricity of the event and the possibility of transformation or revolution,that is, between an absence or a nonpresence around which the present isalways configured and the opening to the new. His writing both projectsitself into the future, proposing a new or utopian vision of what is to come,and investigates the very conditions of futurity opening itself within thedisjunctive structure of experience.
I argue that Khlebnikov’s conception of futurianity (budetlyanstvo) relies
specifically upon understanding experience as opening to a future which ismarked within the present as the noncoincidence of the event. This poieticopened-endedness of the event unfolds the space of prolepsis, where think-ing the future becomes possible in the first place. As Kristeva remarks, Rus-sian futurism ‘‘paid strong attention to the explosion of the October Revo-lution. It heard and understood the Revolution only because its present wasdependent on a future.’’
8The futurist poetic language works in the mo-
dality of a ‘‘future anterior,’’ which projects an alternative historical spacethat cannot be reduced to the linear progression of punctual presents. Assuch, it contests the linguistic, social, and political articulations to whichhistory is submitted. The very possibility of transformation and of a differ-ent future lies within this opening marked by the historicity of the present.
‘‘Each Moment Producing Words’’: Zaum and Historicity
The issue of the relation of beyonsense to signification becomes cen-
tral to understanding Khlebnikov’s poetics for two reasons: first, becauseit is tied to his conception of being and its linguistic modality of occur-rence, and, second, because it illustrates the role of beyonsense languagein his conception of history and revolution. Language and the discursiveinscription of the event become the terrain for negotiating the temporalstructure and the historical meaning of experience. The continuously re-signified boundary between beyonsense and ‘‘ordinary’’ forms of languageconstitutes a reflection of the event temporality of being. Let us illustrate
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this conjunction in a preliminary manner by reference to two quotationscharacteristic of Khlebnikov’s approach to language. The first one comesfromZangezi, a ‘‘supersaga’’ or ‘‘beyonstory,’’ which crosses and rewrites
the genre boundaries between drama, poetry, and theoretical treatise onlanguage and history. The quotation is taken from a prophetic, but alsoparodic, speech Zangezi delivers at the end of Plane Eight:
Have you heard all I’ve said, heard my speech that frees you from thefetters of words? Speech is an edifice built out of blocks of space.
Particles of speech. Parts of movement.Words do not exist; there are
only movements in space and their parts—points and areas.
You have broken free from your ancestral chains. The hammer of my
voice has shattered them; your frenzied struggle against those chains hasended. ( KT,, translation modified)
In this speech, revolution and revolutionary rhetoric signify liberation fromthe bonds of language, from the traditional linguistic usage.Written in ,Zangezi cannot but be read against the background of historical and revolu-
tionary turmoil, perhaps as an ironic commentary on revolutionary change,which, in addition to transforming political, social, and economic orders,must alter relations on the level of discourse and revise the parameters ofrepresentation. Zangezi’s speech underscores the link between altering theworkings of language and changing the ‘‘building blocks’’ of experience.It seeks to transform precisely the manner in which the world opens (intolanguage).
Treated by other characters in the ‘‘superstory’’ both as a prophet and
a visionary, and as a joke or a blabbering idiot, Zangezi resembles moreZarathustra or Eastern sages than a political revolutionary in the modernEuropean sense. Still, the rhetoric he employs is unmistakably revolution-ary: breaking the ancestral chains, the shattering hammer (a reference tothe Soviet emblem of the revolutionary hammer symbolizing the work-ing class), frenzied struggle. Tapping directly into the political and culturalrhetoric of postrevolutionary Russia, Zangezi sets up its own ‘‘revolutionary
struggle’’ in terms of a fundamental change in the understanding of the re-lation between language and reality. It is a change that involves recognizinghow the event temporality of experience is interwoven with language. Zan-gezi’s speech associates the freedom from the fetters of language with theidea that words cannot be understood as autonomous, as part of a languagesystem existing separately from the happening of being. Instead, they are
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interlinked, one wants to say, interfaced, with ‘‘movements in space andtheir parts’’: in fact, language seems to be built of the same material as thespace-time of experience and history.
Zangezi’s ‘‘revolution’’ has to do with the notion of language as built out
of the ‘‘blocks of space’’ and ‘‘particles of movement,’’ as constructed fromthe pieces and traces of the space-time of history or from the particles ofexperience.This particular expansion of the idea of language focuses on thepassage between language and its beyonsense fold. Interrogating the notionof language as a social and representational code superimposed upon his-torical reality, beyonsense ties the poetic (re)invention of language to thehappening of being, to the particles, movements, and planes of experience.The Russian word that Khlebnikov uses for speech— rech—signifies speech,
discourse, talk, or language, but also thing and matter, in a manner similarto the German Sache. Language for Zangezi becomes the matter of think-
ing, which needs to be reconsidered, ‘‘revolutionized,’’ vis-à-vis experience.Similarly to Heidegger’s approach, it is the matter of language in a doublesense: First, it produces and sustains language, and, second, it constitutesthe matter forlanguage, that is, what is to be thought and signified. The
reworking of this ‘‘fundamental’’ difference between materiality and intel-ligibility—of the distinction which structures the parameters of visibility,understanding, and meaningfulness—constitutes the object of Zangezi’spronouncements.
The second quotation comes from ‘‘Our Fundamentals’’ (‘‘Nasha os-
nova’’), one of Khlebnikov’s most interesting essays on language and word
creation. The title word osnova could be rendered into English as ‘‘basis’’ or
‘‘fundament,’’ but this translation loses the root meaning of weaving andinterlacing at play in Russian. A more appropriate rendition in this contextw o u l db e‘ ‘ e n v e l o p e , ’ ’o re v e n‘ ‘ f o l d , ’ ’s i n c e osnova suggests intertwining, a
pattern of weaving that forms the fold for experience and history. Osnova
a l s oi m p l i e ss p i n n i n gat a l e ,a‘ ‘ b e y o n s t o r y ’ ’ (zapovest) that describes the
‘‘laws’’ of experience. Read this way, the title suggests the interlacing of ex-perience and language, which informs Khlebnikov’s poetic work and hisspeculation about history:
Word creation—the enemy of the bookish petrification of language. Itrelies on the fact that in villages, by rivers and forests, language createsitself to this very day, every moment producing words that either die orgain the right to immortality. Word creation transfers this right to theworld of literary creativity. A new word must not only be named, it must
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be directed toward the named thing. Word creation does not break thelaws of language. ( CW I, , translation modified)
At first, it seems that Khlebnikov describes here simply the appearance andcodification of new words, a phenomenon common in the history of anylanguage, and a regular feature of language change. Poetic word creationappears as a justified form of an intense invention of new words, an ampli-fication of a ‘‘natural’’ linguistic process.
However, Khlebnikov’s description is more nuanced, as it links the in-
trinsic creativity of language directly to the event of being. The Russiantext emphasizes the fact that language is an activity: It is not created orinvented, but, rather, it creates itself (tvoritsa). The statement indicates a
nonsubjective view of language, where word creation falls outside the do-main of the creativity of the poetic subject and belongs to the event of lan-guage. Khlebnikov’s remark also ties the constant reinvention of words withthe event structure of experience. For it is language itself that functions asthe ‘‘subject’’ of the phrase ‘‘every moment producing words.’’ Every mo-ment ‘‘speaks,’’ that is, occurs as a form of language, producing words that,perhaps no longer identifiable simply with linguistic signs, make up a con-figuration singular to that particular happening. The singular historicity ofthe moment is obviously lost or veiled in the ‘‘petrification of language,’’in the customary forms and rules of language usage, whether everyday orliterary. Word creation becomes here more than the poetic procedure ofintroducing new words into the lexicon, as it describes the mobilization ofthe plasticityof language against the ossification of its articulated forms andstructures. Since language structures the event of experience, constitutingthe modality in which ‘‘every moment’’ happens, each instant of being be-comes tantamount to producing language anew, to a continuous resigni-fication of the linguistic matrix. This conception of the linguistic charac-ter of experience sees the world—‘‘villages, rivers, forests’’—or, in otherwords, ‘‘nature’’ (priroda), as a form of language, as appearance or mani-
festation that is linguistic. Khlebnikov’s remarks imply that the plasticityof being is itself word-creative, that every minute reinvents itself in words.Theosnova or the envelope within which experience becomes readable in
historical terms traces this interweaving of language and being. We couldsay that the ‘‘fundament’’ of being has the form of this peculiar, shiftinginterlace, thanks to which experience occurs as always already translocatedor ‘‘translated’’ into words.
These two quotations set up the parameters of my discussion of the rela-
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tion between experience and language in Khlebnikov’s work,which extendsthe notion of experience beyond empiricist or rationalist terms. As I havesuggested in the previous chapters, modern experience does not fit into es-sentialist conceptions and must be rethought apart from the idea of theconstancy of the present. In the context of Khlebnikov’s writings, I read ex-perience in terms of the distinction between word creation and the petrifi-cation of language. Furthermore, the undermining of the familiar practicesof signification through word creation becomes the venue for the critiqueof representation of the everyday. The word osnova ties historicity with the
dislocation which language undergoes from the fluid manifestations of theworld as a saying (‘‘every moment producing words’’) to intelligible expres-sions and ‘‘normal’’ syntactic structures. Historicity becomes marked as theexcess or residue of the event over what becomes present or disclosed as itsresult. ‘‘Every moment producing words’’ overflows the bounds of the playof signification and the totality of possible meanings, differentiating itselff r o mt h em e a n i n go ft h ee v e n t‘ ‘ p e t r i fi e d ’ ’i nw o r d s .
‘‘Our Fundamentals’’ describes this dissymetrical relation between hap-
pening and presence in terms of two distinct senses of the word: ‘‘A worddivides itself into the pure word and the daily existing word.We may evenimagine a word that contains both the starlight intelligence of nighttimeand the sunlight intelligence of day. This is because whatever single ordi-nary meaning a word may possess will hide all its other meanings’’ ( CW I,
, translation modified). A lot depends here on what Khlebnikov under-stands by the ‘‘pure’’ part of the word, on whether this ‘‘purity’’ is indicativeof a supra-rational, universal language or, conversely, can be interpreted interms of the inappropriable historicity of the event, excessive and dissymet-rical in relation to the order of representation. Khlebnikov himself remarksthat our approach to language is not scientific enough and that we have tolearn to treat language the way science interprets nature: ‘‘It is evident thatlanguage is as wise as nature, and only now with the growth of science arewe discovering how to read it’’ ( CW I, –). Such a scientific explanation
of language could produce a classification of fundamental sound elementsthat would be as universally valid as chemical elements: ‘‘The plentitudeof language must be analyzed in terms of fundamental units of ‘alpha-betic verities,’ and then for these sound elements we may be able to con-struct something resembling Mendeleev’s law or Moseley’s law—the latestachievements of the science of chemistry’’ ( CW I, ) .I tw o u l db ee a s yt o
conclude that Khlebnikov’s text is motivated by a certain naive, ‘‘poetic’’scientism, which sees in science the equivalent of a procedural model for
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artistic creation and regards poets as the engineers of language. The en-thusiasm with which Khlebnikov outlines his ‘‘scientific’’ decompositionof language into alphabetic verities in order to prepare the ground for theinvention of a new language is obviously symptomatic of the avant-gardefascination with science as the modern model for representing and under-standing reality. It also evokes, as several critics have remarked, Leibniz’sand Pascal’s idea of language as a system of algebraic signs ( VK,).
Large parts of Khlebnikov’s theoretical writings, in particular his reflec-
tions upon the mathematical theory of history, indeed rely upon the scien-tific ideal of investigation and describe the task of poetry in terms of thescience of language or word creation.
9His writing practice, however, inevi-
tably reshapes this alliance between science and art, enlisting the scientisticmodel in the service of his poetic reformulation of language. This kind ofambiguity in relation to science is evident also in the text of ‘‘Our Fun-damentals,’’ where Khlebnikov’s ‘‘scientistic’’ belief in the possibility of in-venting a rationally understandable ‘‘supra-language’’ is undermined by theplasticity of the event that ‘‘produces words every moment.’’ I would arguethat the remarks about word creation, in which Khlebnikov defines eachmoment in terms of its ability to (re)produce itself as words—as an excessover the ‘‘ordinary’’ and ‘‘petrified’’ meaning—strongly suggests the read-ing of the split between ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘everyday’’ word in terms of the eventtemporality of experience. The ‘‘overflow’’ of the event over the order ofpresence singularizes ‘‘every moment’’ and opens it to future reproductionand rereading in ways that cannot be tabulated and, thus, undermine theidea of a scientific calculation of the play of signification. It indicates thatexperience takes place as the petrification of its happening into the orderof representation. At the same time, however, it also underscores the pos-sibility of a poetic language that could maintain the disjunction between‘‘creation’’ and ‘‘petrification’’ by distinguishing between the two senses ofthe word.
Because of this ambiguity reflected in the futurist approach to word cre-
ation, critical controversies have always surrounded the idea of zaum: Is
it linguistic nonsense rather than beyonsense, a failed attempt at invent-ing the ‘‘absolute’’ word and a scientific-poetic approach to language, oris it indeed a genuine poetic proposition of a creative rethinking of lan-guage and experience? The discussion is further complicated by the factthat various Russian futurists differed in their understanding and interpre-tation of the function of beyonsense language. The word zaum was coined
by Kruchonykh
10and, even though ‘‘[t]o both men zaum, beyonsense,
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was an extension of poetic language that rejected the mediation of com-mon sense and deemphasized denotative meaning,’’
11their approaches are
quite distinct.While Kruchonykh creates beyonsense through ‘‘intuitivelyinvented neologisms, grammatical confusions, sound puns, and nonsequi-turs,’’ Khlebnikov’s attitude is that of a ‘‘scientist of word creation’’: ‘‘moreanalytical construction of neologisms, building new words carefully frommeaningful linguistic elements’’ ( CW I, ). Khlebnikov’s explanations of
beyonsense always proceed on two levels: On the one hand, they involvescientific descriptions, diagrams, and mathematical formulas, and, on theother, they incorporate illustrations from nature, quite distinct from theaesthetics prevalent among the city-oriented futurists. In ‘‘Our Fundamen-tals,’’ Khlebnikov refers to word creation in terms of semantic configura-tions: ‘‘[T]hese free combinations, which represent the voice at play outsideof words, are called beyonsense. Beyonsense language means language situ-ated beyond the boundaries of ordinary reason, just as we say ‘beyond theriver’ or ‘beyond the sea’ ’’ ( CW I, ).
Zaum is a combination of the preposition za(beyond, past, behind)and
the noun um,whose range of meanings comprises reason, understanding,
knowledge, and thought. Later in the essay, Khlebnikov characteristicallyphrases his definition of beyonsense in terms of a number of propositionsunderlying his poetic experiments with word creation:
Beyonsense language is based on two premises:
. The initial consonant of a simple word governs all the rest—it com-
mands the remaining letters.
. Words that begin with an identical consonant share some identical
meaning; it is as if they were drawn from various directions to a singlepoint in the mind. ( CW I, )
Khlebnikov’s linguistic search for ‘‘alphabeticverities’’ consists in finding se-mantic correlations between various words that begin with the same soundelement in Russian (and sometimes other Slavic languages) and distillingthe meaning of each initial element. For instance, comparing several Rus-sian words beginning with the sound
ч(ch): chasha (cup), choboty (a kind of
boot), chulok (stocking), chuviak (slipper), cherep (skull), and so on, Khleb-
nikov concludes that ‘‘all these words coalesce at the point of the followingimage: whether we speak of a stocking (chulok) or a cup (chasha), in both
instances the volume of one body (foot or water) fills up the emptiness ofanother body which serves as its surface’’ ( CW I, ).
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This descriptive determination of the semantics of sound elements be-
comes the basis for constructing an alphabet of ‘‘linguistic verities’’—orunderlying linguistic elements—a tabulation of basic sememes at the rootof languages. Such fundamental elements would have the same univer-sal intelligibility and application as mathematical numbers: ‘‘The secondlanguage of poetry. Number-nouns [ chisloimena ]’’ (CW I, ). This nu-
merification of language elements constitutes the prolegomena to a futuresupra-rational language: ‘‘[b]eyonsense language is thus the universal lan-guage of the future, although it is still in an embryonic state. It alonewill be able to unite all people. Rational languages have separated them’’(CW I, ). It is worth noting that the compatibility of the beyonsense
language with the universal intelligibility of numbers has an explicit so-cial and revolutionary agenda in Khlebnikov’s work. The proleptic visionof a pre-Babelian language common to all humankind becomes an ‘‘inter-nationalist’’ poetic/linguistic plane, which would make possible a radicalrenegotiation of cultural, social, and linguistic differences through wordcreation.
This utopian vision of a universal language running through Khlebni-
kov’s work is, however, complicated by his poetic practice, in particular byhis correlation of word creation with the event, which belies the possibilityof ever ‘‘completing’’ the beyonsense alphabet. If we take Khlebnikov’s re-marks about the mathematical laws of history and the construction of asupra-rational language intelligible to speakers of various languages as theprimary defining characteristic of his work, and thus treat his writings asa parallel to the Leibnizian dream of a universal algebraic language, thenKhlebnikov’s project becomes equivalent to a poetic alchemy, a quest forthe ‘‘poet’s gold’’ in the form of an absolute alphabet. Doomed to failurefrom the start, Khlebnikov’s poetry would fit comfortably within the in-terpretation of the avant-garde, and, particularly, futurism, as a utopianventure, naively optimistic about the possibility of influencing the futureand of constructing art in the image of a ‘‘hyperrational,’’ techno-scientificcalculus of being. Yet, as much as Khlebnikov’s works are pervaded by thisidea, they also read experience in terms of an event whose historical occur-rence demands continuous word creation without producing an absolutesemantic key to reality.
The aspect of zaum I want to explore here illustrates Khlebnikov’s at-
tempt ‘‘to recognize the corners of events in the instantaneous foam ofwords.’’
12The ‘‘instantaneous foam of words’’ is the effect of how ‘‘every
moment producing words’’ registers in language, generating deliberate vio-
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lations of linguistic and semantic norms. These semantic and phoneticexperiments are figures of historicity, of the excess of the event over theorder of its representation. In Kristeva’s words, ‘‘by thus suspending thepresent moment, by straddling rhythmic, meaningless, anterior memorywith meaning intended for later or forever, poetic language structures itselfas the very nucleus of a monumental historicity’’ ( DL,). The instanta-
neous multiplicity of semantic planes produced, for example, by ‘‘Incan-tation with Laughter’’ or ‘‘Incantation with Names’’ exceeds conventionalrepresentational and perceptual structures and opens language to ‘‘the cor-ners of events’’ inaccessible to normative linguistic usage. In the words ofZangezi, such poems free one ‘‘from the fetters of words.’’ If those fettersrefer to ‘‘the stable intentional, appellative and denotative relationships withlong-established referents,’’
13then, releasing the semantic energy by disas-
sembling words and putting in motion the particles of language, Khlebni-kov hopes to produce within the poetic text the dynamic of the event.
This poietic relationship between language and experience is often ren-
dered in the image of the world as a book. In a long monologue that makesup Plane Nineteen, Zangezi describes nature as a form of writing, a book:
See the patterns of waves of sandAnd the curly hair of the sea—The beach, the branches, the debris.Pinetree branches move a handAnd a book is written on the sand—T h eb o o ko ft h ep i n e ,t h es h o r e ,t h es e a .
(KT,)
A similar conflation of writing with the ‘‘course of nature’’ informs theimageryof ‘‘The Only Book,’’ in which the book signifies the always alreadylinguistic status of reality, the fact that the world manifests itself as a formof saying: ‘‘to speed the coming / Of the only book / Whose pages are largeseas / Trembling like wings of a blue butterfly.’’
14Khlebnikov’s repeated
presentation of the world and natural phenomena as an inscription, a textto be ‘‘read’’ into words, is consistent with his notion of the ‘‘divided word’’and with the idea that beyonsense language reaches beyond conventionalperception and expression to register in word creation the unpresentable‘‘corners of events.’’ Even though the world appears as a form of writing, itstill requires inscription in words: It finds itself in need of translation. Chas-tising readers for carelessness—‘‘Please pay more attention’’
15—and calling
fora more attentive approach to language, Khlebnikov boasts of the author-
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ship of such a translation, of the book of the (world) book. This seems tobe a reference to the project of beyonsense language, which attempts to‘‘translate’’ the multifarious happening of the ‘‘book of the world’’ throughword creation. While not new, Khlebnikov’s images of nature as forms orspaces of inscription are less an attempt to spiritualize the natural worldthan an exemplification of his understanding of experience, according towhich the event takes the shape of an already accomplished ‘‘translation’’into discourse. One could see beyonsense language in terms of maintainingthrough its deregulated semantics the force of this ‘‘translation’’ against theimperative of representation, against the reduction of the event to discursivestructures.
This Khlebnikovian view of the event is textually tied to the figure of
Zangezi and to frequent references to water images. In ‘‘The Only Book,’’the allusion to a butterfly and the list of great rivers that follows refers thepoem to Zangezi, who describes himself as a butterfly ( KT,) and whose
name may well be a conflation of two river names, both cited in ‘‘The OnlyBook’’: Zambezi and Ganges. Both the text and the character of Zangeziare often linked to water images: rivers, seas, oceans, foam, beaches, and tothe idea of sand writing. In the context of this water imagery, the facilitywith which Zangezi produces his monologues and addresses his listenersmakes foran apt comparison of his pronouncements with what Khlebnikovdescribes as the ‘‘instantaneous foam of words.’’ Zangezi’s language experi-ments—which will be analyzed in more detail below—instantiate Khleb-nikov’s idea of producing the sense of multiple instantaneity, irreducible tothe temporal dimension of the present.
Such a link between historicity and poetic language forms the pivot of
Heidegger’s reflection on poetry. In ‘‘The Way to Language,’’ Heidegger’sunderstanding of experience in terms of the propriative event (das Ereig-
nis)depends upon the idea that manifestation is a form of ‘‘soundless’’ say-
ing: ‘‘The saying is by no means the supplementary linguistic expression ofwhat shines forth; rather, all shining and fading depend on the saying thatshows.’’
16Being and occurrence, presence and absence (‘‘shining and fad-
ing’’), constitute forms of saying through showing, a sort of manifestationalsaying, where events and beings have an intrinsically linguistic status. Lan-guage here exceeds social codes and discursive practices, since it describesthe event of experience simultaneously reaching and breaching articulation,an event whose historicity is marked specifically by what remains unsaid,‘‘untranslated’’ into words. As Heidegger remarks: ‘‘The event of propria-
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tion(Ereignis) is telling (sagend), ’’ it occurs in the manner of a saying ( BW,
), or, in other words, the event is ‘‘the saying’s way-making movementtoward language’’ ( BW,). The movement of the saying toward words
constitutes the historial unfolding of experience: the rift or the distancewhich remains unsaid in words: ‘‘[t]he saying will not allow itself to becaptured in any assertion’’ ( BW,). The propositional and appropriative
modalities of language fail to register the poetic saying, which, as Heideg-ger suggests, requires a different relation to language, a relation that putsinto question the representational paradigm: ‘‘In order to think back to theessence of language, in order to reiterate what is its own, we need a trans-formation of language, a transformation we can neither compel nor con-coct.The transformation does not result from the fabrication of neologismsand novel phrases.The transformation touches on our relation to language’’(BW,–).
Albeit implicitly, Heidegger appears here to be extremely cautious, even
skeptical, about the avant-garde treatment of language, in particular aboutthe avant-garde penchant for word creation, about the kind of inventionsthat proliferate in Khlebnikov’s work. Khlebnikov himself seems to be morethan optimistic about the success and future importance of his beyonsenseproject. In spite of this difference, I see in Khlebnikov’s work an attempt toforce, or, at least, to quicken, the transformation in our relation to languagethrough the emphasis on the beyonsense aspect, the ‘‘hither side,’’ of signifi-cation and experience. There is no doubt that beyonsense aims at changingthe attitude toward language, at transforming it through a different, ‘‘be-yonsense,’’ interweaving of language and experience. The Khlebnikovian‘‘instantaneous foam of words’’ traces the movement of the manifestationalsaying/writing—of the world as a book—into ‘‘ordinary’’ words. The dis-tance Khlebnikov’s word creation opens between ordinary signification andthe semantic fluidity of the beyonsense enacts the movement of the saying(‘‘pages of large seas’’) into language.
Suggesting that manifestation has a linguistic form, Heidegger sees the
world both as opening itself to thought and as being shaped by its relationto thinking, that is, as ready for ‘‘translation’’ into words. Conceiving oflanguage as the riftlike field of an event, Heidegger avoids absolutizing thesaying, and, in fact, historicizes its occurrence. As part of the way-makingof language, the saying has a history, and takes place in specific historicalcircumstances. As I suggest in chapter , it also marks the opening of his-tory, because the translation of the saying into words opens up the distance
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which makes history thinkable. Paradoxically, historicity both inauguratesand eludes the space-time of history. This simultaneous proximity and dis-tance, which structures experience, is reflected in Heidegger’s distinctionbetween words (die Worte) and terms (die Wörter): ‘‘Words are not terms
[Die Worte sind keine Wörter ], and thus are not like buckets and kegs from
which we scoop a content that is there.Words are wellsprings that are foundand dug up in the telling, wellsprings that must be found and dug up againand again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least ex-pected.’’
17The transformation in language Heidegger mentions in ‘‘The
Way to Language’’ has to do precisely with the difference between wordsand terms, that is, with a poetic opening of language as a set of terms with a‘‘stale’’ semantic content ( WTC, ) to the saying that ‘‘wells up’’ in words,
exceeding and ‘‘historicizing’’ the signification of terms. While terms de-scribe the functioning of language as a social code, words circumscribe themanifestational saying, that is, they bring into play the distance, the way-making of the saying into ‘‘terms.’’ Words in Heidegger’s sense are inscribedin what is said without being reduced to ‘‘terms’’ or linguistic signs: ‘‘Ashearers, we abide in the sphere of what is spoken, where the voice of whatis said rings without sound. From this sphere [ Spielraum ], whose essential
nature we have barely caught sight of, much less thought about, the words,without coming to the fore, disclose themselves as speaking in what is spo-ken [öffen sich die im Gesprochenen sprechenden und eigens gar nicht hervort-
retendenWorte ]’’ (WCT, , modified). Both marked in linguistic signs and
irreducible to them,words register, preciselyat the point of their shattering,the historicity of experience.
I draw a parallel between Heidegger’s distinction between words and
terms and the relation between Khlebnikov’s beyonsense language and nor-mative linguistic expression.What characterizes Khlebnikov’s poetic prac-tice is a continuous reopening of words (‘‘terms’’?) to what they tell orinscribe beyond their codified meaning. Word creation extends terms orlanguage signs into their beyonsense sphere, as it reaches an underlyingstratum of language which corresponds to Heidegger’s words that ‘‘speakthrough’’ the signs of language.This poetic reorientation of language allowsKhlebnikov to link word creation to the space-time of history and to readthe telescoping or compressing of the ‘‘beyonsense’’ potential of languageinto linguistic codes as equivalent to the occlusion of historicity within thepresence-bound representational space.
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Zangezi’s Vision of History
Zangezi represents an unusual literary form, which, although ostensibly
a theatrical drama designed for performance, crosses generic boundariesin a way parallel to how beyonsense reformulates the confines of significa-tion. In fact, one of the supra-generic names that Khlebnikov gives to histext,zapovest’ or ‘‘beyonstory,’’ suggests this correlation between the struc-
tural aspects of the text and beyonsense language.This constant movementacross boundaries and between planes describes a sort of a ‘‘geometry oflanguage,’’ which unfolds various planes of the existence of words: ‘‘Thesupersaga resembles a statue made from blocks of different kinds of stone ofvarying colors—white for the body, blue for the cloak and garments, blackfor the eyes’’ ( KT,). The hybrid textuality of Zangezi —a series of dis-
crete ‘‘narrative’’ and language planes—reflects a typical modernist gestureof undoing the unity of the literary text and presents language as a com-plex and layered structure existing on several planes. This particular hybridgeometry of language constitutes a crucial part of Khlebnikov’s conceptionof the relation between reality and language. Both Zangezi, the text, and
Zangezi, the mouthpiece for Khlebnikov’s theories, show how beyonsenselanguage provides the hybrid space beyond the conventions of representa-tion and understanding necessary, in Khlebnikov’s view, for rethinking theinterface of language and reality.
Before we proceed with explaining the specifics of how Zangezi presents
language and history, it is important to underscore the ambiguous statusof the character Zangezi in this text. Modeled after Nietzsche’s propheticfigure of Zarathustra, Zangezi is presented by Khlebnikovas both a prophetof the future—a visionary capable of seeing history through mathematicallaws and the calculations of the ‘‘tables of destiny’’—and ironized as a fool-ish character who has lost touch with reality.The image of Zangezi changesfrom plane to plane, oscillating between the veneration of the crowd of fol-lowers and the jeering of disappointed listeners. Plane Five begins with thecrowd calling out to Zangezi: ‘‘Speak to us! We hear you. Our souls area floor beneath your feet. Brave comer! We believe in you, we await you’’(KT,). In Plane Seven, however, Zangezi appears in quite a different
light: ‘‘But he hasn’t got the true poetic fire. It’s all just raw material, hissermon. Just a lot of unworked stuff. A lot of green wood. Go dry out,thinker’’ ( KT,). The fact that Zangezi is treated alternately either with
veneration or with disrespect, even with condescension, indicates that, even
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when taken as a self-portrait or a speaker for Khlebnikov’s theories, Zan-gezi has to be seen with a dose of irony. The text of Zangezi is indeed at
least as ironic and comic as it is serious. It contains numerous jokes, lin-guistic puns, and robust folk expressions, and the epilogue, which turns outto be a joke about Zangezi’s apparent suicide, puts an additional twist onthis intentional ambiguity. Bursting onto the stage to deny the newspaperstory about his suicide, Zangezi exclaims that it was only a silly, nonsensical(neumniy) trick. Yet the joke is much more important and ‘‘serious’’ than
it appears. It underscores a thin but crucial line between zaumniy (beyon-
sense) and neumniy, where zaum, taken too literally as a drive toward a final
calculation, an ultimate poetic-scientific formula, turns from the flexibilityof beyonsense to an absence of um(reason), a bungled attempt implied in
the prefix ne.Too strictly overdetermined and ordered, sense empties and
dehistoricizes itself; it becomes ‘‘silly’’ by virtue of its overreaching formu-lation. As serious as Khlebnikov appears to be about his calculations of thefuture, Zangezi inscribes an ironic distance to the mathematical laws of his-
tory. It is an important gesture, in line with Khlebnikov’s questioning oflinguistic, literary, and scientific authority, a displacement which it seemsonly fitting for him to perform with respect to the textual ‘‘embodiment’’of his own theories. This move assures that Zangezi’s ideas about languageand history are always situated in an ironic frame in which their ‘‘value’’oscillates between prophetic genius and ‘‘forest fool’’ ( KT,).
The hybrid textuality of Zangezi, the various planes of its ‘‘action,’’ pre-
sents several attempts to explain historical reality—the historical and physi-cal forces at play in the world—in relation to the event of language. Zan-gezi’s prophetic speech about freeing humanity from the fetters of wordsredefines language in terms of the building blocks of space-time: ‘‘Speechis an edifice built out of blocks of space’’ ( KT,). Language exceeds the
idea of a system of signs: It is thought in terms of spatial and temporalmovements, of the interacting forces and unfolding spaces:
Particles of speech. Parts of movement.Words—they do not exist; onlymovements in space and their parts—points and area s…
Planes, the lines defining an area, the impact of points, the godlike
circle, the angle of incidence, the fascicle of rays proceeding from apoint or penetrating it—these are the secret building blocks of language.Scrape the surface of language, and you will behold space and the skinthat encloses it. ( KT,, translation modified)
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The geometries of text and language become here parallel to the geometricalrepresentation of space, as they are constructed out of the spatio-temporaloccurrences and relations. Zangezi’s emphatic statement that words do notexist as signs or entities but only as movements in space, reflects Khlebni-kov’s revision of the understanding of the word: It is movements, occur-rences, spatial relations, points, planes, and angles—a kind of a ‘‘geometryof happening’’—that constitute the hidden building blocks of language.Scraping the surface of language, that is, dislocating language signs intotheir beyonsense play, reveals that language extends beyond the play of sig-nification, that the space-time of experience itself has a linguistic compo-sition.
Particles of experience—parts of movements and space—are also par-
ticles of language. In other words, language extends beyond the idea of asystem of signs or a social code, and refers to the invisible spatial and tem-poral relations and forces. It forms the very matrix of happening, the eventstructure of experience. In ‘‘The Language as Such and the Language ofMan,’’ Benjamin explains that things and beings have their own language,which means that their ‘‘being,’’ though nameless, is linguistic: ‘‘languagehas its own word, and this word applies also to that conception which is en-acted by the nameless in names. It is the translation of the language of thingsinto that of man.’’
18In ‘‘On the Mimetic Faculty,’’ he describes this transla-
tion in terms of a ‘‘nonsenuous similarity’’ which exists between the linguis-tic being of things and their names ( R,).The translation Benjamin has in
mind becomes possible because objects and phenomena take place in a lin-guistic manner, and, one might say, have part of their existence or reality inthe language matter.The idea of beyonsense language seems to go even fur-ther, as it reinterprets the ‘‘nameless in names’’ in terms of historicity: Whatin experience escapes representation, what cannot be presented in terms ofthings or entities, is precisely the happening of being, its event. This hap-pening constitutes the ‘‘matter’’ of language, the linguistic material beyondthe playof signification,or, in other words, beyonsense. Defining letters andsounds in Plane Eight, Khlebnikov reads movement and occurrence as lin-guistic particles: for example, ‘‘ Lis the cessation of fall, or motion generally
by a plane lateral to a falling point. / Ris a point that penetrates a transverse
area’’ ( KT,). Khlebnikov’s ‘‘geometry of being’’ draws a linguistic map
of forces in which history itself, taken as event or occurrence and not as ideaor content, has the status of a language. As in Benjamin’s model, Khleb-nikov’s distinction between beyonsense and ‘‘regular’’ language describes
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the moment of translation from the language of things to the language ofnames. Khlebnikov, however, does not leave the language of things name-less: he regards poetry as the labor of extending language beyond names inorder to retrieve the beyonsense language of things and occurrences.
I refer here to Benjamin’s notion of translation and Heidegger’s idea
of language in order to contextualize Khlebnikov’s conception of zaum
and show how his practice of rendering ex plicit the linguistic character of
the ‘‘particles of experience’’ by means of beyonsense upsets the very ideaof representation and mimesis. When Zangezi remarks that words do notexist as entities or signs but find themselves in motion, much as forces oroccurrences do, he discounts the idea that experience, the ‘‘secret build-ing blocks of language,’’ remains prior to or independent from language.Representation depends upon the distinction and separation of the repre-s e n t e df r o mt h em e d i u mo rt h em o m e n to fr e p r e s e n t a t i o n .I tr e l i e su p o nthe possibility of a mimetic reflection which doubles the mirrored object,both instituting and suspending the difference between the thing and itsrepresentational double. By contrast, Khlebnikov regards experience as in-extricably interfaced with language: The form experience takes is negoti-ated linguistically, with words playing a constitutive role in this event. Theevent never transpires outside or before language but, instead, happens into
words. Beyonsense functions as the edge upon which the world opens itselfas a linguistic configuration of the particles of experience, the edge con-tinuously blunted by discursive practices and linguistic conventions. Thisnoncontemporaneity, or, we might say conversely, a paradoxical contem-poraneity that lacks self-coincidence and presence, marks the ‘‘translation’’constitutive of experience.The phenomenality of being is structured as thistranslative event, nonsynchronous with the representational optics.
In Heidegger’s view, the fold of representation, the es gibt or ‘‘there is’’
which opens the space-time of experience and representation, functionsalready as language beyond words and signification. It forms the sayingwhich, ‘‘signifying’’ through words, remains itself in the register of silence,as the unsaid of signification. For Khlebnikov, this sense of happening,and its historicity elusive to representational schema, constitute the be-yonsense (zaum) matter of language, the building blocks of speech and
writing. Where Khlebnikov differs from Heidegger is in the means neces-sary to achieve a transformation in our relation to language which wouldmake it possible to see the ‘‘linguistic matter’’ of history.While Heideggerdistrusts neologism and word creation for their own sake, Khlebnikov in-tensifies word creating capabilities of language beyond any known scope.
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Word creation in Khlebnikov extends beyond playfulness and innovationand posits as its goal the uncovering of the building blocks of language.To see the relation between ‘‘particles of speech’’ and ‘‘parts of movement,’’Khlebnikov broadens the scope of language, moving beyond the zone ofsense into zaum, into a sphere in which the space-time of history becomes
visible underneath the ‘‘codified’’ skin of language. It is in the field of be-yonsense—a sphere beyond normative understanding of language and yeta space, as Khlebnikov’s poetry suggests, more densely linguistic than lan-guage—that the particles of experience become visible as particles of lan-guage.
The planes immediately preceding and following Plane Eight, which
contains Zangezi’s speech about language, present various takes on be-yonsense language, in which individual letters and sounds—the particlesof language—become elements of being, parts of movements and spaces.The alphabet of letters Zangezi constructs becomes the alphabet of vari-ous forces of happening, and, thus, an alphabet, one might say, of what theGreeks understood under the name of physis—not simply nature, but, as
Heidegger explains, the emergence of what is. Plane Seven of Zangezi de-
velops this notion of poetic language by describing the expansive semanticrange of individual letters/sounds R, K, L, andGin terms of the elementary
forces of history. For example, the letter Land the sound ‘‘el’’ become asso-
ciated with a string of words which begin with or contain the letter/soundL,and which, according to Khlebnikov’s version of zaum, are semantically
connected: sun ( solnyshko, translated as ‘‘light’’), laziness (lenia), love(lyu-
bov),grace ( laska, translated as ‘‘languor’’), and people ( lyudi, translated as
‘‘multitude’’). Khlebnikov amplifies this semantic undercurrent in order tocharacterize historical forces and to describe the features of historical time:‘‘The weather changes— Ldays are upon us! / L,the sweet light of laziness,
of love and languor! / In ‘living multitudes’ you lull us twice’’ ( KT,).
This fragment is characteristic of the semantic and phonetic density Khleb-nikov generates in Russian: using and amplifying the resources of ordinaryRussian, Khlebnikov rewires, as it were, the semantic and phonetic relationsand opens new linguistic circuitry that pushes language beyond sense andsignification to register ‘‘the corners of events’’ illegible within the order ofrepresentation.
19
Plane Eight presents what Khlebnikov calls the ‘‘star-language,’’ or a lan-
guagewhich, moving beyond compilations of words with the same phoneticand semantic components, defines letters/sounds in terms of ‘‘particles ofexperience’’:
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TheVEof branches [ vetok]o n[vdol] the pinetree trunk
TheVEof stars [ zvezd], the night-world turning overhead.
ACHEof girls—golden [ chervonnaya ]s h i r t s ….
(KT,)
The entire plane is based on those largely untranslatable linguistic relationswhich establish connections between various elements of reality: the secretbuilding blocks of language that Zangezi mentions in his speech at the endof Plane Eight.
Plane Nine, titled ‘‘The Plane of Thought,’’ involves elaborate exten-
sions and redefinitions of thought and reason (um), a series of linguistic
inflections of ‘‘reason’’ which describe the opening of rationality to a rangeof beyonsense (zaum) possibilities ( KT,–). Khlebnikov provides his
o w nn o t e st oe x p l a i nt h ev a r i o u sm e a n i n g so f‘ ‘ r e a s o n ’ ’ (um)which reaches
beyond its own linguistic and representational constraints, and becomesa liberated reason, as the first composite on the long list—‘‘free-sense’’ or‘‘out-sense’’ (vyum) —suggests. These possibilities are immediately put to
work in Plane Ten, which constitutes perhaps the most impossible ‘‘level’’of language in Zangezi to translate. The plane is almost entirely based on
the inflectional and neologistic plays around the word mogut’: can, may,
might, be able to, and other words associated with it through the letterM.Khlebnikov deploys here several new ‘‘beyonsense’’ relations, combin-
ing sememes from two or more different words to create neologisms likemogatyr: a cross between ‘‘might’’ and ‘‘ability’’ and the Russian word boga-
tyr,which signifies a noble and powerful man; or mog,a combination of the
verb ‘‘can’’ and the noun bog,god. He also invents entirely new words, like
mogoon, a ‘‘can-er,’’ or mogach’, a ‘‘can-ist.’’ Khlebnikov’s extensions and in-
flections of standard Russian are particularly difficult to render into Englishbecause they rely largely on complex inflectional paradigms. Let me illus-trate the principle of Khlebnikov’s inventions on the basis of one strand ofword creation: ‘‘ Moglets! Ya mogu! Mogey, ya mogeyu! ’’
20Beginning the line
with a neologism moglets, an ‘‘enable-er,’’ Khlebnikov then uses the stan-
dard expression ‘‘I can, I am capable of,’’ and immediately creates anothernoun from theverb ‘‘ mogu’’—mogey, say, a ‘‘mighter’’ (from theverb might).
Then he proceeds with a sort of a second degree of invention, creating afirst person singular verb form ya mogeyu: ‘‘I mighterize,’’ on the basis of the
previously invented noun ‘‘ mogey. ’’ Subsequently, the plane spirals through
a series of second, third, and fourth degrees of word creation, all revolv-ing around the verb moguand various related words beginning with M.As
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the basis for the development of the entire plane, Khlebnikov expands andmodifies the system of inflectional and derivational morphemes, deployingstandard morphemic structures well beyond their prescribed context of ap-plication. A parallel example in English might be to apply the derivationalmorpheme ‘‘ness’’ to verbs which normally use other morphemes to formnouns: kingness, capableness, leverness, and so on. In Plane Ten, the letterMtogether with the verbs and nouns invented from the verb mogu create
an entire matrix of the semantic vectors of ‘‘can’’ or ‘‘be able to,’’ a field ofthe forces of change and transformation already at work in priroda orphysis.
On the level of plot, the verbal innovations of Plane Ten, gravitating
around the notion of power, perform an overthrow of divine authority, asthe letter Minvades the land of B,and god (bog) becomes replaced by
the human ‘‘enabler’’ (mog). Zangezi fulfills his role of prophet and helps
people assert their own authority over language, as the vanquished gods fleeand humanity assumes the position of a god. The mythological allusionsso critical to many of Khlebnikov’s works culminate here in the ascensionof humankind to a godly, mythical status.
21Zarathustra- and Prometheus-
like, Zangezi is both a scientist and a magician, who represents the point atwhich science reaches such power that it assumes the status akin to magic: Itbegins to play the role of an all-powerful tool for explaining and manipulat-ing reality.The Planevalidates the poet’s claim to being the ‘‘King of Time,’’who, combining poetic inventiveness and scientific exactness, places him-self at the center of the universe from which the world and history appeartransparent and calculable according to the laws of destiny.
Yet the Plane may be also read against itself, in terms of that paradoxi-
cal moment in modernity, perhaps the turning point for the Enlighten-ment, when science, impressing intelligibility and unity upon reality andempowering human beings to assume control over it, begins to recognizeitself, as Adorno and Horkheimer suggest, as myth: ‘‘The principle of im-manence, the explanation of every event as repetition, that the Enlighten-ment upholds against mythic imagination, is the principle of myth itself.’’
22
The staging of the fall of divine power becomes also the moment of my-thologizing science and technology, so characteristic of futurist aesthetics.Is, then, Khlebnikov’s zaumthe moment when science achieves such a point
of cohesion that it reverts to myth and the scientific formula speaks with theall-embracing force of poetic/magical incantations?
23While such a read-
ing is certainly plausible, especially in the context of Khlebnikov’s earlierworks,we have to remember that PlaneTen does not end Zangezi but comes
merely midway through the text, and the supersaga closes with Zangezi’s
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joke about the thin line separating zaum andneum. I would suggest that, as
in Adorno’s reflection on modernity, this narrow line marks the reversal ofrationality into the irrational, which happens at the historical point whenrationality achieves global calculative abilities.
This point of generalization and all-inclusiveness, reflected in the alpha-
betic and historical verities sought by Zangezi, is contextualized and ques-tioned by Khlebnikov’s irony and by the continuing ‘‘expansion’’ of wordcreation, which opens an ‘‘elsewhere’’ to the established calculations andformulas. In Plane Thirteen, the accepted rules of word formation becomedeliberately ‘‘overgeneralized’’ to create a sense of language in flight, a lan-guage which moves in the direction of an elsewhere or otherwhere (inesa):
‘‘These nestlings of nowhere, a lattering flutter / Of wings in flight to someotherwhere, / Of ledglings in flight, seeking their selfland!’’ ( KT,–,
translation modified). Khlebnikov’s intention is to draw attention to andkeep open the possibilities of inflection and derivation as a form of open-ing toward the ‘‘otherwhere.’’ What Khlebnikov achieves here is a radicalrevision of the order of representation: from legibility structured along thenorms of syntax and the rules governing the play of signification to a dif-ferent legibility, where language displays a broader scope, or a beyonsensereach. These possibilities become foreclosed by the ‘‘limited’’ scope of thelanguage code, where they get subordinated to the communicational func-tion of language.
My argument is that beyonsense is more than a ‘‘poetic’’ play with lin-
guistic standards: It is the disclosure of a language field which underlies the‘‘limited’’ code employed in various discursive practices. Heidegger hintsat a similar field of saying ‘‘beyond’’ words in ‘‘The Way to Language’’:‘‘Various modes of saying and the said permeate the rift-design, modes inwhich what is present or absent says something about itself, affirms or de-nies itself—shows itself or withdraws.What pervades the rift-design in theessence of language is a richlyconfigured saying, from various provenances’’(BW,). Khlebnikov’s poetry tries to maintain the distinctness of the
beyonsense field of language against the prescribed, ‘‘constrictive,’’ articu-lation into discourse. A good illustration of this difference is the graphicopposition between the inappropriable ‘‘radiation’’ of meaning and signi-fication based upon the linearity of language in Khlebnikov’s diagram oft h ep a r t i c l e‘ ‘ so’’ in ‘‘Here is the way the syllable soi safi e l d ’ ’( CW I, ). If
historicity becomes effaced at the very moment when experience becomesrepresented as history, then the reconfiguration or the rezoning of senseinto beyonsense is meant to counter this reduction.
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On the Beyonsense of Art: Nature, Technology,and the Possibility of Revolution
Khlebnikov’s complex relation to technology has to be considered in re-
lation to his concept of beyonsense language and its link to priroda (nature).
His writings on technology form an integral part of his poetics, and theirfuturist message depends upon his understanding of time and experience,reflected also in his linguistic conceptions. Rezoning language into beyon-sense, Khlebnikov places most emphasis on the very occurrence of beingover and against its (re)presentable content or sense. Situated in the fore-ground, the event temporality of experience shapes the optics of Khlebni-kov’s poetics so that the technological representation of being finds itselfsupplemented and inflected by art. My argument is that the capacity forrefiguration intrinsic to beyonsense language is linked to the idea of changeand transformation: It is Khlebnikov’s response to the historical changesand revolutions he witnessed. The link between the linguistic potentialunlocked in beyonsense poetics and the constitution of experience be-comes the very locus of transformation. The disjunction between beyon-sense and the order of representation, replayed in the distinction betweenart and technology, becomes the site of Khlebnikov’s thoughts on revolu-tion, which forms the undercurrent of his futurist visions.
On the one hand, beyonsense language incorporates the scientific modes
of representation in order to test the limits of their production of senseand to explore the very boundaries of the legibility they institute. On theother, zaum is a critique of how aesthetics reduces art to aesthetic experi-
ence and effaces historicity. The reason we tend to forget historicity is theeclipse of poiēsis in art and in history. Remapping experience, Khlebnikov
extends the representational paradigm into beyonsense in order to recoverthe poietic in art and to bring it to bear upon our understanding of historyand historicity.
24Opened into beyonsense, the poietic space becomes pli-
able, adjustable to the shifting, inappropriable lines of the event, to whatKhlebnikov calls priroda, or nature.
Khlebnikov’s interest in nature, reflected in his studies and ornithologi-
cal writings, complicates his apparently straightforward futurist commit-ment to a technological vision of the future evident in his writings be-tween and . His futurist pronouncements about technology andhis interest in quasi-scientific laws of history appear in a different lightthrough the prism of priroda. Since priroda describes the force of unfold-
ing, the poiēsis of the world, the techno-scientific character of the modern
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changes which fascinated the futurists become, for Khlebnikov, the signof the intensification of the ‘‘nature’’ of happening itself. Technology doesnot so much qualitatively alter the character of happening as it changes theoptics of history. Khlebnikov’s interest in the laws of history finds bothits motivation andits condition of possibility in this emphasis upon time,
captured well in ‘‘The Trumpet of the Martians,’’ a futurist proclamationco-signed by Khlebnikov in : ‘‘The human brain until now has beenhopping around on three legs (the three axes of location)! We intend to re-furrow the human brain and to give this puppy dog a fourth leg—namely,the axis of TIME’’ ( CW I, ).
Although priroda literally means nature, it functions in Khlebnikov more
like the force of occurrence, which underscores the historicity of experi-ence. As Duganov remarks, it refers to the active emergencewhich questionsand rewrites the ‘‘artificial’’ boundary between nature and culture.
25Khleb-
nikov’s fascination with technology and the machine clearly implies thathis idea of priroda calls into question the notion of a pretechnological or
precultural natural world. Comparing Khlebnikov’s priroda with Heideg-
ger’s critique of the concept of nature, I want to underscore how Khlebni-kov’s poetry highlights experience as event. Heidegger critiques the idea ofnature because it presents the world as an aggregate of objects, as a collec-tion of already existing and determined things. Such an understanding ofnature as natura covers over the temporality of being and obscures the fact
that beings emerge and become rather than ‘‘are’’ simply present—the ideastill recognizable, in Heidegger’s view, in the Greek notion of physis: ‘‘Tree
and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctiveshapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early calledthis emerging and rising in itself and in all things physis’’ (BW,).
Khlebnikov’s references to nature—from his ornithological and botani-
cal writings to his nature imagery—form part of his preoccupation withpriroda and, therefore, become closely linked to his interest in time and
historicity. Priroda represents a force not opposed to technology but play-
ing an active role, even regulating, the technologically determined formsof becoming. In ‘‘The Trumpet of the Martians,’’ the favorite image of thelocomotive speedily moving away from the past certainly signifies fascina-tion with speed and technology, but it also demonstrates how the breakf r o mt h ep a s th i n g e su p o nt h i n k i n gt i m e ,o r ,a st h et e x tp u t si t ,‘ ‘ k i d n a p -ing’’ it: ‘‘What better answer is there to the danger of being born a manthan to carry off time?’’ (CW I, ). This hijacking of time suggests that
technology fails to supersede ‘‘nature,’’ finds itself reinscribed into it, and
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signifies the intensification of the ‘‘natural’’ happening which defines physis.
The intensified awareness of temporality, of being as continuous occur-rence, is reflected in the rhetoric of the triumphant privileging of time overspace. ‘‘The Trumpet of the Martians’’ refers to the people of the past as‘‘the vulgar inhabitants of space,’’ while the new ‘‘government’’ of artistsand scientists it proposes to establish is defined specifically in relation totime: ‘‘to form an independent government of time(no longer dependent
on space)’’ ( CW I, ). Khlebnikov’s challenge to the pervasive ‘‘spatiality’’
of thought is tied to his nonessentialist notion of experience, manifest inthe reproduced discursive disjunction between sense and beyonsense.
The idea of technology as part of and subject to the same laws as priroda
may account for Khlebnikov’s ambivalent place within Russian futurismand for his problematic relationship to the Italian futurists, Marinetti inparticular. Although Khlebnikov participated in many futurist ventures inRussia—including the early ‘‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’’ () andTheWord as Such, coauthored with Kruchonykh—his relationship to cubo-
futurism
26is as uneasy as the relation between Russian futurists and their
Italian counterparts.The differences in Khlebnikov’s notion of ‘‘nature,’’ hisless than enthusiastic attitude toward urban life and environment, and hisneed to anchor his brand of futurism in Russian culture and history, mayexplain his unusually hostile reaction to Marinetti during his first visit toRussia in , an outburst very uncharacteristic for the rather shy Khleb-nikov, in which he joined the vociferous attack on Italian futurism initiatedby Mayakovsky. If polemic and provocation were Mayakovsky’s ‘‘normal’’mode of interaction and artistic existence, they are so unusual for Khlebni-kov that his attack on Marinetti warrants a closer look, especially becauseit provides clues about the critical junctures of Khlebnikov’s own work.
27
On one level, Khlebnikov’s dismissal of Marinetti as a precursor of Rus-
sian futurism reflects an attempt to claim priority and uniqueness for theRussian version of futurism, an idea colored by nationalist overtones andlinked to the postulate of a different genealogy which would ally Russianart with Asian heritage against the Western European claim to cultural su-periority: ‘‘Today some natives and the Italian colony on the Neva’s banks,out of private considerations, prostrate themselves before Marinetti, thusbetraying Russian art’s first steps on the road to freedom and honor, andplacing the noble neck of Asia under the yoke of Europe.’’
28On the other
hand, Khlebnikov’s polemic highlights the specificity of his own brand offuturianism (budetlyanstvo), as he preferred to call it. In contradistinction
from the Italian futurists and Mayakovsky, who almost unconditionally re-
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ject the past and call for the destruction of cultural heritage in the name ofstarting anew from scratch, Khlebnikov tends to reappraise the past, bothhistorical events and cultural heritage, in an effort to produce mathemati-cal laws of history which would both allow for the prediction of the futureand facilitate the understanding of the turbulent historical context of hisown work.
Though in Khlebnikov renounced Marinetti, distancing himself
from the homage that some Russian futurists paid to him, in his laterfuturist pronouncement published in cooperation with the Society of ,
29
Khlebnikov appears to stand firmly on the side of futurist ideas. In hisless known, but perhaps most articulate, futurist manifesto, ‘‘The Trum-pet of the Martians,’’ Khlebnikov announces the formation of ‘‘the MartianCouncil’’ and includes Marinetti as its honorary member: ‘‘The followingare invited to become honorary nonvoting members of the Martian Coun-cil: H.G. Wells and Marinetti’’ ( CW I, ). The inclusion of Marinetti’s
name seems less surprising in the context of a text which teems with typicalfuturist images and slogans, such as radical break from the past, denigra-tion of the older generations, building a new future, exultation of tech-nology, frequent evocations of speed, glorification of youth, the future andthe power of change: ‘‘We believe in ourselves, we reject with indignationthevicious whispers of people from the past who still delude themselves thatthey can bite at out heels. Are we not gods?’’ ( CW I, ) ;o r‘ ‘ H o wc a nw e
free the speeding locomotive of the younger generation from the insolentfreight train of the older generation, hitched on without our permission?’’(CW I, ).
In ‘‘The Trumpet of the Martians’’ and other futurist visions like ‘‘The
Radio of the Future’’ and ‘‘Ourselves and Our Buildings,’’ which describes‘‘the-yet-to-be city of the Futurians’’ ( CW I, ), Khlebnikov appears to
be perfectly aligned with the futurist dream of a superbly technologicaland radically redesigned future. ‘‘In the Radio of the Future,’’ technologybecomes identified as the agent which, altering and reforming conscious-ness, defines the future shape of thought: ‘‘The Radio of the Future—thecentral tree of our consciousness—will inaugurate new ways to cope withour endless undertakings and will unite all mankind’’ ( CW I, ). Tech-
nology becomes the central nervous system of the future, because it struc-tures the forms of experience and shapes the consciousness of this experi-ence. Technological interconnectedness and dissemination of information,coupled with the scientific forms of knowledge, become the locus of supra-individual consciousness, the functional matrix of experience and thought.
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Technology signifies the fulfillment of the Enlightenment idea of the unityand universality of humankind: ‘‘Thus will Radio forge continuous linksin the universal soul and mold mankind into a single entity’’ ( CW I, ).
If technology becomes the epitome of future experience as well as of theexperience ofthe future, then this idea finds its perfect culmination in
the concept of a universally understandable hieroglyphic language whichKhlebnikov proposes in ‘‘Artists of theWorld! (a written language for PlanetEarth: a common system of hieroglyphs for the people of our planet).’’ Thislanguage unites the ‘‘work of the artist’’ with the ‘‘work of the thinker’’ inan effort ‘‘to create a common written language shared by all the peoplesof this third satellite of the Sun’’ ( CW I, ). The naive utopian enthusi-
asm of this venture aside, Khlebnikov relates here the technological projectwith the idea of a universal script that would supersede the differences be-tween languages and cultures and retrieve the lost, pre-Babelian unityof ex-perience. In this scenario, the artist complements, perhaps even fulfills, thetechnological ‘‘destiny’’ of being. The conclusion from those texts wouldhave to be that Khlebnikov inscribes his artistic project within the techno-logical understanding of being, where experience and thought take theirform from the technic paradigm of reality. Art becomes a manifestation ofthe fact that reality is ‘‘technologically nerved,’’ that technicity determinesthe very mode of being of what is.
Yet we know already that Khlebnikov’s poetic practice and his beyon-
sense experiments, so heavily dependent upon the idiomatic features ofRussian and the flexibility of inflectional systems characteristic of Slaviclanguages, belie this interpretation. The reading which allies Khlebnikovwith the technological paradigm of experience—and the Picabian ideaof the technological soul of modern art—becomes inflected through theironic prism of Zangezi. The notion of the common system of hieroglyphs
becomes complicated, if not u ndercut, through the multiple linguistic
planes and the event temporality of experience. In Zangezi, words, letters,
and sounds become readable in terms of temporal and spatial movements,as vectors and indices of forces and events. If we can talk in this contextabout words or particles of nature (priroda) in Khlebnikov, those words
are not universal hieroglyphs but singular manifestations of the moment,‘‘every minute producing words,’’ as ‘‘Our Fundamentals’’ suggests.
30It
seems that the often exuberant linguistic creation of zaum tries to keep pace
with the constant alterations and reconfigurations of the particles of ex-perience. The expansion of language into the field of beyonsense respondsto and registers the inappropriable contours of experience, or ‘‘corners of
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events,’’ as Khlebnikov calls them. Reaching beyond the prescribed limitsof signification, beyonsense emphasizes the distinction between the idea ofhistory as a historical datum and history as continuously disarticulated by
its historicity.
The difference between reading zaum as a universal hieroglyphic script
andzaum as an expansion of language which marks the beyonsense status
of historicity problematizes the position of technology within Khlebnikov’sthought. On the one hand, technology spells out the ‘‘essence’’ of moder-nity and promises to define the nervous system of future experience. Onthe other hand, technology becomes reinscribed into ‘‘nature’’ and con-textualized vis-à-vis the beyonsense moment of experience. Marking thehistoricity of the event, beyonsense remains incalculable to the mathemati-cal laws designed by Khlebnikov to establish numerically computable rela-tions between significant events in world history.These laws may well drawthe links between more or less arbitrarily privileged moments in time, butthey fail to register the ‘‘momentary’’ surplus of beyonsense that charac-terizes the poiēsis of experience. However overambitious and idiosyncratic
Khlebnikov’s idea of calculating historical distance, his notion of beyon-sense extends beyond it: While the tables of destiny calculate the equationsaccording to which the main events of history take place, they also hintat the fact that all calculations and mathematical tables of being becomepossible within the fold of historicity, represented by Khlebnikov throughthe impossible number Ö
−. The way in which the beyonsense experiments
of Khlebnikov’s poetry continuously complicate his thought about tech-nology and history can be summed up by reference to Heidegger’s insis-tence on the poetic structure of being: ‘‘[I] f…t h i n k i n gk n o w i n g l ya v oids
the vicinity of poesy [ Dichtung ], it readily appears as the super-science that
would be more scientific than all the sciences put together’’ ( WCT, ).The
ironic plays of Zangezi portray the dangers of such a thinking that becomes
‘‘more rational’’ than science itself.
This ambiguous attitude toward science and technology is also indica-
tive of the double status of revolution in Khlebnikov. The idea of revolu-tion as a violent and sudden change in the social and political order is cer-tainly reflected in Khlebnikov’s futurist predilections, especially in a seriesof manifestoes which he wrote or coauthored for various futurist groups. Itis also reinforced by his laws of history, since the calculations in the ‘‘Tablesof Destiny’’ are structured around ‘‘revolutionary’’ events in Russian andworld history. In fact, Khlebnikov’s obsession with understanding historyin mathematical terms derives apparently from Russia’s loss to Japan in
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and the revolution which followed this defeat within the same year. On theother hand, as I suggested earlier, a different conception of revolution is atwork in Zangezi, one which links transformation to historicity and beyon-
sense language. Such a revolution refers to a radical change in the represen-tational order itself, to the revision of the structure of experience throughthe beyonsense ‘‘subfield’’ of language. Both those conceptions continu-ously feed into each other in Khlebnikov’s writings, in particular in Zangezi,
where the augmentation of language into beyonsene is linked to Zangezi’sreflections on the forces of history.
As is the casewith manyother Russian futurist writers and artists, Khleb-
n i k o v ’ sw o r kb e c o m e sa ts o m ep o i n ti n e x t r i c a b l yl i n k e dt ot h eh i s t o r i c a levents in Russia: the First World War, the two revolutions of , and theRussian Civil War. Never as politically active or ideologically committed asMayakovsky, Khlebnikov clearly sympathized with the social and politicalchanges happening in Russia through the revolutions of and the CivilWar, which may explain why his most openly futurist and ‘‘revolutionary’’proclamations were written between and his death in . Findinghimself almost constantly on the move during the time of the World War I,the revolutions, and the Civil War, Khlebnikov identifies movement as theconstitutive feature of modern life and comes up with a daring architec-tural idea for mobile house units in his ‘‘Ourselves and Our Buildings.’’ Inneed of finding lodging everywhere he goes, Khlebnikov proposes a visionof ‘‘the yet-to-be city of the Futurians,’’ where a mobile apartment could betransported between cities and reattached to stationary frames in any loca-tion: ‘‘[A] container of molded glass, a mobile dwelling module suppliedwith a door, with attachment couplings, mounted on wheels. . . . It is seton a trai n…o ro nas t e a m s h i p ,a n di n side, without ever leaving it, its in-
habitant would travel to his destination ….O n c ei th a db e e nd e c i d e dt h a t
the primary building unit would no longer be an incidental material likebrick, but rather these modular units inhabited by individuals, they beganthe construction of framework-buildings whose open spaces were filled inby the inhabitants themselves with their moveable glass cubicles’’ ( CW I,
).
While Khlebnikov’s visions of the future definitely gather their energy
from the transformations that took place around him, he distances himselffrom the rhetoric of war at work in Italian futurism. Side by side with hisfuturist visions, Khlebnikov writes a remarkable series of anti-war poems,collected under the title ‘‘War in a Mousetrap.’’ As Markov suggests, ‘‘[t]hiswork could become the bible of modern war protesters, and Khlebnikov
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their prophet, if only they knew about it: it combines his avant-garde tech-nique, the anti-war theme, and an orientation toward youth’’ ( RF,).The
title of the cycle suggests the entrapment of war, which locks all sides intoa conflict in which everyone loses. One of the most poignant expressionsof Khlebnikov’s anti-war and anti-violence sentiment can be found in hispoem ‘‘Refusal’’:
I would ratherWatch starsThan sign a death warrant.I would ratherHear flowers murmur(‘‘It’s him!’’)When I’m out in the gardenThan see a gunShoot down a manWho wants to shoot me down.
(KT,)
This dramatic disavowal of violence distances Khlebnikov from the futuristglamorization of waror violent transformation and indicates that revolutionhas to find another venue in his work: the beyonsense potential of language.Khlebnikov’s itinerant or nomadic lifestyle during the Civil War in Russiabecomes itself an icon of de-localized experience—experience deprived ofa site, ground, or essence—which keeps (dis)articulating itself through itshistoricity.The mobile modules of Khlebnikov’s futurian cities signify boththe transformation of the conventional modes of habitation and the dis-placement intrinsic to experience—the absence of a permanent temporalsite that ‘‘structures’’ the event.
Doubting the effectiveness of military revolution and social upheaval,
Khlebnikov links the possibility of change to the futurity inscribed inthe event, which ruptures the present and holds it open to the future. InKristeva’s words, ‘‘[t]he poem’s time frame is some ‘future anterior’ thatwill never take place, never come about as such, but only as an upheaval ofpresent place and meaning’’ ( DL,).The idea of the particles of experience
forming the ‘‘secret building blocks of language’’ becomes, for Zangezi, themoment that revolutionizes language and revises our understanding of his-t o r y :‘ ‘ W eb r e a t h el i k eaw i n du p o ny o u ,/W ew h i s t l e ,o u rb r e a t hm o v e s ,/We blow blizzards of nations, / We causewaves,we bring ripples and waves’’
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(KT,). Though this gesture could be read as an attempt to construct
a secret historical code which would explain through a numerical scenariothe occurrences of important historical events, disasters, and revolutions,I argue that the link between the beyonsense field of language and histo-ricity points to a nonessentialist, language-based conception of experience.The recovery of poiēsis in art and language brings into the foreground histo-
ricity, which remains occluded in different analyses of history. The effectsof such a transformation in experience can be found throughout Khlebni-kov’s poetry, from his very short and experimental poems like ‘‘Incantationwith Names’’ to more traditional and longer poems like ‘‘Russia and Me.’’‘‘Russia and Me’’ is particularly significant in this context because of the ex-plicit parallel Khlebnikov draws between ‘‘transformative’’ poetics and therevolutionary events in Russia: ‘‘Russia has granted freedom to thousandsand thousands. / It was really a terrific thing to do, / People will never forgetit. / But what I did was take off my shirt / And all those shiny skyscrapersthe strands of my hair, / Every pore / In the city of my body / Broke outtheir banners and flags’’ ( KT,).
The poem develops parallels between the image of Khlebnikov’s body
(and the body of his work) and the embodied, material experience of exis-tence. The gesture of taking off the shirt becomes equivalent to the fall ofBastille: ‘‘The Bastille of my shirt has fallen!’’ ( KT,), and the liberation
of the body from the conventions of dress signifies freeing experience fromthe conventions and norms of language.The poem becomes a figure for theexpansion of language into its realm of beyonsense, an expansion parallelto the revision of experience, which replaces its foundationalist notion withthe idea of a disjointed, noncontemporaneous event. Khlebnikov certainlydoes not propose to substitute the poetic liberation of language for the free-dom gained through political changes. Yet, the analogy he establishes be-tween granting political freedoms and the freedom of beyonsense languageunderscores the importance of how we understand experience for thinkingany possibility of transformation.This analogy shows that Khlebnikov, dis-appointed by the carnage of the Russian revolution and the suffering andpoverty precipitated by the Civil War (which he describes in the simple anddirect poems of the s), rethinks freedom in terms of a transformationin the very modality of happening, in the relationality that subtends experi-ence. There is an ironic undertone in ‘‘Russia and Me,’’ which suggests thatgrand political gestures of granting freedom to humanity would perhapsnot be necessary if experience were rethought in terms of historicity and its
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‘‘liberating’’ effects, if freedom, extended beyond the idea of an individual’srights,were grounded poietically: ‘‘It was reallya terrific thing to do, / People
will never forget it. / But what I did was take off my shirt.’’
31
The distance and dislocation opened up by historicity makes any closure
of the present impossible and, thus, keeps open the possibility of a differ-ent future. One of the effects of historicity, as Derrida puts it, is that thepresent is always still to come, that its closure remains always deferred, pro-jected toward what is to come—the future. Calling in Spectres of Marx for
a new way of thinking or a new experience of the event, Derrida associatesthe event-ness of the event with ‘‘[t]he disjointure in the very presence oft h ep r e s e n t ,t h i ss o r to fn o n – c o n t e m p o r a n e i t yo fp r e s e n tt i m ew i t hi t s e l f’ ’(SM,). The unexpected, the new, or the possibility of transformation
finds its space of possibility in the disjunction of the event, in what Der-rida calls the ‘‘event-ness’’ (événementialité) of experience ( SM,). Since
futurity is inscribed in the very structure of the event, it destabilizes experi-ence and renders it intrinsically open to rereading. Such an open-ended orunbounded conception of event is at work in Khlebnikov’s ‘‘beyonsense’’understanding of history. It is exemplified by the ways in which zaum rup-
tures grammar and semantics, opening the conventions and norms of lan-guage, together even with the beyonsense inventions themselves, to poetic‘‘re-invention.’’
32Though obviously not directly translatable into changes
in the social or political realm, the transformation of language and the dif-ferent way of thinking experience contingent upon it become for Khlebni-kov the venues for thinking the future. To the extent that it keeps in playthe ‘‘beyonsense’’ of the representational space of history, poetry makesit possible to think experience through historicity, and to reimagine thepresent in terms of its unstable opening to the future—both to possiblefuture histories and to future rereadings of the present as a historical mo-ment.
Describing a poietics of historicity, zaum links art to the possibility of
reinventing the present. This is the sense in which Khlebnikov’s poetry isfuturian: it reimagines the present as the realm of what ‘‘will be,’’ as the
sphere of what beyonsense language allows to come into being.
33Khleb-
nikov charges poetry with the linguistic energy that inflects the represen-tational order to allow for the ‘‘revolutionary’’ moment of experience topreserve itself against the discursive petrification of meaning. If Derridawrites about the need for a new, postmetaphysical thinking of the event,then we can see Khlebnikov’s beyonsense poetry as an attempt at a post-
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aesthetic concept of art: art that rebels against its reduction to the aestheticparadigm, against the erasure of the productive and liberating effects of his-toricity. The importance of such art lies in its ability to figure experiencewithout totalizing or splintering it into isolated points within the order ofrepresentation. Distinct from the idea of an art of the future, of art that‘‘simply’’ remains ahead of its time, such avant-garde art figures the futurityof experience. Questioning the aesthetic paradigm, it works as poiēsis and
brings its transformative effects to bear upon our understanding of history.It is perhaps in this sense that Khlebnikov’s futurian art remains transfor-mative, open to the future within and beyond its own historical context.
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Part Three : From the
Avant-Garde toLanguage PoetsTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 231 of 363
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To sie˛ nie da przepisac ´
z faktycznos ´ci
na wyraz ˙alnos´c´
(This can’t be rewritten
from facticityto expressibility)
—Białoszewski, Oho
6. How to Write the Everyday
in Eastern EuropeMiron Białoszewski’s ‘‘Minor’’ Poetry
Among many modern poets and fiction writers who make everyday experi-ence and ordinary language central to their writing—from Williams, Stein,or Ponge to Musil, Joyce, and Beckett—Miron Białoszewski, a Polish poetand prose writer, still largely unknown in the United States,
1may hold the
distinction of producing a uniquely iconoclastic body of work, which re-makes literature into a continuous rewriting of the everyday.
2Part of the dis-
tinctive character of Białoszewski’s work comes from the often ‘‘unpoetic’’themes of his poems, concerned predominantly with details of ordinarylife: with such banalities as problems with the plumbing or the elevatorin his apartment building, changes intro duced into his life by the acqui-
sition of new dentures, or the specifics of his hospitalization and kidneyoperation comprised in a series of poems entitled ‘‘Encounters with theKnife.’’ What contributes to the ‘‘shock value’’ of these topics, unpoeticeven by modern standards, is Białoszewski’s systematic displacement, or,to use Deleuze and Guattari’s idiom, deterritorialization, of poetry and lit-erary writing: a reciprocal demythologization of literature and everydaylife. Treating the everyday as an event which constantly defamiliarizes andremakes itself, Białoszewski incorporates the colloquial and nonstandardregisters of language into a literary practice whose critical and ironic forcecomes specifically from its ‘‘intensely’’ minor status: in relation to culturalcenters, literary traditions, or political orientations, but also with respect
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to the ‘‘myths’’ which writing inescapably engenders. As Białoszewski re-marks in an interview: ‘‘My diarylike pieces-poems are indeed diarylike.That is, writing and life go together. And at times, they are the same ….
W o r k i n go nl i f ea si th a p p e n s .D e m y t h o l o g i z i n g .D e m e t a p h o r i z i n g ….I norder to do literature, one should never go to literature. One has to do itfrom something more alive and other, precisely from life. From life and ex-perience [ Zz˙ycia i przez ˙ycia].’’
3In order to question literary conventions
and the social functions of literature, Białoszewski invents a ‘‘minor’’ lan-guage within the ‘‘high’’ literary language, a poetic language which unworkspoetry. One could say that he deliberately produces an ‘‘inferior’’ idiomor a sub-language that undoes the mythology of writing and the culturaland literary idealizations it generates, a Białoszewski vernacular, relentlesslyironizing the pretensions of writing.This poetic idiom reflects the fact that,as Baran ´czak observes, ‘‘Białoszewski always chooses the world of popular
culture against elite culture …. ’ ’
4
For Białoszewski, writing becomes a matter of inventing a language of a
continuous interface, contestation, and parody between literary discourseand idioms of ordinary speech, a language which would be capable of reg-istering everyday experience without transforming it into an aesthetic con-struct. My reading draws some parallels between Białoszewski’s poetics andHeidegger’s critique of the everyday in order to rethink the relation be-tween poetic thinking and everydayness, both beyond the scope Heideg-ger gives to it and in a tenor quite different from the one characteristic ofhis work. I read Białoszewski’s work as a unique venue for reworking thisconnection between the poetic and the everyday: a link which animatesmuch of Heidegger’s project and yet remains undeveloped in his texts onpoetry.
5Białoszewski underscores the proximity between the poetic and the
everyday by juxtaposing the intensityand surprise of everydayexperience—which his work produces through stylistic and linguistic innovations—withthe accepted routine of the ordinary. Interested in the temporality of theeveryday, in the poietic space of the mundane, he pushes language to itssemantic and stylistic extremes where distorted, reinvented words and frag-mented syntax map the overlooked dimensions of the commonplace. Asin the previous chapters, I make the distinction between poetics as a liter-ary category and poiēsis a sam o d a l i t yo fu n f o l d i n g ,a sap o i e t i ce v e n t .I n
Białoszewski’s case, such poiēsis explicitly undercuts nostalgic sentimental-
ization or aestheticization of the ordinary: It strips everydayness of any my-thologizing inclinations, expresslyde-sentimentalizes poetry, and evacuatesany pathos that might accrue preciselyas a result of the poetic (re)writing of
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the everyday.6These deterritorializing literary, cultural, and political effects
of Białoszewski’s exploration of the historicity of the everyday mark theavant-garde moment of his writing—the place of an intense refiguration ofexperience.
Miron Białoszewski (–) occupies an interesting and, in many
ways, unique position in Polish literature. Much less known abroad thancontemporary ‘‘main stream’’ poets like Miłosz, Róz ˙ewicz, Herbert, or Za-
gajewski, whose aesthetics have clearly met the literary world’s expecta-tions about poetry from Eastern Europe, Białoszewski is both an outsiderto that tradition and one of its most severe critics. Like other poets of hisgeneration, for example, the better known Róz ˙ewicz, Białoszewski’s poetry
is distinctively ‘‘anti-poetic,’’ devoid of metaphors and other poetic de-vices, employing ordinary language and everyday imagery.
7Although his
first texts did not seem to fit the profile of his generation, whose mem-bers were intensely preoccupied with the devastating experience of WorldWar II, the publication of Białoszewski’s memoir from the Warsaw Up-rising (Pamie ˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego) in made clear the extent
to which his approach to poetry and experience had been influenced bythe war. Similarly to Zbigniew Herbert, Białoszewski published his firstvolume, Obroty rzeczy, in , after the end of Stalinism in Poland, and
was hailed as belonging to the ‘‘new wave’’ of Polish poetry which burstupon the literary scene after the years of the state-mandated dominanceof socialist realism. With the publication of his subsequent volumes—Rachunek zachciankowy (Calculus of Whims, )Mylne wzruszenia (False
Thrills, ), Było i było (Was and Was, )—it became clear, however,
that Białoszewski’s poetics eschewed classification and developed an indi-vidual, ‘‘plebeian’’ and iconoclastic approach to writing quite distinct fromthe main trends of Polish poetry which, in the face of the repressive regime,emphasized Poland’s place within the cultural tradition of Western Europe.Rather than seeking aesthetic, ethical, or political legitimation within thistradition, Białoszewski opted for an unprecedented project of a radical re-making of literature in terms of diverse ‘‘genres’’ of everyday experience,and, in the process, invented a different ‘‘literary’’ language, which, re-shaped through everyday speech and colloquial idioms, was instrumentalin unworking both the representational constraints and the cultural imagi-nary in relation to everydayness. In the course of his career, Białoszewskiwrote numerous volumes of poetry, a book of plays, and several volumesof prose, which became his main preoccupation after the publication ofA Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising.
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As it evolved over the years, his writing began to increasingly blur the
boundaries between literary genres: His texts became fragmentary, focusedwithin the moment, usually ‘‘dramatic’’ in tone, and the differences be-tween poetry, prose, or drama became more a matter of typographical ar-rangement then content or diction. Białoszewski’s last writings tend to beorganized by major events in his personal life: Zawał (Heart Attack )d e –
scribes his heart attack and hospital stay; Konstancin chronicles his conva-
lescence in a sanatorium in Konstancin near Warsaw; AAAmeryka describes
his trip to the United States. To underscore the connection of his writ-ings with the everyday, Białoszewski groups his poetic texts into cycles,inventing unconventional ‘‘generic’’ names for them, which reflect the mul-tiplicity of the ‘‘genres’’ he discovers in the everyday. Often funny and evenridiculous titles such as ‘‘Cites,’’ ‘‘Leaks,’’ ‘‘Frivols,’’ ‘‘Noises,’’ ‘‘Paste-Ups,’’‘‘Chains,’’or ‘‘Dartings’’ refer to diverse aspects of everydayness and havetheir origin in colloquial speech.
8This unconventional approach to liter-
ary writing met during Białoszewski’s life with both enthusiastic welcomeand severe criticism, especially from those cultural quarters interested inpreserving the high and noble style of the national literary tradition. It isonly recently, however, that Białoszewski’s work has become regarded asa truly major force within contemporary Polish poetry. As the vol-ume of essays from the conference of the Institute for the Literary Studiesof the Polish Academy of Sciences dedicated to Białoszewski’s work sug-gests, literary critics have started talking about a Białoszewski ‘‘tradition,’’an alternative trend within Polish postwar poetry inspired by Białoszewski,which contests and ironizes the notion of the ‘‘Eastern European’’ writer asa moral legislator.
9The continuing publication of the collected edition of
his works by Pan ´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy seems to be the confirma-
tion of the growing importance of Białoszewski’s work for contemporaryPolish literature.
Two major factors which played a determining role in the develop-
ment of Białoszewski’s poetics should be mentioned here. In the s,Białoszewski was regarded as part of the so-called language poetry (poezja
lingwistyczna)
10trend, associated with the writings of Karpowicz,Wirpsza,
Baran´czak, and Krynicki, whose linguistic innovations changed the land-
scape of Polish poetry and predated the better known American languagepoets. Although not a misnomer, this label fails to do justice to the com-plexity of Białoszewski’s work, in particular because it occludes the factthat in his case linguistic deformations and inventions result from a ‘‘poet-
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ics of the mundane,’’ from a transformative engagement with the genresof everydayness. Another important factor in situating Białoszewski’s writ-ings is his experience of the Warsaw Uprising: As he himself observedabout his Memoirof theWarsaw Uprising, his poetic experiments were partly
a result of the effort to register in language the dislocating effects of theexperience of war, in particular of the days of the Warsaw Uprising againstthe German occupational forces in . Chronicling Białoszewski’s reloca-tions and wanderings through the basements of destroyed buildings inWar-saw’s Old Town, where the civilian population ‘‘lived’’ during the uprising,A Memoir registers in its language and writing style the proliferation of
‘‘alternative’’ routines of daily life literally displaced into the underground.For Białoszewski, the reality of the uprising and almost complete destruc-tion of the city did not simply abolish ‘‘ordinary life.’’ In addition to uproot-ing the routine of everydayness, the uprising produced a new kind of ‘‘ordi-nariness’’ of daily bombardment and deprivation, which drew attention tothe inconspicuous and often overlooked details, things and affairs, taken forgranted in ‘‘normal’’ circumstances.While life during the uprising renderedsimple amenities like habitation, food, and hygiene ‘‘extraordinary,’’ it alsoproduced its own substitute practices and habits. Białoszewski’s subsequentpreoccupation with the arcana of everydayness, with exposing the routinesof ordinary experiences and their unsuspected, surprising, and often comi-cal underside, can be traced to this war experience of a forcibly dislocated,‘‘upside-down’’ everydayness.
11This kind of persistent dislodging of the
everyday in order to apprehend its other, poietic dimension becomes thetrademark of Białoszewski’s work.
Białoszewski’s writings obviously do not fit the standard Deleuze and
Guattari definition of minor literature as ‘‘that which a minority constructswithin a major language.’’
12To begin with, Białoszewski already operates
within a comparatively ‘‘minor’’ language on the cultural map of Europe,and his circumstances are less complexly and multiply dislocated than arethose of Kafka’s work, which Deleuze and Guattari use as their main ex-ample. Yet, it is possible to read Białoszewski’s situation differently: In away, Białoszewski’s poetic and cultural deterritorializations could be seenas forceful in a different manner than those of Kafka; for if Kafka’s wereprecipitated, even to a certain extent ‘‘arranged,’’ by historical and cul-tural circumstances, Białoszewski had a language and a tradition, even if a‘‘minor’’ one, within which to recuperate his experiences but, instead, ex-pressly chose to challenge it.We should also not underestimate the fact that
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by focusing his challenge on poetry, Białoszewski isin fact working within
a major and highly prestigious cultural ‘‘language.’’ Realizing the alreadymarginal or minor status of Polish literature, he opts for a second degreemarginalization—a displacement from even the ‘‘minor’’ safety of the mar-gin—in order to question both the familiar topography of the Polish liter-ary tradition and to rechart the territory of poetry. Like a minor literature,Białoszewski’s writings develop the ‘‘tensors’’ and ‘‘intensives’’
13which in-
tensify the internal tensions of language and push Polish literary languageto its limits.They deploy colloquialisms, childlike distortions, nonstandardexpressions, and neologisms to create a map of surprising semantic andgrammatical intensities which reflect the intenseness of the historical andlinguistic paste-up of being, unsuspected in ordinary occurrences.
Białoszewski’s texts work on the principle of a double movement
between the poetic and the everyday: On the one hand, poetry is deglam-orized, brought into everyday experience and focused on the apparentbanality of commonplace things and events, and, on the other hand, con-stant experimentation with ordinary language and colloquial or nonstan-dard expressions undercuts the illusory immediacy and familiarity of every-dayness. His writings consistently deterritorialize poetic language througheveryday idioms, colloquialisms, and nonstandard, even ungrammatical,expressions. Yet, these imported language registers do not constitute a newterrain for poetry: a comfortable space of transparent, ordinary language,underlined with nostalgia for the supposed obviousness and immediacyof the everyday. Instead, they themselves are immediately defamiliarizedby poetic experimentation: word inventions, grammatical and inflectionalinnovations. As though this were not enough, Białoszewski’s writing putsitself in question through yet another inversion: Many of the poetic tech-niques are often employed in a deliberately clumsy and exaggerated, distor-tive fashion, generating what Białoszewski refers to as little poetic ‘‘mon-strosities.’’ In effect, these innovations avoid aestheticizing the nonpoeticregisters of the everyday or recuperating them for poetic practice. Theseoperations produce a distinctively two-pronged textuality, which keeps re-inventing both the poetic and the everyday in order to open writing tothe ‘‘surprising’’ poietic dimension of everydayness—to what Białoszewskicallsdziwienie, or ‘‘wondering.’’ To counteract language’s tendency to self-
mythologization, Białoszewski gives to such dziwienie t h ef o r mo fd e l i b –
erately ‘‘minor’’ poems, or, in the case of his later prose writings, ‘‘littlenarratives,’’ as critics call them.
14
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Dziwienie, or the Everyday as a Situational Paste-Up
Białoszewski’s poetry does more than construct a ‘‘minor aesthetics’’:
an alternative poetic practice, a counterpoetics, which would concentrateupon the domains of experience which, too commonplace or mundane,either remain excluded from aesthetics or can serve as poetic material onlythrough deliberate beautification. Its aim is to rethink poetry as a venue forunderstanding experience through its everyday poiēsis. Białoszewski’s poiet-
ics describes a dimension of everydayness which opens upwhen both poeticlanguage and the ordinary are stripped of their customary connotations,when they are brought, through poetic experimentation, into the state ofwonder (dziwienie). Wonder—a state of thinking and, primarily, a state
of poetic language—constitutes the paradoxically deterritorialized ‘‘terri-tory’’ of Białoszewski’s work, a terrain without set perimeter or parameters,where even the most insignificant elements, like dust, walls, or stairs, canunexpectedly become the fleeting and contingent ‘‘fundamentals’’ of theeveryday.
I read this rethought idea of wonderas a critique of high aesthetic experi-
ence, which for Białoszewski aestheticizes the everyday and forecloses itsmeaning in terms of poetic affect. What is characteristic of Białoszewski’s‘‘wonder’’ is the complexity and heterogeneity of the everyday event, of thep a s t e – u pc h a r a c t e ro ft h eo r d i n a r y :‘ ‘ w h a ti sa ts t a k e…i st h ew h o l es i tua-
t i o n a lp a s t e – u p .T h a tw h i c hh a p p e n s ….T h ec o m i n g s ,t h ea s s o c iations,
dialogical situations, some stories ….W i t h o u tt h i st h e r ei so n l yl i t erature,
aphorism, the absence of the human.’’
15The idea of a situational ‘‘paste-
up’’(zlep) defines writing in terms of the shifting and metamorphosing
character of happening, of the hybridity of a situational paste-up, which iskept in play by the parallel paste-up of literary and ordinary idioms. As aspace of demetaphorizing and demythologization, wonder becomes impor-tant for underscoring this paste-up character of the event and for ironizingthe way in which literature and aestheticization evacuate the everyday. AsBiałoszewski indicates in the cited interview, his texts work expresslyagainst‘‘distilling’’ the meaning of what happens, against reducing the hybridity ofzlepyto the necessarily aphoristic space of representation. Keeping in play
the event of experience and its dislocating effects within the practices ofrepresentation and literary conventions, wonder opens up the spaces of in-scription for the elusive historicity of being. If art, as Heidegger suggests,is to produce a turn within the technological modality of revealing awayfrom articulating being in terms of the universal calculability of resources,
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then it has to refigure being specifically in its everyday dimension. And ithas to do so without lapsing into the familiar debacle of aestheticization,without resorting to the nostalgic mythology of immediacy and fullness.Białoszewski’s work certainly meets these criteria, as it demythologizes bothpoetry and everydayness through reciprocal questioning and ironization. Itis along the lines of this reciprocal demythologization that I want to ex-plore the relation between Białoszewski’s writing and Heidegger’s notion ofpoetic thinking, in order to demonstrate the poietic character of experienceas event.
It is relatively easy to write separately about the importance of everyday-
ness for Heidegger’s early ‘‘phenomenological’’ work and the role of poeticthinking in his late writings but more difficult to discern how Heidegger’sremarks about poetry and the critique of aesthetics bear upon the everyday.Heidegger’s project of the critique of metaphysics begins in Being and Time
with an attempt to redirect thinking along the lines of everyday being, das
alltägliche Sein,
16and this interest, although muted to some degree by his
later investment in Hölderlin’s poetry and its hymnic rhetoric, neverthe-less underpins the entirety of Heidegger’s thought. In order to recognizehow the problem of the ordinary inscribes itself in Heidegger’s definitionof poetic thinking, let us read a rarely discussed part of ‘‘Letter on Human-ism,’’ where Heidegger, reflecting on a story about Heraclitus, expresslybrings together thinking and everydayness. Heidegger comments there onAristotle’s story in De parte animalium (I, , a ) about the disappoint-
ment that unknown guests experience upon visiting the most famous of thepre-Socratics, Heraclitus, and finding him in the middle of a most banal ac-tivity—a story which, as it turns out, engages the problem of the ‘‘essence’’of thinking:
The story is told of something Heraclitus said to some strangers whowanted to come visit him. Having arri ved, they saw him warming him-
self at a stove. Surprised, they stood there in consternation—above allbecause he encouraged them, the astounded ones, and called for themto come in, with the words, ‘‘For here too the gods are present.’’
17
Depicting a commonplace, daily occurrence, the story underscores theparamount importance of the ordinary: the house, the stove, the act ofwarming,with thewords
εἱναι γ ὰρκ αὶἐνταῦθα θε ὺς,‘ ‘ F o rh e r et o ot h eg o d s
are present.’’
The Heraclitus story suggests that what matters for thinking, what in
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fact constitutes its very matter, is a certain attentiveness to the everyday.Heidegger’s commentary, though preoccupied primarily with setting up hisnotion of thinking as proto-ethical, with explaining the word
ἦθοςas an
a b o d e ,ap l a c eo fd w e l l i n g( W,), indicates in passing the importance of
the everyday in the enterprise of thinking, as it underscores the banality ofthe situation in which the visitors encounter the thinker:
The group of foreign visitor s…b e l i e v et h e ys h o u l dm e e tt h et h i nker in
circumstances which, contrary to the ordinary [ übliche ] round of human
life, everywhere bear the traces of the exceptional and rare and so of theexciting [ die Züge der Ausnahme und des Seltenen und darum Aufregenden
tragen ] ….T h ef o r eigners who wish to visit the thinker expect to catch
sight of him perchance at that very moment when, sunk in profoundm e d i t a t i o n ,h ei st h i n k i n g ….I n s t e a do ft h i st h e sightseers find Hera-
clitus by a stove. That is surely a common and insignificant place [ Das
ist ein recht alltäglicher und unscheinbarer Ort ] ….A tt h i s disappointing
spectacle even the curious lose their desire to come any closer.What arethey supposed to do here? Such an everyday and unexciting occurrence[alltägliche und reizloseVorkommnis ]—somebody who is chilled warming
himself at a stove—anyone can find any time at home. ( BW,)
18
All the words that guide Heidegger’s reflection on the passage about Hera-clitus and the nature of thinking refer to the opposition between the nor-mal and the extraordinary.The disappointment that the visitors show at thesight of Heraclitus expresses itself in the rhetoric of the absence of anything‘‘exceptional,’’ ‘‘rare,’’ or ‘‘exciting.’’ The site and the event,which Heraclitusproclaims worthy of the presence of the gods, or, to be more exact, whosebeing is godlike or holy, are perceived as ‘‘ordinary,’’ ‘‘common,’’ ‘‘insignifi-cant,’’ ‘‘everyday,’’ and ‘‘unexciting.’’
The focus of Heidegger’s brief remarks falls specifically on the ‘‘alltäg-
liche und reizlose Vorkommnis’’ —the everyday and unexciting occurrence,
which, at least for the visitors, appears to have nothing to do with thinking.Implicitly, for them thinking constitutes a special event, an extraordinaryoccurrence, which, though based on the everyday and common experience,is at the same time divorced from it, separated by a distance which allowsfor reflection, understanding, and knowledge. For the visitors, the extraor-dinary character of thinking should, not surprisingly, be reflected in theposture in which they expect to see Heraclitus—‘‘sunk into meditation.’’Heidegger clearly distances himself from this view, as the phrases used in
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this passage reveal his ironic, even parodic, attitude toward such a repre-sentation of the thinker and thinking, a representation distinctively remi-niscent of Rodin’s famous sculpture.
What remains only implicit in Heidegger’s commentary is the ques-
tion of how wonder (thaumazein) in the pre-Socratic sense of the word,
underlies the properly philosophical notion of thought as the enterpriseof obtaining knowledge. At the start of his remarks about the rise andnature of thought in Metaphysics, Aristotle locates the origin of philosophi-
cal questioning in wonder:
διὰγὰρτὸθαυμ άζειν ο ἱἄνθρωποι κα ὶνῦνκ αὶ
τὸπρῶτονἤρξαντο φιλοσοφε ῖν(Metaphysics A, , b –)—‘‘For it is
owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to phi-l o s o p h i z e …. ’ ’
19The Aristotelian wonder defines the roots of philosophy
in terms of a desire to know, which springs from the astonishment at theworld.
20Wonder comes to be treated as the origin of philosophy, an ori-
gin which, however, remains excluded from philosophy proper. Acknowl-edging the originary importance of
θαυμ άζειν, Aristotle makes clear that
thought and philosophy arise out of this wonder and change it into knowl-edge—
ἐπιστ ήμη(a ). The Aristotelian wonder triggers philosophical
thought ( φιλοσοφε ῖν) but itself cannot claim the same status, for philoso-
phy as such is an attempt to give systematic and lucid answers to the phe-nomena that cause the human mind to wonder. For one wonders only whenone does not know the cause of things, and philosophy by providing an-swers allows us to achieve a ‘‘better state’’ of knowledge: ‘‘[b]ut we must endin the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the casein these instances when men learn the cause’’ ( M,). As the beginning of
Metaphysics makes clear, Aristotle’s concern lies with seeking
ἐπιστ ήμηand,
thus, with transforming the human mind from the state of wonder to ‘‘thebetter state’’ of knowledge. The distinction between the originary wonderand philosophy defined as a search for knowledge implies that
θαυμ άζειν
is prephilosophical and as such belongs with philosophical inquiry only in-directly, as a way of anchoring and explaining the initial philosophical im-pulse. Heraclitus’s statement, however, complicates the distinction betweenwonder and philosophy and indicates that
θαυμ άζεινis already a kind of
thinking, a thinking that precisely remains unexplored by philosophy as ittakes shape with Aristotle’s definition of knowledge. The visitors’ surpriseresults from their inability to comprehend that warming at a stove is a ‘‘mat-ter of thinking,’’ that it is worthy of the concern of a thinker. The stoveand the mundane necessity of keeping warm become the place holders forwhat constitutes the ‘‘proper’’ site of thinking—everyday experience. Con-
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ceived this way, wonder is not deficient but excessive in relation to epistēmē:
It describes a poietic modality of thinking irreducible and untranslatableinto the order of representation and knowledge. In relation to wonder, theparameters of epistēmē represent a restricted scope of thinking: They ob-
scure the ‘‘ordinary’’ site of thought, and, reducing the poietics of every-dayness to the parameters of signification, render it ‘‘foreign,’’ even unreal,to the enterprise of accumulating knowledge.
21This link between wonder
andpoiēsis opens a postaesthetic venue for thinking art, in which the poietic
dimension of experience puts into question both the customary figurationsof the everyday and the aesthetic ‘‘reduction’’ of poetry.
In the context of this double displacement, it becomes easier to recog-
nize the ramifications and motivations of Białoszewski’s work. If Heideggeruses the Heraclitus story to question the idea that knowledge is the ‘‘betterstate’’ of thinking, Białoszewski’s writing can be read in terms of under-mining aesthetic construction as a better or finished state of representation.As much as Heidegger’s work reformulates the very notion of what it meansto think and to know, Białoszewski’s poetry interrogates the sites where lan-guage and representation, achieving the aesthetic quality of expression, failto register the historicity of the event. Białoszewski’s early poem about thel o s so fh i ss t o v e ,‘ ‘‘ O h !O h !S h o u l dT h e yT a k eA w a yE v e nM yS t o v e… ’My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy,’’ is one of his most explicit instances of re-conceptualizing thinking and language through everyday experience.
Ih a v eas t o v elike a triumphal arch!They’re taking away my stovelike a triumphal arch!!Give me back my stovelike a triumphal arch!!!T h e yt o o ki ta w a y .All that’s left
i sag r e y
gaping
hole
a gray gaping hole.
And that’s enough for me:grey gaping hole
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grey-gaping-holegrey-gap-ing-holegreygapinghole.
(RT,, translation modified)
22
The poem is punctuated by the repetition of the phrase ‘‘like a triumphalarch’’(‘‘podobny do bramy triumfalnej’’) and ‘‘grey gaping hole’’ (‘‘szara naga
jama’’), w h i c hi n s i s t e n t l yd r a w sa t t e n t i o nt ot h et w of o c a lp o i n t so ft h et e x t .
The first one emphasizes the importance of what seems to be an ordinary,old heating stove,while the second encapsulates the role that language playsin mapping experience, literally filling with words the hole exposed by theremoval of the stove. Although the text describes an apparently painful ex-perience of losing an important object, emphasized through the repetitionsand the increasing number of exclamation marks after each of the first threestanzas, it is surprisingly subtitled ‘‘My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy.’’
The loss of an object which constitutes a basic necessity of life and a vital
part of the poet’s experience of having a home (note here the stress that thetitle places upon the word nawet, ‘‘even’’), disrupts the sense of dwelling.
The poem hinges upon the fact that this disruption becomes, paradoxically,a source of linguistic proliferation, which fills the gaping, or ‘‘naked’’ (naga)
hole with words—a process which moves from the repetition of the phrase‘‘gray gaping hole’’ through its syllabization, and culminates in the erasureof the boundaries between words and the invention of a foreign sound-ing sound string ‘‘greygapinghole.’’
23Unexpectedly, the disruption of the
everyday routine becomes a positive experience, which generates a sense ofan inexhaustible joy of language and turns the poem into a celebration ofthe linguistic form of dwelling. Filling the hole exposed by the removedstove with words suggests that dwelling has a linguistic constitution, that ittakes its shape from how the event of experience comes intowords.The sud-den absence of the stove accentuates the ‘‘rising’’ of language and it drawsthe poet’s attention to the fact that being has a language of its own—aninexhaustible rising of words even in the absence of objects and things.Thetext underscores this point by using the word ‘‘jama’’ (translated as ‘‘hole’’),
which plays on the idea of the link between language and dwelling. On theone hand, jamarefers to a den or a burrow, and thus suggests a subterra-
nean dwelling place, and, on the other, it also signifies the oral cavity andalludes to the process of the articulation of sounds.The poem suggests thatthe nature of habitation is primarily linguistic, less determined by the con-stellation of the objects that make up our surroundings than constituted
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as a map of unstable significations, a web of multiple and shifting referrals,into which the world opens. This is why Białoszewski can say emphaticallythat the ‘‘grey gaping hole’’ becomes an inexhaustible source of joy, worthyof a continuous writing of an ode.
24Stripping his place of everything but
emptiness, Białoszewski is happy to discover that he is left with language,with ‘‘naked’’ words. This ‘‘joyous’’ recognition of how language arrangesand builds one’s dwelling—the hole inexhaustibly pouring out words—functions parodically as the origin, the continuous ‘‘spring’’ of poetry.
The ‘‘naked’’ words deflate the celebratory rhetoric of ‘‘the triumphal
arch’’ while the poem’s references to mundane things and technologicallyproduced objects—the missing stove, walls, and the hole—ironize nostal-gia for the immediacy of ordinary experience. These underlying strands ofirony make it possible for Białoszewski to link poetry with the everydaywithout mythologizing the connection and to keep a playful distance in hisown project of ‘‘defamiliarizing’’ the ordinary. The joy of the mundane isalways mediated by language, and the site of wonder is an ordinary, evenugly hole in the wall, whose ‘‘nakedness’’ brings into focus the linguisticconfiguration of experience. Białoszewski’s ‘‘ode’’ marks the recognition ofthe inexhaustible, ‘‘infinite,’’ singularity of even such an apparently simpleevent as the appearance of a hole exposed by the removal of an old stove.This event remains without essence, without the assurance of the ontologi-cal constancy or semantic transparency associated with presence. As theending extends language beyond its accepted rules, it suggests the noncoin-cidence of the event with its representation. It points to dislocation anddisplacement as the very mode of occurrence proper to the event, a disjoin-ing figured in the poem by the removal of the stove and the opening of agap or a ‘‘hole’’ in the structure of experience. The exuberant repetition ofthe words ‘‘grey naked hole’’ underscores the deferral of signification whichmarks the event’s historicity: an event which has no essence, and whichempties or ‘‘holes’’ itself with each attempt at representation. This repeti-tion outlines the poietic dimension of experience, which, manifest as theopen-ended field of the event, finds its reflection in the poetic plasticity oflanguage.
In an early poem ‘‘Of My Hermitage with Calling’’ (‘‘O mojej pustelni
nawoływaniem’’), this plasticity takes a form of dziwienie, of wonder or
amazement:
W a l l ,Ia mn o tw o r t h ythat you should fill me with constant wonder,
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a n dy o ut o o ,f o r k…and you, dust s…
(RT,)
25
In a faintly ironic, quasi-religious idiom, the poet confesses his unworthi-ness to accept the ‘‘grace’’ of the most ordinary objects and things, which fillhim with wonder. The objects are deliberately the most mundane ones—fork, wall, dust—the objects of everyday surroundings, signifiers of domes-ticity, and overlooked trivialities, which, though always present as part ofeverydayness, hardly ever draw our attention. These are the details and cor-ners of everydayness which certainly have very seldom been graced withpoetic or philosophical regard:
Yesmy hermitage has its temptations:solitudememories of the worldand that I consider myself a poet.I wonderI wonder meand comment on the lives of the surrounding.
(RT,, translation modified)
26
I modify slightly the existing translation of the poem in The Revolution of
Things to underscore the fact that wonder coincides with linguistic innova-
tions and displacement. The lines ‘‘I wonde r/Iw o nder me’’ (‘‘Dziwie ˛ sie˛/
dziwie˛ siebie’’) transform, in violation of grammatical rules, the reflexiveverb
dziwić sie ˛,which takes indirect objects in the dative case (in English the
verb ‘‘wonder’’ is nonreflexive but functions as a transitive verb with the useof prepositions ‘‘about’’ or ‘‘at’’), into a nonreflexive transitive verb, whichcan take direct objects in the accusative. To approximate this effect in En-glish, it would be necessary to use the verb ‘‘wonder’’ in a transitive form,with a direct object but without the intervening preposition. The inventedphrase, ‘‘dziwie ˛ siebie’’ (‘‘I wonder me’’), a deliberate transgression against
grammatical propriety, functions as the emblem of Białoszewski’s recon-ceptualization of poetic language.The derivation of dziwić as a nonreflexive
transitive verb, abolishing the prepositional distance between the subjectof wonder and its object, shows how wonder exceeds the subject-centeredparadigm of being. This linguistic ‘‘perversion’’ produces a redefinition ofwonder: Wonder no longer signifies a state of curiosityor ignorance, a ques-
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tion that expects an answer in the form of understanding or knowledge, butan openness to the event through which the world unfolds into language.Wonder changes its role from being a preliminary stage to the institutionof a rational subject in search of knowledge to functioning as the openingu po fas p a c ei nw h i c hat h i n gc a nb e‘ ‘ s o m e t h i n g ’ ’i nt h efi r s tp l a c e .
Białoszewski’s language disclaims both the representational function and
the authority of a commentary, illustration, or exemplary status with re-spect to the experience of the ordinary.The displacements, distortions, andironic playfulness specifically serve the purpose of ridiculing the mimeticpretensions of language. A decisive shift in the conception of poetry, suchan attitude denounces the mistakes, the ‘‘sins’’ of past poetic writing:
Put paper flowers in teapots,pull the ropes of clotheslinesand the bells of boots,for the carnival of poetry,for a solemn unceasing amazement [ dziwienie; wonder].
(RT,)
27
Eschewing conventional poetic themes and imagery, ‘‘Of My Hermitagewith Calling’’ links the idea of poetic carnival with the minutiae of theordinary: boots, clotheslines, and paper flowers. Defining what constitutesthe poetic, the poem opts for accouterments of the everyday, banal, and‘‘cheap’’ (paper flowers) reality. The invocations of the mundane disclaimthe ‘‘offenses’’ of poetic writing, making the carnival of poetry contingentprecisely on the recognition of the ordinariness. The Polish word odpust
(translated as ‘‘carnival’’) is an equivalent of the Latin absolutio, and ties the
celebration with the Church designated days of absolution, a play whichanother passage makes clear:
Switch off the light:Here’s a storehouse of contemplation,y o ua r ea l lc o v e r e dw i t hh e a r t ,give me absolution [ rozgrzesz mnie! ]!
(RT,/UZ I, )
Asking the objects of his everyday surroundings for forgiveness, Białoszew-ski implies that poetry finds itself in need of atonement for the ‘‘aesthetic’’excesses and extravagances of its portrayal of experience. It is the ironicwonder at the ‘‘mundane,’’ manifest in the twists and distortions of lan-
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guage, that secures the absolution for poetry’s mythologization of experi-ence.
The linguistic pun in the title of another poem, ‘‘Zmysłów pierwoustroje’’
(UZ I, ) demonstrates precisely the ‘‘originary’’ character of this poetic
wonder.The neologism ‘‘pierwoustroje’’ (‘‘firstelements’’) plays on the Polish
equivalent of ‘‘microorganisms’’ (drobnoustroje) by replacing the first seg-
ment, drobno-, which indicates the minimal size,with a derivative of the ad-
jective pierwszy —first, initial, originary. The coined word suggests that the
linguistic lacunae in Białoszewski’s poetryare of originaryand principal im-portance for his understanding of poetic language. These blanks constitutethe ‘‘firstelements’’ of language, which arrange, structure, set up, and pro-gram writing (all those ‘‘activities’’ are implicit in ustroje, which carries the
connotation of arranging and organizing—not yet a sign of actual arrange-ment or order, but an index of the structural play which enables ordering).The full title of the poem can then be rendered as ‘‘The Firstelements ofSenses,’’ where ‘‘senses’’ itself carries an additional load of playful ambiguity.The word zmysły refers to the senses as the mechanism of perception but it
also plays in this specific context on myśl(thought) and zmyślanie (‘‘making
up’’ or ‘‘imagining’’). The text leaves no doubt that the ‘‘firstelements’’ arethemselves linguistic, a kind of first zmysły ( c o n s t r u c t so ft h o u g h t ) ,e v e ni f
they signifyonlyas blanks or lacunae. Consequently, these ‘‘firstelements ofsenses’’ cannot be quite categorized under the rubric of either the sensibleor the intelligible, as their ontologico-linguistic status puts this oppositioninto question. They point, instead, to what might be called the ‘‘element ofsense,’’ the space that opens up the very distinction between materiality andintelligibility, without, however, becoming signifiable through this opposi-tion.Wonder marks the poietic dimension of experience,which inauguratesbinary conceptual configurations—matter-sense, subject-object—only toexceed their parameters. The perceptual senses are always already linguis-tically coded—they perceive or ‘‘sense’’ inseparably from language senses,like the sweetness of the beet root felt already in word from the cycle ‘‘Ro-mance with the Particular’’: ‘‘sugar! sweet / already in the beet-root of thew o r d/ …/o u rg l u t t o n o u sw e l l/t r i m m e d/w i t ht h et a s t e buds of lan-
guage’’ ( UZ I, –). Since sensations are felt through words, experi-
enced as inseparable from their meaning, wonder describes experience notsimply as embodied but, rather, as opening an inscriptional space whereflesh can be experienced as a socio-linguistic body, signified through itsfunctions.
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The figures through which Białoszewski describes everyday experience
all refer to habitation, to forms of dwelling and habitual, customary occur-rences—from the ‘‘hermitage’’ of his apartment to the series of poems de-scribing the minutiae of life in a high-rise apartment building. His poetryfunctions as a poetic building of an open-ended and historical map of sig-nifications, within which writing opens up access to the ēthosof everyday-
ness.
28Thisēthostakes the form of poetic thinking, built of the ‘‘first ele-
ments of sense,’’ in which things emerge as what they are. Białoszewski’stermdziwienie refigures the Heraclitean wonder into this specific venue
of poetic thinking, which emphasizes the paste-up character of the event.This poetic dimension of thinking requires a reinvention of the everydayas an ‘‘inexhaustible’’ happening, whose continuously erupting singularitycan never be brought fully into presence: It remains foreign to knowledgeand aesthetic representation. Białoszewski’s poetry parodies the divorce ofthinking from the everyday, its abstraction—for the sake of knowledge—from the mundane, though perhaps never really ordinary, minutiae of ex-perience. It uses the disruptive effects of this parody to question the re-ductions of the everyday to the ‘‘event-less’’ and ordinary scope it is givenwithin the order of representation.
The ‘‘Avant-Garde’’ Peripheries of Culture
On the face of it, Białoszewski’s favorite strategy of writing, dziwie-
nie,poses a challenge to at least some of the tenets of avant-garde aes-
thetics: It espouses a plebeian rather than an elitist viewpoint; it deployscountless forms of low culture and folklore; it uses substandard and periph-eral forms of language; and it is highly individualistic, anti-ideological andanti-communal.
29T h e s ep o i n t so fc o n t e n t i o nd on o tm e a n ,h o w e v e r ,t h a t
Białoszewski simply takes an anti-avant-garde stance. Rather, his work is aconstant demystification of the myth of the avant-garde and its emblem-atic features: super-experimental aesthetics, group ideology, elitist attitude,utopian social vision. As usual with Białoszewski, his irony cuts both ways:His work parodies the avant-garde’s tendency to self-mythologization and
the cultural stereotypes and misreadings of avant-garde art. This disman-tling of avant-garde myths constitutes, as Burkot shows, a necessary ‘‘de-structive’’ part of Białoszewski’s radicalization of avant-garde poetics, inparticular of the problematic of everydayness. Rejecting what he finds ob-structive to the rethinking of experience as event, Białoszewski develops
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the idea of the avant-garde as a ‘‘poetics of the mundane,’’ where the ques-tioning of the most commonplace forms of experience motivates linguisticexperimentation.
Białoszewski’s individualism and extreme privacy, his withdrawal from
official forms of literary life and cultural exchange into the minutiae ofeveryday life, constitutes a challenge to the public function of art. Thiscontestation is particularly significant in the context of the expectations ofmoral and political leadershipwhich Polish culture has placed on artists andintellectuals. As Jarosław Anders remarks in his review of the new trans-lation of Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk, ‘‘Eastern European writers, as we
have been told for years, are moral legislators of their people. They are sup-posed to stand like immovable rocks in the turbulent sea of the region’shistory.’’
30Against this dominant image of literary life in Eastern Europe,
reinforced by Western perceptions of the political struggle during the ColdWar years, Białoszewski appears to be almost an anti-writer, a kind of anti-intellectual,who openlydisplays a lack of interest in playing the ready-maderole of a literary and moral authority. His stance suggests that modern lit-erature can remain important only if it deflates its own stature, ironizesits cultural significance, and takes leave of its conventions. This kind of‘‘individualism’’ is a calculated political and anti-ideological posture, whichmocks the artist as a moral legislator or a creator of beauty and sees art’swork in terms of discerning the critical forces implicit in the event textureof the everyday. As Burkot argues, Białoszewski’s emphasized privatenessis not a sign of narcissism but a way of problematizing the distinction be-tween the private and the public ( MB,). His writings could indeed be
analyzed from the perspective of how they continuously reappraise the lin-guistic work through which the always singular, ‘‘private’’ experience getsarticulated and enters the public domain of meaning. The idiosyncrasiesof his language illustrate the constant renegotiation of this process, an at-tempt to articulate in the general social code the singular shape of experi-ence as event. The emphasis upon the particulars of personal life, dailyroutine and conversations, suggests a challenge to ‘‘naive’’ autobiography,taking the form of writing that details thevarying shape of things and events(MB,). Such writing breaks up the confines of the lyrical subject with
its self-transparent interiority and becomes, as Bauer suggests, a form of‘‘being-in-the-world,’’ a turn to the outside, to the nonsubjective space ofexperience, which results in ‘‘a deconstruction, an unmasking and demys-tification of the accumulated, as well as of the ways of experiencing exteri-
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ority.’’31The hybrid texture of Białoszewski’s language, its always tenuous
position between articulation and disarticulation, inscribes historicity intothe very matrix of experience. Exteriority marked in a certain untimelinessor nonpresence of historicity inlays experience and shapes it by extravertinglanguage into a modality of ‘‘being-in-the-world.’’
I read Białoszewski’s departure from the avant-garde mythology as a ges-
ture of making prominent the ‘‘real’’ problematic of the avant-garde: itsengagement with the aesthetic and political implications of the idea of ex-perience as event. The difficulty of sustaining this focus without renderingthe everyday marvelous or exotic manifests itself in the strain that avant-garde poetics places upon language, which now carries the burden of both
questioning the ordinariness of the everyday and counteracting the effect ofaestheticization. Białoszewski’s work is, then, avant-garde in the sense thatLyotard ascribes to this word, that is, according to a conception in whichthe insistent question ‘‘Is it happening?’’ functions as the defining momentof avant-garde art. Lyotard’s emphasis on the event has both aesthetic andpolitical implications, as it calls for a ‘‘letting-go’’ of grasping and control-ling modalities of cognition and comportment to the world. It is only in themoment of such a releasement/questioning that experience shows itself inan inessential manner, as an event.This Lyotardian avant-garde question ‘‘Isit happening?’’ is amplified and intensified through Białoszewski’s practiceof making language ‘‘dwell’’ within the event. Dziwienie (wonder) expands
or decompresses the moment of happening, registering in linguistic inno-vations and inconventionalities the ways in which the production of experi-ence, its poiēsis, marks itself in consciousness and language. The expansion
and hybridization of language performed by Białoszewski offsets the reduc-tion or compression of the everyday into the significations of the ordinary,into the representable spaces of normalcy regulated by the increasing com-modification of experience and time. In ‘‘ ‘Oh! Oh! Should They Take AwayE v e nM yS t o v e… ’’ ’t h ev a riations on the phrase ‘‘grey gaping hole’’ enact
such an intensification of the event: Repeating the phrase, they extend itinto syllables and then collapse it into a sound string, which underscoresthe surprising effects of the exposed hole and the sudden realization that itis language, more than any material object, that ‘‘preserves’’ experience asalways untimely, as nonsynchronizable with presence and representation.
A good example of such an intensification of an ordinary event is ‘‘A
Ballad of Going Down to a Store’’ from Białoszewski’s first collection ofpoetry:
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F i r s tIw e n ti n t ot h es t r e e tdown the stairs,w o u l dy o ub e l i e v ei t ,down stairs.Then acquaintances of strangersand I passed one another by.What a pityyou did not seehow people walk,w h a tap i t y .Ie n t e r e dac o m p l e t es t o r eThere were glass lamps burning,I saw someone—who sat downA n dw h a td i dIh e a r ?…w h a td i dIh e a r ?The rustle of bags and human talk.And indeed,indeedI returned.
(RT,, translation modified)
32
Part of a series entitled ‘‘Grotesques,’’ the poem invokes both the conven-tions of a Romantic ballad, which in its typical formula incorporates themysterious, the threatening, and the marvelous, and the aesthetic of thegrotesque, with its characteristic distance and distortion. These two ex-plicit citations of literary conventions allow Białoszewski to construct a‘‘grotesque’’ optics in which the commonplace undergoes multiple dislo-c a t i o n st or e v e a la nu n s u s p e c t e dc o m p l e x i t y .
33A routine trip to the store
discloses an unexpected sensual and existential intricacy; it becomes whatit, in fact, always is, a singular event. Yet what is ‘‘wonder-ful’’ about thisevent is precisely its singular ordinariness: walking, seeing, hearing, that is,an experience of what Białoszewski calls the ‘‘firstelements of sense.’’ De-void of nostalgia for immediacy or familiarity, which would aestheticizethe unappealing aspects of the ordinary, the poem reclaims the intricacy ofthe ‘‘normal’’ firstelements of experience from the dullness of unquestionednormalcy. The ending indicates that this descent to the store is precisely areturn to the everyday, which returns experience to its poiēsis.
34
Białoszewski’s typographical arrangement of the poem enacts the tem-
poral extension of the event, thus allowing the firstelements of sense toregister their inexhaustibleness within the space of the poem. This in-
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exhaustibleness comes from the fact that the event is never synchronouswith its articulation, as its historicity dislocates the routine of the sensesin its double, sensible and intelligible, play. Seeing, hearing, and walkingreturn to their place within the poiēsis of the event and produce a cascad-
ing reaction in language against the norms of signification and representa-tion. Reclaiming the firstelements is a linguistic, avant-gardeventure,whichentails dislocating language so that the ‘‘firstelements’’ of experience canemerge. The event unfolds its multiple surfaces, extending, as in ‘‘A Ballad…, ’ ’t h r o u g ht h ee l ements of its senses: audible, visual, tactile, semantic,
syntactic.
In some cases, this practice of focusing on the inexhaustible texture of
the event has also political effects.The most persuasive example is obviouslyA Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, which deliberately parodies the myths
of national martyrdom and heroic patriotism. At the same time, A Mem-
oircan be read as a statement of political defiance in the face of a regime
for which the very mention of the Warsaw Uprising of —militarilydirected against the German occupational force but politically aimed atthe incoming Soviet troops and the Soviet imposed communist govern-ment—was a political embarrassment. Ironizing both sides, A Memoir un-
masks the follyof invoking the myth of national sacrifice during the SecondWorld Waragainst another myth: the necessityof introducing the commu-nist rule in the face of historical circumstances. This parody of the politicsof myth goes even a step further and discloses its underlying seriousnessthrough repeated references to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and itsfi n a ld e s t r u c t i o ni nM a r c h . A Memoir depicts the isolation of War-
saw during the Warsaw Uprising of as a repetition, a reminder aboutthe seclusion and abandonment of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto dur-ing their uprising over a year earlier: ‘‘And afterwards—it was the famous,beautiful, late Easter eve of .The Aryans—we were still called that—inthe churches—dressed up for the holiday—and over there—this hell—thiswell-known, only without hope ….A n dn o ww ew e r et h eo n e si s o l a t e d ,
u n a d m i r e d .A tl e a s tw i t ht h eh o p ef o rt h ef r o n t ’ ’( MWU, –, transla-
tion modified).
35The reminder about the Ghetto uprising both draws a
parallel between the situation of the helpless civilian population of War-saw and the exterminated population of the Ghetto and indicates a piv-otal difference between them: the difference between hopelessness and thepossibility of hope. It also shows how the very quality of myth and its cul-tural functions can allow the myth of Polish heroism often to ‘‘forget’’ thisother uprising, of which the Warsaw Uprising was, in a sense, a repetition.
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As Wacław Lewandowski suggests, Białoszewski opposes the ‘‘heroic’’ tra-dition in Polish literature in order to foreground the ‘‘civilian’’ experienceand to place this experience in the context of the Holocaust.
36The stark
deflation of heroism which constitutes the framework of A Memoir illus-
trates how the mythologization of suffering, instead of opening up to thesuffering of others, can serve to consolidate the narcissism of cultural andnational identities.
This is probably why Białoszewski avoids an appeal to universal human-
ity, to the ‘‘politics’’ of a unifying sameness of human nature, and opts fordescribing the minutiae of the ordinary sensations. His interest in the mun-dane details of experience takes the form of three principal textual strate-gies: irony, linguistic playfulness or ‘‘monstering,’’ as he calls it, and an aes-thetics of the periphery. Such a form of linguistic open-endedness, codedinto elaborately and playfully perverse and parodic language constructs de-rived from but no longer classifiable as ordinary language, becomes identi-fied, especially in later works, with a peculiar kind of irony directed bothat the literary and cultural tradition and at Białoszewski’s own produc-tions. This idiosyncratic irony is so significant that Białoszewski invents aname for it: m’ironia (m’irony). This word appears as the title for a series of
poems which outline Białoszewski’s ars poetica in a discussion which paro-
dies the labor of writing, the notion of poetic inspiration, and the desire fortruth. M’ironia is a clever play on the poet’s first name, Miron, and its lin-
guistic proximity to the Polish word for ‘‘irony’’: ironia. Prefixing an Mto
‘‘irony,’’ Białoszewski coins a self-ironic term which describes his strategyof continuous parodic displacement, an irony turned against Miron and hiswriting or ‘‘mironizing.’’ This irony has a specifically Białoszewskean tone—warm and playful, occasionally harsh, but still full of affection for the mun-dane details of being. More than a poetic device, ‘‘m’irony’’ functions asa form of textuality which, playing with words and idiomatic expressionsand parodying ideas through mixing discursive modes—for example, thediscourse of philosophy with colloquialisms—transforms the predictabilityof ordinary language into dziwienie.
37As a constitutive feature of the tex-
tuality of Białoszewski’s work, ‘‘m’irony’’ ironizes both the discourses fromwhich he wants to distance himself and his own texts, in order to preventthem from assuming a position of authority, of the air of self-importancegenerated by their critical impetus.
The double twist of this ironic mode of writing comes explicitly to the
fore in ‘‘About My Rising,’’ which, exposing the absence of inspiration inthe poet’s work, ridicules the naive and affected assumptions about poetry:
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‘‘I’ve fallen / from my inspiration s/…/w h e nt h e yc u tm eo p e n/t h e r e
will be a scandal’’ ( RT, ) .T h eP o l i s ht e x tw o r k se v e nm o r ee ff e c t i v e l yb e –
cause of its substandard, ‘‘unpoetic’’ phrasing: for example, a careless useof‘‘z’’instead of ‘‘ze’’in‘‘z swoich natchnien ´’’(‘‘frommy inspirations’’), as
well as the colloquially sounding ‘‘oklapłem,’’ translated as ‘‘I’ve fallen,’’ but
which, in fact, plays on the colloquial verb designating deflation and alludesto the loss of poetic power. The poem parodies the idea of poetic inspira-tion as a special state of consciousness or capability of the imagination.This(m)ironic strategy marks an effort to remain open and candid, emphasizingthe need to expose every pretense and affectation to which language suc-cumbs, and to which, Białoszewski seems to suggest, his own texts are alsoprone. Such ironic treatment involves not only the thematic, ideological, orfigural aspects of poetry, but also its linguistic and discursive practices. Inother words, in its most important gesture, it affects the syntactic and lexi-cal levels of language as well as style and discursive mode: ungrammaticalconstructions, colloquialisms, fusion of different modes (written/spoken,educated/uneducated), and inflectional forms considered ‘‘inferior’’ to thestandard ones. Białoszewski undercuts the segmentation of language intovarious spheres of discourse—literary/nonliterary, colloquial/educated—and explores the effect that this compartmentalization has had upon liter-ary, in particular poetic, language. A very short poem entitled ‘‘mironczar-
nia’’is one of such grammatical and stylistic hybrids:
me˛czy sie ˛ człowiek Miron me ˛czy
znów jest zen ´ słów niepotraf
niepewny cozrobien ´
yen´(UZ I, )
a human being agonizes [suffers, struggles] Miron agonizesagain he is a word-incompeterunsure whattodoeroer
The title of the poem resists direct translation, as it plays again on Białoszew-ski’s first name, Miron, combining it with an incomplete word, czarnia,
which suggests agony and suffering (me˛czarnia) —that is Miron’s suffering
or m’ironic suffering. The text chronicles the labor and the pain of writing,its uncertainties, difficulties, and hesitations. Its ingenuity lies in the man-ner in which it fuses the thematic and the formal, as the idea of agony overwords is literally enacted by the text’s often deliberately awkward or over-
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done verbal acrobatics: ‘‘unsure whattodoer’’ (‘‘niepewny cozrobien ´’’)regis-
ters the hesitation in its transformation from a verbal phrase into a noun,echoed in the next line by the separated and modified ending, ‘‘yen´’’(‘‘oer’’),
which begins to reverberate with another possible connotation— len´—a
lazy, idle person (here an ironic reminder that perhaps the poet, despite hisclaims to agony over each word, does not work enough). The difficultiesof the writing process are even more trenchantly illustrated by the phrase‘‘słów niepotraf,’’ which, in the form of a mocking self-accusation, points to
the poet’s deficient ability with words.
This poem also illustrates the second form that Białoszewski’s undoing
of the reduction of everydayness to the significations of the ordinary takes,namely, a calculated, self-parodic deployment of the avant-garde tech-niques of word creation.These techniques are often deliberately misapplied,or used ‘‘carelessly,’’ in order to produce what Białoszewski calls ‘‘wypadki z
gramatyki’’ —a phrase which plays on the etymological meaning of ‘‘falling
o u t ’ ’i m p l i c i ti n wypadek (accident) and means both ‘‘accidents (or inci-
dents) of grammar’’ and ‘‘falling out of grammar.’’ Cutting, disabling, ordistorting words, Białoszewski attempts to exit or leave the word, as heindicates in another poem entitled ‘‘I cannot write’’ (‘‘Nie umiem pisać’’):
‘‘które˛dy wyjść ze słowa?’’ ‘‘which way to exit the word?’’ ( UZ I, ). His cal-
culated ‘‘errors’’ implement a careful dissection of language in an attempt tocut into the word and turn it inside out in order to put into play its poten-tial, even if erroneous or mistaken, meaning.
38Białoszewski’s avant-garde
poetics takes on the form of an exploration of the inability to exit words, ofan inconceivable, preposterous demand that makes this impossibility thevery condition of the possibility of poetic writing. For an exit from the wordcan be made only by means of language: through dissecting words, distort-ing existing words or creating new ones. Language affords no ultimate exit,but this is clearly not the way out that Białoszewski seeks. His intention isto exit the literary and cultural conventions and to enter a poietic dimen-sion of language, whether within, outside, or on the inverse of words. If theevent horizon of experience loses its historicity upon entering the codifiedspace of language and becomes a (hi)story, then these exits from the wordare opened up in order to increase the plasticity of language to a degree thatwould allow it to keep the signification of the event flexible, irreducible towhat it means to be ‘‘ordinary.’’
Białoszewski explains this procedure in a short and playful poem ‘‘Tłu-
maczenie sie ˛ z twórczośsci’’ (‘‘Explaining one’s creations’’), which illustrates
his reasons for writing semi-colloquially, for creating odd and humorous
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but quite trenchant little linguistic ‘‘monstrosities’’: ‘ ‘ …ł a p i e ˛ za słowa/
po tocznie/ po tworze ˛’’(UZ I, ). The first line is an idiomatic expression
which refers to an overliteral interpretation of one’s words, both graspingatbut also forwords; the next two lines play with two words, ‘‘colloquially’’
(potocznie) from which the text separates the first syllable po,correspond-
ing to the initial syllable of the word from next line (it reads as one wordthough its opening syllable is written separately). It is on this word thatt h ee n t i r ep o e mp i v o t s ,s i n c et h ed o u b l em e a n i n go ft h ew o r dc o d e si n t oitself the governing play of the text. The word po tworze ˛,is a pun on two
words: tworzyć, ‘‘to create,’’ and potwór, am o n s t e r .O no n el e v e l ,t h ep u n
‘‘colloquializes’’ the verb ‘‘create’’ into potworzyć (to create casually, in an
off-handed manner); on the other, it invents a verb form from the nounpotwór, something on the order of ‘‘to monster’’ or ‘‘to invent monstrosi-
ties.’’ It can be paraphrased into English in two ways: as ‘‘I will create [write]monsters [that is, linguistic monsters or monstrosities]’’ and, at the sametime, as ‘‘I will create [write] casually,’’ nonchalantly and unceremoniously.This easy-going manner of writing is echoed, structurally and semantically,b yt h ew o r df r o mt h ep r e v i o u sl i n e — po tocznie (‘‘colloquially’’). In a direct
response to his critics, Białoszewski formulates his artistic credo in a waythat evacuates any solemnity and pathos from writing.
The third idiom in which Białoszewski’s poetics of wonder works is that
of peripheral linguistic and cultural regions. As Baran ´czak’s excellent study
of Białoszewski’s poetic language, Je˛zyk poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego,
points out,
39this project of parodying generic literary distinctions, poetic
devices—metaphors, rhymes, rhythm, versificational and stanzaic canons—and the distinction between literature and nonliterature, underlies theentirety of Białoszewski’s work. Białoszewski consistently ‘‘compromises’’and parodies established poetic strategies and forms as well as the basicrules of the educated language by ‘‘contaminating’’ them with the likes ofchildren’s mistakes, colloquial expressions, and new words and idioms gen-erated with the help of the above practices. Disrupting literary and gram-matical conventions, Białoszewski’s texts ironize high culture in order toelevate the trite and the commonplace, the artifacts of mechanical repro-duction, folk art or craft. The parody, however, does not end there, as thesame texts also play ironically with the manifestations of ‘‘low’’ and pro-vincial culture.
40
This contestation of high culture through minor and peripheral aes-
thetics finds a characteristic expression in one of Białoszewski’s best andmost popular ballads, ‘‘Karuzela z madonnami’’ (‘‘A Merry-go-round with
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Madonnas’’). Cast in the circular rhythm of a merry-go-round in motion,the poem stages a confrontation between popular entertainment and highart. The motion of the merry-go-round, inscribed into an extremely intri-cate and skillfully constructed rhythmic and rhyming pattern in the text,‘‘sings’’ a ‘‘Magnificat’’ of the ordinary: ‘‘—white horses /—carriage /—black horses /—carriage /—brown horses /—carriage /—Magnificat!’’
41
The dashes punctuate the intervals between horses and carriages into amusical rhythm which the poem equates with a magnificat. The title ma-donnas are invested with significance through comparison to the madonnasof Leonardo and Raphael. Sitting in each carriage, they have about themthe air of Leonardo (‘‘A one w Leonardach min’’) while the motion of the
merry-go-round becomes the ‘‘turns of Raphael’’ (of Raphael’s brush?): ‘‘W
obrotach Rafaela’’ (UZ I, ). However, the text immediately reminds us that
those ‘‘splendid’’ madonnas exist on the peripheries of towns and are noth-ing more than an embodiment of Sunday pastime and amusement ( ‘‘W
przedmieściach i niedzielach’’ []; ‘‘in the peripheries and Sundays’’). In a
linguistically and aesthetically acrobatic move, the text describes them asthe ‘‘periphe / rafa / elite / madonnas / of sub / urbs’’ ( ‘ ‘ p e r y f e/r a f a/e l i c k i e/
madonny / przed / mieścia’’ [UZ I, ]). The entire texts works around this
ironically coined adjective: peripherafaelite. Running together ‘‘peripheral’’and ‘‘preraphaelite,’’ Białoszewski comes up with a parodic word emblem-atic of the tensions between high and low culture that underpin his poetics.
With this one ‘‘stroke’’ Białoszewski parodies here both the Raphael-
ite idea of beauty and the pre-Raphaelite aesthetics, as he finds his owneveryday and trite ‘‘beauty’’ in the machineries of amusement parks, some-where on the peripheries of towns or in suburbs. Overcharged with mean-ing, the word ‘‘peripherafaelite’’ collapses together high aesthetic ideals andthe superficiality and insignificance of the peripheral. In fact, this neolo-gism is so overinvested with multiple and often contradictory connotationsthat it practically self-destructs, and its dissolution is graphically indicatedby the segmentation of the word (‘‘periphe—rapha—elite’’), which, punc-tuating the rhythm of writing, mimics the slowing motion of the merry-go-round. The poem intensifies the opposition between high and low cul-ture only to dissolve it, to ease the tension with the double stoppage of themotion and of the text. Fusing two words, ‘‘peripheraphaelite’’ enacts themeltdown of the oppositional logic and articulates Białoszewski’s challengeto the binary value system. It suggests the need for opening up a zone be-tween the ‘‘high’’ and the ‘‘low,’’ the poetic space of experience and languageunencumbered with the conventional paradigms and aesthetic judgments.
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Willfully situating itself on the fringes of literature and official culturallife, Białoszewski’s writings continuously enact this meltdown of bound-aries and parody the logic of the center and the margin. Since the marginis always a margin ‘‘with respect to’’ a center or a core, in a dialectical rela-tionship with what marginalizes it, Białoszewski prefers periphery, with itsconnotations of supposed banality, absence of stylishness, even triteness.
42
The two most salient examples of this contestation of the high/lowdivide
areA Memoir, a n das h o r tp o e m ‘‘Stepy amerykan ´skie’’(‘‘American Steppes’’),
a parody of both the rhetoric and the themes of Polish Romanticism.‘‘American Steppes’’ is an ironic reworking of one of the most famous poemsof Polish Romanticism, the sonnet ‘‘Stepy akerman ´skie’’ (‘‘The Steppes of
Akerman’’) by Adam Mickiewicz, a national icon and paragon of high cul-ture. Mickiewicz wrote the series of ‘‘Crimean Sonnets’’—which includes‘‘Stepy akerman ´skie,’’ cited or, in fact, reinvented, by Białoszewski—as a
symbolic representation not only of his personal longing after his countrybut also of Poles’ desire for lost independence. The sonnets are regarded asamong the very best literary texts ever written in Polish. Białoszewski, bycontrast, situates his ‘‘sonnet’’ as an outcome of his trip to America and atotal failure at taking a prophetlike posture characteristic of Mickiewicz:
Kicia Kocia
Wpłyne ˛łam na mokrego przestwór hm hm anu
d a l e jn i c…n i c…zawał talentuaaaaa(drze włosy i re ˛kopis)
43
Kitty Kattie
I sailed onto the wet expanse of the hm hm eant h e nn o t h i n g…n o t h i n g…a total collapse of talentaaaa(she tears her hair and manuscript)
In a deliberate contrast to the lyrical ‘‘I’’ of Mickiewicz’s poem—a malepoet, a Romantic prophet (wieszcz) in exile longing for his country (father-
land)—the ‘‘speaker’’ of Białoszewski’s text is female. ‘‘Her’’ unusual andsilly nickname jars with the poetic vocation, especially the way it is de-fined by the Romantic tradition, and ironizes the masculine stance widelyadopted by Romantic poets. It is important, however, to note that ‘‘Kicia
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Kocia’’ functions as the poet’s alter ego, extending the parody to his own
texts and making the gender play even more immediately relevant for theirlyrical subject(s). Subverting, almost literally turning Mickiewicz’s text intoa stutter, ‘‘Stepy amerykan ´skie’’parodies the inflated notion of poetic inspira-
tion, pointing out the difficulties, exertions, and labor involved in writing.The poet is not at all inspired, the writing, in a reversal of Mickiewicz’smetaphor, does not ‘‘sail.’’ On the contrary, the whole experience is pre-sented as frustrating and depressing, though it is obviously ‘‘lightened’’ andeased by the text’s explicit exaggeration and irony. The ironic treatment ofthe idealized picture of an inspired prophet becomes here the vehicle forBiałoszewski’s critique of cultural and literary traditions. Since Białoszewskiopenly admired Mickiewicz’s poetry, this attack is clearly aimed at the cul-tural mythology which mystifies literary figures and constructs idealizedcanons.
Białoszewski’s contestation of the political mythologies of Polish culture
receives its most poignant expression in A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising
and a series of texts called ‘‘cabarets,’’ written in the politically and sociallyturbulent years of the rise of Solidarity and the imposition of martial law.A Memoir consistently breaks the historical and literary stereotypes about
the uprising; it demonumentalizes the struggle and evacuates any lin-gering pathos by focusing exclusively on the ugly and mundane aspects ofthe everyday fate of civilian population. Although Białoszewski opts herefor the form of the memoir to make problematic the fictionality of litera-ture, at the same time, he foregrounds the imperfection and incompletenessof memory on which he has to rely in writing this text in , twenty-threeyears after the uprising took place. He therefore supplements his accountwith information from newspapers, documentary footage, his father’s rec-ollections, and so on. According to Białoszewski, the twenty-threeyears thatelapsed between the uprising and the moment he was ready to write hisMemoir were necessary to prepare language for it, to find a way of writing
that would not succumb to conventionalized representations of war and theapocalyptic rhetoric associated with them.
What is most striking about A Memoir is the apparent discrepancy be-
tween its theme—the most disastrous event in the history of Warsaw, thedestruction of the city and its inhabitants—and the style of presentation,with its ordinary, spokenlike language and the focus on the cycles of esca-lating disintegration of daily routines and attempts to construct new ones.Choosing the form of linguistic chatter or prattle (gadanie) in order to fol-
low scrupulously, almost day by day, the forced relocations and increasing
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suffering of the civilians caught in the fighting, A Memoir avoids both the
glorification of the heroic struggle doomed to defeat and the rhetoric ofcatastrophism characteristic of Polish war poetry. It also deflates the stereo-types and myths that accumulated around the uprising as one of the ‘‘pri-mal’’ scenes of modern Polish identity by presenting it, as Lewandowskiargues, as a replica, already imperfect and hence never ‘‘primal,’’ of the up-rising in theWarsaw Ghetto: ‘‘The consciousness that this is a replica and—as a replica—less ‘perfect,’ less intense. Therefore the narrator of A Memoir
does not hide that, although the [Warsaw] uprising was the most importantexperience, it was not what shaped his perception and understanding.’’
44
Avoiding the familiar gesture of intensifying the images of terrorand apoca-lyptic rhetoric, Białoszewski presents the war and the gradual destructionof Warsaw by showing, as one critic put it, the destruction of all ordinarypoints of support that organize everyday life: from cooking and eating tosleeping and defecating.
45The chatter prose of A Memoir, colloquial and
often onomatopoeic, is composed mostly of fragments, one word sentencesand sentence equivalents, which effectively heightens the sense of increas-ing disorder and destruction. It emphasizes the chaotic darting and sprint-ing around (latanie) which both paste the text together and unwork it on
the syntactic and semantic levels.The dominant image of a frenzied dartingaround (latanie) is also an ironic commentary on the image of the aesthetic,
Icarus-like flight (lot)and the patriotic surge (wzlot). As usual, Białoszewski
achieves this effect by mixing high tone with the colloquial: lataćmeans to
fly or to soar, but, colloquially, it refers to a disorganized and frenetic run-ning around. As Maria Janion remarks, latanie inA Memoir ironizes lofty
and aestheticized representations of the struggle for independence withinthe post-Romantic tradition of Polish literature. It renders problematic theliterary monumentalization of the Polish form.
46
As a quasi-organizational principle, latanie in Białoszewski’s Memoir ac-
counts for the fragmentary and disjointed description of haphazard, oftenseemingly insignificant events and the absence of military struggle, politi-cal debates, or heroic deeds. The colloquialism of latanie also reinforces
the semi-official, semi-literary, and unsystematic aspects of the languageofA Memoir. It sets the tone for the unheroic portrayal of the inversion
of the securities of everydayness into a multiplying threat of death: InBiałoszewski’s script, satisfying the basic necessities of everyday life—cook-ing, washing, or urinating—entails exposure to bombs and machine gunfire and the possibility of sudden death. The characteristic deflation of lot
(flight, soaring) into mundane and chaotic latanie describes well the way
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in which Białoszewski, even when dealing with a ‘‘central’’ event in Polishcultural memory, locates his writing on the peripheries, on the margins ofwhat gets represented and passes into the national iconography and mem-ory. Such ‘‘peripheral’’ writing makes A Memoir one of the most poignant
critiques of the cultural practices of selecting and centralizing the materialthat becomes the ‘‘substance’’ of history. It recalls Benjamin’s warningsabout appropriating ordinary danger and suffering into a uniform vision ofhistory.
47
Similarly ironic is Białoszewski’s treatment of the events of early s,
which takes the form of a cabaret. It is possible to argue that at this par-ticular point in Polish history, it was the numerous cabarets that servedas the critique of the social and political manifestations of the regime (forexample, ‘‘Sixty minutes per hour,’’ ‘‘Pod Egida ˛,’’or ‘‘The Olga Lipin ´ska
Cabaret’’). Nonetheless, even the cabarets themselves tended to hit a highpatriotic note whenever it came to voicing opposition to the regime. Biało-szewski’s cabaretlike texts, interspersed with both patriotic and parodicsongs, constitute an ironic commentary on the political, social, and cul-tural events from that period.When the title heroine of the cabaret, KiciaKocia, receives the Nobel prize for literature, we are reminded of Miłosz’saward, and both the attacks of jealousy and the prophetlike welcome hereceived upon his arrival in Poland. Anot her of the cabaret texts, bearing as
its title the date May , refers to the events of May , , approximatelysix months after the introduction of martial law, when Warsaw was para-lyzed by a mini-uprising, a day of clashes with the riot police. In this shortsketch, Kitty Kattie’s walk with her dog is interrupted as she runs back intoher apartment screaming that she has been attacked by Bolesław Chrobry(Bolesław the Brave).
48Bolesław Chrobry, a famous Polish king who solidi-
fied the Polish state in the twelfth century, and his troops, turn out to be theriot police in their full armor, with helmets and transparent plastic shields.In another immediate reversal, the king-commander of the police revealsher true identity as Kitty Kattie’s friend who has come to protect her.Withone caricature of Bolesław the Brave, Białoszewski pokes fun at Polish his-torical mythology and the way that the regime and its opponents use its ar-mor for their political purposes. This elaborate and humorous masqueraderuns the full gamut of allusions which play on the desires of both sides ofthe political conflict to appropriate the national(istic) imageryand heritage.
Białoszewski’s most self-conscious comment about his literary and cul-
tural iconoclasm is the title of an early poem, ‘‘a teraz ja—pisarz pism nie św’’
(UZ I, )—‘‘and now me—thewriterof non-holy scriptures,’’ a work that
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again invokes and breaks down the oppositions between the everyday andthe extraordinary, the sacred and the profane, and so on. The poem leavesno doubt that Białoszewski’s writings attempt to avoid any pretensions to aspecial cultural status enjoyed by poetic discourse and opposed to the prag-matic efficiencyof ordinary language. Rather than validate its discourse, thepoem both emphasizes its ‘‘imperfections’’ and ‘‘weaknesses’’ (‘‘złe strony’’)
and ironizes the literary standards that produce such aesthetic judgments.The phrase ‘‘złe strony’’ —which suggests both bad and wrong sides, parts, or
aspects—can be read as an ironic acknowledgment of how Białoszewski’spoetry fails to conform to aesthetic standards. One of the most interestingmoments of the poem, the phrase ‘‘kupa ładu’’ (‘‘a pile [or heap] of order),
announces and subverts, in a catachretic turn, any desire for order, com-pleteness, or clarity. The meaning of this figure/disfigurement is furthercomplicated and undermined by the polysemy of ‘‘kupa,’’ which also signi-
fies poop or shit. This semantic play indicates an order turned inside out, adisorder produced by too much order, which one of the meanings of kupa,
pile, implies—a dissolution of the opposition between order and chaos.The poem’s ending parodies aspirations to conclusiveness and closure, ast h efi n a lp h r a s e ‘‘cia˛g dalszy nasta ˛pi’’—‘‘to be continued’’—suggests that
Białoszewski’s ‘‘scriptures’’ are not only not sacred, untouchable, and un-alterable, but in fact need constant rewriting and appending.The unmistak-able echo of serialization in this last line suggests that Białoszewski’s cyclesfunction as serialized observations, as reproductions of the same situationalpaste-ups for the purpose of underscoring the inexhaustibleness and non-coincidence marked in the structure of the event. As a writer of ‘‘unholy’’scriptures which parody national literary and cultural myths, Białoszewskiopts for the peripheries of aesthetics, for a poetics of the peripheral, as thesite of his writing. His focus on the irreducibility of the event suspends thelogic of the opposites in order to let language dwell within the historicityof the event. Concentrating his texts on the moment of in-betweenness—between logical opposites, between high and low culture, between writingand poietics—Białoszewski produces the effect of an openness of languageand perception to that qualityof happening,or to the burst of experience asNancycalls it, that does not register within the orderof representation.Thisquality of nonsynchronicity means that poiēsis marks the ‘‘critical’’ periph-
eries of representation, whether at issue is the linguistic order, literary andcultural significations, or political mythology.
I explore Białoszewski’s poetry of the peripheries also as a contrast to
that problematic moment in Heidegger’s work when his reclaiming of the
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everyday as the site of thinking tends to lose its critical edge and disappearinto a certain solemnity of poetic annunciation. In Białoszewski, the ob-jective of ‘‘reinventing’’ the everyday becomes sharpened through a criticallook at a certain pathos that sometimes underlies Heidegger’s, or for thatmatter Cavell’s, philosophical project of reclaiming and redefining the ordi-nary.
49Attempting to reclaim the ordinary as the ‘‘proper’’ site of thought,
Heidegger appears to undercut his project when he resorts to a hymnic,celebratory rhetoric in which the poetic is apparently to be found. Becauseof their explicit irony and humor as well as their continuous contrast be-tween the special and the ordinary, Białoszewski’s texts successfully resistany sense of pathos. Białoszewski prefers to weave his texts around thingsof everyday use and of apparently no special value or importance. AlthoughBiałoszewski too writes about the holy, invoking the structures and vo-cabulary of religious rituals, songs, and invocations, his holy is no longerthat of gods, but of everyday objects and events. His ‘‘gods’’ are utensils,floors, dentures, routine activities, small and ugly towns—in all cases, theexamples of what one would more readily call the unholy or the profane.By placing Białoszewski and Heidegger together, I hope to expand andmake concrete what is already at work in Heidegger’s notion of poiēsis, even
though it is often dissimulated by the tenor of his writings. It seems tome that, although Heidegger wants to engage the everyday in his work onpoetry, he continues to slip back into a certain solemnity of the poetic,
50
precipitated by his readings of Hölderlin, Rilke, or Trakl: poets who arequite unconventional, and yet fit well into the tradition of solemn, hymnicpoetry. One of the functions of my reading of Białoszewski is, therefore, asimultaneous rhetorical deflation and a sharpening of the critical implica-tions of Heidegger’s redefinition of poiēsis.
Keeping a Watch in an ‘‘Ant-Rise’’:Technology and Everyday Life
Białoszewski’s late poems, focusing on the changes precipitated by his
move to a newapartment in a high-rise building on the other side of theVis-tula river, reflect the increasingly technological ‘‘location’’ of modern every-dayness.These texts from to underscore the extent towhich every-dayness becomes structured by the elements of lifewhich evolved as a resultof the technologically conditioned mass society. Treating various aspectsof city life in Warsaw, where technology and mass produced objects be-come the ‘‘element’’ of dailyexperience, these poems chronicle the minutiae
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of life in a high-rise apartment building, or an ‘‘ant-rise’’ (mrówkowiec), as
Białoszewski ironically, though aptly, calls it, with all the technological ac-couterments and problems it involves: from elevators and staircases, to cor-ridors, sidewalks, renovation of building facades, pipes, electrical wiring,and light bulbs. For example, a long poem ‘‘Korytarzowiec’’ (‘‘A Corridorer’’
or ‘‘A Corridor-poem’’) dramatizes the events and features of a corridoras the important place, a sort of crossroads, in the life of the apartmentbuilding dwellers ( MśT,–). A cycle of late poems bears a parodic title
‘‘Renewvating the Anthill’’ (‘‘Trynkowanie mrówkowca’’), and describes how
the renovation of the facade of Białoszewski’s building changes the circum-stances of everyday living, upsetting the routine, introducing the element
of the unknown and the new: ‘‘ I am running away /going down /i nt h e
elevator into the world. / I strain my head up / and the renewvators lookout / from up high / from the bridges …. ’ ’
51P r o d u c i n gb o t hat h r e a ta n d
a temptation of the new, the invasion of technology into the privacy ofthe poet’s life is figured through the literal heights of the scaffoldings thatencircle the building whose facade is being given a new paint job.The ‘‘ant-hill’’(mrówkowiec), Białoszewski’s favorite ironic image for the congested
living conditions in the high rise apartment buildings that populate mostof Warsaw’s landscape, is doubly ironic: because of the external conditionsthat regulate and replicate the entire flowof life in the building into a famil-iar routine (identical stairs, corridors, apartments, balconies, sidewalks, andso on) and because, in spite of the standardized, highly organized condi-tions, as though in an ant-hill, life constantly produces surprises, disruptsthe routine, and disorganizes itself.
52How important these technologically
produced circumstances of everyday life become for Białoszewski’s writingsis evident even from the titles of many poems from the collection Odczepić
sie˛(To Let Go, or ‘‘to detach oneself’’), which chronicles the poet’s move
to the new apartment and the process of ‘‘detachment’’ from his old placeof dwelling: ‘‘Looking Through the Window,’’ ‘‘Warsaw from the NinthStairs,’’ ‘‘A High-Rise, Me in It,’’ ‘‘In My High Apartment,’’ ‘‘On this thFloor I Sit, I Stand,’’ ‘‘This Apartment Can Be Inspired’’ ( UZ VII, –).
T h et o n ef o rt h ee n t i r ec o l l e c t i o ni ss e tb yt h et w ol i n e r :‘ ‘ Elevation / hap-
pened’’ ( UZ VII, ), which alludes to the move to the poet’s new apart-
ment on the ninth floor, later echoed again in ‘‘My Own Place’’: ‘‘the cityc h o p p e di t s e l fo ff ./ /Ie l e v a t o r e d ./O n t ot h en i n t h . ’ ’
53In place of a ‘‘ballad’’
of walking to a store, we have a text about being mechanically ‘‘lifted up’’to the poet’s ninth floor apartment. The space between walking and being‘‘elevatored’’ thematizes the difference between event as poiēsis and event
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as circumscribed within the technologically ‘‘built’’ or determined space ofexperience.
As though to watch over this difference, Białoszewski appoints himself
the watchman of the life of his ‘‘ant-hill’’: He is a chronicler of the new,mundane reality of city life, as he constantly reminds his fellow residents topayattention to the inconspicuous.The late poems become even starkerandshorter than the already brief early poems. The simplicity of structures andwords seems to become emblematic of the increasingly compressible spaceof experience,which allows for the repetition of situations and events as un-marked and unremarkable spaces: corridors, elevator shafts, stairwells, andso on. The growing presence of whiteness on the page remains, however,ambiguous in its significations. On the one hand, it reflects the uniformspace of high-rise housing, where only infrequently something breaks theroutine and marks itself in a few words on the page. On the other hand, thewhiteness also contains increased possibilities for inscription, for a possibleturn within apparently ‘‘empty’’ events of everyday life, foreshortened to thecalculable spaces of work, entertainment, dailychores. In ‘‘I, thewatchman,broadcast from the ant-hill,’’ Białoszewski calls to others not to get lost andlose sight of the everyday by becoming inoculated by its routine appear-ance: ‘‘Do not get lost // Be. // Pass, let’s pass each other, / but let’s not passe a c ho t h e rb y ./ /L e tu sp a s s ./ /W e !/Y o u !W h or u na r o u n d/a n da r ep u s h e daround.’’
54The poem is structured around the play on the word ‘‘to pass’’
(mijać) and its double sense of passing by and passing away.We have to pass
away, but this passing should not become equivalent to passing each otherby without paying attention to one another and to what happens around.The closing line alludes to the congested conditions of city life, where onegets jostled by the passers-by, but it may also function as a political allu-sion, calling on fellow ‘‘ant-hill’’ dwellers to resist being pushed around bythe political and social conditions of their life. It is Białoszewski’s uniquetalent to compress into a poem of only eight very short lines both a portraitof modern city experience and a mini poetic and political ‘‘manifesto.’’
In these late poems, everydayness and technology are fused together,
and the opposition between technology and nature no longer seems to ob-tain or be important for Białoszewski’s work. It is quite significant thatwhile almost all of his later poems contain technological elements or massproduced objects, there are essentially no poems about nature. In a cycleentitled Siekierki (the name of a Warsaw suburb), the fragmentary evoca-
tions of the natural landscape are set against the background of a hugeheating plant in Siekierki which supplies Warsaw with energy. The first
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poem in the cycle begins with the sentence: ‘‘A Portrait with Siekierki inthe Background.’’ The landscape appears dominated by the plant: ‘‘ Sie-
kierki / a big place, separate / unknown / millions of little leaves /as in the
Middle Ages’’; or ‘‘ Siekierki / a cloud, bushes / here lurks This one / and
this one walks / attacks / with force / revelation’’ ( UZ VII, ). The land-
scape of Białoszewski’s poetry is inevitably an industrial landscape, a city-scape, where ‘‘nature’’ remains vestigial, no longer playing a significant rolein the scheme of things. Its elements enter into the picture but only as com-plements or part of the larger landscape that is dictated by the conditionsand demands of mass society. Białoszewski writes his poetry quite openlyas a city dweller, for whom there is no other known or imaginable sphereof experience and for whom the question of the judgment as to whetherthe circumstances in which he finds itself are ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’ seems irrele-vant. For Białoszewski, technology is neither fascinating nor threatening.It is just an integral part of the space of experience, often it seems to be itsconstitutive component: Technology is just ‘‘there,’’ inseparable from dailyreality. The question as to whether technology is aesthetic or anti-aesthetic,whether modern art, as Picabia claimed and Heidegger worried, is techno-logical in its essence, or whether it provides an alternative to technology, isa b s e n ti nt h i sf o r m .
Białoszewski casts the question about technology in a different way:
Since the distinction between technology and nature no longer really ob-tains and is not significant for his poetics, at issue really is the thinking ofwhat might be called a technological everydayness. Is the everyday, and thetechnology which has become inextricably interlaced with it, as transpar-ent, immediate, and familiar as it seems? I do not mean here the fact thaton a daily basis the workings of technological contraptions around us aretransparent to us, even if one fails to understand why and how technologi-cal inventions work, but, rather, that daily practice is based on the sense ofthe transparency of technology, a certain obliviousness to the technologi-cal within one’s environment. For Białoszewski, even those most ‘‘familiar’’and ordinary among mass products that occupy most of our daily spacesand whose functions pose no secrets, become the objects of wonder (dziwie-
nie),and their ordinary recurrence is refracted through the ‘‘untimeliness’’
and the surprise of the event. Białoszewski often depicts the dull objects ofeveryday use with epithets reserved for exceptional things and high art: in‘‘Sztuki pie ˛kne mojego pokoju’’ ( ‘ ‘ T h eb e a u xa r t so fm yr o o m ’ ’ )ac l o s e tb e –
comes ‘‘a Semiramis, a pyramid, an Aïda,’’ and ‘‘an opera in three doors’’:‘‘Szafo szafo Semiramido / piramido / Aido / opero w trzech drzwiach!’’ (UZ I,
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).‘‘Szare eminencje zachwytu’’ (‘‘Grey Eminences of Rapture’’) describes
a colander as shining ‘‘in a monstrance of brightness’’ (Białoszewski, RT)
(‘ ‘ …t a kś w i e c i s zwm o n s t r a n c j ij asności’’ [UZ I, ]). What fascinates the
poet is how the utterly functional mass-produced objects of modern lifedo not completely disappear into their usefulness, how their existence doesnot become transparent or wholly explainable through their use as tools orobjects of fantasy and desire. A certain ‘‘untimeliness’’ of their existence,their excess over presence and representation, renders them noncoincidentwith their ‘‘essence’’ as tools or commodities.
The idea that technology is integral to everyday experience, that ordi-
nary life is no longer ‘‘natural’’ but technological in its daily business, seemsto be an unquestioned assumption of Białoszewski’s work. But if the prac-tices of everyday life are pervaded and structured by technological thought,then Białoszewski plays with technology theway he plays with the everyday.The question of the opposition between (high) art and technology, betweenaesthetics and technologically produced mass entertainment, gives way tothe possibility of disclosing the poietic dimension of the technologicallydetermined everydayness, that is, to the possibility of a turn, a subversionwithin the technological texture of experience. There is no ‘‘critique’’ oftechnology, no gesture of escapism, for, clearly, none is possible or desired.It would be a mistake to look at Białoszewski’s work in terms of existentialanxiety brought about by the progressive mechanization of contemporarylife, just as his interest in the deceptively simple, mundane aspects of every-dayness evidences no nostalgia for the supposedly ‘‘natural’’ immediacy ofexperience, extinct in the multiple technological mediations modern lifeinvolves on a daily basis. Instead, Białoszewski is interested in following thedetails of experience so closely and carefully that a different map of every-dayness would break through the script—where no routine is ever possible,f o rn o‘ ‘ s i m p l e ’ ’m o m e n te v e rr e p e a t si t s e l f :‘ ‘ It r yt og i v ee x p r e s s i o ni nm ypoems to new categories of experience and concepts, and this is often mis-understood. In my opinion, the expression of unnamed feelings—that isthe aim of poetry.’’
55
On the one hand, these new categories refer to ordinary spaces and
moments of experience Białoszewski introduces into poetic writing: cor-ridors, elevators, walls, dusts, microexperiences, and events of apparentlyminuscule significance. Rejecting or modifying generic classifications, heinvents his own names for those new categories of experience, assemblinghis poetic ‘‘microseconds’’ into cycles which resist inscription into aestheticcategories.
56On the other hand, these new categories refer to the displace-
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ments which the poiēsis of the event introduces into the uniform space of
the everyday. The new ‘‘generic’’ headings Białoszewski continuously con-structs for his cycles—‘‘Cites,’’ ‘‘Frivols,’’ ‘‘Asleeps,’’ ‘‘Lyings,’’ and so on—attempt to name the different structure of the everyday which his writinginjects into the representational space. The degree to which they departfrom literary categories reflects the distance opening between technologyandpoiēsis, between the ordinary and the everyday. Białoszewski questions
the cognitive, linguistic, and cultural habits that form the grid of every-dayness and finds the linguistic and conceptual energy for this question-ing in the apparent inconspicuousness with which the everyday happens.The inconspicuous, however, has to be brought to the fore through theavant-garde manipulations and extension of language, through a ‘‘distor-tive,’’ playfully ‘‘monstrous’’ look at experience and language, reflected inthe equally ‘‘monstrous’’ and ‘‘unpoetic’’ disposition of Białoszewski’s lan-guage. It is all part of a grotesque optics in which cultural and political my-thology, high and lowart,ordinarydiscourse and literary language, showanunexpected face. Set perceptions, cultural idealizations, and biases, whichform part of everyday milieu, find themselves deformed and put into ques-tion through the distortive prism of Białoszewski’s writings. Art clearly isnot a life saver, a heroic counter to technology, or a special, exotic islandamong the minutiae of ordinariness. Poetry is as everyday as walking, goingto a store, or paying bills, and it has to accompany the everyday at everymoment and attend to any of its aspects, no matter how seemingly dull,prosaic, or even ugly they appear. Poetry has to be more ‘‘everyday’’ thaneverydayness itself in order to trace what the normalcy of experience hidessowell behind its routine masks—the moment of wonderat the ‘‘untimely’’singularity of happening, the unrepeatable burst of experience.
If repetition marks a key feature of technology, Białoszewski’s poetry
underscores the always specific contours, the unrepeatable of the event. Inchapter , I suggested that the reproducibility characteristic of the workof art contains the ability to reproduce art’s work as always singular, ‘‘his-torical’’ in its adaptability and refiguration of the circumstances of whatHeidegger calls its ‘‘preservation.’’ The work of art keeps true to its poieticcharacter precisely by reproducing itself as each time the same and differentfrom itself and from all its former moments of existence. It is this singu-lar reproducibility that is highlighted by avant-garde poetics, brought tothe fore in the linguistic experiments. This reproducibility remains differ-ent from the repetitiveness implied in technology and mass production.Reinforced by mechanical reproduction, it reserves, paradoxically, the pos-
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sibility of questioning the mechanical patterns of reproduction and prob-lematizes the technological ‘‘essence’’ of being in modernity. Always ironicabout ‘‘grand narratives,’’ Białoszewski prefers to probe the corners of theeveryday, the micro-events where technology shows its structuring force,but where, equally, the language transformations performed by his writingretain the critical effects of historicity, which keep interrogating the domi-nant ideologies of experience. As Białoszewski’s poem about the stove indi-cates, such ‘‘holes’’ in representation reveal the ‘‘inexhaustible’’ critical forceof the nonsynchronicity of experience, which reproduces itself in the play-fully created ‘‘monstrosities’’ of language. This is why his language alwayskeeps us on the edge of words, at the points where words and sentences‘‘pop open like chestnuts,’’
57a so n eo fh i sp o e m sp u t si t .I ti sa st h o u g h
Białoszewski wanted the words never to repeat themselves, to signify lessby virtue of their ordinary meaning than by their difference from it. Thisrupturing of words, like the historicity of the event, remains untimely andnonsynchronous with what the event opens up or produces. To be avant-garde in Białoszewski’s idiom means to follow, patiently and daily, the con-tours of these ruptures, to trace them in a language that undermines theidea of essence, and to demystify the myths that ‘‘ordinarily’’ proliferate ineveryday life.
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In a physical Universe playing with words
—Howe, Pythagorean Silence
7. ‘‘A Sounding of Uncertainty’’
Susan Howe’s Poetic Gendering of History
Susan Howe’s works are ‘‘soundings of uncertainty,’’ or articulations assounds and words in time of the uncertainty which operates as the sub-text of history and reflects the intrinsi cally unstable and incomplete in-
scription of experience. If such soundings of historicityconstitute a markedfeature of twentieth-century avant-garde poetry and, in particular, of theunprecedented examination of writing undertaken by language poetry,Howe’s poetic texts and essays stand out for the intensity, precision, andopen-endedness they impart to the temporal dimension of experience. Asthe title of one of her most interesting works, ‘‘Articulation of Sound Formsin Time,’’ indicates, experience measures itself out into time, it unfolds intowords and materializes its significations already in a historical manner. Iargue that the form this articulation of experience into language takes—an open-ended event whose structure inscribes its historicity—opens thepossibility of history. Writing both through and against historical and lit-erary texts—from Dickinson, Rowlandson, and Melville’s Billy Budd and
Marginalia, to Swift, Shakespeare, and the accounts of Hope Atherton’s
wanderings—Howe folds the historical distance those texts open back intothe sense of the ‘‘presentness’’ of her own writing. This refolding of historyintensifies the syntactical and verbal dislocations and transpositions whichqualify the possibility of presence in Howe’s work, which, to be more pre-cise, mark this ‘‘presence’’ as the presence of possibilities. Open and incom-plete, Howe’s poetic texts sound the uncertainty of the articulated forms of
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those experiences, exploring their ‘‘collisions or collusions’’1with violence,
control, and mastery, which mark the production of history as an intelli-gible narrative providing the knowledge of the past. These retracings andrelocations which Howe’s writings perform with respect to the silences andruptures interspersing history figure both the problem of gendering experi-ence and the political and ethical effects of this gesture. As Howe remarks inan interview, ‘‘If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Becausethe gaps and silences are where you find yourself.’’
2
I am interested here specifically in defining the relation between the
problem of history and gender in Howe’s work in the context of how herpoems, inscribing historicity into and against the narrative articulations ofexperience, revise its legibility. The production of this different legibilitybecomes intrinsic to the language plays and textuality of Howe’s poetry.It motivates the most radical reconfigurations of textual space—semantic,syntactic, and typographical—which have become the benchmarks of herwriting. Since experience is always already textual, rethinking its historicalcharacter becomes tied to establishing new parameters of legibility. Theseparameters accentuate the unpredictable and dislocating effects of histo-ricity over and against the articulated forms of experience, making manifesthow the articulation of experience as presence depends upon and precipi-tates the effacement of the event, and with it the alterity and the fracturing,the temporal noncoincidence, of experience. The ‘‘paradoxical’’ discursiveinscription of experience through disjunction and noncoincidence, consid-ered in different ways by Benjamin and Heidegger, finds its characteristicshape in Howe’s work in the ruptures and refigurations of textual space.InThe Nonconformist’s Memorial, Howe is interested in rewriting histori-
cal scenes and texts specifically through the prism of historicity in order toillustrate the revisions that this way of thinking introduces into the narra-tive scope and ordering of historical space: ‘‘Historicity of the scene / Con-fused narrative complex // Two women with names / followed by two with-out names // Distance original disobedience.’’
3The poem reappraises the
scene from John’s Gospel of the first sighting of resurrected Jesus by MaryMagdalene in the context of the subsequent exclusion of women and the‘‘ejection’’ of sexual difference from the universalizing matrix of experience,‘‘accomplished’’ through the narrative of ‘‘original disobedience.’’ Howe’sengagement with reworking the place of gender and sexual difference inthe (re)writing of history involves both inscribing the ‘‘historicity of thescene’’ into the narrative thread of thought and measuring the linguisticdislocations produced by this inscription.
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The Matter of History, the Historicity of Matter
Following Howe’s own remark, ‘‘My poems always seem to be concerned
with history,’’4almost all critical assessments agree that this refiguration of
(literary) history defines the site and, to a large extent, the scope, of Howe’spoetry. Remarking upon the importance of Howe’s work for feminist cri-tiques, critics as different as DuPlessis, Perloff, Quartermain, and Ma allindicate that the meticulous linguis tic and discursive questioning that the
patriarchal and phallogocentric vision of history undergoes in Howe’s workopens the space for the inscription of gendered experience
5— b o t hi nt h e
form of ‘‘women’s voices,’’ which supplement and rewrite the text of his-tory, and as a reinvention of language, which reaches down to its mostelemental parts: transposed or decomposed words, single letters, (absenceof ) conjunctions and syntactical markers, (innovative) page layout. As pos-sibly ‘‘a different way of knowing things’’ ( BM,), poetry becomes for
Howe a counterdiscourse to history, provided that history is identified witha largely monological, patriarchal narrative rationalization that aims to pro-duce agreement about the past.
6Through their linguistic transpositions,
Howe’s poetic texts produce the opportunity to revisit the discursive spaceof history: its historiographic, political, and literary dimensions.
If poetry is history revisited and rewritten, the historical distance Howe’s
poems inscribe does more than reconstitute the past or remake and sup-plement its narrative in order to counter the erasures and to ‘‘sound’’ thesilences that make up the constitutive outside of historical accounts. Howe’sengagement with the past and its textual circumscription seems to takeplace primarily for the sake of the ‘‘present,’’ or, to be more exact, for whatmight be called the ‘‘contemporaneity’’ of experience. I want to differentiatecontemporaneity of experience from the idea of an instant of full and com-plete presence, a ‘‘now’’ that, coinciding with itself, remains entirely satu-rated in its temporal extension. Nothing could be further from this senseof the transparency and immediacy of presence than the sparsely worded,often de-syntaxed, pages of Howe’s poems. Contemporaneity, as I proposeto use it here, refers to the nonimmediacy of experience, taken as an alreadydislocated, withdrawn horizon of an event. The event, as I define it in thecontext of Irigaray, Heidegger, and Benjamin, refers to a dynamic field offorces, whose historicity undermines the closure of experience into livedmoments, representational constants,or psychic spaces. Implied in this ideaof the event, the notion of contemporaneity questions the possibility ofarticulating experience in terms of presence, which is already marked by
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the rupture of historicity. Contemporaneity always bears the stamp of his-toricity, which keeps the open-ended structure of experience against theflattening into presence and incorporation into the linearity of progress.
T h er e w r i t i n go fh i s t o r ya tw o r ki nH o w e ’ s‘ ‘ T h eL i b e r t i e s ’ ’o r‘ ‘ A r t i c u –
lation of Sound Forms in Time’’ should be, therefore, kept nuanced, cali-brated to the complex effects it produces within the contemporaneityof thetextual space. As Howe explains in her ‘‘Statement for the New Poetics Col-loquium, Vancouver ’’ and reiterates in her interviews, history is ‘‘therecord of winners. Document s…w r i t t e nb yt h eM a s t e r s . ’ ’
7This refigur-
i n go ft h e‘ ‘ r e c o r d so fw i n n e r s ’ ’e s c h e w st h ep r o d u c t i o no fan e w ,b e t t e ro rfuller, record authorized by the inclusion of voices omitted from the ‘‘mas-ter’’ account. Howe’s texts clearly render problematic, if not suspect, thedesire to retrieve and revise history by projecting oneself into the past; thatis, they call into question the idea of an empathic recuperation of what hasbeen elided in the hegemonic discourse(s) of history. Just as Howe’s remarkabout documents written by the Masters brings to mind Benjamin’s asser-tion that adherents of historicism identify with the victor, the hesitationsand rewritings which abound in Howe’s poetry testify to the problematicstatus of empathy and are, thus, reminiscent of Benjamin’s ‘‘Theses on thePhilosophy of History.’’ Benjamin’s VII Thesis pairs the problem of empa-t h ys p e c i fi c a l l yw i t ht h er e c o g n i t i o no ft h et r o u b l i n gi n v e s t m e n to fh i s t o r ywriting in the perspective of the winners:
To historians whowish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommendsthat they blot out everything they know about the later course of his-t o r y ….I ti sap r o c e s so fe m p a t h yw h o s eo rigin is the indolence of the
h e a r t ….[ O ] n ea s k sw i t hw h o mt h ea d h e r e n t so fh i s t o r i c i s ma c tually
empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor.
8
The problem with empathy is double: empathy has a tendency to identifywith one, usually dominant, perspective, and it operates on the metaphysi-cal basis of a plentiful presence, underscoring the possibility of making thepast appear in its ‘‘full’’ and ‘‘true’’ identity.
Benjamin suggests that empathy as the foundation of the (re)construc-
tion of history presupposes the effacement of the subsequent developmentof events, rendering the process of retrieval oblivious to the very course ofhistory. What Benjamin detects in this method of restoring the past is acertain blindness to the ‘‘historial’’ character of history, a blindness whichcollapses the disruptive and incalculable occurrence of experience into thehomogeneous space of presence underlying historical narratives. As the
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project of retrieval and restitution of the past, historicism, for Benjamin,deliberately effaces its own historical singularity and, thus, effectively col-lapses and cancels ‘‘history-making’’ as the open-endedness and mobilityof temporal distancing and dislocation. More important, it both presup-poses and relegitimates the concept of experience as the transparency andimmediacy of self-presence. Empathy annuls the historicity of experience,rendering the event uniform and one-dimensional, fully conceivable andintelligible in terms of an instant which remains self-transparent and iden-tical within the contours of its temporal site. Empathic historicism, forBenjamin, occludes the event structure of experience, erasing its historicityand closing off contemporaneity as a field of possibilities. As a result, empa-thy produces the effect contrary to its purported goal: It effaces historicity,effectively sealing off the radically temporal dimension of thought and itsstructural openness to change.
In Howe’s poetry, the moment of breaching language so that it begins to
inscribe contemporaneity as a field of linguistically, historically, and politi-cally charged possibilities, constitutes the event of ‘‘poetry-in-the-making.’’Explaining the title Singularities, Howe refers to the mathematical notion
of singularity as the point of radical instability and change, as the site of thearticulation of difference and possibilities: ‘‘The singularity (I think Thomis saying) is the point where there is a sudden change to something com-pletely else. It’s a chaotic point. It’s the point chaos enters cosmos, the in-stant articulation. Then there is a leap into something else’’ ( BM,). It
could be argued that the linguistic transpositions and decompositions inHowe’s poems function like singularities, that is, as sites of radical linguis-tic, historical, but also ethical and political, instabilities. The singularities
of Howe’s writings constitute the moments where the uncertainty and pos-sibility that pervade all articulation are inscribed into the linguistic textureof her poems. Such singularities become visible, for example, in the con-densed, enigmatic, and polysemic lines like ‘‘velc cello viable toil / quenchconch uncannunc’’ ( S,), which signify through semantic instability and
underdetermination, verbal decomposition, and the absence of syntacticaldetermination.
9
The intricacyof Howe’s writing consists in the link between the rearticu-
lation of history with the examination of language in view of its ‘‘singu-larities’’—that is, its folds of instability and differentiation. Replying to thequestion ‘‘What is in the word?’’ Howe responds: ‘‘It’s the singularity. It’sa catastrophe of bifurcation. There is a sudden leap into another situation’’(BM,). Howe employs theword ‘‘catastrophe’’ inThom’s sense of a mor-
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phology which produces and makes appear a given situation of catastropheas a‘‘conflict situation between local regimes’’ (BM,). The ‘‘catastrophe
of bifurcation’’ succinctly describes the linguistic morphology of Howe’swork, within which significations do not differentiate ‘‘evenly’’ and fail toform determinable configurations of opposites. Instead, they constellateand disperse along unpredictable and unstable vectors of meaning. Tracingthis morphology which in the previous chapters I called poietic, the ‘‘catas-
trophes’’ of language in Howe’s poetry provide the opportunity for remap-ping the historical and sexual dimensions of experience. I will return to theissue of this new poietic morphology in the section on gender, but I wouldlike to signal here briefly that the very distinct morphology of Howe’s textscalls to mind both Irigaray’s remarks on refiguring the sexual morphologyof experience and those features of Irigaray’s writing which remap the tex-tual morphology of critical and philosophical practice.
Howe’s most characteristic practices include: fragmented or broken
down syntactical structures, frequent use of words without syntactic modi-fication or relationship—‘‘chaotic architect repudiate line Q confine lie linkrealm’’ ( S,–)—lines and words intersecting or overlaying one another,
and the typographical revisions of the horizontal-vertical arrangement oflines,
10in which pages becomes inverted and transformed into a shifting
mosaic of poetic possibilities ( S,–, , –). It is enough to juxta-
pose these features with Irigaray’s strategy of writing in questions, whichmultiply rather than foreclose possibilities and uncertainty, with her re-figuration of being in terms of proximity and indeterminateness of iden-tity, to realize that Howe’s poetic morphology reinscribes gender into thearticulation of experience. It exposes the correlation between the erasureof historicity and the patriarchal morphology of discourse. Like Irigaray’sproject, Howe’s poetry reclaims sexual difference and inscribes it into thevery ‘‘matter’’ of language—into words, syntactical and semantic relation-ships, morphology of writing—and does so in the context of revising his-tory and experience. I read the ‘‘bifurcating morphology’’ of Howe’s workas employing various language ‘‘catastrophes’’ in a concerted effort to ques-tion the reliance of the universal claims of history upon the parallel efface-ment of sexual difference and the event structure of experience.
This morphology of bifurcation underpins the question of identity in
Howe’s writings, whether it is the matter of American identity constructedout of the colonialist conflicts, the role of poetry in contemporary experi-ence, or the problem of the erasure of sexual identity from language.When-ever identitycomes into play in Howe’s poetry, it is always contingent upon
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keeping open the field of possibilities for rearticulating experience. Fromits initial prose note, ‘‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’’ leaves littledoubt that the figure of Hope Atherton and the specific historical momentof his ‘‘wanderings’’ are used to multiply linguistic and historical possibili-ties: relations to the other (the colonists and the natives), historical (narra-tive) versus poetic text, the constitution and revision of American identity,the reflection on the role of poetry in contemporary culture. The open-ing section of the poem ‘‘The Falls Fight’’ recounts the historical circum-stances that lead to Atherton’s ‘‘wanderings’’: ‘‘Just after King Philip’s War…D e e r fi e l dw a st h en o r t h e r n m o s tc o l o n i a ls e t t l ement in the Connecticut
River Valley. In May several large bands of Indians had camped in thevicinity.The settlers felt threatened by this gathering of the tribes.They ap-pealed to Boston for soldiers ….‘ T h eR e v e r e n dH o p eA t h e r t o n ,m i n i s t e r
of the gospel, at Hatfield, a gentleman of publick spirit, accompanied thearmy’ ’’ ( S,). Quoting a letter by Stephen Williams, itself a paraphrase of
Atherton’s own account, Howe contextualizes Atherton’s wanderings in theaftermath of the clashes and massacres occasioned by the intervening army:‘‘In the fight, upon their retreat, Mr. Atherton was unhorsed and separatedfrom the company, wandered in the woods some days and then got intoHadley, which is on the east side of the Connecticut River’’ ( S,). ‘‘The
Falls Fight’’ introduces the circumstances of Atherton’s wanderings both toreemphasize the importance of the figures of wilderness and conquest inAmerican consciousness and to question the relation of poetic text to his-tory. Atherton’s curiously feminine name ‘‘Hope’’ on the one hand inscribesand ironizes the hope present in the foundational gesture of establishinga New World (‘‘Pre-Revolution Americans viewed America as the land ofHope’’) and on the other ties the reappraisal of history in Howe’s text tothe ‘‘hope’’ of a poetic refiguration of experience: ‘‘I assume Hope Ather-ton’s excursion for an emblem foreshadowing a Poet’s abolished limitationsin our demythologized fantasy of Manifest Destiny’’ ( S,).
An emblem for the temporal ‘‘wanderings’’ of identity and the linguis-
tic itineraries of Howe’s poem, Atherton’s name becomes linked from thestart to fleshing out the dislocating effects of experience. The introduc-tory narrative frames the series of poems in a way that refolds the histori-cal distance between Atherton’s wanderings and Howe’s poetic rewritingto render in ‘‘sound forms’’ the elusive marks of historicity. The histori-cal framework of the poem anchors Howe’s reflection directly within therevision of the Enlightenment narrative of modernityand its concealed vio-lence: ‘‘Theoreticians of the Modern /—emending annotating inventing /
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World as rigorously related System / Pagan worlds moving toward destruc-tion’’ ( S,). Howe explores the exclusionary practices of systemic think-
ing, which reduces the ‘‘singularities’’ of experience to the homogeneityof historical (and conceptual) narratives, in order to show the futurityinscribed in experience, a futurity irreducible to the horizon of what is(re)presented: ‘‘—Hegelian becoming /—Hugolian memory / Patriarchalprophesy at heels of hope / Futurity—’’ ( S,). There can be little doubt
that Howe’s (re)construction of Atherton’s wanderings questions the ideaof an empathic recovery of the past. As much as the poem reconstructs thepast, it also underscores the distance opened by writing, the field of possi-bilities of revisiting and rewriting history. This nonempathic reinscriptionof history makes possible a rethinking of experience in terms of the in-appropriable and multiple folds of historicity, which keep breaching the‘‘illusion’’ of presence.
American identity, one of Howe’s main interests, is thus combined with
th eq u e s t i o no fh o wt oth i n ko fh i s t o ryw i th i nth ed o u bl eh i s t o r i ca lf o l dc r e-ated by her texts: the reinscription of the past’s historical distance into theconstitution of the ‘‘presence’’ of the text. Howe’s contribution to the con-temporary debates about the politics of identity—both vis-à-vis Americanliterary tradition and in the broader context which encompasses Ireland,England, religious conflicts, and postcolonial perspectives—is to empha-size the intrinsic historical instability of such revisions themselves. Howe’stext separates the question of identity from empathy and from the ideathat experience can be predicated upon the notion of presence. These tex-tual negotiations show the extent to which historicity ruptures the claimsof identity based upon immanence, collective essence, or the substantivenotions of self and community. In Howe’s work, the points of articula-tion—of identity, history, sexuality—become revised into ‘‘catastrophes oflanguage,’’ which take place in the intrinsically unstable and continuouslyhistoricized field of differentiation.
In ‘‘God’s Spies’’ from ‘‘The Liberties,’’ Cordelia responds to Stella’s
question ‘‘Who can tell me who I am?’’ with the sentence: ‘‘Swift, you areswift—’’ ( ET,), and, this short exchange illustrates how the question of
Stella’s identity (Stella was a nickname that Swift gave to one of his mis-tresses, Hester Johnson) entails a difficult negotiation of the layers of textualmaterial, historical distances, and the possibilities opened within the poetictext. The absence of historical material detailing Hester Johnson’s life andcharacter and the scarcity of her own texts leave the problem of who Stellais inevitably tied to ‘‘Swift,’’ that is, to Swift’s portrayal of her and to the
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patriarchal morphology of language and culture in which this descriptionwas created. And yet, as Cordelia remarks, Stella is not only ‘‘Swift’’ butalso ‘‘swift’’—the possibility of critique, rupture, and tension is already in-scribed in Stella’s question.Who Stella ‘‘is’’ remains a matter of negotiation,the negotiation coded into the play between the capital ‘‘S’’ and the small‘‘s,’’ which must recognize the ambiguityof its own historical status betweenhistory and its rewriting.
Both in their structural operations and their cognitive and political im-
plications, Howe’s rewritings of historical accounts and literary texts re-semble more closely Benjamin’s dialectical image than they do, say, theoptics of historicism.To flesh out the significance of this parallel for Howe,especially for ‘‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time,’’ let us recall herebriefly the dynamic and the effects of the dialectical image as Benjaminpresents it in the Arcades project:
For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to aparticular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only ata particular time. And, indeed, this acceding ‘‘to legibility’’ constitutesa specific critical point in the movement at their interio r…I ti sn o t
that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present itslight on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been [ das
Gewesene ] comes together in a flash with the now [ der Jetzt ]t of o r ma
constellation.
11
Dialectical images produce the legibility of history; they function as thestructural condition of the possibility of reading experience in historicalterms. The index of images registers the historicity of being and its effectsupon the forms which the articulation of experience takes. The legibilityBenjamin has in mind questions the philosophical and political implica-tions of empathic identification, its dependence on the substiantialist con-ception of experience, and takes the form of a constellation whose peculiar‘‘instantaneous’’ manifestation inscribes the tension and dislocation con-stitutive of history. This instability and the possibilities it opens constitutethe historical dimension of experience. What becomes legible ‘‘in a flash’’is the heterogeneity inscribed in the unfolding of being, which dislocatesexperience, pushing it out of balance and, as it were, out of its ‘‘time.’’ Per-haps historicity registers as nothing more (or less!) than this impossibilityfor experience to coincide completely with its own time.
The degree of such noncoincidence evident in Howe’s language consti-
tutes probably the most singular feature of her engagement with history,
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an engagement which produces historical legibility in a way that avoids re-producing the universalist momentum of discourse. The terms of legibilityproposed by Howe’s work consistently undermine narrative, empathic, anduniversalizing readings of history. The very difficult, often enigmatic, legi-bility at work in Howe’s writings eschews what Benjamin characterizes ast h e‘ ‘ a d d i t i v e ’ ’m e t h o do fh i s t o r i c i s m( Illuminations, ). Instead, it can
be regarded in terms of mapping, through linguistic ‘‘Tension / Torsion /Traction / Unction / Vection / Version / Vision’’ ( ET,), the unstable
terrain of experience, riddled with possibilities and historical folds.The his-torical material in Howe’s work—whether it is the Dublin of Swift’s Stella,the America of the colonial period, or the literary world surrounding EmilyDickinson—allows her to insert a historical perspective and distance rightinto the very middle of her poetic remapping of experience. The exact-ness of the representation of the past matters less than the production ofthe present as a constellation in which, through the interpolation of his-torical distance, the present becomes redefined by the ruptures of histo-ricity. Perhaps even more complex and unpredictable than the folds andcirclings of Benjamin’s writing style, the poetic legibility Howe’s works pro-duce constitutes one of the most challenging attempts to figure experiencein terms of multiple, shifting, and incomplete constellations of historicaldistances.
Such legibility marked by a double fold of history is at work throughout
‘‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time.’’ Putting in play key motifs in theconstitution of American identity, ‘‘Articulation’’ uses the figure of HopeAtherton as an emblem of a poetic rewriting of experience within the con-text of contemporary life. Signaling the dislocating inscription of the past,t h ep o e mb r i n g st h ef o r c eo ft h eh i s t o r i c a ld i s t a n c et ob e a ru p o nt h ec o n s t i -tution of the ‘‘present’’ in a manner which makes legible the noncoincidenceof experience. This noncoincidence operates both on the level of the struc-ture of the entire poem and, particularly intensified, within several discretesections of the work. Its workings are especially visible on pages to ,in a complex semantic and visual play that both simulates and underminesthe mimetic function of language. Both pages contain the identical num-ber of words and the same lexical items in configurations which representalmost mirror images of each other. In spite of the suggested mirror inver-sion between the architectures of pages and , the opening line (‘‘Positgaze level diminish lamp and asleep(selv)cannot see’’) and the two conclud-i n gl i n e sa r en o ti n v e r t e d ,e x c e p tf o rt h efi n a lw o r d si nt h el a s tl i n ew h i c hswitch places from page to page:
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blue glare(essence)cow bed leg extinct draw scribe upside
[‘‘sideup’’ on page ]
even blue(A)ash-tree fleece comfort(B)draw scribe sideup
[‘‘upside’’ on page ]
The middle section of each page, consisting of four lines, repeats strings ofwords in a sort of cross-reverse, except that on page there are no spacesbetween words, and capital letters replace small ones to mark the juncturesbetween words. For example, ‘‘ isnotion most open apparition past Halo
view border redden’’ on page corresponds, in a kind of a mirror cross,to ‘‘ReddenBorderViewHaloPastApparitionOpenMostNotion is’’ on page
. The absence of syntactical determinations and relationships, combinedwith discrete semantic pieces that resonate within the context of the wholework—‘‘empirical Kantian,’’ ‘‘Maori,’’ Mohegan,’’ ‘‘shot’’—renders readingdifficult, at the same time that it also increases, one wants to say almost at ageometric rate, the possibilities of various constellations and articulations.Tracing the relationships at play on pages and within the entire archi-tectonics of ‘‘Articulation’’ would be one way to draw the historical matrixof Howe’s work. The ‘‘failed’’ mirror production implies that mirroring orrepresenting the past within the apparently ‘‘better’’ structure of visibilityafforded by the present (moment of representation)—a certain version ofthe dream of symmetry—remains a deceptive and dangerous dream, whichdenies the temporality of experience.
This sense of temporality and noncoincidence is amplified by the man-
ner in which the prefatory note, ‘‘The Falls Fight,’’ frames the subsequentsections in relation to Hope Atherton, the purported focal point of thepoem:
Hope’s literal attributes. Effaced background dissolves remotest fore-ground. Putative author, premodern condition, presently present whatfuture clamors for release?
Hope’s epicene name draws its predetermined poem in. ( S,)
While the first sentence projects the sense of determinateness and accu-rateness implied in the phrase ‘‘literal attributes,’’ the second one almostimmediately undermines it with the mutually reinforcing meaning of ‘‘ef-faced’’ and ‘‘dissolves.’’ The semantic relations opened by those two sen-tences dramatize the tension between the desire to grasp Hope adequately,to produce a literal representation of him, and the impossibility of such anapproach in view of the dislocation intrinsic to experience. The historical
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background of the poem, the conflicted accounts of Atherton’s wanderingsin thewilderness of New England, are refracted and blurred,while the fore-ground—the poetic project structured around and emblematized by thesewanderings—is put into question by the disruptive effects of historical dis-tance. In the end, the temporal distance which the text reproduces remainsdistinct from an interval between stable and defined historical points andworks as a changing constellation of proximities and distances between in-distinct and incomplete moments, whose contours are ‘‘dissolved’’ and ‘‘ef-faced.’’ Neither the past nor the present can lay claim to distinctness or‘‘literalness,’’ to a fully articulated or stable identity.
A similar set of historical dislocations is again put into play in the next
line from the above quote, which scrambles the temporal relations: the pastbecomes a site which is ‘‘presently present,’’ inscribed as past within the tex-tual presence, and which alreadycontains a futurewhich clamors for release.H o wp e r s p e c t i v ew o r k si nH o w ec a nb es e e ni nt h ew a yH o p e ,b e c a u s eo fthe inscription of his wanderings into the structure of the text, becomes aputative author. If this gesture of rewriting ‘‘discloses’’ the putative author-ship already inscribed, or ‘‘predetermined,’’ in the figure of Hope Atherton,and represents his time as ‘‘the premodern condition,’’ Howe indicates thatsuch a reflection upon the conditions of reciprocal visibility between thepast and the present, upon the moments when their constellations providethe historical legibility for experience, opens up the possibility of a (differ-ent) future. It is a future which acquires the ability to read its own experi-ence differently, through the instability and openness implied in the figureof Hope.
Such crossings of the past into the present (and the future), enacted in in-
complete, transposed,ordecomposed words and images, remind the readerthat the focus of Howe’s poetry lies precisely on the ‘‘singularities’’ of ex-perience: the moments when time suddenly changes its sign from plus tominus, when the past blows open and ‘‘wounds’’ the present. These pointsof singularity, of sudden bifurcations and transpositions of meaning, makeHowe’s works continuously requestion the present. As a result, the presentbecomes historicized: not simply in the sense that it is related to a histori-cal moment—colonization, eighteenth-century Ireland, the Prague of reli-gious conflict, the America of Melville and Dickinson—but as rupturedby historicity. It is possible to read Howe’s poems precisely as attempts toarticulate history, to ‘‘sound’’ in words the very opening within experiencefrom which history and the possibility of historical consciousness emerge.As the text of ‘‘Articulation’’ circles constantly around the figure of Hope
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Atherton and the various voices that speak through it, the title suggeststhat its focus falls on the poetic articulation of the ‘‘scattering’’ effects ofhistoricity within experience.
Before I discuss the place of gender in Howe’s historical scatterings of
experience, let me briefly consider the political implications of her figu-ration of history. What lies almost on the surface of Howe’s works is thepolitical implications of her reinventions of historical past, personages, andevents: the reimagining of ‘‘the American experience’’ through historicaland literary texts, from Puritan writings through the complexities of thetextuality of Melville’s and Dickinson’s works to reflections on the con-temporary tasks of poetry. For instance, Howe’s relentless problematizationof the effects of the standardization and uniformization of a Melville or aDickinson text draws attention to t he practices of effacing the intrinsic un-
readability and open-endedness of these texts, of their plural textualities,for the sake of producing an underlying version of experience as closed andreadable. These practices transform experience from an open field of possi-bilities into a uniform, regulated pattern, into a univocal text which effacescontradictions and conflicts, or singularities, to paraphrase Howe. Howe’spoems underscore the fact that the historical legibility which experienceaffords is that of inarticulation, incompletion, and stuttering. ‘‘Scatteringas Behavior Toward Risk,’’ which closes Singularities, takes its cue from the
erasures, corrections, and restoration of words and phrases in the genetictext of Billy Budd. In the process of decoding Melville’s text, Howe’s poem
comes to resemble ‘‘a text so urgently stumbling almost blindly through amind-boggling series of tentative and at times almost desperate castings-about for words and phrases that we are caught up in the sheer suspensetheprocesses of the telling generate, a stuttering narrative of inarticulation
unspoken within the narrative.’’
12Although this remark by Peter Quarter-
main refers to Billy Budd, the characterization, especially the last sentence
about stuttering and inarticulation within articulation, seems appropriatefor describing the textuality of Howe’s Singularities. As Howe remarks at
the end of the Talisman interview, ‘‘It’s the stutter in American literature
that interests me. I hear the stutter as a sounding of uncertainty. What iss i l e n c e do rn o tq u i t es i l e n c e d ….H i s t o r yh a sh a p p e n e d .T h en a rrator is
disobedient. A return is necessary, a way for women to go. Becausewe are inthe stutter.We were expelled from the Garden of Mythology of the Ameri-can Frontier. The drama’s done.We are the wilderness.We have come on tothe stage stammering’’ ( BM,).
Demythologizing the American frontier, Howe’s work detects or infuses
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stutter into the Puritan discourse legitimating the colonization and opensthe historical spaces to voices ‘‘not quite silenced.’’ This revised idea of his-torical legibility relies on the peculiar ‘‘articulateness’’ of stutter, on correc-tions and incompletion which render legible the voices and perspectiveserased within the homogenous narratives of history. As they destroy theillusory coherence and transparency of the poetic voice, Howe’s texts showthat history works as a field of unrecognized possibilities, conflicts, andexclusions, to which one must return in order to gain the legibility of ex-perience.The political significance of this gesture—which frees in the spac-ings and corrections of Howe’s texts the effaced perspectives of women,native Americans, or colonized Ireland—appears today, in the atmosphereof multiculturalism, to require almost no commentary.We should remem-ber, though, that Howe’s work, keenly aware of its own historical perspec-tive, is more than a ‘‘celebration’’ of multiplicity or the recognition of theinnumerablewrongs of history. Howe’s is an enterprise of retracing the con-tours of a different legibility of experience, as much for the sake of historyas for the sake of reflecting upon the present moment. Such legibilityavoidsproducing truth or a uniform vision of history, and it prefers to under-mine and ‘‘scatter’’ the universalist momentum of language. A sounding ofuncertainty rather than a production of knowledge, this legibility rendersreadable the political and ethical fallout of the immanentist and universalistrepresentations of experience.
Such a reinvention of history touches upon the politics of experience,
that is, upon the question of what might be called the political momen-tum of experience, of rendering legible the unsettled, ‘‘singular’’ characterof the space in which action and policy making originate. It is in this senseof the political impetus of experience that Heidegger rethinks the mean-i n go ft h eG r e e k polisin his lecture series on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘‘Der Ister.’’
Polisis neither the organization of a city nor the political apparatus of the
state, and, even less, the conflation of the two in the notion of the city-state,which Heidegger sees as the imposition of the modern perspective uponthe Greek understanding of the historical character of experience. Tryingto understand the political momentum inscribed in the historicity of ex-perience, Heidegger suggests that ‘‘[p]erhaps the
πόλιςis that realm and
locale around which everything that is question-worthy and uncanny turnsin an exceptional sense. The
πόλιςthen is πόλος, that is, the pole, the swirl
in which and around which everything turns.’’13Experience is polisand,
therefore, political, to the extent that its occurrence opens the unsettled,‘‘questionable and undomesticated,’’ space of history and representation. I
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see Howe’s texts as an exploration of such a polisof experience in terms
of the ‘‘singularities’’ of language, of the semantic and syntactical folds inwhich the unsettled space of experience retains its indetermination. HerSingularities moves between the exclusions and silencing of Native Ameri-
can perspectives in the frontier mythology and the question of the politicalor of the emergence of the political space through the linguistically andhistorically unsettled inscriptions of experience. These folds produce ex-perience in terms of the unsettling of history, as the political momentumwhich puts into question the attempts to domesticate experience and repre-sent it in the guise of a historical account. One cannot underestimate herethe political resonance of such ‘‘unsettlings’’ in Howe’s writings, literally in-scribed in the tension between American wilderness and the foundationalgesture of its settling, and evoked also in terms of the British colonizationof Ireland. Howe’s texts induce the rethinking of the political sphere ofexperience, suggesting the impossibility of detaching politics from the ar-ticulation of the contours of experience. It is these contours, their politicalquestionability and unsettling effects, that Howe’s works trace down to theelements of language.
The Gender of Legibility, or Reading Sexual Difference
The problem of gender in Howe’s poetry can be characterized by two
questions: What is the gender of legibility, and how, given that the con-ditions of legibility have patriarchal origin, can we at all read sexual dif-f e r e n c e ?I no t h e rw o r d s ,h o wd ow en e e dt or e w r i t et h ec o n d i t i o n so ft h elegibility of experience so that the new sexual morphology could register inthe text of history? Historically, the parameters of readability and under-standing have been prescribed by a grid of concepts related to phallogocen-tric representations of experience: subjectivity, immediacy, presence, im-manence, sameness, universality, and so on, all designed to generalize thesingularity of experience and, in the process, to efface its sexual markings.Underscoring the masculine gender of such legibility, Howe’s poetry re-writes the space of the inscription and alters its morphology to reflect theworkings of sexual difference within experience.
This set of questions is reminiscent of Irigaray’s project, in which the
attempt to refigure the morphology of experience is at all times correlatedwith the rigorous questioning of the conditions of legibility—of the specu-lar dialectics of thinking—and with the revision of discursive practices. Iri-garay suggests that for sexual difference to inscribe itself in cultural prac-
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tices—from philosophy, technology, and science to law and politics—weneed ‘‘the production of a new age of thought, art, poetry, and language:t h ec r e a t i o no fan e w poetics. ’’
14The poetics that Irigaray has in mind is
a rethinking of experience beyond the discourse governed by the patriar-chal erasure of sexual difference. To that extent, the question of the sexualmorphology of experience is inseparable from the question of language. AsIrigaray is well aware, such a poetics requires more than a reinsertion ofother voices, and the voices of others, into a discursive paradigm that willcontinue to erase their differences because it is determined and regulatedby the unifying momentum of the specular logic operative in patriarchalthought. This poetics involves a critico-poetic rethinking of how the basicphilosophemes of Western thought produce and regulate linguistic prac-tices. It postulates reinventing the ‘‘matrix’’ of language so that it wouldinscribe, rather than (ab)use and obliterate, the feminine and sexual differ-ence. Irigaray’s rewriting of the sexual morphology of experience entails therecognition of how the speculareconomyof discourse first sexualizes being,dividing it into matter and spirit, only to cover up this distinction andsecure the speculative unity of difference. In spite of the apparently prolif-erating differences, thought and language continuously reaffirm their uni-versalist momentum, their tendency toward ‘‘specularizing’’ difference andreinscribing it within the ‘‘domain of sameness.’’ Irigaray’s project consistsin diagnosing the degree to which the logic of sameness has been regulat-ing the elements of discourse and in reinscribing (sexual) difference withinthese discursive elements in ways that undermine the dialectical pull of thislogic. Irigaray’s gesture is, therefore, always double: The tendency towardsameness is at once recognized and undermined, mimicked and questionedthrough a new ‘‘poetics’’ which employs fluid syntax, nonassertive and frag-mented sentences, questions rather than statements, mixed registers, andempty subject positions.
It is on this discursive level that I propose to approach the question of
gender and experience in Howe’s poetry. Howe’s works suggest that, inorder to inscribe sexual difference into language, it is necessary to workoften from within the basic structures of language, its elemental parts, evenminimal semantic and syntactical units.To discern the significance of sexualdifference in rethinking experience, one has to operate on the level of partsof speech, to transpose and decompose words and syntax, to bypass gram-matical rules, and to undermine or abandon the conventional connectionsand junctures of language. In My Emily Dickinson, Howe herself outlines
the reach and the elemental character of such a questioning in relation to
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the writings of Dickinson and Stein: ‘‘Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Steinalso conducted a skillful and ironic investigation of patriarchal authorityover literary history. Who polices questions of grammar, parts of speech,connection, and connotation? Whose order is shut inside the structure ofa sentence? What inner articulation releases the coils and complications ofSaying’s assertions? In very different ways the countermovement of thesetwo women’s work penetrates to the indefinite limits of written commu-nication.’’
15Howe’s own poetry modifies and extends the insights of her
‘‘critical’’ writings, operating on the assumption that the workings of lan-guage—from sentence structure, punctuation, and the linearity of writingto the horizontal-vertical arrangement of the page—must be involved inrefiguring the morphology of experience.
If the legibility of experience and history is gendered, if the patriar-
chal articulation of being as monological and universal determines thedialectical dynamic of thought and permeates the elements of language,then an attempt to rethink experience along gender lines requires such an‘‘avant-garde’’ reinvention of language that would affect relations beyond or‘‘below’’ the play of signification. Already Gertrude Stein, in what I termedher poetics of the event, combines the reimagining of English with thequestion of gender and lesbianism, and, in the process, ‘‘liquefying’’ En-glish word order and increasing indefinitely the plasticity of syntax and theelasticity of words and meaning. Howe takes her writing in a different di-rection: She explores the possibilities of an unsettled, and unsettling, ar-rangement of the page, with multiple possibilities enacted simultaneously(words revised and/or crossed out) and made indeterminate by the absenceof conjunctions, the disappearance or minimalization of syntactic relations,the erasure of line definitions (crossing, overlapping, overlaying lines andwords), and the decomposition of sentences and words.
Keeping in mind the various discursive levels on which Howe ‘‘undeter-
mines’’ the legibility of experience, I propose to examine three related as-pects of how her writings reinscribe gender into the patriarchal morphologyof articulation: first, the inside/outside perspective characteristic of the in-scription of women’s voice (for example, in ‘‘The Liberties’’); second, theheterogenous space of Howe’s most interesting works (‘‘Articulation,’’ ‘‘TheLiberties’’); and third, the ways in which the first two strategies contextu-alize and amplify her reworking of the elements of poetic language. I willfocus my discussion on ‘‘The Liberties,’’ in part because this text attemptsto refigure the space of history through feminine voices: Stella and Cor-delia. The prominence I give to ‘‘The Liberties’’ does not imply that the
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three aspects of Howe’s rethinking of gender cannot be found in her otherpoems. For example, the opening section of ‘‘Articulation of Sound Formsin Time’’ mixes various modalities of discourse, from letters and narrativesto poetry, as part of how it rethinks sexual difference. Linking the narrativedevelopment of the poem with the name ‘‘Hope,’’ Howe underscores thegender ambivalence inscribed in the name: ‘‘Hope’s epicene name drawsits predetermined poem in’’ ( S,).The adjective epicene signals the impor-
tance of sexual difference to Howe’s exploration of the poetic refigurationof experience as ‘‘articulation of sound forms in time.’’ According to theOxford English Dictionary, ‘‘epicene’’ refers to: ‘‘. In Lat. and G. grammar,
said of nouns which, without changing their grammatical gender, may de-note either sex. . Partaking of the characteristics of both sexes. . Adaptedto both sexes; worn or inhabited by both sexes.’’ Indeed, Hope is inhab-ited, worn as a name, by both the Puritan minister and the poet’s voice; infact, it is inhabited by both, or more, voices, sexes, and genders at once.What resonates in the name Hope, ‘‘an emblem foreshadowing a Poet’sabolished limitations in our demythologized fantasy of Manifest Destiny,’’is the problematic of gender difference and sexual morphology of experi-ence: ‘‘Archaic presentiment of ruptur e / Voicing desire no more from here’’
(S,). The epicene name designates the place where sexual difference rup-
tures experience, a peculiar ‘‘singularity’’ where the bifurcation of the femi-nine and the masculine enfolds history in its significations and where thisdifference remains problematic, fraught with the possibility of being col-lapsed and erased within the ‘‘manifest destiny’’ of the sexes: that is, thedomain of sameness characteristic of the patriarchal economy of thought.Hope’s epicene name becomes an emblem of how the problematic of sexualdifference complicates the temporal articulation of experience indicated int h ep o e m ’ st i t l e .I f Singularities presents experience as a field of (linguis-
tic) singularities where unstable vectors of possibilities keep rewriting thearticulation, then this particular morphology is inflected by the figure ofHope, whose name echoes in the openings and lesions of Howe’s text.
In ‘‘The Liberties,’’ I examine the problematic of gender by looking at
Howe’s linguistic and typographical inventions in a double context: therecreation of feminine voices and the plural textuality of the work, whichcomprises multiple quotations, journal entries, prose sections, short andlong poems, and plays.The textual map of ‘‘The Liberties’’—‘‘flags chartsmaps / to be read by guesswork through obliteration’’ ( ET,)—is indeed
even more complex than the one of ‘‘Articulation,’’ as it inscribes the prob-lem of identity into a collage of texts, voices, and personages, ranging from
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Swift and ‘‘his’’ Stella and Shakespeare’s King Lear andHamlet to Howe’s
own reinvention of Stella and Cordelia as part of the meditation on herIrish heritage. ‘‘The Liberties’’ is a mosaic of texts which allows itself to bebroken and spaced by other voices, quotations, and perspectives, even as itcontinuously rewrites the cited voices and works. Such a writing strategyis reminiscent of DuPlessis’s remarks about ‘‘female aesthetic’’ in ‘‘For theEtruscans’’: ‘‘A both/and vision born of shifts, contraries, negations, contra-d i c t i o n s ….Ab o t h /and vision that embraces movement, situational.’’
16
What DuPlessis designates ‘‘a both/and vision,’’ a vision which arises out ofcontradictions, continuous mov ement and rewriting, produces textuality
that is polyphonic, multiperspectival, and nonhegemonic. In ‘‘The Liber-ties,’’ the poetic I—part of the meditation upon the identity of the authorand its cultural roots—neverdominates the poem orconstructs a privileged,hegemonic perspective. Its voice becomes refracted and modified by theother voices in the poem, voices that are both quoted (Swift, Shakespeare)and (re)invented (Stella, Cordelia). Howe’s anagramic play on her name—
Ia mc o m p o s e do fn i n el e t t e r s . is the subject of a proposition in logic. is a female sheep, or tree.i se q u a lt oo n e .i sab e g i n n i n g .&a r en o t h i n g .&a r eaq u e s t i o n ,o rs a l u t a t i o n .&a r ed e e p ,ad e p r e s s i o n
(ET,)
—contains no traces of personal experiences and desires, and reads ‘‘her’’identity, like the rest of the voices in ‘‘The Liberties,’’ through the conden-sation of semantic, syntactical, and typographical innovations. The shorttwoword line following Howe’s ‘‘self-identification’’—‘‘THE KEY’’—bothironizes the idea that the author holds the key to her identity and text andsuggests that it is indeed the alphabet that remains the ‘‘linguistic’’ key toexperience.
Even when one reads ‘‘The Liberties’’ through the optics of Howe’s ex-
ploration of her Irish heritage, it is clear that the problematic of the autho-rial voice and identity functions as part of the larger negotiation of thepossibility of feminine voice, as an element in the articulation of what Iri-garay would call the double movement of (de)sexualization of experiencewithin the patriarchal morphology of discourse.This exploration is contin-
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gent upon the possibilityof securing the legibilityof a sexual morphologyofexperience, that is, on elaborating alternative parameters of legibility whichrevise the boundaries of the patriarchal orderof reason: subject, uniformity,and noncontradiction. The first ‘‘key’’ to Howe’s elaboration of this alter-nate legibility can be found in the discursive and stylistic plurality of hertexts, riddled with numerous literary and historical citations and reappro-priations. This way of writing with, in DuPlessis’s words, ‘‘multiple centersof attention’’ (‘‘FE,’’ ) undercuts the monological standards of legibility
which characterize patriarchal discourse,
17and does so in a gesture that, like
the typographical puzzles of ‘‘The Liberties,’’ opens the space for a read-ing of experience that retains difference. What I see operating here is aninversion of legibility which makes it possible to read the staples of modernrationality—the logic of identity, noncontradiction, or universality—as a‘‘misunderstanding’’:
We arediscovered
not solid
the floor
based
on misunderstanding. ( ET,)
It is not surprising, then, that the readability of feminine identity (and
the identity of the feminine) rewrites the rules of visibility, presence, andtruth operative in Western thought. Femininity is ‘‘to be read by guess-work through obliteration,’’ that is, through an undecidable play betweena ‘‘negative’’ reading of the effacement of sexual difference and a ‘‘positive’’reading (of femininity) by means of undermining the patriarchal structure
of discourse. ‘‘The Liberties’’ rewrites the feminine, as it were, onto threevoices—Stella, Cordelia, and ‘‘Susan Howe’’ (‘‘I am composed of nine let-ters’’)—and makes the identityof each voice contingent upon and inflectedby the exchanges with the other two. Interlacing the three voices, ‘‘The Lib-erties’’ departs from the notion of a homogeneous identity and its roots inthe binary schema of speculative mirroring, and presents a heterogeneousand open-ended model of identity as an alternative to the closures opera-tive in the metaphysical concept of the subject. Even though several sec-tions of ‘‘The Liberties’’ invite a ‘‘personalizing’’ reading of the poem in thecontext of the author’s visit to Dublin: ‘‘Across the Atlantic ,I/i n h e r i tm y –
self / semblance / of irish susans / dispersed / and narrowed to / home’’ ( ET,
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), such a reading becomes refracted and complicated by the textual laborof reinventing femininity through the voices of Stella and Cordelia. Thephrase ‘‘I am composed of nine letters’’ works against the idea of a recogni-tion or recovery of an already existing identity, determined by the doubleAmerican and Irish context, both spanned and dislocated by the space ofthe Atlantic. It is more of a rewriting, even a reinvention, which requires asits condition of possibility a different matrix of experience: one that wouldallow for the articulation of sexual difference. For the nine letters of SusanHowe’s name to resonate in language, it is necessary to redo this language,to rewrite its rules, so that a different figuration of the feminine can emerge,and with it, a revised morphology of experience.
As the ironic ending of the ‘‘Book of Cordelia’’ suggests, such a mor-
phology deliberately sidesteps successful articulations, that is, moments ofpresence and meaning, and negotiates a difficult path of failures and oblit-erations: ‘‘I can re // trac // my steps // Iwho // crawl // between thwarts // Donot come down the ladder // ifor I // haveaten // it a // way’’ ( ET,–).
With its lines forming the rungs of a verbal ladder, this fragment plays withthe idea of order, progression, and symmetry, as it decomposes words andwrites them over one another, in order to form unstable and shifting lines ofsemantic and syntactical relations, which dismantle the very configurationthey build. ‘‘ifor I’’ indicates an exchange of identity, of a de-emphasizedand fractured ‘‘i’’ for the model of ‘‘strong’’ identity with capital ‘‘I,’’ whichseemingly guarantees closure and self-presence. In what may be a parodyof Wittgenstein’s famous remark from the Tractatus, the ladder, instead of
being discarded after performing its necessary mediating function, is ‘‘eatena / way’’ by the ‘‘corrosive’’ and unstable language of Howe’s poetry. Such a‘‘corroded’’ linguistic ladder cannot provide the logical steps of progression,for it signifies the deregulation and, in extreme cases, a total disappearanceof conjunctions and syntactical relations. For example, on pages to ,grammatical relations become reduced to a degree zero and words are left,in a parody of Hamlet’s remark, as ‘‘words words words.’’ Language nolonger serves as the mediation in the process of the production of identitybut becomes the space where the points of singularity—the decomposingand transposing rungs of the textual ladder—articulate the legibility of ex-perience in terms of fractures and obliterations.
In the overall architectonics of ‘‘The Liberties,’’ this issue of legibility is
most visible in the play ‘‘God’s Spies,’’ the longest text in the work, whichthrough a series of parodies of Swift and Shakespeare reinvents Stella andCordelia as dramatic characters. ‘‘The Liberties’’ begins with a narrative sec-
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tion which recounts briefly the available material on Stella, emphasizing theabsence of letters and texts written by Hester Johnson herself (‘‘None ofStella’s letters have been saved’’ [ ET,]) and the fact that what is ‘‘known’’
about her comes almost exclusively from men’s accounts and portraits ofher. Illustrating the patriarchal framework reflected in Stella’s portraits, theo p e n i n gs e c t i o ns e t su pt h et a s ko far e c o n s t r u c t i o n ,o r ,t ob em o r ep r e c i s e ,a reinvention, of Stella as part of a change in the representational opticswhich would allow for a different figuration of femininity. This recreationof Stella becomes intertwined with the figure of Cordelia in a dialogue be-tween two female characters which complicates the idea of femininity be-yond the roles of mistress and (un)dutiful daughter. In what has becomea trademark of Howe’s multisectioned and multilayered texts, the ‘‘books’’of Stella and Cordelia (the second one set up against the well-known quota-tion from King Lear in which Cordelia refuses to embellish upon the praises
of her father already delivered by her two sisters) enact, as much visually assemantically, the undoing of the portraits of the two women constructedby Swift’s letters and Shakespeare’s play.The ‘‘Book of Stella’’ continuouslysurprises the reader with the changing compositions of the page, ceaselesslyredrawing the context in which a ‘‘new’’ Stella emerges.The first page of thesection ( ET,) parodies the attempt to contain the text (Stella?) within
fixed and equal margins.While the beginnings and endings of each line arearranged in perfect vertical columns, the effort to keep equal line exten-sions forces an uneven and disrupted distribution of words within lines,occasionally producing split words. Intervals between words range fromtwo or three spaces to wide gaps extending for over half a line. The subse-quent pages produce the impression of a text which explodes the narrowlyprescribed boundaries and metamorphoses from page to page into unex-pected visual constellations, as if to render ‘‘visible’’ the swiftness of Stella’ssoul:
moving or capable of moving
with great speedrapidly running flying following
flight of an arrow
known for the swiftness of her soul
(ET,)
In their linguistic and textual inventions, the ‘‘Book of Stella’’ and the
‘‘Book of Cordelia’’ problematize the legibility of experience availablewithin the heritage of the cultures ‘‘across the Atlantic.’’ It is no surprise,
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therefore, that when both Stella and Cordelia gain their ‘‘own’’ voices ascharacters in ‘‘God’s Spies,’’ the drama consistently parodies Hamlet as a
pivotal text in the establishment of the parameters of Western (male) sub-jectivity. It would take too long to list all the allusions to Shakespeare thatHowe weaves into the play, from cross-dressing reminiscent of his come-dies to the parody of Hamlet’s encounter with his father’s ghost. What isimportant for my argument is the fact that ‘‘God’s Spies,’’ reaching backto the beginnings of modernity in the Renaissance, complicates and re-writes the emergence of the monological, unified subjectivity in Hamlet and
projects an alternative ‘‘stage’’ of experience where identity becomes frac-tured, open, and contingent. Howe’s play unfolds a continuous parody ofHamlet’s tendency to soliloquize: Stella and Cordelia are almost constantlypresent together on stage, always in dialogue or conversation. If indeed themodern notion of subjectivity as an autonomous, self-enclosed space ofinteriority has one of its sources in Hamlet’s monologues, Howe’s rewrit-ing of Hamlet into two female voices which keep inflecting and modifying
each other suggests that the regendering of subjectivity reaches well be-yond the idea of women (re)claiming a separate and autonomous agency ofthe subject, which, so far, has been accessible only to men. At issue is therefiguration of the very notion of subjectivity: from the monological andself-enclosed space of interiority—the subject of soliloquy—to an open-
ended relation, refracted through the unpredictable turns and twists of the
exchanges with the other.
‘‘God’s Spies’’ presents a scenario of the gendering of experience which
is similar to how Irigaray figures a new morphology of experience throughthe notion of two lips, which, neither one nor two, escape and inflect thedialectical dynamic of identity. With the exception of the appearance ofSwift’s ghost who, by contrast with Hamlet’s father, fails to even attractStella’s attention, the entire play transpires between Stella and Cordelia ina series of exchanges which keep negotiating the shared and mutually in-flected space of identity between the two of them. This ambiguity is re-flected in Cordelia’s answer to Stella: ‘‘Swift, you are swift,’’ which situatesStella between Swift’s portrayal and her own ceaselessly metamorphosing(like the pages in the ‘‘Book of Stella’’) ‘‘swiftness.’’ The uncertainty openedup by the gendered difference of perspectives begins to suggest the possi-bility of an alternative, ‘‘feminine’’ articulation of experience: one that isfractured and fluid, operating on the model of proximity (‘‘neither one nortwo’’) which blurs the lines of demarcation and enclosure characteristic ofthe patriarchal model of identity.
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The type of social and communal relations developed in ‘‘God’s Spies’’
would also have to be read along the lines of the nonimmanence and the ab-sence of sameness outlined in Irigaray’s This SexWhich Is Not One: ‘‘Neither
one nor two. I’ve never known how to count. Up to you. In their calcu-lations, we make two. Really, two? Doesn’t that make you laugh? An oddsort of two. And yet not one. Especially not one. Let’s leave oneto them:
their oneness, with its prerogatives, its domination, its solipsism: like thesun’s.’’
18‘‘God’s Spies’’ uses similar language: ‘‘We are at peace—pathless./
Clinging close we come in couples—conversing at landmarks. / Or we riseto the surface at seamark—still—still—far wide—. . .’’ ( ET, ) .I n‘ ‘ T h e
Liberties’’ discrete and definable identity is replaced by a more fluid tex-tual motion which keeps articulating itself in couples and in conversation.The notions of identity and sociality we find in Howe’s text are a result ofa renegotiated matrix of experience; its gendered legibility becomes visibleagainst the structuring concepts of the phallogocentric representation ofexperience: subject, presence, oneness, sameness, immanence, and so on.
The echoing refrain of ‘‘God’s Spies’’—‘‘They murder each other’’—
underscores the violence implied in the ideas of sameness and unified ex-perience and captures the sense of exile and estrangement from such societywhich marks the ‘‘community’’ established in the conversations betweenStella and Cordelia. It is important to note that the action of ‘‘God’s Spies’’extends over one week, and, as Perloff suggests, blurs the boundaries be-tween the historical, the mythical, and the poetic (‘‘CC,’’ ). The action’sspan suggests, on the one hand, a certain ‘‘recreation’’ of reality at stake in‘‘The Liberties’’ (an allusion to the biblical story of creation) and, on theother, Howe’s interest in the everyday, ordinary dimension of experience.Even though ‘‘God’s Spies’’ explicitly invokes and parodies Shakespeare, italso possesses a certain stark Beckettian quality: Nothing much happens inthe play except for the conversations between Stella and Cordelia, and eventhe scene in which Swift’s ghost appears is a dramatic anticlimax, an ironictwist on Hamlet, as Stella, too engrossed in reading aloud Hamlet’s address
t oh i sf a t h e r ’ sg h o s t :‘ ‘ S p e a kt om e , ’ ’d o e sn o te v e nn o t i c et h ea p p a r i t i o n .The absence of spectacular theatrical events or twists of the plot and therepetition of the same motifs and phrases reinforce the implicit connectionto Beckett: both another link to Ireland’s history and culture, always in thebackground of ‘‘The Liberties,’’ and a gesture toward everydayness.
Any analysis of ‘‘The Liberties’’ would be incomplete without the con-
sideration of the link between Howe’s rethinking of historicity throughthe singularities of language and the question of freedom implicit in the
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title. All of Howe’s works obsessively return to the problematic of Americaand its promised freedoms: its founding, history, cultural identity, and lit-erature. ‘‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’’ reposes the question ofAmerica as ‘‘Hope’’ bydemythologizing Manifest Destinyand by inscribingthe problematic of otherness, violence, and domination into the reinventedwanderings of Hope Atherton.The massive reconsideration towhich Howesubmits ‘‘America’’ revolves around the problematic of freedom, or moreaccurately, of ‘‘liberties,’’ for which ‘‘America’’ remains an ambiguous andcontested icon.The title of ‘‘The Liberties’’ indicates the multiple meaningsthis word possesses in Howe’s work. It refers,obviously, to a section of Dub-lin, and illustrates how Howe’s writing remains itself dislocated, spanningher transatlantic American-Irish heritage. On an ironic level, ‘‘The Liber-ties’’ invokes the countless liberties Howe takes with language, molding andreforming it to reflect experience as a ‘‘singularity.’’ These linguistic libertiesopen the space for rethinking the problem of freedom and for conceivingexperience in terms of the ‘‘folds’’ of liberties.
To see this undercurrent of Howe’s work, freedom has to be rethought
beyond the optics of agencyand the idea of freedom as an individual’s prop-erty or possession. I propose, instead, to link the question of freedom inHowe to the idea of historicity. I follow here Jean-Luc Nancy, who, in The
Experience of Freedom, rethinks Heidegger’s approach to freedom as open-
ness to the unknown and the other. For Nancy, freedom extends beyond theidea of civil liberties as defined by the libertarian and communitarian tradi-tions. Freedom is a matter of experience, of a certain ‘‘liberality’’ marked inthe singularcontours of experience,whose occurrenceyields no essence, ex-ceeds representation, and remains inaccessible to cognition. Freedom, then,never belongs to itself, never possesses itself, and, as such, cannot be pos-sessed or become a property of an agent whose liberty would be guaranteedby law and made possible by its status as a ‘‘free’’ subject. Freedom, muchlike in Heidegger’s work, is for Nancy ‘‘the being of a bursting of being thatdelivers being to existence.’’
19Freedom thought this way
is never at first on the order of action, nor is it on the order of volition orrepresentation. It is a bursting or a singularity of existence, which meansexistence as deprived of essence and delivered to this inessentiality, to itsown surprise as well as to its own decision, to its own indecision as wellas to its own generosity. But this ‘‘own’’ of freedom is nothing subjec-tive: it is the inappropriable burst from which the very existence of thesubject comes to the subject ….( EF,–)
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Traditionally, freedom is thought to be a matterof will and action,ora prop-erty arrogated to a subject who is capable of exercising, losing, or regainingit. In Nancy’s reading, freedom describes the singular, unpredictable, andinappropriable contours of how existence opens and manifests itself. As theburst(s) of being, freedom gives existence to the subject who at no pointis in possession of what lets him be. The singularity of freedom rendersthe subject forever out of step with itself, inappropriable, because freedomexceeds the subject’s powers of representation and cognition and remainsoutside the scope of ‘‘his’’ will. It is clear that Nancy thinks here of both theexperience of freedom and, more important, of experience asfreedom: In
other words, freedom is marked as the singular and unpredictable field ofexperience, as the temporal contours of the event. Such freedom (re)occursagainst and bursts through the thought’s inclination to assign an essenceto experience, to represent it in terms of a cause, foundation, or substance.Paradoxically, freedom both incites representation and the will to knowl-edge—it delivers the subject to itself by means of self-representation—and remains free, singular and untraceable, in relation to representationaland cognitive powers. To think and to experience freedom means to thinkexperience in a nonfoundational and nonmetaphysical manner, as the ex-plosion—the catastrophe?—which keeps remapping and resingularizing itsown contours.
Even though Howe borrows a mathematical conception of singularity,
she deploys it in relation to experience, which becomes a map of the catas-trophes of bifurcation, bursting through and opening the confines of rep-resentation. The reconstellating and metamorphosing pages of the ‘‘Bookof Stella’’ are among Howe’s most characteristic strategies of ‘‘writing’’ thefreedom of experience, of (re)figuring experience as ‘‘liberties.’’ Writing ex-perience as freedom means being attentive to the undercurrents of lan-guage, towhat moves language, crystallizes its semantic and syntactical rela-tions, and (dis)allows the sedimentation of experience into representation.Among various modes of avant-garde writing, Howe’s appears especiallyinvested in bringing to (the surface of ) the page the undercurrents of lan-guage and history, in letting them burst through conventions of languageand thought and thus register their singularity against the representationalarticulations of experience. It is within such a syntacticallyand semanticallyopen space that identities are formed and reformed, without ever becomingfully articulated and sedimented. In The Nonconformist’s Memorial, the I
of John’s Gospel becomes a figure for an open-ended space of textuality,opposed to the idea of the subject as the locus of meaning and intelligibility:
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it is Iwithout any real subjectall that I say is IA predicate nominativenot subject the I ist h eb r e a dt h el i g h tt h ed o o rthe way the shepherd the vine
(NM,)
F u r t h e ri n t ot h et e x t ,t h i sf r a c t u r e do rs c a t t e r e dIi si n v o k e di nt h ec o n t e x tof reinscribing sexual difference into experience: ‘‘Pronoun Ior her name
// Or break its boundaries’’ ( NM,). If the notion of the subject is con-
ditioned by the necessary erasure of sexual difference and the inscriptionof the feminine in the universal claims of rationality, Howe’s decompo-sition of the subject fissures the ‘‘single narrative thread’’ of history into‘‘immensities’’ registered, even though only by erasure, in the historicity ofexperience: ‘‘utter immensities whisper’’ ( NM,).
Such questioning of the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms of appro-
priation makes Howe’s work part of the critique of modernity’s reliance onforms of thought and discourse which seek to foreclose the play of possi-bilities, to cover over the ‘‘catastrophic’’ morphology of experience, in orderto provide secure foundations for the regime of representation. It is in thissense that I take the avant-garde to be a questioning of the principles ofrepresentation: Producing postaesthetic works, the avant-garde does notbecome at all disinvested from external or empirical reality, and, hence,from politics, ethics, and culture. On the contrary, it rigorously rethinksthe conceptual framework of representation in viewof the ‘‘inappropriable’’contours of experience. I see works like Howe’s as emphatically invested in
experience, as, on some level, ‘‘unthinkable’’ without this idea of refiguringexperience. What interests me in the avant-garde is how it figures experi-enceasfreedom, and to that effect, reinvents language as a continuously
opening inscriptional space in which experience can register its singularity.What characterizes such an avant-garde is the play between the bursts ofrepresentational and discursive freedom and ‘‘unfree,’’ regimented experi-ence. I would like to suggest here that the problem of how modern art isrelated to politics and ethics should be thought in terms of this ‘‘rigorous’’play. In other words, it is the specific sense of experience as freedom thatcontributes to the political significance of avant-garde art.
Attentive to the ruptures which historicity produces in experience,
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Howe’s writing inaugurates a new kind of legibility, which tries to free ex-perience from the control of the powers of representation. What is mostinteresting about this legibility is that it takes its cue from the indetermina-tion of the event, from what Nancy describes as the ‘‘other thought’’ withinthinking:
this experience of freedom (which is not experience ‘‘in thought,’’ butw h i c hi st h o u g h t ,o rt h i n k i n g , asexperience) is only the knowledge that
in every thought there is an other thought, a ‘‘thought’’ which is no longer
t h o u g h tb yt h o u g h t ,b u tw h i c ht h i n k st h o u g h ti t s e l f( w h i c hg i v e si t ,e x -pends it, and weighs it—which is what ‘‘thinking’’ means): a thought
other than understanding, reason, knowledge, contemplation, philoso-phy, other finally than thought itself. The otherthought of all thought
…i st h e burst of freedom. ( EF,)
20
Nancyemphasizes the dislocation at work in thinking, the fact that thoughtalways traces ‘‘an other’’ thought within it, a thought which disrupts therepresentational pull of thinking and retraces its own contours. This struc-tural dissymmetry of thought has to be differentiated carefully against thesense of the dialectical doubling of thought, a kind of specular mirroring,which reunifies thinking and sublates all its detours through otherness. It isthis dissymmetry that unbalances knowledge, understanding, and reasonand keeps freedom in play.
This other of thought, which keeps (re)thinking and inflecting thought,
and which thought itself can never represent or control, is the historicitywith which thought unfolds. Historicity cannot be represented because iti t s e l fi sn e v e rp r e s e n t ,b e c a u s e ,o p e n i n gt h es p a c eo fr e p r e s e n t a t i o n ,i tn e v e robtains in representational terms. Unrepresented and unrepresentable forthis specific reason, historicity marks itself as always ‘‘new,’’ unexpected,singular. It is in terms of this distinctive sense of new-ness that I approachthe problematic of freedom in the avant-garde. This ‘‘historical’’ significa-tion of the new must be distinguished from Pound’s idea of ‘‘making itnew,’’ of recovering a past greatness and redesigning it for the purposes ofthe present. The ‘‘new’’ also does not signify a remake of the past, a repre-senting anew. Similarly, it is quite different from the narrow interpretationof avant-garde poetry as incessant novelty, as rebellion for the sake of some-thing new. As both Benjamin and Adorno show, this idea of novelty hasbeen quickly appropriated by capitalism and worked into its machineryof production in order to cover over the monotony of technical reproduc-tion and increase the consumer appeal of products.These false appearances
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generated by capitalism effectively cover over the disappearance of the newfrom the increasingly repetitive modern experience: ‘‘A constant samenessgoverns the relationship to the past as well. What is new about the phaseof mass culture compared with the late liberal stage is the exclusion of thenew. The machine rotates on the same spot.’’
21T h en o v e l t yf o rn o v e l t y ’ s
sake dissimulates the essentially unchanging conditions of everyday life andpreempts any attempt at creating a different relation to the past.
The avant-garde idea of the new requires that we think experience as
constantly reinventing itself, without the need of essence and the illusionof stability. The new should be thought of in terms of historicity, whichremarks experience in ways which let it happen as singular. Attentive tothe ever ‘‘new’’ historicity of experience, avant-garde art focuses on whatunderlies and moves thought and language, and produces it as a challengeto the practices of representing history within the framework of transpar-ency and immediacy.
22Its challenge translates into a different understand-
ing of meaning: meaning irreducible to signification, to the play of linguis-tic signs, but, instead, thought of in terms of opening the space formeaning:
‘‘Being’s difference-in-itsel f…d o e sn o t make meaning available as signi-
fication, but is the opening of a new space for meaning, of a spacing, or,
we could say, of ‘spaciosity’: of the spacious element that alone can receivemeaning’’ ( EF,). What manifests itself in experience seen without the
subject as its foundation is another legibility, which defines itself in termsof the always ‘‘new’’ singularity of experience.
This particular resetting of experience ‘‘at freedom’’ underlies Howe’s
typographical experimentations, her ‘‘distortions’’ and reformatting of thepage, from the changing pages of the ‘‘Book of Stella’’ to the crisscrossedpuzzles of Singularities andThe Nonconformist’s Memorial. What Howe’s
work almost literally lays open on the page is the space, the interval,in which signification begins. The frequent instances of ‘‘syntax degreezero’’
love tongue milk pasture wordsbare arm cause cube words
(ET,)
function as language singularities, as spaces for meaning, in which theirreinscription as ‘‘new’’ counteracts signification’s pull toward generality.In Howe’s texts, this sense of the new is continuously extended into thepast, released or ‘‘liberated’’ from the fixed, stationary accounts of history.Howe’s work is a rewriting of history, but a more radical one than those
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which provide new accounts or give new meaning to the past. It is more‘‘radical’’ because it opens the space of meaning differently, allowing experi-ence to remain singular and new, legible as singularity rather than throughthe generality of the linguistic sign. One of the most characteristic mo-ments of such a ‘‘release’’ or ‘‘scattering’’ is Howe’s invocation in Singu-
larities of the genetic text of Billy Budd, t h et e x tw h i c hr e m a i n s‘ ‘ o t h e r ’ ’i n
relation to all the edited, (mis)appropriated versions of Melville’s story. ForHowe, Billy Budd is a text which, because of its manuscript form, remains
inappropriable, always ‘‘new,’’ in spite of the attempts to impose an ‘‘artifi-cial,’’ reasonable readability upon it. Against the readability which operatesin terms of sameness, clarity, and understanding, Howe’s texts delineatea legibility of the ‘‘new,’’ that is, the legibility of the ‘‘other,’’ inappropri-able, contours of experience. I read Howe’s linguistic singularities in termsof those two kinds of legibility, whose difference releases history from thebounds of empathic accounts into the poietic possibilities of freedom. As
the end of ‘‘The Liberties’’ suggests: ‘‘Here set at liberty / Tear pages froma calendar / scatter them into sunshine and snow’’ ( ET,).
Howe’s works, however, also complicate Nancy’s portrayal of freedom,
indicating, forexample, in the title of ‘‘The Liberties,’’ that the issue of free-dom itself becomes ‘‘plural’’ or differentiated in the context of rethinkingdifference. Apart from the idea of different freedoms, I mean here the needto bring the question of sexual difference to bear upon the ‘‘liberty’’ of ex-perience, to consider to what extent the idea of freedom may be implicatedin the patriarchal genealogy of what has come to count as ‘‘experience.’’ Acritique of the connection between the idea of freedom and the notion ofthe unified subject as its foundation has to take into account the disappear-ance of sexual difference which marks such conceptions of subjectivity. AsThe Nonconformist’s Memorial suggests, the uniformity prescribed by logo-
centric discourse excludes, first and foremost, sexual difference: ‘‘The actof Uniformity / ejected her / and informers at her heels’’ ( NM,). This ex-
clusion becomes reinforced by the erasure of the name—‘‘In Peter she isnameless’’—which allows the history to become ‘‘A single thread of narra-tive.’’ Citing the reasons for the unity of historical narrative, Howe’s poembegins to undermine them through its radical typography: The lines are ar-ranged in a way similar to those sections of ‘‘Articulation of Sound Forms inTime’’ which ‘‘almost’’ mirror each other. Yet, the symmetry of the mirror-ing is skewed and asymmetrical, continuously undoing itself in the processof its own construction. These visual ‘‘inconsistencies’’ of the text renderlegible the erasure which instituted the apparent uniformity of the narra-
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tive and call into question the alleged transparency of history.The next twopages ( NM,–) reinforce this revision of legibility through the gesture
of crisscrossing the reversed columns of the same text, which, placed onthe opposite pages with additional lines to break the symmetry, underminethe linearity of reading and literally open the textual space into multipledirections, into plural vectors of legibility.
Howe’s work offers important possibilities for rethinking the legibility
of history in the context of sexual difference, possibilities which she makesmanifest in the poetic workings of language, and their ‘‘Liberties unper-ceived’’ ( ET,). The blank space between ‘‘liberties’’ and ‘‘unperceived’’
literally breaks open the space fora different articulation of experience.Thisinterval suggests that, in order for sexual difference to become part of howexperience is thought, so far unperceived, poietic spaces of language have
to be opened. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Howe’s work is its insis-tence that we learn to read these spaces not only in formalist and aestheticterms but also historically and politically. It is easy by now to assign to suchspaces the dubious aestheticvalue of formal(ist) experimentation, but it stillremains much harder to read them historically, against the conformity ofthought and experience worked out discursively and politically within thepatriarchal framework of culture. As one of Howe’s books makes clear, thissetting of language at liberty should be read as ‘‘the nonconformist’s memo-rial’’ against the act of Uniformity—of thought, history, and experience—which ejected sexual difference from the articulation of experience and con-structed the representational space on the foreclosure of the ‘‘singularizing’’e ff e c t so ft h i sd i ff e r e n c e .
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Beyond the Negative
An Afterword on the Avant-Garde
In this book, I have presented the avant-garde as an event of continuingcultural and philosophical importance, which offers us a radical revisionof experience, temporality, and aesthetics. Against Bürger’s or Huyssen’scontention that the avant-garde is today primarily of historical interest, Irearticulate the catalyzing role of the avant-garde for twentieth-century artand culture in terms of its refiguration of experience beyond empirical, sub-jectivist, and technological conceptions. I argue that in its critical gesture,the avant-garde aesthetics recasts experience in temporal terms as an event,that is, as intrinsicallyopen to the future and to transformation, and thus ir-reducible to the categories of consciousness, dialectics, and representation.To elaborate the historical and philosophical importance of this critique ofexperience, I turn to Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Lyotard, a groupof diverse thinkers who address issues critical to modernity: technology,everydayness, history, gender, and aesthetics. My readings of four poets—Khlebnikov, Stein, Białoszewski, and Howe—illustrate the revisions whichavant-garde poetry introduces into these constitutive elements of modernexperience. Stein’s ‘‘tenderized’’ syntax, Khlebnikov’s corners of events, orBiałoszewski’s wondering of the mundane are all articulations of the eventof experience into a poetic practice. Showing how avant-garde poetry en-acts the constitutive role of temporality and history, I counter the assertionsabout the exhaustion or death of the avant-garde and develop the criticalimplications of avant-garde aesthe tics beyond the idea of negation.
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Fundamental to the move beyond these ‘‘negative’’ conceptions of the
avant-garde is the rethinking of radical aesthetics beyond the idea of ‘‘sub-versive intent’’ or linguistic innovations. The chapters on Stein, Howe,Khlebnikov and Białoszewski all center on showing the extent to whichsuch radical ‘‘experimentation’’ with language and aesthetics, without ex-hausting itself in its subversive impulse, reformulates the constitutive char-acter of temporality and history for modern everydayness. I emphasizethis conjunction between innovative aesthetic and critical reformulation ofexperience by illustrating how, in their different ways, Irigaray, Lyotard,Benjamin, and Heidegger all establish the dependence of the philosophicalcritique of modernity on a radical critique of aesthetics. Benjamin is one ofthe first thinkers to show that the rethinking of experience in relation to art,technology, and history is crucial to the critique of modernity. Pivotal tomy approach is the juxtaposition of Benjamin’s critique of experience withHeidegger’s articulation of a postaesthetic notion of thework of art in termsof the temporal event of unconcealmen t, which breaks with the dominant
conceptions of modernist art such as art for art’s sake, formalism, and art ascommodity. Heidegger hints at this crucial revision of art in his remarks in‘‘TheWay to Language’’ about the necessity of a transformation in our rela-tion to language: ‘‘In order to think back to the essence of language, in orderto reiterate what is its own, we need a transformation of language, a trans-formation we can neithercompel norconcoct.The transformation does notresult from the fabrication of neologisms and novel phrases. The transfor-mation touches on our relation to language.’’
1For Heidegger, the radicality
of art lies in its ability to transform our relation to language, and thus to his-tory and experience. I take Heidegger’s remark as an indication of the needto rethink the linguistic invention characteristic of the avant-garde beyondthe idea of negation or subversiveness, and to examine how the avant-garde,situating art beyond the aesthetic framework, stages the event temporalityconstitutive of experience. I see such a liberation of art from aesthetic cate-gorizations, undertaken in order to stress art’s critical links with experienceand history, as constitutive of the avant-garde movement. Beyond the rup-turing of the representational paradigms and the rejection of aesthetic con-ventions, which occupy the center stage in such recent studies as Felski’sor Suleiman’s, the avant-garde’s challenge to traditional literary, visual, andmusical languages transforms such categorical determinations of modernexperience as technology, instrumentalization, commodification, or sexualdifference. What changes in the avant-garde transformation of aestheticsand language is the very mode of relationality that forms being and experi-
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ence in modernity: from commodification and instrumentality to relationswhich are nonappropriative and intrinsically open to future and otherness.
To see how this critical role of the avant-garde extends beyond the idea
of subversion, it is necessary to elaborate the redefinition of the category ofexperience in the avant-garde. Most studies of modernist and avant-gardeaesthetics either leave this concept unexamined or, like Felski, take experi-e n c et ob eac a t e g o r yo fc o n s c i o u s n e s s ,e x p l a i n a b l ei nt e r m so fr e p r e s e n -tation.While there have been different ‘‘theories’’ of the avant-garde, fromPoggioli to Bürger, none of them fleshes out the underlying philosophi-cal stakes of the avant-garde with respect to the problematic of experienceand temporality. Pointing out that such a rethinking of the relationshipbetween aesthetics, experience, and historicity lies at the core of how Iri-garay, Heidegger, or Benjamin critically engage modernity, I argue that asimilar redefinition of experience occurs in avant-garde poetry. The read-ings in parts II and III show that avant-garde poetry not only refashionsexperience beyond the optics of subjectivity and consciousness but also cri-tiques the erasure of historicity in the technological formation of being inmodernity.The avant-garde’s alternative is the idea of experience as a poieticevent. This event is not a temporal punctuality but an open-ended, future-
oriented field of forces, whose historicity prevents experience from being
reduced into representational spaces, commodifiable objects, or aestheticstates. This notion of the event juxtaposes the technological modality ofrevealing with what I call a ‘‘poietic’’ unfolding. Unlike technē, the poietic
event constitutes experience in its historicity, underscoring its irreducibilityto the orders of representation and consciousness. As long as historicity andtemporality continue to be ‘‘forgotten’’ for the sake of the representabilityof experience, the avant-garde impulse which, in my view, defines the workof art in modernity, will reappear with the force of a ghost in Derrida’ssense of the term: as a task and a demand produced by the spectrality ofbeing, by the event-ness of experience. In this specific sense, art in tech-nological modernity is indeed ‘‘dead’’; it is possible only as a ghost, as anattempt to bring into a figure that which does not, and cannot, exist as abeing or object—the temporality of the event. As the ‘‘ghost’’—hopefullyalso of Ophelia and not only of Hamlet’s father—art haunts modern tech-nologies of power, and, I think, will continue to haunt technological cul-ture, so that it does not play out the patriarchal family scenario in which thestill hesitant and questioning Hamlet is replaced by that other son, the tri-umphant and self-assured Fortinbras. My analyses in The Historicity of Ex-
perience reconfigure experience in terms of this tension between the poietic
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and the technic and examine the ways in which this rift marks the questionof everydayness, history, and sexual difference. In this context, I suggestthat the avant-garde poetics contests the modern practices which constitutethe everyday either in terms of instrumentality and commodification or astheir apparent opposite: a private sphere of aesthetic experience removedfrom history.
As my readings of Stein and Howe indicate, crucial to this rethinking of
the everyday by the avant-garde is the problem of sexual difference. This iswhy Irigaray’s critique of patriarchy becomes important to my study: Onthe one hand, Irigaray rewrites experience as an ethics of sexual differenceand, on the other, she explicitly cast her ethics in terms of a new, radicalpoetics of language and thought. Linking poetics and sexual difference inthe context of Irigaray’s work, I not only show how sexual difference de-termines the character of experience in modernity but also how it developsan aspect of the avant-garde which offers an alternative to what Suleimandiagnosed as the avant-garde’s male aggressivity. The irreducibility of thepoetic event to the order of consciousness and representation becomes inIrigaray’s work the mark of sexual difference, of the inflections of identitythrough the fluid proximity to the other (sex). I emphasize the connectionbetween Irigaray’s poetic idiom and the nonappropriative, ethical relationsto the other (sex) which this discourse figures. Seeing technology and com-modification as a desexualization of experience and an effacement of itsmateriality, Irigaray links historicity with the fluid and ‘‘poetic’’ texturingof sexual difference. In my readings of avant-garde poets, I underscore theirrevision of experience into a matrix of exchanges that occur in the middlevoice, beyond both passivity and activity. Not limited to aesthetic subver-sion or experimentation, the avant-garde poetic idiom analyzed in The His-
toricity of Experience produces a new configuration of experience which not
only does not erase or stereotype sexual difference but makes the proximitycharacteristic of Irigarayan ethics of sexual difference into a model for theethical relation to the other.
All these various aspects of the reconceptualization of experience in
terms of the event allow us to discern in the avant-garde, beyond themerely negative and even nihilistic readings of avant-garde aesthetics, a cri-tique of the dominant models of experience and history. Moving beyondthe negative characterizations is important, because, as I would argue, theavant-garde’s revision of experience also provides an alternative to the post-Hegelian and Marxist approaches, so important to contemporary criticaland philosophical debates. To see these implications of the avant-garde,
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however,we need a concept of negativity irreducible to dialectical negation.Onevenue for such a new understanding of negativitycould be Heidegger’scritique of Hegelian negativity in his lecture course Hegel. Even though
the Hegelian dialectics, as Adorno’s brilliant reformulation of it in Negative
Dialectics demonstrates, can offer a way of recognizing and maintaining the
nonidentical, the force of difference and otherness it preserves remains cir-cumscribed as negative. Claiming that such negativity remains ‘‘question-less’’(fraglosig), Heidegger rethinks in Hegel the valency of the Hegelian
negation in terms of temporality. For Heidegger, Hegel’s negativity is nonegativity, because it does not really put into practice the nothingness thatworks in the force of temporality: In Hegel, the nothing is already sublatedinto the ‘‘yes.’’
2
Reformulating the negative, Heidegger takes a different route from
Adorno’s: Rather than emphasizing and privileging the negative over thepositive moment of (the impossible) synthesis, Heidegger revises the verynotions of temporality and history so that it becomes possible to thinkhistoricity nondialectically, in terms of the temporality of the event. The‘‘nothing’’ manifest in the event refers not to negation but to the ground-lessness or the abyss (‘‘Das Nichts der Ab-grund’’), which marks the transfor-
mative and futural character of temporality. This revision lets us think thetemporal ungrounding of experience beyond lack and negation, as ‘‘morecritical’’ than critique through negation. What emerges from Heidegger’squestioning is a different sense of otherness beyond lack and the negative,beyond the recuperable or sublatable differences. In a way, it is possible toread Heidegger as a radicalization of Hegelian negativity and critique be-yond the dialectical schema. Adorno misses the point when he claims thatHeidegger’s ontico-ontological difference evacuates the force of the nega-tive. Rather, Heidegger—and Irigaray in her own different way—radical-izes the negative into the futural force of temporality and redescribes it asthe transformative opening of the present. This difference could finally beexplained in terms of the distinction between dialectical and futural tem-poralities at play in Hegel (and post-Hegelianism) and Heidegger. The ne-gating force of history in Hegel is not ‘‘negative’’ enough because it sub-lates, both cancels and elevates, the differences that make up experience.The futural force of temporality in Heidegger, by contrast, does not lead tosublation or abstraction but keeps opening up the ungrounding and trans-formative occurrence of the event as spatio-temporal differentiation. Thisforce is more radically ‘‘negative’’ in its finitude than any dialectical senseof negation or of the nonidentical, because it locates the negative not in the
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negating force of an oppositional identity but in the transformative open-ing of temporality. I can only mention here that in her recent writings, inparticular IL o v et oY o u andÊtre deux, Irigaray similarly reformulates the
Hegelian negative to articulate the transformative valency of sexual differ-ence beyond lack or negation.
3
This Heideggerian and Irigarayan reformulations of the Hegelian Er-
fahrung (experience) open the possibility of rearticulating the transforma-
tive, rather than simply destructive or negating, impact of the avant-gardein relation to modern experience. First of all, it allows us to rethink the con-testatory movements, like Dada, beyond the idea of negativityand rejectionand to tie them to the recognition of the futurity of the event. The avant-garde’s critique does not spend itself in the negative or self-destructive im-pulse but reaches toward an understanding of nondialectical event of ex-perience. This foray of avant-garde art beyond ‘‘aesthetics’’ into the work
of experience and temporality lets us locate the critical importance of theavant-garde beyond the idea of a promised future utopia. The approach Ipropose in The Historicity of Experience regards the avant-garde as a form of
critique more radical than critique based on negation, as a futural and trans-formative reinvention of experience. As event, experience unfolds beyondthe strictures of presence and beyond the poles of the identical and the non-identical, the fragmentary and the totalizable, which work as parts of thedialectical economyof presence. It occurs as a kind of its own ‘‘avant-garde,’’as experience always in translation, ahead of and differentiating itself fromthe presence, identity, and signification to which it has always already sub-mitted itself. Reformulating the valency of experience in modernity fromtechnic to poietic, the avant-garde poses the question not only of freedomfrom aesthetic conventions but of experience as freedom. In this gesture italso calls for the critique of the technicity which determines modern ex-perience in terms of power. Manifested as the general structures of avail-ability, calculation, or commodification, these power relations describe thespace where the radical ‘‘postaesthetics’’ of the avant-garde continues tohave cultural and political resonance. It is in these resonances that we dis-cern the avant-garde’s singular contribution to rethinking modernity withits tangled web of relations between experience, technology, and aesthetics.
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Notes
Introduction
. I articulate such convergences between Benjamin and Heidegger in ‘‘After
Aesthetics: Heidegger and Benjamin on Art and Experience,’’ where I argue thatthey allow us to begin thinking about art in a postaesthetic manner; Philosophy
Today , no. (): –. It is important to remember in this context that,
in his writings from late s, Benjamin’s assessment of technology becomes lessenthusiastic than, for example, in ‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction.’’ The picture of Benjamin as writing optimistically about the eman-cipatory effects of technology is, therefore, incomplete. It is in reference to thesemore critical comments that Benjamin eventually makes about technology that Idraw out the similarities between his and Heidegger’s critiques of experience.
. One of the most notable exceptions is Marjorie Perloff ’s study, The Futurist
Moment, which, exploring the idea of the ‘‘futurist moment’’ or breakthrough in
various avant-gardes, provides an ex cellent discussion of the writings of Russian
futurism and the accompanying developments in the visual arts, in particular, su-prematism and constructivism. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre,
and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –,
–. Subsequently cited as FM.
. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, ), (hereafter cited as PC).
. Two important studies, Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), and Huyssen’s After the
Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and India-
napolis: Indiana University Press, ), agree on this point: While aspects of theavant-garde aesthetic have trickled down or been adopted by consumer culture, theproject of integrating art and transforming social life through art failed.
. ‘‘What is new about the phase of mass culture compared with the late liberal
stage is the exclusion of the new. The machine rotates on the same spot.While de-termining consumption it excludes the untried as a risk.The movie-makers distrustany manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this veryreason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is takenfor granted but has never existed.’’ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ),
.
. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, ), (hereafter cited as IN).
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. Huyssen argues convincingly for maintaining, despite their frequent inter-
sections, a distinction between the avant-garde and modernism: ‘‘But even thoughthe boundaries between modernism and avantgardism remained fluid, the distinc-tion I am suggesting permits us to focus on sufficiently discernible trends withinthe culture of modernity. More specifically, it allows us to distinguish the histori-cal avant-garde from late-nineteenth-century modernism as well as from the highmodernism of the interwar years.’’ Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, viii.
. Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde as a failed attempt to reintegrate art and
praxis, placing most emphasis on the institutional character of art in bourgeois
society, does not address the aesthetic-philosophical critique of experience whichanimates the avant-gardes. Adorno’s reading of radical modernist art as a ‘‘nega-tive imprint’’ of society and its evisceration of experience, an imprint which allowsart to operate its social critique, avoids the oppositional optics of separation andintegration (see note ).
. ‘‘Today the best hopes of the historical avantgarde may not be embodied in art
works at all, but in decentered movements which work toward the transformationof everyday life’’; After the Great Divide, .
. In The Inhuman, Lyotard claims that a ‘‘study of the avant-gardes is impera-
tive’’; IN,.
. TristanTzara, Seven Dada Manifestoes and Lampisteries, trans. BarbaraWright
(New York: Riverrun Press, ), .
. In his reflections on l’art pour l’art and on social aesthetic, Adorno sees
the opposition between separation and integration of art as a false dilemma. ForAdorno, art has to be autonomous to be able to critique the society in which it hasbeen produced. The separation of art, however, does not cut it off from the socialsphere; conversely, it allows it to be a determinate negation of the historical situa-tion in which it exists: ‘‘Art’s asociality is a determinate negation of a determinatesociety’’ (). It is in Beckett’s work that modern art becomes the negation of theadministered world of technology: ‘‘This shabby, damaged world of images is thenegative imprint of the administered world’’ ( ). This ‘‘negative imprint,’’ though,
is nevera simple negation but an exposure of the emptiness of modern social life, anevisceration of experience covered over by the continuous novelty of capitalist pro-duction. Through a dialectic of absence and presence, Beckett’s negative imprintin extremis points to an absence of utopia, leaving as ‘‘unspeakable’’ its difference
from the critiqued reality of the present. Art functions as the negative of the socialby emphasizing, through a kind of conspicuous absence, what reality lacks. SeeTheodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, ).
. It would take too long to enumerate all the various readings of Heidegger
which Derrida has carried out through many years, from Of Grammatology and
Margins of Philosophy toTruth in Painting, Of Spirit, orSpecters of Marx. Let me just
agree here with Bernasconi that today, when we read Heidegger, we cannot help N o t e st oP a g e s – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 310 of 363
but always find ‘‘Derrida’s Heidegger,’’ a Heidegger which is often more complexthan the Heidegger ‘‘critiqued’’ by many Derridians; see Bernasconi, Heidegger in
Question: The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, ),
. Bernasconi’s book is an excellent contribution to new Heidegger scholarship,as it demonstrates the nuances of both Heidegger’s texts and Derrida’s readings,which often disappear in the simplified versions of the Heidegger-Derrida oppo-sition (). I would also like to mention Christopher Fynsk’s study Heidegger:
Thought and Historicity, recently reissued in its second edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cor-
nell University Press, ), in particular for its careful and illuminating readingsof the question of historicity and the work of art.
. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘TheWay to Language,’’ BasicWritings, d ed., ed. David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, ), hereafter cited as BW.Bernasconi
provides an excellent discussion of Heidegger’s transformation of language in hischapter, ‘‘The Transformation of Language at Another Beginning,’’ from Heidegger
in Question, –.
. ‘‘Propriative event’’ is Krell’s translation of Ereignis in ‘‘The Question Con-
cerning Technology’’; it keeps in play the twofold sense of occurring and propri-ating, suggesting that Ereignis is never a ‘‘mere’’ event but a happening in which
what is occurs ‘‘properly,’’ or, to be more exact, ‘‘propriatingly.’’ Martin Heidegger,BW,.
. I borrow this phrase from Robert Bernasconi’s excellent discussion of Hei-
degger’s displacement of metaphysical concepts, including that of experience, in‘‘The Way to Language.’’ Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question, .
. See the chapter ‘‘Time and Creation’’ in Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imagi-
nary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
), –.
. This is the reason why Castoriadis identifies only institutional reasons for
the frequent occlusion of historicity in various conceptions of history: ‘‘[b]orn in,through and as the rupture of time, a manifestation of the self-alteration of societyas instituting society, the institution in the profound sense of the term can existonly by posing itself as outside of time, by refusing to be altered by time, by posingthe norm of its immutable identity and by posing itself as this norm of immutableidentity, without which it would not exist,’’ The Imaginary Institution of Society,
.
. Writing about technology and Heidegger’s thought inevitably brings up the
question of the Holocaust and mass extermination during World War II. This isobviously a complicated and vexed issue, to which I can only allude here. For a de-tailed treatment of this problem, one can consult the recent Martin Heidegger and
the Holocaust, ed. Milchman and Rosenberg (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities
Press, ), in particular, Manning’s ‘‘The Cries of Others and Heidegger’s Ear’’and Milchman and Rosenberg’s ‘‘Heidegger, Planetary Technics, and the Holo-caust.’’ Heidegger’s reading of technology as formative of the modern experience
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of the world on a fundamental, structural level can explain the framework withinwhich human beings can be regarded as ‘‘processable resource,’’ as a segment ofbeing that can be calculated, ordered, and made ‘‘available’’ for extermination on amass scale. Heidegger shows how technology can reduce knowledge to the termsof efficiency and availability, erasing the historical dimension of experience, thehistoricity of the event, which accounts for the heterogeneity and singularity of ex-perience. In this way, technology foreshortens experience to the explainable andcalculable matrix of efficiency. Heidegger’s view does not, obviously, account forthe ideological and cultural forces behind the Holocaust, for anti-Semitism andfor the propaganda of hatred, determinative of the years of fascism. This momentof silence makes it imperative to read Heidegger critically on those issues. But Hei-degger’s reflection on technology also makes clear that his reading of the historicityof experience contains ‘‘critical’’ resources for questioning the political formationof national socialism with which he aligned his thought in the s. It is only withthe recent publication of two of Heidegger’s previously unpublished texts fromlate s, Besinnung (–) and Die Geschichte des Seyns (–), published
by Vittorio Klostermann as volumes and of the Gesamtausgabe in and
, that we can see how Heidegger himself extends his critique of metaphysics,subjectivity, and power into a critique of nationalism, communism, socialism, andrace.
. In his early texts on technology, ‘‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion’’ or ‘‘A Short History of Photography,’’ Benjamin writes optimistically aboutthe aesthetic and political possibilities opened up by the development of the tech-nological means of reproduction. He believes that they can successfully rid thework of art of its aura of uniqueness and change its political effects on mass audi-ences. His late writings, however, are much more cautious, even skeptical, aboutthe effects of modern technology upon experience. In ‘‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’Benjamin deplores the destruction of experience brought about by information:‘‘The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sen-sation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience’’; Walter Benjamin, Illumina-
tions,ed. Hannah Arendt (NewYork: Schocken, ), . It is this later Benjamin
that shows some definite affinities with Heidegger’s critique of technology.
. In his ‘‘Afterword’’ to Postmodernism Explained, Godzich writes about Lyo-
tard’s argument in The Postmodern Condition about the altered status of knowl-
edge in postindustrial societies: ‘‘Within such societies, knowledge is treated as themajor force of production and is increasinglydissociated from individuals who pos-sess it in order to become a commodity in the marketplace; it is redefined in termsof specifiable bits of information, and its chief function is to ensure the optimalperformance of the system’’; Wlad Godzich, ‘‘Afterword: Reading Against Liter-acy,’’ in Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodernism Explained (Minneapolis: University
o fM i n n e s o t aP r e s s , ) , .
. In ‘‘The Origin of theWork of Art,’’ Heidegger uses the term Gestalt (figure)
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to indicate that his approach to art is not a matter of form or formalism. It seemsto me that Adorno’s emphasis in Aesthetic Theory on form as the bearer of social
critique plays a similar role. Although the term ‘‘form’’ may create a misleading im-pression that Adorno’s theory leans toward formalism, his understanding of howform (re)figures content, points beyond formalist readings of art; see, for example,page .
. I explore those issues in more detail in ‘‘The Ethos of Everydayness: Hei-
degger on Poetry and Language,’’ Man and World ,n o .( ) : – .
. Heidegger’s position is here similar to those of Adorno and Horkheimer,
who regard modernity as a progressive reduction of being to the formal patterns ofunification, systematization, and so on: ‘‘In advance, the Enlightenment recognizesas being and occurrence only what can be apprehended in unity: its ideal is thesystem from which all and everything follows’’; Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ), .
. Foucault’s critique of experience can be found in The Order of Things: An
Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, ), –.
. See Godzich’s discussion of Appel’s critique of the positivism of social sci-
ences in favor of a hermeneutics of social experience; ‘‘Afterword: Reading againstLiteracy,’’ .
. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), .
. ‘‘Thus, the irruption within the order of language of the anteriority of lan-
guage evokes a later time, that is, a forever. The poem’s time frame is some ‘futureanterior’ that will never take place, never come about as such, but only as an up-heaval of present place and meaning.’’ Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic
Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S.
Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, ), (hereafter cited as DL).
. Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus (Paris: Grasset, ), . Quoted after
Thomas Docherty, ‘‘Postmodernism: An Introduction,’’ in Postmodernism: A
Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
. The event is made understandable in terms of being dislocated ahead in re-
lation to its time, in advance of the contemporary. It is dislocated, however, in away that allows for the recuperation and reappropriation of this distance at somepoint in the future, the point at which the new standards of comprehension wouldcatch up with what now shocks as the ‘‘incomprehensible,’’ futural moment of theavant-garde.
. Docherty emphasizes Virilio’s point that the avant-garde is not only in con-
flict with the dominant aesthetics of its time but also ‘‘in conflict with time itself,being out of its proper moment; it is always necessarily anachronistic. This col-
location of time and conflict is of the essence of the political for Virilio’’; ‘‘Post-modernism: An Introduction,’’ . I would add that the political moment of theavant-garde lies in the fact that in its art the moment itself cannot ever be ‘‘proper,’’
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belong to itself or to representation. It is not simply that the avant-garde must beanachronistic in relation to its proper moment, that is, the moment in which itsaesthetics would become ‘‘dominant,’’ but that the recognition that time does notbelong to itself is already political.
. Georg Lukács, ‘‘Realism in the Balance,’’ in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and
Politics (London: Verso, ), .
. The significance of the avant-garde for contemporary French thinking is
linked, at least in part, to the influence of Tel Quel and thewriters associated with it.
It marked such diverse approaches as those of Derrida and Kristeva, and providedthe context for linking feminist critique to radical writing practice.
. Luce Irigaray, L’oubli de l’air: Chez Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,
).
. I find Irigaray’s poetic practice, the textuality of her nonpropositional writ-
ing, more conducive to rethinking the avant-garde’s critique of experience thenKristeva’s distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic in The Revolution in
Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
). Irigaray is much more closely engaged with Heidegger’s conception of lan-guage and poiēsis, and links the question of poetics to technology, economic ex-
change, and commodification. Her rethinking of sexual difference discloses thelink between, on the one hand, changing the imaginary and the morphology oflanguage and, on the other, a retexturing of experience.
. Heidegger discusses the ‘‘emergence’’ of being in the shattering of a word in
relation to the concluding lines of George’s poem ‘‘Words’’; ‘‘Words,’’ On the Way
to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, ), –.
. I have given that question more attention in ‘‘The Ethos of Everydayness:
Heidegger on Poetry and Language,’’ Man and World ,n o .( ) : – .
. I have in mind here terms like Volk,German Dasein, andFührung, which,
although equivocal in Heidegger’s texts and certainly not coextensive with theirideological use by fascism, implicate Heidegger in the political climate of the s.Recent years have seen a plethora of publications on Heidegger’s involvement withnational socialism, his silence about the Holocaust, and, finally, the politics implicitin his work, from the ‘‘early’’ books by Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labartheto more recent work on Heidegger and politics (Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger,
Thiele, Timely Meditations, and so on) and studies such as Martin Heidegger and
the Holocaust. Also illuminating is Bernasconi’s discussion of how Heidegger’s ex-
ploration of art and poetry is tied with politics; see especially chapters , , ando fHeidegger in Question. Views differ widely on all those questions, which tes-
tifies to the complexity and contested nature of those issues in Heidegger. Thesedivergences also have to do with which specific moments in Heidegger’s work vari-ous interpretations choose to emphasize. It is impossible to do justice here to allthose questions in Heidegger or to their interpretations in relation to ethics andpolitics—it would require a different study. This wider debate constitutes the con- N o t e st oP a g e s – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 314 of 363
text for my specific focus on the radical implications of how Heidegger thinks ofthe relation between art and technology in modernity, and their importance forcontemporary poetry; this is where Heidegger’s thought still remains insufficientlyexplored. My reading of Heidegger, side by side with Benjamin, focuses on theremarks on art and technology which suggest a conception of experience struc-turally open to otherness and resistant to closure or totalization, that is, a notionwhich problematizes not only the idea of representation and full cognition, butalso exclusion and reduction of or blindness to alterity. The conception of experi-ence which emerges from such a reading of Heidegger does not explain or absolvehis writings from involvement with national socialism, but it should be borne inmind in discussions of the ethical and political dimensions of Heidegger’s thought.My discussion explores, then, aspects of what Fred Dallmayr calls, in the contextof politics, the ‘‘other Heidegger,’’ and extends Heidegger’s insights beyond thelimits of his work on aesthetics and poetry. It focuses on those moments whenHeidegger’s understanding of experience as event opens up a nexus of relationswhich link poetic language with the problem of technological determinations ofbeing in modernity and the historicity of the everyday, which is also the site of theavant-garde explorations of art.
. To my knowledge, there are only two book-length translations of Białoszew-
ski’s work into English: a volume of early poems, The Revolution of Things, trans.
Busza and Czaykowski (Washington, D. C.: Charioteer Press, ), and the trans-lation of Pamie˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego; A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising,
ed. and trans. Madeline Levine (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, ).
. This alternative view of the trends in Polish poetry after World War II is
developed in a series of essays published by the Institute of Literary Studies of thePolish Academy of Sciences under the title Pisanie Białoszewskiego, ed. Głowin ´ski
and Sławin ´ski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, ). This is the most interesting
collection of scholarly essays about Białoszewski’s work to appear to date in Polish.
Chapter 1
. In his discussion of the distinction between Erlebnis andErfahrung, Benjamin
employs the notion of the technological disciplining of the human sensorium char-acteristic of modern life: ‘‘Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowdas into a reservoirof electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, hecalls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’ Whereas Poe’s passers-
by cast glances in all directions which still appeared to be aimless, today’s pedestri-ans are obliged to do so in order to keep abreast of traffic signals. Thus technologyhas subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.’’ See ‘‘On SomeMotifs in Baudelaire,’’ Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken
Books, ), (hereafter cited as I).
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. Much of Heidegger’s late writing on art is predicated upon disengaging art
from its aesthetic classification and thus recognizing art’s significance as lying out-side of the realm of narrowly understood ‘‘cultural activity.’’ See, for example, ‘‘TheQuestion Concerning Technology,’’ Basic Writings, d ed., ed. David Farrell Krell
( N e wY o r k :H a r p e rC o l l i n s , ) , – ( h e r e a f t e rc i t e da s BW).
. Recent years have seen an increasing number of publications exploring con-
nections between aesthetics and fascism: Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Ba-
nality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, ); Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard Golsan (Han-
over, N.H.: University Press of New England, ); ‘‘Fascism and Culture,’’ The
Stanford Review , nos. – (), special number.
. Heidegger’s reflections on art in the s and s, some time after his
own fateful engagement with national socialism, can be used to provide some in-dications as to how such a meteoric, though effective, aestheticization of politicscan at all become historically possible. Heidegger’s diagnosis of the complicity be-tween aesthetic definitions of art and the technological regimentation of experience(into aesthetic, everyday, labor, and so on), not unlike Adorno’s critique of the En-lightenment, underscores the underlying metaphysical schematization of experi-ence (subject—object or resource) that facilitates the transition between seeminglyincompatible orders of aesthetics and technology.
. The most obvious difference is Benjamin’s political and cultural critique of
fascism and Heidegger’s association of some of his ideas in the s with the‘‘revolution’’ proposed by the National Socialist party. There is no space here todiscuss the implications of Heidegger’s involvement (the rapidly growing body ofscholarship on the subject as well as on the political implications of Heidegger’sthought makes anything less than a sustained study of these issues seem disingenu-ous). I limit, therefore, my remarks on Heidegger largely to his ideas about art,technology, and history in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ and the postwar essayson technology, art, and poetry. For a sketch of the philosophical and political im-plications of the Heidegger affair, see Fynsk’s ‘‘Postface’’ to the second edition ofHeidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, , ),
– (hereafter cited as HTH ). I am largely in agreement with Fynsk, especially
on two points: first, that Heidegger’s thought is always ‘‘political,’’ not only becauseof its explicit engagement with the politics in the s and s but because ofthe way it questions the limits of thinking about politics; second, I do not thinkthat Heidegger’s thought is ‘‘essentially’’ or entirely determined by the complicitiesof some of his ideas and actions. As Fynsk suggests, taking Heidegger’s politicalentanglements seriously does not lead in any simple way to abandoning his textsor to foreclosing the radical critical insights his critique of the metaphysics of sub-jectivity and of history makes possible. I suggest that Heidegger’s ideas about theevent and art radically open up the notion of experience and refashion it in viewof historicity in ways that render it structurally open and ‘‘mindful’’ of otherness. N o t e st oP a g e s – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 316 of 363
These motifs, which predominate in Heidegger’s thought from the time of Bei-
träge zur Philosophie, are clearly at odds with claims that Heidegger’s work ‘‘sup-
ports’’ the fascist worldview. Acknowledging Heidegger’s investment in what heperceived, at least for a while, to be important about national socialism (which hemistakenly saw as the site of a decisive confrontation with planetary technology;see Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, ‘‘Heidegger, Planetary Technics, and theHolocaust,’’ in Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust, ed. Milchman and Rosenberg
[Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, ], ), we also need to recog-nize the radicality of his critique of being, which tries to think of the event beyondthe fold of technology. I agree with Fynsk that it is Heidegger’s confrontation withTechnik that still needs to be thought. My rethinking of poiēsis and event extends
this confrontation with technology beyond Heidegger’s work. As I indicate, espe-cially in chapter , this revision of experience is not without political and ethicalimplications of its own.
. Both Fynsk and Bernasconi draw attention to this performative aspect of
Heidegger’s idea of the work of art. See Christopher Fynsk, HTH, –, and
Robert Bernasconi, ‘‘The Greatness of the Work of Art,’’ Heidegger in Question:
The Art of Existing (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, ), –.
. InParaesthetics, C a r r o l li n d i c a t e st h en e c e s s i t yo fm o v i n gb e y o n dt h eo p t i c s
of aesthetics in order to flesh out the critical implications of art: ‘‘If ‘art’ is to func-tion critically and indicate a movement ‘beyond theory,’ it must also move ‘beyondart’ and function outside of all forms of aestheticism’’; David Carroll, Paraesthetics:
Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida ( N e wY o r k :M e t h u e n , ) , .
. Such a postaesthetic approach to art, as a critique of the tripartite division
into the cognitive, the moral, and the aesthetic, is explored at length in J. M. Bern-stein’s book, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ): ‘‘If ‘aesthetics’ in itsnarrow sense refers to the understanding of art as an object of taste outside truthand morality, then ‘post-aesthetic’ theories of art are themselves critiques of truth-
only cognition insofar as their going beyond aesthetics implies a denial of the rigid
distinctions separating the claims of taste from the claims of knowing or rightaction’’ (). Bernstein’s insightful book deals with the ‘‘postaesthetic’’ theories ofart, without engaging at length this art itself. My own project integrates the post-aesthetic approach to art that is being worked out in Benjamin and Heidegger withthe analysis of avant-garde poetry’s unworking of the aesthetical framework.
. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. and into. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken Books, ), (hereafter cited as R).
. For a detailed discussion of futurism’s involvement in the formation of fas-
cist political culture, see Emilio Gentile, ‘‘The Conquest of Modernity: FromModernist Nationalism to Fascism,’’ trans. Lawrence Rainey, Special Issue, ‘‘Mari-netti and the Italian Futurists,’’ Modernism/Modernity , no. (): –.
. Gentile argues that aestheticization of politics by fascism functioned side by
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side with its politicization of aesthetics. Singling out aestheticization of politics canbe misleading ‘‘if it obscures fascism’s other important feature, its ‘politicizationof aesthetics,’ which not only inspired fascism’s attitude toward avant-garde cul-ture, but stood at the very origin of the encounter between Futurism and fascismand of the participation of many modernist intellectuals in fascism’’; ‘‘Conquest ofModernity,’’ . A similar argument can be made about the complex relationshipto art and the avant-garde after the revolution in Russia and the creation oft h eS o v i e tU n i o n .
. ‘‘Only a thoughtless observer can deny that correspondences come into play
between the world of modern technology and the archaic symbol-world of my-thology,’’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-sity Press, ), .
. Benjamin’s reflections on the role of art and literature in the figuration of
modern experience take their cue from the disappearance of lyrical poetry (‘‘OnSome Motifs in Baudelaire’’) and the impact of mechanical reproducibility uponthe social function of the work of art (‘‘The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction’’).
.I ns e c t i o n o f Beiträge zur Philosophie, entitled ‘‘Geschichte,’’ Heidegger
expounds the implications of the difference between Geschichte andHistorie. Histo-
rieis aligned with historiology, with the historicist determination and description
ofGeschichte in terms of progress, becoming, or understanding, which conceals
historicity as the futural force of history. In Heidegger’s harsh judgment, histori-ology (Historie) always ends up in anthropological-psychological biographism:
‘‘Alle Historie endet im anthropologisch-psychologischen Biographismus.’’ Geschichte, on
the other hand, is defined by Heidegger in relation to the notion of the event asthe modality of being: ‘‘Das Seyn als Er-eignis ist die Geschichte; von hier aus muss
deren Wesen, unabhängig von der Werdens- und Entwicklungsvorstellung, unabhängigvon der historischen Betrachtung und Erklärung, bestimmt werden’’ (). See Bei-
träge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe, vol. (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, ), –.
. See ‘‘After Aesthetics: Heidegger and Benjamin on Art and Experience,’’ Phi-
losophy Today , no. :–. For a discussion of Heidegger’s overcoming of aes-
thetics, see Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question. As Heidegger writes in Beiträge zur
Philosophie, ‘‘This question [of the origin of thework of art] is intimatelyconnected
with the task of overcoming aesthetics and that means simultaneously with over-coming a certain conception of beings as objectively representable.’’ Contributions
to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloom-
ington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, ), . In the original, thisremark can be found on p. . It could be argued that one feature of such art isits ‘‘weak’’ messianic character, to paraphrase Benjamin, its futurity or structuralopenness to the future and the other. In Spectres de Marx, Derrida refers to the
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thought of such an opening as la messianique, the messianic: ‘‘pensée de l’autre et
de l’événement à venir’’ (). Although the term is Benjaminian, one can iden-
tify in Derrida’s use of the messianic traits of both Levinas (the injunction of theother) and of Heidegger (the thought of the event, of das Ereignis underlies Der-
rida’s approach to Marx). The Derridean ‘‘messianic’’ describes the displacementof the subject, its exposition, toward the other. It functions as the injunction ofalterity, the dislocation of self-presence, that in advance, ‘‘an-archically,’’ foreclosesthe possibility of self-coincidence and identity. Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée,
).
.Periri recurs in periculum, peril or danger. In German, Erfahrung plays both
on the verb fahren, to travel, to be on the way, and on the old high German
fara,danger, from which stem the modern Gefahr, danger, and gefährden, to en-
danger. As Eduardo Cadava suggests, Benjamin’s understanding of Erfahrung in
its strict sense refers to existing ‘‘within a permanent state of danger and emer-gency’’ (‘‘Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History,’’ Diacritics ,
nos. –: ; hereaftercited as ‘‘WL’’). Heidegger’s approach indicates in turn thatthe traversing and the danger implicit in the etymology of Erfahrung constitute the
very structure of experience, its traversal or transposition from the giving of theevent, the excess of es gibt, to its always already being given as a fact or instant of
experience. For Heidegger, the danger of experience lies in its always already col-lapsible structure, in the inherent reducibility and reversibility of the giving of thee v e n tt ot h ep r e s e n c eo ft h eg i v e n .
. ‘‘Just as Derrida has provided a ‘deconstructed’ reading of certain metaphysi-
cal texts and their concepts, Heidegger, in Hegel’s Concept of Experience, in his read-
ing of Hegel’s word ‘experience’ as a word of Being, has heard its claim from beyondmetaphysics,’’ Heidegger in Question, .
. See Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, ), – and (here-
after cited as UZS);On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York:
Harper and Row, ), – (hereafter cited as OWL); and BW,.
. Martin Heidegger, Z u rS a c h ed e sD e n k e n s (Tübingen: Niemeyer, ), .
. Martin Heidegger, Besinnung, Gesamtausgabe, vol. (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, ), . Hereafter cited as B.
. Martin Heidegger, Bremen und FreiburgerVorträge (Frankfurt am Main: Vit-
torio Klostermann, ), .
. For an incisive redefinition of ‘‘experience in the context of historicity and
interpretation,’’ see Joan W. Scott’s essay ‘‘ ‘Experience,’ ’’ Feminists Theorize the
Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, ), –.
. Heidegger employs various figures to describe such modalities of relating:
Entsprechung (co-respondence), Stimmung (tuning), Dis-position; seeWhat Is Phi-
losophy? trans. and intro.William Kluback and Jean T.Wilde (Twayne Publishers,
), –.
. For a more extensive discussion of Heidegger’s views on the philosophy of
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life, see David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, Finitude in Hei-
degger’s Thinking of Being (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
), –.
. For the German text, see Heidegger, ‘‘Die Frage nach der Technik,’’ Vorträge
und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, ), .
. See my discussion of the infold in Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneu-
tics of Nearness: Heidegger, Levinas, Stevens, Celan (Albany: State University of New
York Press, ), –.
. Rodolphe Gasché, ‘‘Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Re-
flections on Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Language,’’ in Benjamin’s Ground: New
Readings of Walter Benjamin, ed. Rainer Nägele (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, ), . Throughout the essay, Gasché underscores the disruptiveeffect of translatability on the unity of form and content of the work of art:‘‘[T]ranslatability represents in the work of art the objective call for overcomingthis still natural unity rooted in mythical linguistic relations’’ ().
. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘‘Der Ister,’’ Gesamtausgabe, vol. (Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ), ; Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘‘The Ister,’’ trans.
William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univer-sity Press, ), .
.‘‘Die Sprache selbst ist in den Dingen selbst nicht vollkommen ausgesprochen’’;
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. , part (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ), .
. When we consider Heidegger’s statements and lectures from to as
an integral part of his philosophical enterprise, the situation becomes more com-p l i c a t e d .I n i nt h e Rektorat speech, Heidegger inscribes the historico-political
context, the national socialist ‘‘revolution,’’ directly into his work. This politicalcommitment of his thought is intertwined, however, with a change in Heidegger’sphilosophical terminology, which ‘‘compromises’’ the ontological character of hisearlier analysis in Being and Time, changes the valency of some of his key terms
from ontological to ontic (for example, German Dasein ), or reintroduces terms (for
example, Geist),which the earlier thought critiqued.To put it briefly, as manycom-
mentators have remarked, Heidegger’s thought at this historical moment involvesitself explicitly with the metaphysical terminology that the project of Being and
Time set out to deconstruct (Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe). Later on in the s,
Heidegger’s texts attempt to reread the terms of his analysis, to change again theirsemantic value (for example, Dasein, which refers no longer simply to the existen-
tial ontology of Being and Time, or to the German Dasein as in the texts of early
s, but describes the attentiveness to the lighting of Being itself ) or abandonthem (as is the case with resoluteness, Entschlossenheit ). Heidegger’s writings also
begin to refer to history in more general terms, projecting themselves against thebroad spectrum of metaphysical thought and, in particular, its culmination in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in technology as the prevalent mode of the re-vealing of Being. It is in this context that Heidegger’s remarks on historicity areN o t e st oP a g e s – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 320 of 363
situated, as a form of analysis that sets up the paradigm for the unfolding of historyas event (das Ereignis), without engaging explicitly the specifics of the historical
circumstances that ‘‘constitute’’ contemporary history.
. Writing about the continuing need to rethink the aspects of Heidegger’s
thought which concern political thought, Fynsk suggests that Heidegger’s radi-cality manifests itself in questioning the very legibility of the political and forcesus to keep reexamining ‘‘the political meaning of an engagement with the verygrounds of legibility’’ ( Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, ). In chapter , I ex-
plore this political meaning of legibility through the work of Susan Howe.
. For an insightful and comprehensive discussion of the common misreadings
of modernist aesthetics and poststructuralism’s proximity to it as aesthetic formal-ism or skepticism, see Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of
Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
).
. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Fred-
erick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, ), .
. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,’’ Existence and
Being (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, ), ; translation modified
(hereafter cited as ‘‘EB’’).
. The German text is quoted from Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, Ge-
samtausgabe, vol. , (hereafter cited as EHD).
. See also my discussion of Heidegger’s ‘‘ die Sprache spricht ’’ inInflected Lan-
guage.
. Rebecca Comay, ‘‘Framing Redemption: Aura, Origin, Technology in Ben-
jamin and Heidegger,’’ in Ethics and Danger: Essays on Heidegger and Continental
Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), . Indeed, the prox-
imity of Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s ideas of history underscores the necessity ofkeeping in view the interplay of the ontic and the ontological in Heidegger’s notionofEreignis and of recognizing the ontic as a ‘‘material corrective’’ to the ontological.
. Cezary Wodzin ´ski,Heidegger i problem zła (Warszawa: Pan ´stwowy Instytut
Wydawniczy, ), ; translation mine.
.Besinnung appeared in as vol. of Gesamtausgabe. Die Geschichte des
Seyns (vol. ) appeared in , while Metaphysik und Nihilismus (vol. ) was
published in .
. I discuss the problematic of power in Heidegger in more detail in ‘‘Powers
to Be: Art and Technology in Heidegger and Foucault’’ Research in Phenomenology
(): –, and in ‘‘Proximities: Irigaray and Heidegger on Difference,’’Continental Philosophy Review , :–.
. The Heideggerian way-making of language does not lie farapart from Benja-
min’s notion of translatability, especially when we realize that for Benjamin thetranslatability inscribed in each text serves as an index point for a sort of translat-ability that describes the workings of language as such or, in other terms, the ‘‘pure
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language.’’ Translatability marks the inner limit of the original and, as a ‘‘structuralfeature that, within the work itself, points beyond it’’ (Rodolphe Gasché, ‘‘Satur-nine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamin’sTheory of Language,’’ Benjamin’s Ground, ), inscribes otherness within the text.
Benjaminian translatability indicates that the ‘‘essence’’ of the work of art is notself-identity but difference, the work’s openness to the otherness of translation.Translatability understood as the internal limen of the text functions itself as a markof a broader translational pattern that, for Benjamin, characterizes language andthe work of art, as such. For the purpose of translation is not so much to render atext into another language as to lay open the workings of language: ‘‘Translationthus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationshipbetween languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationshipitself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form’’ ( I,).
This reciprocal relationship remains hidden (verborgene Verhältnis) b e c a u s eo ft h e
nature of translation involved in language and its tendency to efface itself oncelanguage reaches articulation. A particular instance of translatability can registerthis internal mechanism of language to the extent precisely that at stake in transla-tion is not the form or the content of a text but rather the linguistic intention thatanimates the original: ‘‘The task of the translator consists in finding that intendedeffect upon the language [ Intention auf die Sprache ] into which he is translating
which produces in it the echo of the original’’ ( I,).
The intention in question refers to the intention of language itself, specifically
to the way in which each text ‘‘intends’’ the workings of its language, the mannerin which it points to and marks the ‘‘way’’ of its language. The kinship betweenlanguages which translation discloses is not a question of their proximity in originor history but rather one of the translatability of their intention: the possibility oftranslating not only the linguistic intention of one text into another but, with itand through it,of revealing the proximity between the intention—theway-makingor the translation—of the languages in question.What Benjamin refers to as ‘‘purelanguage’’ is this supplementing, supplementlike, to paraphrase Derrida, relation-ship between intentions animating languages. Since translation allows us best tosee the intention that underlies a given language by way of contrasting it withthat of another, the translatability inscribed in each work functions as the markof ‘‘pure language,’’ that is, the commemoration or remembrance of language’s al-ready ‘‘hidden’’ (by words themselves) intention of ‘‘translating’’ itself into words.Translatability works as the marker of pure language because pure language is bothinscribed in each language (as its particular mode of translation or way-makinginto words) and, at the same time, extends beyond the intention of any single lan-guage. What is it that exists in language and comes into our view in particular intranslations, in the modes of signification particular to each language? It is the factthat there is meaning at all, or, to put it differently, the manner in which languagessignify, come into words. Thus, what Benjamin means by pure language is thatNote to Page Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 322 of 363
translatory mechanism that allows for words to signify, that allows us to havewordsat all. Obviously, each language has its own modes of signification, developed andm o d i fi e do v e rth eco u r s eo fi t sh i s t o rya n ds p e c i fi ct oi t ss o c i e ty .B u tw h a tm a r k sth e‘‘proximity’’ of languages is the fact that there are words at all, that there is mean-ing at all—that is, the proximity of the ‘‘intentions’’ of languages to signify, their‘‘pure language.’’ In this sense, pure language at the same time remains inscribedin and exceeds each single language.
. As Benjamin writes in ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ ‘‘Intention auf die
Sprache’’ ‘‘is a feature of translation which basically differentiates it from the poet’s
work, because the effort of the latter is never directed at the language as such, atits totality, but solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects’’ ( I,
). This point, however, does not take into consideration the explicit translativeeffort within the poetic work of Khlebnikov, for example, or the intralinguistictranslative movement characteristic of the poetry of Gertrude Stein or Paul Celan,who indicate that ‘‘translating’’ is integral to the workings of poetic language. It isno surprise, therefore, that Menninghaus’s study of Celan’s poetry, for instance,aligns Benjamin’s notion of the ‘‘Intention auf die Sprache’’ with Celan’s character-
istic ‘‘undoing’’ of poetic language; Winfried Menninghaus, Paul Celan: Magie der
Form(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ).
. Khlebnikov’s idea of ‘‘beyonsense’’ language as presented in Zangezi oper-
ates on the principle of a phenomenal saying, the linguistic manifestation of theworld, not unlike Heidegger’s notion of die Sage. SeeVelimir Khlebnikov, The King
of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Futurian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –.
. In his lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymn ‘‘Der Ister,’’ Heidegger’s remarks
on translation parallel Benjamin’s concluding remarks about translation as a prac-tice of expanding and transforming one’s own language: ‘ ‘ D a sÜ b e r s e t z e ni s tv i e l –
mehr eine Erweckung, Klärung, Entfaltung der eigenen Sprache durch die Hilfe derAuseinandersetzung mit der fremdem’’ (‘‘Rather translation is more an awakening,
clarification, and unfolding of one’s own language with the help of an encounterwith the foreign language’’); Hölderlins Hymne ‘‘Der Ister,’’ Gesamtausgabe, vol.
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ), . Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘‘The Ister,’’
trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, ), –. The term Auseinandersetzung, a polysemous sheaf
of meanings ranging from exposition, analysis, arrangement, and settlement toargument, difference, and conflict, renders well the tension between identificationand difference, the same and the other, that Heideggerdescribes as the dynamics oftranslation (a most interesting discussion of the Heideggerian Auseinandersetzung,
in particular in the context of the political involvements of Heidegger’s thought,can be found in Cezary Wodzin ´ski,Heidegger i problem zła, –). Heidegger’s re-
marks about translation are clearlyat odds with passages about German Dasein and
poetry, which commentators sometimes see as unequivocally consonant with the
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conception of Germany advanced by national socialism. A similar Auseinanderset-
zung, a tension that strings the transition of the manifestational saying (die Sage)
into words, is at work in Heidegger’s conception of language. My argument is thatin the works of the avant-garde, this tension is inscribed into their very language,constituting a distinctive poetics of intralingual translation.
. Discussing the latency inherent in the structure of experience itself, Cadava
remarks that ‘‘[i]t is what is not experienced in an event that paradoxicallyaccountsfor the belated and posthumous shock of historical experience’’ (‘‘Words of Light,’’). Looking at this latency not as a repressed part of the content of an experience,a ‘‘forgotten reality,’’ but rather as the peculiarity of the manner of experiencingunderscores its historical trajectory, in which forgetting becomes the integral partof experience.To put it differently, experience takes place as the forgetting of itself;it produces itself as its own latency.
. Heidegger, BW,.
. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-sity Press, ), – (hereafter cited as AP).
. In a slightly different context, Fynsk draws attention to the double mean-
ing of Moment in Benjamin’s work. Christopher Fynsk, ‘‘The Claim of History,’’
Diacritics (Fall–Winter ): – (hereafter cited as ‘‘CH’’).
. The beginning of N . rejects Heidegger’s notion of Geschichtlichkeit, as
a failed attempt of reading history ‘‘phenomenologically’’: ‘‘What distinguishesimages from the ‘essences’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heideg-ger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through ‘histo-ricity’),’’ ( AP ,). Perhaps Benjamin would have been more receptive to Hei-
degger’s thought if he had recognized that historicity marks an address, a claim(Anspruch) to which the present answers, and which, by virtue of being always al-
ready ‘‘past’’—‘‘immemorial’’ and irrecuperable—dislocates, each time in a singu-lar manner, the recapitulations of the present. See Fynsk, ‘‘CH,’’ , note .
. ‘‘Materialist historiography does not choose its objects arbitrarily. It does
not fasten on them but rather springs them loose from the order of succession’’(AP ,).
. I follow here Fynsk’s insightful remarks about the historical index as the
quasi-transcendental condition of historical experience: ‘‘With the dialecticalimage, Benjamin effectively historicizes the address of truth and draws it into his-torical experience as its quasi-transcendental condition.’’ Fynsk, ‘‘CH,’’ .
. Underscoring the nonaesthetic character of art in Greece, Heidegger is not,
however, interested in its historically primary religious function. Instead, by thenonaesthetic he means the historical function of art in terms of opening up a world.As ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ indicates, gods and religion are part of thehistorical world inaugurated by art. Only to that extent can art be taken to haveNotes to Pages –Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 324 of 363
a religious, ritualistic meaning, as part of the world-disclosure at work in art. BW,
–.
. Cadava develops this point in more detail; see ‘‘WL,’’ –.. Samuel Weber, ‘‘Theater, Technics, and Writing,’’ – (Fall ): .
. Cadava, ‘‘WL,’’ .. In what follows, I build on Fynsk’s benchmark reading of ‘‘The Origin of the
Work of Art’’ in Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, –. Particularly interesting
is his discussion of the work’s performative ‘‘Dass es sei,’’ ‘‘that it be,’’ which in-
scribes in art its createdness and makes it possible for thework to be ‘‘re-performed’’in its reception (see, in particular, pages –). Fynsk explains that the demand‘‘that it be’’ calls on the artist to work it into the work and on the ‘‘preservers’’ torepeat it. In this way, the work both opens and opens uponits conditions of enun-
ciation. Where my approach differs from Fynsk’s interpretation is with respect tohistoricity. While he places the emphasis on Dasein ’s finitude as the limit which
the work of art makes manifest (–), I suggest that the boundary which thework of art (re)produces is historicity as the limit of experience. Dasein ’s finitude
becomes manifest through historicity as the limit and the excess figured as art’swork.
. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,’’ trans. Joshua Wilner, in
Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, ), .
. Without developing the point or situating it in the context of art, Timothy
Bahti points to the link between transition or translation, on the one hand, andthe making of history, on the other. ‘‘History as Rhetorical Enactment: WalterBenjamin’s Theses ‘On the Concept of History,’ ’’ Diacritics (Fall ): –.
. The use of gründen may suggest that Heidegger proposes here a founda-
tionalist approach to art. In fact, we have to remember that for Heidegger this‘‘grounding’’ characteristic of art is tantamount to an ungrounding, which con-stantly unworks the historicist model of history by reference to the remainder ofhistoricity. Art ‘‘grounds’’ history in the sense of staging the historicity of the event,the play of the reserve, and the concealment, intrinsic to the historical unfoldingof the world.
. Heidegger’s notion of the earth in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ can be
read as providing this paradoxical ‘‘ground,’’ which, though apparently solid, is, infact, impenetrable, and thus continuouslydisarticulates theworld that it ‘‘grounds.’’
. Both Fynsk and Bernasconi demonstrate how Heidegger’s remarks on his-
tory in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ are tied to his reflection on the decisionwhich faced a historical people, that is, the German people, in the s, a decisionwhich Heidegger believed had to do with the confrontation with global forces oftechnology; see Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, –, and Bernasconi,
Heidegger in Question, –. I would argue, though, that the way Heidegger re-
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thinks history, even in the texts from the s undercuts, as Fynsk also indicates,t h ei d e ao ft h e mytho-poiēsis and the kind of national aestheticism sought after by
the National Socialist party.
. For the German text, see Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe, vol. , .
. For a more detailed discussion of Benjamin’s deployment of aesthetic pro-
duction against fascist aesthetics, see Cadava’s ‘‘WL,’’ –.
Chapter 2
.‘‘Angesichts der heutigen Wirklichkeit, die sich als Industrie- und Lesitungsgesell-
schaft versteht, die sich selbst und die von ihr benutzten Bestände selber produziert,entleert sich das Wort des Dichters für jedermann leicht zur blossen Phantasterei. Dich-tung versteht sich selbst gesellschaftlich als Literaturproduktion’’; Martin Heidegger,
Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe, vol. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann, ), .
. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’’ Basic Writings, d ed.,
ed. and into. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, ), (hereaftercited as BW).
. Symbolic hypotyposes ‘‘express concepts not by means of a direct intuition
but onlyaccording to an analogy with one, i.e., a transferof our reflection on an ob-ject of intuition to an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition canever directly correspond.’’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S.
Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, ), .
. See the translation of Ereignis in the Addendum to ‘‘The Origin of the Work
of Art,’’ BW,.
. Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: Oxford University Press,
), . This work is hereafter cited as DAA.
. Francis Picabia, ‘‘How New York Looks to Me,’’ New York American, March
, , p. . Quoted in ‘‘Introduction,’’ New York Dada, ed. Rudolph E. Kuenzli
(New York: Willis Locker and Owens, ), .
. For a detailed discussion of the role of the machine in the formulation of the
futurist poetics, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘‘Propeller Talk,’’ Special Issue, ‘‘Marinettiand the Italian Futurists,’’ Modernism/Modernity , no. (): –.
. I quote this passage after Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘‘Politics and Modern Art—
Heidegger’s Dilemma,’’ Special Issue, ‘‘Heidegger: Art and Politics,’’ Diacritics
(Fall–Winter ): , .
.‘‘Die in der modernen Technik verborgene Macht bestimmt das Verhältnis des
Menschen zu dem, was ist’’; Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske,
), .
. Martin Heidegger, Überlieferte Sprache und technische Sprache (St. Gallen:
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Erker, ), (hereafter cited as US).Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M.
Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, ), .
. See, for example, Heidegger’s discussion of technology in ‘‘The Question
Concerning Technology,’’ BW,–.
. Technology here signifies a certain reading of the differential event of the
world in terms of the possibility of a total or complete calculation and order-ing—a reading which takes the form of what Heidegger calls ‘‘calculative thought’’(rechnendes Denken). This modality of understanding possesses its own philosophi-
cal genealogyand its predominance becomes historicallydeterminable by referenceto the theoretical requisites of modernity, which have produced the scientific prac-tices associated with the project of the Enlightenment. This specific deploymentof the term ‘‘technology’’ identifies it with the forming of the differential of mani-festation into a schema of definable and calculable differences. It links technologywith what might be called a ‘‘calculus of difference,’’ that is, with the mapping ofexperience on the basis of an underlying principle, which has the power to schema-tize difference and render its play representable and calculable in its totality.Whatproduces the sense of quantifiable totality associated with calculative thought isthe assumption that the differences which constitute the matter of experience canbe defined, made understandable, and, thus, processed, as information.The globalscope of the techniques of producing and processing information, continually in-tensified by the development of computer technology, reflects the degree to whichthe schematic computation of differences has become the paradigm of modernexperience.
. I want to mention briefly the implications of this notion of technology,
which reach beyond the ontological dimension of modern experience to the sphereof political and social practice. Derrida’s explicit remarks on politics and politi-cal philosophy in Specters of Marx owe a lot to Heidegger’s critique of technology
and render much more concrete what only lies implicit in it with regard to poli-tics. Reacting to the triumphalist proclamations of the victory of liberal capitalismand of the end of history after the Cold War, Derrida warns about the politicaland ethical dangers of the current attempt to consolidate a worldwide hegemonyof liberal capitalism. Under the guise of the ‘‘true’’ solution to the world’s prob-lems, such a hegemonic reality would, in fact, foreclose any possibilityof a differentfuture, that is, the possibility of emancipation and responsibility. The ‘‘new worldorder’’ of ‘‘democracy’’ proliferating in the various forms of liberal capitalism be-comes possible through technological globalization and technocratic management.In its rhetoric of democracy, it equates the proper management of the world affairsthrough finance, economy, and trade, with an automatic elimination of oppressionand injustice. As a result, politics, ethics, and justice cease to guide social life andbecome themselves ‘‘mere’’ extensions of economic calculation and technocraticmanagement, with the global institutions erected for their efficient administration.
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Derrida’s reading tacitly follows Heidegger’s interpretation of technology: Tech-n o l o g yp r o g r e s s e st o w a r dt h ep o i n tw h e ni tb e c o m e st h ee x c l u s i v es t r u c t u r ea n dmatrix of contemporary reality, reality which it represents as, in essence, calcu-lable—that is, as structured in ways that allow for globalization and total manage-ment. Heidegger would say that the very idea of global management would notbe possible without the underlying technological schema, in which being becomesconceived in terms of the calculus of resources. Derrida’s insightful remarks allowus to distinguish Heidegger’s rethinking of technology and poiēsis from the aes-
theticization of experience, to demonstrate how the notion of poiēsis preserves the
political and ethical significations of experience against their progressive identifi-cation with management and control of resources.
. ‘‘[T]he revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not
unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis. ’’BW,.
. Martin Heidegger, Bremen und Freiburger Vorträge, Gesamtausgabe, vol.
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ), .
. I presented a detailed discussion of the notions of proximity and inflection
inInflected Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, ).
. Tristan Tzara, ‘‘Dada Manifesto ,’’ Seven Manifestoes and Lampisteries,
trans. BarbaraWright (London, Paris, NewYork: Calder Publications and RiverrunPress, ), (hereafter cited as SM).
. Tristan Tzara, ‘‘Dada Manifesto ,’’ .. In this reading, the dream of immediacyand common knowledge associated
with ordinary language and life practices does not produce an antidote to reifica-tion but, instead, becomes an extension of the technological vision of completeavailability of beings as resources. The discovery of local differences, of various‘‘common knowledges’’ and the lived differentials of experience, although crucialto the critique of cultural forms of power, may not be radical enough to escapefrom the increasing calculability of differences on the global scale.
. Lefebvre criticizes both existentialist philosophies and avant-garde poetry
for theirapparent disregard fororevena ‘‘conspiracy’’ against the everyday. He takesissue especially with surrealism,which he accuses of fleeing the everyday to the mys-terious and the bizarre. See Critique of Everyday Life, trans. Moore (London and
New York: Verso, ), –. Lefebvre’s remarks recall and reinforce Benjamin’ssuspicion that the practice of suffusing the ordinary with the marvelous, seekingredemption from the routine and the mundane, entails the risk of remythologizingreality and its embodiment in politics or the state, a risk that affects Heidegger’sown reading of Germany and Volkin the s. Heidegger’s idea of Volkand Ger-
many from ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ and the Hölderlin lectures and essaysis markedly different from the fascist ideology of ‘‘blood and soil’’ as the essentialcharacteristics of the Volk.Heidegger’s anti-essentialism makes clear that a people
is not constituted by an essence, certainly not a racial one. However, the invocationof these problematic and politically compromised terms, even if different from the Notes to Pages –Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 328 of 363
official politics of s Germany, produces a continuous reassociation of Heideg-ger’s work from that period with the remythologization of German Dasein by the
National Socialist party.
Chapter 3
. Judith Butler underscores the strategic importance of the difference from
philosophical texts effected by Irigaray’s miming: ‘‘This miming is, of course, tac-tical, and her reenactment of philosophical error requires that we learn how to readher for the difference that her reading performs’’; Bodies that Matter: On the Discur-
sive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (N e wY o r k :R o u t l e d g e , ) , ( h e r e a f t e rc i t e da s BTM). Mary
Ann Doane describes Irigaray’s mimicry as enacting ‘‘a defamiliarizing version offemininity’’; The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the s (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), .
. For Weed, Irigaray’s style is never purely formal but functions as a ‘‘figura-
tive thematics,’’ which keeps refiguring sexual difference: ‘‘In the years since ‘CosiFan Tutti’ was published, in reading after reading, Irigaray has produced an elabo-rate thematics of sexual difference: a figurative thematics that works against thethematizable, a couple that works against the copula, a sexual difference rich indiscursive positivity’’; see Elizabeth Weed, ‘‘The Question of Style,’’ Engaging with
Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, ed. Burke, Schor, and
Whitford (NewYork: Columbia University Press, ), .The different tenorofcurrent discussions of Irigaray owes much to the recent body of scholarship, whichhas not only relegated to the past the mistaken essentialist/anti-essentialist debate,but has also begun to read Irigaray through her complex involvement with Lacan-ian psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy. The three most important worksto date are: Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London
and New York: Routledge, ),Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of
the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, ), and the already mentioned volume
of essays, Engaging with Irigaray.
. Weed, ‘‘The Question of Style,’’ .. Weed, ‘‘The Question of Style,’’ –.. Chanter, Ethics of Eros.
. Joanna Hodge, ‘‘Irigaray Reading Heidegger,’’ and Ellen Mortensen,
‘‘Woman’s Untruth and le Féminine: Reading Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and
Heidegger’’; both essays are included in Engaging with Irigaray, – and –,
respectively.
. InAn Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray casts her critique in terms of a new
poetics of language, thought, and culture. Since Irigaray sees language as consti-tutive of being and experience, this poetics is never just a matter of style or textualstrategies but refers to the texture of experience and sexual relations, reworked be-
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yond the logocentric and phallomorphic makeup of being; An Ethics of Sexual Dif-
ference, trans. Burke and Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), (hereafter
cited as ESD).
. In his translation of ‘‘The Way to Language,’’ David Krell renders Ereignis
as ‘‘propriation,’’ in order to preserve the sense of ‘‘ownness’’ and the proper in-scribed in the German term; see Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, d ed., trans.
and intro. Krell (New York: Harper Collins, ), (hereafter cited as BW). In
‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ das Ereignis is translated as ‘‘the propria-
tive event’’ ( BW,), which keeps the twofold sense of occurring and propriating
in play, showing that for Heidegger being is never a ‘‘mere’’ happening but an eventin which what is occurs (‘‘propriates’’) as such. Heidegger’s most extensive discus-sion of das Ereignis comes in Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ). Another important discussion of Ereignis, cru-
cial for my approach to poiēsis, can be found in ‘‘The Way to Language,’’ where
Heidegger explains the occurring at play in the Ereignis in terms of language, as a
form of saying (Sagen).
. In , two essays, Christine Fauré’s ‘‘The Twilight of the Goddesses or the
Intellectual Crisis of French Feminism’’ ( Signs[]: –) and Carolyn Burke,
‘‘Irigaray Through the Looking Glass’’ ( Feminist Studies , no. []: –)
initiated the critique of Irigaray’s work on the grounds of essentialism and ideal-ism. This criticism has continued through the s and into the s (see, forexample, Annamarie Jagose, ‘‘Irigaray and the Lesbian Body: Remedy and Poison,’’Genders []: –). Among many responses to this criticism, one should
mention Jane Gallop’s pioneering revision of Irigaray’s reception in ‘‘ Quand Nos
Lèvres S’Ecrivent: Irigaray’s Body Politic,’’ The Romanic Review (): –;
reprinted in Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, ), –, –, under the title ‘‘Lip Service’’; Diana Fuss’s‘‘Luce Irigaray’s Language of Essence’’ from her Essentially Speaking (New York:
Routledge, ), –; and Maggie Berg, ‘‘Escaping the Cave: Luce Irigaray andHer Feminist Critics,’’ in Literature and Ethics, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams
(Kingston, Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, ), –. Berg’s essaylists the many critical reactions to Irigaray’s work that appeared in the early s;see, in particular, page , note . An excellent discussion of Irigaray’s criticism upto the s, especially the essentialism/anti-essentialism debate, can be found inNaomi Schor’s ‘‘Previous Engagements: The Receptions of Irigaray,’’ which opensthe recent collection of essays Engaging with Irigaray, –, especially pages –. For
an assessment of Irigaray’s thought from the perspective of the Frankfurt Schooland social critique, see Nancy Fraser’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to Revaluing French Femi-
nism: Critical Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture, ed. Nancy Fraserand Sandra
Lee Bartky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –.
. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, ), (hereafter cited as TS).
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. Irigaray, Marine Lover: Of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New
York: Columbia University Press, ), . It is at this point that proximity be-comes crucial to Irigaray’s rethinking of the economy of the gift through sexualdifference. The amorous exchange in proximity allows something to be reservedand withheld, without making it enter the economy of gift exchange. Moreover,it can be argued that what allows that gift economy to work is indeed that whichwithholds itself from economic exchange: the giving of itself (as) giving, which cannever be transposed into the gift, or the object of giving; Luce Irigaray, L’oubli de
l’air: Chez Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, ), –; T h eF o r g e t t i n go fA i r
in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press,
), –.
. Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Basil Black-
well), (hereafter cited as IR).
. One could argue that in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, ) Levinas appears to take toheart Irigaray’s inscription of the body into the relation of proximity, as he himselfrefigures his notion of proximity into the new tropes of inverted breath, sensibility,and the-one-for-the-other—all figures of an enfleshed ethical affliction. However,as Chanter argues, this moment of rendering sensibility—the other’s touch—ethi-cal coincides in Levinas’s thought with the de-eroticization of the feminine andwith the flattening of sexual difference into the familiar patriarchal economy ofprocreation—the feminine becomes equated with the maternal, the ‘‘difference’’of sexual difference subsumed under the paradigm of maternity (hence anotherreturn to the problematic of the future as the son, and so on). In other words, theinflection of ethics through the body—a move most important to Irigaray’s ownproject—for Levinas becomes possible not as an acknowledgment and inscriptionof sexual difference but as its effective erasure.While for Irigarayethics needs sexualdifference to be ‘‘ethical,’’ that is, it has to be thought through the difference ofsexes and genders, for Levinas ethics takes priority over sexual difference and evenmandates its forgetting. See Tina Chanter’s discussion of Irigaray and Levinas inEthics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, ).
. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), .
. In her remarkable chapter on the double signification of matter in the con-
text of Irigaray’s thought, ‘‘Bodies that Matter,’’ Butler bases her explanation ofmateriality on the critique of the presumption of an unposited, unsignified body,an apparent locus of prelinguistic experiential plenitude. Judith Butler, Bodies that
Matter, .
. See IR,.
. It is only recently that Irigaray criticism began exploring the relation of her
writings to Heidegger’s thought. Tina Chanter’s Ethics of Eros devotes a separate
chapter to Irigaray’s critique of the question of being through the question of sexual
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difference. Two other essays on Irigaray and Heidegger, Joanna Hodge, ‘‘IrigarayReading Heidegger,’’ and Ellen Mortensen ‘‘Woman’s Untruth and le Féminine:
Reading Luce Irigaray with Nietzsche and Heidegger,’’ appeared in Engaging with
Irigaray, – and –.
. Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), (hereafter cited as SG).
. As much is suggested in ‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ where one of the
most interesting moments reappraises, in fact, Heidegger’s thought in the contextof the ethics of sexual difference. Responding to Levinas’s charge that Heidegger’sthought is only an ‘‘ethics of the ‘fruits of the earth,’ ’’ Irigaray remarks:
The philosophy of Heidegger is more ethical than that [that is, Levinas’s] ex-pression conveys, than his philosophy itself says explicitly.To consider the otherwithin the horizon of Being should mean to respect the other. It is true thatthe definition of Being in terms of mortal destiny rather than in terms of livingexistence raises a question about the nature of respect. And in addition, thisphilosophy is more or less silent on man’s sexual dimension [ la dimension de
l’homme comme sexué ], an irreducible dimension of human existence. Perhaps
Heidegger’s thought was preparing the way for thinking the sexually identi-fied subject [ sujet comme sexué ], in particular as a possible future for thought.
(Irigaray, ‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ in IR,)
My concern is less with Irigaray’s diagnosis of the importance of Heidegger’sthought for a future thinking of the human mode of being as sexuate—a diagnosiswith which Derrida appears to concur in ‘‘ Geschlecht I’’—than with understanding
how the problematic of sexual difference intersects with and complicates the issueof experience in modernity, in particular, how it modifies the correlation betweenexperience, technology, and art, which I have explored in the context of Benjaminand Heidegger.
. ‘‘In order to think back to the essence of language, in order to reiterate what
is its own, we need a transformation of language, a transformation we can neitherc o m p e ln o rc o n c o c t ….T h e transformation touches on our relation to language’’
(BW,–).
Chapter 4
. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London and New
Y o r k :M e t h u e n , ) , .
. Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental
Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ).
. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, ), (hereafter cited as TS).
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. Cope engages in an explicit polemic with Stimpson, suggesting that sexual
difference is intrinsic to Stein’s language; see ‘‘ ‘Moral Deviancy’ and Contempo-rary Feminism: The Judgement of Gertrude Stein,’’ in Feminism Beside Itself, ed.
Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York and London: Routledge, ), –
.
. Both DeKoven and Stimpson discuss Stein’s evolving relation to feminist as-
pirations. As Stimpson puts it, ‘‘[t]hough Stein was never a public feminist, duringthe s she began to cut the cord she and Western culture had tied betweenmasculinity and towering creativity’’; ‘‘The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,’’ The
Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Abelove, Barale, and Halperin (New York and
London: Routledge, ), .
. The translations of both essays have been published in The Lyotard Reader,
ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), – and – (here-after cited as LR).
. This characteristic link between subversive and transformative effects of the
event and the questions of justice, judging, and community is visible in many ofLyotard’s texts. Perhaps the most well known among them is The Differend; see
alsoPeregrinations. The Differend: Phases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Ab-
beele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ) and Peregrinations: Law,
Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, ).
. Although Heidegger did not express much interest in the avant-garde, and
although he certainly never approached avant-garde art the way Lyotard does, hiswork on the event and its significance for modern art and philosophy provides thebackground against which the avant-garde’s importance for contemporary debateson language and aesthetics can be better appreciated. It is not clear to what extentHeidegger’s references to Klee in his later writings and his interest in Cézanne couldbe taken as signs of his changing attitude toward contemporary and avant-gardeart. Even though the term ‘‘modern’’ remains rather vague when Heidegger asks inhis lecture ‘‘The Origin of Art and the Destination of Thinking’’ about thenecessity to which modern art responds, it seems probable that Heidegger has inmind a variety of modern artistic and literary works, including those of the avant-garde. What is obvious is that Heidegger’s ideas from the s and s aboutart, poetry, and language reach beyond his intentions and the ‘‘canon’’ of poetictexts and visual arts he expressly discusses in his work. It is this moment that isof particular importance to my argument here, since I am less interested in Hei-degger’s comments on or commitment to specific works and artistic trends thanin the relevance of his thought about art and language for discerning the broaderimplications of modern art’s departure from the canons of aesthetics.
. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, d ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (New York:
Harper Collins, ), (hereafter cited as BW).
. Heidegger’s thought carefully maintains the critical distinction between the
poetic (Dichtung) and poetry as a literary genre (Poesie). This difference is already
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at play in ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ (), where Heidegger claims thatthe poetic element of language and experience underlies all manifestations of art,including that of poetry ( Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [San
Francisco: Harperand Row, ], ). In ‘‘The Question ConcerningTechnology’’(), Heidegger goes even further, suggesting a distinction between the poeticand what might be called the poietic. Heidegger, for whom experience transpires
always as thinking, that is, as active, embodied, being-in-the-world, employs thepoietic to refer specifically to the experience of the unfolding of the world sup-
pressed and erased in the calculative and objectifying attitude characteristic ofmodern rationality. The difference between the poetic and the poietic, between
poetic forms of literary discourse and poiēsis in the broader, ‘‘Greek’’ sense of un-
folding and letting come into presence, indicates that poetry itself is in the sphereof influence of technological rationality, and its language needs to be put in ques-tion just as much as the conceptual apparatus of metaphysics.
. Seeking a thinking that would not be monopolized by forms of calculative
reasoning, Heidegger delineates the poietic understructure of experience, coveredover by its technological rationalization. See, in particular, Heidegger’s discussionofpoiēsis andtechnē in ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ BW,–.
. In his early work on Hölderlin, Heidegger places the emphasis upon the
gathering force of art, upon its ability to disclose the world in its being, that is,its nexus of relations, differences, and singularities. Already in ‘‘The Origin of theWork of Art,’’ we can see that this ‘‘poetic,’’ as Heidegger calls it, character or abilityof art (see BW,) matters to his thought specifically because it puts into question
culturally and philosophically dominant schema of experience. If we take seriouslyHeidegger’s suggestion that only few works of art remain attentive to art’s ‘‘poetic’’capacity and disclose the world accordingly, then it becomes clear that Heidegger’sadmiration for art is coupled with a most severe critique of its traditional systemof representation and its codification in aesthetics. Only art that puts in questionits metaphysical provenance and its conceptual system that governs our experiencecounts for Heidegger as one with critical, and perhaps even transformative, artis-tic and intellectual potential. It is my contention here that this poetic ability todisclose and let be, which Heidegger ascribes to art, is also at work in avant-gardepoetry. To that extent, Heidegger’s work on thinking and poetry as acts of lettingthings be in the singularity of their occurrence, as activity that questions both theschematization of being characteristic of the age of technology—objectivity, re-source, standing-reserve (Bestand) —and art’s often unacknowledged conformity
with this practice, becomes important to my own argument about the avant-gardeand Stein’s poetic writings.
. The question of the relation between experience and representation is one
of the defining traits of Benjamin’s whole work; his most provocative discussionsof this topic can be found in translation in the ‘‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’’ toThe Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, ),
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–, and in his essays on Baudelaire, Proust, the work of art, and history fromIlluminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, ). Adorno’s concep-
tion of modernist art and its significance for the critique of the Enlightenment ispresented most extensively in his Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
. At the beginning of his essay on Tender Buttons, William Gass remarks spe-
cifically upon this connection between ordinary life and philosophical concernsthat I see as characteristic of Stein’s work: ‘‘Thematically, they are composed ofthe implements, activities, colors and pleasures of home life, its quiet dangers, itsunassertive thrills ….T h eh i g h e s tm e t a p h y s i c a lc a t e g o r i e so f sameness and differ-
ence, permanence and change, are invoked, as are the concerns of epistemology,of clarity and obscurity, certainty and doubt’’; ‘‘Gertrude Stein and the Geographyof the Sentence: Tender Buttons, ’’ inGertrude Stein, ed. and into. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House, ), .
. Gertrude Stein, How to Write (West Glover,Vt.: Something Else Press, ),
hereafter cited as HTW.
. For an illuminating discussion of Stein’s ways of undermining meaning and
the act of reading, see Peter Quartermain’s chapter on Stein, ‘‘ ‘A Narrative ofUndermine’: Gertrude Stein’s Multiplicity,’’ in his book: Disjunctive Poetics: From
Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, ), –.
. For the question of the performative character of Stein’s writing, especially
as it relates to her ‘‘plays,’’ see Jane Palatini Bowers ‘ ‘ T h e yW a t c hM ea sT h e yW a t c h
This’’: Gertrude Stein’s Metadrama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
).
. In his review of ‘‘Stanzas in Meditation,’’ John Ashbery underscores the
monotony characteristic of the poem, seeing it as Stein’s way of celebrating theminutiae of everyday life. At the same time that the monotony of ‘‘Stanzas’’ frus-trates all attempts at extracting a plot or a story line, it also makes Stein’s poem ‘‘ahymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things canhappen’’; see ‘‘The Impossible,’’ in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, ed. Michael J.
Hoffman (Boston: G. K. Hall, ), .
. Gertrude Stein, The Yale Gertrude Stein (New Haven: Yale University Press,
), (hereafter cited as YGS).
. Chessman’s study The Public Is Invited to Dance draws numerous parallels
between Stein’s writings and the works of Kristeva and Irigaray. She suggests, how-ever, that for Stein language is an open field, not wholly structured by patriarchy:Stein ‘‘recreates language as a field of immense possibility for the articulation ofintimacy as well as difference’’; Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to
Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, ), (hereafter cited as PID).
. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, .
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. Among the rapidly increasing number of book-length feminist readings of
Stein, especially interesting are Marianne DeKoven, A Different Language, Lisa
Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, ) and Harriet Scott Chessman, The Public Is Invited to Dance.
. It is possible to argue that both the jouissance and the frustration associated
with Stein’s writings are results of her ‘‘impossible’’ attempt to amplify and fore-ground a space that Kristeva identifies as the semiotic, that is, as the prethetic pro-cesses and articulations that produce the subject and the symbolic without everbecoming themselves part of the system that they institute. See Julia Kristeva, Revo-
lution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University
Press, ), , in which Kristeva’s discussion of the relation between the symbolicand the semiotic constitutes the first part of the English edition of her book, pages to .The play of the semiotic within the symbolic inscribes language with plu-ral and heterogenous processes of signification that encompass ‘‘the flow of drives,material discontinuity, political struggle, and the pulverization of language’’ ( Revo-
lution, ). Kristeva identifies the ruptures and the refusal of the predominantly
thetic signification specifically with poetry and the poetic function of language.Always located within the symbolic as its intra- or infra-text, the semiotic or thepoetic irrupts in poetry and thus reactivates the process and the contradiction (thesemiotic versus the symbolic/thetic) that instituted the symbolic in the first place(Revolution, ). Exposing the unicity of the thetic, of grammar and narrative as
Stein would say, the semiotic continuously allows the symbolic to constitute itselfand, at the same time, dismantles its semblance of unity and self-sufficiency. Un-like Kristeva, however, Stein regards language as not completely determined by thepatriarchal discourse and attempts to write language before, as it were, the rule ofgrammar and linguistic conventions. See also note above.
. In her multivocal essay ‘‘For the Etruscans,’’ DuPlessis characterizes femi-
nist revisions of aesthetics as an attempt to translate (compose?) the ‘‘Etruscanlanguage’’: a language for the erased, never understood space of experience asso-ciated with sexual difference; ‘‘For the Etruscans,’’ New Feminist Criticism: Essays on
Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon Books,
).
. Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America (New York: Random House, ),
(hereafter cited as LA).
. Discussing Stein’s strategy of avoiding the traditional practices of naming in
Tender Buttons, William Gass reads individual entries as discarding ‘‘old titles and
properties’’ and rewording the world: ‘‘[t]o denoun and undenote, then to rename,and finally to praise the old world’s raising of the new word out of the monitoringmind’’ ().
. One of Stein’s most characteristic gestures is to turn repetition (itself a prime
feature of Patriarchal Poetry as evidenced by the ironic cultural-culinary ‘‘menu’’—‘‘Patriarchal poetry and venison on Wednesday Patriarchal poetry and fish on Fri- N o t e st oP a g e s – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 336 of 363
day Patriarchal poetry and birds on Sunda y… ’ ’[ YGS,]) into a critique of itself
by extending it almost ad absurdum (seeYGS,for example, pages , , –,
and ).
. Stein’s manner of writing certainly differs drastically from that of the poets
Heidegger discusses in his essays: Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl. As is often the casewith Heidegger’s thought, though, his insights extend beyond the confines of his‘‘literary taste’’ and, when situated in the context of texts like Stein’s, can in turnreflect back upon Heidegger’s work and render problematic its limitations. This isparticularly important and fruitful with respect to the question of the everyday,whose significance Heidegger’s own idiom, especially in his texts on poetry, tendsto underplay, even though everydayness—the event of everyday being—consti-tutes from the beginning the framework and the goal of his philosophical project.Heidegger’s thought is important to my argument about Stein and the avant-gardeprecisely to the extent to which his reflection about art, aesthetics, and technologycan be shown as anchored in the problematic of the everyday.
. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, ),
(hereafter cited as TB).
. When Gass reads this tension characteristic of Tender Buttons as the con-
flict between concealment and expression, his terms are reminiscent of Heidegger’sapproach to poetry and art (–).
. A more in-depth discussion of indeterminacy in Stein and the work of other
avant-garde poets can be found in Marjorie Perloff’s study The Poetics of Indeter-
minacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, ).
. Don Byrd, The Poetics of the Common Knowledge (Albany: State University
of New York Press, ), .
. The implications and new possibilities for feminist politics opened by the
critique of the notions of the universal and the common are explored, for example,i nar e c e n tv o l u m e Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W.
Scott (New York and London: Routledge, ). In her ‘‘Contingent Foundations:Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’ ’’ Butler discusses the complicityof the substantive notion of the universal in perpetuating the hegemonic relationsof power: ‘‘To herald that notion then as the philosophical instrument that willnegotiate between conflicts of power is precisely to safeguard and reproduce aposition of hegemonic power by installing it in the metapolitical site of ultimatenormativity’’ (–). See also Scott, ‘‘ ‘Experience’ ’’ (–), and Chantal Mouffe,‘‘Feminism, Citizenship, and Radica l Democratic Politics’’ (–).
. If one can talk at all about the common in Stein, about a community or a
politics, it would have to be along the lines of Jean-Luc Nancy’s writings aboutthe community that constantly unworks itself, that recognizes itself only in itsstrangeness. For Stein’s language is a language in the process of exposing itself tootherness, a language continuously rewriting itself not so much into the common-ness of meaning as into the inscriptions of its shifting and always singular limits.
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SeeThe Inoperative Community, in particular the title essay and ‘‘Literary Commu-
nism,’’ which provide the most sustained discussion of Nancy’s notion of ‘‘être-en-
commun’’ (being-in-common); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed.
Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ).
. Judy Grahn, Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology with Essays
by Judy Grahn (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, ), .
.The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, .
. Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography ( N e wY o r k :V i n t a g e , ) , .
. Gertrude Stein, Many Many Women (Barton, Vt.: Something Else Press,
), . As Ellen E. Berry suggests, ‘‘ Many Many Women is an extended medi-
tation on sameness and difference, a compression of the discourse of self andother’’; Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein’s Postmodernism
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), .
. Gertrude Stein, Ida( N e wY o r k :V i n t a g e , ) , .
Chapter 5
. A notable exception is Marjorie Perloff ’s discussion of Russian futurism in the
context of Western European avant-garde in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde,
Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, ). The chapter entitled ‘‘The Word Set Free: Text and Image inthe Russian Futurist Book’’ analyzes Russian cubo-futurist poets, including Khleb-nikov and Kruchonykh; see pages –.
. Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘‘Our Fundamentals,’’ Collected Works, vol. I, Letters
and Theoretical Writings, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Charlotte Douglas (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), (hereafter cited as CW I).
. Velimir Khlebnikov, The King of Time: Selected Writings of the Russian Fu-
turian, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ),
(hereafter cited as KT).
. I quote Mayakovsky after Raymond Cooke’s book, Velimir Khlebnikov: A
Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . For a detailed
introduction to Khlebnikov’s life and writing, see the first chapterof Cooke’s book,‘‘Biography, Discourse,’’ –.
. A detailed discussion of Russian futurism can be found in Vladimir Markov,
Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), here-
after cited as RF.A short history of Khlebnikov’s participation in cubo-futurism
and other Russian avant-garde groups is given by Cooke in the first chapter ofVelimir Khlebnikov. The texts of the two manifestos can be found in KT,–.
. Jean-Claude Lanne, Velimir Khlebnikov: Poète Futurien, vol. (Paris: Institut
D’Études Slaves, ), (hereafter cited as VK).
. Duganov suggests that Khlebnikov locates his favorite number ‘‘in the very
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basis of all that is imaginable, thinkable, of the ‘rational’ ( умный , also ‘specula-
tive’) world, including artistic creatio n’’; Rudolf Valentinovich Duganov, Велимир
Хлебников :Природа творчества (Velimir Khlebnikov: Priroda tvorchestva ) (Mos-
cow: Izdatelstvo Sovietskij Pisatel, ), .
. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
trans. Gora, Jardine, Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, ), (hereafter cited as DL).
. Describing the inadequacy of contemporary understanding of language,
Khlebnikov complains about the need for a systematic exploration of word cre-ation: ‘‘And all because there exists no science of word creation’’ ( CW I, ).
. Even though the actual authorship of the two texts is still disputed, both
Kruchonykh and Khlebnikov signed them. CW I, –.
. Charlotte Douglas, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Khlebnikov, CW I, .
. Quoted after Denis Mickiewicz, ‘‘Semantic Functions in Zaum’, ’’Russian
Literature ,n o .( ) : – .
. Denis Mickiewicz, ‘‘Semantic Functions in Zaum’, ’’ .
. Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks, eds., Modern Russian Poetry (India-
napolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, ), .
.Modern Russian Poetry, .
. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, d ed., ed. David Farrell Krell (New York:
Harper Collins, ), (hereafter cited as BW).
. Martin Heidegger, W a sH e i s s tD e n k e n ? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
), ; What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (San Francisco: Harper
and Row, ), (hereafter cited as WCT).
. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. and into. Peter Demetz (New York:
Schocken Books, ), (hereafter cited as R).
. For Kristeva, Khlebnikov’s extravagant use of alliteration and onomato-
poeia, and especially his glossolalia, produces a supplementary meaning to the‘‘normative line of signification,’’ a sup plement which is charged with instinctive
drives and meaning. Such a linguistic ‘‘experimentation’’ is meaningful in the sensethat it forces language to recognize relations in experience which it cannot or doesnot want to say: ‘‘[H]e wants to make language perceive what it doesn’t want to say,provide it with its matter independently of the sign, and free it from denotation’’(DL,). Kristeva underscores in this context the subjective sphere of desire and
instinctual drives, which ‘‘semiotically’’ disrupt the codified linguistic structures.In Khlebnikov’s poetry, the disruptions originate within the shifting contours ofexperience, in the space prior to the articulation of the split between the subjectand the object.
. Velimir Khlebnikov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. II, reprint of the Moscow Edi-
tion – (München: W. Fink, –), .
. I would like to thank Brian Reed for his comments about Plane Ten, his
suggestions about the role of magic in Khlebnikov’s poetics, and for drawing my
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attention to Kristeva’s brief but incisive reading of Khlebnikov in Desire in Lan-
guage.
. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment,
trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ), .
. Adorno and Horkheimer’s remarks about myth and the Enlightenment pro-
vide probably the best context for discussing the intersection in Khlebnikov’s textsof fascination with technology with an extensive use of magic and of pagan andAsian mythologies. Is magic and myth an escape route from the rationalizationand disenchantment of life in modernity, or is there a recognition in Khlebnikov,albeit ‘‘unconscious’’ and untheorized, that science as a panacea for modern realityapproaches the status of magic? Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that the Enlight-
enment sought in vain to evacuate magic and myth, and that, in the all-inclusivereach of the repetitive formalism of scientific classification and technological andeconomic efficiency, it ‘‘returns to mythology, which it never really knew how toelude’’ (). If zaum is a ‘‘poetic’’ extension of science to devise ‘‘ultimate’’ laws of
history, then Khlebnikov’s interest in magic can be seen as integral to that pur-suit: Poetry becomes the space in which science fulfills its ‘‘myth’’ of becoming the‘‘true’’ answer to the riddle of being.
. Derrida and Nancy have made amply evident the ethical and political im-
plications of thinking experience on the model of a disjunctive event, irreducibleto its signification. The notion of ‘‘a disjointed or disadjusted now, ‘out of joint,’ ’’frames Derrida’s discussion of Marx’s ‘‘spectrology’’ and the ‘‘spectral,’’ disjointedphenomenality of being in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge, ), (hereafter cited as SM). This disjunction inscribed in the
present opens it to alterity and the future, marking the now with a debt to anotherness it has no way of knowing or predicting. The ethical and political stakesof this conceptualization of the event become evident in Derrida’s discussion ofFukuyama’s conception of history. Similarly, Nancy casts his description of beingas freedom in terms of the inappropriable and singular contour of the event—its‘‘excessive’’ happening; The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, ).
. Duganov, Velimir Khlebnikov, .
. For a detailed history of various trends and developments in Russian futur-
ism, belying the apparent aesthetic and political unity of the movement, see Mar-kov’s Russian Futurism. The Hyleans or the cubo-futurist group concentrated
around David Burliuk, Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and Kruchonykh constitutewhatis certainly the most interesting among various futurist orientations, one that gaverise to significant poetic and literary work.
. Fora detailed discussion of the context and the personal and artistic conflicts
surrounding Marinetti’s visit to Russia, see Markov, Russian Futurism, –.
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. This fragment comes from the leaflet signed jointly by Khlebnikov and
Benedikt Livshits; quoted after Markov, Russian Futurism, .
. Markovdiscusses the role this group played in the developments of futurism
in Russia in Russian Futurism, –.
. Duganov characterizes Khlebnikov’s notion of priroda in terms of the verbs
or words of nature (glagoly prirody); Velimir Khlebnikov, .
. For Kristeva, the language of futurist poems produces the permeability and
alterability of the linguistic and social limits: ‘‘[W]hat is implied is that language,and thus sociability, are defined by boundaries admitting of upheaval, dissolution,and transformation’’; DL,.
. I emphasize this sense of uncontrollable futurityof the beyonsense language,
evident especially in Zangezi, to juxtapose it with the magisterial streak in Khlebni-
kov’s work, where zaum is often spoken by an authority: gods, teachers, prophets.
Khlebnikov associates zaum with pedagogical authority, capable of controlling and
explaining beyonsense through quasi-scientific or poetic formulas. As ‘‘King ofTime,’’ the poet assumes a whole gamut of magisterial roles: a futurist prophet, ascientist, a historian, and, at times, a magician. Politically, this position resemblesthe elitism characteristic of many modernis t figures, investing the poet with access
to truth and cultural, if not directly political, authority.Without playing down theimportance of these prophetic roles in Khlebnikov’s work, I want to suggest thatthey coalesce, only to become ironized, in the figure of the prophet/fool Zangezi,in his precarious balancing between zaum andneum. Z a n g e z io p e n st h ed o o rt o
the contestation of the pedagogical pose Khlebnikov often assumes by underscor-ing the futurity marked in the present. The irreducibility of the event in the endprecludes the closure of beyonsense even within a revised representational spaceand questions its compression into a set of rules for history and language.To trans-late the event into norms and ‘‘alphabetic verities’’—signs generalized beyond theboundaries of a single language—could be a mark of neum, that is, of rendering
history ‘‘senseless,’’ of emptying it of beyonsense through the hypergeneralizationof laws concerning the alternative, nonnormative lines of signification. My thankshere again to Brian Reed for his helpful comments.
. Khlebnikov invents the terms budetlyanstvo andbudetlyanin (futurian) from
the phrase budet, ‘‘it will be.’’
Chapter 6
. To my knowledge, there exist only two book-length translations of Białoszew-
ski’s work into English, a volume of early poems, The Revolution of Things, trans.
Busza and Czaykowski (Washington, D.C.: Charioteer Press, ), and the ren-dering of A Memoir of Warsaw Uprising, ed. and trans. Madeline Levine (Ann
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Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, ), reprinted Evanston: Northwestern University Press, (hereafter cited as RTandMWU ). Occasional translations of a few poems are
dispersed through anthologies of Polish or Eastern European poetry. One couldclaim as a cause of this absence the extraordinary, both linguistic and cultural diffi-culty and ‘‘resistance’’ to translation of Białoszewski’s work, at least of his poetry ifnot of the prose pieces, but this argument is quickly countered by the proliferatingtranslations of such ‘‘untranslatable’’ poets as, for example, Mallarmé or Celan.
. David Antin’s talk poetry and some of Stein’s texts, with their emphasis on
ordinary events and objects or on domesticity, come close, in spite of their very dif-ferent idioms, to Białoszewski’s poetics. Białoszewski goes further than any otherwriter in inventing words and rewriting the idiom of poetry through ordinary lan-guage, colloquialisms, and even grammatically incorrect or nonstandard expres-sions and inflections.
. Quoted after Helena Zaworska, ‘‘Spisze˛ wszystko,’’ Twórczoć ,n o .( ) :
.
. Stanisław Baran ´czak, ‘‘Człowiek bezbronny (O Pamie ˛tniku z powstania wars-
zawskiego, Mirona Blałoszewskiego’’ inLiteratura wobecwojny i okupacji, ed. M. Gło-
win´ski and J. Sławin ´ski (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin ´skich, ),
.
. I treat this problem in Heidegger’s work, especially in the context of Haber-
mas’s attack on what he envisions as the aestheticist esoterism of Heidegger’s poeticthinking, in ‘‘The Ethos of Everydayness: Heidegger on Poetry and Language,’’Man and World ,n o .( ) : – .
. Here Białoszewski succeeds more than Beckett,whose stark and intense prose
retains, perhaps intentionally, vestiges of pathos. Białoszewski’s fascination withthe surprising alterity that breaks through the routine facade of the ordinary hasa very different tonality from Blanchot’s often obsessive, sometimes rhetoricallyinflated, tracing of the otherness of things, persons, and events.
. Madeline G. Levine’s essay, ‘‘Fragments of Life: Miron Białoszewski’s Poetic
Vision,’’ provides a good discussion of Białoszewski’s writings from into s;Slavic and Eastern European Journal (): –. Another English-language
publication, a translation of Artur Sandauer’s long essay, ‘‘Junk Poetry,’’ can befound in Sandauer, Białoszewski, trans. Adam Czerniawski (Warsaw: Authors
Agency and Czytelnik, ), –.
. See Michał Głowin ´ski,‘‘Białoszewskiego gatunki codzienne,’’ Pisanie Białoszew-
skiego, ed. Głowin ´ski and Sławin ´ski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, ),
(hereafter cited as PB).
. This very important volume of essays on Białoszewski by foremost scholars
of contemporary Polish literature appears to be intended precisely as a testimonyto an alternative poetic tradition in post-Second World War Polish poetry; Pisanie
Białoszewskiego (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo IBL, ).
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. For a brief discussion of Białoszewski in the context of Polish language
poetry, see Tadeusz Nyczek, ‘‘Mówić wprost,’’ Miesie ˛cznik literacki , no. : –.
The best example of a thorough analysis of the language of Białoszewski’s writingsis Stanisław Baran ´czak’s study, Je˛zyk poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego (Wrocław:
Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolin ´skich, ). Baran ´czak focuses on the prenormative,
‘‘substandard’’ level on which Białoszewski’s language operates. This is a level oflanguage ‘‘below’’ the criteria of normal linguistic usage, which constitutes the ‘‘de-gree zero’’ of language and serves as the initial field of poetry. Burkot, on the otherhand, suggests that Białoszewski’s poetry does not so much register substandardlinguistic forms and expressions as it consciously constructs an idiom that deformsand breaks linguistic rules; Burkot, Miron Białoszewski (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa
Szkolne i Pedagogiczne, ), (hereafter cited as MB).
. This connection between banality and deformation of reality, on the one
hand, and the experience of the Second World War, on the other, is discussed byMadeline G. Levine in ‘‘Fragments of Life,’’ –. Levine provides a little sum-maryof the critical deliberations about the influence of waron Białoszewski’s poeticexperiments, –.
. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ka/fka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the tensors and intensives at length, especially
on pages to .
. The term ‘‘little narratives,’’ describing Białoszewski’s short prosaic forms
was introduced by Michał Głowin ´ski in his essay ‘‘Małe narracje Mirona Białoszew-
skiego,’’ Teksty , no. (): –.
.‘‘Szacunek dla kaz ˙dego drobiazgu’’ (‘‘Respect for Every Detail’’), an interview
of Z.Taranienkowith Miron Białoszewski, Argumenty no. (); my translation.
Unless otherwise noted, translations of Białoszewski’s work are mine. One noteof explanation is necessary. Writing about Białoszewski in English entails a con-scious ‘‘compromise’’ of the inventiveness of his poetic texts. They depend, oftenentirely, upon word creation, frequently based upon colloquialisms, grammaticaland semantic dislocations, or ‘‘mistakes.’’ What makes them even more difficult totranslate is their use of substandard regions of everyday language and diverse cul-tural registers, often strikingly different from normative culture. Unlike Herbert orZagajewski, who write in a ‘‘universal’’ and ‘‘cultured’’ poetic language, recogniz-able across cultural divides, Białoszewski descends in his writing into subtle anduntranslatable minutiae of cultural and ‘‘folk’’ lore, which provide much of theparodic and iconoclastic energy of his texts.
. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag,
), –.
. I quote this story after Martin Heidegger, whose commentary in ‘‘Letter on
Humanism’’ on Heraclitus’s remark about the connection between the ordinary
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and the gods is of particular importance in understanding Białoszewski’s poetics of‘‘wondering the ordinary.’’ See Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann, ), , and Basic Writings, d ed., ed. David Farrell Krell
( N e wY o r k :H a r p e rC o l l i n s , ) , ( h e r e a f t e rc i t e da s WandBW).
. The German phrases are quoted from ‘‘Brief über den ‘Humanismus’ ’’ as it
appeared in W,–.
. Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, intro. and commentary,W. D. Ross (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, ), English translation from The Complete Works of Aristotle
Vol. , ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), .
. A little later, Metaphysics specifies that the wonder pertains to the manner in
which things exist: ‘‘For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that the matter isso’’ ().
Θαυμ άζειν, then, describes the relationship of the human mind to the
fact of existence or being: It characterizes the way in which human beings respondto things as they are, to the phenomenon of their being.
. The fact that the story refers to the visitors as ‘‘strangers’’ or ‘‘foreigners’’
(
ξένοι) underscores this precarious relation between wonder and knowledge: It not
only means that they come from a foreign land or another πόλις, but that, be-
cause of their incomprehension of the wonder of the everyday, they are strangersto thinking as Heraclitus understands it. Expecting from philosophy a systematicinquiry that achieves the ‘‘better state’’ of knowledge, the visitors are foreigners tothe thought that wonders about the everyday and the mundane, where ‘‘gods arepresent’’ even by a stove which becomes worthy of thinking, of
φιλοσοφε ῖν,e v e n
if such thinking does not yield anything that meets the criteria of knowledge.
. The title is slightly modified from the one given by Busza and Czaykowski
inThe Revolution of Things to correspond exactly to the Polish title: ‘‘ ‘Ach, gdyby,
g d y b yn a w e tp i e cz a b r a l i… ’M o j an i e w y c z e r p a n ao d ad or adości.’’ The translation,
unchanged, is quoted from this volume. The text in the original can be foundinUtwory zebrane, vol. , Obroty rzeczy, Rachunek zachciankowy, Mylne wzrus-
zenia, Było i było (Warszawa: Pan ´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, ), (here-
after cited as UZ I). For a detailed discussion of the poem and its ironic relation to
the poetic tradition, see Irena Urbaniak, ‘‘Trwalsze od spiz ˙u,’’ O wierszach Mirona
Białoszewskiego: Szkice i interpretacje, ed. Jacek Brzozowski (Łódz: Oficyna Biblio-
filów, ), –.
. The original phrase ‘‘szaranagajama’’ i ss t y l i z e d ,w i t hag o o dd e a lo fs e l f –
irony about linguistic stereotypes, as ‘‘Japanese.’’ Urbaniak argues that this phraseevokes the Eastern wisdom about the necessity of renouncing our attachment tomaterial things, underscored in the poem by the figure of the poet left only withwords. ‘‘Trwalsze od spiz ˙u,’’–.
. Białoszewski’s use of the word ‘‘ode’’ in this context turns into ‘‘a polemic
with the literary and cultural traditions’’ that see an ode as an elevated, lofty poeticform. Urbaniak, ‘‘Trwalsze od spiz ˙u,’’.
. The Polish text reads as follows:
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Nie jestem godzien, ściano,abyś mie ˛ cia˛gle syciła zdumienie m…
to samo—ty—widelcz e…
to samo—wy—kurz e…
(UZ I, )
. In Polish the passage reads:
Takw mojej pustelni kusi:samotnośćpamie˛ć świata
it o ,z˙e mam sie ˛z ap o e t e ˛.
Dziwie ˛ sie˛
i dziwie ˛ siebie,
i komentuje ˛ wcia˛z˙z˙ywoty otoczenia.
(UZ I, )
. The Polish texts reads:
Włóz˙, włóz˙cie papierowe kwiaty do czajników,
pocia˛gajcie za sznury od bielizny
i za dzwony butówna odpust poezjina nieustanne uroczyste zdziwieni e…!
(UZ I, )
. It is in this specific sense that Heidegger writes about building as related to
the thinking that takes the form of letting-dwell: ‘‘Building thus characterized is adistinctive letting-dwell.’’ Heidegger, ‘‘Building, Dwelling,Thinking,’’ Poetry, Lan-
guage, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (San Francisco: Harper and Row, ),
.
. Burkot begins his study with a detailed discussion of Białoszewski’s ambiva-
lent relationship to the avant-garde, in which he specifies the various points whereBiałoszewski critiques avant-garde writing; Stanisław Burkot, Miron Białoszewski,
.
. Jarosław Anders, ‘‘Unsentimental Journey,’’ New Republic, Dec. , .
. Zbigniew Bauer, ‘‘Powrót czy ucieczka? (W strone ˛ prozy),’’ Poezja ( ) : .
.‘‘Ballada o zejściu do sklepu,’’ UZ I, .
. This grotesque optics is discussed by Jacek Brzozowski in ‘‘Buduja ˛ce zejście
do sklepu,’’ O wierszach Mirona Białoszewskiego, and . For Brzozowski, the form
of this poem suggests that Białoszewski’s poetry assumes this optics as the basis ofits textuality.
. Brzozowski shows that the epilogue of the poem does not lead us back to
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the apartment, since that would be stating the obvious, a tautology. The emphatic‘‘And truly, / truly / I returned’’ carries moreweight, as it underscores the perceptualtransformation in the poem. See ‘‘Buduja ˛ce zejście do sklepu,’’ –.
. The text in Polish reads: ‘‘A potem—była słynna póz ´na i pie ˛knaWielkanoc .
Aryjczycy—tak zwani jeszczewtedy my—po kościołach—odświe ˛tni—a tam—to piekło
—to wiadome, tylko bez nadziei ….T a kt e r a zm yb y l i ś m yt y m i odcie˛tymi, niepod-
ziwianymi. Przynajmniej z nadzieja ˛ frontu,’’ Pamie ˛tnik z powstania warszawskiego,
Utwory zebrane III (Warszawa: Pan ´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, ), –.
. In fact, Lewandowski suggests that Białoszewski was a poet of the Holo-
caust, in the sense that his interest in the intersection of the peripheral and theculturally central was marked by the border between the ‘‘Aryan’’ and the Jew-ish cultures. Białoszewski’s destabilized world without foundations, full of erraticmovement and flying around (latanie), reflects the post-Holocaust space-time of
experience; Wacław Lewandowski, ‘‘Stacja: z ˙ydzi do mnie!’’ inPisanie Białoszew-
skiego, –.
. There is obviously not enough room here for an exhaustive discussion of
Białoszewski’s use of language or even for a summary of the existing critical dis-cussions of it. Stanisław Baran ´czak’s Je˛zyk poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego provides
an admirable and comprehensive diagnosis of the peculiarities and innovationsof Białoszewski’s language, their motivations and their various symptoms, in par-ticular, the prolix coining of new words and idiomatic expressions. Classifyingand systematizing the variety of uses to which Białoszewski’s texts put language,Baran´czak discovers three major matrices of rules that map and govern this linguis-
tic play: children’s language, spoken language, and colloquial language. He arguesthat Białoszewski borrows from the reservoirs of language so far unexplored bypoetry in order to compromise poetic conventions, attack the accepted systemsof valuation and interpretation of literary texts, and challenge the limits of litera-ture. The first part of Baran ´czak’s careful analysis discerns the mechanism through
which Białoszewski uses the logic underlying children’s linguistic mistakes to dis-lodge the ‘‘adult’’ forms of language (–), in particular their proclivity towardovergeneralization and displacements in the application of linguistic rules (), thecreation of new words (–), and finally the various forms of delexicalization,that is, the segmentation and playful use of words, phrases, proverbs, and sayings,specifically those types of utterances which tend to remain unchanged and preciselyresist most strongly any attempts at decomposition or transformation (–). Inthe second part, the book shows how Białoszewski’s use of the spoken language andthe transfer of its characteristics into writing (for example, intonation, the phonic
gesture, emphasis, and so on []) allows for a better means of presenting reality ina work of literature ().The last part explores the influence of colloquial languageupon Białoszewski’s work and the way it motivates the opposition between the cul-tural center and its margins and peripheries. While Baran ´czak’s book provides a
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concise taxonomy of Białoszewski’s linguistic strategies and the way they affect ourunderstanding of the poetic use of language, my reading concerns itself primarilywith the motivation and stakes behind Białoszewski’s language innovations and‘‘monstrosities.’’ Baran ´czak’s study thus remains constantly in the background, pro-
viding some of the guidelines for classifying and interpreting Białoszewski’s poeticlanguage.
. Burkot discusses this problem in greater detail; see MB,–.
. See Je˛zyk poetycki Mirona Białoszewskiego, .
. For a brief discussion of this aspect of Białoszewski’s poetry see Baran ´czak,
.
.‘‘—[B]iałe konie /—bryka/—czarne konie /—bryka /—rude konie /—bryka
/—Magnifikat!’’ (UZ I, ).
. This explains why the proclamation of his own ‘‘philosophy’’ as a critique of
high culture takes place in ‘‘The Philosophy of Wołomin’’ from the vantage pointof the little town of Wołomin rather than Warsaw, where Białoszewski lived hisentire life. I should mention here that both ‘‘The Philosophy of Wołomin’’ and ‘‘AMerry-go-round with Madonnas’’ are included in a cycle of poems symptomati-cally entitled ‘‘Ballady peryferyjne’’ —‘‘Peripheral Ballads.’’
. Białoszewski, Moja świadomość tan ´czy(Warszawa: Młodziez ˙owa Agencja
Wydawnicza, ), (hereafter cited as MśT).
. Lewandowski suggests instead that it was the Holocaust, especially the
Ghetto uprising of , that had the most important impact upon Białoszewski’ssense of reality without foundations; Lewandowski, ‘‘Stacja: z ˙ydzi do mnie!’’ PB,
–.
. Maria Janion, ‘‘Polska proza cywilna, ’’ .
. Maria Janion, ‘ ‘ W o j n aif o r m a , ’ ’ inLiteratura wobec wojny i okupacji (Wroc-
ław: Ossolineum, ), –. Lewandowski links latanie in the Memoir with
the image of running and hurrying feet observed by Białoszewski in the Paris metroand with the scene, recounted to him by his Paris guide, in which a Polish Jew lostin the Paris metro calls out in Polish for help to his fellow Jews: ‘‘Jews, come to me!’’(‘‘z˙ydzi do mnie!’’) and is immediately helped out by someone who understands his
cry.Through these multiple references Lewandowski sees latanie as an icon of post-
Holocaust modernity, which reflects the fears present in the new archetype of thecollective unconscious, that is, the fears of mass relocation and murder, evoked bythe image of a mass of shoes,one of the characteristic signs of extermination camps.As Lewandowski observes, in the metro scene the only descriptive element of the‘‘hurrying’’ masses are the shoes, their soles, visible from below through the rungs:‘‘The entire description of the persons who constitute the crowd in the corridor—in the relocation—has been reduced to shoes’’ (my translation); Lewandowski,‘‘Stacja: z ˙ydzi do mnie!’’ .
. ‘‘A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and
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minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever hap-pened should be regarded as lost for history’’; Benjamin, ‘‘Theses on the Philosophyof History,’’ Illuminations (New York: Schocken, ), .
. Białoszewski, MśT,–.
. For Cavell’s discussion of Emerson and Thoreau in the ‘‘neighborhood’’ of
Heidegger, see especially In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Roman-
ticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ).
. These moments of ‘‘poetic’’ solemnityexplain, forexample, Habermas’s im-
patience with Heidegger’s writing on poetry, although Habermas, in his rash judg-ment, fundamentally misreads the role that poetry plays in Heidegger’s critique oftechnology.
. Miron Białoszewski, Utwory zebrane, vol. , ‘‘Odczepić sie ˛’’ i inne wiersze
(Warszawa: Pan ´stwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, ), ; my translation (hereafter
cited as UZ VII ).
. Other favorite expressions Białoszewski invents to describe the modern con-
ditions of mass dwelling are ‘‘latarnia’’ (lighthouse) and ‘‘ilościowiec’’ (multirise). See
UZ VII, –.
.‘‘Moje nowe miejsce’’: ‘‘Miasto sie ˛ odra˛bało. // Ja wywindowany. / Na dziewia ˛te ’’
(UZ VII, ).
.‘‘Nie zabła ˛ d z c i e ./ /B a ˛dzcie. // Mijajcie, mijajmy sie ˛ ,/a l en i eo m i n ´my. //
Min´my. // My! / Wy! Co lataci e/ij e s t eście popychani!’’ UZ VII,
.‘‘Rozmowa Leszka Elektorowicza z Mironem Białoszewskim,’’ in Burkot, MB,
.
. Głowin ´ski,‘‘Białoszewskiego gatumki codzienne,’’ inPB,–.
. This is a phrase employed by Artur Sandauer to characterize Białoszewski’s
use of words and its tendency to push words to their limit, to the point of breakingopen. Białoszewski mentions the remark in ‘‘Mówienie o pisaniu,’’ in Burkot, MB,
.
Chapter 7
. ‘‘Collision or Collusion with history’’ is a line from one of the poems in ‘‘Ar-
ticulation of Sound Forms inTime,’’ Singularities (Hanoverand London: Wesleyan
University Press, ), (hereafter cited as S). Marjorie Perloff discusses the lin-
guistic play and the critical operation upon history signaled by it in her ‘‘ ‘Collisionor Collusion with History’: The Narrative Lyric of Susan Howe,’’ Contemporary
Literature , no. (): – (hereafter cited as ‘‘CC’’). Perloff suggests that
Howe’s texts explore ‘‘the collisions (and sometimes, it may be, collusions) of threecodes—the historical, the mythic, the linguistic—all three, it should be added, asinformed by an urgent, if highly individual, feminist perspective’’ ().
.Talisman interview, with Edward Foster, in Susan Howe, The Birth-Mark:
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Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover and London: Wes-
leyan University Press, ), ( Birth-Mark is hereafter cited as BM).
. Susan Howe, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (New York: New Directions,
), (hereafter cited as NM).
. ‘‘The Difficulties Interview,’’ Difficulties , no. (): .
. Perloff (‘‘Collision or Collusion with History’’), DuPlessis ( The Pink Guitar:
Writing as Feminist Practice [New York: Routledge, ]), Quartermain ( Disjunc-
tive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe [Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ]), and Ma (‘‘Poetry as History Revised: SusanHowe’s ‘Scattering as Behavior Toward Risk,’ ’’ American Literary History , no.
[]: –) all comment on the double optics of Howe’s work, its stance bothinside the historical space she revisits and outside the hegemonic, patriarchal dis-course that has produced it.
. For Ma Howe’s poems ‘‘subpoena history for an investigation of its violent
crime against women,’’ ‘‘Poetry as History Revisited,’’ .
. ‘‘Statement for the New Poetics Colloquium, Vancouver ,’’ Jimmy and
Lucy’s House of ‘‘K’’ (): .
. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken,
), .
. Perloff discusses the section from which those lines come at some length in
‘‘ ‘Collision or Collusion with History,’ ’’ developing the map of semantic and syn-tactical allusions suggested by the passage; see pages –.
. Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, ),
– (hereafter cited as ET).
. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard Univer-sity Press, ), –.
. Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics, .
. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘‘Der Ister’’ (Gesamtausgabe, vol. ;
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, ), –. Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘‘The Ister,’’
trans.William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Universityof Indiana Press, ), .
. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gil-
lian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ), .
. Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley: North Atlantic, ), –.
. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘‘For the Etruscans,’’ The New Feminist Criticism:
Essays on Women, Literature, Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon,
), (hereafter cited as ‘‘FE’’).
. Obviously a departure from the monological criteria of legibility and en-
dorsement of the multiple character of textuality is in itself not equivalent to thereinscription of sexual difference. Patriarchal, ‘‘male,’’ modernist avant-garde canbe read along such lines and, at the same time, diagnosed as specifically reinforc-
Notes to Pages – Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 349 of 363
ing the erasure of sexual difference from the ‘‘standards’’ of experience. Misogynistproclamations by manyavant-garde artists, reflected in theirartistic or literary prac-tice, indeed illustrate well Irigaray’s claims about the simultaneous sexualizationof experience—designating the unacknowledged or undesirable as ‘‘feminine’’—and its desexualization as necessary for the production of a generalizable, even uni-versal, economy of experience. They can also be read, as Alice Jardine suggests,as instances of (male) appropriation of the feminine in order to revitalize art inmodernism without explicitly critiquing the ‘‘sexual’’ economy of experience.
. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, ), .
. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, ), (hereafter cited as EF).
. When Nancy refers to what ‘‘weighs’’ thought, he plays on the similarity in
French between penser andpeser,indicating that the other, inappropriable current
in thought is what motivates, what ‘‘weighs’’ it; see page .
. Max Horkheimerand TheodorW. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (New York: Continuum, ), .
. Lyotard’s idea that avant-garde art concerns itself with the ‘‘here and now’’
of the happening of everyday experience, that is, with the insistently reposed ques-tion ‘‘Is it happening?’’ underscores precisely the elusive and inappropriable new-ness of each burst of experience: ‘‘Newman’s noww h i c hi sn om o r et h a n nowis
a stranger to consciousness and cannot be constituted by it.’’ The question markdelivered each time as an event or occurrence marks the new of experience. SeeLyotard, ‘‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’’ in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew
Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), .
Afterword
. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘TheWay to Language’’; BasicWritings, d ed., ed., trans.,
and intro. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, ), –.
.‘‘Hegels Negativität ist keine, weil sie mit dem Nicht und Nichten nie ernst
macht,—das Nicht schon im das ‘Ja’ aufgehoben hat’’; Hegel, Gesamtausgabe, vol.
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, ), .
. Irigaray, IL o v et oY o u , trans. Alison Martin (New York and London: Rout-
ledge, ); Être deux (Paris: Grasset, ).
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Index of Names
A d o r n o ,T h e o d o r , , , , , , ,
, , , , , n, n,n, n
Anders, Jarosław, Antin, David, nAristotle, , Ashbery, John, nBahti, Timothy, nBaran´czak, Stanisław, , , ,
, n, n, n
Baudelaire, Charles, , , , Bauer, Zbigniew, Beckett, Samuel, , , , , ,
n, n
Benjamin, Walter, –, , –, –
, –, , , , , ,
–, , , , –,n, n, –n, –n, n,n, n, n
Berg, Maggie, nBergson, Henri, Bernasconi, Robert, , , n, n,
n, n
Bernstein, J. M., nBerry, Ellen, nBiałoszewski, Miron, , , , , ,
, , , , , , , ,–, , , n, –n
Blanchot, Maurice, nBowers, Jane Palatini, nBrecht, Bertolt, Brzozowski, Jacek, nBürger, Peter, , , , , n,
n
Burkot, Stanisław, , , n, n,
n
Burliuk, David, , nBurliuk, Nikolay, Burliuk, Vladimir, Butler, Judith, , n, n, nCadava, Eduardo, , n, n, nCarroll, David, nCastoriadis, Cornelius, Cavell, Stanley, , , , , nCelan, Paul, , n, nCézanne, Paul, , nChanter, Tina, , nChessman, Harriet Scott, , , ,
n, n
Chrobry, Bolesław, Cixous, Hélène, Comay, Rebecca, , nCooke, Raymond , nCoolidge, Clark, Cope, Karin, , nDallmayr, Fred, n, nDeKoven, Marianne, , n, nDeleuze, Gilles, , Derrida, Jacques, , , , , , ,
, , n, n, n, n,n, n, n, n, n, n
Dickinson, Emily, , , , ,
Doan, Mary Ann, nDocherty, Thomas, nDuchamp, Marcel, –, , –Duganov, Rudolph Valentinovich, ,
, n, n
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, , , ,
E l i o t ,T .S . , Emerson, Ralph Waldo, nFelski, Rita, , , Ferry, Luc,
Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 361 of 363
Foucault, Michel, , , Fraser, Nancy, nFreud, Sigmund, , Fukuyama, Francis, nFynsk, Christopher, , , n, n,
n, n, n, n
Gasché, Rodolphe, , nGass, William, –nGłowin ´ski, Michał, n
Godzich, Wlad, nGombrowicz, Witold, Goux, Jean-Joseph, nGrahn, Judy, Guattari, Félix, , Habermas, Jürgen, , , , nHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ,
, , , , , n
Heidegger, Martin, –, , –, ,
, – , – , , , , , –
, – , , , , , – ,
–, , , , , –,, , , , , –, ,, , , , , –, ,, , , , , , ,–, –n, n–n, –
n, –n, n, n, n,
n, n
Heraclitus, , , , , n,
n
Herbert, Zbigniew, , , nHölderlin, Friedrich, , , , ,
, , , , , n, n,n
Horkheimer, Max, , , nH o w e ,S u s a n , , , , , , – ,
–, , , , n, n,n
Husserl, Edmund, Huyssen, Andreas, , , , , n,
nIrigaray, Luce, –, , , , , ,
, – , , – , , ,–, , , , , , ,, , –, n, –n,n
Jameson, Frederic, Jardine, Alice, nJoyce, James, , , , Jünger, Ernst, Kafka, Franz, , Kamensky, Vasily, Kant, Immanuel, , , nKarpowicz, Tymoteusz, , Khlebnikov, Velimir, , , , , , ,
, , , – , , , n ,–n
Kierkegaard, Søren, K l e e ,P a u l , , nKrell, David Farrell, n, nKristeva, Julia, , , , , , ,
, n, n, n, –n
Kruchonykh, Alexei, , , , ,
–n
Krynicki, Ryszard, Lacan, Jacques, , Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, nLaune, Jean-Claude, Lefebvre, Henri, , nLeibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Levinas, Emmanuel, , –, ,
, n, n, n
Levine, Madeline G. n, nLewandowski, Wacław, , n,
n
Lispector, Clarice, Livshits, Benedikt, , nLlewellyn, John, Lukács, Georg, Lyotard, Jean-François, , , –, ,
IndexTseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 362 of 363
, , , , , – , , ,, , n, n, n
Ma, Ming-Qian, Malevich, Kazimir, Mallarmé, Stephan, , nMarinetti, F. T., , , , , nMarkov, Vladimir, , n, nMarx, Karl, , n, nMayakovsky, Vladimir, , , ,
, , , n, n
Meese, Elizabeth, A. , Melville, Herman, , , Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, , Mickiewicz, Adam, , Mickiewicz, Denis, nMiłosz, Czesław, , , Moi, Toril, Musil, Robert, Nancy, Jean-Luc, , , , ,
, n, n, n
Newmann, Barnett, , Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , , ,
,
Nyczek, Tadeusz, nOppen, George, Pascal, Blaise, Perloff, Marjorie, , , n, n,
n, n, n
Picabia, Francis, –, , , Plato, , , Poggioli, Renato, , , Ponge, Francis, Pound, Ezra, , Proust, Marcel, Quartermain, Peter, , nRaphael, Reed, Brian, nRichter, Hans, , Rilke, Rainer Maria, , nRodin, Auguste, Rowlandson, Mary, Róz˙ewicz, Tadeusz,
Ruddick, Lisa, nSandauer, Artur, n, nSaussure, Ferdinand de, Schnapp, Jeffrey T., nSchor, Naomi, nShakespeare, William, Stein, Gertrude, –, , –, , ,
, , –, , , , ,, n, –n, n
S t i m p s o n ,C a t h e r i n e , , , nSuleiman, Susan Rubin, Swift, Jonathan, , , Szymborska, Wisława, Thiele, Leslie Paul, nThoreau, Henry David, nTrakl, Georg, , , nTzara, Tristan, , , –Urbaniak, Irena, nvan Gogh, Vincent, Vattimo, Gianni, Vinci, da Leonardo, Virilio, Paul , nWarhol, Andy, Weber, Samuel, Weed, Elizabeth, , nWilliams, William Carlos, , Wirpsza, Witold, , Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , , Wodzin ´ski, Cezary, n
Woolf, Virginia, Zagajewski, Adam, , , nZiarek, Ewa Płonowska, n
Index Tseng 2001.11.14 17:15 6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE / sheet 363 of 363
/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47 /K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47 /K49/K6E/K66/K6F/K72/K6D /K61/K74/K69/K6F/K6E /K53/K79 /K73/K74/K65/K6D /K73 /K49/K6E/K63/K2E
/K36/K32/K31 /K57/K69/K6C/K6C/K69/K61/K6D /K56/K69/K63/K6B/K65/K72/K73 /K41/K76/K65/K6E/K75/K65/K2C /K44/K75/K72/K68/K61/K6D/K2C /K4E/K43 /K32/K37/K37/K30/K31/K50/K68/K6F/K6E/K65 /K39/K31/K39/K2D/K36/K38/K32/K2D/K39/K31/K39/K37 /K46/K61/K78/K39/K31/K39/K2D/K36/K38/K32/K2D/K31/K36/K37/K37/K45/K6D/K61/K69/K6C/K3A /K6D/K61/K69/K6C/K40/K74/K73/K65/K6E/K67/K69/K6E/K66/K6F/K2E/K63/K6F/K6D
6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE • Northwestern University Press • Buffalo TeX Output 2001.11.14 17:15
/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47 /K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47/K54/K53/K45/K4E/K47 /K49/K6E/K66/K6F/K72/K6D /K61/K74/K69/K6F/K6E /K53/K79 /K73/K74/K65/K6D /K73 /K49/K6E/K63/K2E
/K36/K32/K31 /K57/K69/K6C/K6C/K69/K61/K6D /K56/K69/K63/K6B/K65/K72/K73 /K41/K76/K65/K6E/K75/K65/K2C /K44/K75/K72/K68/K61/K6D/K2C /K4E/K43 /K32/K37/K37/K30/K31/K50/K68/K6F/K6E/K65 /K39/K31/K39/K2D/K36/K38/K32/K2D/K39/K31/K39/K37 /K46/K61/K78/K39/K31/K39/K2D/K36/K38/K32/K2D/K31/K36/K37/K37/K45/K6D/K61/K69/K6C/K3A /K6D/K61/K69/K6C/K40/K74/K73/K65/K6E/K67/K69/K6E/K66/K6F/K2E/K63/K6F/K6D
6478 Ziarek / THE HISTORICITY IF EXPERIENCE • Northwestern University Press • Buffalo TeX Output 2001.11.14 17:15
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