My comment on a single allusion to David Bowie in Louis Cabri’s “Salon, salon” in the new Kiosk 2, evoked a response from Louis that has “Big Post Error” inscribed all over it. Jim Behrle, my personal P.R. agent, tells me that Blogger is claiming to have solved that irritating quirk.

 

I admit, reading what follows, it took me a couple of passes through Louis’ text to realize that retrochic should be understood & pronounced retro-chic & was not related to trochees.

 

The crux of your question about allusion, for me, is: When does one decide to go “up,” when “down” in interpreting and making allusion? Somewhat simplistic down/up metaphor, but: one can go “down” (or sideways) into allusions to specific details (intertexts) of form and history. Allusion can then be differentiated from quotation (Diepeveen), textual present (i.e. reading) from historical text (i.e. allusions), and so on, at a formal level. One can also go “up” into textual allusions to a general idea or concept, e.g. materiality.

 

Example, from criticism, where both directions for allusion might intersect under the rubric of white studies [1]: Bob Perelman’s reading of Bruce Andrews’s violence in I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) goes “up” – into Kantian concepts of aesthetic disinterestedness and autonomy. “When Andrews writes, ‘sink the boat people’, he doesn’t mean it – and thus finally could be said to write under the aegis of Kantian disinterestedness, even though that leads to a liberal poetics of free play” (107). The violence that concerns Perelman in Andrews’s work is too conflicted to get a specific reading as this or that, even though there is an insistent and concerted effort to get into its details, for instance, with the line: “Where’s a battered woman – I want to beat her up?” (Don’t Have Any 193). Perelman writes:

 

How much credence are we supposed to put in that question mark? The rhetoric is indecisive. It’s not “I want to beat up a battered woman” (which would be like Baudelaire’s “Let’s Beat Up the Poor”), but neither is it “Can we possibly understand the twisted feelings of someone who wants to beat up a battered woman?” It’s hard to imagine Andrews is condoning abusive men, but what, besides triggering a conflicted response, does such a sentence do? (Marginalization 106)

 

This passage offers two interpretive scenarios, one negative, one positive. The first, a negative scenario, proposes a formal and historical allusion for the line to Baudelaire’s penultimate prose poem in Paris Spleen (1869), which, while by no means excusing, would nevertheless underscore that Andrews’s offending line has literary precedence. The second scenario foregoes allusion and tries to put the sentence into other words by introducing empathy and the question of empathy’s limits – a positive scenario.

 

Perelman’s ethico-aesthetic dilemma is that while his essay’s principle focus is political in the modernist sense of asking how words translate into action, Perelman emphatically does not want to “endorse a retreat to more normative genres and content” (108).

 

But I want to focus on the social, not the political,[2] evaluation of violence in Shut Up that to me is what makes Perelman’s reading so compellingly connect to the question of allusion. I’ve only just figured this out. Why has Perelman “decided” (this word in quotation marks, because I want to suggest a deconstruction of sorts) to go “up” into Kantian concepts instead of “down” into details? Because, going “up” into Kantian concepts preserves the ethical judgment upon “conflicted response,” upon aestheticizing violence (with all its dire modernist connotations). One unintended consequence however is that going “up” like this relieves the reader of having to deal with any historical mediation between his/her experience of textual violence and the text itself. This despite the caveat that “we should remember the situation in which he [Andrews] is writing. […] Andrews is publishing in small-press books and magazines: what prestige they have is literary.” I venture that a retreat into the aesthetic as the ultimate apologist’s safe-haven for violent expression (along the lines: poets can write whatever they want) would be unacceptable to Andrews and Perelman. If we wanted to remember the situation in which Andrews is writing, then wouldn’t we want to discover allusions going “down” into, sideways through the text? Doing so would problematize the ethical judgment, however, in the following way.

 

Consider the punk band Battered Wives that was, so far as its willfully-obnoxious title goes, representative of a stylistic tendency (in art, music, film, etc) in the late 70s/early 80s that Lucy Lippard calls “retrochic” – as in, stylistically chic to invoke racist, sexist, classist, etc., language and imagery, when cloaked in a retro allusion:

 

It was only in its last three years or so that the [‘70s] decade got it together to pinpoint an esthetic of its own, and this it did with a lot of help from its friends in the rock music scene, not to mention S&M fashion photography, TV and movie culture, and a lot of ‘60s art ideas conveniently forgotten, thus now eligible for parole. As we verge on the ‘80s [Lippard is writing in 1981], ‘retrochic’ – a reactionary wolf in countercultural sheep’s clothing – has caught up with life and focuses increasingly on sexist, heterosexist, classist and racist violence, mirroring, perhaps unwittingly, the national economic backlash…. (“Hot” 40-1)

 

Like the attempted allusion to Baudelaire’s poem “Let’s Beat Up the Poor,” to admit that this punk band is an apt allusion for Andrews’s line is not to condone the aestheticized violence in Shut Up. But it certainly opens the reading of a line such as “Where’s a battered woman – I want to beat her up?” to a cultural moment and (however ephemeral) style (and as a reading of that cultural moment, as in: is that what the Battered Wives mean by their title and album graphic of a lipsticked fist?). Moreover, it objectively locates ethical judgment within that moment rather than within author and reader as if there were no broader social context in which each finds him or herself as individuals. Going “down” into an allusion historically mediating the text resituates Perelman’s ethical judgment upon Shut Up’s “hot spots” (i.e., lines like the sentence in question here) at another social level. The ethical judgment is dialectically transformed, as Jameson would say (117), from a binary between good and evil in the individual mind of reader/writer, towards socio-historical contradiction.[3] In a 1979 Village Voice article whose title itself (“Retrochic: Looking Back in Anger”) performs an allusion – a testy one, to John Osborne’s 1956 “angry young man” play, Look Back In Anger, as moments (together with the young James Dean) of retrochic – Lippard differentiates between two kinds of punk: one practicing Brechtian distancing, the other playing with allusion in a retrochic way that fails to take responsibility for or give direction to the negative cultural baggage of the codes it revives: “[P]unk comes in two guises – this harsh social commentary retaining an echo of Brechtian irony and of the original British music movement’s working class political force; and retrochic, which sees the audience as ‘parents’ – authorities to be done in” (“Retrochic” 69). Another example that Lippard gives of retrochic are 70s Super-8 punk films such as Black Box that one reviewer characterized as “space age social realism” (Hoberman).

 

Perelman’s rhetorical question, “what, besides triggering a conflicted response, does such a sentence do?” is precisely Lippard’s dilemma, faced with retrochic’s senseless violence that in its aestheticization seems fascistic but doesn’t acknowledge itself as so. What the sentence in question does is trigger a conflicted response as an allusion to retrochic. But it is also, itself, a retrochic allusion – which Shut Up, on every level (text, work, publisher, etc), attempts to mediate.

 

In an irony to this question of allusion, Baudelaire’s prose poem begins with the narrator closing himself off in his room for fifteen days to read cultural ephemera (“I am speaking of books that treat of the art of making people happy, wise, and rich in twenty-four hours” [101]). The “lesson” he absorbs from his mass-media infusion is to enact upon a homeless person the sort of violence that retrochic, minus self-understanding, broadly embodies.

 

Which suggests that perhaps capitalism’s continuous cultural “background radiation” is retrochic. Allusions to it in the last few years might include: the Big Allis 8 [4] black-and-white cover photo of a vulnerably-young boy’s face, cropped so that we see only the barest hint of a hairline (the man he will grow into), but most of his chin line (with a few droplets of water on it, the boy that he is), suggesting the raw social material potentially of, at worst, a skinhead (the effect is created by cropping only a detail from a larger photographic work by Roni Horn); the early paintings of Attila Richard Lukacs (especially his “True North” series, presenting Doc Marten boots à la mode); Clint Burnham’s short-story collection Airborne Photo (retrochic might be an apt allusion for the entire axis of Burnham’s poetic and critical work); and even the revived success (in various contexts) of Alfred Jarry’s King/Father Ubu character; among other works. A stunningly paradoxical assertion by Lippard, with interesting implications, is that retrochic’s source is Italian futurism (“Hot” 41). However, Baudelaire’s moment, particularly his prose poems, facing as they are Georges Haussman’s thirty-year plan for Paris under Napoleon III (urban planning rationalized to carry the automobile future) is also key, since linked to the idea of the ephemeral, retrochic ultimately may be modernity’s symptom, and the modern – one important articulation of it anyway – begins with Baudelaire’s prose poems and his famous fashion essay on newspaper illustrator and painter (of bourgeois life and of the Crimean war) Constantin Guys.

 

Allusion is one way to socially saturate [5] a text, raising complex questions for contemporary poetry that is apparently notoriously allusive. I’m only feeling my way here (I don’t know the literature on allusion that well), but maybe it’s useful to think of contemporary allusion divided not only up and down but into at least three kinds: wild, studied, illusive. Most allusion is studied [6]. An extraordinary recent example would be Harryette Mullen’s “privileging the codes of the oppressed” (interview, n.p.) in Muse & Drudge by utilizing Library of Congress slave recordings, Clarence Major’s From Juba to Jive, blues language, and colloquial expressions. Allusion exists wild [7] in Andrews’s texts, and in the texts of numerous others in varied ways and degrees (these categories exist of course only as far as they are useful) – and in certain respects perhaps he might stand tokenized here as a return to allusion. There is a third kind that mimics the gesture of allusion, producing, instead of a specific allusion, the rhetorical gesture of alluding (allusion does not require that the referential function of language predominate, but Perloff’s effect of indeterminacy of referent from Rimbaud to Cage relates [8]).

 

*   *   *

 

[1] For an introduction to key problems and issues of bridging Andrews’s work and white studies, see Juliana Spahr.

 

[2] The result of de-linking poetry and politics, which Perelman concludes is a condition of the times (“The political impossibilities of the present are impossible to escape” [108]”), is that, for example, “lyric” and “anti-lyric” poetries are then equally perceived as having an identical grasp on the social, as if the social were a homogeneous substance (like substance itself, in Spinoza), since all poetry is equally aesthetic and since, following Adorno, the aesthetic, however lyrical, is inextricably tied to the society that produces it. This is meant I believe to open to a benign vision of a future beyond antagonistic differences. But at the same time, this way of concluding from Adorno, who is arguing that there is no escape from the social (from society), by extension not even Spicer’s radio (Andrews makes this point), fails to acknowledge different kinds of social, that is, specific effects within specific texts, both received and produced. (The social is both received and produced, just as consumption and production of capitalism are linked yet distinct, i.e. the social in poetry is not reducible to either being made or received.)

 

Elsewhere I’ve distinguished between the social and the political (even as they join) in an aesthetic work, drawing from a difference between social command and commission, as Mayakovsky and Osip Brik suggest.

 

[3] Ethical criticism constitutes, for Jameson, “the predominant code in terms of which the question ‘What does it mean?’ tends to be answered” (59), but “lives by exclusion and predicates certain types of Otherness or evil” (60). In the context of words’ relation to action, Perelman’s political question for Andrews might be put as follows: Is the relation going to be like Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s influence on the anti-slavery movement, or like Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s on fascist-flamed anti-semitisim? Thus Perelman’s ethical judgment is a form of “social praxis” (Jameson 117), and my intent is by no means to dismiss its value. Perelman’s incisive review of The Political Unconscious has a similar focus as his Andrews essay, concluding that while Jameson discovers this vast intellectual zone of the political unconscious, there is little that seems to be politically conscious in the literary works he examines. A similar comment could be made, from Perelman’s perspective, about Shut Up and, in relation to this work, allusion “down” into history. This to me only demonstrates how social consciousness is uneven in culture (retrochic as proof). Jameson’s treatment of ethics via Nietzsche is impressed on me thanks to a paper by Nicole Markotić on the subject.

 

[4] I am indebted to Sianne Ngai for raising my interest to a disturbance in the Big Allis cover, though can’t be sure whether she would agree with my interpretation of it.

 

[5] Tom Orange suggested in an email saturation as metaphor for thinking about the social text.

 

[6] The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics describes six kinds of allusion (Miner).

[7] Cf. Andrews’s notion of “a writing that is itself a ‘wild reading’” 

(Paradise 54, cited by Spahr) and your “Wild Form” 
(“For Kerouac, 

the signified is a template, not to be reproduced but 
entered into, much as a 

musician might move through an improvisation with others” [n.p.]).

 

[8] One might say from Rimbaud to, for example, Flarf, because Flarf practices illusive allusion, too. Gary Sullivan writes on his Elsewhere blog about “one of [the] things flarf – especially Google-assisted flarf – does best: It strips specific language acts from prior context, the result being a language of almost ‘pure’ elsewhere.”

 

It strikes me there are crucial distinctions, however. Flarf intentionalizes an aesthetics of indeterminacy, whereas Cage or Mac Low, for example, renders indeterminate what was once perceived as intentional. Flarf recuperates dispersal; Mac Low (e.g.) disperses recuperation (recuperation as including, say, the modernist classic).

 

It’s not just a mirroring reversal of syntax, but a paradigmatic difference. Flarf aestheticizes a second time what it already aestheticizes a first time as indeterminate (by evoking that line [sorry for that word, Brian!] “from Rimbaud to Cage or Mac Low”). Mac Low, by contrast, is not aestheticizing once again what he has already aestheticized as indeterminate (in part because of the differential social refraction within each kind of illusive-allusional practice, which to go into would take me far afield a footnote).

 

*   *   *

 

Andrews, Bruce. I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). L.A.: Sun & Moon, 1992.

___. Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern UP, 1996.

Battered Wives. The Canadian Music Encyclopedia. <http://www.canoe.ca/JamMusicPopEncycloPagesB/battered.html> June 30, 2003.

Baudelaire, Charles. Paris Spleen. Trans. Louise Varèse. NY: New Directions, 1970.

___. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Ed. Jonathan Mayne. Phaidon Press Inc., 1995. 1-41.

Big Allis 8. Eds. Deirdre Kovacs, Melanie Neilson, Fiona Templeton. Brooklyn, NY. 1998.

Burnham, Clint. Airborne Photo: Stories. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 1999.

___. Be Labour Reading. Toronto: ECW Press, 1997.

___. Buddyland. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2000.

___. The Jamesonian Unconscious: The Aesthetics of Marxist Theory. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Diepeveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

Hoberman, J. “No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground.” The Village Voice (May 21, 1979).

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

Lippard, Lucy. “Hot Potatoes: Art and Politics in 1980.” Re-Visions: New Perspectives of Art Criticism. Howard Smagula, ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991. 35-49.

___. “Retrochic: Looking Back in Anger.” The Village Voice (Dec. 10, 1979): 67-9. Lukacs, Attila Richard. “True North.” Diane Farris Gallery. <http://www.dianefarrisgallery.com/artist/lukacs/truenorth/index.html>. July 5, 2003.

Markotić, Nicole. “Decentring the Whole: Women and Subjectivity.” Unpublished. 1995.

Miner, Earl. “Allusion.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Eds. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993. 38-40.

Mullen, Harryette. Muse & Drudge. Philadelphia, PA: Singing Horse Press, 1995.

___. “Harryette Mullen in Calgary, Alberta.” Interview compiled and edited by Louis Cabri (featuring Louis Cabri, Jeff Derksen, Nicole Markotić, Steve McCaffery, Victor Ramraj, Sheryl Teelucksingh, Fred Wah). BOO 7 (July 1996). Vancouver, BC. n.p.

Orange, Tom. “the social word.” Private email. November 1, 2002.

Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996.

___. “Exchangeable Frames.” Poetics Journal 5. Berkeley, CA, 168-176.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981.

Silliman, Ron. “Wild Form.” Electronic Poetry Center. < http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/silliman/wildform>. July 4, 2003.

Spahr, Julia. “‘I’m Dracula’: Bruce Andrews and White Studies.” Electronic Poetry Center. < http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/andrews/about/spahr.html>. July 4, 2003.

Sullivan, Gary. “Quick Digression.” June 27, 2003. Elsewhere. <http://garysullivan.blogspot.com/2003_06_22_garysullivan_archive.html>. July 5, 2003.