John Bloomberg-Rissman asks some interesting (and complex) questions:
I’m reading John Xiros Cooper’s Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (
First, on the off chance you haven’t read this book (you seem to be pretty omnivorous), let me summarize Cooper’s argument. I’ll quote the abstract: “... the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. ... the modernist avant-garde epitomized the impact of capitalism ... [Cooper himself distinguishes between capitalism and “market society”, capitalism being merely the after-the-fact theory that tries to come to grips with a fait {better, a process) accompli, and would probably have written “market society” here rather than capitalism]. [Modernism] aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterizing techniques, styles and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. ...”.
The suggestion here seems to be that a) “cultural values” (moral, religious, gendered, racial, aesthetic) arose in a pre-market-dominated society and are no longer what they were (no longer hold the place they held) in a market society; and b) the market can commodify anything. I’m sorry if this is old hat to you. Or worse (it wouldn’t be the first time I was a dollar short and a day late, as my dad used to say). But
here are my questions.
– Is it possible to argue that a major problem with what you (and Poe, I believe you said) call the School of Quietude is that it appears to not recognize that “cultural values” no longer hold the place they held, no longer function as they did, and it therefore assumes certain inter- and intra-personal relations that no longer have anything to do with the world in which we actually find ourselves living?
– If non-School of Quietude poetry does come from the world in which we actually find ourselves, or will shortly find ourselves, living, what values, what kind of values, does it embody? I know it’s not a fair question, in a way, at least in the sense that there’s no such monolith as “
– How long do you expect it to be before the market has caught up to the
I have not, in fact, read Cooper’s work. Cambridge University Press charges obscene prices for its books & I rather systematically try not to buy them. Presses like
As represented– and both Cooper’s website & the Cambridge P.R. materials are consistent with Broomfield-Rissman’s characterization of the book – Cooper’s argument offers a variation on Peter Burger’s attempts to align historic change in the arts with social change in the world. Its hidden premise would seem to be that there is a relationship between the two that would be articulatable, a dream that has existed since (and which owes a great deal of its force to) the old model of base & superstructure, in which the economy is perceived as the engine of history, and culture is more like the design features of the locomotive itself.
To which one wants always to say yes & no simultaneously. It is the doubleness of that answer that is, I think, the true response. At one level, it would seem historically to be anything but an accident that avant-garde tradition as we know can be dated back to the work of Charles Baudelaire, even to his preface to his poems in prose, is historically close (in some sense almost parallel) to the first edition of Leaves of Grass in the U.S. and to the deepest, most passionate love letter that capitalism has ever received, The Communist Manifesto. The middle of the 19th century was an interesting moment in world history.
A century and one-half later, the flaws in the Marxian program, especially as practiced by what were once termed “actually existing” Communist parties, seem apparent enough. Marx’ depiction of the general operating principles of capital, both in the Manifesto & in his later writing, seem reasonably sound, in & of themselves. Marx’ prescription of how to proceed seems, in retrospect, deeply problematic in two critical areas. Both, I suspect, can be traced to Marx’ view of the world, which was always already that of the Eurocentric white man. Marx understood – and Engels later underscored – that anything approximating socialism was not remotely possible unless & until a unified world market system – today we might call that globalization – was achieved. That much, to the enormous frustration of Stalinists throughout the 20th century, Marx got right. He presumed, wrongly, however, that the latter half of the 19th century was quite close to arriving at that moment. This meant that globalization – a precondition for socialism – would be achieved just as the stage of world development was technologically reaching industrialism. In fact, we may still be a century or two from truly getting to a global economy. Which in turn means that the dynamics of capital would – and will – plow right through industrialism and the next few stages of technological development beyond that before the kind of worker resistance Marx envisaged could ever be anything other than a short-term defensive stop-gap. Remember, Marx anticipated the revolt to occur from within the most developed countries essentially as the winners of the race to globalization found themselves being transformed into losers at the next stage and once they held the capacity to generate worldwide political actions in response. Instead, Stalinism brutally modernized the most backward nations making them ready for capitalism. There’s irony enough there for millions of lifetimes.
One argument that seems implicit in the depictions of Cooper’s work is that Marx underestimated the power of markets. Rather, I would argue instead that he may have overestimated them, having presumed them to have arrived at a level of development in the 1880s or thereabouts that we may not get to before 2200 A.D. Along the way, unfortunately, those who took on the claim to Marx’ legacy, but only a part of his program, appear to have effectively – perhaps permanently – discredited the broader arcs of his work. I certainly won’t live to see if it can or will revive a century or more from now under another name, although that is one distinct possibility.
During the past 150 years, tho, the avant-garde has been politically all over the map. It has seen Communists like Eluard & even Mayakovsky, it has seen outright fascists like Pound & Céline. It has had poets & artists who reveled in the violence of war, such as the Italian Futurists, as well as others who were appalled by it, ranging from H.D. to Jackson Mac Low. We have had modern & postmodern painters who were great craftsmen of painting – Picasso, Matisse, Dalí, Gerhard Richter – and others who, with Tzara & Duchamp, argued against the dead hand of an ancient institutional genre.
There has been no one thing that the avant-garde has agreed upon, not even the need, in Pound’s great coinage, to make it new. Making it new, ostrananie, defamiliarization, Brecht’s alienation or “A-effect” are all conceived as being consistent with – and indeed reflecting – the fundamental drive at the heart of capitalism according to an argument such as this. Just as capitalism creates an inexorable drive to overturn whatever the current state of technology is with new tools that will revolutionize industries and markets, so the avant-garde creates an inexorable need to be the “next thing,” as if we can each be the It Girl (or Boy) of poetry for about 90 seconds before giving up the baton to that which overturns us (but only so that it too can overturned some 85 seconds later).
There is, it seems to me, no question that this is one dynamic that may be active in the arts in general – it’s what, if I understand him properly, Barrett Watten calls negativity in The Constructivist Moment – for my money the best theoretical investigation of modern & contemporary arts ever written – and it operates much as does capital’s process of technological (and process) innovation, by breaking phenomena down into their constituent elements & then looking at how they can be recast to arrive at the new, principally by addressing obvious flaws with whatever is (or was recently) current. This operates, tho, as a double movement, mimicking what goes on in capitalist markets on the one hand, yet absolutely necessary if the arts themselves are to address (whether or not we look at this as a reflection or other mimetic process, or even as an analytical one) the current – but always increasingly rapidly changing – life on this planet. There is always some grind in the gears as one recognizes that one’s elders either didn’t get it right or that their vision is now outmoded for whatever reason, and it drives younger poets (& other artists) to update what they are doing.
Not every poet has always bought into this scheme, even in the avant-garde. Robert Duncan’s arguments against originality can be read in exactly these terms, as a critique of this dynamic. That he did so within the framework of the avant-garde tradition makes his contribution here especially important, but it is harder to get to because of his own complicated relationship to critical theory, which I’ve laid out before & is best articulated in the interaction of his books of poetry with his great critical tome, The H.D. Book.
I really need to note here that one should not look, as it is evident Cooper does, at the avant-garde as furthering a specific or overarching argument, even if there prove to be larger tendencies in the work. I think it confuses what actually is at work here, which is why I repeatedly use the phrase “avant-garde tradition” (and, for artists after mid-century, even prefer post-avant, as in the great cry of Jim Behrle’s Ron is Ron comics, “Post-avants, wash your hands!”), a phrase that some have argued is internally self-contradicting. Because I do think it represents a larger social phenomenon for which, at least for the moment, no better term than tradition appears to exist. The avant-garde in its largest historical frame encompasses two dimensions, one that synchronous – community -- & the other that reaches across time – tradition. Baudelaire’s preface to his prose poems can be read as an act very much in kind with Kenny Goldsmith’s more recent provocations with uncreative writing. Both challenge existing formations in remarkably parallel ways.
The “scandal” of the idea that all forms of avant-garde poetry at some level engage the same dynamics of history as does capital (or, if you prefer, as do markets) is, I think, a canard fostered by a certain type of purist who cannot stand complex relationships. Engaging does not necessarily mean approving any more than it does condemning. One can find poets all along that continuum of possibilities, just as one once could find Marxists with any number of possible relations to the question of property & production, up to & including the successful capitalist Engels. Thus one would not expect Gary Snyder’s relationship to these questions to be the same as Christian Bők’s, even tho they might agree on many specifics. Certainly, within the avant-garde tradition there exists a strain of fundamentalists who would argue, as did Dada, that art that participates in historic genres is fatally flawed. The incorporation of Dada into the market economy simply demonstrates that one’s analytical position is not necessarily identical with the history of one’s own art. Pound’s five-foot bookshelf collapses under the same contradiction, merely in a different direction.
Let us then posit the avant-garde tradition as that phenomenon that at least engages the engine of history, however critically, from whatever part of the political spectrum, however successfully (or not) it may seem. What then of the School of Quietude? It has exactly the same range of political reactions – all the way from writers actively on the right, such as William Logan, to poets who legitimately think of themselves as dedicated progressives, such as Marilyn Hacker. Each of its succeeding movements, from the institutional & gentile old formalism of the late 19th century through to the Boston Brahmins & agrarians of the 1930s through the ‘50s, the APR school (which somebody last week proposed should be called the AWP school, for its relationship to the rapid expansion of creative writing programs in the 1960s thru the ‘80s), to the new formalists today, these poets would themselves appear to share very little besides a profound distaste for the avant-garde tradition. But what is that tradition other a community with an active engagement with the engine of history? Their explanations are many, but invariably it is that engagement – and its consequences – that most deeply binds these writers against that which they oppose.
In general, this creates in them a preference for conservative moves – the avant-garde is often conflated as one of the problems of history (and hence of capitalism). That is what is at the heart of Alfred Corn’s infamous declaration in The Nation¹ that his version of the new formalism was, in fact, post-modern: “
I mean ‘postmodern’ in the sense of returning to narrative transparence in place of Modernism’s hermetic and allusive texture.
This kind of “the future is the past” argument echoes other aspects of the contemporary period, unfortunately, such as the Bush administration’s war is peace claims. But the real irony is not that an aesthetic conservative/political progressive should have to tie himself into such verbal knots as this, but the fact that the sequential history of the School of Quietude itself, proceeding from the Brahmins & agrarians with their formal lyric poems – in lock step with the critical regime of New Criticism – was itself “overturned” in the late ‘50s & early ‘60s by many equally conservative poets who opted instead for a free verse form and a wider range of content. That’s the context in which someone like Phil Levine actually is, or at least was, an aesthetic progressive. By the early 1970s, it was almost impossible to find a formalist poet born in the 1930s (Anne Stevenson is the major exception), simply because the engine of history & historic change is as operative on the SoQ side of the equation as it is in the avant-garde/post-avant sector. One could virtually predicted the New Formalists, whose reaction was that the AWP/APR poets were themselves hopelessly infected with the disease of modernism.
So if one follows the thesis ascribed here to Cooper, one discovers that both sides were equally operating under the same regime – as if anybody anywhere could actually escape the history of their times – and that the difference between the SoQ & what Bill Knott recently called the School of Noisiness is not a different relationship to capital, but to the understanding of history, which I would characterize here as a distinction between engagement and something closer to denial.
This doesn’t make necessarily make any poet right or wrong. Pound’s comments on Mussolini & Baraka’s comments on Mao are equal opportunities for cringing. The
One might go back even further than the beginnings of modernism – Stephen Greenblatt sees foreshadowing of this same division in the end of the 16th century, after all, one group determined to keep the benefits of literacy & authorship – literally authority – to those of inherited wealth & the “proper” educations, the other rising up out of small merchants & craftspeople (whom, we might note, were precisely the future of capitalism). So we have a dynamic nearly half a millennium long, one side always trying to stave off tomorrow, the other actively trying to engage it, both sides capable of the full range of tactical political reactions to the process. Do I think that post-avants are any more free of history than the
¹ August 9/16, 1999. Marilyn Hacker once told me that Corn could not possibly have meant what he wrote, but the larger context of that article shows no irony whatsoever.
