Martha Nussbaum: Poetic Justice

I have journals due in one of my current MA classes, but the instructor is only going to glance at them. I have done all of this work for very little return. I know, a journal is often written only for oneself, but I also wrote it as a conversation with the instructor which now will not happen. So as to make this a more fruitful endeavor, I am going to post some of the journals here. Enjoy and feel free to respond so as to make these truly a conversation.
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I am reading an excerpt from a book for one of my classes by Martha Nussbaum. The book is Poetic Justice and the chapter is on the literary imagination. I am reading about the mistrust of literature as subversive by people who are only interested in economics and science and my mind started to wander. (This is actually why it takes me so long to read a book anymore, because for every 250 words I read I write 500). Is there really any way for human beings to get away from purpose? Do we automatically ascribe purpose to every single thing we do, even writing literature? Is there really such a thing as purposeless human activity and what is it in our drive to make meaning that even after the fact, even when we might have thought we had done something purposeless, that we have to assign a purpose to it. I like to think that some writing is just an end in itself, but other times, if I am challenged and on the defensive about “what use is poetry” which I think was originally proposed by Amiri Baraka but I know from my friend in Minneapolis, performance poetry J. Otis Powell! as he used to stand up in front of a 3-piece jazz combo and declaim and question it, I can always assign a purpose to poetry, even avant-garde Dadaistic poetry.

And since we are talking about purpose, I can bring this all the way back around to my BIG paper for this class. The point of my thesis is that Dadaistic avant-garde poetry can liberate the imagination and get us out the quagmire of thought that we find ourselves in and that in this day and age, relevant to Derrida’s law of genre, poetry is in the unique position not to have to be linear anymore the way it was in Aristotle’s day, when it was the only literary game in town. Now poetry can be pure flights of fancy, which is not to say that it is purposeless. Quite the contrary, is the argument that I would make.

And I notice that I start all of my sentences, my paragraphs, or at least most of them, with conjunctions, which is actually how I write when I am free associating, like I do in journals. And I start thinking again about my paper and what purpose I want it to serve, if I want it to be an exploration of something I haven’t explored enough of, like Helene Cixous, if I want it to be about someone that I have studied before and develop expertise on, like Shelley Jackson, or if I want it to be “in service to” my thesis. And so I have written or argued myself right back where I started.

But, I could add, at least having put it down on paper, it is in my mind now and I can start trying to narrow it down somewhat. Thus, I have accomplished something “of purpose” with these ramblings.

Better luck next time.

Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

I could only stand to watch the Kardashians for about 20 minutes. This poem is made up of words and phrases that Kim Kardashian uttered during those 20 minutes. This was also inspired by facebook. But don't hold that against the Dada intent here.


Kim Kardashian Dada Wedding Poem

Pretty sexy, makeup so lame. It's a little weird. I have no idea we're sisters. Festivities up your ass. So glad for your picture. I love my last name. My life is so selfish. Do you need me? We have stages, my friends. I get lucky about a week out of the loop. Then I need five hundred hours, 10 minutes, truly. No joke.

Meditations on Perloff and Meaning

In the US, a mass society with a large university-educated population inevitably breeds an “official verse culture” (Bernstein 1986: 246-49) – a culture whose discourse is as conventionalized as any other mass discourse from advertising to political campaign rhetoric to legal language.” (Marjorie Perloff, 21^st Century Modernism, 155)

“The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one . . . . The painter can no longer say that what he does is as the world looks to him because he cannot look at the world any more, it has been photographed too much and he has to say that he does something else.” (Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-Pieces” cited in Perloff, 162-3)

“Writing is 50 years behind painting.” Bryon Gysin.

In 21^st Century Modernism, Marjorie Perloff takes up the virtues of a literary avant garde, arguing that despite its seeming absence, despite declarations that the avant garde is a purely modernist beast murdered at the hands of post-modernism, that the avant garde of the early 20^th century was only an infancy, a beginning, and that it remains relevant today, that is post-modernism that in a way, and I am massively paraphrasing, perhaps even projecting my own opinion here, wore itself out. I think of the metaphor, growing up in Illinois, of a tornado in a valley, a destructive force to be sure, but moreover, one that eventually wears itself out because it has nowhere to go, so it spins and spins until it has no more strength. The point here, and I digress, is not to engage in a debate on post-modernism vs. modernism, a debate that I am not really ready to settle at the moment. But I am very distrustful of the proclaimers that all that came before me is now dead and over. Further, my own personal take is that postmodernism itself is not contrary to the avant garde, but emerges from it. That if Futurism, for example, with its embrace of a fascistic nationalism, can be seen as the ultimate form of a modernism that is born of enlightenment values, emphasis on apparent rationalism, and the rise of the nation-state, then Dadaism, with its embrace of ir-rationalism, of nonsense and it’s highly inter- and anti-nationalism, along with its progeny Surrealism with its interest in the dark occult and the unconscious, make up the beginnings of the post-modern, of the multiplicity, of the backlash, and that therefore, modernism and post-modernism are temporal but contemporaneous to one another.

Perloff’s assessment of an unfinished literary avant garde, aborted, perhaps before it could be fully realized, when it was merely quickening, is near and dear to my heart then. If we take Bryon Gysin at his wise word that writing is 50 years behind painting, then we can look back 50 years ago to see Abstract Expressionism, particularly of the Pollock strain, all form and accident, lacking not only representation, but meaning itself. What is the meaning inscribed into a splatter painting? A chance operation? If meaning is created, if it is gleaned somehow by an audience member, it is nonetheless, not a meaning that can be “read” infallibly, deciphered authoritatively by a critic. It is an accidental meaning, a meaning created by a subconscious connection to a form or element or color within the piece, a synaptic pre- un- sub- conscious meaning, not a semiotic meaning to be read.

Where is the abstract expressionist poetry? Even a pre-splattering, Surrealist Pollock, a poetry of images to evoke imagination, idea, fully over meaning, story, intent? For all of her avant garde sympathies and apologetics, which are mighty, Perloff still spends much of her time explaining the meaning of things with a reading of poetry that still seeks to explain, that is about metaphor and enjambment and all of those things that matter most and maybe only to graduate students in English, not readers or audience hungering for the liberations (even if they don’t conceptualize it that way or don’t know that they are hungry yet) of imagination, of images. Watching her decipher a poem by Charles Bernstein, ironically, can make it harder for me, personally, to distinguish it from the non-avant garde poetry she sets up as contrast. Is it because her own avant garde of today is Language Poetry, a poetic avant garde immersed in and engaging with semiotics and teories of meaning in ways that, at the end of the day, still engage more with rather than subvert, semioitics and the tendency to “read everything as a text?” After all, if everything can be read as a text, is it possible to create a text that is not meant to be read, but felt, experienced, understood on a different level? Can we have experiences outside of language, and in particular, can we use language to create experiences outside of language? A heady question (pun appreciated, but not intended), to be sure.

Even Craig Dworkin, whose work on the avant garde I greatly admire and who has influenced and supported my own ideas immensely, has, in some of his writings on Zaum (To destroy language”, Textual Practice (18)2, 2004, 185-197) still focused on meaning. Dworkin describes the work of zaum’ as a utopian activity that seeks to circumvent what he sees as “totalitarian” desires to fix meaning. Using semiotic analysis, Dworkin suggests that zaum’ actually can be read not through the usual system of differences, but through chains of similarities and through linguistic and syllabic innuendo. In his reading, Dworkin shows that the “problem” to be solved with zaum’ is not that of making meaning, but the difficulty of limiting the number of possible meanings within each work. He places zaum’ within a matrix of nondiscursive literature including children’s nonsense rhymes as well as lettrism and experiments with concrete and sound poetry. Nonetheless, the very basis of his work shows that we have a hard time talking about poetry, even the avant garde, outside of semiotic analyses. While his work may be about “limiting” meanings, it still assumes that with enough imagination, we can learn to “read” the short syllables of zaum, to somehow understand them. To talk about them on the rational level of academic discourse seems to make it difficult, if not impossible, to talk or even think about them outside of that discourse. Is this the same criticism that writing about performance faces, that it potentially kills the very thing it seeks to examine? Is the avant garde, even a literary one, not always inherently performative, a performance, in the way in which the reader and audience must individually, privately engage with the piece, even if not necessarily on a private or personal level, the way they would with a piece of confessionalism?

Of course, I do not mean to belittle the great work and thinking done by Dworkin and Perloff and others. But it is to say that few people have been able to truly rethink poetry and language and the functions of language. If, as Perloff says, poetic culture has conventions just like advertising or journalism or all other forms of writing, and if as Stein says, those forms of writing make the “reportage” function of poetry are dated and irrelevant (100 years ago in Stein’s day—let alone today in our over-mediated cable television clear channel CNN You Tube etc etc world) then what is the new function of poetry, the Dadaist post-modernism of a poetry that is about freeplay and free association of language to generate its own pictures of a 1000 disjointed words to make the picture of a Pollock, quite outside of story, narrative or even (c)overt attempts at meanings, outside of any attempts at something that can be fixed, understood rationally, something to stimulate both left and right brain simultaneously, not only one or the other separately or sequentially.

“If we could change our language, that’s to say the way we think, we’d probably be able to swing the revolution.” (John Cage, M 210)

Tupac Shakur and Kurt Schwitters

In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters.


Re-appropriating the Avant Garde

One of the most potentially fruitful avant garde movements for spoken word practice is Dada. A collection of artists throughout Europe during and between the two world wars, Dada's literary and performance aspects were deeply intertwined and are difficult to speak of as separate entities, much like current practices of spoken word and performance poetry.

e.g. bailey, writer, performer and one of the founders of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association (MnSWA) once said to me that all spoken word comes from the African diaspora. Obviously any blanket statement like that requires skepticism, and the traditions of performed poetry in Ancient Greece and in Japan, as well as Native American storytelling refute his blanket assertion. But within contemporary practices, built on jazz and bebop in America, and the European avant garde's affinity for African art, there is an idea worth considering here.

"Dadaists recited so-called 'negro songs' . . . Mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity" and also "from the slums of the North-American metropolis: Afro-American rag-time, cake walk and jazz." [i]

While poetry slam and hip hop borrow from African (American) rhythms, including bebop and jazz, as well as dealing with issues of ethnicity and racial heritage, we rarely see in contemporary practice the kind of language experimentation of Hugo Ball or Kurt Schwitters or linguistic explorations of the sources mentioned above. In challenging the "canon," Ishmael Reed poses the question "why can't Tupac Shakur be studied alongside T.S. Eliot?" [ii] I would ask why we don't study Tupac alongside Kurt Schwitters. Given the tendency and desire of early literary avant gardes such as Dada and Surrealism to borrow from (what they perceived as) African Art and rhythms, an art practice that works more directly those traditions would have much to offer contemporary practice, tied in as it often is with hip hop. And with criticisms these avant gardes as "appropriating" from other cultures, it would seem natural for those coming from a diasporic aesthetic to revisit those techniques and ideas and reclaim them for themselves.

The outsider stance of the poetry slam aesthetic also has much in common with a movement such as Dada, which was very critical of and reacting against the literary and artistic "establishment."

"The Dadaists' disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo was so fundamental and deep-seated that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [iii]

One of the hallmark activities of the Dadas was the performance cabaret, most famously, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The cabarets were designed to push the endurance and tolerance of the audience and challenge their ideas toward art. They would include sound poems composed of "nonsense" verse and syllables, declaim their many incendiary manifestos from the stage, perform skits, and in one instance, created a riot by creating and then erasing an artwork by Francis Picabia on a blackboard. [iv] Confrontiation was the hallmark of their work, and confrontation is necessarily a face-to-face, live endeavor. And so while they published their own journals and pioneered visual poetry as well, Dada poets were meant to be heard!

At the same time that Dada was meant to be performed and performative, one of the methods to the madness was to challenge norms by challenging normal thinking, which meant challenging the modes of language in which thought is possible.

"The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient." [v]

Dada shared with Formalism its disdain for "subjectivity" "understood as a solipsistic individuality in art and social life." [vi] Like the Formalists, they too sought a denaturalized language, deconstructing representation in language the way it was being deconstructed by the visual artists in their midst. The Dadaists' goals was to "try to trigger and stimulate change within the individual, hoping that they could get the audience . . or readers . . . to rethink their positions, to make them confront habitual thinking structures, to question their attitudes toward literature, convention, and perhaps even social order." [vii] So deep was their "disenchantment with the cultural and political status quo . . . that they felt they could no longer express it within the boundaries of existing artistic and communicative conventions." [viii]

As I talk with people about Dada writing and performance and its application to contemporary practice, it's fairly common to hear things like "Well, Dada was great, but it's over now," or "Dada was out of its own time . . ." Interestingly, this discussion most recently came up with Bob Holman, director of the Bowery Poetry Club, who was at the same time, scheduled to read Dada poetry at MoMA the day after I met with him, as part of their Dada exhibit. Holman has also been quick to invoke the spirit of Dada, for example in his manifesto-like introduction to Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets'Café:


"Hear this book with your eyes! When the Mouth marries the Eye, the Ear officiates (see Tristan Tzara's "The Gas Heart." Better yet, perform that tiny masterpiece!)" [ix]

There is, in fact, unfinished work to the literary avant gardes. Language has not been fully deconstructed the way the image has. In fact, poet Bryon Gysin is famously noted for declaring that "writing is 50 years behind painting." With the stranglehold on language that we see in phenomena like myth, spectacle and simulacra, we cannot declare the experimentation of Dada, 'zaum, Formalism, Surrealism irrelevant until they have fully borne fruit. There is still, as Michael Moroni calls it, "an unfulfilled project,"

" . . . the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality) . . ." [x]

Charles Olson's calls for post-modern poetry to go back to its origins and come forward again down a different path, "beyond Melville and Romaticism . . . To go back is not to seize the origin, to recuperate some paradisal space, but to begin the 'deed and misdeed' signified by writing. Olson's new beginning rejects (figuratively) everything that lay between Homer's writing and Melville's . . ." [xi] In our time, perhaps we need not to reject everything that came between Homer and Melville, or even between Tzara and Bernstein, but it is certainly a call to revisit the possibilities of the past, to look for unfinished revolutions and business left undone, and see where those threads can be incorporated into our own work.




[i] van den Berg 33
[ii] Ishmael Reed, 3.
[iii] Schaffner, 118
[iv] For particularly good descriptions of Dada events and cabarets, see Annabelle Melzer's Latest Rage: The Big Drum and Dada and Surrealist Performance as well as RoseLee Goldberg's history Performance Art: Futurism to the Present.
[v] Moroni, 9
[vi] Moroni, 4
[vii] Schaffner, 125
[viii] Schaffner, 118
[ix] Algarin and Holman, 1
[x] Moroni, 21
[xi] Riddell, 162