Avant-Gardes in Crisis

Art and Politics in the Long 1970s

Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Andrew Strombeck, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Andrew Strombeck

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438485171
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la poesía

Avant-Gardes in Crisis claims that the avant-gardes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are in crisis, in that artmaking both responds to political, economic, and social crises and reveals a crisis of confidence regarding resistance's very possibility. Specifically, this collection casts contemporary avant-gardes as a reaction to a crisis in the reproduction of life that accelerated in the 1970s—a crisis that encompasses living-wage rarity, deadly epidemics, and other aspects of an uneven management of vitality indexed by race, citizenship, gender, sexual orientation, class, and disability. The contributors collectively argue that a minoritarian concept of the avant-garde, one attuned to uneven patterns of resource depletion and infrastructural failure (broadly conceived), clarifies the interplay between art and politics as it has played out, for instance, in discussions of art's autonomy or institutionality. Writ large, this book seeks to restore the historical and political context for the debates on the avant-garde that have raged since the 1970s.

PART I

ENCLOSURES

Chapter 1

Against Possession

SARAH DOWLING

If we are going to discuss the relationship between experimental aesthetic production and accelerating fiscal crisis, we could do worse than to consider a poem titled “Foreclosure.” Such a poem would seem to speak directly to the twenty-first century’s signature cruelties, evoking the transformations in the global economy that have taken place since the 1970s. We might expect a poem titled “Foreclosure” to make reference to the fact that some six million American homes have been foreclosed on—they’ve been seized back from their owners by banks and mortgage lenders—over the past decade. We might expect a poem by this title to situate the US crisis in home ownership within a broader, worldwide phenomenon, the financialization of housing, which has transformed rental and real estate markets by treating housing as a vehicle for wealth and investment rather than as a social good. Maybe we’d want a poem called “Foreclosure” to comment on the mass evictions, vacant properties, and displacement of residents and communities that have resulted, in the US and around the world. Perhaps we’d hope that this hypothetical poem, “Foreclosure,” would offer perspective on the transformations in capitalism that have taken place over the past four or five decades, and that it would criticize the prioritization of wealth and investment over practical necessity and human need. At any rate, it’s easy to imagine that these are some of the expectations that readers might bring to a poem titled “Foreclosure,” particularly those readers who are interested in the ways in which experimental writers have responded to the accelerating crises in the reproduction of life that have unfolded under neoliberalism.

But poems, especially experimental ones, rarely do exactly what we want them to. I’m going to describe a real poem titled “Foreclosure,” which offers something different—I’ll suggest that it offers something more. Despite the sharp immediacy of its title, the real poem called “Foreclosure” is neither about the 2008 financial crisis, nor about the ways it has impacted individuals’ and communities’ rights to be housed. In fact, it’s not about any aspect of the time period identified with neoliberalism. Written by Lorine Niedecker sometime during the 1960s—the last decade of her life and the one generally considered as immediately preceding the multifaceted crises we are now living through—this poem speaks instead to the never-ending series of dispossessions that its author suffered before, during, and after the Great Depression. Niedecker’s small, fractured lyrics document the life she spent as a low-wage, often underemployed worker in rural Wisconsin; her poems track various forms of powerlessness, both artistic and social. Describing layered and interrelated forms of enclosure, Niedecker intimately links the lyric’s tight smallness with the constrained circumstances of poor women and working people.

In these and other respects, Niedecker “could not have been further removed from the avant-garde poetry scene,” although she did participate in lively and intense epistolary exchanges with Louis Zukofsky, Cid Corman, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and other midcentury experimentalists.¹ This social location, along with her reception as an objectivist poet—that is, as a “persistently under-known and under-valued” late modernist for whom “the praxis of the poem [was] a mode of thought, cognition, investigation,” and for whom investment in the real and the material was paramount—marks her as a writer and thinker who stood outside of, and creatively challenged, the institutions of her day.² In keeping with this volume’s project of contesting the model of the avant-garde offered by Peter Bürger, “calibrated as it is for the white male artist imbued with revolutionary fervor,” to quote the introduction to this volume, Niedecker’s poetry exemplifies a minoritarian mode and accordingly offers a different approach to the periodization of crisis, one that is counterintuitively expansive.

“Foreclosure” evokes that treasured American fantasy: ownership of one’s own home, and of a parcel of territory—perhaps one marked with a white picket fence. The poem shows what happens when the fantasy implodes, presenting dispossession as an undoing of the self. Compressed, grief-stricken, and exhausted, this little poem does not valorize the right to property; it doesn’t discuss loss through the lens of nostalgia or suggest restitution. Instead, it impugns possessive individualism and the legal system that enshrines and supports it, calling for a new relationship to land and, by implication, a new and nonpossessive structure of selfhood. In its entirety, the poem reads:

Tell em to take my bare walls down

my cement abutments

their parties thereof

and clause of claws

Leave me the land

Scratch out: the land

May prose and property both die out

and leave me peace.

That’s it: one quatrain, two couplets; eight lines offering more resignation than revolution. The reading of this poem that I’ll offer is that it shows what happens when the thief who steals your home and tosses you off your land is the state, an entity well beyond legal reproach—particularly in this period, when the US state had positioned itself as the benevolent provider and protector of private property.³ “Foreclosure” anticipates how, in the long 1970s, the worst nightmare of the anti-state critique of sixties radicalism would come true—but it also insists that the capacity to project dispossession into the future is a privilege, given the operations of settler colonialism and segregation. Small as it is, this poem offers a radical analysis of the relationships between the individual, the state, and the institution of property: in mourning the loss of a home and a severed relationship to land, “Foreclosure” suggests that dispossession is a foundational, if too-often obscured, American experience. It locates the losses suffered by its speaker within a longer series of dispossessions affecting the territory where Niedecker lived, describing relationships to land as fundamentally characterized by dispossession and displacement. As a solution, and as a source of “peace,” this poem calls for an end to property and to the cruel legal “prose” in which its rules are enforced.

Even though Niedecker’s poem falls slightly outside of the temporal frame suggested in this collection, having been composed some five to ten years prior to the period under consideration, it nonetheless offers a useful perspective on the relationship of experimental aesthetics to the periodization of crisis. “Foreclosure” places dispossession at the heart of liberal democracy in the US and hints at the ways in which dispossession must be considered structural, rather than appearing as an exceptional and discrete historical event. This poem calls for a reformulation of selfhood and of human relationships to land as the foundations of a way that we might live differently—as the foundations for “peace.” I take Niedecker’s poem as one example of the processes through which experimental art and literature in the later twentieth century detach themselves from the ideologies and logics of liberalism in order to document the tangled ways that people are impoverished and worlds are ended. “Foreclosure” tracks a deformation of subjectivity: as its speaker is dispossessed of her home and her land, so too does she lose legibility as an expressive, humanistic subject. I contend that this poem’s discussion of property marks it as proleptically contemporary and as historically sedimented: the poem seems to speak directly to a post-2008 moment, but it also evokes a long history of settler-colonial dispossessions. Like much of Niedecker’s work, “Foreclosure” creates echoes between the dispossessions of Indigenous peoples in what is currently Wisconsin, settlers’ own land losses during the Great Depression, and the ravages of rural poverty—which are discussed as though they existed endlessly and constantly, transcending time. These repeating losses press Niedecker’s “I” into a new intimacy with the earth, one that exceeds the severance of legal possession effected by the foreclosure process. This new, nonpossessive relationship is expressed through evocations of physical proximity, images of abandonment, and suggestions of persistence beyond death. Reading this poem in relationship to new analyses of the racialization of property emerging from Indigenous and settler-colonial studies, and to Kandice Chuh’s recent theorization of “illiberal humanisms,” I argue that Niedecker’s short piece can be understood as offering a necessary—and necessarily minoritarian—vision of white selfhood: one that is severed from territorial possession and thus is also divested from bourgeois liberal humanism.⁴

Property

Theoretical discussions of property tend to emphasize its abstract nature, describing the processes by which intangible entities such as rights or ideas have come to be understood as ownable, how the capacity to make a claim to these abstract bundles of rights shapes subjectivation, or how property is fundamentally a relationship.⁵ A foundational critique of classical liberal and commonsense notions of property is C. B. MacPherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, which outlines the view that individuals are not only the sole proprietors of their skills, which can be bought and sold on the open market, they are the sole proprietors of themselves.⁶ MacPherson argues that within liberal thought the individual is “nothing more than an owner of himself” and that society consists of nothing more than “a free exchange between proprietors,” a view that some prominent political theorists have argued lay at the root of the 2007–2008 financial crisis.⁷ Building on MacPherson’s reevaluation of classical liberal political theory, Cheryl I. Harris argues that whiteness is not just a racial identity but has become a form of property acknowledged and protected in American law; the conceptual clarity of her argument has been borne out by the recent spate of racist murders wherein the citation of defense of property has proved exculpatory for white killers of African American and Indigenous men.⁸ MacPherson’s and Harris’s foundational works reveal that the critique of abstractions such as recognition, justice, equality, and even personhood itself must be brought into conversation with the material forms of dispossession that remain resolutely unabstractable.⁹ Thus, as Niedecker’s poetry shows, it is necessary to ground discussions of property and possession in considerations of real property—of land—whose possession remains fundamental, particularly in the US, Canada, and other settler colonies.

The risk here is that abstract forms of possession come to obscure lived realities of dispossession in ways that are continuous with settler-colonial forms of erasure. Amy Carillo Rowe and Eve Tuck (Unanga

), among other critics, argue that what distinguishes settler colonialism from other historical and contemporary forms of colonization is the pursuit of land.¹⁰ In conceiving of land exclusively as property or as resource, they explain, settlers make their appropriations seem “natural, logical, or invisible.”¹¹ The logic of appropriation itself evacuates any prior claims of their validity—it insists that claimed territory was simply unowned prior to its settler-colonial appropriation—and thereby confers righteous possession upon the person who, or the nation that, appropriates it. Importantly, the settler-colonial reconception of land as property negates any prior or ongoing claim that does not conform to the legal framework by which private property is recognized. This naturalization of t...