Symposium on Russian Postmodernism
| September 25, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 03, Number 2, January 1993 |
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Symposiasts:
Jerome McGann, Department of English, University of Virginia (jjm2f@lizzie.engl.Virginia.EDU)
Vitaly Chernetsky, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, St. Petersburg, Russia (atd@HM.SPB.SU)
Mikhail Epstein, Department of Slavic Languages, Emory University
Lyn Hejinian, (70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM)
Bob Perelman, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania (bperelme@SAS.UPENN.EDU)
Marjorie Perloff, Department of English, Stanford University (0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM)
[Editor’s note:
This symposium brought together several people working in the field of Russian Postmodernism. Discussions took place in the month of October 26-November 25, 1992.
The genre of this symposium is unusually mixed. You will find here, among other things, lengthy set pieces, conversational responses, poems previously published and unpublished, draft essays, papers from conferences, and excerpts from published work. Instead of a flow of short entries, we received fewer, longer messages.
We have chosen not to regularize the form of these entries or their mechanics, and not to revise or edit messages, in order to preserve the occassional nature of the discussion. You might refer the work found here to a transcription from an oral symposium, with printed text incorporated, and not to the dialogue of essays and replies often published in journals.]
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 1992 11:09:14 -0500
From: "Jerome J. McGann"
Subject: Re: well...no record
Perhaps it will be useful to begin the discussion with a set of
topics and questions that seem to me to be pertinent -- given
what various people involved have already said or written.
Marjorie Perloff's draft essay on "Russian Postmodernism",
sent for this symposium, focusses a central problem: how does one
talk about the relations that have been made and pursued between
agroup of contemporary Russian writers and certain western
writers (are they a "group"? how?) who have been seen as their
counterparts?
Let me say that the (local) history of the emergence of
each"group" -- both have constructed themselves outside given and
traditional institutions -- is a telling fact. (Though of course
"samizdat" and "small press"/private printing/desktop publishing
ventures have in each culture, by now, been fairly
well-established.)
The problem may be seen in various forms. Perloff traces
out some differences in conceptualist programs and ideas. In
_Leningrad_ the same problem appears, I think, in the recurrent
preoccupation with the question of the poetic "object", as well
as with the (perhaps related) question of the status of
"objects-as-such" in two very different types of societies. (The
problem --perhaps it is reciprocal -- of the "subject" also
arises repeatedly.)
For example: I read Perloff's essay and I wonder: why did
she write this? what is the point of pointing out such
differentials? Or I read Watten's essay on "Post-Soviet
Subjectivity. . ." and wonder: is this essay "about"
Drogomoshenko and Kabakov and "post-soviet" writing, or is it
about -- somehow, for some reason --contemporary American
writing?
I think it would be useful if everyone in the symposium
addressed these issues at the beginning. You might want to
respond to Prigov or to Perloff or to Watten specifically, or to
pick up from any of the other related texts in _Leningrad_ or
_The Third Wave_ or _Poetics Journal_ no. 8.
For myself, I would find it helpful if -- in addressing
these issues -- a person would also explain why they take their
chosen approach (e.g., through social and institutional history;
through questions of aesthetics, or stylistics; through a
consideration ofthe relation of poetry and ideology; or of
writing and language and "the person"; etc.).
At some point the more general cultural and social question
also needs to be taken up. How to frame the question is itself a
question? Well, there are different imaginable ways: why has
this intercourse begun? what function does it serve the
individuals, their societies, the practise of writing and art?
Most immediately, what are we doing in this very symposium, what
are we after?
Jerome McGann
Mon, 26 Oct 92 15:37:42
From: Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: first response
Dear Colleagues and Friends, I have just received Jerome McGann's
opening message, and I am as astounded at the format of these
proceedings as I am at the "theme" or "themes" of the symposium.
My own particular concerns with respect to contemporary
Russian (or any other) poetry and poetics were, I think,
originally epistemological; they are still, to a large degree,
although my involvement (as translator) with the particular
writings of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko has enlarged that original,
abstract quandary with particular, immediate ones. In any case,
the question "how does one know" (the question of consciousness
and the quest for a consciousness of consciousness), becomes,
perhaps especially for an American, enormously vivid in the
otherness of a Russian context.
I don't intend by this to be taking a relativist
position--that we can understand ourselves better by
understanding something else seems a banal and thoroughly
uninteresting truism. And to discover that certain American
literary groups have a similarity to certain Russian literary
groups is probably only to discover a coincidence--one which
might motivate curiosity but doesn't necessarily generate
meaning.
The affinities that have evolved in the past five or six
years between certain poets in the U.S. and certain poets in
Russia exist, I think, because those poets wanted them to.
There's been a remarkable degree of seeking out--of which this
symposium is another example.
My own personal initial experience in the course of this
seeking out was a dispersal of my American knowing in the Russian
context (could one call it a postmoderning of knowing?) where the
grounds for that knowing simply didn't exist. The experience
convinced me that knowledge is always embedded--always
contextualized (so that one only knows THAT something or OF
something, for example)--that is always and only situated and
that it depends on specific logics and linkages.
Logics and linkages, of course, are precisely the
materials of poetic method.
And perhaps our enthusiasm for their proliferation is a
specifically postmodern attitude. Finally, I'd like to say
something in answer to Jerome McGann's question, "what are we
doing in this very symposium, what are we after?" that I would
hope we are after some non- or even anti-nationalist engagement
with the man questions that postmodernism and postsovietism
suggest.
Lyn Hejinian
Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1992 19:36:58 +0300 From: arkadii Subject: remarks S-Petersburg 27 October, 1992, 7:33 PM. atd@hm.spb.su Dear colleagues, it seems slightly strange to start any "discussion" (even on postmodern) from the point of a question -- "what all of us doing it for?.." Somehow or other I have nothing to do but to continue offered mode putting a great deal of questions to myself which entailed by first two essays and followed remarks. The very problem of Russian Postmodern to the same extent looks dark as well as "American" or "African". Despite numerous writing on this object the course of approach to it switches itself in dizzying velocity. Couple years ago -- economical premises, transformation of production modes or subjectivity per se, social geterogenity, circulation of capital, signifiers, Ego, etc. + notorious seductiveness, simulacra were really magic formulas, even keys for operations with postmodern phenomena (if one couldn't just to say that agglomeration of them is in fact a certain composition, or invention of its own horizons). Noticeable, that the last mentioned terms have appropriated by Russian critics in a great longing, corresponding, to be sure, to the roots of a main principle of "Russian policy of representation"-- endless chain of "icons" getting its origins in an invisible prototype..) However we hear another voices now, another songs -- "memory," "time," "space," "aesthetic" and so on. Why not? It is entirely immaterial in _what_ terms, even _sentence_ we are going to speak about present state of the given object. Future is only a projection of our habits. Right as _this symposium_ seems at a moment like iridescent bubbles of a monitor in a soapy soup of imagination. As far as I get it, essays by Marjorie Perloff and Barrett Watten somehow or other attempted to touch different things regardless of "concrete" stuff of reading. Sure, between them -- diffusion of two different poetry practices/ consciousness despite the postmodern affirmation of locality, the ways of such deterritorialisation (let us recall a work of Veselovskii, dedicated to wandering plots...). For all of that -- in MP essay evidently runs itself the vein of the problem of interrelations of the language of Father and artificial infant language of Russian "conceptualism" that unfolds the ceaseless dream of an ambiguous release trough the closing of meanings as such in continuous repetitions of the certain rhetoric. (I think Marjorie Perloff feels that explanations of this "event" by Michael Epshtein are not only insufficient, still to some respect -- wrong). And at least, the theme of memory rose by Barrett Watten in his reading my poem. Sure, the _time- memory-space_ questioning is most self-erasable "problem" be tight connecting to such themes as body politics, imagination strategy, etc., -- connecting postmodern's ontic spectrum of worries with ontological ones. Perhaps, if we'll have a time, I'll try offer you couple of pages dedicated to "memory". Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1992 15:09:30 EST
From: Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: second comment
October 30; I've only received Jerry's initial opening message
and Arkadii's first remarks (and a copy of my own first attempt
to enter this e-conversation), so maybe it is premature to add
something now. But it does seem appropriate, both generally
(globally) and specifically (with respect to Russia and to the
U.S.) to frame the notion of postmodernism in the context of
"memory" (I am thinking of Arkadii's use of the term), since
among other things doing so blurs the distinction between
"objects" and "events." And it is this blurring that
characterizes the so-called end of history, postmodernism.
Perhaps the Vietnam War (and the morally-related Watergate
scandal) helped to collapse U.S. history somewhat as perestroika
and the demise of the Soviet Union have collapsed history in
Russia. But maybe, again, the comparison is irrelevant; can we
compare Ezra Pound's and Charles Olson's and HD's (albeit very
different) attempts to recover history with Viktor Shklovsky's
and Vladimir Mayakovsky's and Anna Akhmatova's and Marina
Tsvetaeva's attempts to witness it? Such comparisons themselves
are typical dispersals.
The notion of "memory" no longer suggests contemplation so
much as sentimentality (or its sister, irony), amorality, and
above all novel patterns of logic: "wandering" rather than
hierarchically organized plots. When the cause-and-effect
structuring which determines that an occurrence is an event
breaks down, the event becomes an object. This object isn't
necessarily isolated--it probably always rests in a matrix of
relationships and associations. But they are spatial and it is
atemporal.
The beating of Rodney King has achieved instant
object-status. That's in part because it was "captured"
(objectified) on video tape and the tape has been repeated over
and over, and only objects, not events, can't repeat.
Well, these quick remarks merely invite Arkadii's "couple of
pagesdedicated to 'memory'."
And what of equivalence? In Arkadii's remarks it seems as if
numerous and various items and terms (the objects of concern)
swirl like motes in warm twilit sunshine, and this view is
familiar to me, too. One might be intelligent about any one, or
even several, of them,but perhaps not about the whole mass.
Lyn Hejinian
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 1992 07:38:00 GMT From: Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM> Subject: Postmodern Symposium Dear Colleagues, I came home from 10 days at Stanford to find eleven messages, most about the symposium. There are very interesting comments from Lyn Hejinian and Arkadii Dragomoschenko that I want to mull over for a day or two. In the meantime, I want to address Jerome McGann'squestion, "Why did she (I) want to write about this? For me, the fascination of the Russian language and the Russian world is endless. As someone who loves the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde, but also Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, I want to understand what is happening in the former Soviet Union today. But since my Russian is very minimal, I must rely on what I can read and I suppose I wasn't quite satisfied with Ephshtein's account of what's going on and wanted to speculate on the relationship between two cultures, my point being that since "modernism," whatever that is, hasn't quite been absorbed in Russia, it's hard to imagine a "postmodernism" that would be parallel to our own late-century versions. On the other hand, a book like Hejinian's Oxota could not have been written without the impact of the Russian poets, writers, critics--the whole culture, so there's clearly something wonderfully exciting going on. But what exactly? I hope to learn more. This past week, we have had on the Stanford campus Joseph Brodsky, who was invited by the Stanford Humanities Center. I went to only one session--where Brodsky was talking about Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost. He began by saying that Pound and Eliot had deflected British Modernism from its true path, epitomized by Hardy and then performed an analysis on "The Convergence of the Twain." Now, I want to ask my fellow symposiasts: how do we relate Brodsky to the mode of Dragomoschenko, Parshchikov, and the other "new wave" poets? With best wishes, Marjorie Perloff
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1992 15:40:58 +0300 From: arkadii Subject: moving on in one step 31 October, 1992, 3:32 PM Dear Lyn, dear colleges, I'm not certain that we _must_ speak only about memory (unconsciouses, traces, etc.) as about of a main perspective of postmodern phenomena. Nonetheless, this "term" is really provocative. Firstly, because it involves varies "things" by virtue of which we could get "something" concerning to our current state -- this is to say, about History, or -- to hove we like to understand it, or to understand ourselves. Two or three days ago, when we spend a time with Alexander Zeldovich^1^ (he was back from Finland, and this time with beautiful friend - Marianna) drinking bad wine but speaking about global problems (exactly! yes! - typical Russian manner of wasting of time, like "matreshka" or "perestroika" and so forth) and when he paged first "papers" from beginning of our symposium, he'd said -- "Write them, please, that there is very important thing -- We (Russia) are as a Bermuda triangle for all "-isms", including postomdernism (which itself seems like the same notorious "triangle"). It is a point that _every_ art's mode, every direction transforms itself here in mode of life!^2^ Moreover, this mode of life become "only one" way of dealing with social space..." -- this is to say, with history and memory. Isn't it? To some extent he was right -- all our "revolutions" are the fruits of perverted imagination. Meanwhile the time between -- was gifted by devil. Where is memory? Or -- are we sentenced to be the nation of an eternal Posmodern? Arkadii Dragomoshchenko ____________________ ^1^ Well-known filmaker from Moscow - the last work was "Sunset" on Babel. In the last issue of "Iskusstvo Kino" (Art of Cinema) you can read our idle, "kitchen", talk about the phenomena of "American Cinema". ^2^ I think this was the first impulse which Authors of "Leningrad" got in Leningrad in 1989 (?).
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 1992 17:05:50 +0300
From: arkadii
Subject: memory
(out of the left field or -- )
EROTICISM OF FOR-GETTING, EROTICISM OF BEYOND-BEING(a) (1)
by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; translated by
Vanessa Bittner with
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
(Thank you, Lyn and Barrett, --
you participated in a hard business
of this translation too, preparing it
for the next issue of Poetics Journal...)
I entered - where I don't know
Understanding forsook me -
I stood -all knowledge departed.
St. Juan de la Cruise
There exist a multitude of things about which it
doesn't seem possible to talk, without risking a
meaningless pomposity, regardless of the fact that these
things continue to be a desired object of descriptions and
discussions, remaining not only as a horizon of experience,
but of the possibility of uttering something about it as
well. Simultaneously such things seem illusorily ordinary-
habitual. They are primordially vacillating and
mysterious, they whose senses are not grasped by reason,
which irritates the imagination, emitted and continue to
emit the unusually bewitching enchantment of the
strangeness of being -- which have already become a certain
semblance of sediment -- dictionaries willingly presenting
any rhetoric with this or that spectra of significance --
or: the history of the use of words or: the casts of former
"existential territorialities" (F. Guattari).
Among such things can be found "memory".
The kind proposal I received to deliver this paper
about memory led me to just another dead end of a certain
"beginning", despite the delicate indication of a path by
which thought could follow.
And indeed, is it not tempting to fit the object of
our interest into historical and geopolitical perspective?
All the more, for me, having spent my life in a country
whose, let's say, more than marvelous relations with
"memory" and "history" were marked by the bewilderment of
Chaadaev, but thanks to which I received a rare opportunity
to contemplate her (memory's) surprising transformations,
both on the level of the individual and of society. But
with time everything fades, including the sense of
surprise. However and indeed doesn't the presence of
passion seduce the expressions: "peoples, having
remembered themselves or - having recalled their
destination and, the almost Platonic: "Man, having recalled
that he is a man"? But I will stop here, not without basis
suggesting that this theme will find/has found worthy
illumination in presentations and discussions, so then how
should I, a person deeply private in his habits and work,
even if hurriedly and chaotically, touch upon an object of
conversation from a different side or, perhaps, sides.
More accurately, to remind about the existence of other
points of view. Or at least the possibility of others.
In the Malibu city museum in California there is a
thin gold plate measuring 22X37 mm bearing six engraved
lines, apparently a fragment of an orphick hymn, or
instructions to the soul of one who has died on how to
conduct themselves in the land of shades (2)
Here are the lines whose literal translation is known
to many:
But I am parched and perishing of thirst./Give
me quickly/the cold water flowing from the Lake
of/Memory/Then they will freely let you drink
from/the holy spring,/and thereafter you will
have lordship with/the other heroes.
The spring mentioned in the above fragment is, of
course, Mnemosyne, Memory. Whose moisture is opposed to
the waters of Leto. Also, the opposition of "water of
life" and "water of death" is inferred in the duality of
the nature of someone who speaks, in other words, of the
simultaneous questioning and answering, the nature of which
combines the Earth-Titanic and the Sky-Dionysian. However,
in defiance of the obvious banality of such a
"distribution" of roles and functions, something
nevertheless does not allow us, in reading these lines, to
see the painted plaster frieze of postmodernism.
We will follow once again the well-trod path of plot,
taking into consideration as much as possible also the
amalgam of its narrative: the loss of memory is equal to
death; the dead who have entered the territory of Aida,
first of all lose their memory. (4) The realm of Aida, the
world of night, is itself death or -- oblivion, then how
the day cannot stand unconsciousness -- forgetfulness
transforms itself into the death of the "future" (thus
Orpheus forgets the instructions, transgresses them and
turns around... to his own destruction) -- since memory is
nothing other than potential future, taking its origins in
duration, repitition, prolongation, the logic of which, as
is known, is the logic of history, narrative, day,
continuity, of causality, knowledge, law, the Norm.
Within the borders of this logic, the structure of the
sign (or the mediation of it) is unequivocally manifested
by a direct connection between the "signifier and the
signified," where the signified is the memory of the
referent (the guarantee of the signifier's reality) of a
certain "object" and, more likely, the essence of this
object, reflected or revealed by the intelligible
signified. A rupture or only the approximation of such a
connection, according to general opinion, of the loss of
referent, in other words, chaos, the destruction of the
hierarchic unity of the world picture in which, by the way,
the self identification of the "I" (as a reflection of the
true center of the Universe) and, consequently, of society
becomes impossible. Thus, outside of memory, the becoming
of neither the "I" nor of the personality, self or social
can occur. Outside of "I" and outside of "the social"
narrative becomes impossible, the narrative itself, the
formative state making the world accessible to
understanding, to reproduction and to repetition -- the
content.
In this horizon memory can be taken as the pre-writing
(see Plato about writing as an instrument of memory) which
must steadily uphold being in consciousness in the form of
traces, but, more than anything, the origins of those
traces.
Actually, we know that memory is nothing other than a
means of consolidating, ordering, unifying the world map.
And which to some extent allows us to apply the analogy
between memory and the Eros of Plato, also forming the
world into an absolute ascent of cognition of the ascent
itself. From here -- in spite of the fact that, for some,
memory is something like a depository, an archive or (for
others) a reserve of a mobilly difficult, associative
process of the conscious-unconscious, arises the motif of
her (memory's) teleologicity since it, like "the time of
history" (which memory forms) is directed at the
resurrection of that which, until recently remained as a
trace of a past (thing, person...) as the trace of which
the source was some sort of co-being/o-ccurence.(b) Memory
is teleological, since it satisfies Absolute Memory or "the
embodiment of All the Ages" -- it satisfies Apokostasis, in
other words, the coincidence of "past-present-future" in
the point of presence, in the punctum of the endlessly
lasting "present" in which it, perfecting itself,
nevertheless, is already perfected since it doesn't know
incompleteness, lack or defect. Or -- where memory has no
need for the resurrection of any traces, since there aren't
any, since there is no past as such.
From this point of view any disruption of memory even
in everyday life is not only pathological, but a misdeed
appearing through the limit of definition and infringing
upon a definite conception of world study. And here we
should not remark how in terms of the unfolding of the
description of its known conception of the "semantic" model
of the real, the thread of another ornament begins to
intertwine. Suffice it to say that the Russian word
"pamiat'" (memory) covers perception with dust in a few
semantic layers: 1) that of "imeni"(c) (po(i)myanut' --
po-imenovat', po-minovenie -- po-imenovanie)(d) which
translates into English roughly as "to remember -- to
name", "remembrance -- naming", referring to being called,
concrete naming as to estate, in other words, to possession
since being called is an introduction to property,
appropriation; -- 2) of the first person pronoun, of the
accusative/genitive case: "mya" (from "menya") and 3) "men-
y", of the exchange (obmen) (in part of the sign for a
thing) closing the topology of ya-imeni-imeniya (I-name-
estate) to the act of power, submission and governing that
which stands apart, the external, non-articulated.(5)
Because -- as it follows from Western tradition's
experience, only in the title, in the re-tention (con-
tent)(e) of the name, in the retaining of the established
connection between name and thing the retention of the "I"
and the world is possible. However, are there etymological
premises relevent, despite the seduction-ceremony of their
reading in the protocol of deconstruction, to the true mis-
en-scene of these meanings today?
It is difficult to refrain from making Jean Baudrillard's
statement about the transformation of the very nature of
the sign. To talk about Western culture means, in his
opinion, first of all to talk about the principles and
modes of its co-sociability(f), which must collect the
world into a single entity, more precisely, to return to it
its primordial wholeness (6), belief in this wholeness and,
nevertheless:
All the Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation: that a
sign could exchange for meaning and that
something could guarantee this exchange -- God,
of course. But what if God himself can be
simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs
which arrest his existence? Then the whole
system becomes weightless; it is no longer
anything but a gigantic simulacrum. (7)
Of course, if we touch upon positions, which must some way
or another guarantee the "symbolic exchange", it would be
more important to consider the instance "pure, invulnerable
(absolute) memory", along with that and "space" in which
such an exchange is possible, that is, a gigantic
simulation machine (8) - "absolute historical memory"
(Nietzsche). But even having proposed such absolute memory,
we can say that being completely-almighty, memory is
powerless to penetrate, bring out, preserve one thing --
the sources of one's own co-being/o-ccurence(g) the trace
of which is memory itself. It's strange "beginning", the
striving to remember, to preserve the function of Freud's
Thanatos constantly slips away, having become memory before
carrying the name of forgetfulness (h) which exists between
its infinite impulse to activity, to work, to
repetition/creation.(i) The writing of poetry bears a
close relation to this.
The reverse of memory spreads oblivion. But what
happens there?
Once again the Russian verb "zapamyatovat'", "to
forget"(j) means to go out beyond memory, beyond its
limits, consequently to cross the border of "mya", that is,
"I" ("ya"), "name" (imeni), "self-property" (imenie). But
what, then, can be found "beyond" (k)? Only the "absence
of definition"? Of duration? Of continuity? Of that from
which the word habitually develops in propositions and
modalities? Simply "absence"? Or maybe we'll phrase the
question another way: what happens in the very act of
"forgetting"? Doesn't language itself point out in its
etymological luminescence that for-getting/beyond-being is
literally a transgression (9), that is, a crime(l) of being
(m), waste of reserve, or otherwise, of the former
existence as from the noun created from the verb, otherwise
-- a twice-halted present? Such is poetry, immutably and
courageousely going out to the border, where the dark glow
of the indifferent something, unheard of, having never
existed, but the Genesis "of which", penalizing not even
the word "time"(n), meets the concealing smoke of human
vanity.
Beyond the border of memory, if we believe in the
topography of Preispoden(o) (reverse-side) we find Leto.
On her banks grow poppies. On her shores oblivion reigns,
the transparency of which is transmitted to the world,
drawn into her game, confusing one with another, the times
and intentions, words and silence, -- opening the
transparency of the absence of any scales whatsoever - here
"this" is simultaneously "there", "now" - everywhere
"after" or "already always then". The waters of Leto never
reflect -- it is that place, locus classicus(p) -- where
the myth of Narcissus, seduced by the yearning for another
in himself, ceases to be a source of light in the mirrored
rooms of the human "I"(10). Peering into the sources,
memory enters into the most intimate and closest relations
with Oblivion, which represents to her (memory) her own
death. It is impossible to imagine a certain smile which
is so easy to take for an enigmatic grimace... but where
then do pains come from?
And here the conclusion of the fragment from the gold
plate becomes clear -- the question is full of perplexity
since the questioner in the question-answer about its
double nature nevertheless confirms its belonging to
Heaven, to Dionysus, Transgression, Oblivion, Poetry --
that is, the body of language, speech, which confirms
itself to being torn to shreds, to dismemberment by the
Titans, by Mimesis, having seized him (the questioner) in
the labyrinth of the mirror, in the labyrinth of logic
which rules reflection (vt/tv-orenie;
repitition/creation)(q), in other words of that which is
always seen as the basis of the art of speech... There is
no point in continuing the list of that which, according to
the critics, "reflects" or "depicts/represents", at the
same time appropriating, the word... It doesn't appropriate
but removes layer by layer from the wax table of memory-
warp that by definition possesses neither meaning or trace,
that... which exists in its own disappearance.
However, Night attracts even this mute rustling.
Night, like poetic speech is sourceless and so steps over,
erasing any possible interpretation, her language, her
speech, her intentions , her now, her memory. Squandering
all of this in her own disappearance, poetry possesses
nothing,
only:
**********
Author's Notes:
2) It is noteworthy that this memorandum is inscribed on
material whose nature is ambivalent in its presentation -
gold, sun, and light are inseparable in the mythological
consciousness from ashes (in the Russian language the very
etymology of this word points to their unanimity). Sunlight
is in the same way life-creating, ash-creating and light
itself, more precisely its source, the sun, is inseparable
from "darkness", blindness, like a vision through the wall
of optico-centrism, which controls not only epistemiology
but the metaphysics of culture.
3) The motif which the British poet Robert Graves used in
one of his poems and which I have added to the final piece
of "Ksenia" in part as an answer to Graves.
4) The thirst for memory is equal to the thirst for blood -
a drop of blood gives a moment of memory to the soul of a
dead person.
5) Unfortunately, there is not room here to refer to yet
another nuance of meaning, ehich adds through the meaning
of the word "mnit'" -- to imagine, and for this reason a
signficant problem of memory -- imagination does not fall
in with the intent of today's discussion. In connection
with this it seems to me that Bashlyarovsky's dream should
not be considered exactly as non-memory, as non-
imagination.
6) See Lyotard's meta-recite.
7) Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Stanford U. Press,
1988, p. 170. ("All of Western faith and good faith was
engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could
refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange
for meaning and that something could guarantee this
exchange - God, of course. But what if God himself can be
simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which
attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes
weightless; it is no longer anything but a giant
simulacrum...")
8) Precisely this point, apparently, compels J.L. Borges to
create the metaphor Funes-Miracle-Memory, a metaphor of the
reciprocal devouring of memory and the remembered: of their
factual, monstrous coincidence.
9) Jacques Derrida makes the following distinction between
transgression and reduction-epoche: "The phenomenological
epoche is a reduction that pushes us back toward meaning.
Sovereign transgression is a reduction of this reduction:
not a reduction to meaning, but a reduction of meaning."
Jacques Derrida. Writing and Difference. U. Chicago
Press, 1978. p. 268.
10) Memory-mirror-titans; the torn, dismembered Dionysus,
etc.
11) From the book XENIA (by this author)? Lyn has this
poem.
Translator's notes:
a. The Russian prefix "za-" in the works of this author
reflects the multivalency of one word or invented words due
to the creative morphology of the language. The existing
word "zabyvanie" means literally "forgetting". But there
is also a verb "byvat", "to be", which the author here
fuses with the prefix "za-" which can mean "trans-" or, as
a preposition, "behind", "beyond", "at", "after", "because
of". The noun "zabyvanie" does not exist in Russian (no!
Vanessa is wrong!), therefore the meaning is open to
interpretation and associations.
b. "sobytie" without hyphen means "happening, occurence,
event" which, according to the author, is the result of
"co-being".
c. "imeni" is a declined form of "imya", "name" in the
nominative case.
d. the author inserts an "i" into the root of the verb
"pomyanut'" ("to remember") to emphasize what he sees as
the semantic connection between the words.
e. In Russian these two words have identical roots but
different prefixes - uderzhanie, soderzhanie.
f. "so-obshitel'nost'" hinting at the word "soobshit'" to
inform, announce and "obshitel'nost'" - sociability.
g. see note b.
h. this word also contains the elements "za" and "byt" and
could also allude to the verb "zabyt'" - to forget. See
also note a.
i. a play on sounds/words: "vtorenie-tvorenie". The first
word does not exist (O, Vanessa, dear, this word exists
too) on its own but the "vtor" root implies repeating,
something done a second time. The second word literally
means creation or creating; the consonant pair is simply
reversed or "turned around".
j. "zapamyatovat'" is a less commonly used form of the verb
"zabyvat'/zabyt'", "to forget", and, as the reader can see,
contains both the particles "za" and "mya".
k. see note a.
l. "prestuplenie" which literally means "crime", is
semantically related to the verb "perestupat'/perestupit'"
meaning "to step over" and figuratively "to overstep,
transgress", thus linking the words "crime" and
"transgression".
m. as taken from the verb "byvat'".
n. "vremya" ("time") which contains the elements "mya" and
"ya" from the preceding discussion.
o. Tartarus of Greek mythology.
p. in Latin in the original.
q. See note i.
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 1992 14:46:37 EST
From: Lyn Hejinian <70550.654@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: xeniaX-To: symposia@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu
November 1, Sunday:
Dear Colleagues: I'm amused that our symposium in its first week
has resembled my only other e-mail experience, namely messages
from Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; I bought a modem solely in order to
communicate with him during the long period when Soviet and then
Russian postal system was only sporadically operative, and when
strange (good) fortune gave Arkadii access to e-mail.
In any case, both Arkadii and Eyal have asked me to add
something from Arkadii's forthcoming booklength poem XENIA to our
discussion. The American translation (in manuscript) is a little
over 100 pages long, and it's difficult to excerpt from the
whole, since the "argument" accumulates, like an unfolding
discourse (or in multiple discourses). So I've decided just to
send you the first several pages, with the alternation between
poetry and prose which is characteristic of the work as a whole.
The essay on Memory that Arkadii sent to us, by the way,
will be published in POETICS JOURNAL (the next issue), but the
version you read is slightly rough (no fault of the author's or
Vanessa Bittner's--Arkadii's prose is very difficult to
translate) and we will try to revise a bit before
publication--with Vanessa's help.
from XENIA
You see the mountains
and think them immobile
but they float like clouds.
Al-Djunayd
We see only what
we see
only what
lets us be ourselves--
seen.
The photograph refuses
to let into itself
what it created by studying us.
The frenzied braiding of salts,
ashes of silver.
A cock will crow three times
as dawn arrives. Sight
(in a game of tossed bones? an opening in the body?
shoelaces?
in the autobiography approaching
from behind your head?), finding
no object, seems lost.
History begins
only when powerlessness is acknowledged. I
can't understand: the embraces of father and mother?
The transition of one to the other?
This is the boundary dancing at the threshold
where an echo slowly floats around reason.
To go on.
Death is not an event, but an ex-
foliation:
the past is a knot of ellipses--
noon
with the sun spot removed
whose depths are raised to the simple surface
by the mosquito wind of things,
objects' chips, sucked
in vain
into description--sight--
or the rules for rendering
a two-dimensional representation multi-dimensional--
a question of optics (or allegories).
Flight fades into the porous yellow ice
of the pages flowering between the dry fingers.
The smoke is black.
The azure's shrieking.
Senselessly cloud falls to the south.
And stuck together, like candies of happiness,
demons with their meditations control the eyes
like fire whose net is irridescent and plain
and monotonous too
like the pendulum of love.
It's not death that's "disturbing," but rather--
until one is able to move in metabolic particles--
the absence discovered at every point in the splash
of the day
whose halves are shut
behind the shadow's back (yes, definitely, embraces,
before all else) everywhere
where it can occur
coupling non-becoming with intercession--
the unravelled tissue's decay. Speed.
Skid. The division of time: the roar in a child's seashell.
Surroundings.
The site of wandering examines
its own expectations. The mouth
takes on a definite form
so that the word sky takes on the density of pebbles
smashing the shell of reflections.
Now for the story of the branching city. Complexity doesn't mean
endless additions. The proto-perception of dreams. The multitudes
are mutinous (the more money you give me the more I'll have--and
what do you need it for?). This playful twig sticks up in the
air: attentiveness. But also the epistolary style, exhaustive,
following trackes (are you talking about me? the day before
yesterday you said that you needed me in order to experience
yourself through me), evading possible signs, one's own presence,
Khlebnikov--the ruins of never-erected cyclopic constructions. A
stellar swarming in the absolute transparency of subject and
object. The rustle of a stone flying downward. Slowly I bend
toward you. The slope is open to the south wind. What for you is
a moment, for me is a millenium, augmented by anticipation.
Patience? The foreknowledge that is fated not to answer questions
about death--not to sprout in the skull of matter. Unhurried
oxydation, but also the epistolary method, reaching an
inadmissable surplus: an intersec/ruption, not giving the sought
for sense of conclusion in any point of the splash, rousing the
night with ex-. What distinguishes a "judgment" from an
"utterance"? Look in the dictionary, you say. Look in the
dictionary and the word is already turning into the word that
endlessly approximates a fading voice. As for snow in the
branching story of the city. I bend down toward her and in front
of me the thinnest droplet discloses the time frame of China.
Behind the window there's snow. No. Contaminations of the city.
We'll bring this elm into the map's field. A crow, not knowing
loss. Instead, so as to come nearer, opening--it moves away,
until it disappears completely beyond the boundaries of the
phrase.
*********
translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova. Sun and Moon
Press will be publishing the book in January of next year. My
apologies for any typos--I don't know how to call up files into
my e-mail program, so anything you get from me is typed "in
realtime"--and generally, as fast as I can type it.
Lyn Hejinian
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1992 16:28:22 -0500
From: "Jerome J. Mc Gann"
Subject: memory again
I was moved to the following reflections after reading Arkadii's
essay. I would be much interested in any other reactions.
"Thoughts on `Zapamyatovat'"
What follows are some reactions to Arkadii D's
essay/meditation "Eroticism of For-Getting, Eroticism of
Beyond-Seeing". I am moved to write them because AD's essay
exposes some of the most cherished illusions of the west. And
also because from the west may yet come (do now come, and have
been coming always) other voices and imaginations that stand
counter to those mostcherished in Memory. Other possible
"memories".
AD mentions Plato in passing -- Plato, who deplored writing
because it threatened one of his touchstone values: Memory. But
according to Lyn H "Writing is an Aid to Memory".
LH's is a distinctly anti-platonic thought. And what she
means by "Memory" is not at all what Plato means. Plato's is the
meaning you, AD, sketch in the opening of your essay -- the
meaning of the known and ordered world, the remembered world.
AD also mentions Baudrillard, a quintessential (or so we
have judged) "postmodern thinker". His however is, I believe,
the deconstructive dead end of the Platonic/Enlightenment line.
Out ofthe ground of reality Baudrillard spins the precession of
the simulacra. Or: either Memory or Oblivion. Being and
Nothingness. Presence and Absence. And all these ordered along
the platonic grid of "the real" (the Forms) and the "unreal" (the
Shadow plays).
"But what if God himself can be simulated, reduced to . .
.signs? Then the whole system becomes. . . a gigantic
simulacrum."(Baudrillard) In Baudrillard this famous question
comes as a deconstructive threat -- is posed as such, is received
as such (generally).
That is to say, Baudrillard is not serious.
But Baudrillard may be taken seriously. His whole system
canbe reduced to a system of signs, a gigantic simulacrum, as
ideal as god himself. Himself.
We may think otherwise than this -- say, according to Blake,
for whom all gods reside in the human breast. God (to be
capitalized here as the subject of this sentence) and the gods
always were creatures of the human imagination, ie, in postmodern
terms, constructed systems of signs; it was merely a special
system of signs -- one that asserted it wasn't a signifying
system, but was self-identical ("I am that I am"), that (mis)led
us into the transcendental imagination of reality.
"Absolute historical memory" in this perspective is a
special conception -- a heuristic tool, literally a signifying
system. We must not take it for either god or the "set of all
(memorial) sets". It is simply (and profoundly) the idea of such
a set -- an idea we may want to invoke and use for particular
immediate and practical purposes.
So, "zapamyatovat": "to go beyond memory", to cross
itsborder, is to enter another territory, the geography of
"oblivion". Here is Leto, the land (in English) of Swinburne:
Here where the world is quiet,
Here where all trouble seems
Dead winds and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams. . . .etc.
Most emphatically not an "absence" or a nothing: it is
"positivenegation" (terrifying to Coleridge's idealistic mind,
splendid andcomforting to Swinburne's sensational mind). To
enter this (new)world is (in William Morris's words) to "Forget
six counties overhung with smoke", etc. It is to get, literally,
"News from Nowhere".
"Zapamyatovat": we have no such wonderful word in our
language, so I thank you for it, AD. But it is a word known to
all the poets, and especially to those for whom there is a world
of imagination. The Swinburnian Land of Oblivion, Byron's
Manfred, Blake's Los[s].
jerome mcgann
From: jenglish@sas.upenn.edu (James English)
Subject: Rabate/Chernetsky
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 92 21:47:27 EST
To the symposium participants:
Having only recently arrived from France to take up his new
post at the University of Pennsylvania, Jean-Michel Rabate is
having difficulties getting set up with functional computer
hardware and software. The computer that has just been installed
in his office, for example, is equipped with a French keyboard
but can only read the keyboard input as though it were standard
American. In any event, Jean-Michel regrets that it is
impossible for him to participate in the symposium. He has,
however, solicited a response to the early symposium postings
from Vitaly Chernetsky, a colleague in the Comparative Literature
and Theory department. I have slightly edited Vitaly's text,
which follows.
--Jim English
WHY THE RUSSIAN POSTMODERN?
"Russian postmodernism: an oxymoron?"--this is the
question posed by the title of Marjorie Perloff's essay. What
happens to the cultural phenomenon which according to most
cultural theorists is the product of late capitalism, consumer
society, commodity culture, etc., when it is transposed into the
society where the most basic commodities are in short supply?
And if there exists Russian (or, more correctly, Soviet)
postmodern culture, how does it sustain the claim of being
postmodern, in what postmodernist activities does it engage? To
my disappointment, I found that what Russian postmodernism is
is precisely the question Perloff's essay is not willing to
address. Perloff's agenda seems to be only to underscore that
the two groups--the heterogeneous Russian postmodern poets and
the American language poets--differ considerably; her way of
proving it seems to be to claim that cultural production in the
late Soviet Union has little if anything to do with its Western
postmodern contemporaries. Although she herself admits that "to
generalize from so few examples is, of course, dangerous,"
Perloff is nevertheless willing to do so. In this I see a
possibility that a forum like ours could degenerate into an
enterprise which I would call "paleontological": to
"reconstruct," as Georges Cuvier claimed to be able to do with a
prehistoric animal, the entire Russian postmodern scene out of
one or two of its "bones." Need one to say that the postmodern
culture is not a coherent "organism," and that in these
paleontological attempts we end up creating ghosts like the
mysterious Foma Akvinskii (instead of St. Thomas Aquinas) who
appears in the English translation of Aleksei Parshchikov's essay
"New Poetry" in _Poetics Journal_? Can we thus hope actually to
produce a meaningful discussion and not just a simulacrum of it?
Another problem that I find potentially present in the
argument advanced by Perloff and some other critics is reducing
postmodernism from a culture's condition simply to a movement or
even a sum total of stylistic devices (unfortunately, that also
happens to be the predominant view of postmodernism expressed by
the Russian critics within the former Soviet Union). And, in my
opinion, it is the question why the culture both in the US and in
the former USSR has taken the forms it did, what are these
changes symptomatic of, that needs most urgently to be addressed.
It has been said at various occasions that "cultural
phenomena that reached [Russia] from the West. . . acquired
features utterly unfamiliar to their progenitors and relate to
their Western kin only in name" (Dmitrii Prigov, interview in
_Poetics Journal_ 8, pp. 12-13). Many would argue that it were
often not even the phenomena themselves but rather the names for
them. The case often seems to be that the names were
appropriated for various cultural practices which were not
imported from the West, but conditioned in their emergence by
Russian culture's internal development. But the very fact that
the shapes taken by this cultural production happened to have
striking similarities with their Western counterparts suggests
that the homology goes further than it might seem at first; and
one does not need to be labeled a Slavophile when one asserts
that sometimes Russian practitioners of culture may even be ahead
of their colleagues abroad (remember Marinetti's amazement when
upon his arrival in Russia he was told by the Russian Futurists
that he wasn't going far enough in handling language). Marjorie
Perloff seizes upon the vague, almost "impressionistic"
formulations ofEpstein's account of contemporary Russian poetry,
easily susceptible to criticism. I would like to draw attention
to another essay by Epstein, "After the Future: On the New
Consciousness in Literature,"the English translation of which was
published in the Spring 1991 issue of _South Atlantic Quarterly_,
one of the most noteworthy attempts to date of theorizing the
cultural condition of the late Soviet empire, stating that "by
the 1980s, the basic premises ofartistic consciousness in [the
USSR] were quite postmodern, perhaps even more radically and
consistently than in the West." "Was it not the case," writes
Epstein,
that our culture began creating simulacra, that is, the
utmost faithful copies that do not have an original,
much earlier and in greater quantities that in the West?
How does one have to deal with the figure of Brezhnev,
embodying the 'businesslike constructive approach' and
'the progressive development of the mature socialism?'
In difference with the sinisterly modernist, Kafkaesque
figure of Stalin [here Epstein's point of view is akin to
that of Boris Groys, elaborated in his The Total Art of
Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and
Beyond (Princeton, 1992), who interprets Stalin's Soviet
Union as a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a
total(itarian) work of art; this also leads us to assert
once more the profound homology of totalitarianisms in
the fascist and Soviet states which both embarked on
aesthetisizing the political project (see Walter Benjamin's
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction" in his Illuminations)], Brezhnev is a
typical simulacrum, a postmodernist perfunctory object,
even a hyperrealistic object of some kind, behind which
there is no reality to be found. Long before the
Western video technology started creating in abundance
true-to-life images of the nonexistent reality, this task
was already being solved by our ideology, media,
statistics that counted up to a hundredth of a percent
the crop that had never been gathered." (440 [I have
modified the translation to be closer to the original
Russian.])
"The triumph of the self-valorizing ideas," he continues, "that
imitate and abolish reality assisted in creating the
postmodernist mentality not less than the domination of video
communications which also create the folded in itself world of
the transfixed time" (443, modified translation again).
Since I have brought up Boris Groys's book which from the
moment of its original publication in German provoked a heated
debate among the academics engaged in the study of Russian
culture, I would like to point out some of this book's
unquestionable merits. Groys positions the cultural production
which occasioned the present forum within the context of the
Soviet empire's own development. I strongly disagree with
Marjorie Perloff when she talks about "the long midcentury hiatus
of Stalinist years." While from the point of view of aesthetic
value (recently a very much attacked concept) culture of the
Stalin years probably loses the competition with cultural
products of other times and places, its aesthetical system, its
governing logic should by no means be discarded by a cultural
theorist. Recently there have been trends to explain Stalinist
art both as a modernist and as a postmodern phenomenon. In fact,
in Groys's book the two seem to be conflated, as manifested, for
example, in his insightful remark that "Stalinist culture looks
upon itself as postapocalyptic--the final verdict on all human
culture has already been passed." "Socialist realism,"
Groyscontinues, "regards historical time as ended and therefore
occupies no particular place in it" (48, 49). Of socialist
realism's simulacric concern with verisimilitude he writes:
Its heroes . . . must thouroughly resemble people if
people are not to be frightened by their true aspect,
and this is why the writers and artists of socialist
realism bustle about inventing biographies, habits,
clothing, physiognomies, and so on. They almost seem
to be in employ of some sort of extraterrestrial bureau
planning a trip to Earth--they want to make their
envoys as anthropomorphic as possible, but they cannot
keep the otherworldly void from gaping through all the
cracks in the mask. (63)
We must, then, talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but
probably about three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of
Stalin years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new
post-Soviet culture which is probably emerging now. The culture
that our forum is trying to address, then, could be named the
postmodernism of the late (using both meanings of the word
"late") Soviet empire. The fascinatingly rich scene of the new
Russian poetry that emerged during the past fifteen years or so
has been rather unlucky in the critical/theoretical treatment it
received. Attempts at analysis ended up in imposition of rigid
classificatory grids (a project suspicious tobegin with), and if
Epstein's trichotomy "conceptualism/metarealism/presentism"
offered in his essay "Metamorphosis" (a bowdlerizedversion of
which appears as an afterword to _Third Wave_) is debatable,
Wachtell's and Parshchikov's pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomy
"monological/pluralistic" found in their "Introduction" to
_ThirdWave_, which happens to place all of conceptualists and
those close to them under the former rubric, is hair-raising.
The merit of"Metamorphosis" is that, despite all its weaknesses,
it is still the only attempt to date in any language to offer a
somewhat coherent and inclusive picture of the new wave of
Russian poetry (why this wave should be counted "third" remains a
mystery to me). Perloff finds Russian conceptualism not standing
up to its name, seeing in it the urge to "expose." If anything,
this urge to "expose" (inaugurated in Russian culture by
Vissarion Belinsky [1811-1848]) is something quite alien to the
works in question; they do not"expose"--they deconstruct. In
fact, they precisely "take up the challenge presented by Duchamp"
(Perloff about Western conceptualism). How else would you
classify V. Komar and A.Melamid's gesture of signing the Lenin
"quotation" "Our goal is communism"? (This quote was to be found
multiplied through millions of posters all over the Soviet
Union.) And, to look in the realm of poetry, doesn't, for
example, such a specimen of American language poetry as Bob
Perelman's poem "China," which Fredric Jameson analyses in his
essay "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logicof Late Capitalism,"
strikingly resemble "catalogs" by the Russiancon ceptualist Lev
Rubinshtein (which returns us to Wachtell's and Parshchikov's
puzzling gesture of calling Russian conceptualist poets
"monological")?
What, then, I would suggest as a possible course of
discussion--which has already been begun by our forum and which
should by all means be continued--is both to try to investigate
the multiplicity of paradigms of postmodern cultural production
in the former Soviet empire, to try to single out in what and why
it is both similar to and different from cultural phenomena found
in the US and the rest of the Western world, and, most
importantly, to theorize these similarities and differences. A
Russian proverb says that "the first pancake comes out lumpy"
(pervyi blin--komom). Even if that might be the case, it should
by no means stop us from frying more of them.
Vitaly Chernetsky
University of PA
From: Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM> Subject: Vitaly Chernetsky's essay This is precisely the sort of response I hoped the symposium would generate. Vitaly Chernetsky is right, of course, to say that my remarks were superficial; indeed, I only wanted to raise an issue that had come upbecause certain parallels were being drawn between the "language" poetsand "new Russian" poets that I found dubious and I was having a hardtime finding a connection. It's still hard: for a foreigner to understand the modernist/postmodernist strains in the Stalinist era is difficult and what we now need--and I hope will get from people like Chernetsky--is afuller account than the one Wachtel and Parschchikov give us in Third Wave of what the cultural determinants are and now they relate. But I would like to ask Chernetsky how he proposes that those of us with little or no Russian begin? Is there a bibliography he can suggest? An important cultural study that might help U.S. readers? I would be very grateful for such information. From the "lumpy pancake," Marjorie Perloff
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 14:54:45 EST
From: Bob Perelman
Subject: Russian postmodernism
November 10: Dear Colleagues: My first impulse is toward what
Jakobson might term the phatic: hello, contact, tweet, cheep,
bow-wow.
Lyn, if I had _The Guard_ here I would love to quote the lines
where you mime the operation of translating from the Russian, to
the effect that the dog says quack, the goat says gruss or
whatever. That seems emblematic of the space between contemporary
Russian and American poetry. Vitaly, when I read that "China"
"strikingly resembles" Lev Rubinshtein's catalogs, it feels like
"quack" where I expect "bow-wow." I.e.,
8.
Foo! Right here in nearby dale
Heartthrobs at the nightingale!
9. Mischievous small nightingale
Singing always in the dale!
. . . .
32.
People surely get th' idea,
If they're just not idiots!
33.
People are not idiots,
Even if they miss th'idea! [_Third Wave_, 139, 141]
There is something going on there involving, I would guess,
sarcasm directed against the vatic mode; doggerel as vehicle for
generous social emotion; repetion & permutation. But so much must
be happening at the level of tone, aggressive echoes of cultural
memory, that I'm at a loss to find much similarity to my own
work.
Arcadii, rereading your "Nasturtium," I thought of Williams's
"Crimson Cyclamen." Not that the following sets of lines are all
that much 'alike':
Blades pocked with repetition
(forty seconds spent searching for an analogy
to the upward branching
at the throat of the stem--instead
of this: "the emotions are
a component of composition, and the expression,
itself branching out into exclamation,
means as much as
the comma which proceeds its appearance") [_Description, 99]
The stem's pink flanges,
strongly marked,
stand to the frail edge,
dividing, thinning
through the pink and downy
mesh--as the round stem
is pink also--cranking
to penciled lines
angularly deft
through all, to link together
the unnicked argument
to the last crinkled edge--
where the under and the over
meet and disappear
and the air alone begins
to go from them--
the conclusion left still
blunt, floating
. . . .
each petal tortured
eccentrically
the while, warped edge
jostling
half-turned edge
side by side
until compact, tense
evenly stained
to the last fine edge
an ecstacy [_Collected Poems_, Vol 1, 421, 423]
It's just an analogy of course, but it strikes me that the
distance between poem and flower, made central in "Nasturtium"
and refused if not refuted in "Cyclamen," is like the distance
between critical apprehension and poetry in many cases. In my own
unofficial thought about these matters, and in the emphatically
phatic contact zone of e-mail, such distances sholdn't exist, are
false projections, reified backdrops for auratic arias.
Nevertheless, as Williams puts it in "The Descent":
Postmodernism beckons
as modernism beckoned.
Critical genealogy is a kind
of art prose,
a sort of poetics,
even
a poem, since the lines it rewrites are new lines
read by readers
heretofore unaddressed,
unmarked--
since their eyes
are focused on new media
(even though formally these were unaccredited).
No poem is made up entirely of language--since
the channels it leases are always conduits
formerly unarticulated. A
world lost,
a world unarticulated,
beckons to new genres
and no aesthetic value (trashed) is so valuable as the memory
of value
Among others things, I hope the above will be heard as
counterpoint to Arcadii's "Eroticism of For-getting."
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 14:31:08 +0300 From: arkadii Subject: idle talk Dear colleagues, For me to answer some of the questions posed by Mr. Chernetsky or to oppose some of his arguments I would have to get back to my first remark about endless love of Russian criticism to Baudrillard's rhetoric which it believes is the most relevant instrument in studying the contemporary culture and the rest. But in this article I was most interested by some of his digressions which bring back memories of critical discourse of the time of Socialist Realism. so dear to the author of the article. For example - "sometimes Russians practicers of culture may even be ahead of their colleagues abroad"... Certainly, nobody claims inventing postmodernism but still... sometimes it happens! But what on earth being ahead means? Ahead of what? The head of a foreign colleague? Then what is a system of coordinates for the action? What do we refer ourselves to? A beginning? Then a beginning of what? Or an end? An end of history? No matter what all the subsequent reflections of Chernetsky on post-modernism will necessarily have to be looked at in the perspective of History reaching its completion. History which is not short of time, space or any features of creativity. Background of orthodox vision is obvious even in the very beginning of the passage quoted by Chernetsky, from Michael Epshtain - "our culture began creating simulacra (sic!) <...> much erlyer and in greater quantities..." . That is for sure. Dating back to the polemics of the Nicaea Council in 767 on _kenosis_ through the endless discussions of symbolism and up to the very recent past... In fact, all of this reminds of an attempt to play a game of chess using Go stones. As much as Michael Epshtain's poetic taxonomy. Just in case, one should keep in mind that it owes a lot to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis which according to Kassirer "fundamental altered the biological ideal of knowledge". And so on, and so forth. Meanwhile, to touch again our favorite conceptualism again seems pointless - it's as infinite as any other projection. But sometimes I can't but ponder whether the known slogan Jedem das Seine can become a cliche which being involved into the practice of ironic rethinking would become a surplus meaning of today's culture. Lyn Hejinian is right -- irony is a twin sister of nostalgia. Arkadii Dragomoshchenko.
From: Mikhail Epstein, Department of Russian Studies, 403
Candler Library, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.
To: Editors of PMC and all participants of the discussion on
Russian postmodernism.
November 15, 1992
Dear colleagues and friends:
I am entering the discussion with a delay because of my
inability to cope with such a "postmodern" technical device
as e-mail, which argues in favor of those who resist any
parallels between Russian and Western "postmodern"
mentalities. My theoretical standpoint, however, is the
relevance of these typological parallels: not in the sense
that Russia belatedly "caught up with" the Western
postmodernism, but in terms of their "alternate" (and
complementary) developments, in such a way that Russia was
the first to embrace the "post-apocalyptic" sensibility of
postmodernism, whereas the West was the first to identify
this sensibility in theoretical concepts and to give it the
name of "postmodernism." Vitaly Chernetsky's proposal "to
talk not about a Russian postmodernism, but probably about
three of them: the postmodernism of the peak of Stalin
years, the one of the 1970s and 80s, and some new post-
Soviet culture which is probably emerging now" seems to me
the most promising point of departure and the possible core
of our subsequent discussion. Vitaly Chernetsky refers to
Boris Grois's book which regards Stalin's state as the
fulfillment of modernist (avant-gardist) project; it should
be added that the accomplishment of such a project (if it
really was a success) transported Russian-Soviet culture
into a new, postmodernist, "post-apocalyptic" dimension. No
more tension between the modernist project and reality: this
is already postmodernism (at least the gates to this kingdom
of simulacra).
I suggest to your attention some excerpts from my paper
on two Russian postmodernisms and their interrelationship
with the Western one. The paper was presented at the MLA
conference in December 1991, at the same panel with Marjorie
Perloff's and Barrett Watten's papers now proposed for this
discussion. Also, I will cite several passages from my
recent pamphlet (of a very limited circulation) arguing for
the purely "ideological", "Eastern" version of postmodernism
as opposed to Fredric Jameson's influential theory which
connects postmodernism with the economic basis of the "late
capitalism" and therefore denies its possibility in non-
Western countries (Mikhail Epstein, _Relativistic Patterns
in Totalitarian Thinking: An Inquiry into Soviet Ideological
Language_. Kennan Institute of Advanced Russian Studies.
Occasional Papers, # 243. Washington: Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, 1991). What I am going
to say does not reflect latest interesting developments in
Russian criticism where the question of "post-modernism"
became as focal as the concept of "socialist realism" was in
the 1930s (this is not an arbitrary connexion: actually, the
later stage of post-modernism comes to succeed the earlier
one). In particular, I would like to address you to the
articles of Vyacheslav Kuritsyn "Post-modernism: new ancient
culture" and Sergei Nosov "Literature and Play", accompanied
by editorial comments in _Novyi Mir_ (Moscow), 1992, No.2.
pp.225-239.
[Editor's note: Mikhail Epstein's work is included in the
file SYMPOS-2.193 in this issue of PMC.]
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1992 12:02:21 EST
From: "(James English)"
Subject: Vitaly C. Remarks
To the Symposium participants:
Here is a follow-up correspondence on the Third Wave from Vitaly
Chernetsky.
--Jim English
Dear Bob, dear colleagues:
It is always a dangerous enterprise to offer a reading
(especially a sketchy one) in the presence of the author(s) of
the text(s) one is talking about. I still believe that comparing
Bob's "China" to some of Lev Rubinshtein's work (notice: I am not
attempting to establish an equation between larger corpuses of
their works) is not entirely a misreading (a "quack" when on
expects a "bow-wow"). By the way, in Russian the ducks say
"krya-krya" and the dogs say "gav-gav," but still one can say
with a degree of certainty that Russian ducks and dogs (and other
creatures) "strikingly resemble" their American counterparts.
I would even venture to extend this comparison: I believe
that Rubinshtein is not only about doggerel-like lines as
"vehicle for social emotion" (see, for example, the other catalog
included in Third Wave, "From Thursday to Friday" [Bob quotes "A
Little Nighttime Serenade"]). I apologize for not being able to
present here, due to time constrains, a convincing proof of my
argument, but let me elaborate the parallel a little more. I do
find some of Rubinshtein's texts ("Poiavlenie geroia" ["The
Appearance of the Hero"], "Vse dal'she i dal'she" ["Further and
Further On"] and others) to some extent "Perelmanian," while in
some of Bob's poems (here I would mention, in addition to
"China," "Holes in the Argument" and "Doggerel Overtaken by
Order") I see a mode present which is similar to that of some of
the writings of, say, Rubinshtein or Druk.
A few words about Third Wave. Producing an anthology of the
new Russian poetry in English is a most praiseworthy idea. I
believe, however, that the "pancake" offered by this book is much
too "lumpy." To my knowledge, another such anthology is being
prepared for publication (as far as I can understand, completely
independently from Third Wave). I hope that it avoids some of
Third Wave's drawbacks (although that could be problematic, too:
the project is "marred" by the involvement of Yevtushenko as a
co-editor).
First, why Third Wave? The title is misleading, because the
term "third wave" is customarily applied to the culture of the
Russian emigration of the Brezhnev years (Joseph [or Iosif, but,
for heavens sake, not "Josef," as it is in the introduction to
Third Wave] Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov, Vasily Aksenov, Sergei
Dovlatov, Lev Losev, Bakhyt Kenzheev, Yuz Aleshkovsky, etc.). In
fact, a collection of essays entitled exactly The Third Wave and
devoted to these and other writers of that generation was
recently published in this country. If anything, the emergence
on the literary scene of the generation represented in the
anthology in question is posterior to "third wave." (Besides,
virtually all of the poets represented in the anthology did not
emigrate from the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era.)
Second, the choice of poems is sometimes surprising
(although perhaps it is not the editors' fault), and omissions of
certain poets (Igor' Irten'ev, Evgenii Bunimovich, Aleksandr
Levin and Mikhail Sukhotin to mention just a few) are hard to
explain (as well as perhaps the inclusion of some of the others).
Most importantly, I think that in this particular case the fact
that the original texts are not printed together with the
translations is especially unpardonable: the Russian publications
of these poems are dispersed between various official and
underground journals, almanacs, collections, etc.; there does not
yet exist a single representative anthology of the writings of
this generation in their original language. This is even more
true when one considers the fact that some of the translations of
these poems, in which the play with linguistic and cultural codes
is one of the most relevant elements of construction, are not
entirely reliable; in my opinion, Vladimir Druk was particularly
unlucky in this respect, and I could list dozens of other
instances where I disagree with the translations offered. It
would be unfair, though, not to add at this point that some of
the translations, for example those by Michael Palmer, are
excellent.
One of the most problematic parts of Third Wave is the
introduction by Parshchikov and Wachtell. Some of their
assertions simply run counter to historical facts. (They claim,
for example, that Mayakovsky and Blok were "unpublishable in the
USSR between 1934 and the late 1950s" while these two have been
part even of the secondary school curriculum.) The most
questionable, though, is the pseudo-Bakhtinian dichotomizing
division to which I referred earlier; the mere reading of the
works by the "monological" and "pluralistic" poets (to call
postmodern poetry "monological" hardly makes sense to begin with)
unsettles it completely. And do we really have, in our postmodern
age, to be fed explanations in terms of binary oppositions?
Thus the anthology is framed by two highly idiosyncratic texts
(the introduction and Epstein's afterword), abounding in various
undercurrents evident to the reader familiar with the poetry in
question, which may serve only as an element of confusion (the
way they confused, I believe, Marjorie Perloff).
Finally, Third Wave is not, as it claims to be, the first
anthology of new Russian poetry to be published in English. It
was preceded by The Poetry of Perestroika, ed. Peter Mortimer and
S.J. Litherland, published in Britain two years ago. A note
about the possibility of homologies between the cultural
phenomena in the US and in the former USSR. One should talk, I
believe, not about the homology of movements, but about a number
of similarities, certain shared aspects of the postmodern
cultural condition. As far movements go, Russian conceptualism
is the only actual movement among the classificatory terms we are
offered in Third Wave (there isn't a "metarealist movement" or
school, etc.). This movement spans across genres: visual arts
(including happenings and performances, and through them,
avant-garde theater); poetry; prose; most recently -- film.
Together with the conceptualists, under the same cover (and
within the same "umbrella" groups, such as the Moscow Club
"Poetry" [Moskovskii klub "Poeziia"], which are highly
heterogeneous), one finds poets whose writing is much more
hermetic and esoteric, whose writing practice is to a great
extent conditioned by the situation of a narrow circle; in some
bizarre way they resurrect the paradigm of poetry's existence in
medieval Europe before printing -- poetry circulating within a
limited circle of friends and patrons.
Emerging from underground in the second half of the 1980s,
these heterogeneous literary groups developed differently. Some
came into the foreground of the cultural scene, gaining attention
of the critics and the media, etc.; some remained "widely known
in narrow circles." It is really sad, though, that sometimes
these circles are much too narrow; and in this respect I
especially welcome the happy event of the present symposium which
breaks through the barriers of these narrow circles. Once again,
I believe that the new Russian poetry is fascinatingly rich and
diverse, just like the entire culture of the Soviet postmodern.
We need more events like this one to open it up to intellectual
communities across the globe so that it achieves the recognition
it deserves.
Sincerely,
Vitaly Chernetsky
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 07:42:00 GMT From: Marjorie Perloff <0004221898@MCIMAIL.COM> Subject: Vitaly Chernetsky's commentary Dear Colleagues, I just read Vitaly Chernetsky's comments on THE THIRD WAVE and want to say I appreciate them very much. I myself had wondered about the title, the lack of bilingual texts, and some of the translations. I could not judge the omissions. I also had reservations about the monologic/dialogic dichotomy that Andrei and Andy Wachtel sketched out. Still, I think we should be grateful for THIRD WAVE as a first stab at the problem. The difficulty, when material is so new, is that translations will vary greatly in quality, that the editing will be less than meticulous, and that Introductions and Afterwords may be misleading. On the other hand, Andrew Wachtel, working with Alexei Parschikov, was willing to take on the project and to see it through and, given time constraints, translation problems, and availability of materials, I think it was useful. Clearly, it will take some time before we get the kind of anthology we want and, even then, what anthology, even of our own poetry, is ever ideal, ever comprehensive? Increasingly, U.S. publishers are reluctant to print the original language when they bring out translations; I know Ron Padgett had to fight to get the French into his beautiful edition of Blaise Cendrars's poetry--and then only in the back of the book! The real problem THE THIRD WAVE has faced--and I don't know how this will be resolved--is that unfortunately now that the Soviet Union is no more Americans have become much less interested in the "new new poetry," have lost the thrill of coming into contact with "forbidden" perestroika poetry. Now Russian poetry is just one more foreign poetry and increasingly, U.S. readers seem not to care too much about poetry in other languages. So what we need to do is keep up the momentum initiated by THIRD WAVE, even if the anthology is flawed. This symposium and the help people like Chernetsky have given is a step in the right direction. And I look forward to that next anthology he talks about. Best wishes, Marjorie Perloff