Can curation free the anthology? Giorgio Agamben’s apparatus and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Isabelle Parkinson (bio)
Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

This article analyzes the failure of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (2011) to fulfil the critical action it claims to achieve through curation. Deploying Agamben’s concept of the apparatus, the article looks beyond the editors’ claim that curation enables an avant-garde resistance to the canonizing force of the anthology form, using data visualizations to render visible Against Expression‘s covert enactment of the canonization it claims to avoid. In doing so, the article also questions the potential for curatorial practices to represent any real challenge to the status quo, given curation’s current function as a primary apparatus of the market.

Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing appeared in 2011, when the mode had gained international prominence as an influential strand of “innovative” or “avant-garde” literary production.¹ Situated alongside other contemporary publications such as Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius (2010), and Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing (2011), Against Expression consolidates the arguments for the significance of conceptual writing as a literary category. For the editors, however—in keeping with their characterization of conceptual writing as avant-garde and so resistant to the dominant culture and cultural domination—Against Expression is also an attempt to problematize the anthology form by deploying détournement strategies of appropriation and repurposing.² In their wide-ranging discussion of the American anthology tradition, Joe Lockard and Jillian Sandell describe the kind of anthologizing that Against Expression seeks to challenge:

By spatializing and historicizing bodies of knowledge into meaningful categories, anthologies consolidate new or existing canons of literature. The organization of materials in anthologies often implies a telos of development, and the anthology comes to embody a collective bildungsroman. (242)

The editors of Against Expression want to resist the canonizing, teleological function that ratifies a dominant narrative, instead presenting their work as an act of curation analogous to the literary practices of conceptual writing that reframe, decontextualize, or juxtapose existing cultural artefacts to generate a new set of meanings. This mode of meaning-making operates through action in and on the cultural sphere, mutely revealing rather than directly articulating a critique of dominant cultural, social, and political forms. Meaning is generated in the knowledge of this process; thus, Against Expression offers a dismantled version of the anthology as a practice of curation that lays bare its own processes to reveal itself as critical action.

Rather than succeeding in this endeavour to resist canonization, however, Against Expression in fact activates it, as demonstrated by the publication of a number of subsequent anthologies. In 2013, Norton produced a new edition of Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, which represents just the kind of canonizing, developmental mode Dworkin and Goldsmith claim to problematize and includes twenty-two of the authors represented in Against Expression (Dworkin and Goldsmith among them and prominently featured in the preface and introduction). In 2012, Les Figues Press published I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (edited by Caroline Bergvall), a direct response to Against Expression‘s version of conceptual writing. In 2015, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America came out from the University of Alabama Press (edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey). In the same year, Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK was published by Reality Street (edited by Emily Critchley). What I Say is the second volume of “the anthology project that began with Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone,” and Out of Everywhere 2 is a follow-up to the 1996 publication of the same name (edited by Maggie O’Sullivan). Although they don’t respond directly to Dworkin and Goldsmith’s anthology, these two publications reflect anxiety about the potential marginalization of some writers in Against Expression‘s endorsement of a distinct form of innovative poetry. On the whole, the succession of “revisionist” anthologies evinces a conviction that Against Expression reproduces one of the most significant outcomes of canonization: the exclusion of women and minority writers. This wave of anthologizing therefore begs the question: why has Against Expression produced an effect in the cultural sphere that so roundly contradicts its intention?

To answer this question, some theorization of the formal and editorial possibilities of the anthology is necessary, and I want to use Agamben’s notion of the apparatus as a way of conceptualizing a genre that remains undertheorized.³ In “What is an Apparatus?,” his 2006 gloss on Michel Foucault’s “decisive technical term,” Agamben characterizes the apparatus (dispositif) as a “network” established between elements in “a heterogeneous set” that includes “discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures, philosophical propositions, and so on,” and “appears at the intersection of power relations and relations of knowledge” (3). In Agamben’s development, Foucault’s original “heterogeneous set” is broadened to include “literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings” (14). From this broader starting point, Agamben’s discussion extends Foucault’s theory by drawing on Heidegger’s concept of installation: the “gathering together of the (in)stallation [Stellen] that (in)stalls man, this is to say, challenges him to expose the real in the mode of ordering [Bestellen]” (qtd. in Agamben 12). Agamben defines “installation” as the function of the apparatus. In his formulation, installation is the result of the meeting of the “two great classes”: “beings” and “apparatuses.” For Agamben, “living beings are incessantly captured” in the apparatus, and the engagement—the installation—of living beings in the apparatus creates the “third class, subjects” (14). Thus, subjectivity is defined as a process of constant installation, the capture and recapture of the living being in the apparatus as it moves from one form of engagement to another. As well as broadening its scope, Agamben also makes the definition of “apparatus” narrower and more specific. His example of the mobile phone indicates that he uses the term to denote individual instantiations (that is, apparatuses rather than “the apparatus”), junctions at the intersection of a number of vectors that install the subject as one nodal point in the network. This development of Foucault enables the analysis of an object in terms of its function as apparatus, and provides a framework for discussing the forms and processes of the subject’s installation in the system it intersects.

The literary anthology is a significant object of analysis on Agamben’s terms because it operates at the intersection of knowledge and power and across multiple vectors: as discourse, as institution, and as a method of distribution that circumscribes, validates and manages an area of knowledge. Agamben’s ideas are especially germane to Against Expression because the practice of conceptual writing is itself one of denaturalizing, a laying bare of the apparatus. One of the primary functions of the conceptual work is to expose the ways in which knowledge and power intersect in the construction of the subject.⁴ Dworkin and Goldsmith’s desire to confront the anthology as such is consistent with the defining mode of the conceptual writing they anthologize and define as the contemporary manifestation of the avant-garde. Indeed, this practice (of revealing the processes of subjectification) forms the basis of their assertion that the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century avant-garde has been subdued or repressed by the hegemony of the mainstream lyric that naturalizes the subjectivity (in Agamben’s terms) constructed in the capture of the “living being” in the apparatus.⁵ Because of the overarching emphasis on mode, the conceptual writing movement can claim a resurgent avant-garde position. For Dworkin and Goldsmith, its function is to lay bare both its place in the “network” of Agamben’s apparatus, and the field of literary production as such in relation to the broader cultural and socio-economic landscape. Conceptual writing is avant-garde because it ruptures the existing paradigm by drawing attention to it, thereby breaking the unspoken rule of collusion: the “forgetting” of the truth of its constructedness that enables a writer to produce work within the apparatus. This forgetting is concisely characterized by Dworkin’s description of the typical contemporary work of literature as “the hundred-thousandth lyric published this decade in which a plainspoken persona realizes a small profundity about suburban bourgeois life” (xxxix). In Dworkin’s caricature, the very act of writing upholds and obscures those social and cultural constructions challenged by the avant-garde. The lyric form in particular is highly problematic for conceptual writing because it presupposes a sincere subject position and an authentic voice that expresses something genuinely felt (hence, the anthology is “against expression”).⁶ Dworkin’s ironic alliteration emphasizes the qualities of this position: “plainspoken,” “persona,” “profundity.” His critique of contemporary literary production is also a critique of the institutionalized position it occupies, reflects, and perpetuates, indicated by the reference to “suburban bourgeois life”: a representation of its passive assimilation into the bourgeois worldview and its attendant institutions. The relevance to Agamben’s apparatus is apparent: the naturalization of the subject position as such is the function of the contemporary literature Dworkin critiques. In this paradigm, the work of conceptual writing is to denaturalize the subject and reveal the methods of its construction. To keep faith with this defining practice, and to resist the dissolution of the reader into a state of unexamined and docile subjectification, Against Expression must also therefore draw attention to its own construction and constructedness.

Dworkin and Goldsmith attempt this denaturalization by characterizing Against Expression as an act of curation, a self-reflexive practice that enables a critical engagement with its material. Curation has arguably become the primary cultural practice of the twenty-first century, moving beyond the cultural sphere to represent one of the main modes of social life—from the curatorial turn in journalism through social media to education.⁷ As art historian Terry Smith argues, “curating is everywhere being extended, encompassing every kind of organising of any body of images or set of actions” (17). In tracing the development of curation as a cultural practice in visual and especially in conceptual art, Paul O’Neill’s The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) starts with the historical avant-garde (for example, Dada, Surrealism and constructivism) and ends in the 2010s, when “discursive, pedagogical and dialogical approaches to exhibition production are becoming more prevalent.” For O’Neill, curation can be “used as a means of contesting the critical and aesthetic autonomy of art and the mediation of aesthetic value”; he picks out as exemplary those acts of curation where “the curatorial framework and its structural contestations are made more manifest” (129). Against Expression follows this understanding of the role of curation in contesting and making more manifest the relations of power and knowledge. Dworkin’s introductory essay on “The Fate of Echo” recognizes that “the paratext always suggests a perspective from which to read,” and explicitly takes hold of the paratextual element of the apparatus to present it as the embodiment of a self-conscious argument (xxiv). He is also concerned that, in resistance to the reifying potential of the anthology, Against Expression does not represent a definitive statement or a canon. He presents the anthology as an extension of the online UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, whose “curatorial premise” is to “look beyond received histories and commonplace affiliations” (xxiv). This claim aligns Against Expression‘s curatorial practice with the utopian practices of the 1960s, when “curators were beginning to make visible the mediating component within the formation, production and dissemination of an exhibition” (O’Neill, “Curatorial Turn” 13). Dworkin’s critique of “received histories and commonplace affiliations” also resonates with O’Neill’s characterization of the shift in curatorial practice in the 1990s, when the “ascendancy of the curatorial gesture … also began to establish curating as a potential nexus for discussion, critique and debate” (13-14). Like these art curators, Goldsmith and Dworkin speak critically from within the “institution”⁸—the universities of Pennsylvania (Goldsmith) and Utah (Dworkin)—and Against Expression likewise claims a critical position on established canons at close range, temporarily assembling a series of texts to offer a consciously-constructed argument for literary affiliation that challenges established literary and art histories. The claim to an overt composition and the foregrounding of the act of curation appears to get around the problem of the anthology’s authority by treating it explicitly as a temporary assemblage that is in itself a part of the emergence of the category. Dworkin characterizes his own activity as “assembling the present collection” (xli). As he says,

This anthology documents the explosion of publications since the turn of the millennium under the sign of the conceptual … to offer a snapshot of an instant in the midst of an energetic reformation, just before the mills of critical assessment and canonical formation have had a chance to complete their first revolutions.(xliv)

In other words, the anthology seeks to recognize the category without fixing it, without contributing to its authorization. Dworkin’s diction—”snapshot,” “instant,” “midst,” “energetic”—indicates that the anthology is not definitive, but is rather an immediate, temporary sketch of a phenomenon as it moves. In order to differentiate itself from the authorizing or textbook anthology, Against Expression also defines itself against the activity of canonization in the contrasting image of the “mills”: weighty, destructive and inexorable machines that process the original practices through the culture industry’s discourses and institutions.

Ironically (and tellingly), the canonizing function of the anthology that Dworkin and Goldsmith wish to resist is enacted in the 2013 Norton Postmodern American Poetry, in which they both appear. Editor Paul Hoover denies the possibility that conceptual writing can or should represent a challenge to the continuum of literary history, asserting that “For all the triumphal claims of conceptualism, no one is drowned but Icarus and the ship of history sails calmly on” (lvi). He follows this up with a reminder that “History determined that Rae Armantrout, an experimental lyric poet and close observer of human experience, won the Pulitzer Prize for 2010” (lvi). Hoover’s inclusion of Dworkin, Goldsmith, Place and Fitterman’s work in an anthology that repudiates both conceptual writing’s rejection of the lyric form and its resistance to institutionalized literary histories is problematic, particularly given conceptual writing’s attention to modes of production and distribution as its defining concern. As Place and Fitterman put it, in conceptual writing practices, the “primary focus moves from production to post-production. This may involve a shift from the material of production to the mode of production, or the production of a mode” (Notes on Conceptualisms, 16). The anthology as such is very much a “mode of production” that, in ratifying a version of literature, is also “the production of a mode” that Against Expression wants to both expose and counter. The explicit function of the Norton Postmodern American Poetry is to canonize, periodize, and legitimate what Hoover calls “the ‘other tradition'” (xxviii). This function is unequivocally articulated in the preface and introduction. Hoover celebrates the achievement of the first edition of Postmodern American Poetry (1994) in “canonizing new practices such as language poetry and honouring the avant-garde in general”; establishes a historical model that eternalizes and assimilates innovation by declaring “as happens with every generation, the new wins the day and the broader writing culture is altered by its theories and practices”; and asserts the criterion of newness as the primary measure of value in claiming that “in 1994 the newest poetics was that of language poetry. Today the new is represented by conceptual poetry, Newlipo, cyberpoetry including Flarf, and the postlanguage lyric” (xxxvii). Hoover places this canon of the “other tradition” in the context of a historiography of supersession and so justifies the new edition as an extension of the original’s historical parameters. In this way, the logic of the avant-garde is assimilated to the model of the canonizing anthology. Moreover, his triumphant conclusion that “the book was a great success in its first trade season and became the classroom standard for teachers and students” presents problems for conceptual writing in particular, invested as it is in the production contexts of texts as the site of critical intervention (xxviii). The easy assimilation of “trade” and “the classroom standard” into the discourse of avant-garde cultural production appears to signal the failure of the avant-garde to challenge the status quo. Hoover resolves this contradiction by accepting institutional validation as a criterion of value for the avant-garde. Against Expression tackles it by using a practice of curation that enables Goldsmith and Dworkin to keep faith with the resistant project of conceptual writing without capitulating to the discourses it critiques.⁹

Against Expression deploys a number of paratextual devices to carry out its critique. First, it repurposes a common feature of the anthology: the headnote. Rather than introducing the author and offering a potted history of their life, work, and activity on the literary scene, the headnotes in Against Expression present an argument for the work’s inclusion. The traditional form of the headnote overwritten by Against Expression can be seen in Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry, in keeping with its function as a periodizing, canonizing anthology. Hoover’s headnotes are written in full, formal sentences, and are generally structured to formulate a literary-historical biographical narrative. The entry for Charles Bernstein—who is also included in Against Expression—begins by noting his date of birth, where he was born, that he attended Harvard University, and that he “studied with the philosopher Stanley Cavell,” offering a biographical precis that emphasizes his relationships with an important institution and an important man. Hoover’s assertion that Bernstein was “The leading theorist of language poetry” reflects the discourse of hierarchy that is a common feature of the headnotes in this anthology (517). The final paragraph details his involvement in establishment production contexts and his working relationships with other editors and academics, consolidating the emphasis on institutional legitimisation and moving Bernstein from his role in a radical poetry movement to his position in academia, following a narrative of development. The headnote for Bernstein in Against Expression operates very differently. Formally, the style is much looser and more irregular, as in this very long and unwieldy sentence, an asyndetic list jammed with information and riddled with parenthetical asides:

In addition to the Inkblot Record, “I and The” also recalls less procedural works based on restricted or specialist vocabularies: Hannah Weiner’s Code Poems (composed in the semaphore of the maritime International Code of Signals for the Use of All Nations); Aaron Kunin’s translation of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” into the 170 words of Kunin’s own private sign language (“You Won’t Remember This,” The Mauberly Poems [New York:/ubu Editions, 2004]); Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns and CK Ogden’s translation of Joyce (both of which confine themselves to the 850 words of BASIC English) and – perhaps closest to Bernstein’s poem – Laura Elrick’s “First Words” (sKincerity [San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2003]) and Kit Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas (San Francisco: This Press, 1976).(88)

Rather than offering any sense of development, either literary-historical or biographical, the sentence moves across time in a dynamic engagement with a swathe of texts connected only by the argument of the sentence that gathers them. Moreover, the lack of attention to historical context is reflected in the fact that half of the texts mentioned are undated. Instead, Bernstein’s works are described by referring to conceptual writing’s varied and historically disparate practices and precedents, and the selected examples suggest how these practices might be drawn together—that is, as a working hypothesis rather than a definitive statement. The use of listing and parentheses enhances the feeling that the anthology is a temporary assembly of comparable practices. These techniques are employed in all the headnotes, implying that the selections in the anthology are not fixed, definitive, or authoritative. In this way, Against Expression seeks to resist the hegemonic relations of power and knowledge represented by both the canon and the academy, the two institutions implicated in Dworkin’s wish to evade “canonical formation” and “critical assessment.”

The “curatorial premise” borne out in the headnotes also shapes the other prominent paratextual devices deployed to counteract institutionalizing forms or processes. First, the anthology is organized by author in alphabetical order. As well as echoing the many examples of conceptual writing that use the alphabet to order material or as a constraint, this creates a levelling effect because it randomizes the sequence in which the authors appear.¹⁰ Second, there is no indication in the contents page of publication dates, nor does the page say when the authors were—or are—writing. The absence of any indication of their chronological relationship becomes an overt declaration of resistance to ideas of development or periodization, so the contents page looks like a refusal to offer a genealogical account of the category. In the baldest interpretation, it embodies a refusal to engage with literary history at all, providing instead a decontextualized field of works connected only by their relevance to the category of “conceptual writing.” In addition, so many writers are included, and so many more are mentioned in the headnotes, that the impression is of a levelling inclusiveness determined only by a general category. This is an equalizing field constructed—or deconstructed—out of a flattening of both history and hierarchy.

Despite its disruptive techniques, however, the failure of Against Expression to trouble relations of power and knowledge is revealed in the success of its canonization, as reflected in its editors’ inclusion in the Norton and by the production of those subsequent anthologies that so quickly read it as another example of cultural domination and exclusion. The reasons it fails have to do both with the inescapabilty of specific aspects in the mode of anthologizing, and with the fragility of the political commitment offered by the practice of curation. Dworkin’s desire to present a seemingly immediate, temporary, and authentic record of “tendencies” suggests that, in this anthology, the material is not mediated in the same way as in an authorizing anthology. In fact, this presentation serves to underplay the activity of selection and combination necessary to produce any anthology. It points to a significant aporia in Against Expression as a whole, one that is marked perhaps most distinctly in the unresolved contradiction in the claims that it is both a “snapshot” and an “argument.” The anthology represents an uneasy and compromised adoption of the curatorial mode O’Neill celebrates, evident in the tension between the apparently objective documentation of the “snapshot of emerging tendencies” and the declaration of a subjective project to construct a category that actively “reframes” literary history. Against Expression is unable to keep faith with the demystification it promises, withdrawing it at the moment of articulation in convoluted expressions of the editor’s agency. Rather than foregrounding and laying bare their choices and their implications, the paratextual elements of this anthology obscure those choices and the role they play in installing the reading subject in the network of meanings they embody.

Using methods of data visualization, we can examine the other, less overt paratextual features that mediate the reader’s engagement with the writers and the texts in the anthology and construct a representation of conceptual writing as a movement. Visualization allows us to trace the vectors and networks in the apparatus that are not in plain sight, but play a significant role in regulating the reader’s agency. These elements are arguably more significant in the “installation” of the living being precisely because they are hidden; they do not work at the conscious level and so deny the reader the autonomy that seems to be offered in the foregrounding of Against Expression‘s intervention in knowledge production. Beginning with the question of canonization, a dataset can be gathered from the paratextual apparatus—the introductory essays and the headnotes—in order to trace how contemporary writers are networked into the category of avant-garde poetics. I focus on the patterns created by the frequency, placing, and juxtaposition of author names, unavailable on a single reading but emerging gradually over repeated and variable engagements with the text. In the reader’s experience of Against Expression, the patterns of repetition and combination of author names encourage the reader to “know” that some writers are influential, significant, or connected. The more names an author is associated with, the more likely the reading subject is to perceive them as a prominent influence, nodal point, or typical practice (given that the headnotes reference “like” practices). A canon certainly does materialize when the data is visualized as the totality of underlying patterns of influence and hierarchy created in the headnotes and essays. Attending to the patterns of affiliation (who is named, in relation to whom, and how often), we can plot these relations as a network of names (see Fig.1).¹¹

Fig 1.
The network of names in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Shapes represent the author’s gender: circles = male, triangles = female. Colours are randomized.

The visualization follows the flattening of history that the anthology achieves when it decides not to date the authors, instead presenting us with the system of associations created by the references to those authors throughout the text. In the map, arrows “out” denote the names associated with those writers in their own headnotes, and arrows “in” denote references made to them in the headnotes of other writers.¹² The way these names are selected and combined through cross-reference and association reflects a process of reciprocal identification: Dworkin and Goldsmith draw conceptual writing into the category of the avant-garde by constructing a network of mutual validation. The twenty-first-century writers are therefore legitimized in this underlying network both through their connections with earlier writers and in their associations with each other. Some figures are prominent, and some are more marginal. Stephane Mallarmé, Andy Warhol and John Cage, and 80s Language poets Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman—with lots of arrows “in”—are given greater prominence as central influences often recognized in other writers’ headnotes. These figures generate their own distinct yet connected “spheres” of influence. Contemporary writers Nathan Austin and K. Silem Mohammad—with many arrows “out”—have other writers drawn more tightly into clusters around them, which presents them as conduits or networking figures. The network plot follows the explicit remit of the anthology, making a case for the status of conceptual writing by connecting it to the poetry of the earlier iterations of the avant-garde. What becomes visible is the active construction of a literary field where authors are placed in relation to each other in an imaginary atemporal space of positions. While Gertrude Stein occupies a position of influence parallel to Marcel Duchamp’s, the most populous coterie on the network is made up of predominantly male writers. Moreover, thirteen of the thirty women in the anthology appear in this network as outliers. Not only are women underrepresented in the anthology (just thirty out of 111, or 27.9%); they are also marginalized within its network of validations. The names in the cluster assert the extant male canon of avant-garde art and literature (Warhol, Cage, Bernstein, MacLow) while drawing into their orbit the new writers that Goldsmith and Dworkin ratify as their legitimate inheritors (such as Austin, Mohammad, and Bök). This hierarchy of influence and connection radically revises the “levelling” enacted in the contents page (which was designed to resist the processes of canonization and exclusion), instead reasserting those processes through other paratextual means.

Second, by reinstating the chronology that the Anthology avoids, we can show how this new avant-garde attaches itself to a traditional reading of literary periods. In visualizing the data from the introductory essays and headnotes as a graph with a timeline as the x axis, a pattern appears (Fig. 2).

Fig 2.
Number of references to and from authors in Against Expression: The Anthology of Conceptual Writing, graphed over time.

Looking at the spread of works included as examples of conceptual writing over ten-year blocks from 1900 to 2010, we see that the anthology expresses an underlying periodization in the clusters of associations around moments in a chronology. With clusters of works through the 1910s and 20s, in the 1960s, and again in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, this chronology reinstates the boundaries of modernism, pop art, and postmodernism. Its examples of conceptual writing, therefore, gather around literary moments already considered significant in the genealogy of the avant-garde. In this way, the anthology asserts an already well-established narrative of an interrupted or resurgent avant-garde, and presents a literary genealogy in order to establish the legitimacy of the movement.¹³ Its construction also reveals that, while the literary history of conceptual writing manifests as fluctuation or interruption, the general trajectory is that of growth. The sense of a bourgeoning movement is implied because, with each example of “resurgence,” the number of works increases, indicating an increase in the number of writers engaged in conceptual writing over time. In the contemporary resurgence, the number of writers occupying the same position is so great that it appears on the graph as a tangled knot of names. Despite its interrupted trajectory, the anthology therefore provides a developmental model of evolutionary proliferation. This underlying formation naturalizes its construction through a pattern of precedent and heredity, an evolutionary model of proliferation in which a successful “species” multiplies over time.¹⁴

The deployment of names also shows how the hidden paratext creates an underlying genealogy. On the same chart, the y axis indicates the number of times an author is mentioned in the anthology as a whole (Fig. 2). The higher the point, the greater the number of references to the author in the anthology. Thus Andy Warhol and John Cage are the highest points on the chart, having ten and nine mentions respectively. The size of the point on the chart reflects the number of other authors referred to in that author’s headnote.¹⁵ The number of times an author is mentioned (their level on the y axis) indicates the level of influence they exert, and the relative size of the points indicates their role as a conduit or connector of like practices, a drawing in rather than a handing down. A closer look at the twenty-first-century corner of the chart reveals a proliferation of connecting figures (Fig. 3).

Fig 3.
Twenty-first-century positions on the field.

This part of the chart, with its greater number of larger, “fraternal” points—for example K. Silem Mohammad, whose headnote mentions nine other authors—shows that the anthology ratifies conceptual writing by connecting its twenty-first-century writers to each other and to the other authors in the literary genealogy it constructs. Most of the recent figures are situated low in the field, reflecting the fact that many of them are mentioned only once or twice in the anthology as a whole. However, two figures emerge from this scrum, distinguished by height and size, so both are mentioned more than other contemporary writers and are connected to more of them: in the field laid bare, the editors of the anthology, Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, dominate their contemporary scene.

Dworkin and Goldsmith’s construction and ratification of a primarily male canon is challenged in the 2012 anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. In her introduction, Laynie Browne defines this anthology as a response to conceptual writing’s fast-moving consolidation, expressing a fear that women will be “written out of the project.” Noting that “it is often at the stage of anthologizing that numbers start to shift so that women are not adequately represented,” her characterization of the typical situation of women in literary movements is entirely apposite to the representation of conceptual writing in Against Expression. Moreover, in reflecting and refracting the language used in Against Expression‘s prefaces—with “take shape,” “crystallize” and “documented” echoing Dworkin’s purpose to “document” the “energetic reformation”—her anthology offers a direct challenge to its potential hegemony (14). Browne argues that the “lack of representation of women is in some sense invisible until we come to moments where codification starts to happen. To many then, this writing women out of the canon is invisible until after the fact” (15). This description of the processes of canonization applies to Against Expression, whose latent structures begin to codify a version of conceptual writing that sends women writers into the background. Caroline Bergvall’s introduction to I’ll Drown My Book connects the problem of canonization to conceptual art’s inability to problematize the author function. For Bergvall, “the all-important business of stripping the artist’s social identity, or even denuding artistic persona itself, investigating the artist’s ‘authorial function'” has “proved largely beyond the frame.” Instead, in Bergvall’s view, “the artistic persona found itself neither intercepted nor sabotaged by conceptual methodologies” and “Conceptual Art turned quickly into a small coterie of largely given, largely male, largely white art stars” (19). The relationship between the author function and canonization is relevant to the paratextual choices in Against Expression. Because the authors’ names are stripped of other determination, the author function is foregrounded in favor of, for example, the historical, geographical, generic or political contexts of the text’s production. The proliferation of references to and the connectedness of Warhol or Bernstein, as visualized in the network plot (Fig. 1), consolidate their significance purely in terms of the author function: in Foucault’s original iteration, “the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (“What is an Author?” 119). In this respect, Against Expression fears the proliferation of meaning outside the institutions it claims to be “looking beyond,” as we can see in the centre-periphery model revealed in the network plot.

And what of the claim for the practice of curation as distinct from the traditional anthology? By comparison, the looser assembly, the overt insistence on impermanence, and the self-reflexive approach do seem to offer a more active readerly participation, or at least a chance for readers to “intervene in their own processes of subjectification,” as Agamben puts it (24). The resistance to chronological ordering in the contents page foregrounds the active choice of the anthologist, rather than imposing a history. The large number of names suggests inclusiveness rather than a defined and narrow genealogy. The inclusion of Warhol, Cage and other practitioners previously identified more as artists than writers troubles the category of the literary text. Indeed, the insistence on writing as a much looser category seems to resist the institutions of “author” and “literature,” disrupting the scholarly disciplines that “separate” and “capture” human activity (17). The very refusal to deal in other categories foregrounds the emphasis on the central category of conceptual writing, and, in making one big claim, Against Expression draws attention to its own “mode of ordering” and lays bare its function in controlling knowledge. But if “the apparatus itself is the network that is established between … elements,” then Against Expression is an apparatus that draws together a network of forces in order to assert and authorize its legitimacy (2-3). It brings together discourses (of the avant-garde; of conceptual art; of evolutionary development) and institutions (the canon; the literary period; the literary genealogy; the author function) to control the reader’s engagement with knowledge and construct the reading subject. This is significant in light of the disproportionate number of white male writers represented in Against Expression as a whole, and is expressed most notably in the way these authors dominate the patterns of significance and legitimization revealed in the data analysis. The reader is installed in her identification with “important” writers whose legitimacy is conferred through the insistent repetition of their names and associations with each other: the well-worn processes of a long history of hegemony. By deploying a narrative of curation that obfuscates its canonizing role, Against Expression enacts the subjectification of the reader of the hidden paratext as Agamben defines it in his discussion of the processes of installation. With only a limited and partial understanding of the way the text operates, the reader is not afforded the agency the Anthology seems to offer. Much like the apparatuses that Agamben critiques, the experience appears to be one of self-determination because the reader is made to feel like she is “in the know” and so in control of her own reading choices. As my analysis reveals, however, like the “user” of the mobile phone in Agamben’s example, the reader is the passive recipient of a system in which her choices are delimited and controlled by silent instructions that bypass conscious recognition. The subjectification that occurs here is, therefore, in the predominant contemporary form of the apparatus: the “reader” is in fact locked into what turns out to be a regulatory project by the very illusion that she is in control.

This illusion also marks and sustains the contemporary activity of curation as practiced beyond the art world. Kate Fowle, a director of Independent Curators International, says of contemporary curation: “as the curatorial imperative gains momentum around the world, its form is mutating and becoming untethered from its modern precedent” (9). This can also be said of the way curation has entered the broader cultural sphere, becoming integrated into social, economic and political life and increasingly taking more discrete and specialized forms. “Untethered” from its precedent in visual art, curation has “mutated” to become the primary practice of the market, constructing marketized identities on Facebook and Instagram and curating content as an aspect of “social selling,” hooking the logic of capital into the intimacies of social life. As the Scoop.it Content Marketing Blog asserts, “The very best curation done via social selling is a way for salespeople to demonstrate their value and uniqueness. They have an exceptionally effective—and human—way to build trust and to prompt feedback. Both of which are at the core of building a relationship … and making a sale” (Neely). Feeding into the curated identities of sales “prospects” through content curation is therefore a way of “leveraging your social network” and represents the marketization of “human” relationships and “trust” (Brevet). Curation is thus the primary contemporary exemplar of the apparatus Agamben critiques. Once denoting a practice of institutional preservation and conservation, it became a self-reflexive art practice that seemed to enable institutional critique, but is now a method to capture and construct subjectivity as a collection of temporarily congealed surfaces. The temporary nature of these forms of curation reflects precisely the continuous process of installation and reinstallation that makes subjectivity a negative state. As Agamben argues, “processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, in spectral form. In the nontruth of the subject, its own truth is no longer at stake” (21). The mechanism of curation enacts an infinitely unfinished process of reassembly that sustains a yearning for subjecthood and a belief in the subject as a product of consumer preferences ratified in the assemblages of other consumers.

The role of the anthology in perpetuating and stabilizing an exclusionary canon also plays into contemporary fears about the erosion of the canon and anxieties about the “preservation” of literary studies in the rapidly-changing globalized higher education marketplace. In his 2012 The Global Future of English Studies, James English’s survey of tertiary English programmes across the US, Europe, China, South Africa and Australia, finds that “there is less divergence than we might imagine from the canon of classic British and American works,” and that “the place of this canonical literary study within the baccalaureate degree program as a whole … is surprisingly uniform throughout the world” (117). For English, “the newer, more ‘foreign’ programs emerging with globalization are if anything more committed to the familiar canon of Great Authors than are the established programs of the Anglophone sphere.” As a result, “rather than pulling the discipline apart, the process of global massification is affirming its cohesion around a common core.” English’s discussion reflects the way that this very valid anxiety might paradoxically work against a pluralistic, self-reflexive model of literary studies. The security of the “cohesion” around the “core” of “Great Authors” here stands in for the preservation of English literary studies as such (174). English later recognizes the potential for universities outside the US and Europe to shift the balance of the centre-periphery model, concluding that “it is time for us at the presumptive centre of things to begin paying more attention to the forms our discipline is taking at these sites of rapid expansion” (191). In the context of the global education marketplace, however, the anxieties rather than the subtle conclusions of English’s study will probably form the leading edge. The mass marketing of English studies may well end up seriously compromising its main achievement in the last forty years: the recovery and/or appreciation of writers not previously considered to be “Great Authors,” including women writers, minority writers, writers of popular fiction and, ironically, the authors of world literature in English. Thus, both the “massification” and marketization of English studies and the desire for homogeneity generated by the fears it prompts are very pressing reasons to be wary of the canonizing anthology.

The desire to assuage panic about the future of English literary studies has also recently merged with optimism about “curation” as a way of preserving the value of the discipline. In her introduction to the 2016 special edition of New Literary History, Recomposing the Humanities—with Bruno Latour, Rita Felski argues for a new emphasis on curatorship, one that echoes in interesting ways the argument set out in Against Expression. Felski asks, “To what extent are humanists engaged in practices of making as well as unmaking, composing as well as questioning, creating as well as subverting? … In this spirit, I advance four possible terms—curating, conveying, criticizing, composing” (216). She argues for curation as a practice of making, one grounded in the need to preserve but aware of the responsibility of those choices, imagining the humanities “as a series of actions, practices, and interventions” rather than the result of the functioning and countering of a range of rigid institutions (217). I would argue that this is a problematic solution, given the current function of curation as the primary apparatus of the market. In the global commercialization of higher education (HE), curation and massification are brought together in troubling ways. For example, Pearson—”the world’s learning company”—is a powerful, extensive, and expanding provider for English-medium HE institutions across the globe. One major innovation in their format is “Pearson Collections,” a site that enables “educators” to “Engage Students with Custom Content” and “Create a Collection for Your Course” with an “easy-to-use curation tools” in order to “choose the chapters you want from any Pearson product.” Accompanied by signifiers of agency (“you have your own way of teaching”) and freedom (“you can freely mix and match”), the site deploys the narrative of curation as a creative practice that liberates the individual from regulatory structures and gives them control over the system, enabling them to survey the apparatus and operate beyond its dictates.¹⁶ The model of curation is the model of the globalized higher education market: the curation of commodities in an archive of products limited by economies of scale.

Like Pearson’s decoy of “custom content” curation, curation in Against Expression too becomes a decoy, presenting a convincing surface structure to displace the underlying apparatus of its value system. This parallel demonstrates the hazardous position of the avant-garde vis-à-vis the dominant culture: the avant-garde is capitalism’s critic and its coeval. To be worth the hazard, it must maintain a delicate relation of immanent critique. This function and its attendant constraints are clearly manifested in the method of detournement that forms the basis of conceptual writing practices, a methodology developed out of the necessity to refuse an external standpoint from which to articulate its challenge. The discourse of curation presented in Against Expression, however, claims to offer just such a position, speaking from a critical space outside the institutions it critiques. The dangerous “naivety” (in Agamben’s sense) in this positing of a blameless utopian space from which to speak is perilous for the avant-garde project to denaturalize discourse and expose its function in the network of power and knowledge.

Footnotes

1. Dworkin offers a short history of Conceptual Writing’s reputation in his “An Overview / Chronology of Conceptual Writing” for the Harriet Blog.

2. For an extended definition of détournement, see Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement” in Ken Knabb’s Situationist International Anthology.

3. See, for example, Jeffrey Di Leo: “while anthologies are a pervasive and dominant part of academic culture, they have not been given sustained analysis by cultural theorists” (6). Against Expression itself clearly contributes to the theorization of anthologies, which has developed since 2004, yet “most American anthology and canon revision has focused on author and text selections but little on the anthology editorial apparatus” (Aull 38).

4. One expression of this function can be found in Notes on Conceptualisms in the notion of the “sobject,” the subject-as-object of modernity, the “properly melancholic contemporary entity” that “exists in a procedural loop” exposed by conceptual writing’s “radical reframing of the world” (38-9). See also Fitterman on repurposing: “[the] use of repurposed source materials or identities isn’t meant to replace a more direct investment in identity but, rather, to complicate any of our positions by addressing how our subjectivities are shaped, compromised, or borrowed” (1).

5. See below. See also, for example, Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism, 3-7.

6. The way the term “lyric” has been deployed in definitions and defences of conceptual writing has been heavily contested. Judith Goldman, for example, has argued that this version of the lyric is a “straw man” invoked by the editors, as detailed in her article “Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature.'” Goldman shows that this statement about the lyric draws heavily on the Language poetry manifestos of the early 1980s without acknowledging them. For more on this debate, see also Marjorie Perloff, “Towards A Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context.” What interests me here is the use Dworkin makes of the lyric (and everything he takes it to represent) to position conceptual writing as a practice.

7. See for example Eliot Van Buskirk’s “Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation”; Anita Howarth’s “Exploring a Curatorial Turn in Journalism”; David Balzer’s Curationism; Xuan Zhao et al., “The Many Faces of Facebook,” and Claudia W. Ruitenberg, “Toward a Curatorial Turn in Education.” Perhaps the most telling expression of twenty-first-century curation is the explosion of internet “content curation” tools, used in particular in branding and marketing. Advice on how to use content curation tools now proliferates on the web. See Rohit Bhargava’s “The 5 Models of Content Curation”; Patrick Armitage’s “10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs”; and Ross Hudgens’s “The 3 Most Effective (And Overlooked) Content Curation Strategies.”

8. Note also that Against Expression comes out of a prestigious university press.

9. Although Against Expression is also published in an “institutional” context, it claims a form of immanent critique with typically “conceptual” emphasis on the mode of production. Hoover expresses no such intention.

10. Examples in Against Expression include Rory Macbeth’s The Bible (alphabetised), Dan Farrell’s Inkblot Record, and Louis Aragon’s poem “suicide.”

11. All graphs are produced in collaboration with Amy Macdougall, Medical Statistics, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College University of London.

12. The algorithm that determines the layout of the nodes is called “Fruchterman Reingold,” and is an instance of “Force directed graph drawing.” Nodes are conceptualized as objects in space. Typically, spring-like attractive forces based on Hooke’s law are used to attract pairs of endpoints of the graph’s edges (the nodes) towards each other, while repulsive forces like those of electrically charged particles are simultaneously used to separate all pairs of nodes. If two nodes are linked (in this case, if an author’s headnote references another author), it is as if they are joined by a spring. The strength of the spring is greater if they have referenced each other. Nodes therefore attract one other (if they are linked via “springs”) and repel each other via imagined electro-magnetic force. The algorithm simulates a physical system using these predefined attraction/repulsions, and finds a state of equilibrium. This is how the positions of the nodes are defined. The eventual positions depend on their (random) starting points, which is why there is no unique solution.

13. For example, Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism.

14. In order to provide a picture of as much of the data as possible on a single chart, in Figure 1, Mallarme (1874) and Diderot (1796), the two earlier authors, are not included. Moreover, because they are single representatives of their own moments, they appear more as rogue elements, originals rather than originators, and so not drawn into a literary genealogy as precursors in the same way as Stein and Duchamp, who are located as signifiers of the “avant-garde” phase of modernism.

15. Stein’s name is in the introductory essays rather than in a headnote (because her work is itself is not included in the anthology), so it appears here in a form which reflects that. Each author included in the introductory essays is given two extra “points” to reflect the “fraternal” connection and significance this affords them in relation to all the other authors in the introductions. Stein, Pound and Duchamp are all mentioned in the introductory essays. Neither Stein nor Pound features in the anthology itself, so they do not have headnotes, and although an excerpt from Duchamp’s “notes” is included, no other author is mentioned in his headnote. The names of these three writers, therefore, appear in the same size. This reflects the fact that they are all included in the introductions but are not directly linked with other authors through their own headnotes.

Works Cited

• Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Translated by David Kishik And Stefan Pedatella, Stanford UP, 2009.
• Armitage, Patrick. “10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs.” Hubspot, 11 May 2017, blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-curation-tools. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. Aull, Laura. “Gender in the American Anthology Apparatus: A Linguistic Analysis.” Advances in Literary Study, vol. 2, no.1, 2014, pp. 38-45.
• Balzer, David. Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else. Pluto P, 2015.
• Bergvall, Caroline, editor. I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Les Figues P, 2012.
• Bhargava, Rohit. “The 5 Models of Content Curation.” Rohit Bhargava, 31 Mar. 2011, www.rohitbhargava.com/2011/03/the-5-models-of-content-curation.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Brevet, Helene. “Content curation: the complete guide to leverage third-party content.” The Scoop.it Content Marketing Blog, 5 Feb. 2018 blog.scoop.it/2018/02/05/content-curation-the-complete-guide-to-leverage-third-party-content/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Critchley, Emily, editor. Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. Reality Street, 2015.
• Dick, Jennifer K. “The Pros and Cons of Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing.” Drunken Boat 15, 2012, www.drunkenboat.com/db15/against-expression.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Di Leo, Jeffrey R., editor. On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy. U of Nebraska P, 2004.
• Dworkin, Craig. “An Overview/Chronology of Conceptual Writing.” Harriet Blog, 30 Apr. 2012, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/conceptual-writing-a-worldview. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• —and Kenneth Goldsmith, editors. Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Northwestern UP, 2011.
• English, James F. The Global Future of English Studies. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• Felski, Rita. “Introduction.” New Literary History vol. 47, nos. 2 and 3, 2016, pp. 215-229. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.2016.0010.
• Fitterman, Robert, “When Subjectivity Finds Another Subject: Subjectivity in Quotational Writing Practices.” RobertFitterman.com, www.robertfitterman.com/newworks/when_subjectivity.pdf. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 101-120.
• Fowle, Kate. “ICI Perspectives in Curating.” Thinking Contemporary Curating, edited by Terry Smith, Independent Curators International, 2012, pp. 7-13.
• Goldman, Judith. “Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature’: Citation, ‘Radical Mimesis,’ and Phenomenologies of Reading in Conceptual Writing.” Postmodern Culture, vol. 22, no. 1, Sept. 2011. Project MUSE, DOI:10.1353/pmc.2012.0007.
• Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. Columbia UP, 2011.
• Hoover, Paul, editor. Classroom Guide to Accompany Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. W.W. Norton & Company, 1994.
• —. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.
• Howarth, Anita. “Exploring a Curatorial Turn in Journalism.” M/C Journal, vol. 18, no. 4, 2015, journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1004. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Hudgens, Ross. “The 3 Most Effective (And Overlooked) Content Curation Strategies.” Content Marketing Institute, 15 Apr. 2016, https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2016/04/content-curation-strategies. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. “Instructor’s Guide.” W.W. Norton and Company, March 2013, http://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad-detail-instructors.aspx?ID=24756. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Knabb, Ken, editor and translator. Situationist International Anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, www.bopsecrets.org/SI/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Lockard, Joe and Jillian Sandell. “National Narratives and the Politics of Inclusion: Historicizing American Literature Anthologies.” Pedagogy, vol. 8, no.2, 2008: pp. 227-254.
• Neely, Pam. “Content curation for social selling; how to get even better results.” The Scoop.it Content Marketing Blog, 2 Jan. 2018. Blog.scoop.it/2018/01/02/content-curation-for-social-selling/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, editors. Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. U of Alabama P, 2006.
• ——. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America. U of Alabama P, 2015.
• O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). MIT Press, 2012.
• ——. “The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse.” Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, edited by Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, Intellect Books, 2007, pp. 13-28.
• O’Sullivan, Maggie, editor. Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK. Reality Street, 1996.
• Pearson Higher Education. “Pearson Collections: One-of-a-kind Course Materials.” Pearson Higher Education, 2018, www.pearsonhighered.com/collections/index.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018. ——. “Pearson Collections: Breakthrough to One-of-a-kind Course Materials.” Pearson Higher Education, 2018, www.pearsonhighered.com/collections/educator-features.html. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Perloff, Marjorie. 21^st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.
• ——. “Towards a Conceptual Lyric: From Content to Context.” Jacket2, July 28, 2011, jacket2.org/article/towards-conceptual-lyric. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• ——. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. U of Chicago P, 2010.
• Place, Vanessa, and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Ugly Duckling P, 2009.
• Publishers Weekly. “PW Picks: Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Second Edition.” Publishers Weekly, 24 Dec. 2012, www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-393-34186-7. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Ruitenberg, Claudia W. “Toward a Curatorial Turn in Education.” Art’s Teachings, Teaching’s Art: Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education Vol. 8, edited by Tyson Lewis and Megan Laverty, Springer, 2015, pp. 229-242. Springer Link, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_16.
• Smith, Terry E. Thinking Contemporary Curating. Independent Curators International, 2012.
• Van Buskirk, Eliot. “Overwhelmed? Welcome the Age of Curation.” Wired, 14 May 2010, www.wired.com/2010/05/feeling-overwhelmed-welcome-the-age-of-curation/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2018.
• Zhao, Xuan et al. “The many faces of Facebook: Experiencing social media as performance, exhibition, and personal archive.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Apr. 2013, pp. 1-10. DOI:10.1145/2470654.2470656.