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E V E N I N G W I L L C O M E : A M O N T H LY J O U R N A L O F P O E T I C S ( C O N C E P T U A L P O E T R Y F E AT U R E — I S S U E 4 1 , M AY 2 0 1 4 )

Felix Bernstein
Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry

With thanks to Cassie Seltman, Nellie Barber, Herman

Rappaport, and Genji Amino for reading and discussing.
And thanks to Gabe Rubin for talking me off the ledge.

The following has been excerpted from the print edition of

Notes on Post-conceptual Poetry.

INTRO

What is Post-conceptual poetry?

Post-conceptual poetry is nothing more than a term that means generationally

following, and reacting to Conceptual poetry, often in dialogue with Conceptual
poetry. Some even call Post-conceptual poetry, ‘second-generation Conceptual
poetry,’ as Kenneth Goldsmith or Rob Fitterman taught many Post-conceptual

poets directly or indirectly.1 Post-conceptual poetry by virtue of following

Conceptual poetry also follows postmodernism (which at least by virtue of the
Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry can be thought to contain Language
poetry) and is therefore post-postmodernism.

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However, this essay will argue, contra Jameson, that postmodernism is better
thought to refer the empty simulacrum art of the 80s and that Language poetry is
more accurately post-structuralist.

Isn’t conceptual poetry Post-conceptualism?

Yes. Conceptual poetry by virtue of following 80s postmodern art (Pictures

generation: Cindy Sherman, Sherri Levine) is post-postmodern; by virtue of
following 70s post-structuralist poetry (Language poetry) is post-poststructuralist;
by virtue of following 60s conceptualism (fluxus, minimalism) is Post-
conceptualism. Of course, as one can tell from its billing, Conceptual poetry is not
merely attempting to follow conceptual art (and therefore to align with all that is
Post-conceptualism, which can include 80s postmodern art and 70s
poststructuralist poetry) but also to repeat it and has successfully created some
rather purely conceptual procedures. It has also aligned itself quite strongly with
80s postmodernism and the empty simulacrum. Both the 80s and 60s can be
marked by their aesthetics of empty and vapid indeterminacy—with that emptiness
being valorized for being Zen (Marcus Boon on Kenneth Goldsmith or John Cage
on John Cage) or for being ironic, funny, and reflexive of the culture at large
(Baudrillardian celebrations of 80s art found in the art journal October).
Language poetry, deconstruction, historicism, and post-structuralism, all coming
of age in the 70s, attempted a rigorous negative dialectical poetics of the
sometimes mechanistic, sometimes arbitrary, but always playful, fancy/imaginary
(as opposed to a fixed God given monarchical classical old fashioned Coleridgean
Imagination). Poetic fancy was largely abandoned by the project of Conceptual
poetry (although some of its mechanistic and arbitrary features were
appropriated), as well as by the overarching attempts to follow up postmodernism
with a post-postmodernism that redoubles the emptiness of postmodernism and
revokes the insights of rigorous post-structuralism by returning to structuralism.

What is Post-conceptual poetry, again?

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Post-conceptual poetry by virtue of following Conceptual poetry can be seen as

inaugurating a new tide in the post-postmodernisms (such as Conceptual poetry)
that came of age in the 90s and early 00s. Its practitioners, born (on average) in
the mid-80s, are part of a larger trend within post-postmodernism to bridge
affect, queerness, ego, lyric, and self-conscious narcissism within the inherited
procedural structures of the ‘network’ and the ‘concept.’ They are therefore part of
a larger turn to Queer Structuralism, that aligns the dry empty hierarchies of
structuralism (that post-postmodernism has unanimously returned to) with the
abjection that the term ‘queer’ allegedly refers to.

Who are the Post-conceptual poets?

Some Post-conceptual poets are Sophia Le Fraga, Andrew Durbin, J. Gordon

Faylor, Trisha Low, Josef Kaplan, Joey Yearous-algozin, Holly Melgard, Danny
Snelson, Steve McLaughlin, and Steve Zultanski. Of course, each has a relation to
other aesthetic lineages. Some clear examples being: Fraga’s relation to
performance art, Low’s relation to the Chris Krauss/Kathy Acker memoir, and
Durbin’s relation to camp and New York School poetry.

The famous cousins of Post-conceptual poetry are Lady Gaga (b. 1986) and Ryan
Trecartin (born 1981). Their work responds to similar pressures in their given
fields. I like to call Post-conceptual poets and their colleagues in other fields
queer-conceptualists and/or Queer Structuralists because of their desire for
particular micro communities/queerness combined with a fear of abandoning the

jargon of conceptual art as an apparatus of the social network and the academy.2
There are some other ties, Goldsmith (born 1960) has promoted Trecartin
numerous times and Gaga shares Goldsmith’s worship of Warhol. Gaga has been an
important buzzword for queer theory vis-à-vis Judith Jack Halberstam’s “Gaga
Feminism” and also for LA Post-conceptual poet Kate Durbin’s blog Gaga
Stigmata. Finally, Trecartin has been discussed alongside Goldsmith in Artforum
and in Art in America.

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Can the Post-conceptual poet do anything new?

Not always.

The Post-conceptual poet can assert their authorship by claiming that the “author
is dead” (a la perverse postmodernism/poststructuralism: Language poetry and
Flarf) thereby slipping into the schizopoetic vulgar muck of the Internet.

The Post-conceptual poet can assert their authorship by claiming that the “text is
dead” (a la post-poststructuralism/post-postmodernism: Conceptual poetry)
thereby deferring to conceptual, algorithmic, appropriative mastery over the muck
of schitzopoetic textual flows.

The Post-conceptual poet can assert their authorship by deferring to the

confessional/affective/lyrical (traditional, Romantic poetics) or the
mechanical/conceptual or, better yet, they can mix both together (as a conceptual

strategy or as a heartfelt impulse or some hybrid of both).3

None of that is new. However, the Post-conceptual poet can do one new thing and
declare the “death of work” (unprecedented by its immediate poetic lineage,
though common with the madness poetics of Artaud and esteemed by Foucault and
Deleuze). This is symmetrical to the ‘death of the reader,’ which means here, the
death of the close, analytic, or aesthetically discriminate reader. This would mean
falling into the messy muck of libidinal flows (or the Internet or ‘whatever’)
without leaving a trace of authorship and without giving in to those dominant
modes of leftist discourse (that mark the academy, the art world, and politics),
which require the artwork to pave the way for didactic redemption, and require

that art be boxed into the framings of queer theory or speculative materialism4 or

poststructuralism or affect studies or Badiousian-Zizekian, etc.5 That is to say,

that the Post-conceptual poet could make works that are not afforded privilege of
‘example’ in the seemingly endless war between ‘neoliberal versus subversive’ or

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‘subjective/affective versus mechanical’ or the various attempts to wield both

subject and object (micro and macro) together vis-à-vis universalized particulars
like the term ‘queer’ (which has recourse both to a conceptual universalized
apparatus and a particular, affective, minority).

That is to say, if Post-conceptual poetry can de-cathect from the strategies of

didactic redemption and/or didactic counter-redemption that mark the marketing
strategies that have created the canons of conceptualism and Post-conceptualism,
Language poetry and Conceptual poetry, in the first place. Perhaps, then, what will
occur is a madness that signals not the disappearance of the author [Language
poetry], or the disappearance of the text [Conceptual poetry], but the final
disappearance of work itself.

Alas: no more work for the consumption of others, for the didactic pronouncement
of amoral or moral causes, for the inevitable redemption of the market. But also an
end to the predetermined paths meant to demonstrate madness and perform ‘no
work’ but have therefore become work, examples, and formulas (such as the tired
formula: an excess of work=no work, which has been put to very good use by
Conceptual poetry).

Unfortunately, the ‘death of work’ (or ‘the death of the reader’) seems as likely to
occur in full as the death of the author or the death of the text ever did. That is
because of the need in Post-conceptual poetry (as was true of Language poetry,
and Conceptual poetry) for redemption, branding, and formulaic notions of
politics, differential marks, hierarchies, and didactic declarations. However, “the
death of work” does not need to occur ‘in full’ to remain paradigmatic of the
constellation of practices known as ‘Post-conceptual poetry.’

Has Post-conceptual poetry been redeemed and valorized yet?

Yes. The assertion of didactic modes of redemption for the newly Post-conceptual
poets (as well as many other artists who are of the same generation, born after
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1985) are budding, primarily in and through discourses around the visual arts in
publications that attempt to sell artworks by making a claim to a work’s radicality.
These notes will pull apart some of the more flagrant attempts that have been
made to use pre-existing stale discourses (such as queer theory, affect studies, and
Marxist theory) to promote the work of these artists and poets. But it will also
look at the ways in which Conceptual poetry and Language poetry have been either

redeemed or condemned by critics (as well as the poet-practitioners themselves).6

Are these notes a work of Post-conceptual poetry?

As might become quite obvious, these notes enact a kind of push-pull between
pathetic confession, ironic self-criticality, advanced complicity, enraged hostility,
information surplus, gossip, and longing (for an end to work) that is characteristic
of Post-conceptual poetry (and youth). Still, I do try here to somewhat maturely
take interest in history (over and against theoretical sophistry and my own likes
and dislikes), an interest has been seriously absent in many of the attempts, by
many critics and poets to deal with issues similar to those discussed in these
notes. It is a forgetting of history that perhaps will allow these critics and poets to
take pride of place in the canon formations that will mark this moment. And that
is sooo neoliberal or is it subversive? I can’t tell anymore….

NOTES

1) Everyone can be a poet but only one person gets to amalgamate all that poetry
and present it to the larger institutional world of art, endowing it with value.
This time, that person is Kenneth Goldsmith (b. 1961), working with Hans-
Ulrich Obrist.

2) Mary Kelly made it so that we can raise a baby in a museum. Now Goldsmith
has enabled us to stage our postpostpostrevolts in the museum. And forge tons

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of minor, counter-canons under the auspices of a singular private-collection-

cum-web-domain (ubuweb.com).

3) These notes are being amalgamated as data for Goldsmith and Obrist for their
world-wide-web-renowned event “Poetry Will Be Made By All.” These notes
will be published online at poetrywillbemadebyall.ch and printed at the
LUMA/Westbau exhibition space within Löwenbräukunst in Zurich,

Switzerland.i This is one of 1,000 books published under the condition that
the author be born after 1989 and asked by one of the appointed advisors to
the project. These notes will then tour the globe and be collected by those
collectors who are interested in the work of Goldsmith and/or Obrist.

4) I am filled with hope that this counter-canon formation will position me as

the next amalgamator of data and that I will one day be king of the canon.
However, since I deride curating anyway, at the very least, I hope this will
position me as a critic who can discern whatever new talents will emerge from
the muck of Internet art, and follow in the wake of Goldsmith and associates,
who have allegedly outstayed their welcome.

5) If you are having trouble coming up with new ideas just repeat your old ideas
but Skype them in to Zurich. Their value will multiply.

6) Even better say this: “If you are having trouble coming up with new ideas just
repeat your old ideas but Skype them in to Zurich. Their value will multiply.”
But say it while Skyping in to Zurich.

7) I hope that these notes will be Skyped to Zurich.

8) We are all masters of tumblr and facebook but only some of us are good
enough at using tumblr and facebook that we can receive institutional
recognition and be written up by Claire Bishop (b. 1971) or Kareem Estefan.
Digital art is a huge mess where everyone is a star and everything is

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disseminated. But only one or two leaders disseminate things (information,

and press releases, if not goods) well enough that they can also receive art
world recognition. Thus Bishop’s Artforum essay “Digital Divide,” praises
Goldsmith (Conceptual poetry), Cory Arcangel (straight net aesthetics), and

Ryan Trecartin (gay net aesthetics).ii All of which she finds hallmarks of her
position, a return to critique and negation over and against happy relational
aesthetics (her favorite point of reference being Santiago Sierra).

9) With the Internet anything can be brought into the poem, anyone can become
a star, and the dictates of fashion (receiving likes) replace the critic’s
authority. And yet the crisis that all of these critics (from the older rock star
to Hal Foster) seem to be bemoaning when they cannot figure out who
determines talent on the Internet is really a crisis that at the same time is the
most wonderful thing ever for the critic. Because the greater the mise en
abyme the more important is the role of the critic to make order. And
therefore, most critics writing in glossy magazines bemoaning the mise en
abyme of fashion are purposefully negligent of the fashionable luxury they
gain from this mise en abyme: the critics’ (and curators’) importance is
redoubled! And most, of course, take the chance when bemoaning this mise en
abyme to emphasize those few artists they feel are exempt from this charge.
[This may be one of my approaches in these notes.]

10) Estefan praises Trecartin in Art in America for complicating hardcore

conceptualism a la Goldsmithiii (though, more recently, Estefan has written

that he finds in Trecartin’s new work a naïve acceptance of cyborg post-

humanism troublingly akin to neoliberal solutionismiv). But Estefan’s essays,

appearing as they do in the pages of hip and corporate magazines, mimic the
very neoliberalism he ascribes, as a slap in the face, to some of the artists he
judges. Therefore, it can seem that when it was more in vogue for him to do
so, he put forward Trecartin as a Post-conceptual hero and when not, not.
Trecartin, like Goldsmith or Lady Gaga – or anyone else – can be used as a
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cipher for critics to claim “she is neoliberal” or “she is subversive” … ad

nauseum. See the endless blog wars about Beyonce or Miley. But I would be
blatantly parodying my own argument by saying “it is the blogposts and the
hip art critical discourses that are really neoliberal.” No, I’d rather not appeal
to morality. I’ll just say: criticism of the kind offered by Estefan or Jeffrey
Nealon or Christopher Glazek (not to mention your average queer blogger) is
not intellectually rigorous enough and is severely limited by only being able to
look at work that plays within the irony/affect divide. Such criticism is
deathly afraid of work that slips beyond this overdetermined critical playing
field. Moreover, rather than having any objective way to assess what is or is
not neoliberal, such criticism relies on what is liked or disliked, usually
letting opportunistic fancy lead the way. Not that there’s anything wrong with
opportunistic fancy! But let’s be honest: the will to power has not vanished in
queer hip cool art historical discourse and there is not, and will never be,
some transparent inclusive queer friendly criteria for art criticism.

11) Estefan’s original appraisal of gay male artist Trecartin in Art in America was
that he showed a way to loosen the constricting straps of conceptualism a la
Goldsmith. But to be fair: Goldsmith’s work is “born” Post-conceptual (coming
decades after the height of Conceptualism) and does show interest in affect
and queerness. His own involvement in the catalog for the Institute for
Contemporary Art’s 2010 show Queer Voice, which included Trecartin’s work,
attests to this; not to mention his interest in the gay male artist Andy Warhol

(b. 1928),7 who was a genius at combining dull structuralist mechanic

techniques with affective bodily queer subcultural trippy punk romantic
colorfulness. Nonetheless, the critical trend is to discuss Goldsmith’s work as
a kind of white straight man’s conceptualism, while Vanessa Place (b. 1968) or
Trecartin are viewed as taking the conceptual straight jacket and subverting it
by dealing with queer themes.

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12) The problem is not that there is too much muck out there but that there isn’t
enough, not enough muck to overwhelm the function of the critic. Or to make
the critic admit that at least a major part of his job is to employ opportunistic
sophistry.

13) So many daring critics have attempted to rescue messy post-war poetics from
its mise en abyme. Think of what happened after Fredric Jameson (b. 1934)

described Language poetry as empty neoliberal drivel.8 George Hartley

redeemed the work for being meaningful both politically and aesthetically.
Barrett Watten’s O’Hara performs ideological critique, Michael Davidson’s
Spicer performs ideological critique, Keston Sutherland’s Wieners performs
ideological critique, Jeffrey Robinson’s post-romantic poets (whom he defends
against the Coleridgian complaint of their being mechanistically fanciful)
perform ideological critique.

14) Then also, there is the attempt to redeem works for their affective
ordinariness: Adam Fitzgerald’s Charles Bernstein, Jeffrey Nealon’s Kenneth
Goldsmith, and Andrew Ross’s Frank O’Hara.

15) The danger is plunging into the abyss of complicity (as Johanna Drucker has
detailed); an abyss that Post-conceptual poetry flirts with to the point of, at
times, nearing its own extinction. My father, a founding Language poet
Charles Bernstein (b. 1950) wrote: “My humor is so dark you can’t see it” but
this line was nonetheless ‘seen,’ (and became one of a group of his quotes that
are used as a refrain for so many academic book intros). Post-conceptual
poetry potentiates the possibility of understanding this joke but not telling it.
Of fading fully ‘back to black.’

16) Here is a sharp Marxist argument that should be made repeatedly: “We all can
put out our music for free but Madonna or Gaga or Beyonce will be the top-
selling touring artist. Private property is a thing of the past. Except for houses

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and money. Those must remain distributed in the same old way.” This critique
can and should be leveled against the rhetoric of Conceptual poetry (founded
in the early 2000s) and Gaga feminism (founded in the 2010s) and queer
theory (founded in 1990).

17) Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce

is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is
neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is
subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is
neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is
subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is
neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is
subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is
neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is
subversive. Beyonce is neoliberal. Beyonce is subversive.

18) When attempting to resolve whether or not Beyonce is neoliberal or

subversive, bloggers usually deny the way in which they valorize their own
powers of discriminatory judgment. The more specific, non-moral, critical
judgments of a critic sans identity politics like Marjorie Perloff (b. 1931)
never will forget its own discriminatory judgment. The judgments are
therefore lampooned as being elitist.

19) So, perhaps in fear of looking like an elitist asshole, many contemporary
curators and professors instruct and critique as if their own fancies did not
come into play. This only redoubles their elitism and makes them more
difficult to call out. On the left, there is a moral judgment; on the right, there
is a golden standard of craft.

20) Kenneth Goldsmith, above all else, valorizes a certain craft and technique. His
critics, above all else, valorize moral judgment. Therefore he appeases left and

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right.

21) Then there are those who attempt explicitly to refuse moral judgment or even
the dictates of craft and technique. Instead, you ought to rely on master
discourses and formulas that outwit the dumb ego that produces art and
critique. This is what Slavoj Zizek (b. 1949) does (via a kind of theoretical
Stalinism) and what Vanessa Place does (via a kind of Zizekianism).

22) Sharing on FaceBook, curating an art show, and writing a hip dissertation all
operate in a similar way: Find a private, specific, marginal bubble (a
disturbing punctum) and bring it to the public marketplace.

23) Kids these days: tumblring new styles, bandcamping new genres, wikipediaing
new paradigms. Goldsmith is a kid, opening up as many tabs as he possibly
can. Kids these days are able to utopianize the dystopia, rephotograph their
multiple tabs, and compete with each other as to who can more uniquely
capture the punctum of our trivial existence. (Don’t worry. It’s just a game.)

24) Obama is a kid these days. He can use the binary framework of like/dislike to
his best advantage and get the most followers and the most
likes/comments/views.

25) Facebook was built to stalk girls and now from a youngest age we make
ourselves stalkable, turning our children’s baby books into pornos; then they
grow up to turn their teenage traumas into stylish books, their everyday
hobby/life into a work resume.

26) These notes are partially about Post-conceptualism broadly construed: art
that follows both the postmodern visual art conceptualism of the 60s and the
poststructuralist poetics of Language poetry in 1970s. This includes the visual
artists of the Picture Show generation in the 1980s and the Conceptual poetry

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of the early 2000s (both of which returned to many of the tenets of conceptual
art).

Post-conceptualism is one of many post-postmodern discourses (in general,

those who are post-postmodernism and anti-postmodernism are also anti-
poststructuralism and post-poststructuralism).

Note here that Language poetry is poststructuralist but it is not really

“postmodern,” as is it is commonly used to refer to the empty, meaningless,
schizophrenic signifiers of 80s visual art, Baudrillard’s simulacrum, and MTV.
However, this is how Jameson viewed the work of Language poet Bob
Perelman. And indeed, it is as likely to be thrown out with arguments against
postmodernism offered by those like Zizek and Badiou who fault
postmodernism and post-structuralism alike for its splintered identity
categories, its emphasis on ordinary language, seductive ideological framings,
complicity, and linguistic determinism. Language poetry certainly shared
some characteristics with 80s postmodernism. However, it had much more in
common with the poststructuralist theories of libidinal flow popularized in
the late 60s and early 70s (as part of, among other things, the sexual
revolution). In this way, if it was “postmodern” it was a kind of shadow side of
postmodernism. It can also be seen as part of a cross-section of events
(happening in the Bay area and downtown New York culture) that included
feminist and gay avant-garde and proto-punk performance art (the 70s is well
illustrated by Jay Sanders’ Rituals of Rented Island at the Whitney that
included work by Richard Foreman and Jack Smith). This world, was much
different from what would come about under Reagnomics and the Pictures
Generation in the art world’s 1980s, which can more properly be called
“postmodern” and often conjoins itself to the hip with Baudrillard’s
simulacrum theory. As Semiotexte editor Sylvere Lotringer has written, of his
own part in the 70s (his notorious “Schizo-culture” conference and journal): It
“was about living in New York, in which I saw French theory’s wildest

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extrapolations realized, or at least mine. Being in New York until the early

1980s was like living in theory, madness included.”v Sanders elaborates,

“Lotringer began to imagine a materialist semiotics that rejected language
altogether and instead sought a language of objects themselves. Turning
fortuitously to the visual arts, he immersed himself in the performances of
Jack Smith, Foreman, Sherman, and others seeing this radical potential

imbedded implicitly in their work….”vi

28) If poststructuralist political radicalism climaxed in the mid-70s, (while

aesthetically only coming into Academic, and de-politicized, prominence in
the 80s), then post-postmodernism reflect the various attempts to follow the
act. Post-postmodern discourses (Goldsmith, Geoffrey Harman, Katerina
Kolozova, Francois Laruelle, Lee Edelman, Claire Bishop, Jose Munoz) have

attempted to move beyond negative dialectical materialism,9

phenomenological humanism, being-in-language, radical
skepticism/relativism, and splintered micro-politics in order to enact a
discourse centered around universalized particulars such as the term ‘queer’
or the counterhegemonic Marxist ‘revolutionary.’ The universalizing of
particulars has meant that the micro political emphasis on ‘affect’ has been
projected into a larger field of ‘affect studies’ and communal attachments full
of jargon and didactic structure that are praised for granting access to
‘heterogenous peoples.’ Post-postmodernism, particularly its attempt to
universalize ‘difference,’ is largely influenced by Zizek and Alain Badiou (b.
1937), in their use of Lacan’s matheme as a way to approach the real without
having to go through the splintered identities of post-structuralism. But post-
postmodernism is split down the middle: with some following the Baudrillard
of the 1980s who describe the disappearance of the real altogether
(Conceptual poetry) and others following François Laruelle (affect studies,
queer theory, speculative materialism) who insist on a non-discursive real,
however they do not employ visionary romantic tactics to realize this real but

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rely instead on jargon and proscriptive formalism. Nonetheless, both end up

bringing something real, yet discursively encoded, to the table. Deadpans like
Goldsmith and Baudrillard are obsessed with punctums that will appeal to the
human spectator, just as much as queer theory is. Conceptual poetry has little
to do with the hippie spirit that marks conceptual art of the 60s, as chronicled

by Lucy Lippard or made famous by the term Fluxus.10 Its origins are in the
1980s art world.

29) In distinction to Conceptual poetry, which aligns happily with Baudrillard’s

deadpan disappearance of the real, Post-conceptual poetry attempts to
explicitly bring affect and emotion and ego back into the empty networking
structures that govern us. For many, this is a resounding relief.

30) Post-postmodernism seems on paper to be about giving oneself over totally to

the machine and the symbolic (Conceptual poetry) and the object and the real
(affect studies, speculative materialism) with no human self-reflexive
phenomenological imaginary. Nonetheless, the emerging double “post”
remains haunted by the same human value-oriented patriarchal, hierarchical
scaffoldings as its predecessors. Yes, it makes sense that people are eager to
leave behind the subjective correlationist phenomenological lyrical neurotic
egotistical fantastical imaginary post-modernism of the late 60s and early
70s. But it is becoming alarmingly clear that none of the discourses that
followed postmodernism have been able to abandon the ego. In fact, they
merely redouble the naïvely (unself-conscious) human will to power. As usual,
this will to power is consistently redoubled at any point where it is seems to
have disappeared. So, it appears that post-postmodernism is all about merging
with the machine or the real with only a glimmer of
irony/framing/aestheticism. And it appears that post-postmodernism has
fulfilled the death drive of dark and negative dialectical thought by completely
erasing the manifest image of humans. But, how can we forget that it is always
egos performing that erasure for the ‘impartial’ critic who it tries to woo?
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31) Some Post-conceptual poets might admit the melancholic impotence of the
desire to abandon the human in favor of the real (affect) and the symbolic
(technology) and give up this escapism mid-concept (whereas most
conceptualists never admit their pathos). Nonetheless, the Post-conceptual
poet must keep attempting to add exhaustion to the content of the work. If
one actually abandons the machinery of Facebook and Twitter and networking
and queeronormative identities one is cut out of the archive altogether. That
is to say, only happy dandys (they can be exhausted, queer, or crippled as long
as they are ‘happy’) can and do succeed in this economy.

Be trans and anorexic and dying of terminal illness and bullied, just keep on
posting about it and you’ll be accepted!! Heaven is a place on earth. Don’t
wait for the judgment of God. Find and embrace the judgment of your queer
community.

32) Queer-conceptualism, broadly construed, should be a clean mathematical

process akin to adding excess algorithmically to structure, nothing should
appear to be done by hand or by breath because the value here comes from the
robot that seems like a human (the human that seems like a robot as a motif
has been exhausted by postmodernism).

33) Just being weird and messy does not ensure canonization as post-conceptual
poetry unless it directly pushed against conceptual parameters.

34) The Post-conceptual poet cliché: make frivolous mention of social media,
celebrities, art world institutions, or offer a jargoned feminist/queer theory
critique of those institutions, and hope to get validation merely from the use
of buzz words. Or, in a slightly more self-critical variation on the theme: make
fun of yourself for being limited by these buzz words and discourses but
refuse to take a stab at doing anything else.

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35) In 1975 a turn against the splintered discourses of Freudian-Marxist

poststructuralism (epitomized by the open economy of Bataille and the sexual
politics of Marcuse) brought in a period of sober restoration led by those who
wanted to amend the schizopoetic into a tidy healing discourse (such as
Deleuze; who became the go-to French theorist of the 1990s) or those who
wanted to valorize universalized counterhegemonic activities (the resolutely
anti-postmodern Badiou and later Zizek, both following the formalistic Lacan,
not to mention Mao and Hegel, rather than the chaotic nonsensical Lacan)
thus inspiring those who preferred a universalized particular identity in the
90s (queer theory). This war was waged against the splintered identities
(determined wholly by their linguistic signification) of chaotic
poststructuralism. Conceptual poetry follows up on this move, finding ways to
patch together (through appropriation) the various messy slave discourses
that were inaugurated by postmodern poetics.

36) Those who grew up to be Post-conceptual poets are those who missed the
protopunk anarchy of the 70s and the revolutionary politics of the late 60s.
Rather they were born in the 80s, during the deadening Reagonomic period in
art (the Picture show generation and later in Britain, the YBAs) in which
previously political postmodern tactics were frozen into monumentally
valorized works of blank irony with global celebrities at the wheel. Then they
came of age during the 90s, a time when riot girl feminism and Deleuze
(minor literature spawning micropolitcs and microcinemas) and Judith
Butler’s subversion and queer theory and Zizek’s Hegelian Marxism became
prominent. And then they started working in the 00s: finding ways to combine
the empty symbolic art of the 80s with the ‘subversive’ affective cyborg-
utopian feminist tactics of the 90s. This Post-conceptual combo meant letting
go of the splintered punk and separatist politics found in the late 60s, within
hippie culture, but also within lower east side art culture. Suddenly, in the
00s punk seemed as romantically insular and individualistically hedonistic

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and complacent as modernism and romanticism looked to the radicals of the

1970s. Nonetheless, it was compelling and felt good to be punk! So in order to
maintain this ‘good feeling’ punk became permissible only through and after
neurotic apologies and academic dissertations and ironic quotations. And in
order to maintain the political potential of punk, its movements were
reformulated into a universally applicable (rather than individualistic) party
politics for-all, epitomized by the universalized particular and academically
‘counterhegemonic’ emblem marked by the word ‘queer.’

Queerness created the possibility of rallying around a shared ‘disgust’ and

‘apathy’ and ‘alienation’ and ‘negativity,’ thereby erasing the particular
untranslatable difficulties of the individual’s personal visionary experience of
displeasure and easing us into a kind of harmonized ‘punkness’-without-
hostility. The void of ‘no future’ that had led in the past to suicidal visionary
anarchy became an academic and refined communitarian identity through the
maneuverings of queer professors such as Lee Edelman (an early born, 1951,
Queer Structuralist/queer conceptualist). But this can be seen also in non-
philosophers such as the feminist non-philosopher Katerina Kolozova (b.
1969), who is pissed that postmodernism/poststructuralism (particularly the
kind represented by Butler’s 1990 classic Gender Trouble) has meant that we
never have access to the real in and of itself but only get it through the bars of
language’s prison house (like Language poetry: Charles Bernstein’s “Only the
imaginary is real”). Nonetheless, Kolozova claims that using the obtuse and
scientific jargon of non-philosophy (invented by Laruelle) can finally grant us
access to a real ‘real,’ not just a real couched in irony: killing off the tyranny
of negative dialectical skepticism that has never given us bodies that matter
or an outside world that we could trust as real. Thus, Kolozova has found a
way to wed non-philosophy, feminism, and queer theory together in a post-
postmodern (post-poststructuralist) queer structuralism/queer conceptualism
(a re-structuralism) that allows the real (here marked QUEER) to be found

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through objective, scientific criteria. And this has not gone unnoticed. Her
star is only beginning to rise and a recently a prominent queer theory journal
has devoted an issue to non-philosophy, at least in part because of her
endeavors.

This sort of access to the ‘real’ would have been impossible in most major
works of post-structuralism or postmodernism (from Jacques Derrida and
Bruce Andrews to Baudrillard to Sherrie Levine). One would never ‘stupidly’
give in to symbolic communitarian identities. And even post-structuralist
postmodernism (particularly in its Jewish varieties) recognized a certain
possibility for a future disclosure of the real: still, the real never really came.
Yet this same blank, unfulfilled void, which caused so much negative, agnostic
‘waiting’ in postmodernism has since been filled by joyous notions of political
cathexis and fidelity: Badiou (it must be noted that Badiou was
simultaneously writing alongside the postmodernists but was an active critic)
being the post-postmodernist most heavily committed to the idea of
structurally determined ‘indeterminate’ hyper-contingent events. Yet the
speculative materialists, particularly Quentin Meillasoux (1967) also privilege
this hyper-chaotic contingency, as being a place for radical rupture (basically,

a site for God). As do the Queer Structuralists and non-philosophers.11

Fidelity to this grand event and all the Hegelian determinism that it implies is
the genesis of these new identities. However, this has much in common with
Hegelian structuralism in general, look at October journal where, as per the
title, subjectivity (or at least, recognized subjectivity) is determined by some
sort of grandiose fidelity to the Russian October revolutions. Vanessa Place, a
brilliant re-structuralist, maneuvers the splintered discourses of the ‘slave’
and the ‘victim’ and turns them into monumental, cool artworks.

37) Place would be a Post-conceptual poet if she did not so belligerently cross out
the imaginary, the ego, ideological framings, material-play, etc. But she is
able to do quite a bit within conceptualism. She is able to bring an oozingly
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affective, unabbreviated real (the testimonies of rape victims) through a

materialistic ego-based creative space (the imaginary) that is nonetheless
crossed-out (in favor of appropriation, allegory, irony) and into the symbolic
order (that is cool, avant-garde, self-conscious, cutting edge, masterful
poetry). The difference between her and Post-conceptual poets will be that the
Post-conceptual poet will not necessarily cross out the imaginary [just as flarf
never did]. Therefore, there might be in the work of some Post-conceptual
poets a return to negative dialectical playing with framings and confession. It
should also be noted that Place was once a Post-conceptual poet (her novel La
Medusa reflects this) but then became ‘conceptual,’ at least, in part, because
Conceptual poetry has a more reliably distinguishable canon.

38) Post-postmodernists, broadly conceived, ignore the ego. They would rather
key in on affective residues (the analytic third that exists between analyst and
analysand) rather than the analysand’s ego and their own will-to-power in co-
creating the framing mechanisms that pass as ‘neutral’ within a given
discursive framework.

39) Place is very good at framing and traditional authorship (see her astute and
convincing book The Guilt Project) and is merely trolling by shoving all her
court cases at us. This type of trolling is so common in our culture that to
many it seems unremarkable. However, my response is coming from someone
born in 1992 and perhaps my boredom with trolling is generational. Yes, it
might make one question what is a book and what isn’t a book, etc. But what’s
so funny about her project is that for all her claims of presenting us the thing
without moral markers, she nonetheless is overtly didactic about the apolitical
moral position that she chooses. Maybe the problem with party politics isn’t
that they are ‘moral’ but that they are didactic and lack vision. And if so, then
her amorality shares in that same problem.

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40) Place praises Marjorie Perloff for recognizing poetry as a thing and not a
moral instrument, despite the fact that Perloff has long been a huge advocate
of ruthless discrimination, radical collage, and radical artifice, as opposed to
the sort of amoral thing that Place gives us. Nonetheless, when the amoral
thing becomes chewed up and spit out as art mastery, as occurs in Place’s
case, then it can properly claim the aesthetic attention of a historical and
formalist critic like Perloff.

41) The art dubbed ‘institutional critique’ was always good for pointing out the
exclusive limitations that governed the museum and its relations to collectors.
But institutional critique had to remain a polished craft that had esteemed
practitioners. Now that everyone can be an artist and big museums look
towards the Internet and small galleries and microcinemas, there is a sudden
free-for-all and, as Hal Foster has lamented, a loss of consensus. People who
put forward institutional critique are embarrassed. Benjamin Buchloh (b.
1941) writes, “A new generation of artists claimed the legacies of Duchamp
and Warhol without so much as an atom of the transgressive and subversive
intelligence that these two putative forbears had historically initiated.” And
so the October journalists must seek out a new genius, who will show hostility
towards the mise en abyme of the galleries without erasing the tenets of dry
institutional critique. So Buchloh can turn to Andrea Fraser (b. 1965).
Younger queerer critics might, for similar reasons, turn to K8 Hardy (b. 1977):
an artist who demands to be seen as a quasi-Post-conceptual poet because she
does not show the heroic mastery of ideological structures that someone like
Fraser (or Place, for that matter) does. Yet Fraser and Place will endure, in
part due to a need to preserve an aristocratic elite of institutional critique in
art, even though both are equally interested in parodying and lobotomizing
this mode as they are in repeating it.

42) To argue on discriminatory aesthetic grounds with Perloff’s appraisal, it is

perhaps altogether mistaken to attribute so much power of invention to

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Goldsmith. In poetry, perhaps, he has had the most radical newness (in
responding to the drivel of Post-language poetics). However, in the context of
the visual arts (and here is where he cashes in), where Warhol is already a
mandatory example, he looks like just another proponent of the repetition of
Warhol’s formal tactics [a pop Duchampianism that has also already been
absorbed into pop culture]. Just as, in poetry, Place’s inventions seem quite
new and profound (in responding to the drivel of male-dominated cool
Conceptual poetry). However, in the visual arts, the deadpan quasi-feminist
repetitions of Warhol (in which a female artist repeats his strategies but
intrudes upon them with redoubled Lacan inflected affect) have been done to
death (and, sorry Place, but female artists doing Warhol to death, while
knowing that what they are doing has been done to death, has also already
been done to death).

43) I am not saying that Goldsmith merely copies Warhol’s formal method of
appropriation. More importantly, he also convinces us (as Warhol did) of a
lurking lovely genius behind the façade. This is more than many of the
amateurish Warhol copycats do. Nonetheless, in this, he has missed out what
could have been his crucial invention: that is, to throw away the need to
convince us of the ‘lovely genius.’ That would be the great risk! In all,
Goldsmith has proven to be too conservative and too respectful of Warhol’s
legacy. Doing so, has won him many advantages: it has allowed him entrance
into pop culture and the art world, since Warhol’s legacy is still
sanctimoniously worshipped. And therefore, he has gained quite a bit (of
attention) but lost quite a bit (of invention).

44) So how have we gone about choosing our next geniuses (and this will be most
crucial for the Post-conceptual poets)?

—Firstly: make this free-for-all of net art a part of consistent art historical
lineage (so that the last room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s After

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Warhol show featured Corey Arcangel and Ryan Trecartin].

—Secondly: start websites like riverofthe.net or ubuweb that can mimic the
mode of Tube sites that gives us an overflowing of materials that, like Tube
sites, generate interest and income only to those at the very top.

—Thirdly: turn to old-school critics like Benjamin Buchloh or Marjorie Perloff

who will lambaste the mediocrity of contemporary democratic culture and
therefore point to you as being a cut above the rest or somehow ‘in on the
joke’ of the mise an abyme in the same way that earlier avant-gardeists had
been.

45) Benjamin Buchloh: “Artists can continue to ‘subvert’ norms (emphasizing the

latest trend) but are still mirroring the powers they are subservient too.”vii
Duh. I mean, its fairly obvious, from any theoretically acute perspective that
things like James Franco’s participation in the art world are not COMMUNIST
or even aesthetically radical, nor is there anything particularly
groundbreaking when a young gay dandy like Ryan McNamara predictably
says: “performance is inherently subversive in that the presenting institution
cannot guarantee what’s gonna happen.” At least, Goldsmith admits that
saying things like “everyone is a poet” is not about being subversive: that
being subversive died out with the 70s. His project is not political. It is funny,
though. Anyway, how is Buchloh (a key art world taste-maker employed by
Artforum and other publications to make it easier for buyers and museums to
know what is ‘good’) any less mimetic of capitalism?

46) Nonetheless people like Bishop, who writes with all the swish of someone
proposing politically and aesthetically radical (and even ‘negative’!!)
perspectives, praise Goldsmith, in utter sincerity, as being of uber-importance
in challenging visual art. The fact that his poetry can be valorized for
‘challenging visual art’ in an editorial in Artforum points to a paradox that

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can at the very least be mentioned by someone as astute as Bishop. Isn’t the
poetry that is illegible or unnoticed by the visual art world, that cannot be
accepted in galleries and museums, posing more of a challenge to the stale
hierarchies of visual art? I guess, to be a poet who gets a mention in
Artforum, you can’t just make work that poses a challenge to the hierarchies
of visual art. It has to also participate in them. Damn.

47) Christopher Glazek on Trecartin in n+1 (the hip, youthful, more ‘oppositional’
version of the New Yorker) “Any Ever depicts a universe with women in
charge and gays as assistants. It is an exciting, glorious place and a sneak
preview of what’s to come. Art bros, beware: the future does not belong to
you. Your generosity will not be exalted; your hijinks will not be adored; your
slickness will not be humored. Grab a personality and buy a jumpsuit—the

world is about to get more interesting.”viii

48) Re Glazek: It’s fine if you want to overthrow patriarchal hierarchies with a
new feminist hierarchy where gay men are ‘paid assistants.’ But, at least,
point to the fact that, Trecartin is, in so many ways, the sole artist credited
for his work. His collaborators (both tweens and women) are not in charge. He
is quite obviously a rich white male. And the article praising him is being
written by a posh white male. I don’t mean to suggest that white males making
millions from art is a problem that needs to be addressed in every piece of art
criticism about rich white male artists. But to ignore this fact in an article
that is written under the guise of some sort of queer theory political agenda is
bad journalism, bad politics, bad aesthetics, and bad scholarship. Which is to
say, (and this is probably the only thing you need to take from these notes),
that for all the emphasis on ‘critique’ and ‘contextual awareness,’ in the last
instance, most who participate in critical discourses and art discourses
persistently refuse to check their own context.

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49) Re: Artfrum.com. Recent critiques of the mise an abyme of Internet art
proposed in this vaguely counter-artworld artworld imprint have maintained a
glossy fixation on the industry that produces interest in what it critiques.
Moreover, these critics delight in their own powers of discrimination and do
not take into account the ways in which it is the valorization of the critic’s
discrimination that leads to the sort of artworld 1 percenters they loathe. The
suggestion offered – it’s time we look at things that aren’t dominant in the art
world and online – is quaint and on many levels opposed to the interest of the
critic who wants to have a legacy within those systems. Moreover, for the most
part, the art critic wants to simply replace what is the most successful with
something more marginal. And since artists rise to the top rather quickly,
revolts happen very quickly. J. Varadi’s Artforum article ends by suggesting

those on the sidelines need to do more work.ix This point is acritical and
ahistorical and typical of the blindsided indulgence of artworld calls to arms.
It feels foolish to have to say it, but, of course, those on the sidelines do
plenty of work; it is terribly hard to break into the artworld and not everyone
wants to (or should). Does the fact that someone did not ‘make it’ in the
artworld say something about their merit as an artist or the amount of ‘labor’
that they put into their art? After dragging the major trends of
postconceptualism through the dirt (namely Gaga and millionaire Internet
artists), Varadi nonetheless valorizes a select few, who ‘do it better,’ on the
way to saying that some ‘other’ undefined constellation of artistic practices
should now take dominance because we are ‘bored’ by the ones currently in
power. If you can start to get used to this formula, then you’re on your way to
be an artworld critic.

50) Excuse me for offering, for just a moment, a ‘closer reading’ of Varadi’s piece.

Firstly, let’s question the originality of the critique: to actually bother writing
in print that Internet art and networking art is tedious is to pose a critique
that is at this point more tedious than the artwork it condemns.
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Secondly, let’s question the location of the critique: on a sly and flashy tumblr
called artfrum.tumblr.com and that he then makes several exceptions without
really explaining why (for instance he says that the work of Andrew Durbin is
an exception; I think Andrew’s work is very good and worth critical reflection,
but I would have a hard time how understanding how or in what ways it is
distinct from the other work Varadi is talking about, and Varadi does not
make the effort to elaborate this distinction, which leads me to believe this
might be an opportunistic reference. After all, Varadi’s accompanying pictures
tell a different story, a picture of Durbin drinking a Four Loko while reading
is reduced anyway via its juxtaposition, it is simply one of many pictures of
art that he refers to as cultural detritus. In the text, it seems the only way that
Durbin is hailed to be ‘different than the rest’ is because he has “updated the
Baudelairian dandy.” This comparison is either ill informed or poorly crafted
bullshit. Baudelaire’s dandy was a reaction against the tides of democratic
culture, and quite clearly was marked tonally by depersonalized introversion.
On the contrary, what is compelling about Durbin is his enthusiastic
extroverted complicity with democratic and popular culture. Moreover, this is
what is compelling about the very figures of pop culture themselves that
Varadi condemns, who, as has been documented for years, most famously
through and around issues of postmodernism, Madonna, and feminism, are
aware of the problematics of complicity and are not the empty-headed twerps
like Varadi makes them out to be).

Thirdly, let’s question the authenticity of his critique. Those who truly disdain
Internet art as much as Varadi claims would not so eagerly fold their critique
up into the nexus of the very same discourse and modes of transmission of
that artwork, without at least making mention of the fact that he was doing
that. Moreover, has he talked to any artists not interested in being in the
artworld or in the poetry world, about things like Internet art? There you will
find a critique that is far more incisive because, for all its paranoid

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disinterestedness, it has a certain intelligence here lacking. None of them

merely say “I don’t like that form of art,” they say “I don’t like that whole
discourse, that whole scene, I don’t like those people, I don’t like that
structure, that debate, that hierarchy, that way of living life.” Therefore, they
don’t even want to debate things, they don’t want to inflame the scandal, they
don’t trust the eruption of another form, even if it would benefit them or their
friends.

Lastly, let’s question Varadi’s intentions in making this critique, a critique

that so obviously inflames the very sort of art discourses he claims to be
‘critiquing’? I urge you to view the piece and to decide for yourself why he is
making this critique. I honestly have no idea. I also urge you to track down
other articles that condemn Internet art and count how many make an
exception for a particular Internet artist. Then try and figure out who that
Internet artist is in relation to that critic (a friend, a student, a powerful
person, an academic colleague, an already canonized figure?). And really try
and find out, do these people not like Internet art or do they just want their
art and/or journalism to get more attention? Moreover, do these people really
not like the apparatus of the artworld or the poetry world, or do they like it
but just want more status in it? It’s tricky but it’s fun, you should go do it!
You can also do this for the romantics, futurists, Language poets, or whatever
art clique you’d like to investigate! Do it with this piece! I would make a list
of ones I’ve found recently but that would be difficult to do without severely
alienating myself from those critics, who quite honestly, I would love to hear
mention my name in the conversation of Internet art, in a bad way or good
way. Would you like to hear your name mentioned?

51) Queer Structuralists/queer conceptualists, born after 1960, have turned fully
against post-structuralism and the determinism of the language prison-house
in favor of a return to structuralism: ie, structures as something that can be
objectively determined with the human rational subject having some sort of

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ability to do this determining between what is queer and normative, for

instance. This has in common Badiou’s belligerent ontological turn against
Kant’s epistemologies and the later linguistic turn of Wittgenstein, in favor of
establishing universal and meaningful (rather than chaotic and splintered
postmodern) post-postmodern criteria. Here, the structuralists of October art
criticism (who wrote at the time of poststructuralism but eschewed anything
that resembled its tenets like Language poetry) also come into play, for also
rejecting the notion of splintered linguistic relativism, in favor of abstract
reasoning and charts, ie, structural knowledge that, as long as it is being
carried out by the most advanced specialists in the field, will always be the
most correct and the most avant-garde. Queer Structuralists follow the
mathematically-oriented structuralist impetus in Barthes and Lacan rather
than the post-structuralist linguistically-oriented impetus (the impetus to
lock us in to our egos and our authorship is eschewed in favor of a notion of
subversive efficient political agents who are always in the right, because they
can humbly look past there own egos through empathy and curiosity towards
the great outdoors, the messy inventive sophistry of Barthes and Lacan is also

eschewed in favor of a recapitulation of their precisely formalized sides).12

52) In contemporary art criticism it seems that the artwork has found a way to
traverse the will-to-power, to undo it, or break out of it. Case in point, critic
Jeffrey Nealon praises Goldsmith for delivering the real qua real, dispensing
with the need for an imaginative interpretive or even critical response. After
all it is in the interpretive responses of the past that patriarchal hierarchies
had been formed! Nonetheless, here he has forged his own neutral transparent
cool/queer hierarchy (as do most Queer Structuralists, as do many post-
postmodernists, as do many Post-conceptualists, as do some Post-conceptual
poets). This will be news to nobody who understands that the will-to-power
does not vanish and that attempts to make it look vanished only redouble its
effect. Canons are always created in those moments where it seems that this

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time the canon will be more justifiably produced than ever before. Many of us
understand this and are happy to use this knowledge to support our
Machiavellian opportunistic hedonism (a la Place). Others of us will work
desperately to find a way out of the forgetful impasse that forges the canon.
Foucault, for instance, worked tirelessly against the canon formations of
history. And yet, Foucault has been consumed through those formations.
Through this queeripedia consumption Foucault has been turned into an icon
for the David-Halperin-induced gay techno-utopian sincerity-without-
hierarchies that Gaga Feminists far and wide seem to believe is a reality.

53) A didactic and dogmatic representational system has been made out of the
slippery pataphysical negative dialectics, and a pokerfaced essential identity
has been born. The non-philosopher, post-popstar, after-artist, post-poet has
hoped to throw out the need for poiesis. With videogame ease, just find the
real, and the symbolic will follow, naturally. Skepticism of both the real and
the symbolic has been given up in favor of an affirmative embrace of both.
Despite the fact that we live in an age where people are skeptical of the
symbolic order of white patriarchs, and even disgusted by this, we have failed
to account for the ways in which that disgust has become a way of communally
identifying, that has forged a new queer symbolic order, an unquestioned and
invisible ideology, restricting our singular will in order that it meets the
standards of institutional visibility.

54) Within the 70s in avant-garde poetry, some poets, such as Steve McCaffrey (b.
1947), drew on the open Bataillean libidinal excessive economy but were
nonetheless canonized in a restricted refined literary economy by critics like
Marjorie Perloff. (Perloff’s influential early book, The Poetics of
Indeterminacy, seems to advocate the value of a libidinal semiotics, though
she subsequently moved away from this view in favor of aesthetic hierarchy
and calculated ironic efforts that demonstrate great skill.) It has also been
argued that many of the 70s avant-garde poets themselves fostered such a

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restricted economy, through their own academic affiliations and cliquishness

(particularly criticized on this count is my father Charles Bernstein who
taught at UBuffalo then at UPenn). More accurately, it can be said that these
poets participated in a rigorous and negative dialectical [swerving between
closed and open economies] mode of close reading that can be found in other
70s radical movements such as deconstruction and historicism.

Amy King, Eileen Myles (1949), Christopher Nealon, and others have made an
effort to point towards the repression of affect in the dominant strand of
postmodern avant-garde poetry in the 70s. In contrast, as Matvei Yankelevich
has suggested, there are a slew of poets working in and across a range of
practices not just within dogmatic formation of affect versus irony. It is from
this disdain for the Perloffian canon that a new canon will emerge and the
Post-conceptual poets will find their home. But this can only happen if we
forget our own will-to-power and condemn the will-to-power of the people
that came before us. And the best way to do this is to attack Perloff,
Bernstein, and Goldsmith.

55) One way to protest hierarchies is by claiming to have found a cool, punk, or
authentic way to get outside of them. People are rightfully upset about certain
hierarchies that signify exclusive oppression but rather than acknowledging
their own will-to-power in protesting these hierarchies, they hide behind a
cool queer neutrality. Eileen Myles’ response to Perloff falls prey to this mode
of response.

56) Updating the paradoxical exchanges between open versus closed economies,
and irony versus affect, Goldsmith’s work has found itself as a contemporary
juncture for these competing value systems to wage war. Perloff sees
Goldsmith as an exemplar of avant differentiation from the muck of
democratic culture. Nealon sees Goldsmith as disappearing those hierarchical
marks of differentiation and giving us a slice of ordinary life. Then there are

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those, who simply who don’t like the work, and see it as doing nothing
whatsoever: not making or disappearing hierarchies but simply staying put in
the mise en abyme of mediocrity and privilege. One of the reasons
Goldsmith’s work has been able to find unprecedented popularity (leaving
aside its large numbers of detractors) is that it appeals to two incredibly
different value systems: the system that values the dissolution of poetic
canons and the system that values poetic canons. In this way, he is anti-poetic
and poetic; conceptual (against expression) and Post-conceptual (sumptuously
expressing the melancholic paradoxes of being ‘against expression’); symbolic
and real; normative and queer.

76) On the other hand, Kenny’s less canonized second banana (here with a
pseudonym) Bob Davidson, might, in all, be more interesting than Goldsmith
because he is less accessible. That is, his work does not so easily able to
appeal to the system that values poetic canons (a la Perloff) but can seem to
dissolve hierarchies. Nonetheless, a more common response to conceptual
poetry, in general, will be one that finds it stuck in mediocrity and privilege.
To mimic this reactionary discourse for a moment: “Bob Davidson sinks: his
work belongs in the garbage and not a library…or even more pathetically, in
a gallery room of art made in the era of the master, Kenneth Goldsmith. It
holds up as poorly as most of the flarf spam folder poetics. Yet, of course,
certain stars and geniuses, those who employ these methods ‘first’ or ‘best’ or
‘in the limelight’ rise to the top. If Kenny’s work does not properly fold in to
the canon provided by the library, he made it so that it could fold in very
smoothly with the art world. Davidson’s work fails to do this and therefore is
more true to the promise of conceptual writing than Kenny’s, IE, it is more
truly banal. It folds into nothing more than the garbage. It is like any old
periodical. It appears then the one motivation that remains in the enterprise
of Davidson’s aesthetic impotence is then, if not to be crafty, if not to be
intelligent, then only to be not not-famous, to somehow rise above the

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garbage, to not be ordinarily mediocre, but extraordinarily mediocre, and

how does he become extraordinarily mediocre? Only by playing by the rules:
being around the right people, with the right publishers, writing the right
manifestoes, and doing the right thing. That is, he has not attempted to
suffer the ordinary mediocrity that comes from those writers who write for
themselves, or for presses that fail to manifest in the limelight. Moreover, if
and when it is pointed out that he has a lack of talent or conviction, he can
milk the 21st century fact that hating only adds comments to the video, and
therefore no critical indent can be made, because critique is an internalized
part of promotion, if not as part of the very content of the work. He can do
what the ‘institutional critique’ faction of the artworld has done for years
which is very abstractly internalize the critique posed against their own
work (for instance that it takes the place of craft and intelligence and wit),
by simply adding it in to the work’s self-conscious awareness of impotence,
but never face that critique head-on at a ground level. Thus, for all the
rhetoric that poetry is dead, it would be more accurate to say: the critic is
dead. They have been internalized and lobotomized not just by the
appropriative ironic internalization of the artist but also by the critics
themselves, who have lobotomized their own uncanny human electric ability
to pierce deep in favor of giving abstract, communally sanctioned, and
always pre-fabricated crits.” (this is not my opinion, btw, I am a big fan of
Bob’s work, and am also applying to graduate school, at a place where he
teaches, and would love to grab coffee.)

Does this reactionary position prove, then, that Davidson is secretly the ur-
conceptual genius, and has truly pulled off an act of radical impotence? Or is
he, rather just an ordinary bad poet, as there are ordinary bad poets in each
school of poetry. Is he a genius for being such a bad ‘bad poet’ or is he just a
flat-out bad poet. The problem here is that if his inability to achieve enduring
relevance is supposed to mean something (ie, calling into question the whole

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genius theory apparatus) then in order to say this one would have to make a
claim for the specificity and geniusness of Davidson’s uninteresting banality.
Thus, it would be a poetics that is far too redemptive and therefore as
‘complicit’ with the genius theory dandyism as Goldsmith’s work. Therefore,
he is in a bind: to make his work radically impotent it must fully drop into the
periphery and matter only as sociological waste, on an equivalent level with
periodical garbage and spam mail. However, he does not ever plunge so far
and instead, maintains a pretense of ‘pining for the canon’ and attempting to
be meaningful and successful. This pathos, that the work ‘still tries’ kind
of/sort of to be good and relevant is perhaps, in the end, a melodramatic
failure to fail that makes the work finally doubly impotent (and this doubled
impotence is perhaps the work’s last refuge to being talked about over time,
therefore losing its impotence).

Those who watch Davidson, as many a Post-conceptual poet might, can sort of
look to him as a way to redeem the ‘bad poet,’ and the banal follower, by
creating a sublime effect that allows a reader to witness the labyrinthine maze
of paradoxes around judgments of merit in art that are usually neutralized.
However, in a world where it becomes increasingly commonplace to play
around with such paradoxes (especially old do the Internet, where now we all
are failures and amateurs, trying to capitalize that amateurishness into fame),
the labyrinth becomes a little bit more obvious, and the shtick becomes that
much more irrelevant and boring…but then, also, potentially that much more
interesting…but even if it is more interesting…it is still too commonplace to
matter to the traditional archives, and therefore, the only mode that will end
up being used to select good from bad in these competing common place
enterprises will be that of opportunistic fancy. And maybe this is always the
case with the selection of an art star. And maybe that is too obvious a point
(one that can be made quite clearly) to spend one’s whole life attempting to
convey through artistic practice. Especially, since when you open your eyes,

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even just a bit, you can see that there are a ton of more interesting points to
make and it will be hard to make more interesting points than that in Post-
conceptual poetry. However, these same points start to become quite engaging
when they escape the terrain of white male melancholy and begin to relate to
the problematics of feminism, as happens in the work of Place, Low and Le
Fraga. Since in feminism, to be quite crude, the stakes are higher, as the
referent in question is not merely a case of blue balls.

57) If Language poetry is full of ironic emotions then conceptual/Post-conceptual

poetry is full of emotional irony. In Language poetry one would find “I’m sad”
firmly within ideological quotations. In conceptual/Post-conceptual poetry
one finds sadness in the exhaustion of compulsively produced ideological
quotations.

58) The caché of those modes of thought that have followed up on postmodernism,
such as Conceptual poetry and Post-conceptualism and post-postmodernism
and Queer structuralism, is not merely their claims: to be post-human, post-
phenomenological, non-philosophical, robotic, or to have some improved
access to non-human super-real truths or to have erased dogmatic subjective
relativistic categorizations. These modes of thought continue to thread
forward the lineage of poetry and philosophy, and remain centered around the
subject of the author, and still link themselves to the same institutions.
Therefore, nobody has actually changed their minds. Nobody actually thinks
we are all artists. This is similar to pointing out that, of course, Language
poets were obsessed with their authorial imprint (i.e., we do not need Kent
Johnson to keep using his name as he lets us know this). For instance, see
Jackson Mac Low: “it may be most correct to call such verbal works
‘perceiver-centered’ rather than ‘language centered’ (and certainly rather than
‘non-referential’). Whatever the degree of guidance given by the authors, all
or the larger part of the work of giving or finding meaning devolves upon the
perceivers. The works are indeed ‘perceiver-centered.’”

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59) I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by FaceBook, writing

academic theses on the “starving,” “hysterical,” “naked,” dragging themselves
through the Zurich museums at dawn looking for an angry fix.

60) No matter what else has changed, there are still celebrities.

61) And the celebrities that manage to succeed best in the Queer Structuralist,
post-conceptual poet, post-postmodern, climate are the ones who can enjoy
the machinery and use it well, the happy pothead video gamer (Cory Arcangel,
Ryan Trecartin, oh or Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs: those who show with
hope that one can still sell videos/film/movies after YouTube, or books after
torrents) and so on and so forth …Obama Optimism (uncreative writing…
becomes…creative writing; blackness becomes whiteness; queerness becomes
normality).

62) We only are reading the most read links, only are viewing the most liked
videos, masturbating to the image most masturbated to, befriending the most
befriended friend. We are engaged in large-scale popularity contest, whose
vocabulary is so universalized that even the most marginalized, un-social
beings are thrust into the middle of it: since it is so de-centralized that we are
all its center. We are unavoidably unavoidable; there is no surreptitious way
to sneak in. At once, we are a meaningless drone (whose sole purpose is to
click on advertisements) and the very center/reason for the existence of the
Internet.

63) Everyone might be a celebrity: with their own personal news feed, their own
personal search results and catering to their own tastes, interests, and friends
(keeping haters and opposing viewpoints out, unless they have been checked
and balanced by how many likes they have received or been moderated by the
neutral Wikipedia editor). Queer lives life without straight, never put into the
sort of violent confrontation that would disturb the process of identity

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formation. Gay men will remain post-traumatic subjects, cheered up by the

market; straight men to remain unblemished bullies. We rely on each other by
“not relying on each other” and that is the gayest thing of all.

64) None of us are celebrities anymore. Meanwhile, some people’s personal news
feed explodes with a high saturation of impartial observers. They rocket into
Queer Structuralist fame. They become the celebrities who exist after the age
of celebrity.

65) We are all celebrities with our own Facebook Timeline that grants us instant
retrospective iconic status. And its monstrous desire to absorb us all, gobble
us all up, like a crazy photo album run amuck, extends itself towards the
whole globe. Facebook is not just for the Western middle class, it is for
everyone, from the Western proletariat to the third world revolutionary.

66) I wanted to become a video artist and was excited by how easy it was to
trespass into that space by using cheap video equipment and posting my
videos onto YouTube. My father would share my video links with his Facebook
friends and I felt, already, like a superstar. Then as I became interested in
being a curmudgeonly dissident, I found that was easy enough to do by
blogging, downloading theory from a popular underground torrent website,
and using Ubuweb. What I always wanted to do, was have that kind of
implosion/explosion that made Stefani Germanotta into Lady Gaga, I wanted
to find my Ur-Self, the one who could be as equally monstrous as the machine:
could eat it up, for my own services, then spit it back up again at haters. I
thought by putting it all out there that might do it, and in a way, it might
obliterate me. I’ve yet to have this exciting transcendental moment of excess
turned perfection, surplus turned into meaning, like a Trecartin acidtrip after
which life all makes sense.

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67) Taking acid and reading queer theory is as normalizing as having a lobotomy
and buying a refrigerator.

68) My sister, the photographer Emma Bee Bernstein, of the same age as the Post-
conceptual poets (b. 1985), imbued irony learned from our paternal heritage
with as much disturbing nude confessional affect as possible. In committing
suicide, she seemed to find a way to give herself over to the image of fame, to
the extent that the image possessed her: she become embalmed by everything
she had made, which all took on retrospective radiance, all of which could be
bought and sold as an artwork. She crystallized her suffering and rage into
one giant performative climax: and said, in a post-feminist murmur, that she
was reclaiming with agency the role of the suicidal femme. Yet she did not
have final control of the apparatus that would control and document her
suicide: making it into google searchable gossip, and granting her a Facebook
page that cemented her life in a series of status updates. The last being
“Emma is Charles.” (Our father had just visited in Venice before she died.) I
was given her iPod when she died and played it all the time … just another
technological artifact that seemed to become stamped with her aura and on it,
a final On-The-Go playlist. The song: Elizabeth Harper’s “Charles Bridge,”
replete with enough overdetermined and haunting ‘messages’ to function as a
kind of post-suicide note.

Did she find a way to differentiate herself from paternal lineage, the mise en
abyme of irony, or did she find something that looked subversive but
nonetheless, gave her totally away to the conceptual apparatus marked by the
name-of-the-father?

Oedipal battles are more discernable than sibling rivalries but not necessarily
more important. I have anger towards everyone who stands where Emma fell:
those who demonstrate conceptual mastery even when they demonstrate
‘queer’ or ‘feminine’ failure. But in the end, I also stand where she fell. I am

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glamorous, while she is rotting. Yet this may all be no more than a rouse to
conceal my anger towards her: leaving me with debris from a very troubling
emblem of the Post-conceptual poet and the Queer Structuralist.

Emma was troubled with Amy Winehouse receiving so much media attention
for being out of control cause she wanted girls to live like rockers without all
the ‘concern.’ Like Emma, Winehouse faded fully to black: it was not merely a
performative ironic gesture. And, though her conceptual ironic parodic
pastiched image remains, and that image to some degree produces a signifier
that can incorporate the madness that was her decline (her lack of
choreographed and intentional work can now become replayed as a kind of
choreography of ‘madness’-as-concept), nonetheless with her death, her ‘work’
truly did cease; no matter how you may tease her corpse hair into a Ronnie
Spector ‘do, her posthumous fame bears just a shadowy trace of the raw
madness of one who really left the apparatus behind and faded into a blacker
black than the black that will mark her legacy.

69) Kenny is a wonderful dandy. But now, we are all dandys. Dandyism, as
Baudelaire meant it, suggested a type of difference, through style, that
distinguished one from the crowd, since the “rising tide of democracy spreads
everywhere and reduces everything to the same level.” This power was gained
not through conventional work nor money but a parodic, self-conscious,
aesthetic labor (as RuPaul says, in a refrain that supports camp labor “you
better work!”). The dandy’s style suggested a refusal to compromise, a
rebellion against the typical social order, a certain protest against normative
work but nonetheless there was always a degree of complicity with the class
system. Yet, the boundaries between dandy and crowd were intact. What
happens when the crowd so greatly replicates the dandy, that there can be no
distinction whatsoever? How does one pair the socialist humanism of Oscar
Wilde with his aristocratic dandyism or how about the fact that he was at
times a mere pedophile looking for lower class Arabs to impress and fuck? As

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with Nietzsche, is the disordering of value systems merely a way to

hedonistically affirm one’s personal proclivities or does it carry a darker
undertone: that there are no values and only a disturbed perverse will to
power? Why does Foucault, versed in will to power, nonetheless choose to end
his life espousing a narrow set of values that emphasize the hedonistic luxury
of the Greek man-boy dom-sub situation?

70) These are the paradoxes of the dandy. One can endlessly reformat and repeat
the paradoxes of the dandy (as I did with my recent character Leopold Brant)
and it will never fail to titillate. So that is why we all want to be dandys. We
all want to be New York School poets. And Facebook makes our wish come
true.

71) As dandies, our life has become Spark Notes Idiots Guide to Ourselves: we
become full of paradigms: kings of our world and the historians who notate
the stories. But, as a consequence, we are now excessively burdened with a
dystopic excessive surplus of images of the self that we cannot compete with.
Instead, we imitate the machine’s precision at changing masks by
internalizing its rhythms and become, like Mother Monster Gaga, a robotic
fashionista. And this becomes true even of the humblest of web citizens, who
use the Internet to mark the passing of alienated time. Even they become a
dandy.

72) I can hardly compete with those younger than me, who can produce meta-
histories at a far faster rate than I can: coming up with maybe 40 new
paradigms a day and even fashioning multiple Facebook pages with multiple
selves that are carrying out multiple web lives. And those who will be most
successful will be those who can best manage the multiple tabs and multiple
tumblrs without ever being so dour that they get off the Internet. Those who
incorporate melancholy and confession into the content of their work without

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abandoning the same conceptual scaffoldings and without ever getting out of
the social network.

73) Hopefully, we will be able to document ourselves so fully that there will no
longer be a search for lost time (no more taste of the Proust madeleine: as
Vanessa Place has shown, the 3-D printer makes one just as sumptuous). The
baby book will become an indispensable part of our permanent record. And
everyone will have a post-confessional purge. Jobs will judge us based on how
long it took us to become potty trained. The gravity of our actions will haunt
us from the earliest age. Nostalgia will become a science and we will be able to
perfectly retrieve the most exquisite memories at any time we’d like. There
will be no errors in our histories. We will be logged and filed from the earliest
age by our personal bureaucrat robots, who will manage our various
networking activities.

A world where Gaga’s twitter feeds are read from the beginning to end in
cycles like the Torah. And where our preeminent poets can do nothing more
than enact half-ass imitations of Gaga’s imitations of Gaga’s imitations of
Gaga’s imitations (this has already occurred in LA). A world where everyone is
a poet and has a tumblr and all the content of the avant-garde and pop culture
and art is fully disseminated but still only 1 person/percent (a mother
monster) makes all the money and gets all the credit.

74) Most of the already on-the-scene Post-conceptual poets have been able to
make the contradictions within this essay rife by performing them and
elaborating on them in their work. By more than just my own mode of
opportunistic aesthetic discrimination they have received due praise for
making rigorous demonstration of the problematics of contemporary culture,
and although some of the writing may look a lot like 70s Language poetry (as
it is a combo of performative ego with the egoless, mechanical), as well as
non-minimalist 60s conceptual art, nonetheless by reflecting and

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internalizing the 80s simulacrum (vis-à-vis Conceptual poetry), these writers

maintain a distinguishing mark that has very little in common with the
utopian signifier-play of the 70s or the Zen/hippie body-play of the 60s.
Sophia Le Fraga, who has found a way to suggest something of showy
confessionalism within the monotony of webtalk and texting (and who merges
concepts that one might find in Place with vaudevillian antics); Trisha Low,
whose purge is the envy of any live journalist but also of any romantic lyricist;
Josef Kaplan whose kill list pokes fun at the overdetermined political
judgments that look down upon ‘comfortable poets’ (as Joyelle McSweeny has
noted, this draws interesting links between drone warfare, surveillance,
Facebook, and poetry communities); Andrew Durbin, whose dandyish girltalk
is so fast that it threatens to explode; Danny Snelson, who delivers playful,
colorful deformations, re-performances, and culture jammings of the Internet
and the avant-archive; Steve McLaughlin, whose Puniverse crosses
encyclopediac conceptualism with off-kilter hilarity; Brian Kim Stefans and
his disgusting algorithmic hiccups; J. Gordon Faylor and Kieran Daily and
their info-overloaded texts that produce reading sans perception; and finally,
Steve Zultanski, who has autistically combined the typically autobiographical
details of ‘imagination’ with the mechanically precise autobiographical details
of ‘fact’.

However, equally exciting, are people who seem to elude this set of
problematics and do something else: Not that something else (besides the
problematics discussed here) can’t be found in the work of Post-conceptual
poets too. For instance, Kaplan’s hostility and Low’s punkness, hint to a
movement out of the irony/affect divide into more belligerently personal and
potentially more romantic/visionary territories. Sites like gausspdf and
trollthread and my own upcoming film journal, bloodytentpegs, attempt to
drive through these conditions without ever so easily converting the ‘general

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economy’ into a ‘restricted economy’ (or vice versa) but showing the perverse
messiness of those categories.

75) Two poets of the same age and coterie as the Post-conceptual poets, who,
nonetheless, can hardly be called Post-conceptual poets, as they have
bypassed conceptual influence altogether, are Cecilia Corrigan and Lonely
Christopher; Christopher drawing from new narrative (and its interweavings
of the dark abject transgressions of Rimbaud, Bataille, Kristeva with
contemporary gay life) and Corrigan drawing from absurdist comedy
(something she has in common with some flarfists and Language poets but she
has shown much more pizzazz than even the funniest of the ‘funny avant-garde
poets’ and in this way borders on a kind of playful accessibility common to
those rare crossover art/comedy sensations like Michael Smith’s work in the
70s or Maria Bamford’s recent work, but imagine if those two had brilliant
literary skills). The sensibilities of Corrigan and Christopher mark the limit
points for what might be possible for Post-conceptual poetry but what has
henceforth not occurred.

And if Corrigan and Christopher mark outside points, then looking within
Post-conceptual poetry, it is Trisha Low’s Purge that stands as a benchmark
for radical work that can be done within the parameters of Post-conceptual
poetry. The book, which veers between appropriated girl talk, humorous self-
on-self drag, utterly intelligent and astute criticality, pretty lyric, and raw
confession borders on doing that ‘new’ thing that could crystallize and define
Post-conceptual poetry as legitimately different than what came before: for
Low has internalized and worked through the death of the author and the
death of the text (and therefore, is able to seamlessly manage ideologically
satirical cut-ups a la Language poetry, as well as blatant amoral appropriation
a la Conceptual poetry) but has also begun to push beyond this: and press
towards the death of work. This is not an abandonment of rigor or structure
(this work is obsessively structured and shows biting rigor) but rather an

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abandonment of the ties that bind the artist to assert a kind of ‘mastery of
work’ to appease critics and audiences, in lieu of reaching that ‘vanishing
point’ of brutalized madness that is not marked as ‘madness.’ This is why
madness might not manifest here as ‘not working’ (anarchistic hedonism) or
‘excessive working’ (as it did for Foucault, not to mention Goldsmith) but
rather, working under the confines that one sets for oneself, as opposed to the
ones set by others. Of course, doing this might have appeal to others (from the
passing interest of a scowl to the enduring normative interest that keeps
Artaud in the canons). Indeed, Low’s work is among the most appealing and
talked about of the Post-conceptual poets. But in a sense, all that chatter
covers over a longing for the sort of ‘abandon’ showed by her work that most
in the ‘crowd’ cannot achieve. And it is here, that an avant-garde might always
crop up, just as an asylum might always crop up, because only so very few are
willing to abandon the demands of their time, and those few must be housed
and categorized accordingly. Thus, it is, that Post-conceptual poetry, a truly
vapid and historically uninteresting category houses several gems that will
nonetheless always, to a great extent, be bulldozed over by the boundaries
enforced by the stupidity of the phrase ‘Post-conceptual poetry.’ Likewise, the
‘death of work,’ (and its symmetrical counterpart ‘the death of the reader’)
which here I speak of with a romantic appreciation, is just as likely to produce
a work like Purge, as it is to produce dull mindless work that reflects an age
of outsourced labor and very shticky disappearing acts (look I disappeared
into a tired out, but updated through reference to the Internet, drag persona
and ‘subverted’ what the midwestern straight male spectator expects, or did
expect in the 1950s) instead of the sort of dangerous disappearances that risk
a loss of being able to be seen by the spectator at all.

So much art done by those born after 1985 shows a lack of rigorous
commitment to visionary and critically dialectical struggle and threatens to be
totally lost in the complacency of Facebook event marketing strategies rather

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than ‘praxis.’ But that is not bad or worth condemning. Because that would
mean throwing out what is potentially singular and disruptive about this
period, which will not just be established by those who manage to rise above
the mediocre middlebrow but also will be established by those artists who
have risked plummeting into the abyss of the mediocre currents of the
contemporary but somehow rose above it.

And, perhaps, most disruptive of all, (and most dreaded by those who fight for
the prize of canonized poet) will be those who took the risk of being mediocre
and complicit and drowned (failing to leave a distinguishing a mark). And
even of more importance, and this is something Low’s art already does, is the
potential of art in this moment to throw into question the very sort of
‘difference’ that is proposed by oppositions such as the one I just used
(swimming versus drowning, marked and unmarked). And the questioning of
this sort of opposition is found not just in works by bonafide artists (like Low)
but also in the non-canonized universe of tumblrs and blogs that rapidly
reassemble these distinctions in such an incisive way that those tried and true
deconstructed binaries like ‘low art and high art’ ‘creative writing and
uncreative writing’ ‘author and authorless’ start to seem antique. Let us hope
that the ‘drowning of the book’ and the drowned woman will not just be folded
into opportunism as such like Place’s virtually self-proclaimed sham of an
‘editorial position’ on the not particularly conceptual (except in name)
anthology of female conceptual writing I’ll Drown My Book.

77) Though Language poetry made authors subservient to a larger field of ‘matter’
and ‘language games,’ the authors are nonetheless still THERE and not just as
a simulacral decoy, which is what authors becomes when matter and language
become subservient to firing neurotransmitters and representational
structures (a kind of restructuralism) a la Conceptual poetry. What has been
abandoned in post-postmodernism is what was palpable in post-language
poetics (especially the work of Elizabeth Willis), a search for the somewhere

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else, which would not be merely an escape into the recesses of the heart or the
structures of ideology or the metastructures of neurologically induced frame-
narratives: but rather a turn to a somewhere else altogether (that is to say a
visionary outside of capitalism that does not fall into academic Marxism, or
hip queer theory but is ‘non-relational’ in more than just name).

Despite remaining uncanonized: There is still recourse to a true despairing

that believes in no real (no affect, no queerness) and does not use this no real
as a means for Baudrillardian solipsism or sophistry but instead fades from all
those trace structures that claim fidelity to ‘radical events.’ Something close
to what Low describes as the ‘actual mess’: “i think that performing a
feminine mess involves all the markers of the grotesque, but that always
seems somehow limited to the page or to a symbolic space. i was always more
interested in making an actual mess not just via overdetermined referents
(although i do love those) but in a contextual space, socially etc - in quite a
literal way, the ways i want to make a mess are ways that are already so firmly
disallowed or silenced that they are already illegible, and therefore can never
be carried out to their completion, not visibly anyway.” A real fading to black.
And the fact that this will never be properly canonized, and cannot be
properly canonized, without a drastic erasure (so that it will be marked as
‘madness’ and thereby turned into a kind of normative definition that eludes
what it is describing), is what is so disruptive and exciting about certain
works of Post-conceptual poetry.

78) Like Robert Grenier’s search for the unspoken word in the ‘back of the head,’
or Hannah Weiner’s silent listening, the quest to find the deeply idiosyncratic,
non-habitual word does not necessarily signal a rupture in the symbolic order
that totally bulldozes over the system in place and then puts in its place a new
authority (or else fails). Rather these more miniature ‘revolutions’ bring forth
the unseen into the seen without necessarily enforcing that they be seen
through coercive power tactics. This is a paradisiacal respite from the

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ordinary trappings of power (and all the many orders it operates within: the
real, imaginary, and symbolic). But if it must be schematized as such. Such
work seems to operate mostly at the level of the Imaginary: a subtle
engagement with the ego’s conscious perspective on the material world, with
letters and words, as well as, quite explicitly the imagination; and with
deference, of course, to the order of the symbolic and the order of the real,
but with a refusal to give in to either one. This is to provide everything a
chain of never-ending contingencies, and functions like the ever-
contextualizing neutrality of the historicist that Zizek derides for failing to
reduce everything to a return of the same traumatic kernel of the real,
manifested repeatedly through the appearance of incompatible differences.
The acceptance of this ‘limited’ agency of artist, contrasts with the Maoist
revolutionary or the Warholian ironist (both symptoms of the restoration
marked by the 80s) though it certainly can have overlap. The latter two are
committed to the symbolic order (the first calling for a new hierarchy the
second calling for complacence). It is possible, however, to call a given
Language writer a Maoist or a Warholian (for their insistence on creating a
new canon but also for their ironic complicity with the Academy or pop
culture). Yet, the heart of a work like Grenier’s “On Speech” or Watten’s “On
Coolidge” is to propose an alternative to any such commitments to hegemonic
symbolic orders (the hegemonic order of speech and its hegemonically
enforced juxtapositions).

79) The poststructuralist attempt to subordinate meaning to language has been

followed up by the post-postmodern/post-poststructuralist attempt to
subordinate meaning to neurological transmissions. Neurophilosopher Paul
Churchland’s highly influential alternative to folk psychology’s belief in the
manifest image of humans is to give us a scientific image of humans: as
bundle of firing neurons in a network of cells. The postmodernist/post-
structuralist valorizes human intuition and ontological play and resemblance

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(being in the world, being in language), while the latter finds humans to be
rather insignificant compared to meta-human structures, as well as ‘reals’ (in
the outside world) that escape cognition. This has split repercussions: on the
one hand, it can reaffirm the dystopian Baudrillardian death of the real
(Conceptual poetry); on the other hand, it can reaffirm the utopian, queer
reals of nature and the cosmos (speculative materialism).

The post-postmodern deterministic reliance on neurological, technological,

algorithmic, and cosmological structure does not eschew liberal politics; on
the contrary, it makes Marxist-Hegelianism seem more possible and also
makes dogmatic procedures such as those proscribed by queer theory seem
more probable. That is because dogmatic formalism becomes altogether more
cleanly performable when the subject is so deeply relativized by queer
structural mathematic precision.

The split manifests in another way as well. One group believes that having
discovered a world of the real outside of the human mind, we can finally ditch
institutional legacies of science and the subject (non-philosophy, queer
theory, late affective romantic lyric); the other sides claiming that such
radical departures from traditional subjectivity must be found precisely
through science, psychoanalysis, mathematics, politics, and the avant-garde
(Badiou, Zizek, and Conceptual poetry). Nonetheless, both sides of the split
continue to rely on systemic formulations and institutional housing, but only
the latter will admit to this.

80) Post-postmodernism is potentially nothing more than a mimetic refashioning

of our contemporary global situation: We are kept at an alienated distance
from the art of war, from the medium of war, from the imaginary of war, from
any visionary dismantling potentialities of war. Meanwhile, the government
stores up massive information in warehouses (not to mention its storing of
prisoners) without any useful interpretive apparatus, which could potentially

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disturb the entire apparatus (from the NSA to the prison-industrial complex).
Instead, the punctum (the guilt of the traitor) and the studium (the
compendium of information) are glued together, as if in perfect harmony. This
could be argued to have a grim overlap with Conceptual poetry (and there is
even a self-conscious overlap in works like those of Josef Kaplan). The real is
in that punctum, we don’t need interpretation, just search-and-destroy-
engines to grab the real and expose it to the world. And maybe this is the
world we live in. Whereas imaginary tactics would have us decompose (Percy
Shelley, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida) the
world to find truths (unstable or not, depending on your bent) the world is no
longer in need of decomposing. We have it as a given formula: and must
rather hunt down the real, as if we were in a videogame, finding it glowing
brightly in-and-of-itself (the work of the philosopher and analyst and poet
and artist is no longer needed: the real is just there already). The studium will
deliver us the punctum: we have faith. Any of us can be queer professors and
find out this ‘truth’ for ourselves. Using our Mac computers, we will all be
connected through the shared fact of having peculiar tastes/disgusts, peculiar
base relations to the system that can then help us to link to the system.

81) It would be easy if the whole world were just an amoral thing. However,
negative dialectical poststructuralism is not dead; there are still formulations
of it, from Cartoon Network’s Uncle Grandpa to Cecilia Corrigan’s
forthcoming book Titanic to Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound.

82) Am I, is this, neoliberal mise en abyme? Am I, is this, indistinguishable

drivel? Have I, does this, seek critical redemption? Have I, does this, offer
critical redemption? Have I, does this, align totally with the museum, with my
father’s name, with Kenny Goldsmith’s name? Have I found, is this, the proper
exhibition space to make my points seem properly removed from the mise en
abyme? Doing this now, and questioning my ties to the name-of-the-father,
aren’t I repeating what the father does when he questions his ties to the

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name-of-the-father (his father Herman who signified normative 50s American

culture)? By struggling with Kenny’s struggling with my father am I rebelling
against anybody or arguing with a brother or myself? Should I, does this, suck
up to Language poetry? Should I, does this, suck up to Post-conceptual
poetry? Does this, can this suck up to my mother and feminism and
M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine? Should I, does this, don’t we all, forget about the
promises of feminism? Do I, can I, love Vanessa Place and my father and my
mother and Kenneth Goldsmith and Trisha Low and my sister? Can I, do I,
love by, and through, critique alone?

83) Place, a summary of her viewpoints (note that this is not a real quote from
Place) “One might think of poetry as being ideologically exempt, but it isn’t,
for we are fully embedded in the symbolic order, and everything we do is evil,
and rather than ever risk hypocrisy for what we do, we must admit it
immediately, make it apparent, and parody it, we must constantly identify as
the perpetrator to show and expose that we are one, and allow ourselves to be
‘killed’ when the revolution comes, never protest your guilt. The toughness of
the law exerts itself always, even in places where it is evidently not acting:
like poetry or other ‘inclusive’ institutions. Power still operates in poetry and
creates inequalities. Therefore, there is no ‘good’ haven that is separate from
the ‘evil criminals’ who we scapegoat for all our problems.”

84) Not everything is always so separate as periodizing schemas pretend them to

be. Queer theory’s communitarian identity has something in common with the
radically splintered dialects of the masculinist Bruce Andrews. Sianne Ngai
demonstrates that blurred line, in her affect studies reading of Andrews,
which suggests that by redoubling the excess of ideological artifices, Andrews
brings about a kernel of ‘disgust,’ which we can share, and which can serve, as
our ‘Real.’ This gives us a kind of detachment with which we can ‘look’ at the
falseness of things and laugh, creating a kind of communal bonding. Also it
forges precisely the communitarian identity that Andrews both loathes and

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seeks (the counter-hegemonic one is alright with him). The ‘generalized’

(queer) subaltern’s disgust (affect studies) functions as a mode of
identification that leads towards a homogenous monolithic and accurate
system, that is ‘better than’ any particular efforts to render the world forged
by the real-in-solitude (a category that is ‘absent’ in this scenario). Here,
these lines become blurred because Ngai loses the radical willful innovation of
Andrews and gets weighed down by the need to theorize a collective enjoyment
of ‘disgust.’ The point, perhaps of Andrews, is that he is ‘tough’ to identify
with and creates a kind of blockage in our patterns of identification.
Nonetheless, there is, I think a kind of linkage between what Andrews does
and what Queer Theory attempts to do (vis-à-vis his own reliance on the
universal figure of the counter-hegemonic but also his use of vulgar terms),
with Andrews perhaps proving more successful because his work has an
idiosyncrasy and a hostility that Queer Structuralist Universalist Formalism
seems to lose.

85) In the academy and art world you aren’t supposed to enjoy (as you allegedly
are ‘demanded’ to do in ‘neoliberalism’). But you are supposed to have a
painful understanding of the ideological determination of whatever enjoyment
you have. And you are supposed to confess your jouissance (your ideologically
determined painful pleasures) to someone else in legible forms. “I am
attached to the system in such and such way,” and then once you admit this,
you are on the path towards having more power in the system, getting more
power from the system: because in confessing you are rewarded, you are
respected, you are understood. Basically, through Zizekian psychology, we are
forced to admit our jouissance (that is to expose that pleasure/pain that
attaches you to the system). In naming it, you are then ‘freed.’ And then this
freedom allows you form a new master signifier and ego ideal to replace the
old one (ideally a Communist one but in other parts of the academy, you form

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a queer signifier). Or if not confessing your desire, you are supposed to

confess (a la Ngai) your disgust.

Thus a leading queer theorist Heather Love can confess that she couldn’t
really put two and two together in her emotional life until she could receive
the permission to write about her personal life through her dissertation. What
gets lost in this emphasis on confession and didactic formalism is that the
emotional turbulence that is academically designated, as jouissance, loses its
untranslatability and uninstitutionality: that it might not have to be
surrendered over to the symbolic order (to the affect studies journal, to
Facebook, to the priest, to the therapist). The work of even the most cutting
edge and interesting members of the queer academy like Ngai and Lauren
Berlant seems to make diffidence and pain into a scratch and sniff coloring
book that gives a neat little map of the bourgeoisie mind.

86) “The stuff of conceptualism, the textual thing, is the most static of objects,
inert... Dead as a doorknob. Its representations are radical mimesis because
they do not represent, just present” (Place). In line with speculative
materialism, Place valorizes the content that dumbly remains after all
politicized moralizing interpretation has exhausted itself. Here she offers a
very sharp and snide turn against the post-structuralist emphasis on linguistic
framings, particularly the idea that one should strategically and self-
consciously use seductive linguistic framing mechanisms in politics, a case
argued most persuasively by George Lakoff (b. 1941); since these frames
dictate our lives and identities and choices, and thus are unavoidable.
Unsurprisingly, a major critic of complicitally using seductive ideological
frame-mechanisms to further ones political causes is Zizek, who is obsessed,
always with the gap in the coherent frame that interrupts its intelligibility.

A different attack on the emphasis of framings was offered by David Micah

Greenberg, in the Boston Review, in his critique of Charles Bernstein’s poetry

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for utilizing tactical and conflicting framings to make skewed political points,
Greenberg argues that in the same way the far right does. It was always
argued by Lakoff that the right had pigeonholed these tactics, and his
suggestions to the left have been heeded, particularly by Obama, who found
ways to present the public with a deeply seductive advertising campaign
around the term “change” that linked up multiple different upsets into one
coherent frame through which came his ideological message. And yet
Greenberg imagines Obama’s preaching to be free from such ideological
framing maneuverings, finding it to be neutral and gentle: “Obama is a better
writer than most because, like Lincoln, he challenges audiences to create
space for experiences different from their own. The left’s poetry is not always
positioned to do so, to present or at least evoke the feeling of the differential
texture of social experience, in order to counter those who would obliterate
reality and human life when they do not serve them.” What occurs here is a
very minor manifestation of the move signaled by Obama and in part
generated by the insights of Lakoff that turned splintered micropolitical
positions into a real, neutral, amoral, apolitical, universalized formalism.
Neutral space should be given, through which difference can be experienced
and the framing would be neutrally accepted (so that even a child could
understand it) and thus we take the differance out of difference. Strangely,
though the sort of self-conscious framings of Lakoff inaugurated this turn, it
is nonetheless, a turn away from self-conscious framings and towards amoral
rational structuralist posturings. Zizek berates Lakoff for putting forward
“passionate metaphoric language” and “seductive frames” rather than
“rational argumentation and abstract moralizing,” but it is rational
argumentation and abstract moralizing that is exactly what makes Obama such

an appealing candidate.x Obama is therefore a very PC/mainstream version of

the sort of Messianic figure that is ‘supposed’ to come according to
Badiousian-Zizekian prophecies. Therefore, the PC liberal belief in a kind of
articulatable revolutionary spirit that is coherently oriented around a ‘gap’

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‘punctum’ ‘disdain’ or ‘void’ that is the center of the system (marked by

queerness or femininity or blackness or poverty) is just like the Badiousian-
Zizekian revolutionary, with the only difference being his proclivity for liberal
democracy rather than for communism. Aesthetically, if not politically, the PC
mainstream democratic liberals (like Greenberg and Obama) share with
Badiousian-Zizekian communists a distrust of splintered quotidian dialects
(such as those offered by the ghetto micro-cultures and minor literatures of
postmodernism) that leave no space for rational abstract moralizing that can
create a shared experience and lead therefore to ‘change’; that is to say, that
Badiousian-Zizekian ‘aesthetics’ mean never giving up on party politics and a
‘majority feeling’ (even if that ‘majority feeling’ is a shared feeling of disdain
and distrust). Likewise, Place distrusts quotidian lyrical splintered language
that has not been filtered through the party politics and abstract amoral
rationalism of her own movement (Conceptual poetry).

87) Sharing feelings, through dissertations (a la Heather Love), is not in and of

itself the problem; but the mentality of compulsive sharing does foreclose the
freedom of ‘off the grid’ flights. The unmappable confabulations of the 70s
were thrown away in favor of the Maoist-Lacanian-Badiousian-Zizekian
‘restoration’ that peaked in Baudrillard’s deadpan 80s (covering over any
possibility of punk or romantic escape/secession from the system). See the
ways in which homosexual separatism (the radical faeries, for instance) and
black separatism and feminist separatism (such as Shulamith Firestone and
her notion of literally breaking apart the nuclear family) have been thrown
out of the ‘picture’ of what gay/black civil rights are today. If in Detroit one
might romantically note a possibility for secession, watch how it becomes
covered over superfast: not by the right wing but by the leftist artists and
their desire for an art market.

88) The danger of Post-conceptual poetry is to take refuge in the ‘progressive’

ideal of a widening luxurious middle class, that should have as many ‘rights’

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as possible (legalized pot, legalized marriage), but also have as much

outsourced labor as possible. Things should be relaxed, and we should all have
iPhones. So much of Gaga-feminism and of Occupy Wall Street confined itself
to this sort of viewpoint, in which freedom meant freedom granted through
corporately owned social media: memes (lingos, LOGOTV), Jon Stewart,
Stephen Colbert, Napster and New Sincerity, all are symptoms here. Certainly,
Goldsmith and Ubuweb are in danger of giving the avant-garde over to this
sort of web utopianism [see Goldsmith on Coblert]. The more idealized,
luxurious, and leisurely your labor is, the more money you either already
make, inherited, or are going to attract. This is not just because we have
outsourced ‘real work’ abroad, but also because we have outsourced our
creativity to the past, which we rely on too heavily.

89) By outsourcing labor, habit, control, and rules we have lost our ability to
come up with engaging, and adventurous, alternatives to the structures that
dominate us. Which is to say, with the Lacanians, that we are “enjoying”
ourselves too much. But it is also to say that the way out is not merely to list a
thousand ways that “enjoy” has become a dominant demand in the West. Or to
find a new master term (Post-conceptual poetry, for instance) to settle us
down … but rather, to inventively and adventurously establish rules and
habits that we desire (not rules and habits that the party desires).

90) But is this all fundamentally how language works? Is it always a return to the
repetitive, boring, normative, so that anything truly remarkable will “pop up”
as something to be read and decoded as a “punctum” or a “differance” or an
“objet petit a” or “bold new artist”? Or else encoded into a new significant
term that will freeze up within days and need to be displaced again?

91) With the disappearance of a stable ‘academy’ for the humanities, serious
thinking and theorizing and poetics have, more than ever, a pressure to be
viral or decorative (think of how one does not have to read Goldsmith’s work,

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now that is fine for a one joke thing but it is inevitably going to be everyone’s
joke… And this is new, the dandy’s proclivity for the decorative, was once an
illustration of avant-garde culture’s aesthetic turn, however the hyper dandys
a la Goldsmith are more indicative of an anesthetic turn). The institutions of
the visual art, party promotion, and Internet fame have all increased as the
academic humanities have dwindled. So, for better or worse, serious thinkers
and theorists and historians and critics and artists and poets have to spend
more time angling their work for exciting small decorative galleries/journals
with viral appeal. That is to say: “appeal to the worldwideweb” rather than
“create complex esoteric webs within your own work.” Likewise, ‘negative
queer theory’ and its sibling theories, for all their talk of ‘non-relationality,’
have proven nothing more than compulsory modes of empathetic outreach (to
tenure committees and middle class undergraduates). And thus we must make
everything so that it appeals to the world wide queer. I mean have you looked
into Sarah Schulman’s queer international? And those who endorse this
message of queer internationalism get red in the face when they are quizzed
about the way in which their work is severely hierarchical, about how it even
goes so far as finding queer internationalism as a justification for supporting
Hamas. What we see here, as in Zizek’s Stalinism, and Badiou’s Maoism, and
Schulman’s Hamasism, is the use of abject, particular minorities to endorse a
global left. The case being, that any communal furor and universalized
discourse, however vapid and violent and hierarchical, is altogether justified
if it takes account of some abstract term like ‘queer’ or ‘proletariat’ or
‘immigrant’ or ‘the real’ or ‘the event.’ Instead of using those particular
uncounted ‘minorities’ as a moment to radically break with the system of
communal alliances and to rethink formalistic universalism, they are instead
used to justify a constant and never-ending ‘recounting’ premised on an idea
that one can approximate fairness if one makes continual deference to the
‘abject’ (and here, with all these thinkers, is the paranoia of ever slipping
fully into the uncounted, that is to say, losing the status of being marked by

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and including their name as a ‘heroic, brilliant, radical’ critic, philosopher, or

political activist).

92) The next note is perhaps the only truly personal (and autobiographical) note.

93) It has been a struggle, here, to discuss how a given group of thinkers (Post-
conceptual poets) manages these contradictions. It’s hard to discuss things
like this, as they occur, in the ‘contemporary,’ with your friends and
colleagues (and family and family friends) implicated, in any serious way
because if one does discuss things like this in a serious way (or even in a
trivial way) you look very bad. For one thing you look like you’re very
resentful of the ways in which people have been able to find ‘success’ by
putting their work out through ‘successful’ and hierarchical platforms. But
also, you look hypocritical because you are no better than those people
because your critiques are probably disseminated through some sort of
hierarchical platform, as well.

Art history is written by the curators, critics, and landlords who take the least
amount of risk and are in the end the least remembered. And you have to be
an utter psychotic (like Jack Smith) to complain bitterly about this to the
particular people who ‘help you out’ as an artist. Though, it’s fine to pose it as
a glossy and general critique (the kind offered by Bernadette Corporation), it
is never fine to bite the hand that feeds in any way that would seriously cut
you off from the network that is meant to support and indulge your ‘negative’
perspective.

Nonetheless, I am here, taking the risk of looking resentful and hypocritical

(indulgent and juvenile) in order to make the point that –––––

As someone who has lived within the gated communities of the ‘negative’
cultures of theory and art, I am hereby stating that it is nonetheless almost
wholly impossible to overwhelmingly refuse valorization (of your practice or
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the practice of your ‘friends’) at the end of an article in any substantial

(specific and incisive) way, due to fear of humiliation and the risk of career
injury. And it is this final humiliating limitation that is never discussed: that
in the end you must not cut yourself off from everyone in the marketplace,
only a substantially large group of people in the marketplace. Even if total
hatred of everyone’s actions is precisely the most advanced and persistent
manifestation of the research you are pursuing, a craft you have been
routinely encouraged to carry to its apex, nonetheless, you are still always
supposed to make an exception for the pocket fringe microcollective or
journal or curator or publisher or parent or friend or gallery that will support
you. You will inevitably be forced to gag on the cock of community and family
[even if this community and family is some sort of neo-Paris-is-Burning anti-
family parodic-family post-family or new-model-of-kinship or wtv]. And this
perhaps is the final ball and chain that weds you to the market that you can
all expect to find waiting there, if you pursue any sort of negative path. I hope
that reading this will make you less surprised than I was when I arrived here.

(Endnotes)

1 This follows up on many arguments offered in Notes on Conceptualism by

Rob Fitterman and Vanessa Place. Two quotes from this in particular are
relevant:
“What is an ‘impure’ conceptualism or Post-conceptualism in writing? A
Post-conceptualism might invite more interventionist editing of appropriated
source material and more direct treatment of the self in relation to the
‘object,’ as in post-conceptual visual art where the self re-emerges, albeit
alienated or distorted (see Paul McCarthy).” (24)
“We are painfully aware that Conceptual Art was termed nearly half a century
ago, and much of what we address might equally be called post-conceptual or

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neo-conceptual (to borrow terms from the visual arts).” (12)

Return to Reference.

2 Queer Structuralism/Queer Conceptualism

Judith Jack Halberstam Gaga Feminism
Gaga Stigmata http://gagajournal.blogspot.com/
David Joselit After Art
Jose Munoz Cruising Utopia
Lee Edelman Queer Theory and the Death Drive

Return to Reference.

3 Recent Arguments About Affect/Irony in New Poetry

Marjorie Perloff on Recent Lyric http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-
picasso/poetryonthebrink/
Eileen Myles on Perloff http://www.thevolta.org/ewc29-emyles-p1.html
Matvei Yankelevich on Perloff http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/the-gray-
area-an-open-letter-to-marjorie-perloff
Drew Gardner on Flarf http://www.bostonreview.net/poetry/drew-gardner-
flarf-life-poetry-affect
Keston Sutherland on Conceptual poetry
http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com/post/49378474736/keston-sutherland-
theses-on-antisubjectivist-dogma
Cecilia Corrigan on I’ll Drown My Book
https://jacket2.org/reviews/drowning

Return to Reference.

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4 Brian Kim Stefans gives a good summation of the differences between

Conceptual poetry and Language poetry, and suggests the ways in which
Conceptual poetry and speculative materialism (a constellation of
philosophers following Zizek, Badiou, and Laruelle reach non-
phenomenological, often scientific, approaches to ‘the real’): “The play of the
referent—the polysemeity of the sign as valorized in Language poetry…is not
the goal of these writers, so much as the formation of a radical new form of
indexicality through which the reflexive property of objects—that they always
already equal themselves—will come to supersede or compensate for that
ineluctable property of words, which is that they never equal what they are
pointing to. Letters and words treated as numbers in turn create equations
out of their textual structure; letters and words both buttress them and
comprise them. The work of literature itself forms, then, a sort of proof….
Fiction and poetry are now able to make statements about reality, albeit
speculative ones, which are based not on journalistic observation but rather
on the integrity of mathematical thinking, however etiolated it might be …
The aim of speculative realists—and this is where they intersect with the
apparently non-realist, highly structured mode of [conceptual writers]…is to
create a description of this great outdoors (a metaphysics, even if this term is
often disavowed) without the language of description, which would reduce
this outdoors to mere thought…. rather than wallowing in the impasse of
“postmodern” relativisms [and here postmodern/post-structuralism a la
Language poetry is being referred to] —that there is no knowledge of the
world untainted by cognition or conceptual categories, and hence that all we
can ever know is the language of knowledge—these recent works are
comfortable with the ultimate impossibility of divining essences or absolutes
through thought. In fact, these works bracket the subjectivity of their
“characters” (when they have them) in favor of subjecting readers directly to
the work and putting objects for study in their hands, both literally and
figuratively. In some more extreme cases, these writers even imagine a future

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in which literature will not be made by or for humans at all—what Christian

Bök has a dubbed a ‘rotopoetics.’” (Stefans, Brain Kim. “Terrible Engines.”
Comparative Literature Studies 52.1 (2014): 139-83).

Return to Reference.

5 Philosophy Discussed Here

Eleanor Kaufman, The desire called Mao
Christopher Norris, Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’: A Reader’s Guide
Geoff Boucher, The Charmed Circle of Ideology
Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, The Speculative Turn
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

Return to Reference.

6 History of Poetry and Art Discussed Here

Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, Johanna Drucker
The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, Paul Hoover
Our Aesthetic Categories, Sianne Ngai
Against Expression, Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin
Gausspdf
Trollthread

Return to Reference.

7 Language poetry: inventive poetry (mundane networking)

The death of the author means the importance of the text, and the ideological
linguistic framings.

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Conceptual poetry: inventive networking (mundane poetry)

The death of the text has means the importance of the social network, and
systematic formulaic rationality.

Conceptual poetry takes far more – in its strategy if not its surface styles –
from the visual art collective “Art and Language” and from the Pictures
Generation artists than from Language poetry, which was markedly at odds
with these art world approaches. Conceptual poetry rejects Language poetry’s
negative dialectical materialism and, rather, utilizes Art and Language’s and
Picture Generation’s relational, dialogical, community-based, exchanges of
commodities created through the collaborative valorizing of cliques. There,
the coterie that forms valorization was a part of the work, forming an
allegory for the notion that context determines content.

Michael Corris of Art and Language: “The collective is a stable group of

individuals who are trying to develop an index of their commonality and who
are trying to build on that understanding in order to construct a common
culture. To work as a collective is to question how this commonality is
reshaped, reformed, negated, or intensified by the conversation. This
conversation does not necessarily have to proceed in a dialectical fashion
toward a particular end; it is more related to Bakhtin’s notion of a dialogic
conversation, which is without a pragmatic aim—in other words, conversing
just to see what might emerge in and through an untrammeled exchange. A
stable group is a necessity for being able to maintain that sort of fragile
social encounter.” (95: Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing
Conceptualism).

Language poetry certainly falls back, as all schools of art do, on certain
forms of cliquishness, but so too was there a difficulty emerging from
openness and mutability of forms in contrast to closed forms or merely visual

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description.

Lyn Hejinian: “Difficulty and its corollary effects may produce work that is
not about the world but is in it. The difficulty of the work, then, does not
constitute an intransigence; on the contrary, it is the material manifestation
of the work’s mutability, its openness, not just a form, but, more
importantly, a forming” (“Barbarism,” The Language of Inquiry).

Barbara Guest: “art that is created is infinitely susceptible to new shapes

because no shape can be regarded as final” (The Forces of the Imagination).

Ann Lauterbach: “Poetry resists false linkages…Both conventional narrative

strategies and the mimesis of visual description are inadequate to the
demands of contemporary experience…Resisting false linkages while
discovering, recovering, uncovering new ones, poets might help sweep the
linguistic path of its polluting and coercive narratives, helping us to re-
perceive our world and each other with efficacy, compassion, humor, and
mutual regard.”

Certainly, Conceptual poetry did not eliminate ‘difficulty’ ‘chance’ and ‘play’
but it is allowed to occur only within predetermined symbolic structures, and
they are less so those of language (which is, of course, a dauntingly open
ending set of limits) but rather the limits of art world-style social economies
(what is cool and what is not cool), which can do little more than serve as an
allegory for the context determining the content. It does not even test the
theory. It just allegorizes it.

In a way, Conceptual poetry’s most brilliant scheme has been to ditch the
impoverished poetry community and fall into the arms of the art world,
thereby boosting the symbolic capital of their works.

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“The art world excels at colonizing cultural forms thriving at its margins.
Why not redefine poetry as a post studio experimental writing practice? Why
don’t our great conceptual writers switch affiliations, deign themselves word
artists, and await their mid-career retrospectives? I’m being only partly
facetious: There are clear advantages to having one’s practice subsumed by
the art world.” (William S. Smith, 111, Corrected Slogans).

This type of dematerialization (which is really no more than a hyper-

materialization, a resignifying, and a price boosting of the poetry book)
stands in stark contrast to the previously dominant condition of poetry
making: the imaginative play that takes place outside the symbolic order, the
play with signifiers of a certain stream of Language poetry (though certainly
not all, as the Against Expression anthology proves the precedents for
Conceptual poetry can be found pretty much anywhere one wants to find
them).

Famously, the contemporary dematerialized art object leaves a buyable trace

–

and some art is more buyable than others. (Only some ‘queer’ outsider art
works are discussed in the academy.) This is a basic and obvious fact and yet
it is so rarely mentioned, lest the critic be caught with his or her pants off.
And then they would have to actually defend (to nobody other than
themselves) the real reasons that he or she sets up the criteria’s that he or
she uses. Critics have not been trained to justify their work to themselves,
have not been trained to boost their own will; anymore than most art
students know how to produce art without thinking first about teachers (later
they will think first about dealers and critics).

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Flaunting this predicament is Conceptual poetry, which by dematerializing

poetic writing have fallen back on the dominant structures (even ‘languages’)
of the visual art world and its hierarchies (ruled by Duchamp, Warhol, and
Sherman), which, in of itself, is known for dematerializing the art object (and
therefore falling back on the power plays of networks and communities). This
reemphasis on networks is a key way to receive power: David Joselit in After
Art celebrates art that is ‘connected’ and spectacular.

Here I though I’d just give some quotes from Joselit, none of them are made
up, and I hope they will offer some substantiation of my points about Queer
Structuralism. He is a rallying point for these issues because he finds queer
theory and occupy wall street and the dematerialization of the art object and
the networking superstar and the meme all to be the most radical, exciting
things ever (and anything that reminds him of this stuff should be bought
and collected by major collectors immediately)! “The point is not to deny this
power through postures of political negation or to brush it under the carpet
in fear of ‘selling out.’ The point is to use this power” (86-91). Institutional
critique since the late 60s “parodies the power of art without either
adequately defining it or coming close to actually distinguishing it” (91). For
institutional critique: “either art’s power is ethically corrupt or its power is
nonexistent. As a corollary to this there is a lingering tendency to regard
art’s power as virtual—as an epiphenomenal reflection of other kinds of ‘real’
power, such as capital. I have tried to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the
organization of the art world—its format—is as real as it gets when it comes
to capital’s effects. It’s not just the purchase of artworks, but the self-image
of entire nations, the transformation of neighborhoods and cities, and the
fashioning of diplomatic identities that art is capable of accomplishing. In
fact, its power has probably never been greater” (92-93). Ai Weiwei uses the
power of his fame to express “dissident opinions.” “Ai’s political work did not
result exclusively in object but in the exercise of power” (93). “In Fairytale,

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Ai did not critique the power of images—he exploited the power of art to
transport people and things both spatially and imaginatively. This is our
political horizon after art.” “Not every artist has the opportunity and
capacity to speculate on art’s power exactly as Ai has done, but all can—and I
think should—do so in the same way.” And, lastly on the Whitney Biennial:
“[what it does is to] ‘occupy’ the Whitney—and hence the attention of its
considerable audience—with reformatted forms of media that are usually
associated with online sociality enjoyed in private. In other words,
‘immaterial networks’ enter the museum with ‘material’ traces, and this turns
out to be very poignant. The museum can slow down the pace of online life
and exhibit its frayed edges. I can’t help adding that I found the Biennial one
of the queerest shows I’ve ever seen (my private term for it is ‘melancholy
camp’—a kind of camp form without the exuberant flamboyance that the
compression of the closet created). This is free-range camp—and it doesn’t
seem a coincidence that it arises just as gay marriage becomes the most
visible civil-rights demand for lesbians and gay men. Camp, after all, like the
Internet, is a private language directed toward building networks!” (Joselit,
October, 80)

Language poetry (I would say this too of Bataille and Marcuse) seemed on the
surface to be optimistically utopian (particularly vis-à-vis McCaffery) but
was secretly infused with a bitter pessimism towards all relational systems
and communitarian identities. Conceptual poetry (and ‘death-driven queer
theory’) seems on the surface to be pessimistically dystopian but is secretly
infused with warm optimism towards all relational system and
communitarian identities.

Likewise the little not-too-hidden secret of the anti-postmodernist, Zizek, is

that there is a payoff, and a closure, and that he can get away with this, can
justify his aesthetic, political, and psychological homeostasis, by mean of

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calling this very ‘stasis,’ this very reliance on traditional master signifiers
the only possible radical act, even an act of ‘love.’ Likewise Goldsmith’s
repetition of Warholian homeostasis is defended by Marcus Boon as an act of
sacred enlightenment on par with the teachings of Buddhism. And Place’s
work can be seen as a kind of cruel queer lesbian love (has this dissertation
been written yet?). Is there not in Place an underlying “sweetness”? Her
works are, at least, touchingly ‘considerate’ and she fights in her day-job for
an impossible messianic freedom from the law that she nonetheless obeys
dutifully! It’s heroic.

There is, then, within this post-postmodern (Conceptual poetry, Post-

Conceptual poetry) reduplication of negativity, a masked positivity that by so
brazenly construing itself as so negative, too real, so mean, and too ruthless,
detracts attention from the art being made that is negative, mean, ruthless,
rough, and hardcore but is not as gleefully insistent on being signified, as
such.

I wish I could end like J. Keith Varadi has ended his piece: “In the meantime,
it is undeniably necessary for some of the smarter, more dissatisfied parties
on the fringes to step up and step out, and truly shake things up.” I wish I
could end like RuPaul would: “You better work!” But I really don’t think you
need to do any more work for them, sweetie.

Return to Reference.

8 Here one must note the difference between closely read incisive sophisticated
deconstructive readings and open ending sloppy postmodern indeterminacy:
“Indeed, I would venture to define this as the hallmark of a properly
deconstructive reading as opposed to one which exploits a vaguely Derridean
rhetoric of différance or, on occasion, a quasi-Gödelian rhetoric of

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undecidability. The former kind of reading entails a claim to discern or

detect certain non-manifest textual structures – most often logico-semantic
structures leading to a point of classically irresolvable aporia or
contradiction – that are demonstrably there in the text under scrutiny even
though they had hitherto passed unnoticed when subject to other, less
exacting modes of analysis. The latter kind, conversely, makes liberal use of
those terms and their various cognates but does so in a loose and
approximative way, or through a broadly analogical (even metaphoric) mode
of thought that lacks anything remotely comparable to Derrida’s practice of
close-reading as a form of immanent critique.” Norris, Christopher (2012-08-
02). Derrida, Badiou and the Formal Imperative (Continuum Studies in
Continental Philosophy) (p. 90). Continuum UK. Kindle Edition.

For Badiou and Derrida there is certainly an undecidability which goes to the
point that the truth always eludes the current grasp of knowledge but which
nonetheless can be discovered through certain formal procedures. This
follows Godel, but not the Godel who abandoned work once he discovered
that truth eludes knowledge, but the one who worked twice as hard to
demonstrably prove this fact:

“This was Kurt Gödel’s famous undecidability theorem to the effect that any
formal system of sufficient complexity to generate the axioms of (say)
elementary arithmetic or first-order logic could be shown to contain at least
one axiom which could not be proved within that system or by using its own
logical-conceptual resources.78 What is strange about this is that the
theorem is itself set out and proved by means of a highly complex and
extended formal-logical sequence of argument which cannot but depend upon
just those resources that it shows to fall short of such probative warrant or
ultimate demonstrative force. Gödel espoused an objectivist and classical –
in this context what amounts to a Platonist – approach since he thought that

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it offered the only way to save his argument from just that charge of manifest
self-refutation as well as affording the only adequate ontology and theory of
truth for mathematics and the formal sciences. Unless it were the case that
there existed truths beyond the limits of purely formal demonstration or
proof, and unless our minds could have access to them by some non-
empirical means, then there could be no accounting for our grasp of a
theorem which requires such a highly elaborate structure of logico-
mathematical argument yet the truth of which, on its own submission, cannot
be derived by any purely axiomatic-deductive or rigorously formalized
means.”

Norris, Christopher (2012-08-02). Derrida, Badiou and the Formal

Imperative (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy) (p. 89).
Continuum UK. Kindle Edition.

Likewise, Language poetry had an aversion to the idea of the open-ended

indeterminism that had marked something like Fluxus and conceptual art
(especially in their first reading by Perloff) because they too had a consistent
formal commitment to rigor, negative dialectics, philosophy, Marxism, and
poetics.

On the other hand, Conceptual poetry abandons any recourse to the

accessibility of the truth and therefore just gives empty reams of knowledge,
a kind of dumb indeterminacy associated with Jamesonian postmodernism.
But Post-Conceptual poetry by inserting the possibility of the truth and the
real back into the empty forms of postmodern vapid indeterminacy given by
Conceptual poetry points to a way in which that madness might take hold, in
an sharp indeterminacy that threatens to abandon the formal procedures, and
eschews knowledge, formal rigor, and work, in favor of a boundless, raw
truth. A babbling play of signifieds that have subtracted the power of the

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chart and the signifier, and bares much in common then with the Foucauldian
non-relational homoeros of Leo Bersani. Not in order to level the playing
field (to give the mad subaltern abject woman a ‘voice,’ which is the task of a
relatively conservative writer like Kate Zambreno) but to actually abandon
the playing field altogether.

Return to Reference.

9 The negative dialectics of postmodernism/poststructuralism (including

Language poetry) meant a play of negations and inconsistencies that goes
between the rule and its exception, a play with this does not necessarily form
a meta-authorial mastery (though it often does). Whereas, Zizek’s
transcendental materialism, on the other hand, subsumes all difference and
distinction to a structural logic that is inside the psyche and therefore
idealistic. It is actually quite optimistic and euphorically in line with
capitalism’s paraconsistent logic.

The speculative materialists and non-philosophers and their resurrection of a

pure real also attempt to break free from the ironic crystallization of
poststructuralist practices into a meta-author. Others flee to a
straightforward and mechanical concept (conceptual poetics, network-based
practices). Others still, offer a melding of the two: the symbolic (the concept)
and the real (the punctum) and this is what Zizek offers and Place offers and
the Queer Structuralists offer.

To paraphrase Place: “The slave’s repetition, the slave’s eternal return of the
same, highlights the transcendental signifier and rupture’s their authority,
the slave is signified by another, in another’s language, and by repeating the
other’s language: he begins to master his master: this eternal return of the
same, the same becomes difference repeatedly, avant-garde revolutions

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happen repeatedly, only by slavishly repeating them, can we point to the

governing master-narratives, which we are culpable in.”

To critique Place: What this disavows, though, is the slave who cannot
become a master: who cannot proficiently master the master’s discourse: the
uncommodifiable slave. And it also disavows the ability to foster new
relationships with such “slaves.” Indeed, Place may be right that the criminal
justice system does little to redeem her clients. But locking their words up in
a rigidly dogmatic and “cool” conceptual poetics is no better: it is the “same”
and it does not have to be. Here there can be a difference that does matter,
that does materialize. And a poetics that matters, that “redeems,” is possible.

Place mimes the slave who fails in just the right way to please the master.
But we do not have to keep repeating the slave’s fuck-ups, multiplying
abjectness, collapsing it. In fact, there is a certain rage at having to do that,
in Place’s works, that challenges the more neutral assumptions of
Goldsmith’s work. And perhaps this sows the seeds for creating art works
that stand to elevate themselve, facing all the ridicule that comes with such
elevations, and also facing the damage. The student’s discourse: the student
does not necessarily want to repeat his teacher’s work, the teacher must
therefore stand as a kind of punching bag, an old relic as it were, to be
humiliated, used, and punched in, while the student learns self-satisfaction.
For the teacher to be totally permitting is cruel, for some constraints are
necessary. Such lackadaisical parenting leads to multiple Trecartin babies
running around, knowing not when to begin or end, like little televisions. But
rather than letting us face the horror of the vacuum that is our culture, these
texts seem merely to collapse the art work into the vacuum, and therefore,
give us no time to rhythmically approach it. Besides, the true
competitiveness comes out: who can tumblr or meta-assemble the best? Who
can make best use of compositing and pastiche techniques? It becomes a race

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for the fastest, most productive user of technology: even when it seems to be
frosted in the sweetness of irony. We are being exhausted not by the
machines, but by our need to be better on the machines than our neighbor.
Therefore, while the new aesthetics in the ordinary art world, poetry, and
activist context may be reductive, but it also provides a nice framework for
studying these errors and elevating ourselves above them, as an artist and
student ought to, in order to be critical and studious: not competitively
better than others at being elevated, but equally able to stand outside the
system under analysis for long enough to pose a judgment about it. And in
this way, teachers must sometimes commit themselves to being systematized
for long enough that a student may use them, make use of them, and then
rework the framework in their head. It does not have to be a competition of
who can elevate themselves best, or who is the most critical. Criticality itself
cannot transcend the dynamics of power relations in groups: like a
classroom, let’s say, but it can momentarily be isolated from these dynamics,
as a kind of breathing space. If we collapse all the rhythms into that of porn:
where everything comes on time, we may be perpetually ejaculating but we
might also be missing some other joys.

One of the major shifts that occurs in the switch from Language poetry to
Conceptual poetry (from Madonna to Gaga) is a switch from Derridaean
deconstruction, dissemination, chance, and play of signifiers (in lieu of a
master signifier) in which all truths are lies to Lacan’s rule of the father (his
insistence on master signifiers) in which all lies are truths. Lacanian’s deride
the free-flowing “poetics of indeterminacy” that imply a denial of the
superego, the denial of the father’s power, the belief that he is imaginary, the
belief in counter-culture, in protest, in change, are all pessimistically
rendered impossible. The Lacanian maxim dictates the work of Place
(especially in a piece where she changes each ‘woman’ to ‘man’ in the proto-
feminist work The Second Sex). For Place, the Lacanian maxim is taken so far

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towards an almost a passive aggressiveness that it might paradoxically foster

a belief that woman does exist and must exist. This becomes a challenge to
the dematerialization of Conceptual poetry, especially when coupled with her
work, which serves to bring the material, especially highly affective material,
into Conceptual poetry. But what once was a critique of Conceptual poetry is
now just a part of it as Place gave up her place as a post-conceptual poet.

What Place wants to do, like what Zizek wants to do, is to cruelly bring the
signifier back into the lives of postmodern subjects, who pretend to be
exempt from law and order. The postmodern attempts to transcend distance,
to achieve everything, enjoy everything now (mentioned incessantly by Zizek)
take us to a ‘real’ that we cannot ever have and therefore leave us with a
Baudrillardian virtual reality that basically sucks. The solution, for
Lacanians, is to use the symbolic to understand the real. Zizekian Todd
McGowan: “Reducing the Real event to a meaning and refusing interpretation
altogether, however, are not the only possibilities. There is a third way—that
of situating the Real event within a symbolic context. This path allows us to
attain comprehension without becoming comprehensive and thereby
foreclosing the Real.” In other words, the real can only be understood within
the symbolic. And even the imaginary, which is so often touted as a radical
place in Lacanian theory, is only deemed radical because it will be able to
alter the symbolic.

Zizek and Place point repeatedly to the symbolic order’s insufficiency (we are
living in end times or poetry is dead) but do so only to prop up a ‘new
symbolic order,’ which they can master. If in the past we had been told
‘enjoy,’ now, we are told ‘feel disgust’ and ‘you cannot enjoy’ – and this is
meant to actually allow enjoyment. Just as Place’s use of ‘woman does not
exist’ is actually meant to foster the belief that woman does exist. There is,
then, even in the darkest, most cynical exercises of contemporary art, the

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underlying optimism that this will allow us to find a new mode of enjoyment.
Just as, more simply, queer theory, by emphasizing a derogatory term
(‘queer’), is actually meant to allow us to feel affirmed.

Return to Reference.

10 The real-of-the-real is romantic sheerly affective poetry (the id),

romanticism and modernism and certain ‘weak’ postmodernisms (such as
Hannah Weiner or John Wieners).

The real of the imaginary is the real of egotistical fantasy (often self-
conscious and self-critical): flarf, strong postmodern/post-structuralist
poetry (such as the canonized members of Language poetry), some Post-
Conceptual poetry. Of course, poetics of the imaginary are closer to ‘normal
life’ of the ego than the other two, as Drew Gardner has recently expressed
regarding flarf: it is a poetics of everyday life. Flarf and some post-
conceptualisms, like Language poetry, risk falling into the real-of-the-real
whereas conceptualism for the most part has a blockade against this. Cecilia
Corrigan’s work risks this fall though it is astutely held afloat by self-
conscious, self-critical wit. It is its own bird but nonetheless shares certain
affiliations with Language and flarf – but not so much (besides being
generationally symmetrical, with post-conceptualism). Trisha Low’s post-
conceptual narcissism comes to mind: the messy ‘mirror stage’ of ego
fabrication, imitation, differentiation, and fantasy takes place. Lacan
rightfully aside, what Low calls this, among other things, is the ‘not-not me’:
a regurgitated, messy, mixture of cultural fantasies. Indeed, it is unclear the
degree to which what Post-conceptualismis able to do is all that
distinguishable from flarf or Language poetry. Nada Gordon: “I do not
privilege, obviously, appropriated writing over a more Romantic interiorly
generated writing…in fact, the sort of writing that most intrigues me is that

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which…performs a kind of pavan between these two modes, because that is

how I experience the world, as input and output gracefully and/or shockingly
affecting each other” (153, Drown My Book).

The real-of-the-symbolic (the matheme, the real discovered through and by

the letter alone): Conceptual poetry, post-postmodernism, speculative
materialism, the end point of Zizekian-Badiousian readings of Lacan (which
tend to deny access to the real-of-the-real, and finds the real-of-the-
imaginary as something to be traversed so that one receives the formal
clarity of the real-of-the-symbolic).

Some reasons to flee the real-of-the-imaginary

Neurotic quotes from my father’s book Recalculating (2013): “Ideology’s

veils are imaginary; the freedom from these veils delusional.” (RC] 176),
“Poets are fakers / Whose faking is so real / They even fake the pain / They
truly feel.” (RC 3), “Poetry fakes nothing actually” (RC 98). “In the viscosity
of process, the end never arrives,” “Speak truth to truth,” “Poetry is difficulty
that stays difficult” (RC 4), “Overcome by nostalgia for the future / Bent over
with a dry panic / I clung distractedly / To the promise of the present.” (RC
53), “In starts and flits / We dart and flip / With quirks and fits / Mirroring
mist” (RC 101), “The imaginary ride that actually works.” (RC 89), “Even
when it’s over it’s not over.” (RC 92), “I am a Jewish man trapped / in the
body of a Jewish man.” (RC 129). , “Send me away / I’ve never been there”
(RC 156). “Here where I find you, here will I lose you.” (RC 171).

In these quotes, you can see not only representation of the stuckness of ego-
based imaginary life, but also its mirroring murkiness, and most crucially its
immanence: the inability to escape: to find a transcendental elsewhere. This
can lead some to wish to retreat into the symbolic (a return to the iron clad

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signifier a la Place) or to retreat into the real (new sincerity, new romantic
lyrics).

If Bernstein might seem gleefully trapped by the ego and its linguistic
interpellation, by contrast, Badiou, Zizek, and Place turn against the
linguistic constructivism of poststructuralism/postmodernism. For them, the
subject of truth and the subject of history stubbornly resist the ideological
misrepresentations and immanent materialisms of the Imaginary. The truth,
instead, is always a transcendental outside, that can be determined only vis-
à-vis formulaic formalistic procedures that lead to those revolutionary
moments of change called ‘events’ (they are more restructuralists then
poststructuralists). Therefore, the one with the power to know and to decode
and to change a given situation is always the one who is the master of
formula (the concept, the truth-procedure), rather than someone with an
intelligent feel for ‘everyday life.’ Althusser and Lacan are exemplary heroes
of postmodern linguistic constructivism, as well as for Badiousian-Zizekian
post-postmodernism: they are read quite differently by each. The key
difference is found in their conflicting readings of Lacan’s imaginary. The
constructivists (like Bernstein) happily relegating everything to imaginary
swerves and dips, while the Badiousian-Zizekians (like Place) always
attempting to traverse imaginary idiocy. Post-Conceptual poetry, as a whole,
has not shown its face on this issue yet. While it is possible that they might
return to a delightful imaginary idiocy (like Bernstein and flarf), they might
also increase the compulsory formulaic traversals of the imaginary (a la
Place).

The zany (as Sianne Ngai terms it), a category that includes my own video
work, Ryan Trecartin, and Kiki (Mx. Justin Vivian Bond) appears, in some
ways to be a return to a delightful imaginary. But, I think it has grown
increasingly clear that Trecartin’s zaniness brackets off (and traverses) any

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youthful exuberant imaginary so that it can be used for a very very very cool,
slick style. And Kiki’s turn into Mx. Justin Vivian Bond suggest drippy
sincerity and queer essentialism that has sort of thrown all zaniness to the
trash. As for me, I’m trying desperately to make something ‘special’ out of an
over-abundant load of coincidences and conflicts, in as pure and as rigorous
a way as possible. But also I’m trying to preserve as much of my own
melancholic introverted commitment to writing, performing, and making
videos as I possibly can in the face of my own compulsory drive towards
institutional success and attention-whoring.

Return to Reference.

11 Nick Srinek writes, “Non-philosophy, in its most basic sense, is an attempt to

limit philosophy’s pretensions in the name of the real of radical immanence.
It is an attempt to shear immanence of any constitutive relation with the
transcendences of thought, language, or any other form of ideality, thereby
revealing the Real’s absolute determining power—independently-of and
indifferently-to any reciprocal relation with ideality. It is true that numerous
philosophies have proclaimed their intentions to achieve immanence, with a
number of them going to great lengths to eschew all ideality and reach a
properly immanent and realist beginning. What Laruelle reveals, however, is
that all these previous attempts have been hindered—not by their content,
which is overtly materialist, but rather by their very form of philosophizing.
It is this form that Laruelle gives the name of Decision. Even materialist
philosophies are turned into idealisms by Decision making them reliant on a
synthesis constituted by and through thought. Put simply, through Decision,
philosophy has continually objectified the Real within its own self-justified
terms.” [From “Capitalism and the Non-Philosophical Subject.” Bryant, Levi
R., Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman. The Speculative Turn: Continental
Materialism and Realism. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Re.press, 2011,

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165.] Laruelle wants a non-philosophy that stops ‘deciding’ that stops

‘thinking’ and just presents the real Real, with a neutral uncontested
symbolic jargoned framework. This is a perfect parallel to Queer
Structuralism.

Return to Reference.

12 Queer Structuralism bears resemblance to the trend of new structuralism

found in French philosophy through Badiou’s belligerent ontological turn
against the reliance on Kantian epistemology and Wittgensteinian linguistics,
in favor of establishing universal and meaningful (rather than chaotic and
splintered postmodern) post-postmodern criteria. Also, the structuralists of
October art criticism (that came to prominence in the 1980s but still holds
heavy power in the art world) also come into play, for also rejecting the
notion of splintered linguistic relativism, in favor of abstract reasonings and
charts, ie, structural knowledge that, as long as it is being carried out by the
most advanced specialists in the field, will always be the most correct and
the most avant-garde. Yet the returns to structuralism over and against
poststructuralism does not mean merely the production of ‘dry’ works, but it
also means a return also to a kind of object-oriented-ontology where the
subject is bracketed out so that one can romantically and melancholically
experience the being-of-objects, a kind of wet structuralism that one can find
in the more depressive ends of modernism, such as late Virginia Woolf.

It is a mistake to think that knowledge alone is what October is after, rather

they are after a knowledge that is supported by a kind of Badiousian truth
that is marked by its transcendence of knowledge, but can only be quantified
and faithfully adhered to through knowledge. So Badiou and October, follow
Descartes in appreciating the cogito and rational mind and yet this is only
made possible by transcendent events (such as the October Revolution). Yet,

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Badiou and October, must give deference to Lacan who devalues the cogito by
showing that although Descartes has a rational knowledgeable structured
ego, it just comes to fill a lack of ego, it rests on a ‘nothing’ that the outside
of knowledge/rationality/structure. Finally it is Barthes’ structuralism,
which like Lacan and Badiou and October orients structure around certain
lacks (so-called ‘punctums’). These punctums, radical avant-garde events,
and lacks also are offered as a way to defend and justify the hierarchical
dryness of Queer Structuralism.

Return to Reference.

(Footnotes)

i Poetry Will Be Made By All.

Return to Reference.

ii Bishop, Claire. “Digital Divide.” Artforum September (2012). Artforum.com.

(Also bootlegged online here)

Return to Reference.

iii Estefan, Kareem. “Deep Code.” Art in America, September (2013).

Return to Reference.

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iv Estefan, Kareem. “A Cute Idea.” The New Inquiry (2014): n. pag. Web.

Return to Reference.

v Lotringer, Words Apart, File 4, no 4, Fall 1980.

Return to Reference.

vi Sanders, Jay, and J. Hoberman. Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater,

Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama: Manhattan, 1970-1980. New
York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2013, pp. 36.

Return to Reference.

vii Buchloh, Benjamin. “Farewell to an Identity.” Artforum (2012).

Return to Reference.

viii Glazek, Christopher. “On Ryan Trecartin.” N+1. N.p., 21 Sept. 2012. Web. 02
Mar. 2014.

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ix Varadi, Keith J. “The Bubblegum Dirge.” Artfrum (n.d.): n. pag. Web.

Return to Reference.

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x See Slavoj Zizek’s “Against the Populist Temptation.”

Return to Reference.

T h e Vo l t a Evening Will Come Contributor Bio

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