The following is republished from The New Polis, and is the last of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here, the secondhere, the The
*The following is republished from *The New Polis, and is the last of a four-part series. The first installment can be found here, the secondhere, the third here. The video version can be found here.Jennifer Denrowis the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). Her chapbooks include How We Know it is That (Horse Less Press, 2014) and From California, On (Brave Men Press, 2012). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Gulf Coast, jubilat, Alaska Quarterly Review, Octopus, and Poets.Org. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Denver and is the recipient of a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.Mathias Svalina*is the author of The Depression (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2020), The Wine-Dark Sea, (Sidebrow Books, 2016), Wastoid (Big Lucks Books, 2014), The Explosions (Subito Press, 2012), and multiple other works. He is the coeditor at Octopus Books and lives in Denver, Colorado. Svalina has operated a ***Dream Delivery Service*since 2014. He hand delivers poems to subscribers within a 4 mile radius of his home base in each city and delivers poems by mail to every other subscriber.**Roger Green is general editor of The New Polisand a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of *A Transatlantic Political Theology of Psychedelic Aesthetics: Enchanted Citizens.
**Roger Green: **It speaks about what both of your work, at least in my reading,
is kind of doing is that that the work speaks to the state of emergency, or the
state of exception, in a way that isn’t saying necessarily, this is what we need to do right now, it’s not
saying that it has the answers but it’s about sustaining a way of being in the
midst of emergency.
And that gets politicized in
all sorts of ways to like the state of exception and Giorgio Agamben and all of
that sort of stuff. But there’s something inhabited about the language that you
guys are doing that touches me, anyway.**Jennifer Denrow:**Yeah, just like if we can see better. I do feel like that
is part of what I’m trying to do, to see better. And if we can all do that—see
better—then it would be better. We just have to like resee everything in a
better way but, again, it’s idealistic, like that doesn’t seem to be a good
enough answer, to just like resee things.**Mathias Svalina:**Not unto itself, but it’s a useful tool, a useful practice.**Reflections on the Conversation (Roger Green)**In what follows, I contextualize some thoughts reacting to the above video discussion. The writers begin by discussing the composing process itself and the mediums they use for writing. Then we move into discussing form. Svalina in particular focuses on the uses repetition and the exhaustion of ideas.
When I read the work of
Jennifer Denrow and Mathias Svalina, I think very much about the aesthetics of
innocence. That does not necessarily mean that I see their work as
innocent. The more I think about it, the more I feel a kind of congruency
in their respective work with respect to the Absurd. When combined
with the elements of exhaustion, we might read a certain emotion or idea of
innocence that has itself been exhausted.
Denrow has spent a lot of
time with Samuel Beckett. Svalina’s work is often surrealist, which begs
questions of the contemporary surrealism and politics. Both Denrow and Svalina
are active in the small press publishing world, just as are Selah Saterstrom
and Steven Dunn, who participated in Literary
Conversation 1last month.
We know, for example, that
early surrealism often explicitly aligned with leftist politics. Andre Breton
wrote,
Whatever reservations I might be
inclined to make with regard to responsibility in general, I should
quite like to know how will be adjudicated the first misdemeanors whose
surrealist character is indubitable. When surrealist methods extend from
writing to action, there will certainly arise the need of a new morality to
take the place of the current one, the cause of all our woe.” (in Julien Levy, Surrealism49)
Similarly, Pierre-Olivier
Lapie (who would later be briefly involved with the French ministry of
Education, 1950-51) wrote,
If surrealism turned toward Moscow it
was, one might say, because it hoped to find in the Revolution that support
which is indispensable for the expansion of poetry; the possibility, in
the leisure secured for man by the liberated proletariat, of living with that
personal activity which, for lack of a better word, we still call poetic.
The transposition of the surrealist act to the political plane has had, on the
contemporary youth, the result of bringing them to recognition of the U.S.S.R.,
to the consideration that in theory the Soviet regime is a livable regime,
perhaps the only one. Surrealism has taken the first step which others,
Gide and Malraux, have followed. (L’ Insurrection
Surréaliste, January 1935…in Levy 53)
Svalina says he gravitates
more toward Eastern European surrealism. As I say in the video, I asked Denrow
and Svalina the following questions.
-
To the extent that people
might describe your work as surrealist or perhaps absurdist, how do you feel
your work engages (or not) with the political motivations expressed above? -
Must (or has) surrealism
as an aesthetic change its desires in the wake of the USSR?
3. What is, for you,
the relationship between the imagination and absurdity?
4. In liberal culture,
innocence has often been thematized around the character of the romantic,
liberal child. This is the child of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s *Emile.*The character shows up in
the imaginations of Tom Sawyer and Anne of Green Gables. The “innocence”
of youth is to be preserved from the corruption of the adult world and
“citizenship.” Some readers might regard the voice of Jen’s *California *as “utopic” and Mathias’s *I am a very Productive Entrepreneur *seems
to comment on this as well. Does an idea of innocence pervade your work?
Jen, does it take innocence to feel each horse? each tree?
- For Oulipo writers
using constraint-based techniques, which seem to inform Mathias’s *America
at Play. *The ludic qualities are followed by kind of
exhaustion, or perhaps that moment when a child’s laughs from tickles turn to
tears. One thinks of George Perec’s *An
Attempt at Exhausting *a Place in Paris (1975). Is the America of this
book the America of George Floyd’s murder, of numerous iterations of “I can’t
breathe”? How so if so?
6.*Wine
Dark Sea *alludes to Homer, we also have Creation and Destruction
Myth…A times mythological language can have a minimalist quality to it.
Do either of you feel like you’re actively dealing with a linguistic register
og myth in your or each other’s work?
-
I’ve sometimes
characterized Jennifer Denrow’s work along the lines of being a literary
parallel to the music of Built to Spill. We are, all three of us, roughly
from a generation that saw the rise of “Indie Rock,” which to be sure had
earlier predecessors in songwriters like Daniel Johnston. Is such a
characterization meaningful to you? Does it resonate? Do you feel like
music informs your work? -
For me *The Depression *feels like Mathias
Svalina’s strongest work to date (and I generally like all of his work). The
book importantly deals with aspects that I see as “enchanted.” In Jennifer
Denrow’s work too, the landscape often feels enchanted and on both of your work
there is a tendency to hover “in the middle” (as Jen says in her forthcoming
book) and resonate in an ambiguous space of inside and outside. How do you see
enchantment at work in your own work?
In discussion, an implicit
answer to the last question developed through a a conversation about
epistemology. Denrow says, “This is what I think, or this is what I feel that I
think, is that at some point in time…at some point in time…I just think ‘how to
know’ became so weird and so industrial and so economical or like so related to
… I don’t know… something like progress…” She says, “I don’t feel like
surrealism is…I mean I do think like I do have some like, feeling against the
rational, because it doesn’t make sense to me, but I’m not sure if that’s
enough to connect it to a surrealist ethic.”
“Mostly when, I don’t know,
maybe the Enlightenment I don’t really know politically or historically at what
point in time…or maybe it’s always fluctuated…about how to know. I just feel
like how I know things is not related to knowledge,” says Denrow.
Referring to her work in
relation to Francis Ponge’s poetic focus on material things, Svalina says,
If you look very closely at what appears
to be the rational, the controlled, the useful versions of knowledge and you
keep looking at it intently, the inherent irrational is going to surface as
well, so that you can’t just like…so much of like, uses of language are about
trying to control specific facts or trying to turn things into objects, but I
feel like your writing, with it’s, sometimes like constellating or scattering
or arrivals of astonishing things pushed up against sometimes mundane things or
personal reflections, or collaging that sometimes happens in different kinds of
experiences, like it, yeah, it makes sense what you’re saying that, like, the
resistance of the use-value of knowing, into a more sort of immersive or
inclusive kind of knowing in which a fact that could be employed doesn’t have a
primary importance, nor does like an image of familiar beauty or an image of
familiar constructs of profundity, so that you can have…I’m thinking like in
your new chapbook in those poems you’ll have a line that is very direct about
representing personal experience and then the next line might be a seemingly
disconnect image and then the next line might be a more prose-style sentence
structure that’s thinking or something, you know, in the ways that those are
all sort of, you know, I said “constellating” already but the sense of
projecting the notes of attention and projecting the nodes of attention and
then that attention is revealing surrealism.
I generally refer to this
phenomenon of in betweenness between knowing and not-knowing that is embodied
in image and attention as “enchantment.” Translated into the critical language
of political theology, it parallels notions of ‘postsecularism’.
Here I am playing the part of
translator because, dare I say, the divide between discourse on critical and
cultural theory in the U.S. and aesthetic works has been effectively dismantled
by a discourse on the so-called “death of theory” on the one hand, and a
continued allegiance to the necessary mental rigor to understand largely French
(but more broadly European and postcolonial) intellectual thought, which
dominated literary and political theoretical discussions (and higher education
discourse) throughout the twentieth century.
While we have a few
persistent “stars” in the theory world, such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žizek,
Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway, to me I see more congruence between the
literary work of Svalina and Denrow and the work on possible worlds in
anthropologists such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marisol de la Cadena, and
Elizabeth Povinelli
At an artistic level, I
entirely reject the thought that American writers produce depoliticized
material. Rather, the literary establishment in the United States has broadly
embraced neoliberal goals in its material production of the literary, which has
created and identitarian feedback loop that (mis)aligns notions of liberal
political “progress” narratives with target-market approaches to identity. In
such contexts, people settle for reading, for example, Octavia Butler as a
Black Woman of Color rather than as a revolutionary thinker commenting on the
political-theological situation in the U.S. in a way that was necessarily
articulated through her socially positioned and specifically embodied
perspective.
In other words, the literary
establishment and the neoliberal institutional structures frame U.S. reading
cultures’ readings of (for example) celebrated African American writers such as
Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Jesmyn Ward as African American first
(which wouldn’t necessarily be wrong in and of itself) and stop there in a
self-congratulatory multiculturalist gesture toward “inclusivity” dogmatic to a
liberal virtual imaginary of apparently “infinite capacity.” This is especially
a problem in Literature departments at universities, which are often shrinking
due to a lack of enrollment and thus have a difficult time producing
appropriately new courses to deal with the aesthetic trends of current
literature.
To be sure, I am not
complaining about the attention that these writers of color receive, for indeed
they are often writing with possible worlds in mind that I believe too often
get reduced to a “progressively liberal” agenda. Nor am I simply using them as
a foil against Svalina and Denrow as eurochristian writers.
In one of the most memorable
moments of Coates’s Between the World and
Me, he writes about a white man who tells him he could have him arrested,
simply for sticking up for his son. This real world is to most white people an
impossible world. They might only encounter it in a kind of imaginatively
enchanted way. Beloved in Morrison’s *Beloved *is
no Jacob Marley, nor is thirteen-year-old ghost of a dead prison inmate without
important racially inflected illustrations of disembodiment.
I employ these widely
recognized African American authors at the moment to make a point about
differing forms of enchantment. To take a musical example from Afro-Futurism,
one might think of Sun Ra’s visits to Saturn and his return to talk to Black
American youth in the film Space is the
Placeand a lesser-known poet as an example. In his poem meditating
on Sun Ra, “Leaving
Saturn,” Major Jackson writes of a possible world,
If what I’m told is true,
*Mars is dying, it’s after
The end of the world.
So, here I am,
In Philadelphia,
*Death’s headquarters,
Here to save the cosmos,
Here to dance in a bed
Of living gravestones. (50)
We might think then, not
simply in terms of “enchantment” as a universal category, but rather as an
analytic from which we might see different articulations of “possible worlds,”
for eurochristian enchantment may differ from African American enchantment or
Pan-African modes of enchantment, or perhaps even what we might read as Native
American forms of “disenchantment,” as in the materialist-focused work of Tommy
Orange echoing and reformulating Gertrude Stein, Joan Didion, and Radiohead in
his recent masterpiece, *There
There.*National book awards have in
mind civically-religious articulations of national life. They tell their own
collective narratives about what their judges deem to be important works of
literature, and of course, awards sell books. With due respect to such
important books, the aesthetic array of what is happening in literature is much
more varied. While generally adore many recent major award winners, what if
Fred Moten’s *The Feel Trio *had
won the National Book Award for poetry in 2014 instead of Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night? What kind of
aesthetic permission would that give to the arbiters of what is sayable at the
national level?
I have in recent years been
attempting to utilize political theology discourse (including its resisters and
critics) as a way to inquire into and look at the current work of the literary.
This has largely been a rejection of the liberal politics of recognition. In such
liberal politics of recognition, it’s simply enough to “recognize” and
“include” marginalized perspectives into an already extraction-based mode of
thought. Such universalizing aspirations also persist within the political
notion of the secular as a space of neutrality and “universal” human rights.
Yet we might look to various
expressions of enchantment to relieve us of the eurochristian expressions of
Simon Critchley’s call for a “faith
of the faithless” and Badiou’s too narrow view of modernist poetry
in The
Age of Poets. This is not to deny some superb readings of poems
by both Critchley and Badiou. Rather, it is to question, as I have done in
previous posts on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic
of Enlightenment, the use-value
that philosophers place on literary works to advance their arguments.
Here, I would say that the
recent work of writers such as Jennifer Denrow, Mathias Svalina, Steven Dunn,
and Selah Saterstrom, with whom I have been having literary conversations,
might offer us better ways to think. Similarly, in university literature
courses, we need the creatively critical heuristics not to reduce writers to
didactic representations of identity categories but to read their aesthetic
importance to our lives. We need to read both Fred Moten’s poetry as well as
his critical theory.
The very modes of literary
production in the U.S., in other words, have depoliticized the critical
insights of writers (eurochristian or of color) by relegating them to a
neoliberal marketing system which gives the largely middle-class readership
self-assurance of their intellectual nature by feeding how “woke” they are on
issues of race, ethnicity, gender expressivity, sexual orientation, social
class, religion, nationality, age, ability or disability–all categories
employed by the Association
of American Colleges and Universities under the general frame
of Inclusive Excellence.
This is not so much a
rejection of the aspirations intended here as much as it is an anti-racist and
Critical Race Theory-informed rejection of liberal politics of recognition. We
need the analytical tools to hear and see aesthetic nuances in literary works
and the expressions of possible worlds more than we need to celebrate singular
authors who have become, through mass attention, embodiments of what Michel Foucault
long ago called the “Author Function.”
The absent-presence of the
sovereign author that gave way through Roland Barthes’ articulations of writing
“zero degree” and the “birth” of the scriptor-reader after the “death of the
author” persists in the twenty-first century literary establishment in the
United States, as well as in the knowledge-factories of university curricula.
Even following Marjorie Perloff’s important work on *The
Poetics of Indeterminacy *and more recently on Unoriginal Genius, we need better language for
receiving and analyzing aesthetic works.
Too often, “enchantment” gets
read as a celebration of the liberal-capitalist entrepreneurial spirit. For
surely we might see in the explosion of superhero films, vampire movies, and
epic fantasy films modes of enchantment we might culturally analyze, following
Bruno Bettelheim’s overly Freudian articulations of *The
Uses of Enchantment.*Like the 1970s emergence of the New
Age focus on the ‘self’ and ‘self-growth’, neoliberalism’s flattening effect
relegates all enchantment to the “imagination” of the subject. We will have to
do better than that.
Stuart Hall, among many
working in the field of cultural studies, attempted in his late essays to
resist the relegation of “the subject” to the liberal “individual” by focusing
on the articulation more collective social tendencies. But his work on culture through
and Afro-Caribbean and Marxian trajectory also had to become self-critical of
the very notions of “culture” itself as a category of thought.
The sociologist Max Weber
characterized modern life as being “disenchanted,” though informed in the West
by Calvinist social formations. In this, he was not universally correct
about “modern life” but nevertheless onto something with respect to deep cognitive
framing. The problem is that when we take “cognitive” framing to the
level of “culture” we are dealing with multiple interpretive frames, not just
the measurable statistics based on social scientific questionnaires and
pre-prepared languaging.
As useful as frame analysis
is, what’s more important than the mere potential for positive or negative
framing is an emphasis on intercultural or transgenerational cognitive frames.
These frames have less to do with “identity” as a chosen belief or as a
corporately determined marker (as in a census or a job application) than as
modes of inherited comportment.
“Whiteness” or “white
privilege,” as only one example, is a mode of transgenerationally inherited
comportment. It is informed by what George Lakoff classifies as “deep framing”
as opposed to “surface framing.” What Aristotle determined as “artistic”
(heuristic) proofs versus “inartistic” (facts) proofs becomes a contested
binary in this context.
How could any conception of
deep cognitive framing not always already present itself as an “artistic”
proof? In other words, and more reductively, one might ask perennial questions
about whose narrative creates “history,” for certainly both narrative and
“history” congeal within displays of power and the ability to transfer the narrative
apparatus of that power. But what I am trying to get at amounts to something
more important than reductive statements like “history is made by the winners.”
Instead of employing literary
works as evidence of metaphysical claims about what is “really going on,” then,
we would do well to explore notions of the literary beyond both its
“secularization” away from classist and elitist notions from the 1960s through
the “culture wars” of the 1980s, as well as beyond Marxian-materialist
approaches to literary study too easily domesticated into liberal politics of
recognition. Analytics of differing forms of “enchantment” may help us better
assess the crucial differences in worldview expressed by various writers in
conversation about possible worlds rather than thinking of ‘culture’ as a
static-transcendent entity that can be intentionally transformed by
representation alone (which of course is no rejection of attempts to be more
inclusive of historically marginalized worldviews). But worldview is not identity.
I am heartened by the ways
that the writers I have been conversing with talk to each other about the
nuances of language and thought in their respective works. There is much more
to say about what Mathias Svalina and Jennifer Denrow are saying above, but for
now I’ll leave it to the reader / viewer to attend to such matters.