The American poet and theorist, Joan Retallack, articulates
a formal analysis of avant-garde works by Cage, Stein, Waldrop, Hejinian and
others. The Poethical Wager (2003)
argues, for, if not a reversal, then a revision, of Henri Focillon’s terms, and
states that ‘literature is an engagement with possible forms of life’.
(Retallack 2004: 146) Retallack here revives the term ‘form of life’ from
Wittgenstein’s vague usage which distinguishes between the various regimes of
his ‘language games’ rather than from Schiller’s aesthetics. (Retallack 2004:
23) In Leighton’s terms, life is at the heart of form. For Retallack, as a
poet, ‘This is not a question of the daily habits and routines necessary to the
sane ordering of any life but of the forms one chooses in one’s poesis, the
making of forms of life out of words.’ (Retallack 2004: 147) She continues and
introduces her central neologism: ‘If those forms are made in the course of
thinking through one’s values, then it’s a matter of poethics.’ (Retallack
2004: 147) The texture of daily life, the necessity of being aware, after
Gertrude Stein, ‘that it is the business of the writer to live one’s
contemporariness in the composition of one’s writing’ amounts to a
poetic-ethics. (Retallack 2004: 15) As Stein says: ‘Everybody is contemporary
with his [sic] period… and the whole
business of writing is the question of living in that contemporariness…. The
thing that is important is that nobody knows what the comtemporariness is. In
other words, they don’t know where they are going, but they are on their way.’
(quoted in Retallack 2004: 156) This formally investigative stance toward
reality and the concomitant need to find forms to ‘accommodate the mess’ (as
Beckett puts it (quoted in Retallack 2004: 147)), are interrelated in
Retallack’s closely-argued essays, which amount to ‘a complex-realist aesthetic
and a poethics of everyday life’ (Retallack 2004: 206), where ‘complex’ implies
the Mandelbrottian fractalism of contemporary experience, and where poetics is
aligned to ethics in the very act of making forms consonant to one’s values:
‘Every poetics,’ she says, ‘is a consequential form of life. Any making of
forms out of language (poesis) is a practice with a discernable character
(ethos).’ (Retallack 2004: 11)
Some avant-gardes – like
Retallack’s – develop coterminously with theoretical developments; some
theories develop in direct relation to avant-garde practice and poetics, like
Krzysztof Ziarek’s. His study The Force
of Art (2004) is an immersive book, not unlike the conflicting aesthetics
of Ziarek’s twin heroes, Heidegger, in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ essay
and Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory and
he compares the two in terms of their theories of power. Central to
Ziarek’s thesis is his conception of the work of art as a force field, a
metaphor Leighton traces back to at least Schiller. It is not an object but an
event, and this eventness makes the artwork a ‘forcework’, in his neologism
(and in a similar way to its acknowledgement by Attridge). Inhering in neither
form or content, the forcework is beyond aesthetics, and presumably beyond
poetics as well; the avant-garde artwork is beyond traditional aesthetic
categories. No longer being an object, the work of art evades both culture and
capital, though it is inscribed by both. Forcework is a non-violent power-free
thrusting; it re-orients ‘aesthetic commodity’ in ‘aphesis’, a concept derived
from Heidegger which is defined as ‘a letting be or a letting go’, a benign
process of enhancement rather than a seizure of power. (Ziarek: 22) Enhancement
is non-power, defining the forcework of art as free or ‘de-powered’, not as
technocratic participant in increase and production. ‘In art … forces are
“empowered” to be “otherwise” than powerful’. (Ziarek: 51.)
In the work of art, forces are no
longer tethered by the social, and in a redefinition of the autonomy of the
artwork, as that is theorised by Adorno, and in order to address the staticness
and sense of separateness implied by Adorno’s lofty critique, Ziarek insists
not only that artworks transform and re-work their forces (as Adorno would have
agreed), but that they transform the ordinary relations of social power, and
the receivers of the artwork can carry this non-violent, power-free
relationality into social praxis (which Adorno would have found too direct a
relationship under existing social conditions, although he inisisted, like
Ziarek, that form was a matter of ‘noncoercion’ (AT: 7)). The event of this
transformation is an interruption of the real, a rupture as the artwork works (a term Ziarek valorises over
form) by its ‘modalities of relation’, not in terms of its content. (Ziarek:
28) Artworks’ ‘importance for praxis is not in the thematic critique or even in
formal subversiveness’, but essentially in the forcework. (Ziarek: 60) An
example of these processes is Gertrude Stein’s transformative ‘release of
things from the closure of their naming’ in Tender
Buttons. (Ziarek: 47) As in the strictly formalist accounts of form above,
the particular moment of the reception of the event of forcework will transform
our sense of judgement, will involve a qualitative enhancement, a letting be.
Ziarek’s denial of aesthetics has led him to be excluded from this chapter’s
argument, although his sense of art as a non-violent force is gently absorbed
into it, though Susan Wolfson’s account (in Formal
Charges) speaks louder.
See my critical poetics-poetry-essay ‘A Carafe, a Blue
Guitar, Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek and the Avant-Garde’ in Armand, Louis,
ed. Avant-Post. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006: 264-280
for a longer response to Ziarek’s book. Avant-Post
may be read free here:
