In our inaugural episode of Buried Text we discuss Professor Ming-Qian Ma’s “Negative Seeing”: Robert Smithson, Earth Art, and the Eco-Phenomenology of “Mirror Displacements”” published in Analecta Husserliana, Volume CXXI, “Eco-Phenomenology: Life, Human Life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos,” Springer Verlag (2018).
Professor Ming-Qian Ma is one of the most astute and underappreciated critics writing on avant-garde poetry today. His vision, enthusiasm, deep seriousness, and commitment to the avant-garde has been an enormous percolating influence on our own alter-institutional endeavor at TPRI and Buried Text. His book, Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method (Northwestern, 2008) would be introductory reading for an institution to come called TPRI. In reference to Gadamer, Feyerabend, Serres, and so many others, here Ma argues that avant-garde poetics performs a “method-of-no-method,” throwing all methods up for scrutiny, while casting a dubious light on the givenness of presentation. With chapters on Louis Zukofsky, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, John Cage, Charles Bernstein, and others, and with philosophical underpinnings from Descartes to Kant to Merleau-Ponty and beyond, Ma’s book refuses any simple theoretical method in favor of a rigorous style one can only call poetics, an idiosyncratic method that eschews the truth-procedures of all methods in favor of a pure expenditure of excessive, particular poetries of expenditure and chance, vision and invisibility, knowledge and non-knowledge.
The book is worth quoting here at length. Of the poets he gathers under his negative sight he writes, “the selected poets included in this book can be seen as sharing, both in principle and in practice, the following critical dispositions. For one thing, they problematize two types of methods in their works. Inextricably intertwined with one another, these methods are writing’s methods and “language’s methods.” For another, resorting to Serres’s model, they identify both types of methods and their working mechanisms in the structures of conventional texts of various kinds, and they convert their own texts into the conceptual-structural sites where the problems of method in terms of writing and language are investigated and theorized. For yet another, as a corollary of the aforementioned two dispositions, these poets regard poetry, or the writing of poetry, as an active, counter-methodical performance defined by Bruce Andrews as “rereading”; more concretely put, for these poets, poetry, to the extent that it is a critical-analytical reengagement with method as a problem is the “rereading [of] the reading that a social status quo puts us through.
“This book, with its title taken from Andrews’s critical-poetical formulation, is an attempt, in a limited fashion, to map the diverse perspectives from which the issue of method is addressed and re-read…precisely because this postmodern moment of critical intensity is only transient, its insight is genuinely avant-garde.” Eight blistering chapters later he concludes, forecasting a poetry yet to come: “Defiant to methodological appropriations, it is a poetry whose “newness” cannot and will not be established, because “what becomes established with the new,” as Deleuze asserts, “is precisely not the new.” It is, in other words, a radical newness, and it takes values that the methodological terms currently available do not yet have. In this sense, the poets’ critique of method, as evidenced in the poetics of counter-method variously manifested in the innovative practices of avant-garde poetry discussed in this book, articulates eloquently, at the level of philosophy, a poetic, post-dialectic rethinking of “thinking” itself, a conventional “thinking” in whose image the concept of poetry has hitherto been defined. To the extent that it unfolds a wide, open horizon, the colon that ends Bergvall’s poem [“Of Boundaries and Emblems,” as quoted in Perloff, After Free Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries,”] indeed evokes, both literally and symbolically — or more literally than symbolically, to be accurate — a poetry of the future, one, that is, yet to be imagined and conceptualized. It is the sign, perhaps, of a new poetry which has “its power of beginning and beginning again,” as Deleuze puts it, and hence “remains forever new.” For this sort of “new,” in its refusal to be recognized and named methodologically, “calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow,” to follow Deleuze’s argument, “but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and uncregonizable terra incognita.”
To explore that widely open horizon, the poetics of counter-method presents the first critical step, constituting, via its “counter-” position, the precondition for the emergence of a poetry yet to come.”
What does it mean for poetics to explore this “widely open horizon?” How does one take this “counter-” position? Perhaps one cannot. If it sounds enigmatic here, perhaps it must remain so. However, Ma gives some hint as to what this kind of poetics might do in his later essay, “Negative Seeing” (2018), the subject of our discussion. Bringing Husserl’s phenomenological reductions to an “eco-phenomenological” elsewhere through Robert Smithson’s “anti-seeing” Yucatán “mirror displacements” Ma argues this artwork “paradoxically enables the world to appear counter-intuitively through the mirror displacements, [and] presents itself as an artistic rendition of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenon of givenness. Theorized as the third phenomenological reduction contra that of Husserl and Heidegger, Marion’s phenomenology of givenness postulates a phenomenon saturated with intuition, which appears absolutely and unconditionally, beyond the limits set by the horizon and the transcendental I. In both Smithson’s eco-phenomenology of the “Mirror Displacements” and Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, the appearance of this saturated phenomenon is, as Marion epitomizes it, “invisible according to quantity, unbearable according to quality, absolute according to relation, irregardable according to modality.”
Invisible according to quantity, unbearable according to quality, absolute according to relation, irregardable according to modality. Does such a poetics remain utterly buried, impossible to be exhumed from its unbearable, invisible, absolute, irregardable situation? If so, then our focus as poets and practitioners of a poetics to come might not be able even ourselves to theorize or understand what such a saturated phenomenon is; rather, our activity might require commitment to something like this invisible avant-garde, a commitment that does not announce itself as a blasting, exploding, transrational, sub-real straight-jacket of libertarian, individualistic freedom characterized by a paradoxical insistence on the hyperbolic use of constraint, method, and science as demonstrated by a vortex-like artist or poet; nor does it redouble contemporary culture’s unfortunate slip into an eschatological theological-apocalyptic mode wherein the poet can only sing songs of either decline or nihilistic celebration. Instead, the commitment we spectralize here is an undefined, empty-set, radically unproclaimable, yet virtually emergent in every poetics as the corrosive potentiality of a catalytic dissolution of unjust metastabilities. This poetics might be closer to one of what Fred Moten calls “the swarm” or “the sentimental avant-garde” that sets out not with positivistic programs of disarrangement, but with stern refusals against the mandate of appearance, in favor of something present yet fugitive, other than appearance, deeply idiomatic, profoundly idiosyncratic: the inappropriable and the inalienable. Moten writes, “The idiomatic is an inalienable property yet to have been accomplished, a quality both always already present and achieved only by way of an impossible return. And how do we reconcile the necessities of both return and detour? No. More precisely, how do we deal with their interinanimation? In this case return is accomplished by way of a rerouting structured by properly philosophical refusals to improvise, proper valorizations of writing over speech…in the hope of an ensemble of the senses and, after the fact of its ongoing deferral, an emergence of radical orchestration. You descend into the depths of music and linger there, dancing in the hoped-for shadow of a bridge, unfathomable ocean song, uncrossable river suite, sentimental avant-garde, subjunctive-sentimenal mood.” This subjunctive-sentimental mood, this mood of commitment to the radically inappropriable, might be the flip-side of a poetics that remains “forever new,” one characterized by its uncharacterizability, one whose “experimental” nature is not a fashionable metaphor for “innovation” or “newness,” or part of some fictitious heroic Sisyphean climb to the heights of poetic difficulty that merely mirrors the neocolonial, idiotic, and evil dreams of contemporary billionaires, but, as Joan Retallack suggests, stands against “strategies of imaginative imperialism,” in favor of “Practices that reach out (interrogatively) toward constructive new ways of understanding and being in the world [that may be] our only chance at real instruments of optimism.” Despite, as Judith Goldman writes in Agon, our “toxic implicature” in this global enthymemic racist financialized necropolis that Capital wants to reduce to a wasteland, literature retains its status as a radical counter-method, capable of disjoining discourses of teleology, eschatology, and meritocracy from poetry and poetics. “Literature is…not a stable discourse contained by institutional conventions that define it as a “hollow” or “void” representation of serious descriptive or performative language. Rather it is a maverick, ironic discourse that continually questions and redefines the divide between the literary and the non-literary: an autonomous domain from which to deconstruct itself and all other discourses, through an unruly rendering of given conventions as undecidable. In turn, this undecidability — activated by irony in the world at large and by literature — becomes the site of “the aporia of responsibility as irresponsibilization” (Willis)…the given stymied.”
To stymie the given requires that poetics and poetry subtract from its right to fiction precisely this right to fiction, so that for a glimmer of a moment, an instant of the avant-garde, fiction appears (if negatively) as the real, as the inappropriable, as the absolute, as the non-negotiable. Here all former reals, conversely, take on the appearance of fiction, turning our mind’s eyes into wastebaskets and incinerators for the intolerable givens of the contemporary. Refusing to simply provide an allegorical mirror of the present or of the concept of literature, TPRI and Buried Text insist on the necessity of making a re-commitment to poetic institutionalization as the indeterminate gathering of diffuse practices that disown individual poetic right in favor of practical, ongoing gathering and dispersion that, fail as they might, fail better in their retroactive faith in an institution yet to come, a humanity yet to be attained, a commons yet to be enacted, and a world radically dissimulated of its current impossible, intolerable, and violent binds, real and imaginary, between culture and capital, state and corporation, human and nature. Here are open sets of multiple representation, medial interventions that intervene by providing warped portals to elsehweres and nowheres that are also here and now, non-projects of poetic love, evidence of something we have yet to name. We may not be those that name it.