Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics

Afterword: Measuring Sites, Unbinding Measures

258 Afterword Afterword Measuring Sites, Unbinding Measures Passaic center loomed like a dull adjective. —Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” in Robert Smithson A tour of the landscape of site-­specific poetry since Williams might seem to lead us to two diametrically opposed conclusions or viewing promontories, as if set on either side of the final parking lot. The first is the notion that the linguistic turn in the humanities of the late 1960s finally disabused those remaining positivists of the idea that there could be a fit between words and places, between locations and descriptive languages: Language, in all of its infinite, uncontainable iterability, was the ultimate site of all poetry. And will remain so. The more reflexive poetry since the 1980s shows up the illusions of 1960s attempts to ground or enact a linguistic site-­ specificity. But, however indebted we might still be to this turn, such a narrative does not help us understand what remains pressing about site-­ specific poetry—and why turns to the ostensibly boundless digital in recent poetics will never simply transcend the problems of siting. A similarly misleading conclusion is the most common would-­ be corrective to the preceding view: now that we are finally through the period of linguistic excess that began in the late 1960s and swept through North America like a semiotic poltergeist, unhinging meanings and dispersing causalities, we will finally be able to site or ground language in the actual contexts (plug in your specialization field here) that are in reality its ultimate horizon. But do not be seduced by those familiar theoretical prospects, for they are only the most normative versions of poststructuralism on the one hand and New Historicism on the other—and it is only when they are so reduced that they become mutually exclusive. If one wanders just a little bit beyond this familiar DMZ where literary-­ his­ tori­ cal bus tours tend to deposit their guests, one might encounter an inconspicuous interpretive center where docents are preparing a rather different reading of the landscape. Let us ponder , then, their recently fabricated models, diagrams, wall texts, and sequential lighting displays. Afterword 259 In fact, the idea that the linguistic turn and the turn to contextualization , his­ tori­ cal or otherwise, need to be seen as opposed is itself a product of the 1980s, as New Historicism was making a place for itself in the humanities in part by caricaturing preceding theoretical movements. What claims us in site-­ specific poetry is not merely the appeal to the empirical, the lure of promised concreteness. When we read such poetry we do not “put it in its proper context” as if context were singular and to “contextualize ” were to contain with airtight finality. Rather, in the most compelling site-­ specific poetry, as in postminimal art, claims about specific locations, specific physical sites, always coincide with other claims about discursive and historiographic sites—about disciplinary languages used to produce interpretive authority at sites, about how such poetry frames its relation to its past in and out of its specific discipline. In fact, very much like the proper name, with its fantasy of direct indexical reference, so site-­ specific poetry’s promised concreteness always undoes itself the closer one examines what actually counts as a “site.” And this is not simply a dangerous mystification but actually part of its appeal: the fact that “siting” will always be necessary and at the same time provisional, heuristic, and multiple. The upshot of this is that, in reading such poetry, we are not in a position to choose definitively and finally between the empirical and the discursive, the immediate and the iterable, the local and the global. Rather we are helped by such writing to understand the concrete forms of their mutual imbrications—the ways that digging into the sedimented past of this New Jersey town also propels us into the institutional norms and practices of Ameri­ can history; that contextualizing this pile of rocks in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, by means of an essay, also entails a fundamental rethinking of the work of genre and of the larger work of art historiography; that exploring this Massachusetts cave also sends us spelunking into the larger conventions of scientific description , or that touring the backstory of this blackberry-­ laden shack will also be a tour of disciplinary authority and the gendered histories of ornament .1 The occasion of framing, measuring, charting is also the occasion of unbinding...