The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

The Death of the Critic

144 The Death of the Critic the most imposing obstacle facing anyone foolhardy enough to ask whether an avant-garde artistic praxis is possible under postmodern conditions is the much-contested nature of the terms themselves. Since my claim here will be that a postmodern avantgardism is not only possible but manifest in that most conservative of arts, the art of criticism, I hope I may be forgiven for deferring a demonstration of that claim until I’ve established just what I mean by ‘avantgarde ’ and ‘postmodern’ in this particular context. The Linguistic Skepticism of the Avant-Garde A classic definition of avant-gardism, one that seems to serve as a kind of accepted folk-wisdom among many poets of what Ron Silliman calls the post-avant, was articulated by Renato Poggioli in his 1968 study TheTheoryoftheAvant-Garde. Poggioli proposes that avant-gardism proceeds from the assumption that languages and systems of expression are, by their nature, entropic. Avant-garde artistic and literary praxis are, in this view, inevitable reactions to “the flat, opaque, and prosaic nature of our public speech, where the practical end of quantitative communication spoils the quality of the expressive means.” For Poggioli, the “conventional habits” of expression in a bourgeois, capitalist society are subject to a “degeneration,” and the role of the avant-garde must be the 145 Poetry in a Difficult World renewal of whatever language (literary, visual, etc.) the artist chooses as a field of operations (37). This idea, of course, does not originate with Poggioli, but derives from a long tradition of thinking about experimental art, much of it from the era of the historical avant-garde itself. Poggioli’s point about linguistic entropy was already present in Victor Shklovsky’s seminal article of 1917, “Art as Technique.” Here, Shklovsky presents the problem of linguistic entropy as a problem of ever-decreasing experiential returns: “If we start to examine the general laws of perception,” he writes, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. (753) In this view, ordinary life in modern society is inherently a matter of alienation, not merely from one’s labor, but from one’s every action: “...life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war” (754). Only the artist devoted to new forms of representation can overcome this alienation. If, as Shklovsky claims, “the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” then the technique of art must be “to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception...” (758). The artist, in this view, should be an innovator who works against habit and banality. This view of the avant-gardist’s role as the eternally vigilant regenerator of languages, symbolic systems, and modes of experience, appears in countless manifesti of the historical avant-garde, and is handed down to us through thinkers like Poggioli and Clement Greenberg (whose Avant-Garde and Kitsch made the idea central to American academic thinking about the avant-garde). So thoroughly normalized has this view now become that an American academic can, at a reputable scholarly conference , casually remark of an experimental poet like Michael Palmer, “the writer’s task is to challenge received ideas about signification, to undermine authoritative modes of discourse” (Finkelstein), and meet no 146 The Poet Resigns response other than approval. Approval is, of course, entirely merited: this is a vital element of art’s role in our time. But while this view of the avant-garde is correct as far as it goes, it is limited by its formalism and aestheticism, by the deep-seated tendency to see art as independent of its institutions and social embeddedness. The Institutional Skepticism of the Avant-Garde One irony of Victor Shklovsky’s status as a kind of patron saint of the avant-garde is that the examples he chooses to illustrate his idea of defamiliarization are not drawn from the powerful currents of avantgarde practice that flowed through Russia in 1917. Suprematism and...