Reclaiming the Stereotype: Poetic Collage, Exemplarity, Negativity and the “Ethics of deferred Comprehension.”
Poetic collage’s efficacy as a radical form with culturally reflexive potential is up for debate.
As a poetic device of composition, collage evinces an anti-closural ethos, to wit, as a material mimesis, one that occupies the total poetic construction, of fragmented, discontinuous post-modern cultural and social experience. In our post-Baudrillard world, where simulation, or, to use his terms, “illusion,” is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible, collage stands in as the schizophrenic subject position pointing to a vast array of realities and points of disconnected references that refuse to link up, or represent a bounded realness.
But is subjectivity the only province of collage? —Or is it able to refract more? I may want to initiate my personal stakes into this discussion. Collage—as an assembled “thing” of disparate “stuff”—is a compositional modality I have employed when writing in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The inter-splicing of lyric, historiography, found-text, and direct quotation has been a fruitful endeavor, therefore, I am invested not only in understanding more deeply the aesthetic affordances of such a modality, but also in a defense of it as an art object with the potential for cultural agency. Though at times unavoidable, my goal is not to defend the grand principles of collage, the transcendent rules of its construction and subsequent interpretation / recuperation (many brilliant essays on this have already been written), but rather to treat collage as, still, despite its unchecked proliferation into American Poetics, an avant-garde practice with the potential of site-specific interventions in culture and forms or representation. To accept collage’s potential for specificity, and build a defense for it, I found it imperative to winnow my own reading of collage “texts,” and their respective interpreters. To that end, El Lissitzky’s, The Constructor, self-portrait, negative version (1924), in concert with Barret Watten’s reading of it, will serve as an invaluable territory to ground this discussion.
The major criterion for Watten to gauge the social reflexivity of radical form is the relationship between exemplarity and negativity. A useful way to think about exemplarity and negativity is to consider the tensional relationship between the avant-garde’s marginality—their social outsiderness—and its utopian futurity. The avant-garde, as a gross generalization, re-articulates the world through radical forms of representation as to make the comprehension, or the meaning of their representations, only partially available. In doing so, the avant-garde takes up a position generally outside the ethos of a dominant culture. The art object, as a constructed totality, stands as a figure of possibility; or another way to think about the art object is as an imaginary example of future cohesion that interns its historic moment where interpretive horizons are not yet realized. Negativity, then, is both represented by the artists social status as outsider—the avant-garde—and the “ethics of deferred comprehension”; that is, the art object “encompasses both representation and its impossibility”; impossibility, here, meaning the art object’s interpretive integration into the lifeworld of a culture is denied (Watten 159).
Lissitzky’s historic moment (post-revolution Russia) fits the bill as a moment of collective possibility, or social and political potentiality, which Watten confirms:
The experience of revolution leads directly to self-negation and, in consequence, abstraction—seen as continuing the dynamics of the revolution. With the whole world aligned against the revolution, it will be necessary to remake the world anew (164)
Russia, in a state of re-articulating its internal social relations and its external geo-political relations, without the full comprehension of its transformative effects (one could argue this is always the case for political revolutions), is exemplary of a constructive totality that recuperates its own negativity. The state, devoid of tradition means of self-identifying, (no longer a Tsarist Empire), leaves its citizens in a similar position. Yet, the revolution doesn’t efface the individual citizen, nor reduce its social action to pure ephemera. For Lissitzky, the geo-political negativity of Russia is tantamount to the social negativity of the citizen / artist bound to incomplete social transformations. Lissitzky thus transforms this social negativity into an aesthetic negativity whereby the positive materiality of The Constructor affirms action, while at the same time does not reduce the lacunae of its historical moment into a comprehensible unit. Lissitzky’s “self-portrait,” while reducing action to formalist experimentation, does represent a “constructor” reordering the material world radically anew. Collage is the radical form Lissitzky employs to accomplish such paradoxes .
According to Watten, Lissitzky’s “self-portrait” is among a set art objects that makes available, albeit retrospectively, this link between exemplarity and negativity in early 20th century Russian Constructivist art. Watten writes:
Lissitzky’s portrait exists in a potential space between dissociated elements: texts, compass, layout grid, abstract forms, hand and head of the artist (in a turtleneck sweater). Importantly, too, the portrait exists in two versions, positive and negative. The potential space for construction, then, is the object of Lissitzky’s portrait, a space predicated on its reversal (161)
In this passage, Watten highlights a formal aspect pertinent to Lissitzky and to my views of collage—“dissociated elements.” These “dissociated elements” construct a space of potentiality by suspending unity and disunity in the composition. The elements of Lissitzky’s “self-portrait,” not least of all its “negative” version (the possibility of the collage’s positive version is held out indefinitely), points to a cultural disorientation amidst new social formations, and to their future cohesion. As in, the “dissociated elements” may at some point become “associated elements” through expanded interpretive horizons. However, the “dissociated elements” of Lissitzky’s portrait, read as a collage, are inextricable from its totalizing effect.
Collage, deriving from the French verb “coller” which refers literally to “pasting, sticking, or gluing,” applies to The Constructor as it combines self-portraiture, text (note: English letters “xyz”), a compass, and various patterns of graphing paper in its composition. These various elements, or what can be termed peripheral forms, inform one another. The letters “xyz” indicate the end of a sequence (in this case, an alphabet), but in terminating within the spatial plane, the sequence’s recursion becomes an imminent possibility; that is, an alphabet never ends indefinitely, it can always begin again. Likewise, the compass, interposed over a hand in a manner that represents its latent potential for use and construction (the hand and compass are two separate images combined only through the art object), refracts an insurmountable gap between human agency for construction and social change and the perfected design for these formations to adhere to. Everywhere in the composition graph paper is distorted and discolored, becoming an uneasy background attempted to articulate its proper form and position having now been appropriated into a radical formalist experiment. As collage, we are asked to read these individual elements in Lissitzky’s “self-portrait” as fragments of an exterior world misplaced in a spatial plane of two-dimensional representation. The content of these dissociated elements, their specific reference to process and construction, refers to new social formations in Russia while they enact the possibility of cohesion and sequence; but the form—collage—also posits an example of Constructivist will that recuperates a sense of negativity, as Donald Kuspit notes: “Collage is a demonstration of this process of the many becoming one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it” (Kuspit 42). The gaps between the compass and hand, the alphabet that ends and does not begin again in the composition, are mimetic of relations that fail to fully fructify, likewise, the collage and totalizing form fails to fully integrate its material into a cohesive, interpretable whole, thus form and content have a very specific relationship, one argues for the other.
I now want to turn more directly to poetic collage and mount a defense for it based on Watten’s terms of interpretation: exemplarity and negativity, that is, how collage can function as a form of social reflexivity.
One of the major problems in poetic collage is its perceivable limit in sourceable material. Whereas visual art can appropriate a vast array of materials, thus expanding points of reference exponentially, poetry is limited to language and discourse. Though this horizon is being breeched by poets who incorporate pictorial elements, for the sake of this discussion I will accept the limit. Working strictly within the realm of discourse, a poetic collage espouses an inherent belief in literary communication, or minimally, the possibility of communication through discourse. This “possibility” toward literary communication in the poetic collage is enacted by the poems discursivity, arrived at by the writer’s apparent desire for unhampered access to the world—the “encyclopedic impulse” (Hejinian 41). The collage argues for inclusivity, that is, not limiting the kinds of discourse that contribute to the total communicative act of a poem. As such, the poem either seems inconclusive or absolutely secure in its conscious choices. Yet, The disparate forms of discourse, like that of the visual collage, both inform the total expression of the art object and threaten to tear it asunder. What this inclusivity results in is not surprisingly an “open text,” to barrow Lyn Hejinian’s term (43). According to Heijinian, “the ‘open text,’…invites participation, rejects authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies [and] resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification” (43). Discourse, as something “made” and traditionally fixed as a commodity produced by its context, meant for a particular brand of consumption, is opened up to new interpretive horizons by its dislocation in the poetic. So, by assembling the poetic collage strictly of discourse, the tensional relationship between social formations, i.e. context for discourse, and cultural meaning—communication-- are brought to bear on the poem. The poem stands as example of the communicative act, while recuperating its negativity, or “deferred comprehension,” in the form of different registers of discourse pulling the poem in any number of directions.
As stated by Watten, the “ethics” of incomprehension create a space for potential social formations to galvanize around a sense of utopian futurity, a society that can complete the art objects recuperation through its expanded interpretive horizons. The poetic collage is exemplary of a radical form that can produce such results. In poetic collage, the horizon of comprehension is restricted to the particular, localized, and at the same time relations between modal clusters are indeterminate or deferred. Here, both examples of comprehension and incomprehensibility are present. Small truths are inextricable from the smaller events within the collage poem, but an extrapolation to larger acts of evaluation is denied. Truths are bound to the event, but suggest no greater course of action, presently, through the total art object.
However, to assume the collage as a poetic redresses the reader to complete the form, through reference to peripheral forms then plugging them back into the art object at hand, thus finding a possibility of coherence spread across all forms of cultural production, levels all collage to the same cliché—the reader completes the form. This equation, accurate due to its generality, is by no means a defense for collage. Rather than finding meaning in the peripheral forms, like Lissitzky’s portrait, the collage poem is a model for action among an indeterminate social landscape, whether revolutionary or not. The poem, as a construct, asserts a will to act, while accepting its interpretive constraints. Opposed to the reflexive post-modern subjectivity claim on the collage poem, it in fact is a means to collectivity and future coordination.
A lot more can be said about collage poems. For collage to avoid the deadness of trickery or device, or worse, universalism, it must employ, both in its form and in its content, a possibility for new cultural politics. It must be a means to and an extension of new social formations. This is not to say that an explicit critique of old positions of cultural politics and social formations is the “new position” for which formations surround and galvanize, creating a context for new formal innovation. In understanding the relationship between exemplarity and negativity, we can move to a more effective interpretation and use of collage, one that does not originate and terminate in the space of subjective experience.
References:
Watten, Barret. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Print.
Donald, Kuspit. "Collage: The Organizing Principal of Art in the Age of the Relativity of Art." Collage: Critical Views. Ed. Katherine Hoffman. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 39-58. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language Of Inquiry. Univ of California Pr, 2000. Print.
Poetic collage’s efficacy as a radical form with culturally reflexive potential is up for debate.
As a poetic device of composition, collage evinces an anti-closural ethos, to wit, as a material mimesis, one that occupies the total poetic construction, of fragmented, discontinuous post-modern cultural and social experience. In our post-Baudrillard world, where simulation, or, to use his terms, “illusion,” is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible, collage stands in as the schizophrenic subject position pointing to a vast array of realities and points of disconnected references that refuse to link up, or represent a bounded realness.
But is subjectivity the only province of collage? —Or is it able to refract more? I may want to initiate my personal stakes into this discussion. Collage—as an assembled “thing” of disparate “stuff”—is a compositional modality I have employed when writing in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The inter-splicing of lyric, historiography, found-text, and direct quotation has been a fruitful endeavor, therefore, I am invested not only in understanding more deeply the aesthetic affordances of such a modality, but also in a defense of it as an art object with the potential for cultural agency. Though at times unavoidable, my goal is not to defend the grand principles of collage, the transcendent rules of its construction and subsequent interpretation / recuperation (many brilliant essays on this have already been written), but rather to treat collage as, still, despite its unchecked proliferation into American Poetics, an avant-garde practice with the potential of site-specific interventions in culture and forms or representation. To accept collage’s potential for specificity, and build a defense for it, I found it imperative to winnow my own reading of collage “texts,” and their respective interpreters. To that end, El Lissitzky’s, The Constructor, self-portrait, negative version (1924), in concert with Barret Watten’s reading of it, will serve as an invaluable territory to ground this discussion.
The major criterion for Watten to gauge the social reflexivity of radical form is the relationship between exemplarity and negativity. A useful way to think about exemplarity and negativity is to consider the tensional relationship between the avant-garde’s marginality—their social outsiderness—and its utopian futurity. The avant-garde, as a gross generalization, re-articulates the world through radical forms of representation as to make the comprehension, or the meaning of their representations, only partially available. In doing so, the avant-garde takes up a position generally outside the ethos of a dominant culture. The art object, as a constructed totality, stands as a figure of possibility; or another way to think about the art object is as an imaginary example of future cohesion that interns its historic moment where interpretive horizons are not yet realized. Negativity, then, is both represented by the artists social status as outsider—the avant-garde—and the “ethics of deferred comprehension”; that is, the art object “encompasses both representation and its impossibility”; impossibility, here, meaning the art object’s interpretive integration into the lifeworld of a culture is denied (Watten 159).
Lissitzky’s historic moment (post-revolution Russia) fits the bill as a moment of collective possibility, or social and political potentiality, which Watten confirms:
The experience of revolution leads directly to self-negation and, in consequence, abstraction—seen as continuing the dynamics of the revolution. With the whole world aligned against the revolution, it will be necessary to remake the world anew (164)
Russia, in a state of re-articulating its internal social relations and its external geo-political relations, without the full comprehension of its transformative effects (one could argue this is always the case for political revolutions), is exemplary of a constructive totality that recuperates its own negativity. The state, devoid of tradition means of self-identifying, (no longer a Tsarist Empire), leaves its citizens in a similar position. Yet, the revolution doesn’t efface the individual citizen, nor reduce its social action to pure ephemera. For Lissitzky, the geo-political negativity of Russia is tantamount to the social negativity of the citizen / artist bound to incomplete social transformations. Lissitzky thus transforms this social negativity into an aesthetic negativity whereby the positive materiality of The Constructor affirms action, while at the same time does not reduce the lacunae of its historical moment into a comprehensible unit. Lissitzky’s “self-portrait,” while reducing action to formalist experimentation, does represent a “constructor” reordering the material world radically anew. Collage is the radical form Lissitzky employs to accomplish such paradoxes .
According to Watten, Lissitzky’s “self-portrait” is among a set art objects that makes available, albeit retrospectively, this link between exemplarity and negativity in early 20th century Russian Constructivist art. Watten writes:
Lissitzky’s portrait exists in a potential space between dissociated elements: texts, compass, layout grid, abstract forms, hand and head of the artist (in a turtleneck sweater). Importantly, too, the portrait exists in two versions, positive and negative. The potential space for construction, then, is the object of Lissitzky’s portrait, a space predicated on its reversal (161)
In this passage, Watten highlights a formal aspect pertinent to Lissitzky and to my views of collage—“dissociated elements.” These “dissociated elements” construct a space of potentiality by suspending unity and disunity in the composition. The elements of Lissitzky’s “self-portrait,” not least of all its “negative” version (the possibility of the collage’s positive version is held out indefinitely), points to a cultural disorientation amidst new social formations, and to their future cohesion. As in, the “dissociated elements” may at some point become “associated elements” through expanded interpretive horizons. However, the “dissociated elements” of Lissitzky’s portrait, read as a collage, are inextricable from its totalizing effect.
Collage, deriving from the French verb “coller” which refers literally to “pasting, sticking, or gluing,” applies to The Constructor as it combines self-portraiture, text (note: English letters “xyz”), a compass, and various patterns of graphing paper in its composition. These various elements, or what can be termed peripheral forms, inform one another. The letters “xyz” indicate the end of a sequence (in this case, an alphabet), but in terminating within the spatial plane, the sequence’s recursion becomes an imminent possibility; that is, an alphabet never ends indefinitely, it can always begin again. Likewise, the compass, interposed over a hand in a manner that represents its latent potential for use and construction (the hand and compass are two separate images combined only through the art object), refracts an insurmountable gap between human agency for construction and social change and the perfected design for these formations to adhere to. Everywhere in the composition graph paper is distorted and discolored, becoming an uneasy background attempted to articulate its proper form and position having now been appropriated into a radical formalist experiment. As collage, we are asked to read these individual elements in Lissitzky’s “self-portrait” as fragments of an exterior world misplaced in a spatial plane of two-dimensional representation. The content of these dissociated elements, their specific reference to process and construction, refers to new social formations in Russia while they enact the possibility of cohesion and sequence; but the form—collage—also posits an example of Constructivist will that recuperates a sense of negativity, as Donald Kuspit notes: “Collage is a demonstration of this process of the many becoming one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it” (Kuspit 42). The gaps between the compass and hand, the alphabet that ends and does not begin again in the composition, are mimetic of relations that fail to fully fructify, likewise, the collage and totalizing form fails to fully integrate its material into a cohesive, interpretable whole, thus form and content have a very specific relationship, one argues for the other.
I now want to turn more directly to poetic collage and mount a defense for it based on Watten’s terms of interpretation: exemplarity and negativity, that is, how collage can function as a form of social reflexivity.
One of the major problems in poetic collage is its perceivable limit in sourceable material. Whereas visual art can appropriate a vast array of materials, thus expanding points of reference exponentially, poetry is limited to language and discourse. Though this horizon is being breeched by poets who incorporate pictorial elements, for the sake of this discussion I will accept the limit. Working strictly within the realm of discourse, a poetic collage espouses an inherent belief in literary communication, or minimally, the possibility of communication through discourse. This “possibility” toward literary communication in the poetic collage is enacted by the poems discursivity, arrived at by the writer’s apparent desire for unhampered access to the world—the “encyclopedic impulse” (Hejinian 41). The collage argues for inclusivity, that is, not limiting the kinds of discourse that contribute to the total communicative act of a poem. As such, the poem either seems inconclusive or absolutely secure in its conscious choices. Yet, The disparate forms of discourse, like that of the visual collage, both inform the total expression of the art object and threaten to tear it asunder. What this inclusivity results in is not surprisingly an “open text,” to barrow Lyn Hejinian’s term (43). According to Heijinian, “the ‘open text,’…invites participation, rejects authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies [and] resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification” (43). Discourse, as something “made” and traditionally fixed as a commodity produced by its context, meant for a particular brand of consumption, is opened up to new interpretive horizons by its dislocation in the poetic. So, by assembling the poetic collage strictly of discourse, the tensional relationship between social formations, i.e. context for discourse, and cultural meaning—communication-- are brought to bear on the poem. The poem stands as example of the communicative act, while recuperating its negativity, or “deferred comprehension,” in the form of different registers of discourse pulling the poem in any number of directions.
As stated by Watten, the “ethics” of incomprehension create a space for potential social formations to galvanize around a sense of utopian futurity, a society that can complete the art objects recuperation through its expanded interpretive horizons. The poetic collage is exemplary of a radical form that can produce such results. In poetic collage, the horizon of comprehension is restricted to the particular, localized, and at the same time relations between modal clusters are indeterminate or deferred. Here, both examples of comprehension and incomprehensibility are present. Small truths are inextricable from the smaller events within the collage poem, but an extrapolation to larger acts of evaluation is denied. Truths are bound to the event, but suggest no greater course of action, presently, through the total art object.
However, to assume the collage as a poetic redresses the reader to complete the form, through reference to peripheral forms then plugging them back into the art object at hand, thus finding a possibility of coherence spread across all forms of cultural production, levels all collage to the same cliché—the reader completes the form. This equation, accurate due to its generality, is by no means a defense for collage. Rather than finding meaning in the peripheral forms, like Lissitzky’s portrait, the collage poem is a model for action among an indeterminate social landscape, whether revolutionary or not. The poem, as a construct, asserts a will to act, while accepting its interpretive constraints. Opposed to the reflexive post-modern subjectivity claim on the collage poem, it in fact is a means to collectivity and future coordination.
A lot more can be said about collage poems. For collage to avoid the deadness of trickery or device, or worse, universalism, it must employ, both in its form and in its content, a possibility for new cultural politics. It must be a means to and an extension of new social formations. This is not to say that an explicit critique of old positions of cultural politics and social formations is the “new position” for which formations surround and galvanize, creating a context for new formal innovation. In understanding the relationship between exemplarity and negativity, we can move to a more effective interpretation and use of collage, one that does not originate and terminate in the space of subjective experience.
References:
Watten, Barret. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Print.
Donald, Kuspit. "Collage: The Organizing Principal of Art in the Age of the Relativity of Art." Collage: Critical Views. Ed. Katherine Hoffman. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. 39-58. Print.
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language Of Inquiry. Univ of California Pr, 2000. Print.