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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819571373 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Wesleyan University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
On the Outskirts of Form
Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA
If geography has been imagined and made as part of capitalism's historical geography then it can be reimagined and remade in an image other than that of capital in the future. — David Harvey
We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect.
— Lisa Robertson
The New Cosmo
In Alejandro González Iñárritu's 2006 film, Babel, the historical geography of globalization is presented through a series of interlinked stories about a crisis of communication among widely dispersed individuals. A Japanese businessman gives a rifle to a Moroccan herdsman who has served as the former's guide on a hunting expedition in northern Africa. The herdsman gives the gun to his two sons so that they can ward off jackals that are preying on their herd of goats. While engaging in target practice, one of the boys shoots at a bus carrying tourists, striking an American woman, Susan (Cate Blanchett), and causing her husband, Richard (Brad Pitt), to staunch the bleeding while frantically attempting to contact the American embassy for medical aid in a remote village. Once Susan is helicoptered to a hospital, Richard phones his undocumented Mexican nanny back home in San Diego and asks her to take care of their children for a few more days. The nanny, Amelia (Adriana Barraza), had planned on returning to Tijuana to witness her son's wedding. Lacking any alternative childcare, she takes the two American children with her across the border. After the wedding, she returns late at night with her nephew, and when the border guards become inquisitive about the presence of two American children in the back seat, the inebriated nephew guns the car across the border, leaving Amelia and the children in the California desert. The film then cuts back to Japan where the deaf daughter of the businessman, Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), is cruising the neon-lit streets of Tokyo with a group of deaf friends. Her alienation within the hearing world is marked by a series of sexually explicit exhibitionary acts that culminate at the end of the movie with her standing naked on the balcony of her high-rise apartment with her father, staring at the brightly lit global city. Whatever promises globalization proffers for increased communication and intersection are, as the title implies, lost in a confusion of tongues and temporalities.
What disturbed many critics about the film are the sudden cuts and shifts of locale from Morocco to San Diego to Tijuana to Tokyo that keep the viewer constantly off balance. David Denby, writing in The New Yorker, called Babel "an infuriatingly well-made disaster" in which the overlapping stories "are so idiosyncratic that they don't comment on one another; they just lie side by side in the same film" (103). Denby feels that moviegoers are right to expect "some sense of order sterner than trivial contingency," but this desire for continuity misses Iñárritu's salient point about the impossibility of rendering new global realities according to more traditional narrative devices. The film allegorizes the limits of national narratives to contain citizen-subjects widely separated by linguistic, cultural, and economic barriers at the same time that it illustrates its own diegetic limits in telling a story in traditional narrative terms. And if narrative coherence suffers, so do ethical determinants. "No one is evil," Denby complains, and thus no one is accountable for the "terrible events" that befall its deterritorialized characters. While it is true that Iñárritu does not point the finger at a particular source for these events, their indeterminate provenance marks Babel's comment on the agentless nature of global power. Seen from the standpoint of the stateless Amelia, isolated in the desert and tied to her two Anglo charges, or from the standpoint of a deaf Japanese girl in a sound-drenched metropole, the experience of fragmentation Denby bemoans may very well be the structure of feeling that we call globalization.
I described Babel as an allegory, but it is more properly a fable about a new form of cosmopolitanism in a world where millions of people have fled homelands to escape political repression, ethnic cleansing, and poverty within an increasingly globalized economy. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the film displays the breakdown of "homeland" as a stable figure for origins in a period of what Aiwa Ong has called "flexible citizenships" created around labor flows, trade agreements, and outsourcing opportunities. As a fable about cosmopolitanism, the film invites comparison with an earlier version that we associate with modernity and whose global modality is colonization. For the modernist generation, cosmopolitanism implied being a citizen of the world, unmoored from a single place (provincialism) or national identity (nativism). Poe's man of the crowd or Baudelaire's flaneur could negotiate threatening urban spaces because they were not perceived to be of those spaces. Characters in Henry James's novels are on a perpetual grand tour, moving from England to Italy to France to the Orient, exorcizing psychic and cultural limits of their national origins while engaging in touristic voyeurism. Their progeny in the personae of modernist poets — Eliot's Prufrock, Pound's Mauberly, Stevens's Crispin — become the models of poetic cosmopolitanism: witty, world weary, mobile — fuguers lost in Imperium.
Unlike the philosophical-political cosmopolitanism envisioned by Kant in "Perpetual Peace" (1795), with its utopian belief in world-citizenship through hospitality and shared rights, the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globetrotting businessman or wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant laborer, sex worker, and political exile. The former, like their Victorian counterparts, are marked by access to education, languages and cultural capital — what Craig Calhoun calls the "class consciousness of frequent travelers." The latter are defined by postcolonial histories of displacement and structural violence that complicate both the idea of a national homeland and the forging of a new, assimilated identity in the host country. Such disparities argue against speaking of a single cosmopolitan tendency but rather of what James Clifford calls "discrepant cosmopolitanisms" that differentiate the "different degrees of entanglement in national/transnational orders" (365).
In order to study the poetics of such displacements I will focus on discrepant cosmopolitanisms created within the North American context, specifically those created in the long shadow of NAFTA. My examples include the Mexican poet and novelist Cristina Rivera-Garza's poem, "Tercer Mundo," the American poet and activist, Mark Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down, and Canadian poet Lisa Robertson's Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. By focusing on poetries forged around a hemispheric trading bloc rather than a school or shared aesthetic, I hope to discover critical affinities grounded in political and material realities of globalization. In this respect, I am taking a cue from Amitava Kumar's anthology, World Bank Literature, which seeks to understand the role of literary culture in an age of international finance and structural adjustment policies. As Kumar points out, thinking through global ventures like the World Bank or NAFTA necessitates an understanding of the inextricable bonds between economic, political, and cultural life such that changes in one are felt in the others. As Kumar observes, in the wake of worldwide anti-globalist struggles, the "analytic shift from the liberal-diversity model of 'World Literature' to the radical paradigm of 'World Bank Literature' signals a resolve not only to recognize and contest the dominance of Bretton Woods institutions but also to rigorously oppose those regimes of knowledge that would keep literature and culture sealed from the issues of economics and activism" (xix). By stressing a hemispheric frame for reading poetry I also hope to define a shift in geographical focus away from a kind of spiritual localism — the "spirit of place"— among poets of the 1950s and 1960s toward spaces currently under construction. By stressing literary community formed through shared economic interdependencies I want to complicate the idea of "imagined communities" produced within the nationstate — including literary movements or schools — and situate them across national borders and cultural agendas.
This latter aspect of my project requires a reconsideration of avant-garde linguistic practices as they are used to imagine new urban, geopolitical realities. It is here that the trans-generic, fragmented poetries of the recent generation join the discontinuous cinematography of Iñárritu and the street theater of anti-globalist activism. As I will point out, Cristina Rivera-Garza creates a surrealist narrative to imagine a fabulist third world, a "self-generated out-of-place"; Mark Nowak uses documentary materials and photographs to chronicle the decay of industrial cities due to downsizing and outsourcing practices; Lisa Robertson's "soft architecture" project continues a tradition of the modernist manifesto focused around urbanism and capitalist space. It is tempting to read their formal practices as a continuation of the historic avant-garde's defamiliarizing of urban spaces by incorporating the commercial detritus of everyday life. Cendrars's and Delauney's La Prose du Transibérien ..., Marinetti's manifesto "Against Past-Loving Venice," Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, situationist dérives, all anticipate the work of contemporary cosmopolitan poets in their defamiliarization of the rationalized metropole. Yet works of the historical avant-garde in both utopic and dystopic forms still imagine that there is a building to build, a neighborhood to restore, a national border to traverse. In an era of flexible accumulation, transnational capital, and nomadic labor, such sites and spaces can no longer easily be cognitively mapped.
Emergent discourses of cosmopolitanism differ substantially from previous models based on the authority of the nation-state and its organizing dyads: local/global, metropole/province, self/other. My three examples offer an admittedly limited perspective on how cultural production has been transformed by NAFTA, but I might offer some tentative suggestions about how the specific properties of the agreement relate to questions of cultural production. The shadow that NAFTA casts is precisely that, a form of unheimlich reality through which subjects are produced and economic displacement is lived. When it was passed in 1994, NAFTA was seen as an agreement between equal trading partners that promised the removal of tariffs and restrictions on both material and intellectual property among the three countries. As Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo observes, NAFTA "'opened up' the borders among the three nations by changing the formal legal controls on the entry and exit of goods and capital, although notably not of people" (753). Critics agree that the promise of more jobs, greater mobility, increased environmental oversight, faster growth and a leveling of economic disparities among the three countries has been a phantasm, especially for those at the lowest end of the economic scale. According to the authors of Dying for Growth, globalization — far from improving access to healthcare, medicines, and sanitation — has increased physical impairments and disease by privatizing healthcare, exposing workers to industrial waste, and denying access to cheap, generic drugs. The loss — the "great sucking sound" — of more than one million jobs to the developing world has produced a growing trade deficit with Mexico while the anticipated increase in jobs for Mexican laborers has resulted in a permanent maquiladora underclass and an increase in illegal border crossing and surveillance since the act's passage. The good news about U.S. exports to Mexico and Canada having increased by $104 billion between 1993 and 2004 is matched by the bad news that imports during the same period have increased $211.3 billion, leaving a trade deficit of $107.3 billion. Instead of an increase in environmental protections throughout the three countries, there has been a precipitous reduction of unified standards leading to increased pollution, toxic spills, and deregulation. Agriculture has been especially affected. Michael Pollan points out that corn, Mexico's most stable agricultural product, has been eviscerated by the importation of federally subsidized U.S. corn. Mexican farmers who can survive must do so by adopting industrial farming practices and chemically intensive methods of growing to compete with U.S. practices. As many critics have agreed, NAFTA is less an act that promotes free trade than an investment agreement that shores up the wealthiest sectors of the economy in each of the signatory countries.
What do these factors have to do with poetics? How does the removal of tariffs and subsidies to achieve more porous borders impact the borders of language arts? At the most basic level, NAFTA has inspired a lively arts discourse around globalization that would include work by the binational Border Arts Workshop (BAW), the feminist writing collective, La Liñea, the performance work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Michael Schnorr, and Heriberto Yépez, the theater of Cherrie Moraga and mixed-media art of the Chicano Asco group, the poetry of Rodrigo Toscano, Alfred Arteaga, Bruce Andrews, Claudia Rankine, Jeff Derksen, M. Nourbese Phillips, Dione Brand, Rita Wong, Wade Compton, and others. What joins all of these artists as well as my three specific examples is a recognition of the phantasmal quality of post-NAFTA reality — a world in which the illusion of mobility and expanded communication masks the reconsolidation of wealth and the containment of resistance within a totalized surveillance regime. If modernism was marked by the "unreal city" of the Baudelairean crowd, the new cosmopolitan phantasmagoria is a reality effect of sign systems and grids of exchange, a Times Square of the imagination.
A recent Los Angeles County Museum exhibition of Chicano art was titled "Phantom Sightings," a phrase that captures something of the fugitive nature of artwork specific to Latino culture in Southern California but applicable to the work of art in an age of globalization as well. "Phantom Sightings" hints at work that no longer relies on the permanent object in the gallery space but that may appear on walls or underpasses, public signage (as in Heriberto Yépez's Frontera installation) or food carts (as in La Linea's "poemales"— poems written on the spot and wrapped in cornhusks) as well as flatbed trucks, community centers, and computer screens. The phrase also speaks to the uncanny quality of the Chicano demographic, one that is pervasive as a population yet which remains invisible within zones of power and representation. And this phantasmal quality extends into the urbanist focus of my three examples. For Teresa Rivera-Garza, the "third world" is no longer lodged in a specific geopolitical reality but in carceral and social spaces, "un hospital, una fiesta, un orfanatorio, una villa de reposo secuestrada de la realidad" (a hospital, a party, an orphanage, a rest home abducted from reality; 32–33). The architecture of the new global city, as Lisa Robertson points out, is "soft," its glamorous surface permeated by investment capital from East Asia and elsewhere. The speaker of her urbanist manifestos is less an individual than an "office," an institutional site visited by multiple subjects. For Mark Nowak, the cosmopolitan movement of global labor has turned small towns in the rust belt into ghost towns, their local infrastructure impacted by events in far-flung zones of outsourced labor and trade. And as in Babel, generic categories no longer hold but blur into prose, photography, documents, fable, and manifesto. Formal innovation seems based less around interrogating the status of the sign or, alternately, the integrity of the Subject than around the problem of citizenship and public agency. Unlike the privileged status given to personal alienation in cold-war poetry, the new cosmopoetics embodies alienation within a specific economic reality — neoliberalism — a telos-evacuated form of personal emancipation owned and operated by the global market.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
<P>Acknowledgments<BR>Introduction<BR>A PUBLIC LANGUAGE<BR>On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics in the Shadow of NAFTA<BR>The Dream of a Public Language: Modernity, Textuality, and the Citizen Subject<BR>OBJECTIVIST FRAMES<BR>Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism<BR>"Closed in Glass": Oppen's Class Spectacles<BR>APPROACHING THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY<BR>Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method<BR>"The Repeated Insistence": Creeley's Rage<BR>A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov<BR>Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk<BR>Ekphrasis and The New York School<BR>The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity<BR>"Struck Against Parenthesis": Shelley and Postmodern Romanticisms<BR>"Skewed by Design": From Act to Speech Act in Language Writing<BR>Vertigo: Thinking Toward Action in the Poetry of George Oppen<BR>Afterword: Impossible Poetries<BR>Notes<BR>Bibliography<BR>Index</P>What People are Saying About This
"Michael Davidson's compelling essays provide a rich fund of insight into American poetry from Oppen to Ashbery, from Objectivism to transnational poetries. Written with eloquence and concision, these pages deftly fuse formal analysis with cultural history."
— Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics
"Michael Davidson's compelling essays provide a rich fund of insight into American poetry from Oppen to Ashbery, from Objectivism to transnational poetries. Written with eloquence and concision, these pages deftly fuse formal analysis with cultural history."—Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics
"Michael Davidson's compelling essays provide a rich fund of insight into American poetry from Oppen to Ashbery, from Objectivism to transnational poetries. Written with eloquence and concision, these pages deftly fuse formal analysis with cultural history."—Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics
"Michael Davidson's superbly written book compellingly expands the category 'American poetry' into a global(ized) context, a 'cosmopoetics.' On the Outskirts of Form represents one direction in which scholarship on American poetry must move if it is to remain intellectually and culturally relevant, and Davidson is on the cutting edge of that future."—Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry
“Michael Davidson’s superbly written book compellingly expands the category ‘American poetry’ into a global(ized) context, a ‘cosmopoetics.’ On the Outskirts of Form represents one direction in which scholarship on American poetry must move if it is to remain intellectually and culturally relevant, and Davidson is on the cutting edge of that future.”