[Wgcp-whc] Wg/CP--minutes Gleize (3/24/06)

richard.deming at yale.edu richard.deming at yale.edu
Wed Apr 5 14:24:26 EDT 2006


4/5/06

Before anything else, I want to remind people that we will be meeting this
Friday at 3 in Rm 116 in the WHC to discuss the work of Ann Lauterbach.  We
will be looking primarily at her recent book of poems?Hum?and her
collection of essays?Night Sky.  The suggestion has been made that we pay
closest attention to the essay ?As (It) Is; Toward a Poetic of the Whole
Fragment?; ?Is I Another? A Talk in Seven Beginnings?; and the long
sequence ?The Night Sky.?  Also, I want to remind everyone that Lauterbach
will be joining outr group in April 14th.  But now to other business.

On March 24th, The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met to
discuss the work of contemporary French poet Jean-Marie Gleize.  The session
was facilitated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, one of our group?s coordinators, who
is currently developing a paper on this particular poet to be delivered at a
panel on Gleize?s work.

Gleize, born in 1946, locates his work in a post-surrealist moment and he spent
his formative years steeped in the work of Tel Quel, the famous (or infamous,
depending on the current season) French avant-garde literary journal that ran
from the 1960s to the early 1980s, putting himself to apprenticeship with the
work of Denis Roche, a key figure connected with that poststructuralist
journal.  Gleize is both anti-lyric and anti-figural, attempting to create a
poetry that wholly flattens out the personal in an attempt to dismantle
figuration.  This anti-lyrical stance has established Gleize as an influential
figure (pun intended) for many of the ?younger? French poets, such as
Pierre Alfieri and Olivier Cadiot.  One might see this anti-lyricism as an
attempt to make poetry coextensive with reality, rather than attempting to use
poetry as a means of participating in some transcendental ideal or perpetuating
the problematic ideology of the romantic subject. This frame of reference
explains Gleize?s profound investment and expertise in regards to the work of
Francis Ponge.  In this way, Gleize might best be thought of as engaging in a
kind of negative modernity.  This means that Gleize?s poems are always
attempting to operate in the mode of critique and assertion.  I will quote here
from an interview with Gleize that was circulated with the last minutes:

?Quite simply, in life, I have this feeling about myself, as many of us have:
I think I have no sense of direction. I never really know where I am. I take a
very long time to get my bearings when I?m in a building or city. I don?t
know how it all works. For me, writing is intimately linked to questions of
orientation. I always consider myself a little lost?from this comes the idea
of ?being situated.? ?To be situated,? in a social context, is also to
be situated politically, poetically. I always thought of literature as a more
or less violent assertion, a perpetually inappropriate proposal. This proposal
must be asserted. Within the framework of art, to propose is to impose. Both
constructively and as a means of counteraction. To my mind, any artistic
project is megalomaniacal: it is exorbitantly ambitious to believe that one can
propose something wholly individual and singular. Regardless of this, every
artist thinks that his work decisively cancels or completes all that came
before it. How ludicrous it is to assume that daring to do something
persistently is to act in opposition to all other gestures. There is an
inherent element of opposition, of imposition, in the act of attempting
creation.?


In this we see the emphasis on articulation as assertion, and a deeply dialectic
understanding of place and subjectivity.  In his emphasis on a recurring belief
in destroying to proceed, Gleize?s modernism becomes clear.  We also see
evidently the difference between this poet and Michel Deguy, who privileges
metaphor and the possibilities of the lyric in deepening one?s relationship
to and with the phenomenological world, and who?being a Heideggerian?is far
more skeptical of the value of polemics.  (For a useful contrast, refer to the
minutes of the group?s discussion of Deguy?s work on 10/15/05).

As a means of situating his poetics, we focused our attention on the text of
Gleize?s collaboration with media and installation artist Marie Sester,
Quelque Chose Contraint Quelqu?un (Something Compels Someone).  The book has
Gleize?s poem superimposed over photographs and drawings (although highly
colored in then original, out photocopies were only black and white) of various
places, maps, a passport, architectural designs, and constructions by Sester.
The images also include CAT scans and x-rays, as well street signs and neon
signs (primarily from Las Vegas).  This seems an apt collaboration in that
given her training as an architect, place is central to Sester?s
understanding of things.  She sees in the current state of politics and
capital, the ascendancy of transparency and the diminishment of the invisible. 
If surveillance devices, x-rays, and the like make everything potentially
transparent, then the possibility of the invisible vanishes?so to speak. 
Sester is consciously Foucauldian in her desire to question public?and
private?spaces and they way they are made to participate in the formation and
enforcement of social values.  As Gleize writes, seemingly paraphrasing
Sester?s own descriptions of her work: ? I want to make space for the /
body and for thought take it away from information / from space it is beyond
what is visible because it / is part of the freedom of the invisible and of the
/autonomous exercise of thought.?

	Given their shared investment in art-as-critique, it makes absolute sense that
these two artists would work together.  Interestingly, the English translation
is printed not on facing pages but inter alia.   This makes the double-voicing
itself visible simultaneously with the two languages placed one on top of the
other.  It also might contribute in the notion of a ?thick page? with its
multiple layers made immediately evident.

	There was some discussion that actually the book?and especially Gleize?s
text?seemed curiously quaint.  Given the kineticism of Sester?s media work
or the fact that some of the images represented?flatly?her installation
work, one thought that the book as a limited technology came to the fore.  In
his call for the value of clearing space and the need always to assert a
beginning, the project seems ideally suited for three dimensions but on the
page seems always to be informed by conventional reading practices (left to
right, top to bottom) and the reality that the words will always seem printed
on top of the images.  The images themselves always point to their inadequacy
at representing the material real of Sester?s work , however, in way that the
language seemingly can?t do.  Despite the fact that the title page appears
halfway into the book, which then is described as ?permanent lecture series,
praise of stammering, and verbal installation exercises,? the text still is
laid out more or less conventionally.

Yet, there might be other ways that Gleize?s poem moves against (he might say
?riots?) conventions.  In the book this ?lecture? might be permanent,
it isn?t verbal as much as lexical and one begins to note a resistance to
speech.  The stammering, though, might be the mixing of the literal language of
Gleize?s text and the visual language of Sester?s images in a way that is
disjunctive but not exclusively so.  There is an inherent destabilization of
where and how to orient one?s self  or one?s eye, moving back and forth (or
in and out) depending which surface has precedence in that moment?a primacy
that might change with the next page.  In that way, the page has that
doubleness of Wittgenstein?s image of the duck/rabbit.* It is with the
invocation of stammering that Gleize?s language begins to break up and repeat
itself??as the lecture begins I pronounce the /name of several cities / this
is the city of**/ pronouncing the name of a city / the/ a/ feminine name the
city a city pronouncing the name /of a city?? and so forth.  We might read
this as Gleize?s attempt to engage Gilles Deleuze essay ?He Stuttered,? 
in which the latter considers when a writer becomes ?a stutterer in
language?  and when he/she makes the ?language as such a stutter? the
author  creates ?an affective and intensive language, and no longer an
affectation of the one who speaks.  Making language stutter, according to
Deleuze, distances it from speech and "if the system [of language] appears in
perpetual disequilibrium and biurfication, if each of its terms in turn passes
through a zone of continuous variation [as it does in the Gleize/Sester
collaborative text], then the language itself will begin to vibrate and
stutter, but without being confused with speech, which never assumes more than
one variable position among others, or moves in more than one direction?
(Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical,  p. 108).  It is clear how Deleuze?s
comment works sympathetically with Gleize?s discussion of disorientation.
Indeed, doubtlessly Gleize had this essay in mind. Still, there was some belief
that the disorientation would necessarily be more manifested in actual
installation work. In any event, Gleize?s text in conjunction with Sester?s
visual images raises the compelling question of the implications of estrangement
and disorientation that poetry makes possible.  This focus ?useful to two
different poetics--could provide a fruitful dissensus between Romantic and
Modernist claims for poetry.

We also discussed the ways that Gleize?s work does indeed employ figuration
and at times the poem does become lyrical. He for instance he tells us ?that
the tongue is like a theater.?  This is important in that it makes evident
some contradictions in his thinking, which wouldn?t be an indictment but
would also make evident that one does not escape ideology, one becomes aware of
its mechanisms, seeing them as constructs rather than natural.   In that the
quaintness of the technology of the book is made visible and so what might be
intended is this distancing effect.  Some members of the group suggested that
although Gleize?s work seems too steeped in poststructuralist theory circa
1985, this might not be so obvious in France, where Derrida never became so
omnipresent a force as he became in the United States.  Thus, perhaps here for
some the work is overdetermined and oversaturated in its self-consciously
theoretical stances, but in France it still carries cache?or at least remains
edgy and persuasive.

Clearly this was a text and a poetics (if not necessarily a poem) that
challenges and provokes.  Thus we are fortunate that Jean-Marie Gleize will be
meeting with the group for a special session on Monday, April 10th, from 10
AM?Noon in Rm. 208 of the Whitney Humanities Center.  Please join us for what
will no doubt be a fascinating conversation on space, poetics, and contemporary
French poetry.

?The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics meets every other Friday
at 3.00 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University to
discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within international
alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric poetry. All are welcome to
attend.?

Exit, stage left,

Richard Deming, Recorder

 P.S. Minutes with footnotes?  Incroyable!  Wittgenstein drew a figure that if
looked at one way looked like a duck, looked at a different way, it looked like
a rabbit.  Nothing changes in the physical world looking at the figure and so
this suggests what shifts (often back and forth) is perception.  A person who
could only ever see one or the other perspective has ?aspect blindness.? 
The implications this understanding of perspective and its role in
perception?and vice versa--have in regards to notions of truth and reality
are perhaps evident then.



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