Dissensual Operations: Bruce Andrews and the Problem of Political Subjectivity in Post-Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics and Praxis

Abstract

The following dissertation is the first full-length study of contemporary post-avant-garde poet and critical theorist Bruce Andrews and brings to bear a decidedly post-Marxist framework on one of the most rigorously politicized and prolific bodies of North American avant-garde poetry and performance to have emerged from (and since) the Language Poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. Highlighting the singularity of Andrews’s aesthetico-political stance and poetic practice (vis-à-vis other Language Poets), the dissertation offers a theoretically-inclined and broadly Rancièrean reading of key texts and performances from the 1970s to the present to demonstrate what ties Andrews’s post-vanguardism to emancipatory politics. Engaging the decidedly post-Althusserian thought of Rancière, it argues that Andrews’s radical rethinking and appropriation of Brechtian, Adornian, Debordian, Barthesian, and Althusserian paradigms is well suited to contest a post-political social formation that presents itself as both non-ideological and non-antagonistic. The dissertation amply demonstrates how Andrews seeks to critique and render perceptible the totality of late capitalist social relations and the disavowed historical contingency of today’s neoliberal consensus by soliciting a ‘dissensual’ mode of reading/listening to the social that would capacitate the subject of that experience in such a way as to facilitate a process of political subjectivization. Continuing the radical tradition of politicized avant-gardism, while significantly departing from both the meta-political (Hegelian-Marxist) paradigm of the historical avant-garde, as defined by Peter Bürger, and what Jacques Rancière has shown to be ‘entropies’ of certain postwar conceptualizations of the avant-garde, Andrews’s aesthetic politics and cultural praxis instead centers on a radicalized (post-Althusserian) notion of critical reader-response and discourse theory turned poetic practice. Ironically, while Language Poetry’s continued institutionalization and canonization in the 1990s and 2000s has secured a non-marginal place for Andrews’s work and his role as co-editor of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the specificity of both his aesthetico-political stance and poetic practice have often been sidelined or ignored, which the dissertation seeks to correct. It thus combines and, at times, oscillates between critical-theoretical reflection, or conceptual labor, and symptomatic readings of key Andrews texts and performances, including such works as Edge (1973), Give Em Enough Rope (1987), I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992), Divestiture—A (1994), Ex Why Zee (1995), Blood, Full Tank (2007) and You Can’t Have Everything … Where Would You Put It! (2011). In light of the formalist cliché of and critical focus on ‘difficulty,’ the dissertation demonstrates Andrews’s montage-based work to be, in fact, dissonant rather than difficult, and to be well suited to contest a post-political social formation that presents itself as both non-ideological and non-antagonistic, where ‘consensus’ has come to mean the ideological eclipse of an identity constituted through polemicizing over the common.