houen intro powers of possibility

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Introduction

In 2009 the financial services company American Express launched anadvertising campaign around the central slogan Realise the Potential.

Cashing in on this imperative is easy, as the companys website explains:every time you purchase something on your Amex card, you are rewardedwith points that can be redeemed for a range ofextraordinary treats.1

The implication is that owning such a card means possessing the ability toconvert metaphor into real exchangeWhat if last nights dinner couldbecome an iPod?and this power of transmutation is supposedly thepotential to change your life; a power to redeem the costs and tedium ofyour daily commute, for example, by turning them into a reward for

yourself. In short, the world is full of

untapped potential

for redemption;a human resource that lies latent in ourexperiences no less than in thingsaround us. And the campaign is keen for people to realize the creativepossibilities of what it is pushing: the pen that writes the humbleshopping list can also write the next Pulitzer prize-winning novel.2

Well, surely that depends on the literary abilities of the person holdingthe pen? But the point is that the advertisement doesnt want you to thinkyour abilities are fixed or limited, for its underlying suggestion is that evenif the metamorphic potential you realise is trademarked, it is still apotential for change that you, personally, are credited with. To the extentthat it does mark individual agency and creativity with trade, the adver-tisement is grist to the mill of anyone who thinks, like Fredric Jameson,that we are living in an age of postmodernism characterized by predica-ments such as the following: culture is now primarily conceived in termsof consuming commodities; the constant investment in new products andservices means aesthetic innovation and experiment have lost their nov-elty; with cultural change turned into cycles of consumption, we have lost

1 American Express website, http://www.AmericanExpress.com/Potential, accessed4 September 2010.

2 Ibid.


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a practical sense of the future.3 Today the treat, tomorrow the com-mute. That is to say, we have also lost practical and aesthetic senses ofpotential other than those of late capitalism.

Ill return to the relation of postmodernism and aesthetics shortly; first,I want to outline a more particular view of potentiality as combiningindividual capacity, possibility, and power. That view has recently beentheorized by a number of Italian political philosophers, including Mas-simo de Carolis, Paolo Virno, and Giorgio Agamben. In de Caroliss view,personal liberty in modern society is now perceived in terms of freedomas practical power (potentia, or possibility) that entails having at onesdisposal concrete possibilities.4 Consequently, he argues, the only ration-

ale for ones actions is

the accumulation of ever greater potential

.5

Sociallife becomes a competition between those who have power and those whodo not; or, in other words, between those who can and those who cannotmembership of the former clan being what the American Express adver-tisement implicitly extends. A main attraction of the practical powerdescribed by de Carolis is the corollary that one can buy it freely, regardlessof the faculties one might have inherited genetically. Against this idea of afree market of potential, though, Paolo Virno draws on Karl Marxs notionof labour-power to point out that peoples abilities are selected andvalued as the potential to produce: The living body [of an employee]becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because itis the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate ofthe most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking,for remembering, for acting, etc.).6 The faculties Virno lists there areclearly generic, but they are also shaped into specific skills and potentialsthat are subject to exigencies of supply and demand. The result is thatalthough such labour-power as potential is non-present, non-real and

quite distinct from its correspondent acts, it is nevertheless turned into acommodity.

Going on strike is one way an employee can try to wrest some controlover her or his labour-power. The efficacy of a strike lies not just inworkers stopping production but in demonstrating that they retain the

3 See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(London: Verso, 1991), 36.

4 Massimo de Carolis, Toward a Phenomenology of Opportunism, trans. MichaelTurits, in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 38.

5 Ibid. 39.6 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito,

and Andrea Casson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 83. See also Karl Marx, Capital:A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1: The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. BenFowkes (1867, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990), Chs 6 and 7.

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potential to work again if their conditions of employment are improved.As Aristotle argued, if an individual capacity is a potential (dunamis) thathas a latent existence even when its not being exercised, then the potential

to do or be something is also the capacitynotto do or be it.7

For Agamben,an awareness of that is what Herman Melvilles character Bartleby theScrivener forces on his employers when he starts responding to theirrepeated requests with the statement I would prefer not to.8 Imprisonedfor not executing directives, Bartleby effectively executes himself in pre-ferring not even to act on the urges of his bodily appetites: refusing food inprison he ends up dying of starvation. Despite that concluding sting toMelvilles tale, Agamben upholds Bartleby as exemplifying the kind ofinoperativeness

(inoperosit) whereby the capacitynot to act guaranteesindividuals a degree of free will and autonomy: processes of living are

never simplyfactsbut always and above all possibilitiesof life, always andabove all power (potenza).9 In stating this, Agamben draws attention tothe fact that the Italian word potere is both a noun for power and theinfinitive verb ofbeing able. The same kind of intimacy is evident in theGreekdunamis; that it can denote both power and potentiality is whyits also dynamic.10 The French words puissance and pouvoir similarlyregister a dynamic intimacy of power and capacityan intimacy thatscrucial for an understanding of how Michel Foucault develops his theoryof power in terms of both politics and individuals. If, as Agamben argues,individuals always retain some power over how and whether they exercisetheir potential, in Foucaults view that is why political power (pouvoir) isfounded on bringing the capacities of people under its sovereign rule. Ashe states in a 1976 lecture he gave at the Collge de France, powerssovereignty

assumes from the outset a multiplicity of powers [in its subjects] that are notpowers in the political sense of the term; they are capacities, possibilities, and itcan constitute them as powers in the political sense of the term only if it has in the

7 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I-IX, trans. Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1980), 461 (IX, 1056 b 10).

8 See Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby, or On Contingency, in Potentialities: CollectedEssays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1999), 24561; also Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), in BillyBudd, Sailor, and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009), 341.

9 Giorgio Agamben, Form-of-Life, trans. Cesare Cesarino, in Hardt and Virno (eds),Radical Thought in Italy, 1501, Agambens emphases. As Leland De la Durantayepoints out in Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 2009), 67, Agambens notion of inoperativeness is inspired by the Refuse to

Work! slogans of radical Italian workers groups in the sixties and seventies.10 See Paul Weiss, The Dunamis, Review of Metaphysics40:4 (June 1987), 65774.

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meantime established a fundamental and foundational unity between possibilitiesand powers, namely the unity of power.11

Strictly speaking, the management of that foundational unity is notpurely political; as Foucault argues, from the eighteenth century onwardsnation states have had to rely increasingly on administrative and economicnetworks to regulate individuals capacities to procreate, work, and tradefor the common good. Managing peoples multiplicity of powers hasthus required a biopolitics that draws politics and economics into amarriage of convenience. And in the lecture course he delivered between1978 and 1979 at the Collge de France, Foucault discusses US neo-liberalism since World War II as the modern incarnation of biopolitics par

excellence. (Many of the points he makes about it have clearly beeninfluential for de Carolis, Virno, and Agamben when thinking aboutlabour and practical power.) In Foucaults view, neo-liberalism effectivelypromulgates the evolution of homo conomicus by casting personalcapability as capital ability such that a person becomes an entrepreneurof himself.12

The extent to which individual capacities and potentials have beenpolitically and economically managed in America since the sixties is a

particular concern of this book. My main aim, though, is to approach thatissue by examining how a range of US writers addressed it throughexperiments in literature and performance. Given the slipperiness ofpotentiality as a concept its perhaps not surprising that theres beenvery little attention given to how it has been an issue for different USwriters and political movements over recent decades. As Martin Heideggerwrote, because the entire history of Western humanity has been morecomfortable thinking purely and simply in terms of actualities [ . . . ] weare still unprepared [ . . . ] when it comes to thinkingpossibility, a kind ofthinking that is always creative.13As Ive shown above, a range of thinkersin recent years have made advances in thinking possibility in terms of apotentiality that draws power and individual capacity together. While Imindebted to their work, Ive been more interested in considering howvarious literary writers have themselves thought creatively about suchmatters. Accordingly, instead of adhering to one theory of either potenti-ality or power, Ive sought to present in this book a genealogy of how

11 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 197576,trans. David Macey (London: Lane, 2003), 44.

12 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 197879,trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 226.

13 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. DavidFarrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), 130, Heideggers emphasis.



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concepts of both have been explicitly related and debated in America overrecent decades. Rather than expand further here on theories of power likeFoucaults, then (Ill return to him in Chapter 4 when considering how

the novelist Kathy Acker engages with him), itll serve the rationale andtrajectory of the books chapters better if I outline some of the ways inwhich relations of power and potentiality grew from the mid-1950sonwards as a pointedly US concern.

Responding to recent advances in technology, industry, and scienceparticularly confirmation of the role played by DNA in genetic hereditythe American social psychologist Gardner Murphy, for example, stated inhis bookHuman Potentialities(1958) that Human nature remains largely

undiscovered.14

On one hand, he argued,science

and the

mass demo-cratic movement presage new possibilities for human evolution; on the

other hand, those possibilities are hampered by Cold Warpower systemsthat increasingly regulate peoples lives while threatening total annihila-tion. Having emigrated from Germany to America in 1940, the socialtheorist Herbert Marcuse voiced similar concerns in Eros and Civilization(1955), arguing that the Cold Wars invidious effects were exacerbated bythe automatization of necessity and waste, of labor and entertainment,[that] precludes the realization of individual potentialities.15 One meansof liberating those potentials, he suggested, lies with art, for while indus-trial civilization constantly requires people to subordinate dreams anddesires to a reality principle rooted in work and consumption, art canprovide ways of realizing alternative possibilities. It can also liberate thesenses, he wrote, which, far from destroying civilization, would give it afirmer basis and [ . . . ] greatly enhance its potentialities.16

Marcuses writings were influential for numerous members of the NewLeft counter-culture that gathered momentum in America in the sixties.

Inspired in part by a Hippie movement eager to explore the liberatingbenefits of the contraceptive pill, LSD, and rock n roll, the counter-cultures vision of the personal as political was also one of realizingindividual potential. The New Left organization Students for a Demo-cratic Society (SDS), for example, announced in its Port Huron State-ment (1962) that it regarded individuals as infinitely precious andpossessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.17 AsIll show in Chapter 1, for counter-cultural exponents like the poet Allen

14 Gardner Murphy, Human Potentialities(New York: Basic Books, 1958), 14.15 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere Books, 1970), 92.16 Ibid. 149.17 Quoted in Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the

Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (1968, repr.; Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press, 1995), 58.

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Ginsberg, the need for nurturing those capacities was made particularlypressing by the Vietnam Wars industrial consumption of lives. Anothermanifestation of Americas militaryindustrial complex was its space

programmes, which prompted extensive discussion of human potentialin terms of evolutionary options. For Lewis Mumford the advent of theastronaut was just another small step towards turning man into anautomaton controlled by a governing megamachine that wants humanpotentialities [ . . . ] suppressed or completely eliminated.18 In contrast,Buckminster Fuller was sanguine about the prospect of turning the planetinto aSpaceship Earth on which our higher potentials could be attainedby modifying social environments through networked technology.19 The

anthropologist Roger Wescott was similarly positive, if more eccentricallyso, in his study of human potentials. Musing on the possibilities of evolu-tion in terms of future extraterrestrial life he wrote that his maximallyhuman being would be a sort of furless and tailless but hooved and wingedmonkey with arthropod appendages.20 The absurdity of that statementdiminishes if one considers, as I do in Chapter 3, the wider debates aroundspace colonies and evolution, much of which clearly informed the novelist

William S. Burroughss space-age mythology and his views on humanpotentialities.

Whether such potentials were indeed available to all humanity wasntwithout equivocation; they certainly didnt seem universal to revolutionaryBlack Power groups in the sixties. Disenchanted with the extent to whichhard-won legislative changes to voting rights and segregation actuallychanged the daily injustices faced by many African Americans, thesegroups repeatedly accused white America of trammelling their chancesin life. Opposing what they perceived to be white power with Black Power,the groups frequently invoked theirrevolutionary potential and called on

the revolutionary possibilities of black art and literature to bolster acultural realization that African Americans could comprise a separatenation within the nation.21 How this involved pairing cultural practicewith political projects is what I examine in Chapter 2 in relation to AmiriBarakas plays and poetry. What I want to emphasize here is the diversity ofdebate in sixties America around the terms Im discussing. The references

18 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970, repr.;London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 303.

19 R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity(1969, repr.;London: Penguin, 1970), 395.

20 Roger W. Wescott, The Divine Animal: An Exploration of Human Potentiality(NewYork: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), 319.

21 See, for example, Harold Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution?(New York: William Morris,1968).



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to potentiality that Ive cited are not lone references; whether it was aquestion of Black Power, Flower Power, or Cold War power systems,what various intellectuals and writers emphasized is that these involved

contests over individuals potentials that pertain to a host of specific issues,including race, labour, creativity, gender, and sexuality.

If, then, one is to consider how power and possibility have variouslybeen debated and conjoined in recent decades in America, one mustconsider the sixties as a watershed in the matter. The degree to whichthat decades contestations have remained a live, influential legacy isanother issue, and one that I take up at various points in this book. Asvarious social commentators have pointed out, the groundswells of sixties

liberations were met in the seventies with a growth of neo-conservatismthat continued to consolidate itself over the next two decades.22 The kindof ideology that Foucault identified as evolvinghomoconomicuswas alsobeing advanced in America from the early seventies with initiatives like thecorporate Quality of Working Life (QWL) ethos, which, as Nikolas Rosepoints out, encouraged employees to see work not just as economicallysatisfying but even as the creative fulfilment ofindividual potential.23 Ifpolicies like QWL served to absorb peoples lives and labour power morefully, such management was subsequently reinforced biopolitically duringRonald Reagans presidency with legislation on issues such as abortion,drugs, and HIV/AIDS. In Chapter 4 I argue that those biopoliticalmeasures, coupled with enhanced powers of policing and incarceration,were cast by various public figures, including Kathy Acker, as involving anew crisis in relations between power and potentialityboth social andindividual. Growing interest in theories of power like Foucaults amongUS intellectuals in the eighties also enabled new insights into how theregulation of peoples capacities extended right up to the structural dy-

namics of capitalism and the Cold War. The extent to which thosedynamics had, by that decade, buried the legacy of the sixties under apedestal of postmodernism is an issue that I explore in Chapter 5 whendiscussing how the Language poets addressed it with regards to literarypowers of possibility.

Whether literary powers can indeed be politically affectiveor canat least combat the effects of political power on oneselfis a centralpreoccupation for each of my chapters. Ive already mentioned that the

22 See, for example, Stephen Paul Miller, The Seventies Now: Culture as Surveillance(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), Ch. 1, and John Ehrman, The Eighties;America in the Age of Reagan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), Ch. 5.

23 Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self(London: Routledge,1989), 118.

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burgeoning interest in human potential from the mid-1950s saw theoristslike Marcuse argue that aesthetic practice is essential for fostering alterna-tive civilizing possibilities. He wasnt alone in arguing along those lines; in

The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1957) the literary theorist GyrgyLukcs deliberates about potentiality when outlining bases for anew styleof literature that could bridge Cold War divisions. A crucial benefit of thenovel approach he discusses would be a fuller understanding of thepossibilities of human development, and of the laws underlying it.24

And in Lukcss view, the first step towards that understanding necessi-tates making a distinction between abstract and concrete potentials.The former he associates with the subjectivism of Western modernism,

which, he claims, unrealistically apportionedinfinite

possibilities toindividual character byfiguring it as something that isnt rooted in social

habitat. In contrast, concrete or real potentiality is what arises from adialectical exchange between character and social environment.25

Lukcs doesnt relate his theory of potentiality to those of other think-ers, but the distinction he makes in formulating it is not withoutprecedent. Aristotle differentiates between potentials that are innateand those that are acquired by practice.26 More pertinent to Lukcssdistinction between the abstract and concrete is the contrast Avicennamakes in the eleventh century (CE) when outlining a tripartite hierarchy ofpotential that ranges from ones general capacity to learn a skill, to thepartial acquisition of a skill through training, to the full potential of a skillthats been mastered.27 The ability to train new capacities is also affirmedby the American theorists of human potential when claiming it can evolveand therefore isnt bound by the entelechy Aristotle outlined (in whichpotentiality is fundamentally a capacity to attain ones generic form, whichis essentially fixed).28 Similarly, other theorists like Gilles Deleuze and

Flix Guattari advocate afluid notion of individual power and potential bydrawing on Spinozas assertion that a persons singularity is primarily acapacity to affect and be affectedthat capacity changing according to the

24 Gyrgy Lukcs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and NeckeMander (London: Merlin Press, 1969), 98.

25 Ibid. 224.26 Aristotle, Metaphysics I-IX, 443 (IX, 1047 b 31).27 See Arthur Hyman, Aristotle, Algazali, and Avicenna on Necessity, Potentiality, and

Possibility, in Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville (eds), Florilegium Columbianum:Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller (New York: Italica, 1987), 7382.

28 See, for example: Gardner, Human Potentialities, Ch. 17; Wescott, The DivineAnimal, Ch. 12; and Israel Scheffler, Of Human Potential: An Essay in the Philosophy of Education (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), Ch. 2. Regarding Aristotlesentelechy, see Charlotte Witt, Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in AristotlesMeta-physics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 413.



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environment and social relations in which the person is immured.29 Inlight of these visions offlexible potential, whether one can distinguishrigidly between abstract (or general) capacity and concrete capacity is

equivocal, and certainly an implicit issue of contention for the writersI discuss. If a persons potentials are not simply innate, are they reducibleto the concrete manifestations of capacity that are in evidence through thatpersons interactions with an environment? Might the person not retainother unrealized capacities for thinking, feeling, and actingcapacitiesthat can be extended and reoriented through being exposed to alternativeworlds of possibility, for example? These arent questions that Lukcsconsiders when he valorizes concrete potential over the abstractthe

concrete species having been, in his opinion, more the concern of socialistrealism, to which his literary sensibilities incline. Nevertheless, his call forsome new stylistic syncretism is in part an awareness that Stalins advocacyof socialist art as an engineering of souls was more dictatorial thandialectical.

In the chapters that follow I show how distinctions between abstractand real potentials of character are explored by the writers I discuss interms of degrees to which new literary powers of possibility can befashioned and turned into experience. This means realizing that there isa fundamental unity between literature and potentiality. Not all literatureis characterized as fiction by genre, but there is an aspect offictionality thatis inherent to all literary genres as well as theatrical performance. Whetherwe are faced by a narrator in a novel, a character in a play, or a speaker in apoem, we realize that each pronounces its literary suspension from boththe author and real world. With that suspension hangs the fictionality thatgives the play or literary work licence to stand as an alternative worldof possibility. However, when literary critics have considered the status of

literary potential by making recourse to the possible worlds theories ofSaul Kripke and others, theyve tended to hobble that potential on twocounts. First, while the writers I examine explicitlyfigure plays andpoemsandnovels in terms of possible worlds, the critics who relate such worlds toliterature tend to focus solely on prose fiction. Second, the conclusion ofthese critics is that fictional worlds of possibility are essentially abstract. InLubomir Doleels view, for example, fictional worlds are nonactualizedpossible states of affairs,30 and that ontological status is sealed by Ruth

29 See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-phrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 2567;also Deleuzes Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: CityLights, 1988), 97104.

30 Lubomir Doleel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1998), 16.

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Ronen with a further segregation: it is obvious that possible worlds areindeed non-actualized but actualizable [...] whereas fictional worldsare non-actualized in the world but also non-actualizable, belonging to a

different sphere of possibility and impossibility altogether.31

Viewingfictive worlds from a twin perspective of ontology and epistemology,Ronen is clearly basing her argument on the conviction that the kind offantasy world conjured by Lewis Carroll in his Alice adventures cannot beactualized as a factual state of affairs. Even if you suspend disbelief inwatchingfilm director Tim Burtons 3D cinematic reprise of the Alicebooks, the sad fact is that the dimensions that appear to be dancing allaround you are as phantasmal as the Cheshire cats smile . . .

But what about the aesthetic aspect of literatures possible worlds, anaspect which, as the Greek etymon aesthesis registers, touches on sensi-

bility, feeling, and experience? Yes, it may be that a novels narrator or apoems speaker or a plays character is suspended from the world, but thatdoesnt prevent the text from eliciting thoughts, desires, and feelings thatdo take place in the real bodies and minds of readers and audiences. Justbecause a literary work shapes worlds of possibility doesnt mean its incapableof real affective potency. Doreen Maitre acknowledges something of this inher work on literary worlds, thereby presenting a refreshing alternative tothe blinkered vision of most other critics who have addressed the topic.Limiting her discussion to fictional worlds of possibility, Maitre arguesthat they afford an opportunity for imaginative identification wherebyreaders capacities for sympathy are roused to enable them to become(imaginatively) another.32 Fiction thus allows one to live through alter-native states of consciousness and thereby extend the range of onesexperience.33What about other literary genres or theatrical performance,though? And if performance and various genres can extend ones experi-

ence, can they also have enduring effects on ones capacities for thinkingand feeling? Maitre doesnt consider individuals capacities in terms ofpotentiality, nor does she relate literary worlds to political power, but ifthose worlds can turn potentials into lived experience then can they be aneffective utopic forceperhaps not by way of changing political structuresbut at least by altering the way individuals feel, think, and interact withtheir social environment? Such questions subtend each chapter of thisbook. And in terms of the US context that Im examining, they also bear

31 Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994), 51, Ronens emphases.

32 Doreen Maitre, Literature and Possible Worlds(London: Middlesex Polytechnic Press,1983), 16.

33 Ibid. 54.



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on debates about literary and cultural postmodernism, particularly regard-ing whether the avant-garde should also be accorded the status of phan-tasmal Cheshire cat.

I cite avant-gardism as an important practice at stake here because thehistorical avant-garde has traditionally been cast as attempting to turnnew aesthetic possibilities into powers of social action. Basing his theoryof the avant-garde mostly on the Italian Futurists, Renato Poggioli, forexample, argues that modernist avant-garde movements had three maintendencies: turning art into praxis (agonism); opposing social conventionsand mores (antagonism); and constantly overturning the movements ownbeliefs (nihilism).34 Those who argue that since the sixties all three of

those characteristics have become moribund do so mostly on the basis ofbelieving that postmodernism has made avant-gardism neither culturallynor stylistically viable. Matei Calinescu and Andreas Huyssen, for ex-ample, both assert that the demise of avant-garde practice, particularly in

America, has resulted from the predominance of consumerism and popu-lar culture.35 For Huyssen, the development in the fifties of Pop Art boretestament to how avant-gardism was already being incorporated by con-sumer culture. That accords with Jamesons claim that from the earlysixties aesthetic production in generalincluding the experiments ofwriters like Thomas Pynchon and John Cagehad become uncriticallyspongiform in absorbing elements of popular culture.36Along with Cali-nescu, Huyssen, and Jameson, Stuart Hobbs and Charles Russell similarlyagree that the sixties marks the closing chapter of avant-gardism in

America.37 For Calinescu, its novelty by this period had simply lostany trace of heroic appeal.38 Once stylistic innovation is symptomatic ofmass turnover in novel commodities, genuine stylistic innovation is nolonger possible. And if literary writing has increasingly recycled and

blended copies of cultural copies, thats because it reflects how our dailylives are already saturated with a stream of simulacra. From those argu-ments, Jameson draws several corollaries: real individual characters have

34 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 237, 6674.

35 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1987), 276312, and Andreas Huyssen,After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, and Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1986), Ch. 9.

36 Jameson, Postmodernism, 13.37 See Stuart D. Hobbs, The End of the American Avant-Garde (New York: New York

University Press, 1997), and Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: TheLiterary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1985), Ch. 8.

38 Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 148.

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become no less apastiche than the literature they produce; and becauseeveryday experience is largely of simulacra, the postmodern conditionengenders an endemic waning of affect as another of its symptoms.39

In other words, the condition anaesthetizes individuals to the very loss ofautonomy with which it infects them.

Those assertions dont make for positive answers to the questionsI posed before them. In contradicting the view that literary works canpose genuinely alternative worlds of possibilitywhether at the level ofstyle or contentthe arguments also deny the ability for such works toextend the range of a persons capacities for thinking and feeling. Theaffective force of literature is diminished along with a notion of potential-

ity

both social and individual. So when Jameson argues that weve lost apractical sense of the future, that supports his view that the collective

ideals of an artistic or political avant-garde expired along with the notion(or experience) of the so-called centred subject.40 Losing individual andaesthetic autonomy to postmodern culture is also why, in his opinion,literature can no longer be an affective utopic force. Hobbs comes to thesame conclusion, and cites the growth of creative-writing courses in

American universities since the sixties as evidence of how artistic van-guards have been assimilated not just by consumerism but by culturalinstitutions.41 In Chapter 5 I take issue with this assumption that a poet,for example, teaching at a university is ineluctably compromised aesthet-ically and politically by that institution; what of the fact, for example, thatthe salary the university provides can enable a writer not to depend on themainstream literary market for a living? As Ill demonstrate, these issueshave also been carefully considered by Charles Bernstein and fellow Lan-guage poets, most of whom have some university affiliation. For Bernstein,rather than simply countermanding literary possibilities, teaching writing

in a university can itself become a form of utopic agonism, and thatconviction complements his view of postmodernism: We can act: we arenot trapped in the postmodern condition if we are willing to differentiatebetween works of art that suggest new ways of conceiving our present worldand those that seek rather to debunk any possibilities for meaning. 42

Those who can versus those who cannot; that distinction, whichde Carolis associates with divisions in earning capacity, is brought tobear by Bernstein on the opposed camps of opinion regarding whether

39 Jameson, Postmodernism, 710, 1718.40 Ibid. 15.41 Hobbs, The End of the American Avant-Garde, Ch. 7.42 Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, Avant-Garde or Endgame?, in Radical Artifice: Writing

Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14, Bernsteinsemphasis.



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postmodernism holds individuals lives and potentials in a straitjacket. Buttheir respective notions of capacity are not commensurate; while deCarolis suggests that those who can are seen as those able to purchase

possibilities as consumable commodities, the ability for aesthetic actionBernstein develops is more about using literary possibilities to build acapacity in oneself forcombatingparticular patterns of thinking and feelingthat consumer culture encourages. The literary critics and theorists who,like Bernstein, contest the existence of hegemonic postmodernism arenumerous, and include Jean-Franois Lyotard, Marjorie Perloff, HenrySayre, and Philip Nel. In defending literary vanguardism they also makerecourse to notions of potentiality. Nel, for example, criticizes Jameson

and others for eliding theoppositional potential of particular postmod-ernisms, which is why in Nels eyes the adversarial potential of the

avant-garde remains feasible.43 Similarly, Sayre argues that since theseventies a distinct avant-garde in art and literature has emerged in

America, one that places an emphasis on performance and the kind ofcompositional indeterminacy that Perloff associates with John Cageswork. Citing the performance-oriented poetry of David Antin and JacksonMac Low (among other examples), Sayre suggests that an importantfeature of such work is that it becomes a situation, full of suggestivepotentialities, rather than a self-contained whole.44 This belief in thecontinuing possibility of avant-gardism also leads Sayre and like-mindedcritics to contest the great divide that Huyssen identifies as separating theera of modernism from that of postmodernism. For Perloff the division ismore apparent than real,45 while for Lyotard the modern, postmodern,and avant-garde are equally implicated in writers rejections of taste,form, and consensus. The postmodern avant-garde artist or writerworks without rules, he argues, in order to formulate the rules of what

will have been donenamely, something newly modern.46Lyotards argument implies not only that the modernist injunction to

Make it New continues to be honoured by writers, but also that theycontinue to innovate the kind of practical sense of the future that

Jameson thinks has been lost. This raises the distinction that some other

43 Philip Nel, The Avant-Garde and American Postmodernity: Small Incisive Shocks(Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), xxi.

44 Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7.

45 Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The New Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell,2002), 164.

46 Jean-Franois Lyotard, Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism, trans.Regis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge trans. GeoffreyBennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minneapolis University Press, 1984), 81,Lyotards emphasis.

Introduction 13


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critics have posited regarding US writing since the sixties: that between theinnovative and the experimental. In his book on American fiction ofrecent decades, Richard Walsh, for example, uses innovative rather

than experimental to suggest the broadest of literary orientations thatcan encompass work ranging from John Barths metafictional explorationsto the more mainstream New Realism of Raymond Carver.47 MarcelCornis-Pope takes a similar tack in extending the moniker of innovativefiction from the surfiction of Raymond Federman to the midfiction of anovel like William Gibsons Neuromancer, which in Cornis-Popes viewnarrowed the boundary between experimentation and traditional fiction(we shall see what Kathy Acker makes ofNeuromancerin Chapter 4).48 In

terms of poetry, Jed Rasulafindsinnovative

more useful than

experi-mental for two reasons: first, because some poets who innovate at the level

of form and content would not consider themselves to be experimental;and second, because unlike experimentation, he argues, innovation isntnecessarilyvolitional and can be circumstantial.49 Despite such distinc-tions, what these critics attribute to innovative literature no less than thosewho defend the persistence of avant-gardism is potentiality. Although hedoesnt address Lukcss work on contemporary realism, Cornis-Pope,for example, argues that by questioning mimetic conventions with self-reflexive narration, novelists such as Federman and Ronald Sukenickopened up ignored possibilities offiction to contest official constructionsof Cold War reality.50 If Walsh also concludes that innovative novelistshave given the creative imagination access to the full potential of itsmeans, its largely because such novelists have themselves emphasizedthe importance of that potentialas when Sukenick wrote of the need forrepatriating narrative techniques from the realm of determinism to thatof potential, or when Federman stated the importance of imagining a

history to-come in order to provide a potential point of view, preremem-bering the future rather than remembering the past.51

Ive offered this brief purview of stances on postmodernism, avant-gardism, and experimentation in part to highlight how little consensus

47 Richard Walsh, Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), ixx.

48 Marcel Cornis-Pope, Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold Warand After(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), xiixiii, 19.

49 Jed Rasula, Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 12.

50 Cornis-Pope, Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting, 42.51 Walsh, Novel Arguments, 166; Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away(Los Angeles: Sun and

Moon Press, 1986), 114; Raymond Federman, The Twofold Vibration (Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press, 1982), 12.



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there is about the valencies of those terms, even though theyve beendebated extensively over the past three decades. In my view, the divisionthat supposedly separates modernism and postmodernism is as porous as

that which purportedly divides the historical avant-garde movementsfrom more recent soi-disant vanguards like the Language poets. Thosewho claim that the sting of such groups has been blunted by mass-consumerism need to take into account that even the Italian FuturistsPoggiolis avatars of bellicose avant-gardismwere producing ratherchichi advertisements for Campari by the 1930s and had become thequasi-official aesthetic movement of the Italian Fascists.52 I make thepoint not to suggest, like Peter Brger, that the avant-garde has always

been uniformly overdetermined by institutions and commodification;53

instead, Im suggesting that modernist avant-garde movements as well asmore recent ones have, with varying degrees of success, had to struggle tobe culturally oppositional. Moreover, to consider the historical avant-garde as a solidary practice is also problematic given that there have beenso many disagreements between vanguard groups over how combativethey really werethe Vorticists charges that Italian Futurism embracedmass-modernization too readily is just one case in point.54 Too frequently,the contestations of cultural assimilation advanced by groups such as theVorticists have been ignored by theorists of the avant-garde, and thats alsothe case with responses like Jamesons to contemporary movementssuch as the Language poets, who have proffered their own critiques ofpostmodernism while putting them into poetic practice.55 Such critiqueshave extended to reflecting on vanguardism itself, as when Hejinianclaimed:

The Language [poetry] community has less in common with modernist avant-garde movements than with aesthetic tendencies grounded in marginalized culturalcommunitiesthe cultures, for example, of the so-called (racial) minorities andof gay and lesbian communities.56

As Gnther Berghaus has noted, affiliations with marginal politicalmovements have also largely been ignored by theorists and critics when

52 See Fortunato Depero (ed.), Numero Unico Futurista Campari 1931 (repr.; Paris:ditions Jean-Michel Place, 1979).

53 See Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 2334.

54 I discuss this particular quarrel more in my Terrorism and Modern Literature:From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Ch. 2.

55 See Jameson, Postmodernism, 289.56 Lyn Hejinian, Materials (1990), in The Language of Inquiry(Berkeley, CA: University

of California Press, 2000), 171.

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considering avant-gardism since the sixties.57 Like Hejinian, though, hehesitates in aligning recent movements with modernist antecedents: thenew avant-garde (or post-avant-garde, or whatever it may be called) must

be the result of acritiqueof the old avant-garde.58

So much equivocation about what is postmodern and what is avant-gardeeven from someone like Hejinian whose fellow Language-groupmembers have claimed vanguardist credentials! The lack of consensussurrounding the terms is one reason why Im proposing with this bookto offer an alternative approach by examining the work of experimental

American writers in terms of their concern with powers of potentiality,both aesthetic and political. As Ive stated, theorists of postmodernist and

avant-garde literature make frequent reference to potentiality when dis-cussing how (if at all) literature can still be utopic, affective, or innovative.Its rare, though, for those theorists to relate literary possibilities tophilosophical concepts of potentiality, and even rarer for them to relatethose possibilities to particular cultural debates about the concepts. Inthe chapters that follow I show howfive US writers each engages withsuch debates and specific issues of political power while developing aliterary practice that draws together the following OED definitions ofpotential: (1) possible as opposed to actual; capable of coming intobeing or action; latent; (2) possessing power (potency); (3) a quantity ofenergy or force; (4) the potential or subjunctive mood (grammar). Toreturn to the points I made about possible worlds, the simplest way ofcharacterizing this literary practice is to say that it builds a world ofpossibility that can act as an affective force to combat the effects of socialand political power on individuals capacities for thinking and feeling. Suchan approach, paceLukcs, is not a revamped realism; I propose instead thatit requires a new concept of literary practice to do it justice: potentialism.

One benefit of focusing on how potentialism has been developed in aUS context since the sixties is that it provides a new basis for drawingconnections between an array of writers whove never been discussed inrelation to each other at length in any other literary study: namely, AllenGinsberg, Amiri Baraka, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and LynHejinian. It would be difficult to group these figures in terms of avant-gardism for the fact that Acker was never part of a literary movement, andalthough Burroughs (like Ginsberg) was associated with the Beat move-

ment from its inception, he increasingly pursued his own interests from theearly sixties. When critics have used avant-gardism as the basis for relating

57 Gnther Berghaus, Avant-garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 263.

58 Ibid. 261.



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some of these writers to others its usually been by way of a single genre.59

As I stated earlier, though, the literary interest in forging oppositionalpossible worlds hasnt been limited to novelists, and in the chapters that

follow I show how the writers I examine variously experiment withdifferent genres as well as performance. The generic correspondencesI assemble have also mostly been missed by other critics who have focusedon a single genre while adhering to postmodernism or the avant-garde astheir hermeneutic term of choice. In adducing new similarities betweenthe writers in question, Im certainly not proposing that they form amovement that they didnt realize they were forming. Nor am I suggestingthat the varied potentialist practices they develop are essentially identical.

The following chapter outlines testify to some of the differences at stake inthe writers approaches.In Chapter 1 I discuss Jamesons claims that the realm of freedom and

voluntarist possibility championed by the sixties counter-culture wasillusory, and I consider how the matter was taken up in that decade bycounter-culture exponents like Allen Ginsberg when protesting the USwar effort in Vietnam. Seeking to counteract the spread of coldwarsubjectivity, Ginsberg composed a number of what he called auto-poems in which he experimented with dictating into an audio-taperecorder snippets of lyrical observation and, occasionally, material sampledfrom the radio. In anti-war auto-poems like Wichita Vortex Sutra we arepresented with combinations of the various senses of potentiality thatI cited above from the OED: the poem addresses specific matters ofpolitical power while posing alternative possible worlds that are given anaffective force through various mantramantra which Ginsberg claimedwere intended to educe latent feeling and bodily potential of feeling[ . . . ] in the wholebody.60 I examine how he continues to develop that

potentialist approach in the seventies, and I also consider how it waslinked to counter-cultural demonstrations of the time that used perfor-mance when appealing to America as a democracy.

Faith in Americas democratic vistas wasnt shared by most AfricanAmericans at the time. Ive mentioned that various black intellectuals

59 See, for example: Perloff, Radical Artifice; Susan Vanderborg, Paratextual Commu-nities: American Avant-Garde Poetry since 1950 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: SouthernIllinois University Press, 2001); Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance,Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993); Christopher Beach, Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry between Commu-nity and Institution (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999); Arnold Aronson,American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History(London: Routledge, 2000).

60 Allen Ginsberg, Poets Voice (1966), in Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays, 195295,ed. Bill Morgan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 258, Ginsbergs emphases.

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questioned how universally accessible the individual potentials extolled byNew Left groups actually were. In Chapter 2 I pursue this when exploringhow the black writer and dramatist Amiri Baraka (who changed his name

from LeRoi Jones) became a key figure in the separatist Black ArtsMovement as well as the politics of black Cultural Nationalism. Situatinghis work in relation to claims about African American revolutionarypotential, I examine how Baraka experimented with poetic improvisationand performance rituals to inculcate a sense in black Americans of beingculturally distinct. That aesthetic programme is envisioned by him asfomenting an alternative social imaginary: The imagination is the projec-tion of ourselves past our selves as things. Imagination (image) is all

possibility because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, anyuse (idea) is possible. [...] Possibility is what moves us.61 WhereasGinsberg appeals to the nation indiscriminately to draw out latent anti-war sentiment, Baraka seeks to contest Americas political system and instilnew separatist racial potentials.

If Ginsbergs view of individual potential was broadly humanist,William S. Burroughss was more about escaping humanitypreferablyby leaving the planet. In Chapter 3 I discuss Burroughss growing disen-chantment with the space programmes and I examine how, from thesixties to the eighties, he fashioned an alternative literary space mytholo-gy. Starting with his Nova trilogy, I analyse his experiments with textualcut-ups, which entailed randomly splicing together fragments of differenttexts. Burroughs presented cut-ups as scrambling conventional lines ofcognitive association and thereby opening new possibilities of experience.By the end of the Nova trilogy he also figured these possibilities asaffecting biological potentials. I consider how he cultivates that idea insubsequent novels which feature counter-cultural communities, retro-

active utopia, and human-alien characters who are figured as blueprinthybrids awaiting a Guardian reader to realize their potential throughthe experience of reading.62All of this is depicted by Burroughs as a questfor a new Potential America (P.A.).63 Viewing that quest in patrioticterms is questionable, though, for ultimately he envisages his literarypotentialism as an alternative space programme with which to fostercapacities for astral travelling in readers, thereby enabling them to leaveboth America and their physical bodies behind.

61 LeRoi Jones, The Revolutionary Theatre (1965), in Home: Social Essays (1966,repr.; Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1998), 213.

62 William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands(1987, repr.; London: Picador, 1988), 42.63 William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads (1983, repr.; London: Flamingo,

2001), 140.



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Around the same time that Burroughs was plotting eccentric escape,Kathy Acker, whod been much inspired by him, was decidedly pessimis-tic about the state of America, as is clear from her eighties novels. Some of

her earlier writing was anarchically insouciant, particularly her experi-ments in splicing her own diary material with other authors texts. Bythe late seventies, though, Acker was avowedly adopting a more diagnosticapproach in trying to analyse social power. Believing that potentialitiesare Models and paradigms for actions as well as beingpolitically kin tothe imagination,64 Acker by the eighties presents grim pictures of howsuch potentialities are economically and politically managed. I discuss thiswith particular reference to how she addresses biopolitical policies of the

time on matters like abortion, HIV/AIDS, and incarceration. I thenconsider her subsequent turn: whereas Burroughs sought escape fromthe body, Acker develops what she calls languages of the body thatdraw on taboo and abjection to generate alternative capacities of feelingin order to combat biopolitical management, particularly regarding genderand sexuality. She also employs those languages, I argue, to give affectiveforce to the potentialism she plots in her laterfiction that features a rangeof pirates and cyborgs.

Ackers change in approach is partly about contesting the effects ofpower on oneself rather than attempting, like Baraka, to instigate changesin political institutions. As I demonstrate in Chapter 5, the relative meritsof both kinds of approach have been debated periodically by the Languagepoets since the early eighties. Informed, like Acker, by post-structuralistand postmodern theory, the Language group has written extensively aboutthe legacy of sixties counter-cultural movements, as well as whetherexperimenting with poetic form and content can be a way of engagingpower and potentiality. I show how this is evident in early exchanges

about realism that Hejinian initiated in the group. Its also evident inher ideas about open text, and in Ron Sillimans experiments withthe New Sentence as a particular Language style. The point at whichHejinians poetry takes on an overtly potentialist slant, though, is whenshe formulates her notion of a person as a subject who constructs him/herself performatively within situations that demand an awareness ofpossibility: The recognition of these possibilities constitutes ones firstexercise ofpossibility, and on that depends ones realization that oneself

is possible.65

A poem, for Hejinian, can present such a situation and can

64 Kathy Acker, Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age (1995), in Bodies ofWork: Essays(London: Serpents Tail, 1997), 99.

65 Lyn Hejinian, The Person and Description (1991), in The Language of Inquiry(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 203, Hejinians emphasis.

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therefore train readers to exercise potential in their everyday lives. LikeAcker, though, Hejinian is also aware of political and economic stricturesthat are placed on peoples capacities, and I examine how she and other

Language poets address those strictures not only in poems but in criticalreflections on capitalism, socialism, and USSoviet relations.

In gathering the five writers that I consider, Im not suggesting thattheyre the only ones with potentialist tendencies in America during theperiod under consideration. John Cage, for example, is another figureI could have discussed at length, and I do make reference over the courseof the chapters to various writers with whom the ones I discuss share anaesthetic affinity. My decision to offer a series of individual case-studies

was taken because potentialism involves a complicated set of issues

literary and politicaland I realized that case-studies would best enableme to analyse how the writers I consider have experimented with differenttechniques to address the particular issues of power that individuallyconcern them. My choice of the five writers was made primarily because,more than most other US writers of this period, they offered explicit andprotracted questioning of whether power and individual possibilities havebecome amalgamated into the kind of foundational unity that Foucaultposited. As Ive intimated in my chapter outlines, the various literaryexperiments involved in their questioning are an important feature ofthe potentialism that each writer builds, for the experimentation is seenby each to be synonymous with establishing new possibilities of conjoin-ing form, content, and affective power.

So: potentialism. I realize its not the most euphonic term. (Onecolleague suggested it has too many syllables for ears that have grown upon Englishto which I replied that it has the same number as literature.)But it sounds better than possibilism, which would have the added

disadvantage of not doing justice to the various senses of potential thatIve cited (possibility being just one of them); senses that the writersI consider are certainly intent on correlating as an essential part of theiraesthetic practices. Doing justice to those correlations is one justificationfor coining the neologism, then. Another is that the writers experimentsare also informed by the rich currency of discussion in America abouthuman potentialities that Ive citeddiscussion that has received scantregard from literary scholars, despite the fact that the province of potenti-

ality makes up so much of the ground on which literature treads, anddespite the fact that literary potentials have frequently been invoked bytheorists of postmodernist, innovative, and avant-garde literature, eventhough those theorists rarely pause to consider the conceptual complexityof potentiality. While I do defend potentialism, then, as the most appositeterm to ascribe to the complex literary practices I examine, I stand by its



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ism with several caveats in hand. Ive stated that I dont see the term asdenoting a unified movement that has hitherto not been identified. Imalso not suggesting that all aspects of the entire oeuvre of each writer

I consider should be redesignated potentialist. As Ill show, the term ismore appropriate for some texts and periods of work than others, and italso takes on a different tenor with each of the writers I discuss. The fivecase-studies are intended to present something of the variability of poten-tialism as a practice, and Ill reflect more on its ramifications, and on thebenefits and limits to using the term, in my Conclusion.

Introduction 21

houen intro powers of possibility

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