[Translit] at Yale University
[about #switch the language section]
With this post we are continue new section (with the tag that will allow you to easily find its posts), in which we will publish foreign-language materials devoted to [Translit]. On the one hand, a lot of such materials have started appearing, on the other hand, they haven't been systematized on the blog at all but have just come through here and there as a one-off aberration.
We have never limited ourselves to a Russian-language audience, striving not only to translate Russian ad bring it into correspondence with other languages but also to serve as an apparatus for the transmission and re-coding of messages in foreign languages, in other words, a mechanism for the systematic defamiliarization of our own language in both the linguistic and poetic sense. The time has come to extend the metaphor of defamiliarizing translation ("translit") into the regular practice of publishing in foreign languages.
Here we will put poems and articles by the authors of [Translit] that have been translated and published in foreign languages (which will also allow us to study the infrastructure of foreign-language resources devoted to experimental literature), interviews from newspapers and journals of a wider profile, and also announcements and reports on [Translit] events that take place abroad. If you would like to limit your reading to the materials in this section, you can subscribe to the RSS-feed with the tag "switch the language.
Some representatives of [Translit] will participate in the conference Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics After Socialism at Yale University 17-19 of April
17 of April
6:00-8:00 Screening and Q&A [Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium]
Keti Chukhrov. “Love Machines” (2013)
19 of April
4:00-7:00 Poetry Reading and Closing Reception at ArtSpace [Artspace Gallery]
Pavel Arseniev, Keti Chukhrov, Aleksander Skidan
Abstracts
Pavel Arseniev. “Literature of a State of Emergency: Varlam Shalamov vs. ‘All Progressive Humanity'”
Some epistemological contradictions in Shalamov’s testimonies (collected for the most part in his manifestos and notes on literature, but sometimes peeking out of the stories as well) show that his proses need to be examined not on the thematic and formal levels between which thought usually flits, but rather on the level of the pragmatics of the artistic utterance. Shalamov manages to extend the description of extreme experience leading to writing to the state of emergency of the very experience of writing. In this way literature, going outside the bounds of the law of language’s fictive and rhetorical qualities in cases of serious internal or external threat, turns out to be literature of a state of emergency.
The new writing, pointing out both the inadmissible didacticism and the unforgivable remoteness of old literature, seeks not just to present extreme material or suggest extreme stylistic solutions but to establish a certain emergency method of action, a special pragmatics of writing. As a result of this search, “new prose” gets distanced from both the old order of writing and, more generally, the order of writing per se, thus approaching an existential act: “Descriptions are not enough for our times. The new prose is the event itself, the battle and not its description. That is, a document, the author’s direct participation in life events. Prose experienced as document.” Shalamov seems to extend the emergency from the referential to the pragmatic level of his prose.
This paper will investigate pragmatic metaphors used by Shalamov and this very notorious state of emergency of the described circumstances, which make the “emergency conditions” take on the attributes and features of a purely linguistic catastrophe, a rout of/by language itself.
Keti Chukhrov. “On the Internal Colonization of the Unequal Other”
The paper tries to explore the contradictions of the concept of violence conditioned by its dubious positioning both as oppression and liberation (in works by Sorel, Benjamin, Lucaks, Fanon, Zizek) and articulate the ethics of an act that could function as the counteraction to systemic violence without remaining the act of resentment or mere rage, quite in the vein of the resisting procedure implied in Benjamin’s opaque term “divine violence”. We claim that it is the dimension of the general that conditions the type of violence that Benjamin calls for by this term.
The analysis tries to unravel the concealed elements of suppression not only in the democracy rhetoric of real politics, but even in the discourses and activities of emancipation in art, culture and social work. Despite being exerted on the territory of left leaning political activism such activities often fall into the trap of confining oneself to appropriating the resistant subjectivity of the oppressed while preserving the class gap with the oppressed and hence accomplishing concealed internal colonization of the evicted “Other” - the unconscious act that afterwards could burst out in various forms of violence.
Aleksandr Skidan. “Dramatizing Violence: Scenarios of Revolt in Contemporary Russian Poetry”
The paper will discuss reflections of/on violence in the poetic practice of three contemporary Russian poets - Galina Rymbu, Kirill Medvedev and Elena Kostyleva. In contrast to the “non-violent” post-Soviet cultural consensus of 1990s, marked by the critical reconsideration of the violence and its aftermath brought by the October Revolution, Civil War and Stalinist repressions, this new generation of poets, whose development coincides with the restoration of capitalism in Russia, put this “peaceful” liberal paradigm into question. Galina Rymbu, Kirill Medvedev and Elena Kostyleva provide three different models of reflecting violence in their work, yet all of them are symptomatic in that they recognize and deal with the violence inherent not only in the State and its repressive apparatus, as during Soviet and early post-Soviet liberal discourse, but, first and foremost, in the State ideological apparatus and the social order at large. The latter includes everyday language as a general medium of social communication and sexual relationships structured as power relations, thus making the militant revolutionary vision of social change at once more urgent than ever before and hard to imagine in the present conditions. It is poetical imagery and its encounter with oppressive conditions that still hold a political perspective in the age of political saturation.
Then there would be few papers devoted to the poetics of members of [Translit] editorial board
Mark Lipovetsky. “Roman Osminkin’s Practice: Between Sergey Tretyakov and Dmitrii Prigov”
Roman Osminkin as a poet and commentator of his own (and his peers’) work, actively engages with Western theory and early Soviet Marxist aesthetics. With a special esteem he treats Sergey Tretyakov, the LEF theorist and practitioner, the author of the concept of “the literature of the fact” and the thesis about the necessary involvement of literature into the productive life of society. Osminkin adopts these ideas and attempts to adapt them to contemporary cultural condition, although he never mentions negative effects of the LEF theories, which basically had paved the way for Socialist Realist doctrines. However, in his further interpretations, using theories of Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, Osminkin, on the one hand, limits the contemporary (post-Fordist) production by the production of words and linguistic units. On the other hand, he defines poetry as the language’s “idler”, as its “free agent” feeding on gaps and failures within the discursive texture.
Resultantly, in Osminkin’s theoretical justifications and especially in his poetic and performative practice, the “leftist” discourse functions as a “shocking” clownish outfit, needed for an outlandish trickster’s act that most of all resonates with Dmitry Prigov’s legacy. Osminkin also frequently cites Prigov, yet, his connection with the latter is deeper than the young poet would admit. Osminkin inherits Prigov’s interpretation of culture as the system of language practices, consisting of “grammars” and unconsciously reproduced rhetorical gestures, as well as his conceptualization of poetry as the methodical deconstruction of all “truths” and their rhetorical mechanisms. However, Prigov’s method also included the elimination of the author’s “authenticity” and voice replaced by the performance of the discursive “image”. In Osminkin’s poetry the authorial voice and subjectivity are much more pronounced and distinctive than in Prigov’s. The paper will explore whether the subjectivity constructed in Osminkin’s texts revives traditional Romantic subject, or whether it incorporates performance and deconstruction in a radically new concept of the subject.
Kevin Platt. “Dmitry Golynko and the Weaponization of Post-Lyricism (from the Language of Inquiryto the Language of War)”
Dmitry Golynko, like many other contemporary Russian poets, has continued and deepened a legacy of late twentieth-century experimental and conceptual poetry. As with other contemporary Russian experimental poets, his theoretical and poetic work palpably draws on the writings of the poets of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. In his most recent works we may recognize his intense practice of deployment of the words of others in a form of discourse poetry that utterly dispenses with the lyric voice in favor of a situational description of social, political and existential occurrence. These works recall, for instance, Lyn Hejinian’s post-lyrical poetic practices. As Hejinian wrote, “The ‘personal’ is already a plural condition. […] One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” Yet in dismantling the lyric voice and examining the linguistic constitution of the subject, Golynko’s work adopts rather different tactics than Hejinian’s. Her work in this mode was and is motivated by a desire for a post-lyric phenomenology of reconciliation that allows new forms of community to arise. In contrast, Golynko probes the social and political structures that prevent commonalities from arising-and forces the reader to confront his or her possible complicity in these structures. Golynko’s experiments in post-lyrical discourse poetry shock us by letting the voice of the other in, showing us what already may be inside each contemporary subject in the first place. His generation of revulsion, squeamishness and repulsion is key to the weaponization of post-lyricism.
Schedule http://utopiaafterutopia.com/political-violence-and-militant-aesthetics-after-socialism/political-violence-conference-schedule/
Participants http://utopiaafterutopia.com/political-violence-and-militant-aesthetics-after-socialism/political-violence-conference-participants/
With this post we are continue new section (with the tag that will allow you to easily find its posts), in which we will publish foreign-language materials devoted to [Translit]. On the one hand, a lot of such materials have started appearing, on the other hand, they haven't been systematized on the blog at all but have just come through here and there as a one-off aberration.
We have never limited ourselves to a Russian-language audience, striving not only to translate Russian ad bring it into correspondence with other languages but also to serve as an apparatus for the transmission and re-coding of messages in foreign languages, in other words, a mechanism for the systematic defamiliarization of our own language in both the linguistic and poetic sense. The time has come to extend the metaphor of defamiliarizing translation ("translit") into the regular practice of publishing in foreign languages.
Here we will put poems and articles by the authors of [Translit] that have been translated and published in foreign languages (which will also allow us to study the infrastructure of foreign-language resources devoted to experimental literature), interviews from newspapers and journals of a wider profile, and also announcements and reports on [Translit] events that take place abroad. If you would like to limit your reading to the materials in this section, you can subscribe to the RSS-feed with the tag "switch the language.
Some representatives of [Translit] will participate in the conference Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics After Socialism at Yale University 17-19 of April
17 of April
6:00-8:00 Screening and Q&A [Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium]
Keti Chukhrov. “Love Machines” (2013)
19 of April
4:00-7:00 Poetry Reading and Closing Reception at ArtSpace [Artspace Gallery]
Pavel Arseniev, Keti Chukhrov, Aleksander Skidan
Abstracts
Pavel Arseniev. “Literature of a State of Emergency: Varlam Shalamov vs. ‘All Progressive Humanity'”
Some epistemological contradictions in Shalamov’s testimonies (collected for the most part in his manifestos and notes on literature, but sometimes peeking out of the stories as well) show that his proses need to be examined not on the thematic and formal levels between which thought usually flits, but rather on the level of the pragmatics of the artistic utterance. Shalamov manages to extend the description of extreme experience leading to writing to the state of emergency of the very experience of writing. In this way literature, going outside the bounds of the law of language’s fictive and rhetorical qualities in cases of serious internal or external threat, turns out to be literature of a state of emergency.
The new writing, pointing out both the inadmissible didacticism and the unforgivable remoteness of old literature, seeks not just to present extreme material or suggest extreme stylistic solutions but to establish a certain emergency method of action, a special pragmatics of writing. As a result of this search, “new prose” gets distanced from both the old order of writing and, more generally, the order of writing per se, thus approaching an existential act: “Descriptions are not enough for our times. The new prose is the event itself, the battle and not its description. That is, a document, the author’s direct participation in life events. Prose experienced as document.” Shalamov seems to extend the emergency from the referential to the pragmatic level of his prose.
This paper will investigate pragmatic metaphors used by Shalamov and this very notorious state of emergency of the described circumstances, which make the “emergency conditions” take on the attributes and features of a purely linguistic catastrophe, a rout of/by language itself.
Keti Chukhrov. “On the Internal Colonization of the Unequal Other”
The paper tries to explore the contradictions of the concept of violence conditioned by its dubious positioning both as oppression and liberation (in works by Sorel, Benjamin, Lucaks, Fanon, Zizek) and articulate the ethics of an act that could function as the counteraction to systemic violence without remaining the act of resentment or mere rage, quite in the vein of the resisting procedure implied in Benjamin’s opaque term “divine violence”. We claim that it is the dimension of the general that conditions the type of violence that Benjamin calls for by this term.
The analysis tries to unravel the concealed elements of suppression not only in the democracy rhetoric of real politics, but even in the discourses and activities of emancipation in art, culture and social work. Despite being exerted on the territory of left leaning political activism such activities often fall into the trap of confining oneself to appropriating the resistant subjectivity of the oppressed while preserving the class gap with the oppressed and hence accomplishing concealed internal colonization of the evicted “Other” - the unconscious act that afterwards could burst out in various forms of violence.
Aleksandr Skidan. “Dramatizing Violence: Scenarios of Revolt in Contemporary Russian Poetry”
The paper will discuss reflections of/on violence in the poetic practice of three contemporary Russian poets - Galina Rymbu, Kirill Medvedev and Elena Kostyleva. In contrast to the “non-violent” post-Soviet cultural consensus of 1990s, marked by the critical reconsideration of the violence and its aftermath brought by the October Revolution, Civil War and Stalinist repressions, this new generation of poets, whose development coincides with the restoration of capitalism in Russia, put this “peaceful” liberal paradigm into question. Galina Rymbu, Kirill Medvedev and Elena Kostyleva provide three different models of reflecting violence in their work, yet all of them are symptomatic in that they recognize and deal with the violence inherent not only in the State and its repressive apparatus, as during Soviet and early post-Soviet liberal discourse, but, first and foremost, in the State ideological apparatus and the social order at large. The latter includes everyday language as a general medium of social communication and sexual relationships structured as power relations, thus making the militant revolutionary vision of social change at once more urgent than ever before and hard to imagine in the present conditions. It is poetical imagery and its encounter with oppressive conditions that still hold a political perspective in the age of political saturation.
Then there would be few papers devoted to the poetics of members of [Translit] editorial board
Mark Lipovetsky. “Roman Osminkin’s Practice: Between Sergey Tretyakov and Dmitrii Prigov”
Roman Osminkin as a poet and commentator of his own (and his peers’) work, actively engages with Western theory and early Soviet Marxist aesthetics. With a special esteem he treats Sergey Tretyakov, the LEF theorist and practitioner, the author of the concept of “the literature of the fact” and the thesis about the necessary involvement of literature into the productive life of society. Osminkin adopts these ideas and attempts to adapt them to contemporary cultural condition, although he never mentions negative effects of the LEF theories, which basically had paved the way for Socialist Realist doctrines. However, in his further interpretations, using theories of Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze, Osminkin, on the one hand, limits the contemporary (post-Fordist) production by the production of words and linguistic units. On the other hand, he defines poetry as the language’s “idler”, as its “free agent” feeding on gaps and failures within the discursive texture.
Resultantly, in Osminkin’s theoretical justifications and especially in his poetic and performative practice, the “leftist” discourse functions as a “shocking” clownish outfit, needed for an outlandish trickster’s act that most of all resonates with Dmitry Prigov’s legacy. Osminkin also frequently cites Prigov, yet, his connection with the latter is deeper than the young poet would admit. Osminkin inherits Prigov’s interpretation of culture as the system of language practices, consisting of “grammars” and unconsciously reproduced rhetorical gestures, as well as his conceptualization of poetry as the methodical deconstruction of all “truths” and their rhetorical mechanisms. However, Prigov’s method also included the elimination of the author’s “authenticity” and voice replaced by the performance of the discursive “image”. In Osminkin’s poetry the authorial voice and subjectivity are much more pronounced and distinctive than in Prigov’s. The paper will explore whether the subjectivity constructed in Osminkin’s texts revives traditional Romantic subject, or whether it incorporates performance and deconstruction in a radically new concept of the subject.
Kevin Platt. “Dmitry Golynko and the Weaponization of Post-Lyricism (from the Language of Inquiryto the Language of War)”
Dmitry Golynko, like many other contemporary Russian poets, has continued and deepened a legacy of late twentieth-century experimental and conceptual poetry. As with other contemporary Russian experimental poets, his theoretical and poetic work palpably draws on the writings of the poets of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school. In his most recent works we may recognize his intense practice of deployment of the words of others in a form of discourse poetry that utterly dispenses with the lyric voice in favor of a situational description of social, political and existential occurrence. These works recall, for instance, Lyn Hejinian’s post-lyrical poetic practices. As Hejinian wrote, “The ‘personal’ is already a plural condition. […] One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, incomplete, and subject to dispersal.” Yet in dismantling the lyric voice and examining the linguistic constitution of the subject, Golynko’s work adopts rather different tactics than Hejinian’s. Her work in this mode was and is motivated by a desire for a post-lyric phenomenology of reconciliation that allows new forms of community to arise. In contrast, Golynko probes the social and political structures that prevent commonalities from arising-and forces the reader to confront his or her possible complicity in these structures. Golynko’s experiments in post-lyrical discourse poetry shock us by letting the voice of the other in, showing us what already may be inside each contemporary subject in the first place. His generation of revulsion, squeamishness and repulsion is key to the weaponization of post-lyricism.
Schedule http://utopiaafterutopia.com/political-violence-and-militant-aesthetics-after-socialism/political-violence-conference-schedule/
Participants http://utopiaafterutopia.com/political-violence-and-militant-aesthetics-after-socialism/political-violence-conference-participants/