'Poetic Kitsch Becomes a Dynamic Tool of Gothic Marxism': Daniel Tiffany on Class in Avant-Garde Poetics
Boston Review is making space to discuss class--in their words: "To confront, reinvigorate, and complicate the conversation about class in contemporary poetics, we are launching a poetry forum with this capacious essay by Daniel Tiffany."
Tiffany's piece, entitled "Cheap Signaling," investigates Marx's original formulation of class, the attempts to define the category today, diction as expression of class identity in poetry (with examples offered therein--from Dana Ward to Jennifer Scappettone), and more. "Although these poets might regard the confection of vernacular and academic vocabularies as essentially harmonic, or complementary in their opposition to dominant culture, these mash-ups of diction should be read as enacting the class conflicts inherent in the institutional affiliations, or affinities, of some of these poets." Right...
...These class conflicts should be viewed as a manifestation of what David E. James, the Marxist historian of experimental film, calls “the most typical avant-garde”: a paradigm in which minority cultures are directly confronted, veiled, or subdued by various dominant structures (especially the university, the principal institution of the poetic elite). At the university in particular (a place with no majors—or even minors—in Proletarian Studies, or Departments thereof), James contends, “The back of a working-class identity must be broken across the abyss of a class migration to a station where feelings of pride and success will always be gnawed at by estrangement and betrayal.” The university, even when it does not economically bar entrance to the working class, suppresses knowledge of its history and its present conditions.
If deliberate exposure and critique of this sort of class polarization is not one of the aims of this fashionable (and acquisitive) poetry—a poetry often sheltered by the university—then one might regard it as developing inscrutably a cult of the poet-intellectual, an apparatus that serves to mask, and even protect, various forms of domination—rather than confronting them, as would appear to be the case.
Tiffany goes on to discuss Fred Moten's work as complicating "the verbal field of class antagonism by submerging it in the verbal performance of race," the essay by Commune Editions editors at Jacket2, “Self-Abolition of the Poet,” and yes, kitsch: "With its reliance on verbal formulae and clichés—akin in ways to epic poetry, but also to the shadowy genre of gothic melodrama—kitsch offers a poetic and dialectical mode of cheap signaling."
The new kitsch operates, to use the latest terms, at the crossroads of the anthropocene, the gurlesque, and the general strike. From this intersection, the poem’s relation to consumerism and the marketplace may be described as homeopathic: the substance of the remedy is an infinitesimal trace of the malady. The homeopathic poetics of kitsch—rooted in the social properties of diction—supports an aesthetic disposition, a mode of critique, at once physically real and undetectable, substantial and negligible, active and trivial.
In addition to the younger poets I mentioned earlier, evidence of the development of a new kitsch can be found in the poems of Patricia Lockwood, Ben Fama, Jenny Zhang, Ana Carrete, Kendall Grady, Nicholas Wong, Amy Key, Monica McClure, and Sam Riviere. The ostensible submission by these young poets to the jingles and formulae of mass culture masks a form of resistance—a new “face” of the avant-garde—that is inscrutable, ambiguous, complicit, indirect.
This eclipsing/recognizing is elucidated earlier in the piece. Read it all at Boston Review.