Andrew Epstein on Everyday Life Practices

For the Los Angeles Review of Books's blog, BLARB, Andy Fitch interviews Andrew Epstein about his new book, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture. Fitch points out "Epstein’s expansive scope stretches from the psychological formulations of William James, to the cinematic essays of Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, to contemporary everyday-life poetic experiments by Brenda Coultas, Claudia Rankine, and Harryette Mullen. Perhaps most importantly, Attention Equals Life offers the galvanizing example of an omnivorous yet meticulous scholarly study that poses direct questions to readers about how best to live out one’s own everyday." Let's pick up at the start of their conversation: 

ANDY FITCH: Would it fit first to contextualize Attention Equals Life in relation to a preceding generation’s critical projects? Here I think of Marjorie Perloff books like Radical Artifice and Wittgenstein’s Ladder, which point to related social phenomena (proliferations of distracting mass-cultural discourse straining possibilities for concerted, constructive, non-consumerist attention), and which provide similar points of philosophical reference (a skepticism regarding transparent linguistic renderings of the world, an incrementalist critique of universalizing moral pronouncements or epiphanic transcendence or systematizing closure), but which focus on models of syntactical defamiliarization somewhat divergent from the forms of everyday-life project that you track. So how have studies like Perloff’s, which seem to take a more distanced stance towards representations of “the everyday,” helped to prompt your own enthusiastic engagement with the everyday, your attempts to retain and yet refine our focus on a fluid artifice/authenticity binary — even just your attempts to articulate a concept as elusive as the everyday (with its multidisciplinary manifestations in any number of materialist, empirical, cultural, phenomenological fields) in the first place?

ANDREW EPSTEIN: From a very early stage, Marjorie Perloff’s work has been very important to me. Since you named her as an example, I would say that her way of reading avant-garde texts (everybody says this, but it’s true), her way of making these texts legible, as things that you can really engage with, and her method of doing close readings of them were hugely formative for me. But more particularly to your question about books like Radical Artifice and Wittgenstein’s Ladder in relation to my own: in Radical Artifice she certainly discusses ways in which mass media or technological change have informed avant-garde poetics, and that’s very important to what I’m talking about, though I think she is not so interested in the category of the everyday. If I think back to that book, and the Wittgenstein book, if she is concerned with the everyday, it’s really in terms of ordinary language. In a couple places in Attention Equals Life I’m very interested in ordinary language, but I’m more focused on everyday experience, action, behavior, and objects — not just language. So as far as thinking about the everyday as a concept, and in terms of work she’s focusing on in those books (mostly Language poetry and other forms of avant-garde poetry), I guess she’s really more of a formalist and more interested in how the poems work in terms of form and language, and less so in terms of content (although I don’t love that binary). I think that one thing I was interested in was how much Language poetry, for example, with Ron Silliman being an important figure in my book, is so insistently focused on the daily and on the ways in which language mediates, shapes, and forms daily life. I didn’t feel like that was a category of analysis in either of those Perloff books, or maybe in the preceding generation of scholarship you mentioned more broadly.

Read more at BLARB.