Parallax Volume 20, Issue 3, Special Issue: Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities, Jul 2014
Our post–Cold War era of globalization and the associated expansion of information and communicat... more Our post–Cold War era of globalization and the associated expansion of information and communication technologies have encouraged the view that literary history on a world scale is best described as a series of waves translated from culture to culture. In the turn-of-the-millennium essay that expresses this view most influentially, Franco Moretti repeats the word ‘wave’ no fewer than twenty-three times, describing it as the key metaphor for the ‘distant reading’ of world literature.1 As Moretti notes, the metaphor of the wave has done powerful conceptual and theoretical work across various branches of the humanities and sciences.2 Moretti cites linguistics and archaeology, but its most obvious uses have arguably been in physics, where ‘wave’ is hardly perceived as a metaphor at all. Yet the idea of seeing light as in some way analogous to the up and down movements of water on the world's oceans is at root metaphorical. The tendency to ignore this metaphoricity has caused more than one conceptual slip-up in the history of science, where the metaphor at one time predicted the medium of ether in space and seemed to disallow the possibility of light being both wave and particle.
The lesson that we might take from this – not to misrecognize our metaphors for reality – is what I see as part of the attraction of the concept of ‘diffraction’ for thinkers like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. And it is in response to arguments such as Moretti's, which draw on the same metaphorical baggage, that the concept might be most useful. Recognizing the limits of their metaphors helped physicists to dismiss the notion of ether and to explain the seemingly bizarre conclusions of the double slit experiment. Likewise, questioning what we mean by a wave in the study of literature and culture can help us think more clearly about language, media and materiality in our age of digitalization and globalization.
This essay begins from the premise that it might be useful to attend to the metaphorical structures through which cultural and literary forms and traditions are imagined as objects and particles or as media and waves. Moretti proposes a ‘law of literary evolution’ whereby the wave of a literary form, such as the novel, is subject to ‘interference’ as it passes into a new language, culture and tradition.3 Moretti's extension of the wave metaphor imagines languages and cultural traditions as definable objects or media that presumably refract or diffract the wave of a cultural form to produce new interference patterns. Moretti's use of the wave metaphor reflects a static notion of place and cultural tradition that has been common in accounts of world literature, be they built on the world-systems model of geopolitical centres and peripheries or on accounts of the circulation of texts beyond their place of origin.4 However, it is not at all clear whether a nation or a linguistic and cultural tradition can be thought of as a consistent medium or static object, especially in the context of our current age of globalization and the Internet.5 Moretti's own proposal – that we think of cultural forms such as the novel as dynamic waves – argues against this static model of cultural location. Approaching all cultural forms as wave-like would mean, if we accept Barad's account, acknowledging that these forms are not given entities but complex ‘phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations’ that are, crucially, ‘intra-acting’. That is, they are ‘relations without preexisting relata’ – relations that exist prior to, not as a result of, notional cultural entities such as the European novel or the Japanese tradition.6 Moretti wants to register the dynamism of one form (his prime example is the novel) by treating others (for example, the Japanese tradition) as relatively static and constant. Drawing on Haraway's account of diffraction, we might instead approach world literature as having ‘many more meanings and contexts to it and once you've noted them you can't just drop them. You have to register the “interference”’.7 Only in this way can we address the full complexity that the wave and interference model implies.
One counter to my proposal would be the one that could also be levelled at many attacks on Moretti's proposal for distant reading: to object to his approach on the grounds of its being insufficiently attuned to the complexities of specific texts is to miss the point since what Moretti aims for is precisely a general account of literary history. However, although in what follows I will draw on the methodologies of close reading, I do so not in order to advocate for close over distant reading, but because of what my reading here might tell us about the conceptual problems with Moretti's model. These problems become particularly acute in any attempt to map literary history after 1989, when a new era of globalization and the rise of digital technologies and the Internet unsettle the assumed notions of cultural objects and media, and the propagation of cultural forms on which Moretti's theory and his use of the wave metaphor rely.
Drawing on Haraway and Barad, this essay proposes diffractive iteration as an alternative to the opposition between the theoretical totality of distant reading and the local particularity of close reading with its nominalist attention to difference – and to the entrapping binary of sameness and difference through which both globalization and new media are often theorized. Instead of imagining an unchanging wave-like form of cultural propagation in already fixed media, or stressing isolated encounters between cultural and technological objects, diffractive iteration demands a consideration of matter, medium, history and culture as dynamic, interactive and intra-active processes.
I develop this model in and through a reading of the long poem Dahai tingzhi zhi chu 大海停止之处 (Where the Sea Stands Still), written in 1993 and first published in 1995, by the poet Yang Lian 杨炼, alongside Yang's subsequent collaboration with Anglo-Canadian programmer-poet John Cayley on the transformation of the poem into the digital HyperCard and performance piece Where the Sea Stands Still (1997).8Where the Sea Stands Still is about the problems and possibilities of imagining places and cultural positions in terms of waves and interferences and is itself an example of a text produced out of a complex set of iterations, locations, histories and media. The poem was written in Sydney, Australia, in the shadow of the events of 4 June 1989, but also of Deng Xiaoping's 1992 trip to the south that ushered in China's subsequent economic expansion and our current era of globalization. Yang and Cayley's 1997 multi-media performance piece in turn engages another chapter in recent Chinese history: it was one of a series of works commissioned by the ICA Gallery in London to mark Hong Kong's return to China. The HyperCard poem was then reworked into an HTML hyperlink poem of the same name and uploaded onto the World Wide Web.
Composed the year that CERN first made World Wide Web technology freely available, Yang's poem exemplifies the problem of locating a text that is the product of multiple waves of literary forms, cross-cultural imaginaries, histories and media and of the interference patterns that these intersecting waves produce. The composition and subsequent re-mediation of Where the Sea Stands Still show how much our notions of globalization, of digital literature and of the Internet are intertwined with prior cultural imaginaries, often ethnographically inflected. In different ways, both Yang and Cayley draw on modernist writers' imaginings of the Chinese ‘ideograph’ in their ‘struggle to write of the simultaneously semiotic and cultural transformations of language in the age of technological media’.9
Like place and location, media are not so much things as relations that ‘inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning’.10 The shifting nature of documents on the World Wide Web has provided us with a new ‘machine for exploring the nature of textuality’.11 This machine can help us rethink text and media – alongside place and location – not as clearly defined objects but as ‘social experiences of meaning’, involving processes of updating and re-editing that continuously produce new iterations and interferences.12 Diffractive reading is particularly suited to rethinking place and media in this way because it demands attention to matter as, in Barad's words, ‘agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things’.13 And this attention to materiality must be to form as well as content, to media as well as political positions in ways that do not simply reduce texts to evidence for wider geopolitical equations, but address how texts can alter the metaphors through which we think that wider geopolitical and historical reality.14 Through Where the Sea Stands Still, I want to explore some ways in which we might complicate a wave model of world literature by treating, firstly, place and, secondly, media not as passive recipients of waves of form, but as diffractive, iterative processes that produce and are inflected by multiple interferences.
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Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition, as opposed to privileging “innovative” or “original” works. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures, languages, and places, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and media divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets to conceptualists, samizdat wordsmiths to Twitter-trolling provocateurs, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Caroline Bergvall, NourbeSe Philip, Yang Lian 楊煉, John Cayley, the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Brandon Som, Yi Sha 伊沙, Hsia Yü 夏宇, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.
—Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, author of The Literary in Theory, Structuralist Poetics, and On Deconstruction
“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder
“Jacob Edmond addresses what he calls ‘forms of textual strangeness’ across contemporary poems of beautiful complexity and staying power. This theoretically astute book challenges us to read with a keener eye and to recognize how much poetry can tell us about political catastrophes, national dislocations, and promises of cultural renewal.”
—Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, author of Commemorating Pushkin and Distant Pleasures
“One of this book’s secrets: it is, above all, a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular after deconstruction. What is it possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual? As an antidote to these dichotomies, A Common Strangeness gives us triangles, operating in varied scales. Edmond’s analysis of poets from the US, Russia, and China allows him to shed new light on the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that drive the aesthetics of globalization today. Overlapping, Edmond’s philosophical and linguistic triangles become hexagons, enneagons, dodecagons. These multiplying shapes provide fertile new ground for anyone interested in comparative poetics after 1989.”
––Eric Hayot, Penn State University, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin and Chinese Dreams
“Edmond differs from most scholars who make a point of crossing national and linguistic boundaries to speak of a new ‘world literature’ in that he deals with non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone writers and can give close readings of the former as well as the latter because he knows their languages and the histories of their literatures. The fact that he applies this knowledge to a number of representative poems makes his study unique. . . . He makes significant contributions in the areas of literary history, textual analysis, and a theory of comparative literature that ‘negates commensurability in favor of superimposition, encounter, and touch.’”
—Michael Heim, University of California, Los Angeles
“Ultimately the readings support an interpretation of Benjamin as authority for interpreting the experience of globalization, or ‘common strangeness’ as that experience appears in poetry. The close readings are . . . also very worthwhile in the context of critical discussion of world literature.”
—Edward M. Gunn, Cornell University, author of Rendering the Regional and Rewriting Chinese""
This special issue questions the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘New Zealand’ in order to unsettle the assumption of essential identities that is often inadvertently produced by, on the one hand, ‘Asia-in-the-New Zealand imagination studies’ and, on the other, various studies of Asian diasporic communities. While both these approaches are important, I want to suggest a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between concepts of Asia and New Zealand that does not ‘lead to the assumption that the cultural traffic of the imagination only operates in one direction’, nor to the easy delineation of Asia from New Zealand (Hayot 5). A crucial element of this dynamic understanding involves reading representations of Asia not as outside New Zealand, but rather uncovering the diverse ways in which Asia is already and for a long time has been inside New Zealand cultural practices. This also means equally resisting an easy multiculturalism based on static, essentialised identities and instead addressing the complexities of and problems with the very notions of representation and identity. Thus reconceived, there are no simple essential identities that allow one to speak of ‘Asia in New Zealand’ as if it were a matter of what is ‘outside’ coming ‘inside’. The rethinking or remaking of representations of New Zealand and Asia in this issue instead recognises how the study of literature, along with other forms of cultural production, ‘even in a single national context, requires an attention to the transnational contexts and flows that shape and define the relationship between literature and nation’ (Hayot 4). Such ‘relational’ rather than ‘nominal’ thinking is becoming increasingly important to transnational literary studies (Friedman), and has been felt within New Zealand historiography (Moloughney; Ballantyne and Moloughney), but its possibilities within Aotearoa/New Zealand literary and cultural studies still remain to be fully explored.
A Russian anthology of New Zealand poetry, Land of Seas, was published in Moscow in 2005. Now New Zealand is reciprocating with a special issue of Landfall that includes contemporary Russian writing and art.
Edited by Jacob Edmond, Gregory O’Brien, Evgeny Pavlov and Ian Wedde, the ‘Russia’ issue features a selection of previously untranslated works by contemporary Russian poets: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Anna Glazova, Dmitry Golynko, Alexei Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Alexandr Skidan, Viktor Sosnora. Many of these translations have been created by leading New Zealand poets working in collaboration with Edmond and Pavlov. The issue also features a wide range of writing on contemporary Russian literary and art cultures, economies and diasporas.
As well as bringing Russian literature and art to New Zealand readers, the issue surveys the ways in which New Zealand writers have engaged—as travellers, readers and scholars—with Russia and its people.
Landfall 213 also includes an account by the curator Marcus Williams of the Blue Noses, whose comic video satires were a highlight of the 2005 Venice Biennale and whose work is substantially represented here.
recognizing similarly repetitive structures even in works that seek to resist
sameness through strangeness, we can complicate the opposition between
mass reproduction, consumer capitalism, and globalization, on the one
hand, and modernist aestheticism, on the other.
The lesson that we might take from this – not to misrecognize our metaphors for reality – is what I see as part of the attraction of the concept of ‘diffraction’ for thinkers like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. And it is in response to arguments such as Moretti's, which draw on the same metaphorical baggage, that the concept might be most useful. Recognizing the limits of their metaphors helped physicists to dismiss the notion of ether and to explain the seemingly bizarre conclusions of the double slit experiment. Likewise, questioning what we mean by a wave in the study of literature and culture can help us think more clearly about language, media and materiality in our age of digitalization and globalization.
This essay begins from the premise that it might be useful to attend to the metaphorical structures through which cultural and literary forms and traditions are imagined as objects and particles or as media and waves. Moretti proposes a ‘law of literary evolution’ whereby the wave of a literary form, such as the novel, is subject to ‘interference’ as it passes into a new language, culture and tradition.3 Moretti's extension of the wave metaphor imagines languages and cultural traditions as definable objects or media that presumably refract or diffract the wave of a cultural form to produce new interference patterns. Moretti's use of the wave metaphor reflects a static notion of place and cultural tradition that has been common in accounts of world literature, be they built on the world-systems model of geopolitical centres and peripheries or on accounts of the circulation of texts beyond their place of origin.4 However, it is not at all clear whether a nation or a linguistic and cultural tradition can be thought of as a consistent medium or static object, especially in the context of our current age of globalization and the Internet.5 Moretti's own proposal – that we think of cultural forms such as the novel as dynamic waves – argues against this static model of cultural location. Approaching all cultural forms as wave-like would mean, if we accept Barad's account, acknowledging that these forms are not given entities but complex ‘phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations’ that are, crucially, ‘intra-acting’. That is, they are ‘relations without preexisting relata’ – relations that exist prior to, not as a result of, notional cultural entities such as the European novel or the Japanese tradition.6 Moretti wants to register the dynamism of one form (his prime example is the novel) by treating others (for example, the Japanese tradition) as relatively static and constant. Drawing on Haraway's account of diffraction, we might instead approach world literature as having ‘many more meanings and contexts to it and once you've noted them you can't just drop them. You have to register the “interference”’.7 Only in this way can we address the full complexity that the wave and interference model implies.
One counter to my proposal would be the one that could also be levelled at many attacks on Moretti's proposal for distant reading: to object to his approach on the grounds of its being insufficiently attuned to the complexities of specific texts is to miss the point since what Moretti aims for is precisely a general account of literary history. However, although in what follows I will draw on the methodologies of close reading, I do so not in order to advocate for close over distant reading, but because of what my reading here might tell us about the conceptual problems with Moretti's model. These problems become particularly acute in any attempt to map literary history after 1989, when a new era of globalization and the rise of digital technologies and the Internet unsettle the assumed notions of cultural objects and media, and the propagation of cultural forms on which Moretti's theory and his use of the wave metaphor rely.
Drawing on Haraway and Barad, this essay proposes diffractive iteration as an alternative to the opposition between the theoretical totality of distant reading and the local particularity of close reading with its nominalist attention to difference – and to the entrapping binary of sameness and difference through which both globalization and new media are often theorized. Instead of imagining an unchanging wave-like form of cultural propagation in already fixed media, or stressing isolated encounters between cultural and technological objects, diffractive iteration demands a consideration of matter, medium, history and culture as dynamic, interactive and intra-active processes.
I develop this model in and through a reading of the long poem Dahai tingzhi zhi chu 大海停止之处 (Where the Sea Stands Still), written in 1993 and first published in 1995, by the poet Yang Lian 杨炼, alongside Yang's subsequent collaboration with Anglo-Canadian programmer-poet John Cayley on the transformation of the poem into the digital HyperCard and performance piece Where the Sea Stands Still (1997).8Where the Sea Stands Still is about the problems and possibilities of imagining places and cultural positions in terms of waves and interferences and is itself an example of a text produced out of a complex set of iterations, locations, histories and media. The poem was written in Sydney, Australia, in the shadow of the events of 4 June 1989, but also of Deng Xiaoping's 1992 trip to the south that ushered in China's subsequent economic expansion and our current era of globalization. Yang and Cayley's 1997 multi-media performance piece in turn engages another chapter in recent Chinese history: it was one of a series of works commissioned by the ICA Gallery in London to mark Hong Kong's return to China. The HyperCard poem was then reworked into an HTML hyperlink poem of the same name and uploaded onto the World Wide Web.
Composed the year that CERN first made World Wide Web technology freely available, Yang's poem exemplifies the problem of locating a text that is the product of multiple waves of literary forms, cross-cultural imaginaries, histories and media and of the interference patterns that these intersecting waves produce. The composition and subsequent re-mediation of Where the Sea Stands Still show how much our notions of globalization, of digital literature and of the Internet are intertwined with prior cultural imaginaries, often ethnographically inflected. In different ways, both Yang and Cayley draw on modernist writers' imaginings of the Chinese ‘ideograph’ in their ‘struggle to write of the simultaneously semiotic and cultural transformations of language in the age of technological media’.9
Like place and location, media are not so much things as relations that ‘inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning’.10 The shifting nature of documents on the World Wide Web has provided us with a new ‘machine for exploring the nature of textuality’.11 This machine can help us rethink text and media – alongside place and location – not as clearly defined objects but as ‘social experiences of meaning’, involving processes of updating and re-editing that continuously produce new iterations and interferences.12 Diffractive reading is particularly suited to rethinking place and media in this way because it demands attention to matter as, in Barad's words, ‘agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things’.13 And this attention to materiality must be to form as well as content, to media as well as political positions in ways that do not simply reduce texts to evidence for wider geopolitical equations, but address how texts can alter the metaphors through which we think that wider geopolitical and historical reality.14 Through Where the Sea Stands Still, I want to explore some ways in which we might complicate a wave model of world literature by treating, firstly, place and, secondly, media not as passive recipients of waves of form, but as diffractive, iterative processes that produce and are inflected by multiple interferences.
Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition, as opposed to privileging “innovative” or “original” works. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures, languages, and places, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and media divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets to conceptualists, samizdat wordsmiths to Twitter-trolling provocateurs, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Caroline Bergvall, NourbeSe Philip, Yang Lian 楊煉, John Cayley, the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo, Vanessa Place, Kenneth Goldsmith, Christian Bök, Brandon Som, Yi Sha 伊沙, Hsia Yü 夏宇, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.
—Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Cornell University, author of The Literary in Theory, Structuralist Poetics, and On Deconstruction
“A Common Strangeness is unique among studies of contemporary poetics in being genuinely global in its perspective and its reach. At home in Russian and Chinese as well as American poetry and that of his native New Zealand, Jacob Edmond pinpoints the crucial relationships that exist between what are seemingly disparate poetic cultures. The Chinese poet Yang Lian, who lived in exile in Auckland, is read under the sign of Benjamin and Baudelaire. The American Language poet Lyn Hejinian’s important dialogue with the Russian avant-gardist Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is studied carefully, and Bei Dao, Dmitri Prigov, and Charles Bernstein are treated as representative figures of cross-cultural thinking in the age of globalism. Edmond’s is a provocative, exciting, and genuinely original study of the new poetics; we will all be learning from it!”
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities, Stanford University, author of Unoriginal Genius and Wittgenstein’s Ladder
“Jacob Edmond addresses what he calls ‘forms of textual strangeness’ across contemporary poems of beautiful complexity and staying power. This theoretically astute book challenges us to read with a keener eye and to recognize how much poetry can tell us about political catastrophes, national dislocations, and promises of cultural renewal.”
—Stephanie Sandler, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, author of Commemorating Pushkin and Distant Pleasures
“One of this book’s secrets: it is, above all, a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular after deconstruction. What is it possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual? As an antidote to these dichotomies, A Common Strangeness gives us triangles, operating in varied scales. Edmond’s analysis of poets from the US, Russia, and China allows him to shed new light on the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that drive the aesthetics of globalization today. Overlapping, Edmond’s philosophical and linguistic triangles become hexagons, enneagons, dodecagons. These multiplying shapes provide fertile new ground for anyone interested in comparative poetics after 1989.”
––Eric Hayot, Penn State University, author of The Hypothetical Mandarin and Chinese Dreams
“Edmond differs from most scholars who make a point of crossing national and linguistic boundaries to speak of a new ‘world literature’ in that he deals with non-Anglophone as well as Anglophone writers and can give close readings of the former as well as the latter because he knows their languages and the histories of their literatures. The fact that he applies this knowledge to a number of representative poems makes his study unique. . . . He makes significant contributions in the areas of literary history, textual analysis, and a theory of comparative literature that ‘negates commensurability in favor of superimposition, encounter, and touch.’”
—Michael Heim, University of California, Los Angeles
“Ultimately the readings support an interpretation of Benjamin as authority for interpreting the experience of globalization, or ‘common strangeness’ as that experience appears in poetry. The close readings are . . . also very worthwhile in the context of critical discussion of world literature.”
—Edward M. Gunn, Cornell University, author of Rendering the Regional and Rewriting Chinese""
This special issue questions the terms ‘Asia’ and ‘New Zealand’ in order to unsettle the assumption of essential identities that is often inadvertently produced by, on the one hand, ‘Asia-in-the-New Zealand imagination studies’ and, on the other, various studies of Asian diasporic communities. While both these approaches are important, I want to suggest a more dynamic understanding of the relationship between concepts of Asia and New Zealand that does not ‘lead to the assumption that the cultural traffic of the imagination only operates in one direction’, nor to the easy delineation of Asia from New Zealand (Hayot 5). A crucial element of this dynamic understanding involves reading representations of Asia not as outside New Zealand, but rather uncovering the diverse ways in which Asia is already and for a long time has been inside New Zealand cultural practices. This also means equally resisting an easy multiculturalism based on static, essentialised identities and instead addressing the complexities of and problems with the very notions of representation and identity. Thus reconceived, there are no simple essential identities that allow one to speak of ‘Asia in New Zealand’ as if it were a matter of what is ‘outside’ coming ‘inside’. The rethinking or remaking of representations of New Zealand and Asia in this issue instead recognises how the study of literature, along with other forms of cultural production, ‘even in a single national context, requires an attention to the transnational contexts and flows that shape and define the relationship between literature and nation’ (Hayot 4). Such ‘relational’ rather than ‘nominal’ thinking is becoming increasingly important to transnational literary studies (Friedman), and has been felt within New Zealand historiography (Moloughney; Ballantyne and Moloughney), but its possibilities within Aotearoa/New Zealand literary and cultural studies still remain to be fully explored.
A Russian anthology of New Zealand poetry, Land of Seas, was published in Moscow in 2005. Now New Zealand is reciprocating with a special issue of Landfall that includes contemporary Russian writing and art.
Edited by Jacob Edmond, Gregory O’Brien, Evgeny Pavlov and Ian Wedde, the ‘Russia’ issue features a selection of previously untranslated works by contemporary Russian poets: Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Anna Glazova, Dmitry Golynko, Alexei Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Alexandr Skidan, Viktor Sosnora. Many of these translations have been created by leading New Zealand poets working in collaboration with Edmond and Pavlov. The issue also features a wide range of writing on contemporary Russian literary and art cultures, economies and diasporas.
As well as bringing Russian literature and art to New Zealand readers, the issue surveys the ways in which New Zealand writers have engaged—as travellers, readers and scholars—with Russia and its people.
Landfall 213 also includes an account by the curator Marcus Williams of the Blue Noses, whose comic video satires were a highlight of the 2005 Venice Biennale and whose work is substantially represented here.
recognizing similarly repetitive structures even in works that seek to resist
sameness through strangeness, we can complicate the opposition between
mass reproduction, consumer capitalism, and globalization, on the one
hand, and modernist aestheticism, on the other.
The lesson that we might take from this – not to misrecognize our metaphors for reality – is what I see as part of the attraction of the concept of ‘diffraction’ for thinkers like Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. And it is in response to arguments such as Moretti's, which draw on the same metaphorical baggage, that the concept might be most useful. Recognizing the limits of their metaphors helped physicists to dismiss the notion of ether and to explain the seemingly bizarre conclusions of the double slit experiment. Likewise, questioning what we mean by a wave in the study of literature and culture can help us think more clearly about language, media and materiality in our age of digitalization and globalization.
This essay begins from the premise that it might be useful to attend to the metaphorical structures through which cultural and literary forms and traditions are imagined as objects and particles or as media and waves. Moretti proposes a ‘law of literary evolution’ whereby the wave of a literary form, such as the novel, is subject to ‘interference’ as it passes into a new language, culture and tradition.3 Moretti's extension of the wave metaphor imagines languages and cultural traditions as definable objects or media that presumably refract or diffract the wave of a cultural form to produce new interference patterns. Moretti's use of the wave metaphor reflects a static notion of place and cultural tradition that has been common in accounts of world literature, be they built on the world-systems model of geopolitical centres and peripheries or on accounts of the circulation of texts beyond their place of origin.4 However, it is not at all clear whether a nation or a linguistic and cultural tradition can be thought of as a consistent medium or static object, especially in the context of our current age of globalization and the Internet.5 Moretti's own proposal – that we think of cultural forms such as the novel as dynamic waves – argues against this static model of cultural location. Approaching all cultural forms as wave-like would mean, if we accept Barad's account, acknowledging that these forms are not given entities but complex ‘phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations’ that are, crucially, ‘intra-acting’. That is, they are ‘relations without preexisting relata’ – relations that exist prior to, not as a result of, notional cultural entities such as the European novel or the Japanese tradition.6 Moretti wants to register the dynamism of one form (his prime example is the novel) by treating others (for example, the Japanese tradition) as relatively static and constant. Drawing on Haraway's account of diffraction, we might instead approach world literature as having ‘many more meanings and contexts to it and once you've noted them you can't just drop them. You have to register the “interference”’.7 Only in this way can we address the full complexity that the wave and interference model implies.
One counter to my proposal would be the one that could also be levelled at many attacks on Moretti's proposal for distant reading: to object to his approach on the grounds of its being insufficiently attuned to the complexities of specific texts is to miss the point since what Moretti aims for is precisely a general account of literary history. However, although in what follows I will draw on the methodologies of close reading, I do so not in order to advocate for close over distant reading, but because of what my reading here might tell us about the conceptual problems with Moretti's model. These problems become particularly acute in any attempt to map literary history after 1989, when a new era of globalization and the rise of digital technologies and the Internet unsettle the assumed notions of cultural objects and media, and the propagation of cultural forms on which Moretti's theory and his use of the wave metaphor rely.
Drawing on Haraway and Barad, this essay proposes diffractive iteration as an alternative to the opposition between the theoretical totality of distant reading and the local particularity of close reading with its nominalist attention to difference – and to the entrapping binary of sameness and difference through which both globalization and new media are often theorized. Instead of imagining an unchanging wave-like form of cultural propagation in already fixed media, or stressing isolated encounters between cultural and technological objects, diffractive iteration demands a consideration of matter, medium, history and culture as dynamic, interactive and intra-active processes.
I develop this model in and through a reading of the long poem Dahai tingzhi zhi chu 大海停止之处 (Where the Sea Stands Still), written in 1993 and first published in 1995, by the poet Yang Lian 杨炼, alongside Yang's subsequent collaboration with Anglo-Canadian programmer-poet John Cayley on the transformation of the poem into the digital HyperCard and performance piece Where the Sea Stands Still (1997).8Where the Sea Stands Still is about the problems and possibilities of imagining places and cultural positions in terms of waves and interferences and is itself an example of a text produced out of a complex set of iterations, locations, histories and media. The poem was written in Sydney, Australia, in the shadow of the events of 4 June 1989, but also of Deng Xiaoping's 1992 trip to the south that ushered in China's subsequent economic expansion and our current era of globalization. Yang and Cayley's 1997 multi-media performance piece in turn engages another chapter in recent Chinese history: it was one of a series of works commissioned by the ICA Gallery in London to mark Hong Kong's return to China. The HyperCard poem was then reworked into an HTML hyperlink poem of the same name and uploaded onto the World Wide Web.
Composed the year that CERN first made World Wide Web technology freely available, Yang's poem exemplifies the problem of locating a text that is the product of multiple waves of literary forms, cross-cultural imaginaries, histories and media and of the interference patterns that these intersecting waves produce. The composition and subsequent re-mediation of Where the Sea Stands Still show how much our notions of globalization, of digital literature and of the Internet are intertwined with prior cultural imaginaries, often ethnographically inflected. In different ways, both Yang and Cayley draw on modernist writers' imaginings of the Chinese ‘ideograph’ in their ‘struggle to write of the simultaneously semiotic and cultural transformations of language in the age of technological media’.9
Like place and location, media are not so much things as relations that ‘inspire conflicted cultural moments of self-consciousness about the making of meaning’.10 The shifting nature of documents on the World Wide Web has provided us with a new ‘machine for exploring the nature of textuality’.11 This machine can help us rethink text and media – alongside place and location – not as clearly defined objects but as ‘social experiences of meaning’, involving processes of updating and re-editing that continuously produce new iterations and interferences.12 Diffractive reading is particularly suited to rethinking place and media in this way because it demands attention to matter as, in Barad's words, ‘agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things’.13 And this attention to materiality must be to form as well as content, to media as well as political positions in ways that do not simply reduce texts to evidence for wider geopolitical equations, but address how texts can alter the metaphors through which we think that wider geopolitical and historical reality.14 Through Where the Sea Stands Still, I want to explore some ways in which we might complicate a wave model of world literature by treating, firstly, place and, secondly, media not as passive recipients of waves of form, but as diffractive, iterative processes that produce and are inflected by multiple interferences.
Работы Дмитрия Александровича Пригова в основном читаются в контексте русской литературы и культуры, каждодневной советской и постсоветской жизни и советского и постсоветского русского национализма. Тем не менее с самого начала, подход Пригова к этому национальному контексту был тесно связан с его отношением к остальному миру. Например, его исследование публикаций самиздата, как художественной практики, связывает фетишизацию русских интеллигентов универсальной ценностью, содержащийся в этих хрупких, тщательно воспроизведённых текстах, с широко распространенными повторениями и копированиями в международных концептуалистических искусствах. Вместо того, чтобы просто контрастировать местную культуру с глобальным языком современного искусства, Пригов соединяет различные местные и транснациональные языки и культурные системы в своем глобальном проекте. Связывая разнообразные дискурсы, жанры и медии-исскуства, он позволяет им выражаться по новому––процесс, который он неоднократно называет «пересечением». Он разрушает претензии каждой системы на абсолютную полноту, приводя ее к встрече с другой такой же системой. Расширяя представления Михаила Бахтина о том, что команды и манипуляции жанров являются формой свободы, Пригов подчеркивает, как ограниченность бесконечного повторения, так и свободу каждого жеста посреди бесконечных возможностей пересекающихся систем и языков."
The Chinese are the non-European, non-indigenous ethnic and linguistic group with the longest history in New Zealand. Their literature therefore plays a unique role in complicating the dominant bicultural and bilingual narrative of New Zealand literary history. Sinophone New Zealand literature engages both Māori and Anglo-settler concerns with language, place, and identity, illuminating and entwining elements of their often opposed positions on these issues. Sinophone New Zealand writers share with their colonial and postcolonial Anglophone counterparts an ongoing anxiety about the relationship of their language and culture to the land they have settled and a closely connected need to define themselves in relation to a much larger literary culture abroad that is itself dispersed among multiple centers, be they London and New York, or Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taipei. At the same time, as a cultural and linguistic minority in New Zealand, speakers of Chinese languages have shared with Māori speakers a need to use literature to preserve and assert their cultural identity in the face of an at times repressively dominant Anglo-European settler culture.
Volume abstract:
This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings in Tibetan, Malaysian, Taiwanese, French, Caribbean, and American Sinophone literatures. By placing Sinophone cultures at the crossroads of multiple empires, this anthology richly demonstrates the transformative power of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and by examining the place-based cultural and social practices of Sinitic-language communities in their historical contexts beyond “China proper,” it effectively refutes the diasporic framework. It is an invaluable companion for courses in Asian, postcolonial, empire, and ethnic studies, as well as world and comparative literature.
As the product of a cross-cultural encounter between two persons, their collaboration occupies the middle ground elided by the oppositions that the question presupposes. Read through the binaries of the Cold War and postmodernist theory, Dragomoshchenko’s poetic contribution to his collaboration with Hejinian has been taken as either a window on late-Soviet culture and its difference from the West or as singularly resistant to representation and interpretation. Yet Dragomoshchenko and Hejinian’s previously inaccessible one-thousand-page correspondence, which I drawn on here, offers another way to understand their collaboration as interpersonal encounter that molded it. Their bilingual correspondence intermingles private letters with poetic texts and addresses correspondences and non-correspondences between Russian and English, between the Soviet Union and the United States, and between language and the world. Many of Dragomoshchenko’s poems of the 1980s are dedicated to Hejinian, drafts of some poems appear in letters to her, while others, such as his important but largely neglected long poem “Uzhin s privetlivymi bogami,” include extracts from their letters. The poems themselves were written with a view to Hejinian translating them into English as part of their joint project “The Corresponding Sky,” which in its original English variant stresses the place of letter writing in their collaboration. The Russian version, “Nebo sootvetstvii,” lacks this sense, calling to mind instead correspondence as a key term in modernist poetics, especially that simultaneous invocation and negation of correspondence between language and the world which derives from Baudelaire’s “Correspondances.” Baudelaire’s sonnet might be read as staging either the experience of urban modernity or the endless intertextual correspondences of linguistic signification.
When taken as epistolary address and response to a singular other––as co-response––Dragomoshchenko’s correspondences provide a third term outside the binaries that have constrained readings of his work. These correspondences in turn offer an alternative to the dichotomies that restrict our understanding of the moment of historical change in which his collaboration with Hejinian took place.
Эта статья занимается проблемой, которая все больше и больше принимает внимание литературоведов, работающих в нынешней эпохе глобализации, после деконструкции и после культурных исследований: как мы можем примирить обобщенную абстракцию языка, культуры, общества и истории с специфическим текстом и с человеком, который пишет или читает это? Обширная переписка и сотрудничество русского поэта Аркадия Драгомощенко с американским поэтом Лин Хеджинян между 1983-м и началом 1990-х годов не только ставит этот вопрос, но также предлагает путь к переосмыслению его концептуального предположения.
Результатом этой кросс-культурной встречи между двумя людьми является то, что их сотрудничество стоит на среднем месте, которое возражения предполагаемые этим вопросом не учитывают. Ранее недоступные тысяча страниц двуязычной переписки Драгомощенко и Хеджинян, на которую я здесь опираюсь, смешивает частные письма с поэтическими текстами и обращается к соответствиям и несоответствиям между русским и английским языком, между Советским Союзом и Соединенными Штатами, и между языком и всем миром. Многие стихи Драгомощенко 1980-х годов посвящены Хеджинян, наброски стихов появляются в письмах к ней, а другие, такие как его важная, но в основном заброшенная поэма «Ужин с приветливыми богами», включают в себе отрывки из их писем. Стихи сами были написаны с расчетом, что Хеджинян переведет их на английский язык, как часть их совместного проекта «Небо соответствий», которое в своем первоначальном английском варианте, “The Corresponding Sky”, подчеркивается, каким важным было написания писем в их совместной работе.
В русской версии, «Небо соответствий» не хватает этого смыла переписки. Вместо этого, «Небо соответствий» напоминает соответствие, как основной термин в модернистской поэтики, особенно тот одновременный вызов и отрицание соответствия между языком и миром, который приходит из “Correspondances” Бодлера. Сонет Бодлера может быть прочитан, либо как опыт городской современности или бесконечные интертекстуальные соответствия языкового значения. Точно так же, как поэтический вклад Драгомощенко в сотрудничество с Хеджинян можно прочитать через противоположности холодной войны и постмодернистской теории, также на него можно посмотреть или как на окно на позднесоветскую культуру и ее отличия от Запада или как на разбитое зеркало языка, которое сопротивляется репрезентации и интерпретации. В тоже время, если мы посмотрим на “correspondences” (переписки и соответствии) Драгомощенко как на письменное обращение и ответ единственному человеку––как со-ответ––они дают третий смысл, который стоит за пределами противоположностей, которые ограничили понимание его работ. Эти correspondences, в свою очередь, предлагают альтернативу дихотомиям, которые ограничивают наше понимание момента исторических перемен, в котором состоялось его сотрудничество с Хеджинян.