Anarchism and Literature
Session Coordinator: Jesse S. Cohn
Dept. of English, Purdue University North Central
1401 S. U.S. Hwy 421, Westville, IN 46391
jcohn@pnc.edu
Détournement and the Anarchist Practice of Defamiliarization
Disruption, upheaval, juxtaposition—these notions of artistic and literary fragmentation underlay much of the avant-garde project. They are also central to anarchism, in both its political and cultural manifestations. This paper will explore the anarchist practice of defamiliarization, a technique that seeks to make the familiar unfamiliar, to subvert ordinary perception, and disrupt the banality of everyday life. Drawing primarily on détournement, the Situationist International’s concept of defamiliarization, this paper will examine how an anarchist defamiliarization might different from others’ formulations, particularly Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt.
Audrey Vanderford
University of Oregon
audreylv@darkwing.uoregon.edu
"Beyond the Incomparable Nation": Peter Kropotkin and the Anarchist Poetics of Robert Duncan
Through his connections with New York anarchists and such Bay Area anarchist groups as Kenneth Rexroth’s Libertarian Circle in the 1940s, San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan (1919-1988) was deeply influenced by the libertarian tradition. My paper explores the impact of Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aid on Robert Duncan’s aesthetic and political proposal for a “symposium of the whole” in his essay “Rites of Participation.” Through a close reading of Kropotkin’s classic definition of anarchism and Mutual Aid against Duncan’s “Rites of Participation,” I argue that Kropotkin’s notion of a relationship between natural order and anarchism was a key factor in the development of Duncan’s open-field poetics.
There is a general misconception that the American anarchist tradition is primarily individualist in nature. My discussion of the relationship between Kropotkin’s communist-anarchism and Duncan’s poetics counter-balances the trend in literary studies toward focusing exclusively on the influence of individualist-anarchism (e.g., Proudhon, Stirner) on modern and postmodern cultural production and political ideology. As I argue in my paper, Duncan’s communist-anarchism complicates the simple binaries of culture and politics, individualism and communalism, “lifestyle” anarchism and “social” anarchism. My paper also challenges the notion that anarchism is “anti-foundational” (cf. David Kadlec’s Mosaic Modernism), illustrating ways in which both Kropotkin and Duncan envision anarchism not only as a critical theory of the state but a constructive theory of society based on natural law.
Dan Featherston
University of Arizona
feathers@email.arizona.edu
Poetic Licence: Hugo Ball and the Anarchists
This essay argues that Ball's early attempts to fuse anarchist theory and aesthetics anticipates much of the post-68 theoretical work in semiotics, particularly his critique of the sentence and of the bourgeois "speaking-subject," and in his attempt to fuse libertarian economic models (Proudhon's) with avant-garde theories of language, "so that the individual vocables regain their autonomy." This latter aspect of Ball's work has been ignored in most studies of Modernist avant-gardes, often in favor a similar project undertaken by the Marxist-influenced "Objectivists" of the 1930's and the "language-poets" today. As such, this paper makes an intervention into the "black-out" of anarchist contributions to modernist & post-modernist aesthetics.
Roger Farr
Capilano College
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca