139 | 2017

JEFF DERKSEN

For Sincerity. A Short Introduction to Sincerity’s Social and Aesthetic Possibilities

With this gathering of the work of artists, writers, and poets from Europe and North America, we want to make an argument, or at least launch a plea, for the aesthetic, material, and social possibilities of sincerity. To do this, we look back to sincerity’s history and pull forward moments where it speaks to our own strange and taut present. It is a necessary time to rethink sincerity, partly because of the strangeness of sincerity historically and its performance, both positively and negatively, today. Sincerity mediates our relationship to the present, and the present shapes sincerity as part of what Raymond Williams calls, beautifully, the “structures of feeling” we live within: these unfixed yet defining formations and positions are shot through with sincerity. For do not many of the most compelling political formations today draw on a social sincerity to come together and demand, at a number of scales and sites, that another world be made (a step further than imaging another world to be possible)?

This gathering of works raises the question of how sincerity surfaces at times of social and historical shift, from the changes in the global economy and the national public spheres, to the intensity of the moment of the cultural front in North America, and to the forms of sincerity that are generated in new political formations and artistic practices today. So, with this relational collection of works, we hope that sincerity can itself be seen as a productive space—as a political and aesthetic intensity between historical subjects—because of its contradictions, but also because of its necessity.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 139/2017, pp. 7–10.

LINA LEONORE MORAWETZ

Abstract Events. A Conversation with Georg Deggerich

LM What is it like to translate Reznikoff’s work? The language of radical Objectivism is easy … and difficult …
GD Compared to other poetry, especially modern poetry, the poems in Holocaust are surely easy to translate. As in the case of other representatives of Objectivism, Reznikoff’s poetry is characterized by clarity of style and expression and also by a consistent renunciation of figurative language. Reznikoff contrasted the ambiguity or even hermeticism of modern poetry with a transparency of message, which eludes any kind of interpretative leeway. In this respect, the presumed simplicity of style is the result of a conscious literary decision. For the translator, this implies being as true as possible to the wording of the original text and avoiding any attempts at stylistic variation, for instance when Reznikoff used the same verb several times in a row. By the way, certain anomalies of form are part of the message. One of the most striking stylistic devices used in the Holocaust poems—introducing verses with the linking conjunction “and”—expressly underscores the inevitability of the events and the mechanical precision of the killing machinery. (…)
LM In Holocaust, Reznikoff carried to an extreme the poetological method of a “radical Objectivism,” which he developed over a period of more than forty years. He extracted, quite similar to an archivist, “tissue samples from the documentary mass” (Jacques Roubaud). In the case of Holocaust, this pertained to court records from the Nuremberg trials and from the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. At the same time, Reznikoff strongly intervened in the text with techniques of selection, densification, and linguistic revision. How exactly should we view the poetological method as applied to the inception of the Holocaust poems?
GD It is true that the content of all poems in Holocaust is based on the documents you just mentioned. Reznikoff did not add anything to the texts or interpret the material in any way. This is an important point, because Reznikoff’s concern was “documentary poetry,” which lends a voice to the victims of the Holocaust, while the poet himself stays completely outside of the poem. His only role is to be a mediator of language.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 139/2017, pp. 35–38.

DINA AL-KASSIM

For Solidarity. Witnessing the Other’s Revolution

Today as we are caught up, even against our will, in debates that were vital in the 1990s—I am talking about cultural appropriation, identity, institution, right-wing resurgence, hypermasculinism, white
supremacist nationalism, and the needful reassertion of anti-racism/anti-colonialism, feminism, queer theory, and critical aesthetic practice—the notion that supposed solidarity and exploitation coincide in the same agents of progress surfaces with undeniable insistence. Sincerity “itself” must stand the test of a new socius that increasingly reveals a simple fact: agency is not sovereign sincerity but a social process of relation. Questions of responsibility and authenticity are raised once again in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism gone awry and global right-wing resurgence against imagined identity politics, yet the discussion proceeds asymmetrically; just as Narcissus knows nothing of the lake that returns his gaze, just as he falls captive to his own reflected pleasure given back to him as “self-knowledge,” so the sovereign imagination knows nothing of the delicate ecology that cannot be reduced to intentions, good or bad. And in this version, Echo remains unheard and unremarked.

In contrast, Gayatri Spivak recalls the lesson in relation that she identified in the figure of Echo, an aesthetic education, which necessarily supplements the rights talk of access and inclusion lest the latter be revealed as yet another abstraction of capital. Drawing upon First Nations’ “more ecological practice of living, where the opposition between the human and the natural is made indeterminate,” Spivak advocates reversing the devaluation of aboriginal cultures and technologies: “… this developed pre-capitalist structure must once again be filled with the more robust imperative to responsibility which capitalist social productivity was obliged to destroy. And, to repeat, the imperative must be understood and valued (an aesthetic education!) as defective for capitalism rather than necessarily pre-capitalist on an interested sequential evolutionary mode”.¹

¹ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Imperative to Re-Imagine the Planet”, in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 335–350, 344.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 139/2017, pp. 51–54.