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Pierre Joris, A Nomad Poetics
Wesleyan University Press, 2003. 162pp. $17.95. ISBN 0-8195-6646-2

In an interview with Don Byrd reprinted here Pierre Joris notes that 'whenever my essay, or "manifessay" for a Nomad Poetics has come in for criticism, it has usually been for some perceived notion of a romantic vision of nomadism'. Reading Joris's "manifessay" and the other writings gathered here in support of it one has the overwhelming feeling that it has been overtaken by recent and continuing political events. This makes a nomadic poetics seem simultaneously more urgent and less possible and often makes A Nomad Poetics seem like the expression of a deferred hope or even nostalgia for a past dream of the future; and the experience of reading it a largely pessimistic one.

'The days of anything static – form, content, state – are over,' asserts Pierre Joris in the opening piece. He goes on: 'The past century has shown that anything not involved in continuous transformation hardens and dies. All revolutions have done just that: those that tried to deal with the state as much as those that tried to deal with state of poetry.' These words were originally published in Boundary2 in 1999 and highlight that one meaning of Joris's 'nomadism' is that the avant-garde practices of the last century should be carried carefully across the millennial turn's empty quarter and into the next. For Joris, many of those practices are themselves intimate with movement and the presence of poetics signals a scepticism and/or a rejection of fixity. A Nomad Poetics explores how continuous transformation is to be kept new in essays and reviews – and one interview – published between 1999 and 2003.

The method of 'a nomadic poetics' is, Joris tells us, 'rhizomatic'. It will follow a 'flux of ruptures and articulations, of rhythm, moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic spaces, moving around & through the features accreting as poem'. Joris is therefore developing the idea of the rhizome first advanced in Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The rhizome is a way of figuring non-hierarchical systems and, crucially for Joris's nomad poetics, 'collective assemblages of enunciation'. Deleuze and Guattari's definitions are complex but two are helpful in understanding what Joris is advancing. First, 'a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to arts, sciences and social struggles.' Second, a rhizome is a species of map that not only 'fosters connections between fields' but also has 'multiple entryways'.

The rhizomatic method is developed through quotations from and readings in a huge array of precursors and contemporaries including Paul Celan, Tristan Tzara, Eric Mottram, Nicole Brossard, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Bernstein and Robin Blaser. So Joris's assertion that 'a nomadic poetics will cross languages' is rearticulated in his reading of the 'nomadic trajectory' of Mottram's 'Against Tyranny' and of the 'strategies of destabilization & questioning' evoked by the phrase 'The field of shifting' in Bernstein's Rough Trades. The temporal range of these reference points and the connections that Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome establishes between arts, sciences and social struggles make clear that Joris's project is an historical one. A nomad poetics is a way of connecting contemporary innovative work with the historical avant-garde and thereby re-connecting with its originary union of artistic and political radicalism. A nomad poetics is therefore a way of keeping the avant-garde 'avant'.

At the same time, Joris has to take account of the fact that remaking this union is more likely to be wishful than actual. So when Joris writes that his own work as a translator is underwritten by Blaser's conception of 'a translation of oneself into the Other' his figurative language can perhaps be read as the articulation of a political impossibility. Joris adds that 'there are by now many others rather than one other' so that translation becomes 'a practice [...] of possible community'. Just as the nomad wanders from place to place securing food by gathering and hunting or by exploiting suitable grounds for quick crops, so Joris wanders through twentieth-century culture and the reader, in her turn, wanders through Joris's essays. Joris's sentences too are often gatherings of quotations, comments and responses as opposed to clear processes of subject-verb-object or clause and sub-clause. The reader is obliged to perform Joris's figurative reading practice with him.

As Joris's suggestion of translation as a practice of possible community makes clear, a nomadic poetics is also a kind of political behaviour. It is one that has already prompted a sharp critique. In an 'Open Letter' to Joris published in Fall 2001,

Adrian Clarke argues that being true to the condition of your nomadicity could well be to submit uncritically to those larger forces that require our mobility, adaptability and lack of attachment for their own inimical ends; that a flight through languages risks a refusal of any real engagement with the coercions inscribed in our pluralised and unstable language(s) of daily use.

For Clarke, literature that is true to the condition of the individual's nomadicity runs the risk of being merely a palliative for that individual and not a curative that addresses the societies in which the individual moves and transacts. Such literature risks being not only anti-revolutionary and anti-resistant but also solipsistic. Clarke would counter the risks of submission and refusal with a re-emphasis of linguistic materiality and lines up Bruce Andrews, Karen Mac Cormack and Zukofsky in support. Joris's nomadicity is, for Clarke, an attempt to keep the avant-garde 'avant' which, as such, is complicit with 'those larger forces'. 'Leave the forward march of the New to the Market', says Clarke and practice instead 'bringing to stand'.

Clarke is touching, very properly, on an old concern for, as Renato Poggioli observed, the avant-garde is the product of societies that are democratic and liberal; and that 'it is exactly the particular tensions of our bourgeois, capitalistic, and technological society that has given the avant-garde a reason for existing.' This, in turn, makes it important to map the British ground of Clarke's criticism. The long march of new right economics through the institutions of civil society under Thatcher, Major and Blair has broken the links between progress and social reform and between art and social tensions. The popularity of reality shows on British television is symptomatic of both a complacent belief that everything is basically OK and a loss of faith in the possibility and validity of intervention. Or to put this another way, the widespread use of CCTV footage showing crimes in progress is completely divorced from any sense of the conditions that cause them or that those conditions can be ameliorated. No wonder Clarke wants to 'bring to stand' – what else would he want in a country where dominant cultural and political wisdoms are largely matters of repackaging inertia?

However, Joris's assertion of the end of 'anything static' – and Clarke's criticism of Joris's apparent free-floating – inevitably resonate in other ways as one looks back at 9/11 and forward into the 'war on terror'. The attack on the WTC seems to symbolise the end of the static just as the 'war on terror' seems designed to prove that a static 'way of life' confined to an increasingly small part of the world is more valuable than migrant, rootless, transnational otherness. Systems founded on a belief in the immanence of identity to clearly demarcated spaces are adopting an aggressive-defensive posture. As George Van Den Abbeele observes in an account of Jean-Luc Nancy's poetics of finitude, the 'inscription of cultural identity on to [...] topography, however, can only ever protect the differential undoing of that identity by the reinforcement of the inscription that is violence.' To cross a border is increasingly difficult so that what was once innocent now always already has the potential to be constructed as transgressive. To be able to speak more than one's mother tongue, to be able to pass, is no longer just cosmopolitan and cultured but potentially dangerous.

What this suggests is that we are all living in and will continue to live through difficult times for cultural products whose immanence is synonymous with continuous transformation. In this context, the 'war on terror' seems, in part, a way of justifying deep-seated paranoid responses to the continuous transformation wrought on Western societies by refugees and economic migrants. It is a way of finally severing the post-colonial ties emblematised in the London migrant association slogan Jacqueline Rose quotes in States Of Fantasy: 'We are here because you were there'. So when Joris adapts Breton and says that the poem written out of a nomadic poetics will be an 'explosante mouvante' this does not have the effect of making words sound more dangerous than they are but of suggesting that certain varieties of cultural behaviour – e.g. contacts with nations demonised by the US and its allies – are increasingly likely to be viewed as suspect. A similar effect occurs when Joris writes at the end of the preface to his collection of translations 4X1 that,

now, as I write this preface in these post-911 days, the book feels like a psycho-topography that leads from matters involving late-19th century colonialism all the way through the long and torturous 20th century to leave us exactly there where we have to start to think a new cultural constellation that will, finally, have to include the heritage of the excluded third – Islam & Arab culture

The sentence mimes discomforts of arrival and commencement but the climate post-Bali and post-Madrid makes such thinking very difficult indeed. It may be that certain types of cultural contact and translation will come to be viewed as revolutionary activity by both practitioners and the state. Even so, Joris does seem to avoid to some difficult questions here. For example, for whom exactly does this new constellation 'have to include' an excluded heritage? Is this just another version of capitalism revitalising itself with novelty? Does the excluded third have a say in whether or not it wants to be included in the new constellation?

The new global terrorism, the 'war on terror', the consequent climate that makes such questions complex and uncomfortable, the concerns over borders and migrants and the suspicion aroused by certain cross-cultural contacts are symptomatic of the world mapped in telling numerical and statistical detail in the philosopher Alphonso Lingis's essay 'Anger'. It is a world divided into 'the technocratic-commerical archipelago' and 'the outer zone'. The former consists of what Lingis terms urban technopoles where about one seventh of the planet's population live. The latter contains the rest of humanity who live in a state of distress which quickly turns to anger:

Anger declares inadmissible, intolerable the walls of technicization and simulacra that shut off one finite and singular life from the presence of others, and the Berlin Walls everywhere being built to shut off the finite and singular lives of those in the outer zone. It is the force that alone can produce for us a political existence.

Lingis's emerging world order throws Joris's nomad poetics and Adrian Clarke's critique into sharper relief. For Joris, artistic nomadicity's transcultural and transnational practice is a way of breaching those new 'Berlin Walls' and, in that breaching, of producing a newly validated political existence for the avant-garde artist. For Clarke, artistic nomadicity risks updating the naïve utopianism inherent in 'keep making it new' models of the avant-garde. His criticism can be summed up in an urgent question: does the figurative reading and writing practice of a nomad poetics risk becoming a literal walking away from political problems that are on one's doorstep?

Joris's conclusions may be less obvious and his practice unavailable to those who, unlike him, do not live across and between several languages or have not made it their practice to do so. In that sense, a nomad poetics may well be an avant-garde practice that, like many before it, works best for its inventor. This may go some way to explaining one of the most surprising aspects of A Nomad Poetics: its tone. This is a body of writing that has a confident sense of its own importance and urgency. A poetics that is concerned with extra-territoriality and with becoming as a counter to in-dwelling would perhaps benefit from being more exploratory, tentative and hospitable to criticism. Joris's response to Clarke's 'Open Letter' is included here and actually seems guiltier of utopianism than the original 'manifessay'. Two examples are instructive. First, Clarke says that he is 'nervous of the incarnation of your nomadics in cyberpoetics'. Joris's response is to re-emphasise that new media and cyberpoetics represent 'a multiplication of possibilities and potentialities' and to assert that 'though it is necessary to step gingerly, we certainly do have to take those steps'. Well, actually, no we don't if we don't want to. Some of us are still working through the possibilities and potentialities inherent in words. And who and where is the 'we' for whom Joris speaks so confidently? More to the point, how is it that with a very few exceptions such as Mark Amerika's Grammatron cyberpoetics' multiplications have produced works that are aesthetically boring and politically complacent? Second, Joris argues that 'we have some catching up to do' because 'the enemy (late global capitalism) has been thinking nomadically for long time'. He adds that 'The multi-nationals [...] do not dwell, they move'. This seems to go against the primary motivations of the historical avant-garde that Joris's nomadic poetics seeks to re-connect with: namely, the standing aside, the retreat, and the counter-motion as critique and vantage. In the middle of World War 1, Hugo Ball offered Dada from neutral Zurich as a requiem for European societies trapped in what he termed 'death-throes and death-drunkeness'. Similarly, the Expressionists celebrated convulsion, delirium and revelation as counters to their perception that so-called progress was turning man into machine.

A Nomad Poetics perhaps has most value not as an available practice in kit form but as an irritant. The writings it gathers prompt urgent questions not only about the relationship of avant-garde artistic practices and revolutionary politics but also about the relation of the avant-garde artist and the state. Indeed, the book's action as an irritant is manifest in an uncomfortable undercurrent running through much of this essay: unexplored references to terror, war and violence. I began my account of A Nomad Poetics by saying that the experience of reading it is a largely pessimistic one. The book engenders pessimism because it now has to be judged against a background of bloodshed and the concomitant reification and polarisation of individuals, nations and cultures into insiders and outsiders, threatened targets and secure non-targets, allies and demonised others. In this climate, each reader and writer will have to decide for themselves whether artistic nomadicity's cultural performance is also a relevant political behaviour.