Barrett Watten, tr. Abigail Lang
Véronique Pittolo
La Fondation des États-Unis vous invite
le mercredi 15 mars 2017
à une conférence de Barrett WATTEN à 18h30
“Poetics as Value Thinking: Transvaluations of Language Writing”
Discutante: Hélène Aji
suivie d’une lecture bilingue Double Change à 19h30 (environ)
de Barrett WATTEN et Véronique PITTOLO
Fondation des États-Unis
15 Boulevard Jourdan,
75014 Paris
(RER Cité Université / Tram Cité Universitaire)
entrée libre
inscription recommandée : https://www.weezevent.com/double-change-barret-watten
Evénement organisé par Hélène Aji et Abigail Lang avec le soutien de l’université Paris-Diderot (LARCA), de l’université Paris-Nanterre (CREA) et de l’École Normale Supérieure.
Biographies
Poète et critique, Barrett Watten est un membre fondateur du mouvement Language. Il est l’auteur de Frame: 1971–1990, Progress/Under Erasure, Bad History, et poursuit actuellement la composition de Zone. Une traduction par Martin Richet de Plasma / Parallèles / « X » est disponible en français au Quartanier. De 1982 à 1998, Barrett Watten a dirigé la revue critique Poetics Journal avec Lyn Hejinian dont rend compte le volume A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998 (dir. Hejinian et Watten, Wesleyan 2012). Il est l’auteur de trois volumes d’essais critiques : Total Syntax (Illinois, 1985), The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan, 2003) et tout récemment de Questions of Poetics. Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa, 2016). Avec Carrie Noland, il a dirigé le volume Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (Palgrave, 2009). Il a coordonné et publié un projet d’autobiographie collective en dix volumes composé par dix membres du mouvement Language : The Grand Piano. An Experiment in Collective Autobiography San Francisco 1975–80 (Mode A, 2007-2010). Barrett Watten est professeur à Wayne State University à Detroit.
Véronique Pittolo se situe dans une écriture hybride, entre poésie et prose, dont l’unité est la phrase, le vers remodelé vers une possibilité narrative ou l’énoncé qui lui permet d’associer réflexion critique et enchantement poétique. Elle revisite le patrimoine commun pour réveiller les souvenirs du lecteurs, réactiver des bribes de ces fictions «éteintes», déplier les mythes pour les replier autrement : Hélène de Troie, Shreck, le petit chaperon rouge, Gary Cooper… Elle considère ses propres textes comme une matière vivante à réactiver, lors de lectures publiques, par exemple. Elle est l’auteur d’une quinzaine de livres, la plupart parus aux éditions de l’Attente et chez Al Dante et de plusieurs projets multimédias. En 2012, Toute Résurrection commence par les pieds se présentait comme un recueil de poèmes critiques interrogeant la place du féminin dans l’art occidental de la Renaissance au XXème siècle. En 2014, Une jeune fille dans tout le royaume proposait trois contes contemporains qui fustigeaient les clichés d’une certaine éducation bourgeoise, catholique et policée. Monomère & Maxiplace est à paraître aux éditions de l’Attente en 2017.
Véronique Pittolo favors a hybrid form between poetry and prose, lines with a narrative possibility, statements which enable her to combine critical thinking and poetic enchantment. She taps our common cultural background, rekindling the reader’s memories, reactivating dormant fictions, unfolding myths to refold them differently: Helen of Troy, Shreck, little red riding hood, Gary Cooper… She considers her own texts as a living matter to be reactivated, on the occasion of poetry readings for instance. She is the author of some fifteen books, most published with Editions de l’Attente or Al Dante, and several multimedia projects. In 2012, the critical poems collected in Toute Résurrection commence par les pieds questioned the place of women in Western art from the Renaissance to the twentieth-century. In 2014, Une jeune fille dans tout le royaume offered three tales that castigated the clichés conveyed by a polished Catholic bourgeois education. Monomère & Maxiplace is forthcoming from éditions de l’Attente.
Barrett Watten is a professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of Total Syntax, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics and, most recently, Questions of Poetics. Language Writing and Consequences (Iowa, 2016). He coedited Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement with Carrie Noland, and A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–1998 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive with Lyn Hejinian. A founding member of the Language school movement of poetry, his creative works include Frame: 1971–1990, Progress/Under Erasure, Bad History, and, in progress, Zone. He lives in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
“Poetics as Value Thinking:
Transvaluations of Language Writing”
In several recent essays, I have taken up the figure of the poet/critic as a producer of value in a way that combines aesthetics and political economy. In this lecture, I will restate my conclusions so far—in relation to the concept of “value” in Marx, after George Henderson’s revisionist Value in Marx—and explore, through the concept of transvaluation, how “value” can be expanded to the production of “values” in poetry and art. I will continue the genealogy of the poet/critic from its modernist forebears through the moment of Language writing up to the present. Supported by my reading of value theory, I want to make three points about the dual figure of the poet/critic. The first is that the dyad comprehends the social relations of poetic production in both theorizing and intervening in them. Poet and critic are twin aspects of poetic labor, brought into relation to create both the centripetal poem and centrifugal text. The second is that the labor of the poet/critic takes up the literariness of the work that came before and reproduces it in present terms; there is a necessary and indissoluble relation between the writing of the present and the past, which cannot be undone by mere negation. The third is that the poet/critic dyad recognizes the expansion, not contraction, of terms for value in a manner that parallels the difficult work of establishing value in political economy. Indeed, for precisely the reason that the question of value in political and economic terms is expanding, in ways that could never have been foreseen, the poet/critic theorizes writing as production in open terms—as a mode of knowing and acting toward an undisclosed future. We do not know yet what aspects of the lifeworld we may call into question and substantiate are relevant or correct; we can only know by testing. The poet/critic is agonistic in this sense: as a dual figure for value and labor, it keeps all stops open as a mode of interpreting the world that can change it. In the company of associated producers, the poet/critic looks ahead.