“Hostility…within”

the Neoliberal University

poetics, image, theory & thought

Lyn Hejinian

Social Meaning in the Event of Poetics  

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In the early 1970s, a group of literary writers in the US made a turn to language; this was also a turn to poetics. The writers did not organize themselves as an intentional society or declare themselves members of a school or movement, but they did meet in their respective cities with what in retrospect seems like extraordinary frequency at poetry readings and they did hang out together after the readings at local bars or at each other’s places, where conversations about what they were reading (much of it literary theory just being published in the United States), what they were doing as writers, and why they were doing it were intense, prolonged, sometimes contentious, and felt to be important. What was at stake, and remains at stake, was meaning—or, rather, what was at stake were meanings, both present and possible: literal meaning, political meaning, aesthetic meaning, and above all social meaning. In a 1975 issue of Alcheringa (New Series, Volume One, Number 2; Boston University, 1975), a small anthology of poems by some of these writers appeared. It was edited by Ron Silliman, and in his brief prefatory note he writes, “9 poets, out of the present, average age 28, whose work might be said to ‘cluster’ about such magazines as This, Big Deal, Tottel’s, the recent Doones supplements, the Andrews-edited issue of Toothpick, etc. Called variously ‘language centered,’ ‘minimal,’ ‘non-referential formalism,’ ‘diminished referentiality,’

Abigail Child

Inside the Image Vortex: Editing Ethics

My first reaction to the prompt for the conference webinar in March 2021—to address the “poetics and the university in crisis”—was to aim for a larger arc. To begin with a series of questions. What are the social and economic structures that evoked these crises? Is this actuality a crisis of ethics as much as one of poetics—ethics as a definitional aspect of what a poetics should be? If poetics is to serve, not as a blueprint, but an inspiration, a process, a set of ideas for creating a radicalized filmmaking and a more daring writing, how would we define this new poetics within the context of our ever aggressive, indeed regressive corporatized world? 

The university has its institutional priorities for art and aesthetics, as does corporate media and Hollywood-style filmmaking. Each institutionalized system reproduces its own ahistorical readings of the past and fictionalized utopias of the present. Thus, the artist-image-maker is confronted with a series of challenging tasks. How can we, as artists, slice through the seemingly impervious structures of hegemony associated with the institutional, the conventional? Can a not only critical but a politicized poetics help?