Public (E-Journal, York University)

Berland, Jody

Hanke, Bob

Sign of a New Park

Greyson, John

English

Something Always Seems to Go Wrong Somewhere

Harcourt, Peter

A Muted Trumpet from Afar: Ruminations on the Cinematic Avant-Garde

Pastoureau, Michel

Blue, slowly. 
Michel Pastoureau 
It cost me much to part with the blue coat which I wore the first time I 
danced with Charlotte. But I could not possibly wear it any longer. 
- Goethe, The Sorrows of Werther' 
The relationship between colour and time is a close, complex and chang- 
ing one. In ancient European societies, time, measured by religious feasts, 
secular ceremonies, and the stages of life and death, was marked through 
the symbolism of colour. In contemporary societies, the relation between 
colour and the rhythm of time has been displaced and transformed. 
Colour is less and less associated with the sacred and more and more with 
the social-to appearance, to the playful, to the ephemeral. The frequency 
of its variations having been accelerated, if not corrupted. The symbols 
giving way to codes and in turn to simple fashion fads. Colours tell the 
year, the season, the spirit of the day, and the whims of time passing. 
Nevertheless, it is remarkable that these shifts, perversions or trivializa- 
tions do not appear to have in the least modified, through the course of 
time, the hierarchies, preferences and value systems governing colour. 
These remain intact today in the concrete domain of real practice, when 
we consider society as a whole rather than a particular micromilieu and 
when we inscribe the problems and stakes of colour within a time frame 
larger than a few weeks or a few months. 
Certainly, the use of colour changes, but, contrary to  what we may 
believe, it changes at an extremely slow pace. Typical in this regard, is the 
example of clothing. In the top designers' creations, in fashion magazines 
and in advertising, colours seem to be changing constantly and at faster 
and faster rate every decade. However, in the clothing actually worn by 
common mortals-that is to say, on the clothing that we see, not on tele- 
vision or in a magazine but in the street, at work, at the factory, in the 
train or subway-colours evolve a lot more imperceptibly, timidly and 
discretely. Well known to historians and sociologists is the fact that blue, 
white and black have been the colours most worn for the past five, six, 
and even ten generations by European men and women across all social 
classes and categories. 
What will the case be tomorrow? In the long run, will the colours of 
everyday life keep, at the heart of social practices, this almost immobile 
character, barely troubled by the wild dreams of fashion and the extrava- 
gance of a few creators. Or will they be submitted to more sustained 
changes in rhythm, to more profound mutations, to wholly new values 
and sensibilities neither limited by the discourse or behaviour of a few nor 
by the simple surface of beings and things? Furthermore, is this a possible 
prospective in matters of style and the sociological interpretation of 
colours, and can one predict the changes, the innovations or the disap- 
pearances that will affect this field in the decade or decades to come? This 
remains to be seen. 
Surely, it is likely that new technologies, new materials and new sup- 
ports will bring about some changes in taste and use. In respect to cloth- 
ing, for instance, fabric textures unknown before will probably make 
textiles 'speak' in a different way. Similarly, in the area of photography, 
image and television, the acceleration of the changeover from the chemi- 
cal or the magnetic towards the digital will lead to different applications 
for colour, which will in turn somewhat modify our modes of perception 
and sensibility. In the everyday, new categories of light, new modes of 
lighting will play into the scripting of colours, and in this way, on their 
role in the interior design of houses, buildings, offices and means of trans- 
portation. However, do all these mutations mean that the colours of 
tomorrow will be different from those of today? Probably not, for two 
reasons. 
The first is that regardless of the discoveries or manipulations of sci- 
ence and technology, colour remains a function of society, a cultural prac- 
tice, and a symbolic value. It is first of all society that 'makes' colour, and 
not the eye, the brain, nature, science, the computer, the artist or the pig- 
ment. Social practices and cultural values are not fixed, far from it; but, 
contrary to what is often affirmed, they evolve, as slowly and even slower 
than technological progress, aesthetic mutations or scientific discovery. 
For this reason it would be almost absurd to try and predict the 'colours 
of tomorrow.' In twenty or thirty years, they will be no different from 
today. At the most, we may imagine that in Western societies, a greater 
attention will be paid to two colours little present in daily life today: 
green, and more importantly, yellow. As for projections further into the 
future, one or two centuries from now for example, the exercise is at once 
impossible and devoid of interest. 
The second reason-and it is the principle one-comes from the fact 
that, for historians, sociologists and anthropologists alike, colours consti- 
tute neither matter, nor light, nor wave, nor vibration. They are abstract 
intellectual categories that are defined differently by culture. In the West, 
for close to a thousand years, the basic colours number six: white, red, 
black, green, yellow, and blue. There is absolutely no reason to believe 
that a given mutation might alter these six base colours in the decades to 
come. This also goes for the following five colours, those of the 'second 
rank,' which play a minor social and symbolic role: grey, brown, purple, 
pink and orange. No, if there are to be mutations they will only affect the 
varying hues of these eleven colours. New media, new pigments, new light 
may act upon the hues and shades of hues, valorizing some, and discredit- 
ing others, sometimes creating and multiplying them, perhaps even mak- 
ing some disappear. But for the six base colours that are pure categories 
(foremost ideological rather than material), the new tools, new pigments 
or new light will not have an effect. The example of the computer is 
already available to us as proof. Common are the ads which boast the 
number of colours a computer and its peripherals can recognize, save, 
edit, reproduce. Over the years, we have gone from 16 shades of grey to 
256 colours, to 64,000 colours, to 512,000, to  several millions, indeed 
tens of millions of colours today. It is unlikely that this evolution will 
carry meaning. For the machine and the technology, maybe (but even 
then.. . .). For the user, certainly not. A nuance in colour that the human 
can neither name nor differentiate from surrounding shades is a shade 
that does not exist. The human eye can really only distinguish with cer- 
tainty about a hundred odd shades (perhaps two hundred in particularly 
adept subjects) and the lexicon permits the naming of only a few dozen. 
Given this, what can these thousands and millions of colours represent? 
Can such a number have a particular significance? No, of course not. 
Colour does not exist on its own; if we refuse to acknowledge this, we 
cannot hope to understand any of the historic, social, cultural and sym- 
bolic phenomena it is tied to. Outside of its perception through the cou- 
pling of human eye and the brain, a colour only really exists if it is 
individualized by a culture, a vocabulary, and a set of social practices 
which give it name and meaning. 
This leaves the question of taste and preference. Will they evolve? We 
are forced again to respond in the negative. It is quite probable that in the 
West, for the next ten, twenty or fifty years, one colour will retain a far 
lead over all the others: the colour blue. In effect, all the public opinion 
polls undertaken since the end of the nineteenth century show that, with 
great consistency, blue is the favourite colour of more than half of the 
European population, ahead of green (15-20% of respondents) and red 
(7-8%). It is probably safe to say that if polls had been taken at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth century, indeed even in the middle of the eighteenth 
century, the results would have been identical: blue, already blue, always 
blue. In France, this tendency is even more evident than in neighbouring 
countries, with a 60% preference rate. Without reaching such high rates 
blue is also the colour of choice in the US, Canada, Australia and in all 
countries of the Western world. 
130 Stretch 12345 
European culture has progressively spread to other continents, leaving 
an almost indelible mark. On the other hand, polls carried out in non- 
Western countries reveal differing preferences. In Japan for example, red 
comes first ahead of white and black. In China, India and many parts of 
Asia, it is yellow (little appreciated in Europe). In Islamic countries, it is 
green, the colour of the prophet which superceeds white and black. All 
matters related to colour are always tied to the cultural. 
This well documented inclination towards the colour blue by Euro- 
peans poses a number of questions to historians: why? how? since when? 
how long will this preference last? what are the stakes and the signifi- 
cance? Moreover, there are many more questions which are difficult to 
answer because they point to problems inscribed in duration, and which 
bear on all aspects of social, religious, artistic and intellectual life. I have 
deliberated much on these questions elsewhere and I don't wish to re- 
examine them here. What is certain is that the unmediated European taste 
for blue is not very old. It dates back to halfway through the middle ages, 
more precisely from the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries, when for rea- 
sons theological, artistic, social and moral, the old western colour system 
which revolved around the prehistoric triad of white-red-black disap- 
peared. In a few decades, a new value system is established based on six 
base colours (white, black, red, blue, green, yellow) among which blue, 
until then very discrete, henceforth occupies a preponderant place. But it 
is in the eighteenth century in the era of the first wave of romanticism 
that blue takes the place of red and definitively gains the status of top 
colour, if not the colour par excellence. 
Contrary to what we might believe, this prediliction of contemporary 
societies for blue is not the expression of particularly strong symbolic 
impulses or stakes. On the contrary, it is because it is symbolically less 
'charged' than the other colours (particularly red, green, white or black) 
that blue is the unanimous choice (and will continue to be favoured). 
Being the colour chosen by more than half the population undoubtedly 
contributes towards weakening the symbolic potential of the colour blue. 
Since, all things considered, when we admit that our favourite colour is 
blue, what are we really revealing about ourselves? Nothing, or almost 
nothing. This taste is so banal, so lukewarm. Whereas admiting a prefer- 
ence for black, red or even grey.. . 
Here lies one of the characteristics of blue within the western symbolic 
order of colours in the modern and contemporary eras. Blue doesn't make 
any waves; it is calm, peaceful, distant, almost neutral. It invokes dream- 
ing (think of the Blues.. .) but this melancholic dream is in a way anaes- 
thetizing. Hospital walls are painted blue, tranquilizers are packaged in 
blue, it is used in traffic rules to express what is permitted, it is solicited 
Stand up picking up coffee 13 1 


Blue, Slowly

Grosz, Elizabeth

Darwin and Ontology

MacDonald, Scott

9/11, Critique, and Avant-Garde Film 
Scott MacDonald 
As I sat at the panelists' table during the final session of the Tulips Confer- 
ence, trying to listen to the panelist whose presentation immediately pre- 
ceded mine, I was seized-again, as I had been all week-by misgivings 
about the relevance of the argument I was about to make, only a few weeks 
after the catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center and its world-shak- 
ing aftermath. Basically, my argument in "Professional Myopia: How Acad- 
eme Is Failing Cinema"' is that the widespread tendency throughout North 
American academe to give up on 16mm projection and switch to video and 
digital presentations of film is destructive of film history, since it endangers 
most forms of alternative cinema. Further, I believe that this de facto deci- 
sion results from the laziness of academics whose definition of "profes- 
sional" is the use of critical and theoretical writing, ostensibly in the name 
of cinema, as a means of accruing power and status within the academic 
social system. But on that October 21st my paper seemed so frivolous that I 
considered not giving it at all and opening a discussion of how avant-garde 
media could fit within what seemed a frightening new world. 
Of course, even before the Tulips Conference, I had realized-though I 
was embarrassed to admit it, even to  myself-that watching the Twin 
Towers collapse had changed my own thinking, even about the politics of 
alternative cinema. The attack had toppled two of what had seemed, for 
forty years, my most fundamental assumptions: that while I was no com- 
munist revolutionary, I was anti-capitalist; and that my job as a teacher 
and scholar was to critique the problematic dimensions of American mili- 
tary and economic power as this power was encoded within the commer- 
cial media. I realized that my thinking had already changed, just a few 
days after the attack, when I received an email sent by, perhaps originated 
by, a group of New York City artists. It said, "Islam is not the enemy/War 
is not the answer1Break the cycle1Pass it on." Instead of speaking for me, 
as it might have before 9/11, the message annoyed me, and while I didn't 
have the words to respond at that point, by the time a friend sent me the 
same message a few weeks later, I was able to send a curt reply: "No, 
Islam is not the enemy, but certain forms of radical, fundamentalist Islam 
do seem to be; and at the moment, I have no faith that our peacefulness 
will do anything but invite further attacks." Much on my mind during 
those weeks was the image of the group of peaceful souls on the Odessa 
Steps in Potemkin whose appeal to the czar's soldiers is quickly met with 
further violence. 
In the wake of the attack on the Trade Center, the thing that seemed 
most obvious to me was that the perpetrators, whoever exactly they were, 
had planned to kill as many people as possible. As the second tower col- 
lapsed, I had said to my partner, "There go twenty thousand people." It 
was Guernica on a massive scale. In the end, the number was, thankfully, 
nothing like twenty thousand, but the point had been made: those who 
had planned and carried out the attack were interested in mass destruc- 
tion, and had they been able to kill a million people, or to level New York 
City altogether, they would certainly have done so. 
As a result, during the following weeks I found myself frustrated at the 
nature of many of the responses of alternative media people to 9/11 and 
the subsequent war in Afghanistan. What condemnations of the Trade 
Center attack I did hear or read seemed, at best, pro forma-something 
said only to demonstrate the speakers' humanity, so that they could make 
the real point, which took a variety of forms. The crudest versions went 
something like this: "Those capitalist pigs [who worked in the Trade Cen- 
ter] finally got what they deserved: pay-back for all the shit they've been 
responsible for"; "The towers shouldn't have been built in the first place; 
they were just two giant capitalist phalluses." More common were state- 
ments that, while the terrorist attacks were horrific, we (capitalist Ameri- 
cans) certainly had it coming; an attack on America was long overdue. 
Indeed, we deserved to be attacked, and so m u c h  that any military 
response from us was entirely unjustified-still further evidence of the 
belligerent capitalist imperialism that had just come home to roost. 
I was surprised by my lack of patience with a set of attitudes that, for 
much of my life, had seemed my own. But the World Trade Center attack 
had demonstrated the obvious: that there are people in the world, other 
than Americans, other than capitalists, who are willing to effect horrific 
atrocities, including the unapologetic mass destruction of men, women, 
and children, seemingly without misgivings, in the name of God. When 
much of the artistic community rushed to blame the United States as at 
least the indirect cause of the attack, this community revealed its own 
fundamental attachment to a sterile nationalism, even a kind of negative 
imperialism: "No one else in the world is responsible for anything; this 
community seemed to say, "Only our nation can be responsible for a hor- 
ror of this magnitude, and only the suffering we cause and our embarrass- 
ment and self-hatred are real." 
In mid-October I went to New York to attend the New York Film Festi- 
val avant-garde programs organized by Mark McElhatten and Gavin 
Smith, and, like so many others, made a pilgrimage to Ground Zero. 
After circling the site of the attack, we walked to Wall Street to see the 
Stock Exchange with its giant flag-and I was amazed to hear myself 
think a silent prayer: "Don't let the nation collapse; hang in there." 
During the month between 9/11 and my visit, I had been haunted by 
two images of Lower Manhattan. One was that ubiquitous view from 
Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the financial district that for 
a generation or two had been the most iconic image of New York. The 
other was more "private," a view down East Broadway in Chinatown 
toward the Woolworth building and the Trade Center, an image I had 
come to associate with a transformation in my life during my early thir- 
ties that had brought me storybook romantic love and a new professional 
passion: exploring and serving the wide world of avant-garde cinema. 
Those views had become my quintessential images of the city around 
which my life had always circled and in  which, during the late 1970s, I 
was discovering a world of new possibilities. 
Or to put it in a truer-if more melodramatic-way, 9/11 had revealed 
to me that I had-not exactly sub-consciously, but not exactly con- 
sciously, either-come to see New York City as a "sacred space" and to 
feel that the City's energy and beauty, its ethnic and historical multiplic- 
ity, its artistic pre-eminence were encoded in those two images. By the 
time of my visit to Ground Zero the connection of the attacks to a certain 
strain of fundamentalist Islam had come to seem quite clear, and I 
remember thinking that, whatever else one might say about the United 
States, we had not nuked Mecca and were not (I hoped, assumed) even 
considering such an action, despite the terrorist attack on my "Mecca" 
and its obvious implications. It had come to seem quite evident that the 
target of the attacks was the most visible symbol, not just of capitalism, 
but of modern life in an industrialized society and the many good things 
this life has made possible-including a living discourse of all kinds of 
cinema. 
By the time I drove to the Tulips Conference a week after my visit to 
New York and Ground Zero, I was increasingly troubled by the fact that, 
over a period of three decades, the primary justification for independent 
cinema had become its ongoing critique of American capitalism and bour- 
geois life. Of course, I had used this justification endlessly: my ongoing 
series of filmmaker interview books is called A Critical Cinema. In avant- 
garde film, at least American avant-garde film, a critique of capitalism- 
as exemplified and propagandized by Hollywood filmmaking in particu- 
lar-has been a badge of honour for decades. And in American academe 
much of what is considered sophisticated writing is implicitly, and some- 
times explicitly, anti-capitalist and anti-American. 
It is true that in recent years I've been growing more conscious of the 
ironies of this situation, which seem particularly evident in academe, 
where new spins on Marxism, new forms of anti-Americanism and anti- 
Westernism, are of particular use in moving up the ladder of academic 
power and prestige. Granted, I don't read as much academic writing as 
many of my colleagues, but I've never read an academic book or  essay 
that, in its critique of capitalist patterns in commercial cinema and mod- 
ern industrial society, also critiques what its own real purpose within a 
capitalist economy is. It may be argued that  many of these essays and 
books are meant to be calls to action, but, in most instances, the action 
that seems most called for is a further immersion in the increasingly com- 
plex-and for most readers opaque-language of academic discourse. 
In avant-garde filmmaking, the same paradox is evident, particularly in 
the most pervasive avant-garde approach of recent decades, "found- 
footage" or "recycled" cinema, where many filmmakers feel free, even 
obliged, to steal whatever imagery and sound they want from whomever 
they want (other than Disney!) as a means of mounting a critique of com- 
mercial media by turning its own absurdities and excesses against it. I 
have always been in sympathy with this Trojan-Horse strategy, but I am 
also aware that  for many of these anti-capitalist warriors "success" is 
measured, at  least in part, by the acceptance of their work at  festivals and 
in museums that are usually underwritten by (who else?) "The Enemy." 
And when it seemed that in American Beauty Sam Mendes had stolen the 
image of the plastic bag from avant-garde filmmaker Nick Dorsky, few in 
the enraged avant-garde community seemed to see the irony of the situa- 
tion (Dorsky later explained that he wasn't sure he should use the image 
since it was so common in poetry). 
At some point during the Tulips Conference, in response (as I remem- 
ber) to several pro forma attacks on capitalism as the problem in world 
affairs, Peter Harcourt stood up and announced that he was not an anti- 
capitalist and that his hope was not for an end to capitalism, but for an 
"enlightened capitalism," a more humane and decent capitalism. It was 
precisely what  I had been wanting to  say, and Harcourt's statement 
brought to mind some lines from Emerson's "Self-Reliance": 
Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They 
teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored 
inflexibility than most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. 
Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what 
we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with 
shame our own opinion from another.2 
Continuing to argue for a global revolution-either in the name of com- 
munism or of fundamentalist Islam-seems to me as fully a form of polit- 
ical suicide as was the World Trade Center attack. As a result, I must, and 
do, hope for changes in the nature of capitalism, which I believe can be 
effected (and in some past instances have been affected) by creative 
human beings of courage and good will. 
I've come to believe that what I long understood as a progressive cri- 
tique of capitalism, by media scholars and media makers, is often implic- 
itly reactionary-and disingenuously reactionary at that. It assumes that 
the best that media scholars and makers can do is react to the status quo: 
model a hatred of capitalism and whatever it supports (except perhaps 
those systems that benefit makers and scholars). As a result, activities that 
might develop or maintain spaces within capitalist societies for more pro- 
gressive alternatives are increasingly ignored. It's simply easier-and often 
more profitable-to produce "radical" written critique of what one 
doesn't like than to create and support vital alternatives within capitalist 
economies. How else are we to account for the paradox of academe's pro- 
duction of a huge anti-capitalist (institutionally supported) literature cri- 
tiquing mainstream film, and of fewer and fewer opportunities for 
students and the public a t  large to experience truly progressive moving- 
image media on a regular basis in a public forum? I've become convinced 
that so long as film critique is grounded in a knee-jerk anti-capitalism, 
and in a hatred of the United States as the most visible representative of 
capitalism, it can never play a progressive role in an improvement of 
media or society. At most, it can lead only to endless complaint and self- 
righteous frustration-and to an expanding literature that may serve the 
careers of academics, but does not serve film history or expanded media 
awareness in any practical way. 
On the other hand, if we could accept that alternative media could play 
a role in the development of a more humane form of capitalism, and, by 
doing so, help enable an ever-expanding world to deal with its many prob- 
lems more effectively, we would have a less frustrating and more useful 
rationale for presenting a broader range of media art. We could express 
our revulsion with the more decadent tendencies of commercial cinema 
without damning commerce itself, which makes all media possible; and we 
could be clearer about how avant-garde filmlvideo provides evocations of 
a more gentle, generous world, and more energetic in our efforts to be sure 
that these evocations reach those for whom they can be transformative. 
What we need now is a new commitment to making what we consider the 
best and most progressive films/videos/digital works available and attrac- 
tive to a growing audience, and a new generation of scholars who can see, 
and tease out, and communicate the visions of progressive media makers 
so that a new generation of viewers can find their way into this work. 
My deepest respect as a film historian and programmer has always 
gone to those films/videos that demonstrate most dramatically the quin- 
tessential lesson of avant-garde media: that magnificent works can be 
made from minimal financial resources. Indeed, many of what seem to me 
the most intelligent and memorable films and videos reveal the decadence 
of most Hollywood filmmaking, and so much of modern life, in both 
their production process and in the experiences they create for audiences. 
Of course, avant-garde film- and video-makers have developed myriad 
ways of transcending limitation. If I am most deeply attracted to 
films/videos that model a retraining of perception-so that I can live more 
fully in the limited time I have, with the limited resources at my disposal 
-I remain in sympathy with all those makers who use the often limited 
resources available to them within capitalist economies to produce some- 
thing substantial-and who, by implication, suggest we can do the same 
in our lives as teachers and as citizens. 
There is, of course, a considerable history of organizational models for 
expanding academic and public awareness of alternative media, many of 
which were developed by individuals or small groups with very little to 
work with. The most obvious of these models are the major North Amer- 
ican film societies of the 1930s-1950s-Cinema 16 in New York, Art in 
Cinema in San Francisco, and probably the Vancouver Film Society (I've 
not yet seen any detailed records of this venerable organization's work)- 
which created large and vital communities around the presentation of 
alternative media during an era as politically and economically conserva- 
tive as our own. These organizations didn't rely on government funding 
or even on angel financing; they modelled community organization and 
action on the basis of a commitment to the use of media as a means of 
expanded awareness and more informed citizenship. The results of their 
efforts included new audiences for a wide range of cinema, a network of 
smaller film societies each of which developed its own audience, and the 
widespread distribution of forms of film that might never have been seen 
otherwise. That so much of this history has been ignored by so many in 
academe-even in an era when Masters and Doctoral theses about cul- 
tural history abound-is both typical and frustrating. 
Ultimately, what a good many alternative films/videos demonstrate to 
those of us who find our way to them is that our quality of life-once our 
basic needs are met-is not a function of accumulation or extravagance, 
but of a deeper, more complex attention and awareness. This is, above all, 
the lesson that capitalism, in its more corrupt manifestations, doesn't 
want us to learn, and it is this lesson, above all others, that so many of us 
within modern industrialized societies have the opportunity to teach our- 
selves, our students, and the larger society. Generations of inventive, 
courageous filmmakers have produced a body of work we have only 
begun to deploy in this quest. It remains for us to become a true avant- 
garde again, and show how cinema can model movement toward a world 
order that neither embarrasses nor frightens us. But we can only do this if 
we're willing to move beyond the cul-de-sac of endless written critique of 
and complaint about what we don't respect, and serve the field of creative 
media by working to develop vigorous communities, inside and outside 
academe, around the informed, inventive, regular exhibition of what we 
do admire. 
Notes 
1 Scott MacDonald, "Professional Myopia: How Academe is Failing Cinema," Quarterly 
Review of Film Studies 19, No. 3 (Summer 2002), 201-207. 
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance," The Complete Essays and Writings of Ralph 
Wraldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library, 1940), 145-146. 


9/11, Critiwue, and Avant-Garde Film

Cubitt, Sean

Nichols, Miriam

Urban Landscapes and Dirty Lyrics: 
Peter Culley and Lisa Robertson 
Miriam Nichols 
It is time to paw the 
landscape once more as radically 
as hard green berries 
replace the red and once more 
It is too late to be simple. 
- Lisa Robertson, from "porchverse"' 
A born-in-New-Yorker once remarked to me that the only polis one was likely to 
find on the west coast would be a national park. While I would not care to defend 
the east versus west distinction beyond cocktail parlance, it is probably fair to say 
that nature is never far from the end of one's nose in British Columbia. The big 
mountains, big forests, big ocean, and resource-based economy get in people's 
poems, artworks, and politics as the coastal rain gets into their bones nine months 
out of the twelve. Always dressed in quotation marks of course, "nature" is a 
perennial locus of cultural expression. In The Climax Forest (1995), Peter Culley 
weaves scenes of the town and country around his home near Nanaimo on Van- 
couver Island into dense landscapes that include personal, cultural, and historical 
~omponents .~ Lisa Robertson, in XEclogue (1993), Debbie: An Epic (1997), and 
The Weather (2001), plays off the conventions of various literary constructions of 
place to articulate deterritorialized environments that blend the linguistic, horti- 
cultural, gendered, and political with naughty sex. For both poets, landscape is 
much more than local scenery: it is an intense performance of lyrical sensibility 
riven by historical events and cultural complexity.3 
Peter Culley began to publish chapbooks with small local presses in the early 
1980s; Lisa Robertson emerged a little later, toward the end of the decade. At this 
time, Language writing was au courant in the U.S. and Canada, poststructuralism 
reigned in the academies, and the Kootenay School of Writing (1985) had just been 
established in Vancouver as a local venue for the new avant-garde poetics. Culley 
and Robertson inherited from their elders the reflexivity which marked this second 
phase of the postmodern-acute awareness of linguistic, social, political, and cul- 
tural determinants of experience-and an attention to the "politics of poetic form" 
as Charles Bernstein was to phrase it famo~sly.~ For these younger poets, epistemo- 
logical skepticism and a distrust of the merely aesthetic was not a discovery or 
focus of their work, but a point of departure. In addition, the big commercial media 
to which early Language poetsS had responded became for the succeeding genera- 
tion an even more intense source of determination. Not only were their immediate 
predecessors focused on the inescapability of social interpellation, but new, denser 
forms of mediation were on the horizon in the shape of computer technology and 
the globalization of economics. Under such circumstances, lyric and landscape, per- 
son and place seemed to become simulacra. What appeared to be lost to the avant- 
garde as well as the mainstream of the 1980s and 90s was a way to publish the 
experiences of its constituents, and in fact even the concept of experience had been 
discredited in the poststructuralist critique of phenomenology. 
Nonetheless, it is to the experience of person and place that Culley and Robert- 
son return us, not as perceptual immediacy but rather description of the sensations 
and feelings of being-here. Lyn Hejinian's comments on personhood are relevant. 
She writes that if we consider person and place as inseparable, "the epistemologi- 
cal nightmare of the solipsistic self breaks down, and the essentialist yearning after 
truth and origin can be discarded in favor of the experience of e~perience".~ To
this I would add that the nightmare of the over-determined, interpellated self 
might begin to break down too with presentations of "the experience of experi- 
ence." To recognize one's embeddedness in a place that has been importantly 
shaped by impersonal historical events, and to acknowledge the epistemological 
impossibility of direct experience or authentic selves does not mean that person 
and place cannot be articulated, but rather that their status changes. Re-enter the 
lyric-a poetic voice more closely associated with personal feeling than with pub- 
lic stance. To turn to lyric is to let the poetic voice become small and personal, 
rather than large and public. But the twist in Culley and Robertson, as with con- 
temporary others, is that this little voice sounds in a "landscape" that is really the 
whole of the writer's time-space milieu. This is what it means to render person and 
place inseparable: the contemporary lyric voice drags its historicity along with it. 
On one hand, the poems simply record the "experience of experience"; on the 
other, they give us a local and personalized view of a public geo-historical site. 
In Land Sliding, a survey of Canadian landscape writing, William New remarks 
that, "The particular and local ... do not exist in a cultural and historical vacuum; 
they derive from conventions-and while they can and do often re-record these con- 
ventions, whether for good or ill, they also counter and contend with them, 
reclaiming continuously the power of reality from the presumptions of knowledge".7 
The significance of the poetic gesture we find in Culley and Robertson is that it 
points to another moment in this on-going contention for "the power of reality": it 
is not original, in the sense of announcing a new formal or cultural paradigm, but 
singular in its insistence on the specificities of person and place. If, in a commercial 
culture, a meaningful voice is denied to most people, if reality is not publicly nego- 
tiable even in the limited way of representative democracies, if it is instead the prove- 
nance of corporate boardrooms, government caucuses, or private research facilities, 
both the citizen and artist are effectively silenced. The publication of those small "r" 
excluded realities becomes a measure of what the mainstream denies, destroys, for- 
gets, or is simply not structured to acknowledge. Hence, when Culley walks us 
through the damaged landscapes around Nanaimo we get a distinctive and intimate, 
small "r" view of a place that has been roughly handled by the corporate and civil 
agents of global economics-all filtered through the poet's eclectic tastes in opera, 
pop music, and German Romanticism. By a different method, Robertson also pulls 
the public and institutional into relationship with the personal and lyrical. Like a 
squatter, she inhabits and redecorates abandoned literary genres that have shaped 
our imagination of place. In the rank utopia of pastoral, she plants the "renovated 
flower" of a sexualized rhetoric; over the Roman ruins of epic, she tosses "Debbie's 
stiff ~ h i r t " ; ~  in the meteorologically-inspired Weather, person and place blend as 
breath to wind. This is to do otherwise than expose the ideological fagades of domi- 
nant social paradigms or perform the indeterminacy of language: it is to talk a lived- 
in reality back to the Big One. As nearly a century of radical art has shown us, 
cognitive liberation does not translate easily into public policy and art that relies on 
it for radical cache' is beginning to wear thin. Robertson is blunter than I on this 
point: in "porchverse," she writes that "the socius l of 'le texte' l is bullshit".9 Cer- 
tainly her purpose and Culley's is to show us the social frames that shape lives and 
to attend to the endless possibilities for combining things that language provides, but 
it is also to sing the poet's being-here-to insist on that specificity-and thus, defi- 
antly, to reach again for the power of the real. 
Notes 
1 Lisa Robertson, "porchverse," The Weather (Vancouver: New Star, 2001), 69-78. 
2 See Peter Culley, The Climax Forest (Vancouver: Leech Books, 1995). 
3 See Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (Vancouver: Tsunami Editions, 1993); Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver: 
New Star Books, 1997); and The Weather (Vancouver: New Star, 2001). 
4 See The Politics of Poetic Fom: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 
1990), for a collection of essays from (mostly) American Language writers on politics and aesthetics. 
5 For a survey of Language writing in its inaugural moments see the essays in Bob Perelman, 
WritingITalks (Carbondale; Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); The 
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, eds. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale; Edwardsville: South- 
ern Illinois University Press, 1984); In The Amevican Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME.: National Poetry 
Foundation,l986); or Barrett Watten, Total Syntax (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni- 
versity Press, 1985). These collections, all from the 1980s, include much discussion of the poet's relation- 
ship to mainstream culture and politics, and this is the kind of work that precedes that of Culley and 
Robertson. In 1985, for instance, a large conference at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design brought 
many American language writers to Vancouver for a lively few days of readings, discussions, and occa- 
sional battles with local poets. At this point, Culley was just emerging and Robertson not yet publishing. 
6 Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 203. 
7 W.H. New, Land Sliding (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 11. Emphasis mine. 
8 Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic, 1. 17. 
9 Lisa Robertson, "porchverse," The Weathev (Vancouver: New Star, 2001), 75. 


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