Charles Bernstein: Avant-Garde Is a Constant Renewal

The essay explores the work of Charles Bernstein in light of constant renewal. John Ashbery, as one of the brightest representatives of the New York School, and Charles Bernstein, as a representative of the language (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E), have similar attitudes toward language. They have much in common in terms of poetics: in the rejection of loud phrases, prophetic statements, emotions, confessionalism, and certain self-centeredness. Poetry is a private matter for both. Both have poetics built on the “oddness that stays odd,” as Bernstein himself put it, paraphrasing Pound's “news that stays news.” Both are aimed at renovating the language, and the verses of both are built on fragmentation, collage, moving from one statement to another without preparation. However, in Ashbery, whose poems are surreal, these transitions are smoother, based on an apparent connection, what Bernstein calls “hypotaxis” or “associative parataxis.” In contrast, Bernstein's poetry is built on parataxis; it is “bumpy,” in the poet's own words.

The Cage Case. Arts and Social Neuroscience

A great story told by a musician is the basis of the best stage experimentation of the second half of the 20th century. The musician is John Cage, whose work synthesizes the entire system of arts within the extraordinary world of the avant-garde. This great story begins with the experimental artistic activities which were developed in the 1920s, consolidated in the thirties and continued through the post-war period up to the dawn of the fifties. Apart from the socio-historical cross-section Cage’s experimentation provides, it is also a pretext for reflecting on the artist’s work as well as the relationship between neuroscience and art. Important contributions to this topic come from the neuro-scientific-social research on new expressions “of creativity, imagination, genius” (Pecchinenda, 2018). This study is based on the assumption that Cage was the forerunner of neuronal experimentation that would be central to the experiments and research of many other artists. The theoretical reference model can be found in the research of the neuroscientist Kandel et al, whose work was the starting point for this investigation. Kandel grasps the definitive break between scientific logic and humanistic sensitivity in the methodological reductionism practiced by neuroscience and in the experiments of contemporary creativity. According to Kandel, both neuroscience and artistic experimentation have similar objectives and problems, and in some respects seem to develop similar methodological practices. Kandel identifies the use of memory, synthesis and knowledge of the world in authors such as Mondrian, de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Louis, Warhol as well as the New York school of which Cage was an important member. The relationship between art and neuroscience is synthetized in the avant-garde action of Cage and in all the artists who launched continuous attacks against traditional forms. The transition from figurative art to abstraction is “comparable” to the reductionist process that is used in the scientific field to explain complexity and phenomenology. The prolegomena of this discourse are anticipated by a previous work written by Kandel in 2012 and can also be found in other studies on the relationship between neuroscience and art, in particular in the reflections of the neurobiologist and father of neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki. Zeki analyzed artists work as a practice perfectly comparable to the research carried out by neuroscientists. Cage, the focus of this investigation, carried out a sound-stage-vision experimentation affecting theatre, media and art which can be examined from at least two different perspectives. The first concerns the definitive subversion of “innate rules of perception” (Kandel) and the second deals with the relationship between art and neuroscience.

Sound and Fury Signifying Something: The Political Consequences of the Opt-Out Movement

Background and Context Grassroots activism is on the rise in American education, leading some scholars to announce the arrival of a “New Politics of Education” in which political elites and grassroots actors clash over foundational questions of policy and power. However, little research has examined just how consequential grassroots education activism might actually be in this new era. This study takes up this area of inquiry by examining the political consequences of the opt-out movement, arguably the largest and most high-profile grassroots education movement in recent history. Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the political consequences of the opt-out movement in four New York school districts. Specifically, this study addresses the following research questions: What impact has the opt-out movement had on local education politics and policies, and do these effects vary across communities with different levels of opt-out activism? Research Design This study takes the form of a mixed methods, comparative case study analysis of the opt-out movement in four New York school districts purposefully sampled to exploit variation in district opt-out rates and racial demographics. Within each district, five sources of original data were collected, including a survey of Grade 3–8 parents, focus groups with opt-out parents and non-opt-out parents, interviews with district elites, interviews with key activists, and documentary sources. Data analysis was both quantitative (descriptive statistics) and qualitative (inductive simultaneous pattern coding). Findings Results suggest that while the opt-out movement has not yet produced many substantive changes in state or local test-based accountability policies, it has significantly increased and transformed parent engagement with education politics in the four case districts. These engagement effects were particularly pronounced in the high-opt-out districts. Conclusions and Recommendations This study concludes by offering a tempered view of the opt-out movement's impact on education policymaking while simultaneously indicating potentially significant changes in the way parents participate in education politics. In doing so, it produces implications for the study of education politics, policy, and activism more broadly. Principal among these are the importance for grassroots movements to build alliances with institutional actors in order to effect meaningful policy change, and the value of considering alternative definitions of movement “success” in future research on education politics and activism.

“Hints That Are Revelations”

This article reads the transformation of urban space in US cities during and since the urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s in dialogue with queer and disability theories of access to the social and the built environment. Knittle focuses on obsolescence as an urban planning strategy used to justify the removal of buildings and people from the present, as he explores how queer and disability studies have negotiated and advocated for access to the present and the future while refusing assimilation to normative social forms. He reads across body and city scales to consider access as dynamic and to map how the ableist expectations projected onto disabled bodies in what Alison Kafer describes as a “curative imaginary” appear on the city scale as an “urban curative imaginary.” To explore resistances to obsolescence that refuse assimilation while demanding access, Knittle reads the “window poems” of queer New York School poet James Schuyler. In these poems, Schuyler documents small and large forms of urban transformation from his Manhattan apartment during the 1950s and 1960s. Schuyler’s poems, Knittle argues, model strategies for how to identify the obsolescence of normative space rather than the obsolescence of queer and disabled bodies. He uses the poems’ focus on the queer potential of how urban spaces change to argue for a queer disability urbanism that takes the dynamism of access as a precondition for negotiating equitable forms of social participation and public life.

American Surrealism

Surrealism, whose doctrine was originally conceived as an uncanny hybrid of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud, was not easily transplanted from its Parisian hothouse to the wide-open spaces of the United States. Surrealism’s materialist dream-logic caught on mainly among the poets and painters of New York City during World War II when war refugees André Breton and his cohort spread their influence there. After the war and the return of the French surrealists to Europe, American surrealism withered until the cultural revolution of the 1960s when it underwent a new and even more vigorous flowering, often blending with left-wing political activism. With the end of postwar economic expansion, paralleled by a more conservative turn in American culture, surrealism as a self-conscious literary movement once again receded to the margins. At the same time, the surrealist image has become broadly disseminated in contemporary American poetry as a readily available and legible trope, used whenever a moment of sublime estrangement is needed in a poem. Surrealism persists in this way as an individualized stylistic flourish, maintaining a dilute yet ubiquitous presence in American literary culture. Yet even as surrealism appears to have been assimilated into and domesticated by the larger culture, a number of more or less marginalized American poets have remained committed to the original vision of surrealism as a revolutionary worldview, as a word- and world-transforming practice. The second wave of surrealist writing in the Untied States broke and bifurcated during the 1950s and 1960s into various channels represented by the New York School, Deep Image, and the orthodox Chicago Surrealist Group. In the first quarter of the 21st century, few American poets claim a purely surrealist identity. Nonetheless, an occulted surrealist practice runs through the dominant trend in contemporary American avant-garde poetry, namely, the synthesis of Language writing and the New York School. American culture in the 21st century, characterized by a more or less complete commodification of the life-world, where desire—another key term in surrealism—has been sublated into consumerism, brings a new set of challenges to the surrealist imperative to achieve utopia by way of profane illumination.