Taylor Brady’s and Thom Donovan’s Nonsites || Rob Halpern's Introduction (Reading at Camerawork)

The following is a transcript of Rob Halpern’s introduction to Taylor Brady’s and Thom Donovan’s Nonsite/Camerawork reading on 7/25/07:

I want to introduce Taylor’s and Thom’s work by way of a little thought experiment. In the spirit of the Nonsite Collective’s commitment to turning the space between related projects into a kind of learning commons, I thought I’d talk about the commitments Taylor’s and Thom’s writing share, and I want to do this by way of the concept of the “nonsite” itself, insofar as this rubric has the potential to bring two projects into relation whose surface effects don’t resemble one another.

I should say, first, that while it’s difficult to dissociate the concept of the nonsite from the work of Robert Smithson, the Nonsite Collective isn’t interested in rehashing Smithson’s ideas. As Thom mentioned to me yesterday, the limit of Smithson’s notion of the “non-site” was made pretty clear recently by Tonya Foster. Responding to Smithson's fascination with Central Park, Foster remarked that his work on Central Park would have looked a lot different had he done a little bit of research regarding the impact of the park's construction on the African American community. Instead, that impact, and the various displacements that occurred around it, underwent a secondary erasure in Smithson's essay on “The Dialectical Landscape,” thus becoming a real, unacknowledged “nonsite.” And this touches on the way the collective wants to orient its attention, while testing the potential of such concepts for different kinds of critical and practical use.

In relation to both Taylor’s and Thom’s work, “nonsite” becomes a useful term insofar as their work responds to various forms of social invisibility and erasure. Taylor’s novels, for example, situate their narrating subject in relation to the often illegible catastrophes of accumulated dead labor, capital’s post-modern concentration and trickle-down thru S. Florida’s suburban development. The writing takes aim at a whole panoply of violent forces we can never adequately grasp, but which have nonetheless penetrated us and made us into the social beings we are.

In an expanded version of this introduction, I would speak to how both Microclimates (Krupskaya 2001) and Occupational Treatment (Atelos 2006) allegorize the effects of these forces at the level of their narrative form. Briefly, though, with respect to Occupational Treatment alone, the book opens with the line: “here is the catalogue of the construction disasters I promised,”—and while those disasters range from a gratuitously dispatched old aunt to the hidden violations of military occupations, that catalogue arrives at the limit of its own narrativization in a series of blank film stills in the novel’s central section, where the writing works to “recover [from oblivion] invisible event obscene relation” referring here, among other things, to the violent construction of the gendered body—something rarely treated from the so-called normative male position within the sex/gender matrix of identity and desire—just one of many constructions crucial to the smooth functioning of capital.

But Taylor’s work activates a much wider array of thematic blanks and formal voids in its tireless effort to “to place ourselves in relation to things” and “reassemble a picture of one’s location in the world”: these are blanks and voids where what can’t be seen becomes the real material against which both the narrating and the lyric subject positions itself.

Within the framework of Taylor’s project, our socio-aesthetic problems can be thought of in terms of vision: our situation being one in which the light we depend on in order to see the world turns out to be the residual glare emitted by all our apparatuses of social production: military, industrial, sexual, urban, environmental. This is a world in which, as Taylor writes, “the sun has risen. And is false. Layer after unbearably bright layer. This is the opacity of light in the barrens of architecture” [OT 239]. Melissa Dyne’s cover image for Occupational Treatment illustrates this beautifully: the scene is one of a dark room in which the only light is the light emitted by a camera obscura projecting an inverted image of a desert motel and a pool on a blank wall. The camera obscura, of course, is critical for Karl Marx in his effort to describe the inversions in perception and cognition that structure ideological consciousness. One can say that the rigor of Taylor’s writing amounts to a counter-force commensurate to that structure. But this is a counter-force that refuses the consoling illusion that the ideological image can be simply overturned or corrected, as Taylor’s work is painfully aware that the image apparatus itself is what generates the light enabling our vision in the first place.

“As I pondered what this revelation might mean for the course of our migration across the plains of redevelopment, residual brightness continued to dazzle, in decorative shards that ate into the structure they purported to reveal, the picture I was beginning to reassemble of my location in the world, and for the second time in my life I was graced with a vision of dancers just behind the level blank of visibility… [OT, 242]”

Like the underdeveloped tract of suburban landscape, this blank is never neutral. Instead, it’s saturated with uneven relations of power so refined and thinned as to admit the illusion of their own transparency, except at those places of bodily contact where power thickens. With the aid of this illusion, the S. Floridian “vista full of property” manifests in the novels as “an excess of vacancy:” the scene of the subject’s own constitutive void, as well as the location of a direct address where the subject is made heavy with identity.

As the narrative unfolds around the “unseen events that structure the experience of a vanishing plot of woods,” every written gesture registers an intense longing to account for its own fenced-in void where identity converges with the functionalism of its own incoherence, and the writing works to fill that objective vacancy with the subjective record of its history. Anyone who’s read one of Taylor’s sentences can feel how it registers the pressure of social force as the sentence folds and expands by way of often intractable grammatical subordinations, mapping a set of subject/object relations that were effectively made by the forces of subordination themselves. As they aim to occupy “the level blank of visibility” with something other than the bad infinity of what can already be calculated, Taylor’s sentences exert a commensurate counterforce, precisely calibrated in relation to the withdrawn violence they work to grasp, their seemingly infinite pliability constrained by finite measure.

This is only one way in which the narrative presences the invisibility of capital’s structural and structuring violence —what Taylor refers to as “the displaced violence of foundation”—a violence that shapes our field of vision so that to see the underdeveloped tract of landscape in S. Florida is to see nothing. And if, in our situation, that landscape, where one can only see nothing, is a so-called “site,” then the novels themselves become nonsites where the invisible relations of structuring force become visible—as if for the first time.

Thom Donovan’s writing has the appearance of being something else entirely—and in many ways it is—but his project compliments Taylor’s with respect to its sustained relation to various forms of withdrawn violence and direct address.

In Thom’s project, this violence gets thematized and thought thru as disaster, and as he’s pointed out, it’s useful here to think of disaster etymologically in relation to the stars—disaster, as in: delinked from stellar guidance, unmoored from the visible constellations, or dissociated from the horoscope and other forms of totalizing organization; in short, severed from social mythologies of fate, mythologies that nonetheless determine who lives and who dies. Unlike the individual’s death, disaster is something all of us, together, as a community, hold in common, despite its not being present for us to share as a site for real communion.

By way of Jalal Toufic and Hannah Wiener, to whom he has apprenticed himself, Thom has adopted Nietzsche’s idea that “Every name in history is ‘I’,” as a strategy to undo those forms of individualism upon which dominant regimes of justice are founded, regimes whose vengeful moralities condemn countless persons to a kind of “death before dying.” In Thom’s poems, the “I” becomes a nonsite where social catastrophe penetrates lyric apostrophe and the apostrophic O of lyric address becomes as large as the catastrophic event that’s been removed from vision. In the lyric as Thom practices it, the “I” becomes NO ONE, as it finds its singularity paradoxically in a multiplicity of names dispersed across the fragile skin of the social body. Thom’s “I” moves in relation to a disaster whose erasure from the perceptual field has, in a certain sense, made experience impossible. “So my eyes tear-up,” he writes, “as an act of being ‘not any longer I’ when I see without sight […] A blindness where “I” is cancelled (be-)fore new relation.”

And in a poem called “Unliving Democracy” :

‘I’ wants such little
--Distance to lay waste
To ‘me’ again and touch—
The bodies I am not

The bodies I have been
--And those a mind
Has sacrificed like—
Soldiers we will never see

Thom’s poetics enact what he refers to as a “spiritual technology,” a social category marshaled to oppose all forms of quietism while bringing the invisible to light in a situation where our light has all but gone out. At the same time, the proliferation of proper names and dedications in Thom’s work raises the stakes around its social consequence. The poems are always poised consequentially and irreversibly to address specific persons and projects in relation to which the work seeks new forms of community with the living, and responsibility to the dead.

For example, in a poem for Rachel Corrie, Thom writes:

Who are you
who would not
swallow.

[…]

Thought
blows through
the mind
and

we are here.

Or one for Michael Cross:

This sense of discovery
Is of tethers that free
The organs to leave
And anyone to arrest
The mind with their unwilling.

Or, in another for Nick Piombino and Taylor Brady:

’I read a white…’ site
Thru lyric to review
All things unquiet
& burnt for thinking.

Another poem, this one after George Oppen, recognizes how “disaster has become our business,” acknowledging how post-modern capital nourishes itself on the crises it reproduces in the interest of its own dominion.

Within the measures of Thom’s project, disaster can’t be seen, nor can it be experienced, and yet disaster hails the lyric subject into social being, commanding the ear, while enjoining the poem to bear witness to that which can’t be witnessed. The disaster can be thought of here as an Event w/ a capital E : as a hole shot thru perception, or a void where a social situation’s structuring antagonisms concentrate invisibly. This triangulation with the eventful disaster threatens to render the poem impossible, but what makes Thom’s writing critical is the way it refuses the convenient alibi that the poem’s disastrous impossibility is a fateful condition of language itself. The poem rather risks its impossibility on real catastrophes where it is unbearably implicated. Taylor’s lyric practice, like Thom’s, activates a similar risk in relation to catastrophe. “I think it is necessary to risk an inability to speak if I am to find whether anything can still be said,” Taylor writes in the sustained meditation on lyric that concludes Yesterday’s News (Factory School 2005), and one might think here of Oppen’s “shipwreck,” to which this meditation on lyric refers.

The serial form Thom’s poems assumes, like Taylor’s lyrics in Yesterday’s News, recalls what Leslie Scalapino refers to in relation to Robert Creeley as the serial poem’s “several dimensioned locus,” at once separate and continuous, and the subjectivities the poems activate are polyvalent forms of fidelity to the Event that calls them. So whether Thom is writing about the unthinkable situation of women ‘suicide bombers’ in the Middle East, as he does in his poem/essay called “Into Bride (Army of Roses)” [forthcoming in the next issue of War & Peace]; or, the ongoing disaster of what goes under the sign of democracy, the poems court their own fatelessness as they wager seeing nothing in an effort to make legible the withdrawn disaster that makes nothing the only thing we can see.

In a late piece on Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin tells us that Les Fleurs du mal was the first book of poems not illuminated by starlight. He seems to suggest that the stars are extinguished in Baudelaire because the poems unmoor themselves from all determinate coordinates of progress and meaning once those coordinates have become those of capitalist production itself. In becoming unmoored, the poems become fateless, and the dark figures they cut are allegories of a kind of living death. Strangely, though, this is how the poems resist the death-in-life prescribed by a new world of commodities that have themselves taken the place of the stars in an otherwise lightless universe, a world governed by a catastrophe that has erased the poet’s city and jettisoned the present out of any living continuity with the past. The poems become fateless insofar as they resist this disaster by courting their own.

So when the stars go out in a world in which not even the sunlight is true—leaving only the residual glare of production by which to see our common waste—the promise of future vision can only be activated by way of the nonsite. Taylor’s work and Thom’s work both remain faithful to this promise.