I was invited to take
part in the closing panel of the UBC Arts Undergraduate Society’s student
conference on “Innovation.” The members of the panel were asked to discuss ways
in which academic faculty could foster innovation in student research, but I seem
to have missed the memo, and so I prepared a set of remarks offering a critique
of the concept of innovation. I realized my mistake about five minutes before I
was scheduled to speak, so I ended up improvising some comments—using bits and
pieces from what I had written—on the poetics of “study” (gesturing a little at
Fred
Moten and Stefano Harney’s work on the undercommons) and on research as
question and risk rather than innovative production: that it might be better to
think of ourselves as students rather than experts. I also felt that I had
pitched my remarks all wrong, and that it would be better to talk with this
audience than read out my prose. Still, I like what I wrote; I used this moment
to start thinking about Tanya Tagaq’s music,
a critical project I have been meaning to set in motion for some time. Here is
the composed undelivered text I’d prepared.
Innovation Without
Innovation
Kevin McNeilly, University
of British Columbia
Unmade Remarks at the
AUS Humanities Conference
Saturday, 16 January
2016
I want to make a few
remarks to frame and to critique the ideological loading of the concept of
innovation. I’m resisting the un-interrogated praise of making things new—the
allure of novelty—and at the same time trying to suggest a relationship to
time, a going forward (or perhaps better, outward) that can be sounded as a
crucial potential in particular forms of lyric, in poetic language that W. H. Auden
famously imagines as “a way of happening, a mouth.”
Approaching
the end of writing The Order of Things
(1966/1970), Michel
Foucault admits that he discovers himself “on the threshold of a modernity
that we have”—that he has—”not yet left behind” (xxiv). This unqualified “we”
is epochal, its episteme described
asymptotically by the reflexive acknowledgement not only of the limits of his
own language, but also of a cultural latecomer’s language as such: “the
question of the being of language,” as he puts it, is “intimately linked with
the fundamental problems of our culture” (382). (I’m poaching and
re-appropriating material, if not the argument, from John Rajchman’s 1983
essay “Foucault,
or the Ends of Modernism” [50].) The
shared cult of Bildung—linked to
myths of progress, of newness, of innovation, of transcendence, of what the
philosopher of science Isabelle
Stengers refers to as the “epic” of our time—presently and lately, as it
touches the expressive limits of its own futurity, its forward motion, can only
cannibalize and repurpose itself in the guise of renewal, a mortal remix that
tends to pass off an eviscerated avant garde for material discovery.
Foucault
must be thinking of Walter
Benjamin’s angel of history, pictured in the ninth of his “Theses on the
Philosophy of History”:
A
Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the
angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain
of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls
it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it
has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer
close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his
back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm
is what we call progress.
So-called progress
names a cultural if not an ontological imperative as a species of dire pharmakon: remedy as ruin, betterment as
destruction. In the opening paragraphs of one of his
last texts, Worstward Ho, Samuel
Beckett articulates this imperative as driving whatever remains of
self-expression in our time, the need to “go on,” and to go on saying, despite
exhaustion, despite the obvious futility and emptiness of the new, despite the
asymptotic approach of his language to its absolute expressive limits, its
nohow: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” The
work’s title parodies
Charles Kingsley’s 1855 novel Westward
Ho!, an extended romance of colonial expansion, masculine industry and
liberal self-reliance. More recently, Beckett’s lines have often been misappropriated
and repurposed as a kind of global capitalist mantra, a call to
technological and corporate innovation. As readers, and fellow latecomers, we
need to be more rigorous and careful about what Beckett articulates here.
Beckett’s
language sloughs off the trappings of Western progress for an acknowledgement
of cultural and epistemic decrepitude: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever
tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Speech
deteriorates into fragmented clichés and bathetic puns; pushed to its verbal
limits, the romance of expressive imperatives can only cannibalize itself. What
passes for innovation or renewal reduces to tautology: “Imagination dead
imagine.” For me, this fraught word-circuit allegorizes the broken teleology of
the human project, its attenuated failure, a diagnosis that seems increasingly
self-evident in our era of climate change, endocapitalism, exhaustive
consumption, viral technocracy, global insecurity, displaced populations and
supersaturated media. The imperative to innovate, however, persists as a
resilient remainder, or “stirrings still” as Beckett’s last text puts it.
Acknowledging the vestiges of this imaginative prod that might stir us on is
one of the cultural functions of lyric, still, today. Confronted with its own
extinction, Beckett’s language nonetheless enacts a thetic rhythm, a halting
but persistent step beyond itself.
The
American poet C. D.
Wright, who died earlier this week, suggests in One with Others (2010) a comparable cultural function for poetry in
our fraught, self-destructive era of “progress”: “It is a function of poetry to
locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” Wright’s
declaration may sound as if she wants to recuperate naïve confession,
potentially masking wreckage in aspirational nostalgia. That’s certainly a
danger in advocating for poetry in an age when lyric language becomes
increasingly corny, recycled and fatigued. Better understood, Wright advocates
for a fracturing of interiority, a form of innovation, a freeing that doesn’t
so much foster the cult of expressive genius as open intimacy onto an alterity,
an outside, that refuses merely to cannibalize its own ruins.
Let
me give you an example of what I mean. Tanya
Tagaq’s 2014 album Animism culls
a lyric intensity, an embodied affective immediacy, by splicing and looping an
extemporaneous, situated circular breathing derived from Inuit throat-singing
back onto itself, supported by her core improvising trio with Jesse Zubot and Jean Martin,
and others. Confronting the porous boundaries between the human and the animal,
the corporeal and the machinic, the given and the made, the recording troubles
the edges of signification, and generates its eros by turning those zones of
encounter inside out. Each nascent “song” offers a kind of post-natural
ecology. It innovates not by being new but by freeing up, by crossing lines,
and by making vocal music from the come-and-go of those transgressive stirrings.
Her/their music surges up, finds its pulse, in sustained and audible risk.
There is much to say, and to say on, about this recording, but I’ll finish my own
set of re-purposed texts by briefly noting how Tagaq and group re-purpose and
renew—innovate through—The Pixies’s “Caribou.” A parody,
perhaps, of ethnomusicological collecting, the CD opens by concocting a form of
techno-shamanism with a cover not of Inuit folksong but of American post-punk,
inverting salvage anthropology into a call for, if not a performance of,
primordial agency—deft ululation, yes, but also voicing an acute cultural
politics through expansive virtuosity, decolonizing the ear: “Give dirt to me /
I bite lament / This human form / Where I was born / I now repent.” In an
interview in NME Black Francis apparently disclosed that
"maybe even the singer of the song is reincarnated as a caribou." In Tanya Tagaq's version, animistic metempsychosis emerges from speech act—thematized as repentance in
the lyrics—toward verbal becoming, the self—its human form—transubstantiated
through unfolding textures of voice: anthropomorphic debris reanimated, said
on, sung on.
