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Campbell, Marion May 2013, Barbarian, Victorian writer, pp. 1-5.

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Barbarian
While Im very much concerned in konkretion with the failure of avant-gardes to
make revolutionary change, I dont think that my work really participates in
anything like a contemporary avant-garde in Australia; it would seem a
ridiculous romance to dream it possible for any subversive movement to get real
traction in these slippery, grey, cynical times. Here, mainstream culture is
controlled by a handful of mega-marketers and state ethics an oxymoronic
combo dictated by military alignment with the US, the latest polls and the
maximization of mining profits. What kind of book can rival the impact of Gina
Rinehart fulminating from a traytop? Work thats genuinely subversive has to be
feral, electric, evanescent, flaring in fugitive acts through street performance, in
image and text interventions outside galleries and theatres and formal
publishing. Art thats genuinely avant-garde erupts in events eschewing the
theatres of financial transaction.
But I hope that a text like konkretion might at least work interruptively, in
the sense that, in its difference from mainstream literary fiction, its not readily
assimilated into consumer culture. As a citational text, it draws attention to the
productivity of quoted fragments from the radical tradition of European writing,
set in friction with each other. It seeks to disrupt reading as smooth consumption
through the clash and spark of plural voices, rather than claiming to be the
singular expression of an author who-might-happen-to-be-me.
With this term, interruptive, I also invoke the potential energy to challenge
the dominant cultural myths that lamentably still masquerade here under
larrikinism and its avatars, whereby so-called casual racism adopts a jokey
mask in football and its subcultures. I think we could claim that there are myriad
cultural workers in Australia whose work strives to be interruptive of the reflex
logorrhea of talk-back jocks, the mindless twittering of racist, sexist, homophobic
reflexes, the circulation of readymade thought, the cumulative deadly toxins of
prejudice. It is the daily manifestation of crude casual racism and sexism that
makes one want to define oneself as unrepentantly barbarian.

Avant-gardes have no linear descendency; the generation of oppositional or

insurrectionary cultural movements is in no way continuous; but they flare in fits
and starts through lateral leaps and anachronistic loops; they move at different
speeds with different intensities in specific host cultures, where they act at times
as virulent viruses, or as insidious worms, which temporarily, at least, manifest
in new modes of contestation for cultural, gender, ethnic minorities. Avantgardes have always had a transgressive relationship, at their instigation at least,
with museums and galleries and the publishing industry. And yet, one of the
great banalities in postmodern or hypermodern culture is that the rudest, most
virulent mode of insurrection will soon find enshrinement in the Tate Gallery or
in an alternative canon promulgated and reproduced by professors of avantgarde studies.
Its 1963 and, as the Latin teacher makes her magisterial entry in academic gown
and high cast silver French roll into our classroom, I realise that I am late for the
parallel German class and leap-frog over the chairs barring my way. As I fly out
the door, I hear her exclaim to her select little group, But who is that barbarian?
Instantly I see the alignment: on the one hand theres the Home Fortress of Latin,
on the other the Wilderness of the Barbarian Hordes, to which I have relegated
myself.
I take great pleasure noting fifty years later that German cultural theorist
and critic Walter Benjamin called for a new kind of new barbarism, echoing
perhaps Rimbauds poem of this title, which radically resisted the logic of art as
reproduction, or mimesis, brandishing a kind of performative delinquency away
from all effete cultural protocols of the West, a departure away from settled
meanings towards radical innovation and unsettling process. To depart for the
sake of departure is all, the earlier Baudelaire had said, not for the sake of arrival.
This bleeding flag Rimbaud waved against the fixation on product, profit, on
nailing meaning and sending it to the Bank of Cultural Patrimony. On Rimbauds
horizon were endlessly new and disruptive encounters with the foreign or, with
the so-called bar bar, with those, who to civilised Greek ears spoke a blurred
subaltern language, bar bar a contemptuous typification, which from the start
was encoded in the etymology of the word barbarian. In fact, as Boletsi argues in
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her recent Barbarism & its Discontents, rather than the avant-garde I would argue
that there is a surprising number of writers in Australia who practise a radical
kind of literary barbarism, not just in the sense of engaging in making-strange in
the matter of language, but in terms of magnifying the politics operating slyly in
the fabric of everyday life: Im thinking of the poetic practice of John Tranter,
Philip Salom, Jennifer Maiden, Gig Ryan, Jill Jones, Joanne Burns and Michael
Farrell, to name a few. In the experimental prose poetry of such as Ania Walwicz
and Kathleen Mary Fallon you find still active a virulently willed barbarism. And
in terms of narrative there come to mind the radiant exceptions of Anthony
Macris in his Capital II: Great Western Highway, the works of Brian Castro or the
magnificent protest that is Kim Scotts fictional output.
One or two reviewers have complained that I have endlessly cited foreign
writers in konkretion, as if this were decking myself out in so much borrowed
prestige; but for me poetry should be made by all not by one, as the gloriously
ioconoclastic avant-gardiste Lautramont asserted back in 1873. I do not
integrate these voices, subduing them in a logic of the same; my text carries them
like so many glinting splinters in its flesh. They are recruited to speak back to
this world now, this world where the poetic and revolutionary fervour still might
come together to produce waves of life-affirming change, as we seemed for a
moment to be glimpsing in the beginnings of the Arab Spring.
This is what I most wanted to explore in konkretion. I wondered what might have
happened had the German would-be revolutionaries of the early 1970s like
Ulrike Meinfhof and Gudrun Ennslin of the Rote Armee Fraktion, the Red Army
Faction, used language as a field of pleasure, a site for barbarian ridicule of
mainstream politics and its grey discourses and earnest dialectics, that is, if
theyd worked more like the Situationists International. Then perhaps they might
have delivered less lethal but more effectively interruptive events, rather that
bombing newspaper headquarters and military installations and gunning down
industrialists and police. Setting language into a state of jubilation, into a
Rabelaisian parody of instrumental discourse, can perhaps still be a subversive
force. I would love to see performances breaking out in the parliament, in the

stock exchange, in university lecture theatres: across the serious sites of

capitalist exchange that we need disruptive parody!
I am sick of my old lament that almost before theyre out would-be oppositional
artworks quickly become canon-fodder The more inevitable the
commodification of artworks of protest and resistance might seem, the more one
has to intensify innovation, to communicate disruptively in order not to lie down
in comfortable acquiescence with the anaesthetizing agencies of this mediatized
global village, with its pre-metabolised slogans for feel-good belonging, its
ideology of capitalism-as-freedom, and its ready tagging of outsiders as
barbarians who would storm the white pickets fences of our entitlement.
In his essay Surrealism Walter Benjamin invoked the movement as one
that sought to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution and it seems its
often out of nostalgia for these moments of utopian intoxication that all
oppositional art in the contemporary scene can be dismissed as bad faith in an
era where shock value is sexy and thus marketable. Of course we cannot, by
definition, look to the so-called publishing industry for radically oppositional
works. In 1968, it seemed for a moment that the fervour and transformative
energies of dada, surrealism, and constructivism had jubilantly resurfaced. These
moments were allied with the Black Panther movement, civic rights struggles in
the US, guerilla movements in South America and the overthrow of many
colonial regimes, as well as revolutionary forces, such as the Red Brigade in Italy
and the Red Army Faction in Germany. However, in street murals, in video
works, in graphic novels, different break-outs still occur all the time, shooting
their glorious transient lava at any moment from an infinity of sites, in the
Philippines, in Africa, in Mexico, if not necessarily in the shopping malls of the
west.
Dispiriting as it is to be locked in repetition of the protest against the
commodification of oppositional practices, I think we need perpetually to open
new channels for disruption, interrogation, for un-settlement. In narrative, for me
resistance or cultural opposition to the dominant feel-good myths that circulate
as Australianess amounts to a rejection of the know-it-all modes of narration,
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with their chopper-in-the sky assurances that all is seen; that all can be
accounted for, all glossed, prickly questions smoothed over, their resolution
assured in an aesthetics of harmonious integration.
Let us not nurse nostalgia for the failure of social upheaval. Murderous violence
and semiotic violence are not the same. However, as oppositional ex-pat
Australian intellectuals McKenzie Wark and Andrew McCann remind us, there is
still the possibility of improvising ways of making interruptive art to challenge
the pre-consumed texture of daily life, even if the Situationists of the 1960s and
1970s failed to disable what seem to have been the ineluctable, all-consuming
triumph of pan-capitalism.
Marion May Campbell
July, 2013