In the 2000s, a new mode of conceptual writing, mostly taking place on the early internet, emerged from the playful provocations of copyright law: Via simple digital processes, pre-written texts could be placed in other literary contexts, transposing the appropriative technique underwriting Marcel Duchamp’s avant-garde “readymades” to a neo-avant-garde “copy-paste.” Here, literature was made to signify not through its content (what is said) but through its concept (what is art?). As with Duchamp, the meta-concept of these recontextualizations was often a critique of the art world itself—or, in the case of conceptual writing, the poetry world. With its attachments to authorship, lyricism, and romantic notions of resistance, the poetry world was the ne plus ultra of a capitalist society that needed to be shocked out of its bourgeois stupor. These twenty-first-century conceptual writers effectively cosigned the position of many contemporary critical theorists, who adopted the Marxian hermeneutic of suspicion and found that all art and criticism are always already absorbed by the ever-expanding commodity sphere of late capitalism. The highest form of critique, then, was tongue-in-cheek participation in the world of arts and letters, since no path for resistance was tractable. The result, as Jacques Rancière observed in his 2008 “critique of critique,” is that “we have left-wing irony or melancholy,” since “all our desires for subversion still obey the law of the market.”[1] The political philosophy of left-wing irony and melancholy isn’t socialism but rather nihilism, a form of “antipolitics” that keeps its tongue so firmly in cheek that it does not speak at all, lest the utterance perpetuate that which it seeks to condemn.[2] For the artists of this ironic-melancholic Left, the last kernel of hope resides in the promise of aesthetic autonomy, where art is capable of anticipating a world in which resistance is possible but forecloses such a possibility in the present.
Across five books published from 2013 to 2023, Jordan Abel interrogates the antipolitics of conceptualist appropriation, as well as conceptual writing’s underlying assumptions about aesthetic autonomy and art’s (in)ability to enact forms of resistance. The mode of conceptualism into which Abel’s poetics intervenes, however, might be more precisely defined as settler conceptualism. In his short essay “On settler conceptualism,” Michael Nardone polemicizes the default cultural understanding of conceptualism, emphasizing “conceptual writing’s ability to take up an array of inscriptive modes and to portray specific enactments of power through language.” He asks for an examination of “the differences, responsibilities, and effectivity of these textual transfigurations.”[3] Nardone observes that he came to know conceptual writing while at the same time bearing witness to hearings for the proposed Mackenzie Valley Gas Project during his time living in Denendeh (the Canadian Northwest Territories), and his essay helps to connect conceptual writing’s investment in aesthetic autonomy with the political economy of settler colonialism. Elaborating on Nardone’s key term, I define settler conceptualism here as a practice wherein the author assumes autonomy from the appropriated text, ontologically detaching themself from any actually existing representation of their subjectivity, since all representations risk reification. The settler conceptualist therefore floats above a vast territory of unclaimed words, like a cartographer above a half-finished map, mirroring the top-down re-spatialization of Denendeh by Imperial Oil and the National Energy Board. While nominally refuting the colonial-capitalist concept of private property through free appropriation, settler conceptualism nevertheless relies on private property by accepting it as an a priori truth against which artistic subjectivity can constitute an autonomous aesthetic that would imagine the eventual negation of property relations (i.e., all texts belong to all people). Settler conceptualism constructs artistic subjectivity as capable of transcending the present system and anticipating a future system in which autonomy is no longer required—which necessitates, preserves, and ultimately fetishizes the very construct it presumes to destroy. Dependent on its apophatic relationship to private property, settler conceptualism ironizes itself, becoming more and more irreverent as it seeks to shock the reader out of their bourgeois habituation to writing as embodied labor, relying on the shock value of unlawful appropriation for aesthetic effect. At an impasse of effectivity, settler conceptualism shelters left-wing irony and melancholy.
By contrast, Abel’s poetry challenges the settler conceptualist definition of appropriation, working with texts that are already co-constitutive of the subjectivity that would transcend them: not “belonging” to the artist as property but reciprocally creating the artist through discursive linguistic and representational acts. As an example, Abel’s experimental autobiography NISHGA (2021) explores this reciprocity through an extended reflection on his experience being “‘doubly dispossessed’” from Nisga’a land and knowledge by the intergenerational trauma of Canada’s Residential Schools.[4] Through transcripts, visual art, notes, screenshots, and found text, NISHGA painfully de-abstracts terms like “settler colonialism” and “intergenerational trauma” by identifying and historicizing specific acts of theft and violence, including sexual violence and self-harm. It is a difficult, heartrending book. In concentric rings of intimacy, NISHGA presents excerpts from Abel’s mother’s notebooks, his father’s artwork, court records pertaining to himself and his parents, the Vancouver Aboriginal Child and Family Services website (for which Abel’s father’s art provides the logo), the summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and other documents, revealing how his subjectivity is entangled with the familial, civic, symbolic, national, and world-historical. NISHGA’s penultimate section refers back to itself by way of a transcript of Abel’s doctoral thesis defense of a research-creation project called NISHGA. The section begins with a photo set inside an image of a frog superimposed over a thick column of text. The transcript explains that the text is a reworking of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 The Last of the Mohicans (which would later become Empty Spaces (2023), Abel’s experimental novel), that the frog is Abel’s father’s artwork, and that the photo is of the Vancouver Art Gallery where Abel met his father for the first and only time. The photo, Abel explains, “contains neither of us, but this page as a whole contains both of us.”[5]
This kind of intersubjective superposition occurs throughout NISHGA, which contains in microcosm all of Abel’s publications to date. Along with early sketches of Empty Spaces, it contains excerpts from his first book, The Place of Scraps (2013)—which draws on Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau’s “salvage anthropology” of the Nisga’a, Totem Poles (1950)—as well as poignant reflections on Un/inhabited (2014) and Injun (2016), both of which are derived from a corpus of ninety-one western-genre novels whose copyright has expired and are archived online at Project Gutenberg.
Abel’s incorporation of his past and future work in NISHGA is emblematic of an autopoietic conceptual strategy throughout his oeuvre. Autopoietic because Abel works with texts that lay bare the relationship between author and appropriated text, wherein the subjectivity of the author is always already a part of that which they appropriate. Rather than appropriate from what is “outside” that which constitutes his subjectivity—from what settler conceptualism defines as “someone else’s (intellectual) property”—Abel appropriates from that with which his subjectivity is already in relation. This includes texts in the digital commons that he has previously authored or that contain representations of himself or of the Indigenous knowledge and land from which he has been severed. Abel effectively shifts conceptual writing’s allegory from its concept (what is art?) to its method (how art is practiced), “unsettling” appropriation through an Indigenous approach to avant-garde aesthetics. Through the way in which he appropriates, Abel shows that information is already social; property is what renders it private. By largely respecting the laws of copyright, Abel reveals that private property is a settler-colonial legal fiction sustained by the ongoing acts of expropriation, dispossession, and genocide. In other words, copyright need not be transgressed to precipitate an “unsettling” aesthetic experience, because settler coloniality is already the ultimate transgression of Indigenous being.
One self-reflexive passage in NISHGA provides a window into how autopoietic conceptualism can be reparative, resisting the left-wing irony and melancholy of settler conceptualism. A note in the book tells the story of Abel being confronted by “an established and popular Indigenous artist” as to why he feels entitled to “work with and deconstruct the work of others.” Abel recounts telling the artist that he “attempts to mirror the appropriative mechanisms of colonialism,” but on reflection, he realizes this is not the case. He clarifies:
If I could return to that moment now, I would have said that I work with found text because that was my first real connection to Indigeneity, and, as an intergenerational survivor of Residential Schools, I create art that attempts to reflect my life experience, including my severance from Indigenous knowledge and land.[6]
Here Abel demonstrates what is possible in art under a political and aesthetic regime of settler coloniality. He can neither transcend the system that undermines Indigeneity nor reappropriate colonial logics toward emancipatory ends, but by historicizing the conditions that have determined this aporia he can intervene in the settler-colonial logics that link autonomy with property in the aesthetic of conceptual writing. Prefiguring a relation between subject and text, Abel reauthors his own representation from within that selfsame text.
The Place of Scraps also enacts this reparative autopoiesis, transforming the materials and histories that structure Abel’s severance from Nisga’a land and life into the ground for a reencounter with Indigeneity. The erasures of Barbeau’s Totem Poles that make up the book are punctuated by lyric departures from the text’s overall conceptual strategy. In the first of these departures, Abel recounts being brought to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as a child, in 1992:
The poet endures—level one, stairwell; level two, stairwell; level three, stairwell; level four, stairwell. But the poet is incapable of converting the contents of the stairwell into memory; the poet does not identify the totem pole in the stairwell as the pole erected by Sakau’wan, the same pole that was removed from the Nass River valley in three pieces by Marius Barbeau.[7]
Here, Abel remembers that he does not remember seeing the pole in the museum. Revisiting this memory in the third person, Abel asserts the presence of the pole by way of its absence, “the recurrence of the totem pole in the poet’s life combined with an apparent failure of memory.”[8] This ability to generate presence through absence is what Anishinaabe scholar and poet Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance,” that which “is more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence.”[9] The Place of Scraps shows that this active presence is hard-won in the face of material and discursive misrepresentations of Nisga’a land and life. Abel’s erasure of a passage that recounts how Barbeau transported the totem pole to the museum read as follows:
remove
thousands of
Indians
successfully
without feeling a tremor
Abel, The Place of Scraps, 25.
If, as Vizenor also writes, “the indian is a simulation, the absence of natives,” then Abel shows how an active presence intervenes in such erasures.[10] Rather than “appropriate” from Totem Poles, Abel shows that his subjectivity is already bound up with it and the culture it (mis)represents: The totem poles were not the property of the Nisga’a; they are part of the Nisga’a. Against the settler-colonial fetishization of the totem pole that extracted it from Nisga’a land and life, Abel shows a reciprocity of subject and object that renders such fetishization impossible. In an entry dated “05.08.2011,” Abel recounts returning to the ROM as an adult, where he “refuses to pay to see a totem pole that was taken from his ancestral village.”[11] In this act of economic refusal, Abel reencounters both the totem pole and his memory of forgetting, autopoietically transforming erasure into survivance: “The pole is here; the poet is here.”[12] Abel is prefigured in the totem pole and representations of it.
Prefigurative, relational, and ongoing, reparative autopoiesis of this kind emphasizes the possibility of transformation from within intractable conditions by correlating means and ends. Artist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson identifies this correlation as a common thread in Nishnaabeg philosophy and praxis, where “the processes of engagement highly influence the outcome of the engagement itself.”[13] This is echoed in the political theory of Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard, who insists on a “prefigurative politics” that “demands that we enact or practice our political commitments to Indigenous national and women’s liberation in the cultural form and content of our struggle itself.”[14] Abel uses westerns and Western texts to allegorize the intractability of what Coulthard calls the “colonial politics of recognition,” and precisely by examining his struggle with colonial recognition politics—not his autonomy from them—is he able to align the aesthetic with Indigenous critical thought.[15] Correlating process and outcome, reparative autopoiesis cultivates the possibility of subjective transformation through art practice when handled with critical, self-reflexive care.
Abel’s work is not only reparative, however. He also shows that artistic subjectivity is a fraught entanglement, with the potential for autopoietic processes that are degenerative as well as reparative; degenerative because a prefiguration of subjectivity as relational and as shaped through narrative and symbolic representation has the potential to alienate subjects from themselves. These are the stakes of Abel’s work. Or, as he puts it: “Totem Poles was an imperfect entry point and I had no other way in.”[16] Sylvia Wynter calls the narratives and symbols in texts like Totem Poles and western genre fiction the mythoi that co-constitute, alongside material conditions, the category of the human.[17] The reciprocity of mythoi and materiality thus describes “the autopoiesis of being hybridly human,” where mythoi shape neuropsychology, sociality, and culture, which in turn shape narrative and representation, revealing how a system can alter itself from the inside.[18] When degenerative, autopoiesis creates the “selected” and “dysselected” subjects of modernity—those whose being is justified by “genetic merit” and “rational” economic conduct, and those whose claims to the category of the human are questioned for a “lack of this merit.”[19] Two of Abel’s books, Un/inhabited and Injun, investigate the degenerative aspect of autopoiesis, pointing to his awareness of the possibility of reifying his own already-alienated subjectivity through poetry.
Injun, as its title suggests, is full of racial epithets. The title poem is serialized across twenty-six parts, one part for each letter of the alphabet, signaling the inscription of self-alienation across the totality of available letter forms in the English language. It also has an entropic conceit, moving from order to chaos: Part a) begins in couplets; g) introduces indents between words; at the halfway point, m), empty space is introduced within words; at p) the words explode, as if the language resists containing what it would signify; by the time we get to x) the letters are upside down on the page, interrupted by empty space but legible. The effect is one of involuntary speech, words coaxed from the disembodied corpus:
Abel, Injun, 26
The racial violence of axes and sledgehammers is harrowing, their damage inflicted as wounds of empty space, a visual echo of settler-colonial history hollowing out the page. Here and elsewhere in Injun, language appears to literally degenerate, evincing the imbrication of colonialism’s destructive tendencies with the imposition of the English language on Indigenous land and life.
The empty space of typographical erasure has been a generative conceit for Abel. In Un/inhabited, the section “Extracted ” projects found text as a cross section of land interrupted by vertical bars of empty space, resembling geological core samples or the long shafts of oil derricks. This is not merely “extracting ” from western genre fiction as a form of revenge. Rather, the density of the text, its unreadable overlaps, and its erased columns visually depict how subjects are made to believe there is no other way of doing or being outside settler coloniality:
Similarly, in the book’s first section, “Pioneering,” Abel used his word processor’s “find” function to generate prose poems composed of sentences from the westerns that contained his search terms: “uninhabited,” “settler,” “extracted,” “territory,” “indianized,” “pioneer,” “treaty,” “frontier,” and “inhabited.” Abel copied and pasted these sentences into columns then deleted each search term, leaving a blank in its place. As in “Extracted,” “Pioneering” suggests that one cannot meaningfully resist from within the totality. One is forced to use the master’s tools: copy-paste, find, delete; appropriate, extract, erase.
The degenerative autopoiesis of Injun and Un/inhabited reaffirms the antipolitics of left-wing irony and melancholy, where capitalism is a totality from which there is no escape, and every move always runs the risk of further reification. It is not incidental that these are Abel’s most “purely” conceptual works, with little to no lyric departures like those seen in The Place of Scraps and NISHGA. They mirror the appropriative, extractive, and self-alienating mechanisms of colonialism to allegorize “the shadow presence of Residential Schools” in Abel’s work.[20] However, by enacting these mechanisms on texts in the public domain, rather than on intellectual property, Abel divests from the false promise of aesthetic autonomy. He does not transcend these texts but rather exists among them, embodying an intersubjective capacity for transformation. Un/inhabited’s concluding section, “Index,” reverses the process of erasure that runs through the book: Rather than subtract terms from the digital commons, Abel adds what is not yet present. The index is a list of landforms, some of which appear in the “Pioneering” section of prose poems, but most of which do not. Those that do not are consequently asserted to exist in addition to the corpus that stands in for settler colonialism. Abel’s inclusion of terms derived from Inuit and other Indigenous languages—“nunatak,” “pingo,” “tepui”—further emphasizes that these conceptualizations of land are sustained by Indigenous and Inuit knowledge and practices.[21] Abel prefigures a relationship between author, mythoi, and materiality that attempts to sustain a transformable subjectivity.
Empty Spaces, Abel’s most recent book, reverses the conceit of typographical erasure in his degenerative works. Through typographical excess—thirteen chapters of unparagraphed prose—Abel signals the fullness of land that has historically been misread as empty. The source text for this reversal is The Last of the Mohicans, a narrativization of terra nullius, the legal mechanism used to justify settler colonialism. In an interview, Abel explains that he rewrote Cooper’s long descriptions of unpeopled nature, then repeated his rewriting in reverse, last sentence to first, and then repeated this process yet again, rewriting each time.[22] This is an autopoietic process, survivance, asserting an active presence in a narrative of absence. The book begins:
A deep, narrow chasm. Black rocks. The river lies still on those black rocks. A mile above, there is a tumbling; there is a moment. At this very moment, there is a tumbling in the air a mile above us that runs straight through the open heavens and into some other place.[23]
Just as Abel does not simply mirror colonialism’s appropriative techniques, neither does he limn a precolonial utopia. The “us” is capacious, irreducible to the settler or Indigenous perspective. The land is not empty: “The woods are full of sounds and rocks and trees. The woods are full.”[24] But neither is it undisturbed: “Blood pooling in the streets. Blood gushing from soft, delicate bodies.”[25] Invoking relation rather than autonomy, Abel’s method of appropriation pokes holes in an us/them binary that would reify subjectivity and render the text either ironic—reproducing what it condemns—or melancholic, condemning all reproduction. Abel’s self-described “impurely conceptual techniques and practices” in Empty Spaces reject conceptual writing’ s presumption that artistic subjectivity is autonomous from the text and that texts can be “purified” of subjectivity, muddying the waters of input and output, self and other, poetry and fiction, the real and the representational, layering like nacre over the generative “impurity” around which an oyster forms a pearl.[26] In Empty Spaces, Abel demonstrates the reciprocity of author and text, allowing readers “to see the line that connects the eye to the heart to the knife to the antlers to the wings.”[27] Perception is drawn to the possibility of autopoietic repair rather than remaining forever trapped in a system of compromised signification and co-opted action.
Abel’s autopoietic conceptualism divests from aesthetic autonomy by prefiguring ontological relations between artistic subjectivity and material, symbolic, and discursive representations of the self. These relations negate the negation of private property in settler conceptualism, as seen in the casual flaunting of copyright law, and enact subjective transformations through engagements with the public domain, (mis)representations of Indigeneity, and Abel’s own texts. If reification previously seemed inescapable, this is because settler conceptualism relies on the inescapability of reification to enact its critique. Rather than capitulate to narratives of late capitalist immanence or presume to possess private knowledge of an uncorrupted authenticity that his art can advance, Abel correlates means (how art is practiced) with ends (what art does). Autopoiesis pushes left-wing irony and melancholy aside in favor of an impure dialectics of reparation and degeneration: action as outcome, aesthetic critique as poetic practice.
Notes:
[1] Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009), 25, 33.
[2] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2024), 184–85.
[3] Michael Nardone, “On settler conceptualism,” Jacket2, February 5, 2016, accessed November 11, 2024, https://jacket2.org/article/settler-conceptualism.
[4] Jordan Abel, NISHGA (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2021), 276, quoting Abel’s friend Natalie Knight.
[5] Abel, NISHGA, 268.
[6] Abel, NISHGA, 108.
[7] Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013), 59.
[8] Abel, The Place of Scraps, 63.
[9] Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15.
[10] Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 15, emphasis in the original.
[11] Abel, The Place of Scraps, 143.
[12] Abel, The Place of Scraps, 143.
[13] Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2011), 17.
[14] Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 159, emphasis in original.
[15] Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 156.
[16] Abel, NISHGA, 44, emphasis in the original.
[17] Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” interview by Katherine McKittrick, in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 11–14.
[18] Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?,” 27, emphasis in the original.
[19] Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An
Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 322–23.
[20] Abel, NISHGA, 188.
[21] Jordan Abel, Un/inhabited (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014), n.p.
[22] Jordan Abel, “On Nishga, Empty Spaces, and Experimental Art: An Interview with Jordan Abel,” interview by J Shea-Carter, The Ex-Puritan, no. 55 (2021), accessed November 11, 2024, https://ex-puritan.ca/jordan-abel-interview-2021.
[23] Jordan Abel, Empty Spaces (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2023), 3.
[24] Abel, Empty Spaces, 4.
[25] Abel, Empty Spaces, 90.
[26] Abel, “On Nishga, Empty Spaces, and Experimental Art.”
[27] Abel, Empty Spaces, 127.