The Neoliberal Dispositive of Experimental Poetry

Abstract

Experimental poetry highlights the hidden nihilistic essence of the neoliberal paradigm or modern scientific capitalism “after the end of history”. By highlighting the structure of the bare signifier (without speech, without meaning) as a spatialization of the fundamental cut of (experimental) poetry and the deconstruction of the trace of the ontoteleological signification of the absent presence, god, the truth, and so on, in the structure of the sign that it performs, the signifier is established as the “space” of the truth of the essence—that is, as a live, creative, and essence-based alternative to the aggressive destruction and exploitation of global mercantilism. The author analyzes in great detail a poem by the founder of the OHO movement, Iztok Geister, and a poem by his close colleague Aleš Kermauner, pointing to the fatal historical poetic turn produced by the experimental poetry of both poets in light of the deconstruction of the trace in both the narrow sphere of the literary-history re-memorizing of this poetry and the problematic general devaluation of poetry as the primary, suppressed ethical and sociopolitical abyss of the essence in the communication of the global cybernetic civilization. Both suggest a realistic revolutionary essence of experimental poetry, which academic circles have in vain sought to suppress or erase from the literary-history canon; from a wider perspective, the dominant media are also failing in their engagement to effectively eliminate it from the serious sociopolitical and financial-economic dialogue. Experimental poetry reveals a different and more fatal truth or essence of “literature”, the world, and the relations in the world than the one sold by modern scientific and technical neoliberalism. However, the reality of the revolutionary utopia is that experimental poetry has already been created.