| Summary: | This article looks at how Barrett Watten’s poem Progress relates to its audience, and to its sociocultural, economic and political contexts. Written in 1982-83 at the tail end of the Reagan recession, the poem is a long reflection on what it means to produce culture in a hostile neoliberal context, following the relative failure of the emancipatory movements of the 60s and 70s, and the dismantling of the horizon of progress of esthetic forms themselves. Watten’s poem is written in a parataxic mode via samplings of the contexts or worlds that its author inhabits. The text constructing an unstable voice that reflects the experience at the site of culture once the political role of art has been compromised. This voice builds itself up through negativity, by refusing linear narratives and stabilized readings, strategizing its relation to its context by resisting the visible and the clearly legible. Watten thus proposes an empty site of culture through which we might rethink how we inhabit our different worlds and recognize ourselves there.
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