Citizen de Claudia Rankine : un texte-réseau

Abstract

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) uniquely dramatizes the threat (or promise) of the obsolescence of the poetry collection in the age of postcapitalism. Through its unlikely appearance at a Donald Trump rally in Illinois in 2015, the book went on to experience a viral media life, connecting to networks and interpretative communities far beyond its presumptive field. What is more unlikely than the idea of a poetry book disrupting the media stream of a presidential campaign? And yet, in doing so, Citizen fulfilled the role of disruptive political agent that Bifo Berardi envisioned for poetry in The Uprising: Poetry and Finance (2012). To create such disruption, however, an image must be allowed to join the media stream, so that the poetry collection can no longer remain a zone of internalization, defined solely by what lies inside. Arguably, all the book needs to be allowed to circulate is a cover. While Rankine’s book evidently provides more than that, still the reception of Citizen makes it clear that processing a poetry book is both a visual and literary experience. Rankine’s previous collections already gestured towards the book as material object, but in Citizen it dominates her practice, as she acknowledges how digital technologies have, for better or worse, rewired everybody into conceptualizing on sight, reinforcing – rather than extinguishing – the look-first racism of contemporary culture. Citizen’s impact is not just a matter of its internal literary dynamics, therefore. To the disinterested viewer, it exists primarily through its external visual impact, a thing to be looked at rather than read. Drawing on Paul Mason’s opposition between hierarchy and network, this essay demonstrates that the poetry book, a traditionally hierarchical object, is reinventing itself as a network in the digital age.