COMMENTARY ON THE WORK OF BRUCE ANDREWS
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Textual Politics and the Language Poets
1989 |
 |
From
Chapter One, “endless PTOTEANL inkages”:
[12] Bruce Andrews's recent work, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or,
Social Romanticism), invokes the anger and disgust of Dada, as seen in
this excerpt from "Isolate Your Fuse" (1986):
Isolate your fuse my sentimentalization of hatred juggling for Jesus; hardware sweats at bedside discipline can be good detective, time for the blanket show. I wish into chocolate that's bloodhound prone facts, make prime less waste-if only I had strangled it in its tank. I'm too proud to think you want to be liberated but basically you're just a dental supply fixture, shoot them in the head to anesthetize them; hype anchors the argument like Mary Poppins under the thumb of a filthy vein body just another android fun machine. Quadriculus circuli sweethearts maneuver their sanitary napkins into impenetrable cabinetry; startled starlets squared by squids, alla-y'all sucker sucker muhfuhs—punk beliefs can be bought. 6 trolls out of 7 news be sweat holiday prophylactic fishhead bloodclot-meanwhile back at the political. Who wears the blonde wig in that family? Dollies hurt leg: I feel whoops shame;
A perfectly glandular reprisal, hog-heaven for the fashion-tyrannized I recommend a transplant-rock of the weenies those bottles will seek their own salvation. Vietnam tastes better: do ten seconds of fake mambo, spawn a tress shit sticky history of perfection. What positions your rights at the bidet flowering penis choreography, it's supposed to get harder if you're being strangled; why don't you just pest off?
[13] Unleased disposition schemers, this is soup to be defoliated, just the right corporate body as eating roast tractor parts. I'd sell my government, to these men, any day. look for quick profits in communist misfortune. I AM SOMEBODY It's a Fun World friends you to buy their own money Because Politics Stinks, act insecure & put other people at ease. I went from Hegel to Mighty Atom commix
Afro-cubist that mass equals crass dim men pop
a sauce that monsters fault.
[23] Of the Language Poets, Andrews has written perhaps the most extensive
critical response to The Tennis Court Oath. In "Misrepresentation"
(L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 12 [1980]) Andrews claims that Ashbery's book "poses
for us a radical questioning of established forms, yet at the same time,
and so appropriately in its own form, it explores the implications of
that questioning-not as an idea, but as an experience and a reading."
The work demands, in other words, "Behavioral reading, rather than
hermeneutic ones." Through his "convulsed" syntax, his
"jagged kaleidoscope" of images, and his interruptions of tone,
Ashbery questions language's ability to represent as well as our desire
to represent, our need to expose the world and [24] ourselves in the light
of day. "I try to/ describe for you," Ashbery writes, but he
recognizes that "no stars are there/ No stripes,/ But a blind man's
cane poking. . . ." Once one has recognized the inherent opacity
of the word, the social contract behind its supposed transparency, "it
makes sense to be skeptical, to embody in composition the doubt that transparency
is more than a devious & second-best fraud, fraught with an illusory
naturalism, a making into nature what is really our production. "
The answer is not, however, to give up on language and meaning-why write
if such were the case?-but to put forward a writing of self-conscious
production that recognizes the arbitrary but necessary choices behind
what we determine as "truth."
Charles Bernstein is one contemporary poet to benefit from Ashbery's "swerve"
from Stevens and Whitman (if it is a swerve-one could possibly argue for
a disruption of ruminative continuity even in parts of their work.) Andrews's
discussion of The Tennis Court Oath, for instance, applies equally well
to many poems in Bernstein's Controlling Interests (1980). From "Matters
of Policy":
On a broad plain in a universe of
anterooms, making signals in the dark, you
fall down on your waistband &, carrying your
own plate, a last serving, set out for
another glimpse of a gaze. In a room
full of kids splintering like gas jets against
shadows of tropical taxis-he really had, I
should be sorry, I think this is the ("I
know I have complained" "I am quite well"
"quit nudging")-croissants
outshine absinthe as "la plus, plus sans
egal" though what I most care about
is another sip of my Pepsi-Cola. Miners
tell me about the day, like a pack of
cards, her girlfriend split for Toronto....(P. 1)
The disjunct syntax, the incomplete statements, and the radical shifts
of imagery all recall Ashbery's early work. But what does not occur in
"Matters of Policy" is the tortured meditation on perception
and representation. Such questioning has been digested during the fifteen
or so years intervening between "White Roses" and Bernstein's
poem. The essential insight of Ashbery's work-the social production of
meaning-now becomes the domi-nant focus, enlisted in an examination of
the politics of the use of language. Irony is posed in Bernstein's work
not just as a questioning of language but as a guard against ideological
contamination.
[25] In "Misrepresentation" Andrews sees Ashbery's work as the
germ for "an ideologiecritik, and a critique of clarity and transparency
and language . . . ; and hierarchy arising historically at the same time
as instrumental literacy (Levi-Strauss) or the incest taboo." The
notion of poetry as ideology critique, as a specific mode of ideological
struggle, associates much Language poetry with the various avant-garde
manifestations which occurred earlier in this century. It is to that question
that I turn in the next chapter.
From Chapter Two, “Ideological Struggle and the Possibility of an Oppositional Poetic Practice”:
[39] Poet Bruce Andrews's own practice grows out of the desire to lay
bare the social coding that shapes our present use of language. Andrews
hopes to [40] extend the production of meaning, not to deny it. Such a
position lies behind the following passage from one of his poems:
gaps
shocks through
absorbing
hover
the subjunctive
we're
less
thoughts
(Wobbling, 80)
Even though the standard syntactical patterns and grammatical units are
missing here, this poem nevertheless can mean and can be read. Andrews
has opened up the possibilities of syntax, allowing the reader to determine
the paths she will pursue in combining these words into a meaningful complex.
If one were to draw lines from each unit to other units close by, as in
a connect-the-dots puzzle, then one might visualize the various possible
combinations offered above. In any case, the poem lays bare the device
of standard syntax, revealing its arbitrary and socially- determined nature.
Andrews explains this practice of baring the frame as follows:
Laying bare the device remains as a task but it becomes a more social act, of social unbalancing, of a social reflexivity of content, rather than some kind of (what I have called in the past) preppie formalism. Because the modernism that's at stake now is more public and is more involved with the conditions of meaning, it also becomes more social. So that if people are arguing (as some of the poststructuralists seem to) that social meaning has disappeared, then just trying to disrupt the system with some radical formalism isn't going to be enough. Instead, if something's going to be disruptive, or disrupted, it's going to have to be method, seen in a more social sense-as the social organization of signs, as ideology, as discourse; those are the more broadly social things that need to be shaken unhistoricized, politicized, contextualized, totalized-by laying bare the social devices, or the social rules which are at work. ("Total Equals What: Poetics &Praxis," 57; italics in original)
Andrews emphasizes that he sees his work not just as technique for technique's
sake, but as a materialist critique of the present social forces which
encode our day-to-day language practice. Such a poetry functions as an
ideology critique. Such a questioning closely parallels Althusser's reexamination
of the connections between language, ideology, and the self: "Like
all obviousnesses, including those that make a word 'name a thing' or
'have a meaning' (therefore including the obviousness of the 'transparency'
of lan-guage), the 'obviousness' that you and I are subjects-and that
that does not cause any problems-is an ideological effect" (Lenin,
171-72). In their questioning of the function of reference, the self-sufficiency
of the subject, and the adherence to standard syntax of the closed text,
some so-called Language poets have developed a poetry which functions
not as ornamenta-tion or as self-expression, but as a baring of the frames
of bourgeois ideology itself.
From Chapter Four, “Realism and Reification”:
[71] [F]ollowing Baudrillard, [Steve] McCaffery sees the masses' inertia
not as their subjugation but as their release from repressive structure.
In a cryptic final note he posits "the media's proximity to what
Bataille terms 'general economy' that is precisely an economy of waste
and irrecoverable expenditure." This economy of waste is contrasted
to the repressive organization of narrative structure in an earlier stage
of capitalism that allowed for no loose ends-everything was made to fit
into an equation. But the postmodern media, McCaffery claims, offer the
possibility that " 'fascination' (the narrative condition of the
masses) is of an imaginary and not symbolic order, [which might] then
[mean that] the revolutionary return of the mother as the techno-phallic
goddess will require a certain discourse of its own"(p. 43).
No doubt. But whose interests are inscribed in that discourse? McCaffery's
position depends on and could be seen to perpetuate the very orders he
loathes. His fellow Language poet James Sherry has written, "The
modernists [72] perceived chaos; they did not aspire to it.... Everything
is already destroyed around us. Yet what can we do to rebuild when the
old forms are radioactive with the half-lives that constructed them?"
("Limits of Grammar," 111-12).Bruce Andrews suggests an alternative
to both co-optation and flight:11 'wordness', 'eventism'-a way of reconstituting
language by unpacking the tool box" (LB, 33).
In "Writing Social Work & Political Practice" Andrews distinguishes
between three possible modes of writing, each mode carrying with it an
implied approach to political and epistemological practice. The first
mode is realism, which Andrews critiques in much the same way as Silliman
and McCaffery do for its "assumptions of reference, representation,
transparency, clarity, description, reproduction, positivism" (LB,
133). As such, realism relies on a linguistic fetishism. Any political
practice growing out of this mode will be either reductionist (socialist
realism) or ornamental, complacently reinforcing the status quo by reproducing
its basic assumptions of reference. The second mode, "an alternative
structuralist mode," characterizes the practice of poets such as
McCaffery. This mode focuses on the diacritical structure of the sign.
A radical version of this mode would be a poetics of subversion: "an
anti-systemic detonation of settled relations, an anarchic liberation
of energy flows. Such flows, like libidinal discharges, are thought to
exist underneath &independent from the system of language. That system,
an armoring, entraps them in codes & grammar" (LB, 134). The
goal of this poetics, then, is to create a deliberate opacity and dissemination
of meaning. Such a poetics abdicates the central struggle over meaning,
however, thereby leaving the organization of signs and society to someone
or something else:The Blob-like social force of interchangeability &
equivalence (unleashed by the capitalist machine, and so necessary to
the commodification of language) precedes us: it has carried quite far
the erosion of the system of differences on which signification depends.
It's reached the point where a coercive organization of grammar, rhetoric,
technical format & ideological symbols is normally imposed in everyday
life to even get these eroded differences to do their job any more (an
assembly line to deliver meaning, of certain kinds). So to call for a
heightening of these deterritorializing tendencies may risk a more homogenized
meaninglessness (& one requiring even more coercive props)-an "easy
rider" on the flood tide of Capital. (Andrews, LB, 135)Andrews agrees
here with McCaffery's claim that capitalism has carried out the goal of
the avant-garde—the abolition of total structure. But Andrews hardly
agrees that such a development is positive. The political activity of
the avant-garde now lies elsewhere, as we shall see.
One could ask, however, how a passage from a poem of Andrews's such as
the following resists the homogenization he warns against in the above:
[73]
SONG NO 129
waldio draig impyn
holl
bronwen pos
plisgo hafan
nodachfa
oed santes rhwd
illawcio
sarn
heulog
haig
achul can
job
gweithfa balm canolwar
oen nodd
rewyddiaduriaeth
blaenori tref
tramgwyddo
tosyn wele reiat
cynffon maint
medi
Andrews's answer is that "Whether we bypass the referential fetish by writing non-signs or whether we tackle & problematize it depends, again, on how we define the medium. Writing is actually constitutive of these underly-ing libidinal flows; it is the desire for meaning, if not message. This is a third characterization of the medium, acknowledging the usefulness of the second one but acknowledging its limitations also" (LB, 135). Writing is neither simply representation nor repression; it is, Andrews claims, the production of meaning and value. These meanings can be reinforced (realism), blown apart (structuralism), or opposed by a "political writing that unveils demystifies the creation & sharing of meaning." Andrews wants a practice through which the production of meaning can be felt, not just taken for granted or destroyed. While only "a dramatic change in the structure of capitalist society is likely to disorganize the fetish" (p. 136), poets in the meantime can draw attention to the ideological structuration of sign systems. Andrews's poem above is to be seen, then, as precisely such a focus on the building blocks and processes that go into any organization of signs into semes through the manipulation of syllables (here quite typical Anglo-Saxon ones) and space, as well as the constitution of desires, the "articulation of and on the body" ("Constitution," 163). His concern with the body in the poem, reminiscent of Foucault's body politics, can be seen in the performance instructions which accompany many of the poems in Love Songs, such as those for "NO 117": "Two performers walking, the first slowly, the second swiftly, repeating their word (memorized)....[74] Each time A crosses the path of B (the closer the better), both performers go on to the next word. "
A further distinction between Andrews's concern with the production of
meaning and that of a purely structuralist linguistics is his insistence
that "systems of meaning . . . fare] broader than signification,
broader than the structure of the sign, but something more like 'sense'
or 'value' in a more social dimension" ("Total Equals What,"
48). While the structuration of ideology and social organization can be
seen as analogous to the structuration of language, it should not be reduced
to the latter. Though the structuralist focus on the immanent process
of signification helps one to see the epistemo-logical problems of realist
modes of discourse, Andrews claims that that is only one level or horizon
of language. A second horizon can be seen as "the structure of discourse"
which organizes the diacritical differences of significa-tion into a polyphony
of voices and puts those differences "in motion, through action,
through the organization of desire, through the organization of discourse"
(p. 49). The third and ultimate linguistic horizon is the set of ideologies
which "inscribe in different ways" the polyphonic organization
of differences. Thus, a particular ideological formation structures the
limits and possibilities of discursive practices.
The exploration and explanation of the possibilities for meaning, then,
serve also as a critique of ideological and social practices. For the
materials of language, through their particular articulation, are transformed
into mean-ing-a meaning which though arbitrary in Saussure's sense is
nevertheless imposed, distinctions organized into interdependency, each
requiring the other "as the ground of their possibility" ("Total
Equals What," 52). This recognition should not lead to the abandonment
of organization, Andrews argues, but instead to a more positive recognition
of possibility:
By calling attention to possibility, we're acknowledging that the totality [in Althusser's sense] isn't just a negative restrictive thing, or some deterministic program. It's also something that's reproduced by action within the system and, at the same time, it becomes a resource or a medium that can be drawn upon.... The social rules that are involved in it are positive, enabling, constructive, and constitutive.... To imagine the limits of language (as an active process, a method) is also to imagine the limits of a whole form of social life-in this case, of a predatory social order (or interlocking network of orderings) that desperately needs to be changed. ("Total Equals What," 53)
A poetry that is critical, demythologizing, contextualizing (in the sense
of recognizing the codes giving shape to language) can become an active
in-tervention as a laying bare of the device, an uncovering of the framing
involved in any meaning, a framing which both sets limits and offers possibilities,
extensions, alternatives.
In this way Andrews suggests a way out of the endless debate between realism
and modernism. The focus of the debate has shifted, the terms now [75]
being modernism versus "a more social [or socialist] perspective."
The question, no longer about representation-vs.-repression, now is "whether
form, as an activity, will help reinforce the generative qualities of
language's raw materials rather than close it off" (p. 57). Such
a question implies a way of looking at Andrews's "SONG NO 129"
above as revealing the resonating, generative potential of language in
addition to its more negative role as ideology critique. Andrews proposes
a practice, then, which desires both openness and possibility.
To return to our initial question, then, of the whether to which Andrews
and Bernstein might identify with the position which Eagleton satirizes
(and supposing, as I do, that Andrews and Bernstein share a close enough
position not to complicate such a question), the answer is both yes and
no. To the extent that the Tel Quel position questions the hegemony of
realism as a literary and epistemological mode of representation in capitalist
society, then the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E would agree. But to the extent
that it offers no possibility of practice within language-there being
no constructive possibility of a purely genotextual mode of praxis-Andrews
and Bernstein in a qualified way share Eagleton's suspicion that history
has somehow evaporated from such a view.
To what extent Andrews and Bernstein share Eagleton's call for a "materialist
realist" (" 'Aesthetics and Politics'," 31), who gives
off a sense of "the dust and heat of the class struggle" (p.
33), is not clear. Eagleton's prescription is vague and uncomfortably
romantic. The question, at any rate, cannot be between one mode of realism
and another, for realism implies the re-presentation of what can no longer
be thought of as present in the first place. "Realism" remains
endlessly trapped within questions of the paradigmatic axis of language.
The shift that Andrews proposes is one to the syntagmatic axis, the site
of framing or structuration. The question now is the social organization
of the chain of signifiers within specific and determinate discourses.
Praxis is now a question of syntaxis.
From
Chapter Five, “Praxis and Syntaxis”:
[76] In "Language, Realism, Poetry," the introduction to In
the American Tree, Ron Silliman writes, "As is manifestly clear in
the pages that follow, neither speech nor reference were ever, in any
real sense, 'the enemy' " (p. xvi). In "Semblance" Charles
Bernstein writes, "Not 'death' of the referent-rather a recharged
use of the multivalent referential vectors that any word has . . ."
(The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 115; hereafter LB). In "Text and Con-text"
Bruce Andrews notes, "Not exactly 'dereferentialist'-for can writing
be adequately tagged with what it's not doing? Isn't that the old chest-busting
negativism of the avant-garde?" (LB, 31). And Andrews and Bernstein
together insist, in "Repossessing the Word," that "the
idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome
and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is
to refer, one-on-one, to an already constructed world of 'things.' Rather,
reference, like the body itself, is one of the horizons of language, whose
value is to be found in the writing (the world) before which we find ourselves
at any moment" (LB, ix).
The momentum behind such qualifications grows out of the desire of many
so-called Language poets to break out of the anti - referentialist stereotype
within which they have been defined. They themselves, of course, are largely
responsible for such a characterization because of their earlier realism-
equals- reification argument and their participation in symposia such
as "The Politics of the Referent" (1977) and "The Death
of the Referent?" (1981), the question mark in the latter title notwithstanding.
Whether or not it is true that "reference . . . is one of the horizons
of language" (Jacques Derrida's work at the very least challenges
such a claim), it is important to examine the reasons some of these poets
give for rejecting the stereotype of anti- referentialist. As the above
statements indicate, the poets do not want to limit the scope of language
nor to act out of pure negativity. They instead wish to expand the scope
of language and to present a positive front in their challenge to common
linguistic assumptions.
[77] "The recent non-referential formalists, such as Clark Coolidge
and Robert Grenier," writes Silliman, "frontally attack referentiality,
but only through negation by specific context. To the extent that negation
is determined by the thing negated, they too operate within the referential
fetish" (LB, 131). The early work of Coolidge, Grenier, McCaffery,
Andrews, and Silliman all served as the logical extension of the dominant
focus of literary art in bourgeois society-the paradigmatic. Saussure,
as we have seen, divided parole or the spoken utterance into two axes,
the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic or, as Roman Jakobson later called
them, the metaphoric and the metonymic ("Two Aspects of Language").
The paradigmatic axis refers to the word's ,'vertical" relation to
a given langue, all other words which could be associ-ated with or substituted
for the word, as in metaphor when one word stands in for another. The
paradigmatic axis also represents the possible con-notations of the word
and, ultimately, the word's signified. Questions of reference, then, examine
the paradigmatic extensions of the sign. The syntagmatic axis, in contrast,
refers to the word's "horizontal" relation to other words around
it, as in a sentence, the chain of contiguous signifiers. it is the syntagmatic
axis which limits the possible connotations on a given word's paradigmatic
axis.
While the so-called anti-referential poem is posed as an attempt to deny
the possibility of reference, it nevertheless remains within the paradigmatic
approach to poetry. But once the question of reference has been bracketed,
new possibilities for the conception of the poem arise. It is the achievement
of many Language poets to think beyond the stalemate of the paradigmatic
question and to pose poetry as an exploration of the syntagmatic, as a
question of the power of frames and, by extension (as we shall see), of
ideology. The role of poetry thus shifts from denying to revealing, unveiling,
dis-covering.
In order to follow this important shift in focus from the paradigmatic
to the syntagmatic, I will first explore the assumptions inherent in a
paradigmat-ic focus. Next I will look at the discussion of syntax initiated
by the minimalist and conceptual artists and its influence on certain
Language poets' expanded notion of poetic syntax. And then I will follow
that exploration with a reading of particular Language works that are
built on these notions of expanded syntax, and the political claims that
arise from the process which could be called "syntaxis": the
act of laying bare the role of syntactical frames in ideological production.
Extensions of the Paradigm
As Silliman explains in "Surprised By Sign (Notes on Nine),"
Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, though written about French poets
such as Rene Char, applies quite well to the Language poets represented
in "The Dwelling Place" anthology of 1975 (the title itself
coming from a phrase in Barthes's [78] book). Consequently, since my assertion
that some modern poetry un-derscores the syntagm rather than the paradigm
appears to contradict Barthes's discussion, I first need to address myself
to the claims of Writing Degree Zero. In characterizing the shift in poetry
that has occurred since Rimbaud, Barthes emphasizes the breakdown of syntax
and the foregrounding of the word's materiality in modern poems. Whereas
Barthes sees classical poetry as a decorative form of prose, both modes
performing the same expressive function, modern poetry by contrast appears
to be written in a language quite foreign to prose. The word in a classical
poem was a function, a transparency; the word in the modern poem is a
substance, an object suigeneri. In modern poetry, Barthes explains:
... connections only fascinate.... the Word in poetry can never be untrue, because it is a whole; it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed connections be-ing abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and recollections: it is a sign which stands. The poetic word is here an act without an immediate past, without environment, and which holds forth only the dense shadow of reflexes from all sources which are associated with it. Thus under each Word in modern poetry there lies an existential geology. (p. 40)
By "project" Barthes may mean that the word extends only on
its vertical axis (projection) or that the word's goal now is only to
foreground its vertical, referential dimension. In either case he overlooks
that the effect of the isolate word is not simply a focusing on the paradigmatic
extensions due to its unanchored position in an indeterminate syntax but,
more important, a reflection on the role of syntax itself in determining
the particular coloring of a word. To say, furthermore, that such a word
is now without environment (syntactical context) is to impose an unnecessarily
narrow definition onto the word "environment." No word, even
the word which appears by itself on an other-wise blank page, is without
environment; it is simply without its norma-tive environment. Barthes
restricts himself to the paradigmatic extensions of the poem; but it is
the syntagmatic extension which concerns many Language poets.
Certainly Barthes is not unusual in his focus on the referential vectors
of the word, for that has long been the focus of questions about language.
But the works of Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Bruce Andrews, Charles
Bernstein, and other Language poets are not simply (or not always) a negative
reaction to the domination of the paradigmatic; those works begin a thinking
outside of purely paradigmatic concerns. In order to see this shift, we
first need to explore (by means of what may at first seem an infinite
digression through the history of literary theory) the possibilities of
poetic form within such vertical concerns. For only then will the particular
contribution of the Language poets be clear.
• • •
[95] At this point we should be able to sketch an outline of the various
possible poetic manifestations this concern with syntax offers. if, as
I have suggested, some of the Language poets have provided a way of thinking
outside of the paradigmatic frame, then we should be able to plot a new
semantic rectangle [96] based on a new initial binary opposition. Instead
of the Reflection/Expression opposition which applies to questions of
representation (Reflection as the representation of the external, Expression
as that of the internal), I propose that the initial concerns of many
"Language poets are Structure (as in frame, context, horizon) and
Force (as in anything which resists structure: desire, play, impulse).
Thus we could arrange the structure of possible permutations of this initial
opposition as follows:
Within the syntagmatic paradigm, so to speak, the above four positions
represent the range of possible stances toward the notions of Structure
and Force. (I should mention here that I offer this schematic map as a
way of asking questions about the stands of various poets on these issues,
not as an end in itself.) The first position, then, represents the attempt
to take into account both a concern with structure and a concern with
force. I would argue that this is the position most often expressed by
Andrews and Bern-stein, the position I provisionally refer to as "syntaxis."
By "syntaxis" I mean the mode of writing which, by baring the
frame, deliberately focuses on the process of signification as a production
of meaning through the syntactical organization of force. When Andrews
states that his writing grows out of a "desire to investigate the
possibilities of meaning, rather than just the possibilities of form-to
investigate, in a sense, the way our ability to create different kinds
of content and different kinds of form gets shaped" ("Total
Equals What," 50), he is talking about writing as syntaxis. Bernstein
posits similar concerns in the following: "What pulses, pushes, is
energy, spirit, anima, dream, fantasy: coming out always in form, as shape"
(LB, 44). The shape of energy, the structure of force: the two are never
separate.
The second position on the chart above represents the emphasis on writ-ing
that focuses on the work's structure at the expense of the disruptive
forces resisting that structure. Certain comments by Watten might lead
one to place him here. His desire for "total syntax," for instance,
might be interpreted in this light, as well as his desire to see that,
"although the landscape is mutat-ing, the driver is always in control
of the car" (Total Syntax, 64). While such a [97] reading of Watten's
view might not be completely wrong, other of his state-ments complicate
that reading. When Watten writes, for example, that for the contemporary
writer "a thorough and uncompromising 'editorial' imagina-tion is
needed, alongside whatever dissociation participates in the original act"
("The XYZ of Reading," 4), he reveals a phase-one concern with
the articulation of both structure and force. As he has told me in conversation,
Total Syntax "implies an interest in extending the implications of
art from the work into the world, but ... also begs the questions of closure,
totalization. . . I'm not arguing for a totalization of art in political,
psychological, or linguistic senses" ("Barrett Watten on Poetry
and Politics," 196). It seems more accurate to place Watten along
with Andrews and Bernstein in phase one while noting that phase one in
fact offers a variety of possible articula-tions of structure and force.
Phase one, as well as the other phases, should be depicted as a range
of options between two extremes, as in the following extension of the
preceding chart:
Thus we could say that Watten might appear at position IA while Andrews
might appear closer to 1D.
When Steve McCaffery calls for a poetry, on the other hand, built on the
concern "for releasing energy flow, for securing the passage of libido
in a multiplicity of flows out of the Logos" (LB, 88), he clearly
articulates a position at the third phase. Here the emphasis is on the
unrestrained flow of Force and the refusal to impose any obvious Structure
whatsoever. But when he claims that "language centered writing not
only codes its own flow but codes its own codicities," McCaffery
reveals that-at least to some extent-he too works within the assumptions
of phase one (perhaps at 1E). Nevertheless, his dominant position tends
to be at phase three.
I cannot imagine what a poetry derived from phase four concerns would
look like. Only the blank page would appear to meet the conditions of
both Not-Force and Not-Structure, yet even the blank page can be read
as the articulation of silence or refusal or death. "if the poet
in Cocteau's Orpheus claims god-head by inscribing blank pages,"
Watten writes, "those pages still have been written-and if read aloud,
they would have a temporal structure" (Total Syntax, 217). While
the conceptualists have posited works which exist only in the mind, their
position nevertheless is at phase one. Far from positing [98] nothingness,
they are profoundly concerned with ideational structure and content. And
as we have suggested above, even the presentation of nothing-ness signifies.
At any rate, one aim of the above chart is to differentiate between various
poets I have discussed throughout these chapters. But I wish to stress
that even such a differentiation remains at a necessarily general level
and does not imply that everyone who might be plotted at a certain point-say
I D-will write a similar poetry. That both Andrews and Bernstein could
be said to occupy such a position does not at all imply that their poetry
is then in-distinguishable, or even that the poetry of each is homogeneous.
The same poet can occupy different points at different times. As Douglas
Messerli has pointed out in his introduction to the "Language"
Poetries anthology, "If Andrews positions himself as a writer who
would make his poetry a public production.... Bernstein advocates a concept
of privacy for writing" (p. 4). My point is to identify particular
articulations of concerns, of the claims that each poet makes for his
or her poetry; to that extent, then, Andrews and Bernstein can be seen
to be much closer in their views than each would be to Watten or Silliman
or Howe.
Conversely, as I suggested in chapter one, the recognition that certain
Russian Futurist poets and certain Language poets might write a poetry
that looks similar does not guarantee that the concerns behind those poetries
are at all similar. The effects of the formal characteristics of a poem
depend on the intricate texture of contexts in which the poem is inscribed;
the same poem may serve widely divergent ends at different times, among
different au-diences, within different historical contexts. This is my
claim in chapter three against Jameson's reading of "China."
His equation, however qualified, of schizophrenic language and Language
poetry reveals an uncharacteristic in-sensitivity on Jameson's part to
the role of context in determining the effects of a work. Jameson's uneasiness
with any but a normative, narrative syntax might place him at phase two
above.
My second aim in the chart and in this chapter is to emphasize the significance
of the shift from predominantly paradigmatic concerns to syn-tagmatic
ones. As I have said already, the work of some Language poets extends
beyond a purely negative reaction within the paradigmatic horizon. If
the claims of this poetry rested solely on those that I examine in chapter
four-that this poetry subverts the referential fetish-then such a challenge,
though important, would fail to point beyond the vertical axis.
It has been my hope in this chapter, however, to emphasize the positive
challenge of this poetry-the challenge to question not just what we think
but also the way we structure what we think. As I have suggested in chapter
two, this challenge is an injunction not merely to think clearly but to
recognize the role of ideological frames in the constitution of our world.
Andrews makes this concern quite clear in the following: This poetry "moves
toward a more critical (or contextual) focus on meaning itself and on
... [an] overall social [99] comprehension. And I think this involves
a greater sensitivity to the matter of ideology-which is embodied in discursive
frames that we use and in the social arrangements which stage the possibilities
for meaning to be produced" ("Total Equals What," 50).
That sensitivity to ideology lies in the manipulation of syntactical frames,
in the creation of what Bernstein has called a "syntaxophony,"
in order first of all to lay bare the framing process of ideology; and
second, to place the reader in a more active role as the coproducer of
the meaning of the poem. Such a foregrounding of the "materialism
of the idea," as Jacques Derrida has called it, through a conscious
syntactical praxis is necessary in order to "counterbalance the neutralizing
moments of any deconstruction" (Dissemination, 207). The important
but neutralizing deconstruction of the "referential fetish"-and
with it the bourgeois claim to "natural" language-must be accompanied
by the laying bare of the framing process. Otherwise we simply substitute
one realism for another and thereby perpetuate the very arbitrariness
we criticize. The answer to reification is not a further obliteration
of meaning-as McCaffery and Melnick have at times suggested-but a laying
bare of the social process of meaning production. As Andrews puts it (LB,
136): "To politicize-not a closure but an opening. " Or as Marx
puts it in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte": "The
social revolution . . . cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only
from the future."
George Hartley is Associate Professor of English at Ohio University. He is also author of The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime.