Entries tagged with Language writing

October 4, 2024

Entry 62: The One Great Story

Remarks on Jameson and Narrative

Under any house is a basement of psychological dimensions, a surplus affective space. And as I read The Political Unconscious into the night, a sump pump in the basement would go on and off, shunting gallons of water out of its perpetual flood. An editor asked me for a theory of such drainage in the form of a critical review, which I refused as not entirely serious. —”Foxes,” Bad History, 60

The year is 1981. Carla Harryman and I are living in a working-class bungalow on Hampshire Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, competing with raccoon families and occasional gunshots to establish a relationship in an indeterminate time. Ronald Reagan has been elected, while the alternative arts are forging ahead on multiple agendas. Poets Theater is in full swing, with a character called “Jameson” in Kit Robinson’s play, as I discussed previously. Jameson has entered the Language and New Narrative debates and given his talk at 80 Langton Street, siding with Narrative while symptomatizing Language, but also has now published The Political Unconscious, a watershed work that would have long-term impact on questions of narrative and form. Jameson’s “questions of interpretation,” bringing together form and history, would anchor a more expansive, contextual methodology not confined to surface language—bypassing precisely the critique of Language’s dissociation of sensibility in the postmodern. The “turn to history” via poetic form begins right here. … More

September 29, 2024

Entry 61: History Is What Hurts

Remarks on Jameson and Language

The media, for once, are getting it right: with the announcement of Fredric Jameson’s passing on September 22, one often sees a likeable photo of an engaged, outer-directed, smiling and welcoming, if prodigious and awe-inspiring scholar and critic in early or late days of his notable life and career. There is something of the Peaceable Kingdom in the intellectual devotion and worldly accomplishments evoked: “For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love,” per The New York Times. While Critical Theory, in both nature and practice, accentuates the negative, Late Jameson presents a beneficent gaze that is rarely encountered—especially with Marxists. The Grand Narrative of Progress Toward a Better Life seems activated by his very presence, a moment of positivity restored at the moment of loss. … More

December 31, 2023

Entry 55: Beginning Again and Again

Scaffolding Repetition: Gertrude Stein,
Language Writing, Electronic Dance Music (online here)
eLyra 22, special issue on “Poetics and Politics
of Repetition,” ed. Bruno Ministro, 25 December 2023 (online here)

Abstract: This essay takes up the critique of repetition in Gertrude Stein, her claim to have written a “continuous present” that “begins again and again” and “includes everything” versus her later qualification that repetition is always shifting in terms of “insistence” and “emphasis”. Even so, Stein focuses on the unfolding of the verbal material primarily in a linear fashion, though resonances and overtones abound. In Electronic Dance Music, from Detroit to Berlin techno, one finds more vertical layerings and “scaffolding”—a term taken from Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky—as a way of building up sonic elements in pleasurable and meaning-bearing ways. Using these two contrasting models of repetition, I read three language-centered poets—Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, and Marjorie Welish—in terms of their complex forms of temporality in poetic form, seen in terms of Stein’s often repeated framework of “beginnings, middles, and ends”. I conclude with a discussion of ”vital movement” in the electronic dance music of Berlin DJ Ellen Allien.

Keywords: Modernism, avant-garde, repetition, language writing, poetry, electronic music, American, Berlin

… More

November 14, 2023

Entry 54: The Transmission of Poetry

MATERIAL TRANSMISSIONS:
DEMOTIC SURREALISM/HIERATIC LANGUAGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, 1975–1980

Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive
of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly
hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.

—André Breton, “The Automatic Message” (1933)

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March 20, 2022

Archive 15: The Currency of History

In Questions of Poetics, I wrote that, in contrast to André Breton’s motto “I seek the gold of time,” what I wanted is more like the “currency of history.” All this bears on the question of value, of course. Breton’s wish to alchemically transform desire into substance is inscribed on his tombstone, where it is still doing its work. In another present, I see history as a gold mine of another sort, making meanings that circulate and become value. Such is the task of the poet, broadly put, writing works that will be circulated until they find their meaning and use. It is also the task of the literary historian, to establish the contexts, motives, situations in which such meaning may be made. There needs to be more literary history, not of the old, positive kind but one addressed to the making of value in poetics as history. This could begin with the work of an archive, as an assembly line of parts for meaning making—eventually tending toward a form of comprehension, like the work of literary history depicted above.

Lilian Chaitas’s Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes contains, in my reading-in-progress, the best account of the debates on early Language writing I know. Published in 2017, it is a meticulously detailed, 435-pp. account of American poetic avant-gardes from the New Americans to Language writing, drawing its theory from Renato Poggioli and Pierre Bourdieu, with a glance back to Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995). Originally it was a 2013 dissertation written to German standards under the direction of Bernd Engler at the University of Tübingen, where not coincidentally I was hosted as a Fulbright scholar in 2005 and staged a raucous conference on Authorship and the Turn to Language that December—a currency of history itself. But I did not know the work existed until a section of the last chapter, retelling the 1978 Duncan/Watten cataclysm in microscopic detail, turned up as a pdf on Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. I finally located a copy on Amazon.de, which arrived last month from a warehouse in Nijmegan, Netherlands. The last chapter, “Language Poetry in the 1970s and 1980s,” is what concerns me here—and which so impressed me that I provide it in three separate pdfs (here and below), one for each of the major sections. These address, in turn, “The So-Called ‘Language’ School”; “The Duncan/Watten ‘debat/cl/e'”; and “Stalin as Linguist.” … More

September 26, 2020

Archive 07: The Hegemony of Language

Twenty years on, it is timely to reread the kind of discourse—or brazen publicity—that was circulated about Language writing and the academy, and indeed the entire project of poetics that was imagined as their synthesis, about 2000. In the two decades that followed, everything has changed in terms of the “horizon of expectation” that led to this premature discussion of the dominance of Language writing in the academy; in 2020, I will say confidently from my experience, and what I know of others’, that such a thing never happened. Perhaps it was meant not to happen, and the provocative title page to the September 2000 article in Lingua Franca by Andrew Epstein may be the reason why. As I work through my archive, I am finding numerous such signposts to futurity that did not arrive, while at the time I was caught up in the process, let us charitably say, of negotiating the “stakes at the table” of the future of Language writing. Why this discourse was misdirected, and for whose interests, will be the substance of my reading below; those interested may find, in the interest of time travel, the full text of the article here.  … More

April 13, 2020

Archive 04: The Death of Stalin

The way things are going
They’re gonna crucify me . . .

—John Lennon

It is hard to move ahead, at this point in time, to the dark core of my archive with a straight face: I mean the awe-some spectacle of “Stalin as Linguist,” the apex of all literary hit pieces. And, as luck would have it, someone has gone and started the job for me. On 24 August 2018, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars hosted David Levi Strauss’s mini-dossier of the scandal that erupted in Poetry Flash over his 1985 revival of the 1978 debate with Robert Duncan over Louis Zukofsky, about which I have written so much I do not even want to link to it [but see below]. The capstone of the dossier is not Levi Strauss’s encomium, nor the original Poetry Flash slam, published over two full pages about the same time, but Clark’s 1987 version, cleaned up and published in Partisan Review. The stakes of the retrospective defense of Duncan (and belated attack on me) get past the local knee-capping to seek support from a serious piece of red-baiting, which, in the mid Reagan Era, still had resonance with neocons and would be taken up by them.

My charge is to find new take-aways from this old history, and there are several. First, Levi Strauss’s dossier, with Dispatches‘ minimal introduction, is mainly a scandal-provoking display, meant to complement the uploading of the Duncan tape as part of a long-term fascination with that event—not to gain any sort of understanding of it. But the dossier itself is bad history (sense 1: methods): the context for this privileged eruption of the Poetry Wars misses the larger stakes of the reception of Language writing, which was full-tilt at the time [see below]. As such it is a nostalgic bit of hagiography for Levi Strauss and the Duncan revival. Second, the scandal returns to what was so cryptic and provocative about the line “Stalin as a linguist” itself. What was its use in my poem, and what bad history (sense 2: events) does it refer to? What issues of authority, relevant to the present, does this second-order invocation of “Stalin” disclose? Finally, the publication of this dossier itself had a context, in fall 2018, that would become fateful quite soon—providing an example of the uploading of pseudo-scandalous material to target, abject, and humiliate. The dossier draws on the tradition of the journalistic hit piece and remediates it in the age of doxxing and trolling, for nefarious purposes to come. … More

April 10, 2020

Archive 03: Abjecting the Avant-Garde

Continuing my work in the archives, I want to locate the shift from a more or less happy recognition of new writing in the late 70s to what can only be called full-fledged reaction by the mid 80s. While the encounter with Duncan over a materialist reading of Zukofsky was a premonition, it was an isolated—if internalized—event. The San Francisco literary avant-gardes—Language writing among others—got a lot good press at their moment of emergence, in a climate of openness that only encouraged their work. The milieu of Left cultural activism—backed up by federal support for alternative publishing through the NEA and community arts jobs via CETA—is readable in the October 1978 cover of the San Francisco Review of Books. The author shot of Kathleen Fraser juxtaposed with Ron Silliman reading Ketjak at Powell and Market Streets goes with the Left agenda: articles on Black power, the nuclear arms race, the Russian revolution, and—the small press. As with the earlier countercultural moment in the 50s/60s, avant-garde writing and small press publishing were seen as part of a cultural politics extending out in all directions. The inky, unpretentious typography of the cover goes along with a baseline populism of multiple agendas. … More

April 6, 2020

Archive 02: Reception Study

Pursuing the truth hidden in the archive, I could have called this entry “Poetry Wars,” as a hot-button topic. But that would be to give in to the facile and fetishistic, the already scripted. What I am interested in is learning from the traces of reception, what the reception of a work, an author, a movement gives us as information, in a kind of feedback loop, of the world in which it was meant to have its effect—to “win its way” as Stein wrote. But that course is never guaranteed. Whitman’s assertion of a reciprocity with the people, his readers—”I alone receive them with a perfect reception and love—and they shall receive me”—may be posited as an ideal that is impossible to achieve. And it is true that the reception history of Language writing often took place in an opposite sense—to the extent that populists could claim it had been rejected by the “people,” seen as a literary ideal. It could be said that the entire movement, as a group form of “negative capability,” held open its horizon of reception until some future time to come. Rather than empowering the reader, Language writing intuited its reception as something it could not yet wholly envision or grasp. The writing itself, I would now say, took form on the basis of an unknown futurity.

Returning to the files for evidence does not disclose a simple negative history; far from it. “The morning of starting out, so long ago” (Ashbery) was as legitimately optimistic as it could have been. In that sense, an “originary” moment, at least on the West Coast, might not be the December 1978 “canon-making” debate with Duncan over Zukofsky’s reception, but the May 1979 “focus on language-centered writing,” edited by Steve Abbott, in the Bay Area journal Poetry Flash. By that time, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E had begun its four-year run of publication out of New York, and San Francisco small presses such as The Figures, Tuumba, and This Press had brought some of the early major works of the movement. But seeds of contestation or reaction were already evident. Alan Soldofsky’s “Language and Narcissism”—one of five contributions to the issue—was the first attested moment of “Language baiting,” and tended to overshadow the positive contributions of the forum. From that moment to Tom Clark’s cartoon parody of this author—likely drawn from the head shot on the cover of Poetry Flash—was but a little minute. And from that moment to the present, “forty years on” as Tony Green wrote, the discourse of populist antagonism to Language writing has been in place. Returning to the archive creates a series of talking points to comprehend what was at stake. … More

May 14, 2017

Document 50: Poetics as Value Thinking

Poetics as Value Thinking:
Transvaluations of Language Writing

Presented at Fondation des Etats-Unis, Paris
sponsored by Double Change/Ecole normale supérieure
15 March 2017

This lecture is a hybrid of two thought experiments—one, a discussion of the poetics of value that sees political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, linked discourses of the determination of value. The second is a proposal for the transvaluation of poetics, and specifically Language writing, as a prospective organization of poetic labor as a form of a “knowledge base” (adopted from information and digital theory). The notion that unites both is that poetry and poetics are forms not only of value making but value thinking—sites for the transvaluation of a general notion of value into particular values. … More

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