An online commentator, I have heard, has just described my critical work Questions of Poetics as imperialist and hegemonic—strong language indeed! While my book does make strong claims, they are in the context of critiquing, and revising, the history of Language writing after 2000, among many topics. One of its major polemical goals is to defend Language writing from the charge of being a “period style”—a term first used by Marjorie Perloff and taken up by others to dismiss Language writing’s continuing relevance. I argue that Language writing has been widely influential, among many tendencies; it is a part of the literary history and poetic resources of the present. That does not make it the Third Rome, no. 

The term period style thus appears frequently in Questions of Poetics. For anyone attempting to get an overview of the work’s scope and claims, the index may prove helpful—where you will find eleven citations to “period style.” Reading through of the text using period style as a search term yields the following, which may help with the charge of imperial ambition:

Even at the origins of Language writing, we must reject the notion that its contributions were merely a period style; numerous modernist and postmodern authors undertook writing projects that foreground language in similar ways. An origin is a historical, cultural, and aesthetic complex that can never be adequately recovered, but only retrospectively constructed—in the process of which, the difference between Language writing as an active method and the static description of a period style comes clear. (11)

In the productivity of new genres, within the context of Language writing’s dialectic of radical particularity and formal agency, I see a continuation of the 1970s focus on political economy and a refutation of its critics’ attempts to contain, marginalize, and overwrite it as a period style. (14)

The provocative phrase “period style” stands for a reductive attempt to create a logic of avant-garde succession in which innovative form advances from one period to the next. An analogy to the market creeps into the concept of period style, in the notion of competitors eliminating each other through formal innovation and succession, while underneath the market analogy lies an unreflective set of historical rather than aesthetic claims. To show how claims to historical succession and periodization are always a part of any manifestation of the present, and how the present is constructed and experienced in historically distinct ways, I compare the three movements [Language writing, conceptual art, conceptual writing] in terms of how each argues its case for periodization. In so doing, I distinguish their constructions of a historical present from the broad economic periods of Mandel and Jameson, while refusing to reduce periodization to a mere succession of period styles. (16–17)

The politics of neoliberalism and Language writing’s radical use of political economy are the focus of chapter 2, as are the ways its new genres and forms are irreducible to a period style. (21)

In a determined attempt to split [the] use of the radical particular from its larger motivation[,] Language writing’s political motives were suppressed in its early reception by Marjorie Perloff, for whom the “turn to language” in poetry would become no more than a period style, its historical contexts being reduced to mere generational succession. To counter Perloff and her reductive art historical narrative of the rise and fall of avant-gardes, and to reconnect the two halves of our project, we will need to distinguish between the prospective and retrospective horizons of Language writing to answer the charge of a static, atemporal period style. [79]

“Period style” is thus a retrospective denial of prospective address, misreading as it negates the very contexts that gave 1970s art meaning. (80)

While it seemed to many of us [writing The Grand Piano] that the ensemble of aesthetic, political, performative, and gender relations we adopted were prospectively necessary, in retrospect mutual reinforcement drops away, leaving contexts and motives more perceptible. The limit case of such a dropping away is when the social and artistic overdetermination of motives collapses into a period style—this is the “death of the avant-garde” in Bolaño’s dark romance, if not in Peter Bürger’s pessimistic theory. The ascription of period style in this sense coincides with the repressive regimes of Pinochet, Reagan, and Thatcher: forget your utopian hopes and get used to the mausoleum of literary history—you lost. (80)

Returning to the historical emergence of Language writing makes it possible to recover its prospective horizons from the literary entropy of “period style.” The crux of the relationship between technique and method in Language writing, between its radical particularity and open form, is its privileging of the part over the whole, particular over universal, signifier over signified—the formal “dominant” found everywhere in the work. (84–85)

Language writing is for this reason more aligned with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s notion of “discursive formation” than a “period style”; as a social movement, it is a discursive construction of subject positions akin to the emergence of new social movements and identity politics in the period. (85)

My account of the Language school thus moves away from the foregrounding of the signifier and toward its use of language as a politics—from the local contexts of its production toward a global imaginary. It is with that task—to separate the critical agency of Language writing from any tendency to stabilize it in a period style—that I now approach more recent examples. (86–87)

To counter the charge of a period style that locks in unchanging features of Language writing from the 1970s, I will start with the textual and historical attributes of Ron Silliman’s now complete The Alphabet (2008). (87)

With Language writing, I have questioned for some time how nonnarrative forms, as presentist, are embedded in periodizing narratives, as well as how nonnarrative forms may themselves be historical. The stakes for such a concern are no less than the crux between how Language writing intervenes actively in the present (as an aesthetic “laying bare the device” or critique of dominant ideology through a radical use of language) and how it is understood historically (as representative, symptomatic, or even a period style). (137)

On “period style” as a negative descriptor of Language writing, see Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 8. Briefly citing three Language writers, she claims: “Different as these three selections are, theirs is a period style that exhibits specific features. First, this is a poetry of programmatic nonreferentiality, words and phrases refusing to ‘add up’ to any sort of coherent, much less transparent, statement. Syntactic distortion is the key. . . . All three poems use predominantly abstract language, and the pronouns have no discernible referents. . . . The defeat of reader expectation—a kind of cognitive dissonance—is central to these poems” (8–9). After a 2008 conference on conceptual writing, it was immediately publicized by Al Filreis, “Language, Period Style of the 80s,” Jacket2 (May 30, 2008); Kenneth Goldsmith cited the passage in “Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius,” an online article in Harriet (May 30, 2008); it was picked up in Steve McCaffery’s essay “Language Writing,” in Ashton, Cambridge Companion, 143; and in Commune Editions’ commentary posted on Jacket2 (April 1, 2014): “But this does not mean that there is any great honor is achieving a period style. . . . As soon as one period style has become evident, another has begun to emerge within or alongside it.” (226, n. 10)

See introduction, n. 10, for Perloff on Language writing as “period style of the 1980s.” Ironically, she criticizes Language writing in the same terms in which she praised it in 1985. (236, n. 20)

The opposite principle, which I use to read Language writing and many other art practices, from Allen Ginsberg’s journals to On Kawara’s date paintings to Tracie Morris’s sound poetry, John Cage’s Etudes australes, and Wolf Eyes’ noise music, is critical art practice. A “critical art practice” is one that reflexively examines its basic assumptions of language, form, genre, medium, identity, culture, history, and so on. I will develop “critical art practice” in a subsequent post.