Throughout Questions of Poetics, I use radical particularity as a critical concept to discuss the making and interpretation of Language writing and other forms of art—but also its limits as a pre-given or “one-size-fits-all” concept. Language writing may be characterized, in almost every instance, by the foregrounding or highlighting of the “radical particular,” but this does not simply guarantee the success of its aesthetics or politics, nor does it distinguish its use of the radical particular from other art practices. I see the focus on the “radical particular” as common to the avant-garde, as having a critical potential that is the beginning, not the end, of its politics:

Radical particularity has a long history in avant-garde practice—indeed, it may be the formal feature most characteristic of the manifold histories of the avant-garde, from Dada’s cut-ups to surrealism’s found objects to imagism’s direct treatment to Language writing’s parataxis, continuing in myriad ways in present poetry and art. The priority of parataxis (or principle of equivalence) over hypotaxis (or principle of subordination) has, in itself, even been taken as the key principle of Language writing’s claim to a politics, as if the mere foregrounding of the materiality of language would overturn the Symbolic Order, mirroring or subverting the equivalence of the commodity form and exchange value by bringing material social relations to consciousness and thus negating them. What remains to be shown are the precise relations between materiality, signification, criticality, and form such that the agency of the work is not reduced to a universal effect, good for every occasion. (8)

Obvious examples of the “radical particular” would include not only literary ones like imagism, Dada, or Language writing, but visual art (Duchamp’s Fountain; Meret Oppenheim’s Object) and music or performance (Arnold Schoenberg; John Cage; Thelonious Monk; Steve Lacy; Joseph Beuys; Carolee Schneemann). But, in my account, it is not necessarily a guarantee of aesthetics, politics, meaning, or anything: more needs to be said. It would be hard to see how such an open questioning of the meaning or nonmeaning of the radical particular could be seen as “hegemonic,” but apparently it has been. In any case, the concept is both specific and open to multiple horizons of interpretation, agency, and use. Here is a short compendium of the uses of the term “radical particularity” in my introduction and Chapter 2, on Language writing and political economy, which should establish it as a critical—not positive—term for questions of poetics:

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)

Poetry as material practice is a site for critical intervention. The three terms that have borne the most weight in my discussion of poetics as critical method have been radical particularity, aesthetic negativity, and formal agency. . . . How is aesthetic negativity used in new genres of poetry, music, and visual art; and second, how do the transformations of radical particularity and form occur in the making of the poem as object? (18)

The concept of the poet/critic is developed in chapter 6 to show how the dialectic of poetry and criticism is irreducible to formal dominants such as concrete universality or radical particularity as guarantors of meaning. (21–20)

In a series of essays, I have questioned the conventional understanding of avant-garde poetries in terms of a dominant formal device: the foregrounding of radical particularity—the use of the part to stand for a critique of the whole. Radical particularity, more precisely put, is the presentation of a particular word or object (or part of a work) in poetry or visual art (or any genre of art) as materially opaque, interpretably complex, historically situated, and unsublatable to the whole. The foregrounding of radical particularity asks the question of whether part and whole (of the work or other levels of analysis) can ever coincide—if we are to grant that the whole is never a mere abstraction. Radical particularity is a feature common to many avant-garde practices . . . . William Carlos Williams’s red wheelbarrow and Marcel Duchamp’s urinal are both radical particulars in this sense. In the Language school, radical particularity takes poetic form as a series of material signifiers in a range of nonnarrative verse and prose forms, resulting in a deferral or constructedness of meaning that resists totalizing unities, both within and outside the work. (73)

I establish a ground for Language writing’s use of radical particularity in conditions of late capitalism in the 1970s and follow its reception, which supported Language writing’s critique of political economy in the 1980s before retreating into formalist aesthetics in the 1990s. . . . I then trace Language writing’s use of radical particularity through later works of its early proponents. In Ron Silliman’s work, culminating in his long poem The Alphabet, I see a decades-long attempt to work through the differences between a poetics of radical particularity, its historical origins and development, and the vanishing horizon of totality. In its ubiquitous deployment of the New Sentence, Silliman’s work enacts a nearly obsessional attempt to investigate the relationship between poetic particulars, historical contexts, and major form that represents “the whole.” (74)

In their fictional proof that poetry cannot be written under conditions of fascism or exile, [Roberto] Bolaño’s novels unfold as prose romances of social impossibility, using the limits of poetry as a device, while they ironically foreground a contrary use of radical particularity in which “the part is the untrue.” (77)

A key moment of retrenchment is Marjorie Perloff’s essay “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties” (1985), which, while endorsing a poetics of radical particularity, consists largely of extended close readings: “But is it poetry? Tina Darragh’s paragraph is a mock page from a dictionary; instead of ‘oilfish’ to ‘old chap’ (which is, of course, not under ‘C’), we are given a set of riddling permutations of words beginning with ‘t’: ‘technical,’ ‘textbooks,’ ‘textiles,’ ‘T-formations,’ ‘T-groups.’” (82)

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)

Silliman’s one-volume “book of books” is itself a radical particular—a 1,054-page (plus notes) monument containing twenty-six nonlinear sections, each adopting some variation of radical particularity and each written within a specific time frame. (87)

[Silliman’s] radical particularity thus splits into complementary functions: an anticipatory use of the part to stand for an as-yet-unrealized whole, and a resulting nonidentity of part and whole that materializes their refusal of closure. (88)

Content, in other words, is decisive in Silliman’s language writing. The opening section itself demonstrates how: radical particularity, in the New Sentence and its variants, constructs a historical register out of basic units of autobiography and everyday life. (90)

Silliman’s formalism is exactly this kind of allegory: it calculates the relationship between particular (typified by the New Sentence but registered in many other subspecies of radical particularity in his work) and general (the author and form that guarantee it) within the unfolding work. (96)

[Carla] Harryman’s reworking of Adorno positions the radical particular, seen as the nonidentity of concept to material, at the center of her unfolding arguments. . . . What is important is the relation of the essay as genre to the radical particularity of the concept in its irreducible, nonidentical, material form. (99)

To track the poetics of radical particularity in emerging poets of the last decade, I will conclude with a brief account of Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn (2012), a masterful collection of hybrid verse and prose forms that departs from the technique of the New Sentence through a range of competing genres: New Narrative and what I have termed the New Essay and the New Lyric. (103)

The use of radical particularity as thematic allegory begins at the level of form, which generates, in a recombinatory method that connects [Rob] Halpern’s work to Language writing, but which stops at neither language nor reference in exploding the gaps in equivalence. . . . The resulting dissociation is the terminal effect of a logic of enjambment circling around an open wound. (106)

I first used the term “radical particularity” in a talk on Charles Olson, arguing that for him, “history is immanent to experience and dispersed in the radical particularity of its contexts”; “Olson’s Historicism,” paper presented at “Poetries of the 1940s,” University of Maine, 2004. I used it again in the context of diasporic and globalization studies in “Franco Luambo Makiadi’s Universalism and Avant-Garde Particularity,” in Noland and Watten, Diasporic Avant-Gardes, 137–55; and in two talks that developed what I term “global parataxis”: “Radical Particularity, Critical Regionalism, and the Resistance to Globalization,” paper presented at the Modernist Studies Association annual meeting, Long Beach, Calif., 2007; and “Global Parataxis: Critical Regionalism and Radical Particularity,” paper presented at “Conceptions of Collectivity in Contemporary American Literature,” University of Mainz, Germany, 2011. (234, n. 1)

radical particularity, 8, 10, 13–14, 18, 22, 73, 78, 87–98, 234n1; and Adorno, 74; and the avant-garde, 73; and Bolaño’s novels, 77–78; and Halpern’s Music for Porn, 103–108; and Harryman’s Adorno’s Noise, 98–103; and Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes, 217–218; and history, 102, 106, 107; and Language writing, 8, 13–14, 73–74, 76, 79, 82, 84–85, 115, 153, 238n37; and political economy, 74, 78; and “Radio,” 207; and Silliman’s The Alphabet, 87–98, 103 (289)

This should be enough—if meaning is use, this is how I use the term, both to show its structural importance but also to critique its limits. If there is no “one-size-fits-all” formal device that guarantees a politics—as the early reception of Language writing often assumed—what remains is to focus precisely on how the radical particularity that is so ubiquitous across many kinds of poetry and art practice does its work, or fails to. And for that, one must step outside the limits of form and merge with discussions of context, history, person, politics.