A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats
Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”
In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trilling’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies.
My original contribution to this dialectic was a presentation at the 1996 Orono conference: “Being Hailed In and By the 1950s: Social Negativity and Cultural Poetics.” The essay begins by asking how a ten-year-old boy reading Time magazine in 1959, somewhere in the vicinity of U.S. military presence in the Far East, could be hailed by passages from Allen Ginsberg such that they would make a lasting imprint, preserved in memory. Thinking this through, I first go to Louis Althusser’s well-known parable of ideological subject formation: “I say: the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology.” If so, being hailed by Ginsberg is no less than constitutive of subjectivity, of who I am: I must look for similar traces elsewhere. One such could be found in earliest memories of the Outside as media interpellation in the 1950s—the family television set as organizing fixture of the ISA nuclear family, recorded by photographs taken by my father of our first Magnavox set, in a hardwood cabinet, I recall. The two images I presented (reproduced on slides from a family album) were notable: Joseph McCarthy at the Army/McCarthy hearings; and Duke Ellington at the piano. The deep structure of “hailing” could be unpacked from their denying and beneficent gaze; here hailing has drawn me in, one level deeper, to a “cultural logic” of the Outside (as disturbing, confirming) that just is ideological subjectivity. Going deeper, I called up Jacques Lacan’s First Seminar, from 1954, which concludes his account of the transference in the following terms: “The subject[,] thinking the thought of the other, sees in the other the image and sketch of his own movements. Now each time the other is exactly the same as the subject, there is no other master than the absolute master, death.” Ideological subjectivation has as its goal in its own destruction; at which point, “Jacques Lacan has figurines representing elephants handed out.” A parallel between the period concern with Cold War annihilation and Buddhist accounts of “emptiness” and “void” espoused by Ginsberg, Kerouac, and many others cannot be missed. Going one level deeper, I asked, of what does this void consist?
Thus my final paradigm of hailing, as cultural logic of the 50s, was the model Bettie Page, being “hailed” on Coney Island beach by the photographer who would orchestrate her canonical pin-up career, resulting in a series of iconic images now understood to be classics of the genre (and subject to informed critique particularly after her death in 2008). Page also gained notoriety from her work in discipline and bondage footage, which led to her being called up by a congressional committee and precipitated her withdrawal from modeling—the likely onset of a traumatic response, which would be later manifested in her biography. I carefully accessed and reproduced these images, filled a carousel with slides, and projected them to an astonished audience at the conference. In considering the meaning and impact of this material, I was to an extent looking through these images to what I could discern of the cultural logic of hailing, which I wanted to describe in terms of Page’s performance and the dark truths it both revealed and concealed. I was only partly looking at the images, though the audience could not avoid them—projected to a width of about thirty feet in the conference room, creating a memorable scene of interpellation if there ever was one. It was not only the happy, sex-positive images but the disturbing performativity of the bondage photographs that I want to include in my discussion of hailing. I ended my lecture with a slide of a blue elephant, after Lacan, to audible sighs of relief. The talk did in fact cause a minor riot. I recall Ann Charters hated it, and there were complaints to the organizers asking for me to be expelled forthwith. There were legitimate risks to my presentation, that I knew, but later in a rapprochement with a feminist critic I admitted to not being entirely in control of my material—particularly the impact of the slides, which I had only looked at in a slide sorter. I thus learned a lesson in visual media, which I used in my next presentation at Orono—a plenary talk on the cultural logics of the 60s, the Free Speech Movement, Allen Ginsberg chanting Sanskrit at a demonstration, and the Black Panther Party. Wanting to channel the 60s at the conference, I achieved that goal in the noisy debate that followed with Amiri Baraka.
These dialectical reenactments were a result, in part, of the original series of interpellations in the 50s and 60s, for which the Beats prompted a notable but certainly not the only moment. There was indeed a “cultural logic” that they represented. What is also important is the structure of the Academy at the time of its presentation: anything but the repressive conservatism of the Brandeis conference or Diana Trilling, or the liberal inclusiveness of the Wagner symposium, or, later in the 60s, Thomas Parkinson and Josephine Miles’s patronage of the Beats and San Francisco Renaissance at Berkeley. What developed in the Academy from that point on was equally present in my discussion—that is, the turn to Theory, which equally transformed the profession from the 80s onward. My being in the Academy at all—I was untenured when I gave this presentation in 1996—followed from questions I was asking about the poetics of encounter, which I wanted to articulate across the field of poetics, enabled by the turn to language, cultural studies, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and so on. I wanted to approach the cultural logic of poetics from “state of the art” theoretical resources that had implications beyond my merely personal framing of the question. The larger question, it now seems, is the dialectics of the encounter, in the early moment of the Beats that continued, at a later date, with the Orono conferences and in a disciplinary project I still aim to pursue.
This led to my work with graduate students at Wayne State University, one of whom has co-organized this discussion, and the essay in the current volume on Michael McClure, Lenore Kandel, systems theory, and Gregory Bateson. As overtheorized as that essay may seem—in a performative manner, I took the discussion as far as my theoretical resources would permit—it is also a dialectical moment that stems from the antagonism and holism of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Corso, as well as Bettie Page and Lenore Kandel. The question that I asked is how the proto-poetics of the Beats—in their immanent assumptions as well as the dialectic of the Outside—“teaches and may be taught.” Could I present my talk on hailing in the 50s at, say, a humanities symposium at my present university? Could I show slides of Bettie Page, and bring forward the historical frameworks and gender politics of her performance, in the classroom? Could I stay with the “trouble,” in Donna Haraway’s useful sense, that these materials compel? Although there are now multiple repressive cultural logics that answer the question with a resounding “no,” what the dialectic of the Beats and the Academy offers, I think, is ultimately more positive. The dialectic of Outside that was occasioned by the Beats, and their larger counter-cultural context of enlightenment in the 50s and 60s, truly continues on the Inside, where it may be teachable and may be taught in multiple forms.
Notes
Image: a dorje or “diamond thunderbolt.”
Note: The MLA round table celebrates the publication of Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio, eds., The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson, S.C.: Clemson University Press, 2023), in which appears my essay, “Holism, Antagonism, Proto-Poetics, and Pedagogy Among the Beats,” pp. 75–100; see here.
