Difference Spreading: From Gertrude Stein to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry

By Peter Nicholl.

[Collected in Anthony Easthope and John O. Thompson, editors. Contemporary Poetry Meets Modern Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 116-27. Red numbers in brackets indicate page numbers in this book.]

In 1978, a new magazine appeared on the American poetry scene. The magazine, strangely titled L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, became during its four years of publication a main forum for a group of young writers keen to engage in theoretical speculation and debate about their medium. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E disappeared in 1981, but its name has lingered on, mainly as a means of designating a highly varied body of work which was shaped by the emerging protocols of the magazine. The names of writers involved will not necessarily be familiar to the British reader (some are discussed elsewhere in the present volume): Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein (the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E), Lyn Hejinian, Michael Davidson, Hannah Weiner, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Clark Coolidge, Bob Perelman, Tina Darragh, Michael Palmer, Steve McCaffery, Carla Harriman, Ray DiPalma, . . . .¹ The list could easily be extended, for the magazine's project of a writing which is 'language-centred' and which works in terms of 'diminished reference' has offered an attractive experimental format for those concerned with breaking the hold of a more conventional, modernist-derived poetics. Are we dealing, then, with a definitive postmodernism? The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theorists rarely use that word, but it suggests itself for two reasons: first, because this new poetics is closely enmeshed in contemporary Marxist and post-structuralist thought; and second, because the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project has strong connections with an 'alternative' line of American writing which prefigures aspects of postmodernism in a way that the more conventionally mainstream modernism does not.

The literary line which counts here is one which includes Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Laura Riding, John Ashbery (the Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oath) and Jackson Mac Low. Given Stein's privileged place in this line it isn't especially [117] surprising that it was her work on which several writers were asked to comment in a special issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Responses were invited to three pieces from Tender Buttons (1914): 'A Carafe, That Is A Blind Glass', 'Glazed Glitter', and 'Roastbeef'. The Toronto poet Steve McCaffery provided the following poem:

TRANSLATIONAL RESPONSE TO A STEIN SINGLE

a carafe that is a blind glass

she types clarity
relations to a scene
a seen in
zero

queer ones in the pain
of pattern
wheeled directions to
a fullness

that negated more to
more what chaos enters in

no one same article
unlike a wide.²

Gertrude Stein's 'single' reads as follows:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.³

McCaffery's 'translational response' to Stein's text will help us trace the passage from modernism to a form of postmodernism, but since his poem engages so closely with its original, something must first be said about the technique of 'A Carafe'.

The first thing we notice about Stein's text is that it is difficult and difficult mainly because its way of referring to a carafe seems abstract and obscure. There are problems at every turn: the grammar is unsystematic, terms are unclear (what is 'a system to pointing'?) and propositions are opaque ('The difference is spreading'). With a second reading, though, we may begin to suspect that the periphrasis of Stein's text, its way of circling around the object so confidently announced in the title, is not so much a failure of reference as a problematising of reference itself. As the poet Michael Davidson observes in his contribution to the same L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forum, 'The objects themselves are commonplace - as common as the [118] carafes, bowls and guitars of Cubist still lifes - but Stein's disjunctive prose removes them from their commonality and accentuates the gap between object and description.' (LB, p. 197) The strangeness of Stein's language, then - its way of 'leaping free of the gravity of the familiar', as Bob Perelman puts it (LB, p. 199) - makes us aware of the difference between language and its objects, producing a verbal artefact which is related to the real (it is 'a cousin' to the actual carafe) while not literally 'resembling' it. Davidson concludes that

What this implies for the act of reading is that there are no longer any privileged semantic centers by which we can reach through the language to a self-sufficient, permanent world of objects, foodstuffs or rooms. We must learn to read writing, not read meanings; we must learn to interrogate the spaces around words as much as the words themselves; we must discover language as an active 'exchange' of meaning rather than a static paradigm of rules and features. (LB, p. 198).

Davidson's distinction between 'writing' and 'meaning' points up the extent to which Stein's work diverges from what is often considered to be the main line of Anglo-American modernism. Think, for example, of Pound's criteria for imagism: 'direct treatment', a strict regimen of verbal economy (an economy with often distinctly moral implications), and a fundamental commitment to the natural object as 'always the adequate symbol'.⁴ The image gave Pound the means to assert the rights of 'absolute metaphor' against what he saw in the early phase of his career as the self-indulgent vagaries of associative metonymy.⁵ Like Eliot's related concept of an 'objective correlative', imagism aimed to produce a balance between internal and external worlds, using a model of visual perception to instigate desired formal constraints. In this sense, the visual offered an index of intelligibility, a guarantee of language's power to detach emotion from the purely associative and 'occult' flux of psychic process .⁶ In his early criticism, Pound liked to speak of the poem as a sort of 'equation' for a state of mind, thereby suggesting that poetic language entailed symbolisation of an originally inchoate experience.

When we look back at Stein's piece about the carafe it is striking how much at odds it is with these ideas of 'objectification' and 'direct treatment'. In fact, Stein seems to imply that words do not evoke concepts of things so much as things generate patterns of words.⁷ We begin with the idea of a carafe but the words which follow are often produced by associative contexts which are triggered by the words themselves ('blind' sets up an echo for 'kind', for example). The progression of the carafe text, then, the manner in which 'The difference is spreading', assumes that it is only by a sort of indirect treatment that we can hope to grasp the object - 'indirect', because [119] as soon as we name it, call it a 'carafe', our sense of a vital particularity is eclipsed in the generic blankness of the noun. As Stein puts it in 'Poetry and Grammar', 'A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it.' (LMN, p. 125) Stein's great discovery, as she recalls in another essay called 'Portraits and Repetition', was that writing and description are two very different things:

And the thing that excited me so very much at that time and still does is that the words or words that make what I looked at be itself were always words that to me very exactly related themselves to that thing the thing at which I was looking, but as often as not had nothing I say nothing whatever to do with what any words would do that described that thing. (LMN, p. 115)

This passage shows very clearly how Tender Buttons, like the Cubist painting to which it is often compared, tends to situate itself midway between representation and abstraction. While her search for words is motivated by a desire to express what made 'what I looked at be itself', her discipline of 'looking' entails a freeing of perception from memory and that 'dead' language of description by which memory makes the past familiar ('looking was not to mix itself up with remembering' (LMN, p. 1131).

Stein's idiom may seem coy at times, but her reference to 'excitement' is more than whimsical hyperbole: for the fact that non-descriptive terms suggest themselves to her produces pleasure in precisely the degree that it frees the mind from the obligations of reference and conventional repetition. This particular freedom is the objective of a form of modernism which is quite different from the one we associate with Eliot; compare, for example, his view of 'naming':

Try to think of what anything would be if you refrained from naming it altogether, and it will dissolve into sensations which are not objects; and it will not be that particular object which it is, until you have found the right name for it.⁸

For Stein, though, the domain of writing is precisely that of 'sensations which are not objects': once released from the instrumental duties of ,naming', language begins to take on a polymorphous life of its own, generating 'excitement as it becomes a thing to be enjoyed for itself. It's perhaps not surprising that so many of the pieces in Stein's Tender Buttons are concerned with food, for eating epitomises that fundamental association of linguistic materiality with oral pleasure (locutionary and sexual) which runs throughout her work. I am reminded here of a passage in Freud's Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious. Freud [120] is discussing cases of jokes which depend upon wordplay, cases where, he says, 'the (acoustic) word-presentation itself take the place of its significance as given by its relations to thing-presentations'. We experience a particular pleasure on such occasions, and Freud concludes that

It may really be suspected that in doing so we are bringing about a great relief in psychical work and that when we make serious use of words we are obliged to hold ourselves back with a certain effort from this comfortable procedure.⁹

'Hold ourselves back': Freud implies that a 'serious use of words' always entails a kind of repression, that if words are savoured in the mouth rather than being put swiftly to work, meaningful tasks will never be accomplished. To lift this repression, to abolish the lack on which a descriptive language is founded, is to disclose what Stein calls a 'continuous present' of language in which desire might seem to engage its object. Instead of Pound's imagistic 'instant of time' - an instant accorded immediacy by being lifted out of time and fixed, as an object to be perceived - the 'present' of Stein's texts is the unrepressed 'now' of writing and reading.

This idea of the poem as 'process' overcoming the exigencies of reference gives one key to Stein's importance for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets - for if, as McCaffery puts it, 'Reference in language is a strategy of promise and postponement' (LB, p. 189), the authentic time of the poem should be, in the words of Charles Bernstein, 'a series of substitutions or replacements that don't stand for or in place of but themselves embody that moment of time'.¹⁰ If L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry sees itself as distinctively new (postmodern, perhaps), it is because such ideas repudiate a whole tradition of writing about remembered experiences of the lyric self, turning attention instead to the 'tense-less' condition of language as medium.¹¹ Hence the view of Robert Grenier, another respondent to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forum, that Tender Buttons entails

the realization of new nominatives - (not neologism but) whole text, in process, 'replaces' worn-out, now-merely-conventional name offered up (in title, commonly) to be melted down in crucible of language process attention forging other access to the ongoing of what's what. (LB, p. 205; my emphases)

Grenier goes on to observe, however, that Stein cannot be fully assimilated to contemporary 'language-oriented writing' because much of her work 'show[s] her thinking language not as object-in-itself, but as composition functioning in the composition of the world' (LB, p. 206).

[121] Grenier's qualification may now help us to read McCaffery's poem, for here we evidently are dealing with language as 'an object in itself', with the difficulties of Stein's text not only intensified but raised, as it were, to a higher power. In 'A Carafe', the spreading of 'difference' (the gap between language and its object) also carries the trace of an actual thing which the text parodically 'describes' ('A kind of glass. . .'). And like many of the pieces in Tender Buttons, this one sometimes shadows the form of the declarative sentence not merely to heighten the effect of 'not resembling', but also perhaps to inhibit the emergence of a purely sound-based writing. ¹² It is as if the 'process' of the text does not abolish the referent so much as enact the suspension of its materiality. So, for example, 'a single hurt color' is at once a phrase generated within the text (as part of a very loosely determined complex of terms expressing relationship, 'kind', 'cousin', etc.) and a fairly easily 'translated' reference to red wine. Stein wants us to see that there is an 'order' which is not dependent on 'resemblance', but her practice is almost dialectical in its retention of the trace which is our point of departure.

By way of contrast, the 'translational response' in McCaffery's poem is such as to make the process of linguistic composition completely sufficient to itself. 'Translation' here is a deliberately adopted strategy which, like the 'procedural' writings of Jackson Mac Low, Ron Silliman, Tina Darragh, and others, substitutes an arbitrary but usually systematic structure for the conventionally authenticating forms of 'voice' and sensibility. Stein's text is handled as a linguistic object, a collection of words rather than of expressive items whose meanings must be respected. McCaffery's way of 'centering language within itself' (LB, p. 189) can best be seen by following line by line his negotiation with Stein's text (her words are given in italic):

[she] types/kind clarity/in glass
relations/a cousin to a scene/a spectacle
/a seen in
zero/nothing
queer/strange ones/single in the pain/hurt [color]
of pattern/an arrangement
wheeled directions to/in a system to pointing
a fullness/All
that/this negated/and not more to/not
more what chaos/unordered enters in/in
no one same/not resembling article
unlike/The difference a wide/spreading.

Some of McCaffery's 'translations' are simply synonyms which provoke modifications of meaning ('cousin' becomes 'relations', for example). [122] In other cases, the synonym allows a shift to a different part of speech (the noun 'kind' becomes the verb 'types'). Other forms of wordplay are designed to make us focus on the opacity of the language: the pun on 'scene'/'seen', for example, or the contorted phrasing of 'more to/more what chaos enters in', which seems to be triggered by the literal positioning in Stein's text of 'unordered' ('chaos') between 'not ordinary' and 'not resembling'. McCaffery 'translates', then, by synonym and wordplay, but with a quite deliberate inattention to semantic continuities, so that, for example, the phrase 'queer ones' is produced from two words ('strange' and 'single') which occur in different clauses (Stein, of course, has prepared the ground for this fluent conjunction by dropping any punctuation between the clauses).

Most of McCaffery's substitutions are intended to break down the surrounding contexts of particular words and prevent their integration into higher grammatical levels. ¹³ So 'wheeled directions' is produced by the deliberate removal of the translational context which, presumably, read 'pointing' as 'wielding directions'. With the last line of the poem -'unlike a wide' - McCaffery completes his destruction of the trace of the carafe in Stein's text. Here we are firmly within the domain of what Barrett Watten calls 'the self-sufficiency of the sign', ¹⁴ as the 'translation' forces an adjective to do the work of a noun. This is the (degree) zero 'scene' of writing¹⁵ which restructures meaning by abolishing reference. If Stein's text represents an extreme pitch of modernism in its desire to somehow suspend or bracket the referent, McCaffery's 'translation', with its rather portentously illogical phrases, insists on that loss of the real which we associate with current theories of postmodernism. (Jean Baudrillard's concept of the 'simulacrum' is perhaps the most influential example.)¹⁶

Yet there is no pathos here about the recession of the 'real'. On the contrary, McCaffery's poem fully endorses the priorities of a well-known essay by Ron Silliman, 'Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World'. As that title suggests, Silliman's main contention is that the ideological production of a natural, commonsense 'world' (the world of an unproblematic realism) depends on the illusion of the 'blank' page, on the transparency of language (LB, p. 127). The 'disappearance' of the medium is, in Silliman's view, an effect governed by those processes of exchange and reification which define commodity fetishism: the text is 'exchanged' for a world which is always given in advance. The task of an oppositional writing, then, is to efface the world in order that language might 'appear' in all its insistent materiality, constituting thereby 'a barrier to actuality' (NS, p. 179). This idea has, of course, little novelty in itself, and can be [123] traced in its more extreme modernist versions from Mallarmé through the sound poetry of futurism and dada. Yet it is not simply a technical insistence on the medium which is important here: beyond the foregrounding of artifice there is a concept of writing's origin as lying within language itself (not, that is, within that discipline of 'looking' which generates the texts of Tender Buttons). ¹⁷ McCaffery observes, for example, that the 'unavoidable presence of words within words contests the notion of writing as a creativity, proposing instead the notion of an indeterminate, extra-intentional, differential production'.¹⁸ Language is, as it were, mined for the ideas it may produce: as Lyn Hejinian puts it, in terms which recall the formalist theories of Roman Jakobson, 'where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies' (LB, p. 29). This way of thinking implies a certain diffuseness and indeterminacy of meaning - or meanings, because semantic integration is obstructed in the service of a highly localised production. McCaffery's 'translation' provides a 'jamming of the message', as he puts it elsewhere,¹⁹ allowing the reader to grasp meaning not as something transcendent but as a sequence of local intensities. Whereas language subordinated to representation is 'a huge mechanism for suppressing libidinal flow', McCaffery's preferred form of writing is committed to what Georges Bataille called a 'General Economy', 'an economy of loss and expenditure without reserve'. ²⁰ Such 'expenditure' is primarily on those non-semantic aspects of language (phonemic and graphemic) which cannot be recuperated at the level of the signified. The results are clear in the poem we are examining: there is a deliberate 'viscosity of thought', to borrow a phrase of Charles Bernstein,²¹ a materiality which should produce quasi-erotic pleasure as we hear 'the sound come into meaning rather than a play with already existing meanings by way of metre' .²²

'. . . unlike a wide'. - that phrase, with its triumphant period aping closure, trails in its wake at least one difficult question: is this artificial and mannered language simply decadent, or does it respond to the challenge of a distinctively postmodern period ?²³ Of course, the highly developed theoretical matrix of this poetry prevents any naive equation of the postmodern with the authentically 'new'; not only are these writers keen to acknowledge their own lineage, through Russian futurism, dada and surrealism, but they would assume, too, the truth of Jakobson's observation that 'virtually any poetic message is a quasi-quoted discourse' .²⁴ The issue of 'decadence' turns rather, I think, on the question of artifice and the extent to which a practice of 'writing' (as textuality) can be seen to direct attention away from not only the lyric sensibility but from social discourse generally. It [124] was the loss of a social horizon which the nineteenth-century critic Paul Bourget saw as the consequence of a decadent atomisation in his own time (hence his criticism of the Goncourts' style on the grounds that 'It delights in witticisms and couplings of terms which make the reader jump, while classical prose tries [to ensure] that no word of the phrase comes loose from the securely woven web of the style as a whole.'²⁵ Bourget's anxiety, that this disruption of syntax would lead to language being valued for itself rather than as a means of articulation, reappears in Eliot's critique of Swinburne's verse, where meaning 'is merely the hallucination of meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment'.²⁶ 'Hallucination of meaning' might seem an apt description of the effect of McCaffery's poem, but from the perspective of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the idea of 'hallucination' erroneously assumes a fixed ('reified') meaning in the first place (LB, p. 162). In contrast, these writers are keen to bring about that very 'uprooting' of language which Eliot laments, and to ensure the writer's failure to 'digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects' .²⁷ By a striking reversal of terms, the linguistic effects marked as 'decadent' by Bourget and Eliot now become the condition of a social horizon: as McCaffery puts it, 'The referent no longer looms as a promissary [sic] value and the text is proposed as the communal space of a human engagement.' ²⁸ In fact, for the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, the aim is precisely to create what Bruce Andrews calls (in terms curiously akin to Eliot's) 'A semantic atmosphere, or milieu, rather than the possessive individualism of reference' (LB, p. 36).

That characteristic leap from the linguistic to the socio-economic should make us pause. Andrews's way of opposing a disarticulated conception of 'meaning' to 'reference' as appropriation (a reaching through language to grasp or 'digest' the real) epitomises one main strand of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E thinking which adduces systematic connections between structures of discourse and those of capital (conventional 'meaning' is equated with surplus value, for example) .²⁹ This seems to me the most tendentious aspect of the whole theoretical project, backed though it is by an impressive array of marxist and post-structuralist sources .³⁰ Let us consider instead Andrews's critique of 'individualism', for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing is most assimilable to the broad outlines of the postmodernism debate when it mounts a sceptical interrogation of the subject. The main ideas here are familiar from recent continental theory: the subject is constituted in language and is excentric to the language s/he speaks (Lacan); the subject is unstable or 'in process' (Kristeva); the subject is 'interpellated' [125] by ideology, hence subjectivity is an ideological effect (Althusser). In terms of poetic writing, this network of ideas has two main results; first L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing aims to break with what Bernstein calls 'the modernist assumption': 'the impulse to record or transcribe the movements and make-up of one's consciousness' (LB, p. 42); second, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E largely repudiates a poetics based, like that of Charles Olson, on the voice and breath, with its attendant 'heroic stance' and 'will to dominate language '.³¹

This attack on the voice epitomises the main aspects of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E which we have already examined, and it certainly seems to accord with the 'disappearance of the subject' and the fading of 'depth' and history which Fredric Jameson discerns in postmodernity.³² Perhaps, though, it is misleading to describe L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, as Jameson does, as having 'adopted schizophrenic fragmentation as its fundamental aesthetic' .³³ Jameson means to draw attention to the breakdown of the signifying chain in this writing which produces 'a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers', a 'linguistic malfunction' which prevents us from unifying 'the past, present and future of the sentence' and of our own experience.³⁴ The poem which elicits this analysis - Bob Perelman's 'China' - is, however, hardly as atomised as Jameson suggests, and indeed its formal discontinuities remind us that the erasure of 'voice' may lead, not to the schizophrenic production of the 'isolated Signifier', but to a cross-cutting of different tonal registers. This is the 'dialogical' quality which Michael Davidson has in mind when he remarks upon 'the various registers and tones, generic markers and rhetorical devices by which even the most hermeneutically intransigent poem is made' .³⁵ McCaffery says something similar when, in response to an interviewer's question about the uniformity of tone in some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, he refers to 'the orchestration of several discourses and a violent centripetality of contexts' .³⁶ But does McCaffery's own traffic with Stein's text produce 'a communal space of human engagement'? If our answer is in the negative it is perhaps because of a felt discrepancy between the reader's required 'productivity' at the local level and the concept of a 'communal space' which is induced from an externally elaborated body of theory. As it 'translates' us from modern to postmodern, McCaffery's poem in fact suggests that to reject the 'voice' is not only to deny the imperial claims of the lyric self, but also to court an extreme of tonelessness which effaces social discourse in 'style' (as Davidson remarks in another context, 'What may begin as a desire to expose language as system may result in an avoidance of the socially-coded nature of larger linguistic units') .³⁷ While McCaffery observes that 'The fight [126] for language is a political fight. The fight for language is also a fight inside language' (LB, pp. 159-61), his poem may serve to remind us not only that the postmodern is that contradictory space in which 'our' language (whose?) is always in the balance, but also that the spreading of 'difference' opens the possibility of both repossession and expropriation.

NOTES .

1. The two main anthologies of this writing are The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (eds.), (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 198it) and 'Language' Poetries: An Anthology, Douglas Messerli (ed.) (New Directions, New York, 1987). For a fuller length study, see George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989).

2. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, pp. 200-1 (hereafter cited in the text as LB).

3. LB, 195. The full text of Tender Buttons is reprinted in Gertrude Stein, Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-45, Patricia Meyerowitz (ed.) (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 161-206 (hereafter cited in the text as LMN).

4. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (Faber, London, 1960), pp. 3, 5.

5. See Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (1916; rpt. The Marvell Press, Hessle, 1960), p. 84 on the Symbolists, 'They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonymy.' There is a brief but suggestive discussion of Pound's shift from metaphor to metonymy in J.H. Prynne, 'China Figures', in New Songs from a Jade Terrace, trans. Anne Birrell (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 367-9.

6. Eliot remarks of Joyce and Milton, for example, that 'a dislocation takes place through the hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense of the visual and the tactile, so that the inner meaning is separated from the surface and tends to become something occult' (quoted in Andrew Ross, The Failure of Modernism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986) where there is a useful discussion of related issues).

7. See, for example, Randa Dubnick, The Structure, of Obscurity: Gertrude Stein, Language, and Cubism (University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 1984), p. 33.

8. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley (Faber, New York, 1964), p. 134.

9. The Pelican Freud Library, Vol. 6 (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1983), pp. 167-8.

10. Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Sun & Moon Press, Los Angeles, 1986), p. 362.

11. See, for example, Bruce Andrews, LB, p. 37: 'Language-centering seems to capture some of the more exploratory aspects of the consequences of itself, without referential guidance, without parental guidance, without tense.'

12. See, for example, LMN, p. 119: '. . . I was getting drunk with melody and I do not like to be drunk i like to be sober and so I began again.' Stein concludes here (p. 120) that 'Melody should always be a by-product it should never be an end in itself . . . .'

13. For an influential! discussion of the 'new sentence' as a means of inhibiting 'integration' and 'keep[ing] the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language', see Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (Roof, New York, 1987), pp. 63-93 (hereafter cited in the text as NS).

14. Total Syntax (Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1985), p. 8.

15. The 'zero' in McCaffery's poem certainly seems to allude to Roland Barthes's [127] concept of 'Writing Degree Zero'; compare McCaffery's remarks on 'zero-semantic sound poetry' in LB, p. 161.

16. See, for example, Jean Baudrillard, 'The Precession of Simulacra', in Simulations (Semiotext(e), New York, 1983).

17. See Bernstein, 'Words and Pictures', in Content's Dream, for an expanded critique of 'the poetry of sight' in modern American writing.

18. North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986 (Roof, New York, 1986), p. 208.

19. North of Intention, p. 105. Cf. Charles Bernstein, 'Language Sampler', Paris Review, 86 (1982), p. 78, 'The trouble with the conduit theory of communication (me-->you) is that it presupposes individuals to exist as separate entities outside language and to be communicated at by language.'

20. North of Intention, p. 64.

21. Content's Dream, p. 67; Bernstein also speaks of 'a gooeyness and gumminess . resistant to easy assimilation' in the work of Clark Coolidge (ibid., p. 263).

22. Ibid., p. 391.

23. Marjorie Perloff, Dance of the Intellect (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), p. 217, comments on the fin de siècle quality of this writing with 'its renewed emphasis, after decades of seemingly "natural" free verse, on prominent sound patterning and arcane, or at least "unnatural" diction'.

24. Quoted in Watten, Total Syntax, p. 141.

25. Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine, 2 vols. (1883, 1885; Plon, Paris, 1924), 11.173 (my translation).

26. Selected Essays (Faber, London, 1972), p. 327.

27. Ibid.

28. North of Intention, p. 20.

29. See, for example, McCaffery, 'From the Notebooks', LB, pp. 159-62.

30. See also Rod Mengham, Review, Textual Practice, (Spring, 1989), pp, 115-25; cf. Andrew Ross, 'The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American Writing', in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 361-80.

31. Bernstein, Content's Dream, p. 329. The 'phallocentric' entailments of the voice are also proposed here,

32. See especially 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, 146 (July/August 1984), pp. 53-92.

33. Ibid., p. 73. For an extended critique of Jameson's reading of Perelman's poem, see Hartley, Textual Politics, pp. 42-52.

34. 'Postmodernism', p. 72.

35. 'Hey Man, My Wave!: The Authority of Private Language', Poetics Journal, 6 (1986), p. 42.

36. North of Intention, p. 115.

37. 'Discourse in Poetry: Bakhtin and Extensions of the Dialogical', in Michael Palmer, ed., Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 1983), p. 144.

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