Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.
With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1851
You can see these slides at natalia.cecire.org/presentations
right: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 1945.
Experimental
Language Poetry, Two Whales, and a Dream of the Future
Natalia Cecire | n.cecire@sussex.ac.uk | @ncecire
Bard College, 12 March 2018
Photo: still from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Paramount Pictures, 1986.
"In fact, when one tries to trace the history of the term 'literary experimentalism,' one finds that the term was used in the United States relatively infrequently until the 1980s and 1990s."
Paul Stephens, "What Do We Mean by 'Literary Experimentalism'?: Notes Toward a History of the Term" (2012).
Some current expectations about what "experimental writing" means:
- politically "oppositional" (opposing what?)
- aligned with scientific modernity
- prefers doing to saying, prefers performance to discourse
- sees language as plastic and material, not a transparent medium
- Language and the making of experimental writing
- Star Trek IV and the dream of futurity
- "Experimental" is a problem, not a solution
- Language and the making of experimental writing
Language writers (a.k.a. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers, a.k.a. Language poets) include:
Bruce Andrews, Rae Armantrout, Steve Benson, Charles Bernstein, Michael Davidson, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Tom Mandel, Ted Pearson, Bob Perelman, Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten; active 1970s–present, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York.
Two big concerns:
- self-historicization: how to understand one’s own situatedness both in literary history and a broader history of American empire
- communication: how language not only works as a medium but also acts in a social world
Selected criticism by Langpo-associated writers about early C20 writing:
- Bernstein, Charles. “Stein’s Identity.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 485–88.
- ———. “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA.” In Content’s Dream: Essays, 1975-1984, 244–51. Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.
- Davidson, Michael, Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Steve McCaffery, Peter Seaton, Rae Armantrout, Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, Carl Andre, and Robert Grenier. “Reading Stein.” In L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Vol. 6, 1978.
- Hejinian, Lyn. “Two Stein Talks.” In The Language of Inquiry, 83-130. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
- Noland, Carrie, and Barrett Watten, eds. Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
- Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.
- ———. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
- Quartermain, Peter. Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
- Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Beginning with Stein and Zukofsky, and significantly reinforced by the examples of the abstract poems of Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery and the aleatorical texts of Jackson MacLow [sic] in the fifties, there has been a continuity of experimental work that foregrounds its status as written language.
Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text (1988).
In this situation, modernism was no longer especially important. The discursive tone of later Eliot, the incantatory vaticism of Yeats, the kaleidoscopic novelty of Surrealism minus Marx and Freud, the authoritative common sense and rural cast of Frost (often translated to the suburbs), and an attenuated version of Williams as poet of the quotidian—these echoes might be read everywhere, but the more basic facts of modernism were shunned. The poet as engaged, oppositional intellectual, and poetic form and syntax as sites of experiment for political and social purposes—these would not be found.
Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (1996). Emphasis added.
The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.
Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (1977).
p. 4: A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, fringed surreys, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line. We ate them.
p. 5: A sequence of objects, silhouettes, which to him appears to be a caravan of fellaheen, a circus, dromedaries pulling wagons bearing tiger cages, fringed surreys, tamed ostriches in toy hats, begins a slow migration to the right vanishing point on the horizon line. The implications of power within the ability to draw a single, vertical straight line. Look at that room filled with fleshy babies. We ate them.
Ron Silliman, Ketjak (1978), rpt. in The Age of Huts (Compleat) (2007). Emphasis added.
[T]here is a strict interlinkage between the kind of language called science and the kind called ethics and politics [...]. When we examine the status of scientific knowledge—at a time when science seems more completely subordinated to the prevailing powers than ever before and, along with the new technologies, is in danger of becoming a major stake in their conflicts—the question of double legitimation, far from receding into the background, necessarily comes to the fore. [...] In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).
[F]or the last forty years the "leading" sciences and technologies have had to do with language: phonology and theories of linguistics, problems of communication and cybernetics, modern theories of algebra and informatics, computers and their languages, problems of translation and the search for areas of compatibility among computer languages, problems of information storage and data banks....
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).
Solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.
Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (1985).
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails, and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953).
It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle.—Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others.——And to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form [Lebensform, elsewhere trans. "form of life"].
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (1953).
The emphasis on language in our writing can be explained by our sense of urgency of the need to address and, if possible, to redress social fraud […since] fraud produces atrocity.
Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)
epistemic virtue: a quality that is good for making knowledge (it's epistemic), but which also takes on other valences of goodness (ethical, political)
examples: objectivity, precision, contact/directness
ostranenie: estrangement
San Francisco Bay [source].
The word 'barbarism,' as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means ‘foreign’—that is, 'not speaking the same language'…—and such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.
Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)
Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (1990)
There is a history of cultural figures that have developed from the Cold War for the dilemma of Us [versus] Them, and these figures...must be renegotiated when faced with the real Soviet Union....To do so is to confront the fantasy and dread...with real knowledge.
Barrett Watten, in Michael Davidson et al., Leningrad (1990). Emphasis added.
So far:
- knowledge-production is deeply implicated in state violence (e.g. state-funded big science leading to military technologies)
- language-games are seen as the form that this violence takes
- different, oppositional and disruptive language-games (i.e. "experimental writing") are seen as a solution
2. Star Trek IV and the dream of futurity
Two big concerns:
- self-historicization: how to understand one’s own situatedness both in literary history and a broader history of American empire
- communication: how language not only works as a medium but also acts in a social world
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). The alien space probe approaches, its signal causing widespread destruction.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) prepares his crew to meet the paranoid and primitive people of San Francisco, California, circa 1986.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Chekhov (Walter Koenig) and Uhura find the Enterprise docked at Alameda.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). Chekhov (Walter Koenig) is caught on board the U.S.S. Enterprise and interrogated by the U.S. Navy.
The word 'barbarism,' as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means ‘foreign’—that is, 'not speaking the same language'…—and such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.
Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)
This guy just made a major engineering breakthrough. Sort of.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Gillian suspects Kirk and Spock's motives.
So far:
3. "Experimental" is a problem, not a solution
Other than mystifying creativity itself—which now looks more like an intuitive blast of inspiration, and less like work—“innovation” gives creativity a specific professional, class dimension. It is almost always applied to white-collar and profit-seeking activities, although its increasing popularity in educational contexts only reflects the creeping influence of market-based models in this field. Rare is the “innovative” carpenter, plumber, or homemaker, in spite of the imagination, improvisation, and managerial skills required of each.
John Pat Leary, Keywords for the Age of Austerity (2015).
Two big concerns:
- self-historicization: how to understand one’s own situatedness both in literary history and a broader history of American empire
- communication: how language not only works as a medium but also acts in a social world (i.e. epistemically virtuous language-games)
quoted in the Telegraph (above) and The Stage (below), 2014.
[W]e should be...asking ourselves about the aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science. The question or questions that have to be asked are: “What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you are a science?” What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you trying to minorize when you begin to say: “I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist.” What theoretico-political vanguard are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the massive, circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take?
Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976.
San Francisco Bay [source].
unsorted slides follow...
Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Opening sequence.
Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Having traveled through time to a nightclub in Chicago in 1943, Sun Ra creates havoc with his dissonant jazz.
San Francisco Bay [source].
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). The alien space probe approaches, its signal causing widespread destruction.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) prepares his crew to meet the paranoid and primitive people of San Francisco, California, circa 1986.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Chekhov (Walter Koenig) and Uhura find the Enterprise docked at Alameda.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986). Chekhov (Walter Koenig) is caught on board the U.S.S. Enterprise and interrogated by the U.S. Navy.
The word 'barbarism,' as it comes to us from the Greek barbaros, means ‘foreign’—that is, 'not speaking the same language'…—and such is precisely the task of poetry: not to speak the same language as Auschwitz. Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities.
Lyn Hejinian, "Barbarism" (1995)
This guy just made a major engineering breakthrough. Sort of.
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
Gillian (Catherine Hicks) suspects Kirk and Spock's motives.
Work your ass off to change the language & don't ever get famous.
Bernadette Mayer, "Experiments."
A bibliography follows this slide.
This presentation was created using reveal.js 3.5.0, by Hakim El Hattab.
Bibliography
Cantor, Geoffrey. “The Rhetoric of Experiment.” In The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences, edited by David Gooding, T. J. Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, 159–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Collignon, Fabienne. Rocket States: Atomic Weaponry and the Cultural Imagination. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
Coney, John. Space Is the Place. Videorecording. Plexifilm, 2003. [Ubuweb]
Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007.
Davidson, Michael, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991.
Bibliography (continued)
Erickson, Paul, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm, and Michael D. Gordin. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Gooding, David, T. J. Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds. The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Harris, Kaplan. “Editing After Pound.” Sagetrieb 20 (2014).
Hejinian, Lyn. “Barbarism.” In The Language of Inquiry, 318–36. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Lemov, Rebecca M. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.
Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Theory and History of Literature, v. 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Bibliography (continued)
Nimoy, Leonard, Paramount Pictures Corporation, and Paramount Home Entertainment (Firm). Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. DVD. Paramount Home Entertainment, 2009.
Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Scott-Heron, Gil. Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Vinyl. New York: Flying Dutchman Records, 1970.
Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Schiebinger, Londa L. “Why Mammals Are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History.” American Historical Review 98, no. 2 (April 1993): 382–411.
Silver, Curtis. “September 24, 1960: 1st Nuclear Carrier, The USS Enterprise Launched.” WIRED, September 24, 2010.
Bibliography (continued)
Sloan, De Villo. “‘Crude Mechanical Access’ or ‘Crude Personism’: A Chronicle of One San Francisco Bay Area Poetry War.” Sagetrieb 4, no. 2–3 (Fall and Winter 1985): 241–54.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and A Second Look. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Stephens, Paul. “What Do We Mean by ‘Literary Experimentalism’?: Notes Toward a History of the Term.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 68, no. 1 (2012): 143–73. doi:10.1353/arq.2012.0003.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 2nd ed. repr. Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1997.
Wolfe, Audra J. Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America. Johns Hopkins Introductory Studies in the History of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.
Yeo, Richard R. “Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830-1917.” In The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical Studies, edited by John Andrew Schuster and Richard R. Yeo, 259–97. Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel-Kluwer, 1986.
Sun Ra, Space Is the Place, dir. John Coney (1974). Federal agents interrogate Sun Ra.
The tune they make him listen to at the end of the clip is the Confederate anthem "Dixie."
Paramount Pictures, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, dir. Leonard Nimoy (1986).
No Cold War-era cultural object is complete without a comment on modernism.
