Innovative Writing 5

The Normal Writer is what Deleuze and Guattari call the "subject of expression." I've been rereading A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Massumi, U. of Minnesota Press, 1987, the second work on capitalism and schizophrenia), especially Chapters 10 ("1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…") and 11 ("1837: Of the Refrain"). "Subject of expression" is not a difficult concept to grasp and seems to sum up more or less what we take for granted about the artist's relation to art, viz., that art is an expression, and that what expresses it is a subject in both the cognitive sense (the perceiver) and the grammatical (performing the action). D+G don't question the expressive nature of art, and in fact they underscore art's status as placard or poster, claiming and defining a territory. In doing so they are already (pp. 316-321) associating art with ethology, the specific association being music with birdsong, and they cite Olivier Messiaen's contention that some birds are not merely virtuosos (a scientific fact; birds train to sing, and some excel) but artists. "What we wish to say is that there is a self-movement of expressive qualities [which] are auto-objective, in other words, find an objectivity in the territory they draw" (317).

The animal artist is not a "subject of expression," in other words, but the voice of the world. "[E]xpressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that 'express' the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances" (317). This is a much more dynamic relationship with the world with which one is continuous than the detached representation/reporting/rendering that constitutes Normal Writing. D+G "can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings better than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the slightest risk of anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest interpretation. It is instead a kind of geomorphism" (318-19). I take "geomorphism" to mean that affect is not simply the expression of human feeling, which, if you are a strict Skinnerian, is the only sort of feeling there is. Affect is instead integral to what I must still mystically refer to as "the world," a concept that abolishes Emerson's distinction (in "Nature") of the Me and the Not-me. (Emerson goes on to abolish it himself.)

Various literary movements of the last century and a half have wanted to practice an objectivism that dismantles the "author" and his (inevitably his) "voice." "Language Poetry," which is so called because these poets form a school that grew up around the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, always struck me as aptly named because it aimed to take language away from those who claimed to own it and who use it to serve their own interests and preserve their own power in a hierarchical system, and to create a new one. This utopian poetic language, refusing the distinction between poetry and poetics, hence always critical, making its attack on voice, on grammar, on figurative systems, on representation, on all the conventional literary vehicles of "meaning," sought to open itself up to the language-formations that would bring in a new order. I don't think it's too much to say that this was always the goal.

But, like most Marxist movements, Language Poetry works better as a critique than as an art. It has not transcended its status as one literary school, caught in the paradox that an ideology that insists on inclusiveness must exclude anyone whose practice doesn't conform or lose its status as an ideology. It is no less caught in the toils of the university. There are anthologies, journals, symposia dedicated to Language Poetry. Like other schools it has its stars — Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein are two of the brightest. It is thoroughly territorialized.

This is not to say that it has not moved American poetry in an innovative direction. In particular it shares with constrained oulipian writing the radical revision of the reader's place in the work, from consumer to participant or even collaborator. But the activist reader of Language Poetry must pass through a sort of re-education camp that makes it more unlikely that he or she will meet the writing on the plane of delight.

Back to the musician bird, geomorphism, and delight in the next post, where I hope also to discuss the issue of performative and absorptive writing.