Innovative Writing 6

The direction in which a lot of the energy-to-innovate is flowing, as was very evident at &Now, is towards multimedia work, which can mean many things but in practice means tech-based composition, on the web or on disc. It was particularly evident because the projectors or speakers kept breaking down, and the first thing to be said, therefore, is that the composer (a term I'll use to take in writing and visual work as well as music) must be multi-proficient or very good at collaboration. Or management: some of the work presented as collaborative soon revealed a hierarchy in which the composer was firmly in control of the whole work and its production values, while allowing associates some latitude in the interpretation of the directions. I see value in both methods of working — many situations (schools, theaters) are not natural democracies — but of course the expressed ideology is anti-hierarchical, and so a degree of disingenuousness creeps in. So what else is new, in the arts.

The multimedia approach strikes me as having potential, though I have yet to see work that weds its components or even puts them into creative competition on a level field. But I have not yet developed the taste for this sort of work, where too often one element is privileged and the others are thin. Because the skill set that goes into producing multimedia work resembles that which is used by game designers, a game aesthetic often colors the whole project. Some people will like that; not me. But that coloration, that imprints the work upon the known territory of games, is not inevitable.

The proclaimed aesthetic of this sort of work is that of the performative. I don't know if I have ever seen this spelled out in so many words, but it appears that the "performative" is preferred to an aesthetic called "absorptive," the characteristic of the "romantic novel" (add "bourgeois" to that label and you'll be on firm ground). I am groping a little here, but I think what is being opposed is a style of composition that grows out of the tradition, going back to Schwitters, Haussmann, and Mayakovsky, and running through the Situationists, Fluxus, and the Beats, of making poetry public by performing it, instead of leaving it to be absorbed with little grunts of appreciation by the elitist trained reader in the comfort of his (inevitably his) tweed-and-leather-elbow-patched armchair. The absorptive reading is seen as a consumerist reading, an appropriation of one subjective experience within another by a process of sympathetic identification, an intersubjectivity. This has to a large degree come true, as more and more of what is marketed as "literary" fiction presents the victimization of some marginalized subject in a world very far from mine (very far in its décor, its sociology, but very near in its sensibility and style, which deploys the standard, teachable set of writer's tricks), so that I, who belong to a majority culture, will sympathize with that subject's plight and perhaps do something about it. But since I am always open to fantasies of victimization, I may simply use this writing subject's desperate plight as a way of reifying my own malaise. Work that is performed before an audience addresses us differently and asks me to respond more actively, or so it is claimed. Of course there will always be readings that ask me to respond to some particular subject's "voice," but if there's a group of people listening, I will at least be able to listen not only to that voice but to the other people's listening. To that extent the language detaches itself from the subject and becomes more objective, if only because it regains a sound.

Multimedia work, while as difficult to produce as work destined to be performed before an audience, may really be used by individuals on their computers at home. The objectivity will come more from the intercommentary of the elements of the composition, and the user will be active in the composition, which he or she may use at will, attending differently with successive uses. Constrained writing, though you read it in a book, perhaps in that armchair, gains objectivity because it represents a language use that does not make sense as the utterance of a subject. It lacks the coherence that "the writer's voice" bestows and it doesn't ask participation ("absorption") in another's experience.

Nevertheless I would like to speak up in favor of "absorption." I am with Wallace Stevens when he says (in "The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm"):

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book

as much as when he says ("The Creations of Sound")

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet…

To be continued.

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.

Innovative Writing 4

Maybe, now that we've thought about the "correctness," the conformity to paradigm imposed by both the commercial literature market and the university, we can go on to ask what innovation is in writing. In some ways it seems like an odd question. We still live in a romantic/revolutionary culture, not a classic or traditional one; that can be seen in the status of the aphorism, phrase, or mot. In the classic culture the more often a maxim is repeated, the truer it becomes, the more truth-value that form-of-words accumulates, since each successive repetition is a quotation, and the more a statement is quoted as truth, the more its author is raised to a condition of wisdom, sanctity, or divinity. We still retain traces of that culture, and Dorothy Parker is (witty and) wise, Oscar Wilde or Gertrude Stein are sainted, Shakespeare is divine. But mostly we still live like restless romantics.

In a romantic culture the reverse is the case: repeating a form of words leaches truth-value out of it, and you can't even be citing Shakespeare more than so often. We must constantly be saying things in new ways. We must use language strikingly, like Kafka's axe, "to break the frozen sea within us." (It was books he was wanting to make an axe of.) Therefore innovation ought to be a core value in our literature, and all writing ought to innovate. Publishers look for the next new thing; or so they claim. Of course what they mean is the same old thing with some one striking departure from what has been done lately. "Successful" writers, by which I mean commercial writers, are under pressure to repeat whatever formula it was that first got them into the pile at Borders, with variations.

At &Now there was some fitful discussion of what we ought to be calling innovative, especially in the panel of the place of women in experimental, innovative writing — still battling the old canard that women are not naturally experimentalists, as if Sei Shonagon or Marie de France had never written. Shelley Jackson, another valid counterexample to that canard, said that innovative writing ought to move us out of our comfort zone. That comfort zone could be described as our training in literary correctness, carried out by our teachers and by the commercial publishers. Normal Art is our comfort zone — so is Normal Innovation, the gesture of defiant difference, such as the choice of marginalized situations seen as dodgy, such as drug addiction or pedophilia. One ought not to be addicted to drugs or to be molesting children; but we read novels to find out how it's done. Frisson! (Yawn.) Or there's talking about women's pussies or men's dicks. These words make us uncomfortable, but of course they also make us very comfortable by allowing us a vicarious aggressiveness, since these are aggressive terms more even than sexual ones.

What if we talked about women's dicks or men's pussies? Things start to get a little more genuinely uncomfortable, particularly if we are not using these terms figuratively. Girls with penises carry us into the world of Henry Darger and the Vivian Girls. But there is a sense, unless one is as genuinely strange an outsider as Darger was, of the trop voulu, of the writer who is working a little too hard to shock. Maybe what needs to be carried into the discomfort zone is the writer, not the reader.

To be continued.

Innovative Writing 3

In my last post I noted how restrictively "correct" the university environment can be for writers (and teachers) seeking to do innovative work. Since that word "correct" is now a piece of code, I thought I ought to clarify that I didn't mean "politically correct." There are quite a few writers who think of themselves as "innovative" (if attendance at &Now is a measure), who are the opposite of correct in that sense, whose idea of innovation is quite ordinary point-of-view narrative marked by some violence of imagery or language, some sexual (yawn) explicitness with a naming of parts and a pinch of violence (ooh) against or exploitation of women, some racism carefully attributed to characters within the story. One such writer read before an audience in the Hallwalls Cinema at this last &Now. He was fulsomely introduced and lavishly applauded. He is a visiting professor at some university or other.

No, by "correctness," I simply meant the constant tic of looking over your shoulder to gauge what the departmental taste-makers will approve of. University academics need to keep up with each other's work, and in most areas of research and scholarship this is of course their best practice. In most areas there is an ongoing conversation that can be tough to join if you haven't been following it, and you certainly don't want to join it at a stage that has already been passed. But most disciplines carry on that conversation within the dominant paradigm that sets the questions valid to be asked by that community. Writers don't form that kind of community. It's good that they should get together and celebrate each other from time to time, but what they mostly actually talk about, if they are university writers, is gossip and academic politics. Readers have something to say to each other; writers mostly gather to form or to cement alliances.

Of course this problem of correctness extends outside of universities. There is, as I was saying, a dominant paradigm in mainstream publishing and a canon of correctness that can rival in its strictness the templates that the romance-publishers issue for prospective romance-writers. Even outside of that world there can be a back-drag towards the "hip," usually by a representation of edgy lifestyles, done in what one could call the Loud Style. Print has no actual volume, but you know what I mean. Its complement could be called the Mutter, a style that keeps its eyes downcast and its hair in front of its face, delivering snippets of inwardness. I realize that these styles are practiced by a generation younger than my own, and therefore I do not comment on the value of it. Writing can only have value for readers who are in a position to make use of it, and there are a variety of uses to which writing can be put, morbid fantasies among them.

Innovative writing, though, is (I contend) the writing that creates a new readership by suggesting the new uses that can be made of what that readership is being asked to read, what content and what language-uses, and not writing that addresses a pre-existing community ("market" would be the more accurate term) organized around certain lifestyle markers, whether those are the pipe-tweed-and-elbow-patches set that Henry Miller detested or the droopy waifs of today. In other words innovative writing demands readers who have some confidence in their ability to deal with something never seen before, readers restless with the offerings that dribble or spout from the usual pipelines.

Therefore one question that could occupy innovative writers is how to train innovative readers with some critical sense about what actually constitutes innovation. We need more anthologies of what Queneau called les fous littéraires, and we need those anthologies to break away from the warhorses of Modernism and Post-Modernism. We have Rothenberg, Kostelanetz, Messerli, Gross & Quasha, but what else do we have? (Please help me fill in my ignorance.) And could an anthology, or a series, of folies littéraire be addressed to readers instead of students, so that the goal could be delight instead of improvement? How about an &Now purely for readers?

To be continued.

Innovative Writing 2

As a provisional definition of innovative work in writing, or any other art-form, let's say that innovation releases the medium from a deadening ownership that turns the reader into a consumer and no more. To put it more simply, innovative writing is writing freed from the assumptions and the formulae of mainstream literary writing. That practice assumes the possibility and desirability of a final form, a perfection of the work, a perceptible perfection, and the author is held responsible for bringing the work to that perfection and is praised for succeeding or blamed for failing. For perfection to be perceptible to many people, those people must share a set of values — a paradigm; and the writer must know what those people think and want, must become highly knowing about his or her readers and must play to their desires or distastes.

Various communities consolidate around different paradigms, but for a number of economic reasons (which I explored eleven years ago in an essay called "Readerly Writing"; selections can be read at www.tomlafarge.com) those communities have tended to become one quite homogeneous literary community of writers, agents, publicists, editors, instructors, critics, professors of literature, and readers. Literary writing, indeed imaginative writing broadly speaking has become a Normal Art, to adapt a term ("Normal Science") coined by Thomas S. Kuhn. That is, all the questions that are thought to be worth asking about literature are defined and then refined by the leaders of this community and make sense within this paradigm. Practices that emerge outside the paradigm (constrained writing, e.g.) will not constitute research into real and valid questions, at least not in the minds of the members of the community that practices Normal Writing.

At the heart of the paradigm stands the university. There is no other academy in this country. Therefore I will answer my earlier question, whether the arts in the United States should divorce themselves from the university, with a clear "Yes." Universities, in my view, should devote themselves to their real mission, education and scholarship, and the training of future teachers and scholars. As regards literature, their work is to train readers. I owe a great debt to the university where I did my doctorate, because it pushed me to read, not just works, but whole periods of writing that I would not have sought out on my own: Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, medieval lyric and drama, English prose style in the neo-classical and early romantic periods, the romance tradition of narrative. My reading was both honed and enormously broadened in its range. More importantly, my sense of literature was complicated to the point that when I first learned about the work of Dada, the Surrealists, the 'Pataphysicians, and the Oulipo, I had been prepared to make use of it by Middle English punctuation poems, medieval macaronic poetry, the calendrical and arithmological structures of Elizabethan sonneteers and the gemmatria of the kabbalists, and the combinatorics of Ramon Llull, by the speculations about language of Athanasius Kircher (thank you, Hans Aarsleff).

But if I had taken a degree in "creative writing" at that university, none of that richness would have been available to me. I would have received some support, some criticism, that might have helped me; I might have been steered to the writer's career path and be teaching now in an MFA program with full benefits. But I would have been a professor of writing first and a writer second. Worse, all my writing would have been perceptible within the dominant paradigm and would be judged on that basis, whereas as things stand what I write is not easily visible, both because I haven't published a lot of it, and because what I have published does not have a clear and recognizable "face." I believe this works for the other arts as well, mutatis mutandis.

Innovative work must escape from the imprisonment of that "face." Predators spot their prey (and dangers) by hunting what ethologists call a "searching image," a pre-established visual formation that matches what they must strike or flee. Animals evading predators will change their coloration or body-form in order to escape from the searching image; writing must do the same to evade the paradigmatic gaze. But the university creative writing program, which for many universities is that lucrative ruminant, a "cash cow," takes money to teach a "discipline." The concept of the academic "discipline" has become central to university teaching since the Second World War. (Before that things were more fluid, as Louis Menand showed in The Future of Academic Freedoms [U. of Chicago Press, 1996].) That concept has lately been called into question, may seem in some areas to be dissolving (Menand thinks so), but here the university creative writing program has been conservative.

I don't mean that innovative practices are not taught in universities. I do mean that the study of innovative practices will not lead naturally and easily to a career in publishing or writing for publishers, or to teaching writing. Davis Schneiderman, to pick one name from among many, teaches his students a great deal about innovative writing, especially in the area of collaborative writing, which he also practices. But my contention is that his practice and his teaching would serve us all better if he worked outside the university. Workers in universities cannot avoid the value of correctness. The university community is built around correctness, and ultimately any writer who works within the university will find himself or herself explaining to students what the correct thing is, either to endorse it or to challenge it, and will thereby move their writing practice into a zone of self-consciousness that will ultimately leach the life out of it. Therefore I say that writers, if they want to innovate, have to go back into a darkness that they won't find in universities or writers' colonies.

To be continued.