By Ryan Ruby
Context Collapse is a long, mock-academic, critical essay poem. Beginning in ancient Greece and continuing beyond the present, it examines how the increasingly wide gulf between poets and their audiences are mediated by new communications technologies and changes in publishing economies, and how this, in turn, significantly impacts poetic form. You are reading Context Collapse 5, which spans the second half of the 20th Century, and takes place largely in New York and San Francisco. In this period, the accelerated syntactic and typographic experiments of modernist poets like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein go into overdrive, thanks to the democratization of the printing press (via the mimeograph revolution, xerox machine, and small press distribution), the institutionalization of poetry (via the MFA system), and radical shocks to the global economy (via neoliberal financialization). By the dawn of the 21st century, cutting edge poetics have turned poetry into a decontextualized, authorless visual-conceptual art form, preparing the way, like so many other sectors of contemporary culture and the economy, for its algorithmic automation.
In 1946, mere months after
Circumstances forced Pound and Stein to change
Addresses,[1]two Professors of English
Literature at Yale University
Published an article in The Sewanee
Review arguing that an “author’s intent”
Was, at a minimum, unknowable
And would be, moreover, irrelevant
To any appraisal of a poem
Even were it possible to know it,
An act of critical commodity
Fetishism[2]so brazen one wonders
How it achieved hegemony, until one
Remembers that at the time media
Were entering the context of no context,
And the page, like Oakland and television,
Had become a place where there was no there there.[3]
“Judging a poem is like judging a pudding
Or a machine. One demands that it work,”
Reason the two professors, a judgment
With which quasi-objectivists like Stein—
who baked a Cake and a Custard into
Tender Buttons—and William Carlos Williams—
For whom poems were machine[s] made out of words—
Would no doubt have concurred,[4]though what ‘to work’
Means here, and in the companion piece they’d
Co-author a few years later, is not
That the pudding should be edible let
Alone delicious, nor that the machine
Should decrease labor-time, only that there
Should be no “lumps” in the former and no “bugs”
In the latter, in which case, the machine
In question might as well have been the one
Designed by Marvin Minsky, the future
A.I. pioneer and Turing Award
Winner, then working at Bell Labs under
Information theorist Claude Shannon,
A black box, whose sole function, when the switch
Is flipped on, is to release a lever
From within the box that flips it off again,
A useless machine, in short, a gimmick,
But also an objective correlative
Which leads to an overwhelming question.[5]
What is it? Glad you asked. If to imagine
A language is to imagine a form
Of life, then what, pray tell, is the form of life
Of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E?[6]Answer: Academia.
Beginning with the inauguration
Of the first creative writing program[7]
And continuing up to the present,
The university system will come
By degrees to function as an ersatz
Commodities and/or labor market
For literary producers of all stripes,
A neofeudal archipelago
Rising with the neoliberal tide.[8]
For those who take the anti-academic
Self-positioning of every movement
To appear in or grow out of Donald
Allen’s New American Poetry,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E not excepted,[9]at face value,
This claim will seem absurd, to put it mildly,[10]
Yet the statistics bear it out. Whereas
The best-known modernist poets could access
Private incomes or were drawn from the ranks
Of the so-called liberal professions,[11]
Of the forty poets perched on the two
Branches of Silliman’s language-centered
American Tree,[12]almost two-thirds have
Taught at the university level,
Published with university presses,
Or received an MFA or PhD.[13]
Each could be said to have contributed
To the rise of a new subject-formation.
Not: ‘poet-critic.’ Rather: poet-scholar.[14]
Notes:
[1]He: to 1100 Alabama
Avenue, NE, Washington D.C.,
then St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, now
the Department of Homeland Security;
she: to the Avenue Circulaire, then
as now, the Cimetière du Père Lachaise.
[2] “[…] the commodity-form, and the value-
relation of the products of labour
within which it appears, have absolutely
no connection with the physical nature
of the commodity […] It is nothing
but the definite social relation
between men themselves which assumes here, for them,
the fantastic form of a relation
between things … [T]o find an analogy
we must take flight into the misty realm
of religion. There the products of the […] brain
appear as autonomous figures endowed
with a life of their own, which enter into
relations both with each other and with
the human race. So it is in the world
of commodities with the products of
men’s hands.” —Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1
[3]Wimsatt and Beardsley’s acknowledgement that
“the words of a poem […] come out of a head,
not out of a hat” is less a concession
to reality than it is a mark
of their argument’s transitional nature
at the levels of both theory and praxis:
Barthes’ structuralist critique of the subject
(see above) would be much more rigorous,
and a younger generation of poets
were already following Tzara’s lead
(in “How to Make a Dadaist Poem”)
and composing work with the aid of headgear.
[4]If admittedly for different reasons.
Stein and Williams (and Zukofsky et al.)
were hoping to locate Kant’s Ding an sich
in language itself; the New Critics were more
interested in fabricating an ideal
scholarly object. Much as physicists had
reduced planets, cannonballs, and atoms
to bodies so that generalizations
about motion could be made, the New Critics
performed an Epoché of the poem’s
‘extrinsic’ elements—i.e., the context
of its production, biographical
and/or historical—so that it could
withstand purely formal analysis.
[5]In what is surely the definitive
treatment of the subject of the gimmicky
as a negative aesthetic judgment,
Ngai lists the following ‘antinomies.’
The gimmick, she writes, 1. Both saves labor
and intensifies or eliminates it;
2. Works too hard and does not work hard enough;
3. Is both outdated and newfangled;
4. Is a dynamic event and also
a static thing; 5. Is a “one-and-done”
device that can be used billions of times;
and 6. Makes capitalist production
at the same time transparent and obscure.
With these contradictory logics in mind,
gimmicky writing can be defined as
writing whose interest does not exceed
the interest in the devices, constraints,
or ideas used to generate it.
The reason the modernist strategy
of exposing the device succeeds where
device-based conceptual writing practice
does not is that the former continues
to recognize the distinction between
the familiar and the unfamiliar,
while the latter—allergic to distinction
in general—collapses this one too.
In both cases, though, the upshot of making
the familiar strange was that it wasn’t
long before the strange was made familiar.
[6]a.k.a. ‘language,’ language poetry,
language writing, language-centered writing.
These names, which, in their time provoked heated
Debates, will be used here interchangeably
according to local metrical needs.
[7]By Wilbur Schramm, at the University
of Iowa, in 1936,
where he was soon joined by Wellek and Warren,
who helped transition American writing
from the ‘Pound Era’ to the ‘Program Era.’
(The observations in McGurl’s study,
which is concerned exclusively with fiction,
can be applied, mutatis mutandis,
to the poetry of the same period.)
Although far more attention has been paid
to the directorship of his colorful
successor, Paul Engel, Cold War culture
warrior par excellence, Schramm’s career
as a scholar of mass media (read:
propaganda) which takes him from Iowa
to the Office of War Information,
where he might have met MacLeish and Olson,
and his post-war tenure as the founder
of institutes of communications
research in Champagne-Urbana, Palo
Alto, Honolulu, and elsewhere, gives
probable cause for the charge that his workshop
might have been an ideological
state apparatus from its inception.
[8]That the publication of the first issue
of This magazine—co-edited by
a recent graduate and a current
attendee of Schramm and Engel’s program—
which is widely held to be the founding
moment of what will come to be known as
language writing, is almost perfectly
contemporaneous with the Nixon Shock
and the drafting of the Powell memorandum,
which are held by David Harvey et al.
to be the founding moments of what will
come to be known as neoliberalism,
is obviously coincidental,
and any implied comparison would
surely be offensive to both parties,
but it is worth noting that, beyond timing,
they share a commitment to a politics
of pure nonreferentiality,
whereby words (in the case of the former)
and money (in the case of the latter)
are turned into floating signifiers
of value (semantic, monetary)
through their respective deregulations
of syntax and foreign exchange markets.
The argument that capitalism
and reference were of a piece, put forward
by the more politically-minded
language poets near the end of the decade
was thus never less true than when it was made—
a clear case of poets fighting the last war.
See Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s pamphlet
The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance.
[9]The object of these poets’ criticism
is the voice poem (a.k.a. the workshop
poem) a brief free verse lyric crafted
in the first person present, in a plain style,
in ‘natural’ diction, which, as a rule,
expresses an anecdote from the author’s
personal / subjective experience
—paradigmatically of strong emotion—
and which is anchored to a realistic
mise-en-scène by a series of concrete
particulars (a.k.a. referents).
Where L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in particular is concerned,
is complaints about the voice poem were
more metaphysical than aesthetic,
directed at its presupposition
that, as Bernstein writes, “individuals
exist as separate entities outside
language” and its attendant presumption
that language is an unproblematic
“transom” for communication between them.
[10]Whatever the ultimate trajectories
of their members, their counter-argument
goes, there is still no reason to conclude
that, ab ovo, the decentered small press
publication and dissemination
networks of the ’60s and ’70s,
which flourished under the sign of offset
printing, the letterpress, and ‘mimeo’
(publishing technologies the Xerox
Corporation had recently rendered
Jurassic—and therefore inexpensive)
somehow constituted a less authentic
avant-garde than the little magazine
groupings that flourished entre les deux guerres.
But is this really such a clear-cut case
of creeping determinism? After all,
to lose one avant-garde to co-optation
may be regarded as a misfortune;
to lose two starts to look like carelessness.
Decentralization hardly provides
a guarantee of independence from
ideology and hierarchy:
don’t forget: the university system
is itself a decentralized network.
[11]William Carlos Williams was a doctor;
Eliot, a banker; Stevens, the vice
president of an insurance company;
Moore worked as a part-time librarian;
Crane for his father’s candy factory
and as a copy-writer (though, to be fair,
more out of duty than necessity).
Pound, it is true, lived by his pen, and Stein
had inherited wealth, but, as in all things,
they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
[12]A representative anthology
of language writing (1986)
published by the National Poetry
Foundation (University of Maine).
See also: Bernstein and Andrews’
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Messerli’s Language Poetries,
and Hoover’s Postmodern American
Poetry: A Norton Anthology,
all published in roughly the same period.
As a genre of consolidation,
the destiny of the anthology
is the course syllabus. The appearance
of one is a symptom of a movement’s
imminent institutionalization.
[13]N.B.: These are the current numbers,
which have increased since its initial date
of publication. Of the remainder,
a non-trivial fraction has found work
in the capital-intensive art market.
The point is not to accuse these writers
of hypocrisy, nor to dismiss valid
critiques of the conformity encouraged
by the ethos of professionalism
and the craft-based approaches to poetry
endemic to creative writing programs,
nor still to minimize the differences
in the disciplinary cultures of these
programs and those of the English departments
in which they are more often than not housed,
it is only to note that, around this time,
the struggle between the ‘academic’
and the ‘anti-academic’ shifts terrain,
moving into the academy itself
with all that entails for a political
economy of discursive relations.
The development did not go unnoticed.
Rasula: “The dominant condition
circumscribing American poetry […]
is its subsistence in administrative
environments.” Golding: “what is in fact
the main audience for poetry today
is the academy.” Last but not least,
Silliman: “The university provides
the context in which many, and perhaps
most, poetry readers are first introduced
to the writing of our time; it may
even be, as has sometimes been argued,
the context in which the majority
of all poems […] are both written and read.”
Qtd. in Lazer, Opposing Poetries.
[14]Poet-critic, the term suggested by
Barrett Watten in Questions of Poetics,
is not wrong per se, but it seems to belong
to an earlier publishing context,
when criticism had more in common
with the belletristic essay than with
the academic paper and was aimed
at a small, general-interest public
instead of at a nano-audience
comprised exclusively of specialists.
(Samuel Johnson and T.S. Eliot
might plausibly be claimed to represent
the formation’s English-language bookends.
Cf. Lawrence Lipking, “Poet-Critics.”)
Poet-scholars, needless to say, were not
themselves specific outgrowths of language
writing. They existed well before it,
if sporadically. Empson’s career
provides but one instance. And after it, too:
of the living poet-scholars cited here,
only a third or so are typically
associated with language writing.
As a subject-formation, however,
the origins of the poet-scholar
may in fact be traced to the tectonic
upheavals in the global economy
beginning in the early ’70s
whose effects on higher education,
the publishing industry, and urban
housing and job markets are still being felt.
You can read an extensive interview with Ryan Ruby at Three Quarks Daily.
