Statement of Record

Context Collapse

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Context Collapse

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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.

About the author

Ryan Ruby is the author of The Zero and the One: A Novel (Twelve Books, 2017). He is the recipient of the 2019 Albert Einstein Fellowship from the Einstein Forum and has been an Affiliated Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. His writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Dissent, n+1, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

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