I S S U E F O U R BODY & LANGUAGE Bruce Andrews May 2007 O.K., let s talk about the Body & (or in, or with) so-called Language Writing. A standard rap would be: this is the territory for an oxymoron. Instead of a plenipotentiary of the body, Language Writing gets staged as its enemy, as a disembodied kind of writing practice especially in contrast to the other sorts of poetry present at its creation (in the 1970s and since). So, is the criticism legit? Did the contrasting poetries of the era or even now do a better job at putting the body into the foreground? Short summary of an answer: only if we are talking about the body of the author. Which wasn t something this experimental writing paid much attention to while, most immediately, it seemed to evolve from the most drastic compositional methods of the socalled New American Poetry, at the same time as it resisted what has proved to be such an intoxicant: the authorcentered romanticism of that tradition (whether Black Mountain or Beat or New York School). If by Body you mean the preening display or performance of the author s character, then Language Writing implied a disembodiment. It took a pass on most of that. Also it skirted many familiar routes to that destination:
the anecdotal, storytelling mode of (even the smallest scaled versions of) narrative; the declamatory or propagandizing mode of direct political talk ; the individualizing voice of the precious poet, the lyric expressiveness of the authorsubject (& its typically pushy male stereotyped mode); & the trappings (or upholstery) of poetry as a genre that set up pretty coercive expectations about that expressiveness. So-called Language Writing also neglected to divert attention to the representation of bodies outside the writing: it signalled a neglect of depictions of landscape, of symbolism & figuration & illusions of depth or spirit, of descriptive (novelistic) stuff, of continuities of experience realistically unveiled. And by skirting narrative, as well as normal (& normative) style & grammar, it disabled some of that harnessed outward pull by creating a much less single-mindedly directive surface & a much more disjunctive texture (typically criticized as a compulsive attraction toward non-sequitur). One of many relevant parallels, from modernist visual art, would be abstraction. Language Writing has always been a more abstract & non-representational writing. Not documentary, not naturalistic. It refused to be sublimated to the task of packaging & picturing an outside world. And it wasn t so leashed to the job of expressing the author s subjectivity & consciousness. When it comes to getting credit for involving the body, this meant big risks & apparent obstacles. Because the usual trajectories of literature do entertain some attractive claims about the body especially how well equipped they are supposed to be to showcase embodiment: either (a) bodies in a real world getting depicted, with narrative or illustration helping to offer up a transparent look at that outside stuff ; or
(b) the intimate bodily life & gestures of the author herself as she voices her sensibility In these other types of poetic writing, we could expect to find bodies being represented, or being transparently projected & made available. But there were other bodies getting disappeared, other conceptions of the body getting neglected. And here, a more abstract & non-representational emphasis by so-called Language Writing helps to put them into play, to honor them, to valorize them. By resisting the outward pull & pressure of representation, this kind of writing could focus attention even more drastically back on the readable space of the page on the surfaces of writing. And this made possible two different ways to engage BODIES: First, to put even more into the foreground the materiality of words, the literal body of its language. To bring it back, after it had been reduced or squeezed down to allow for a representational transparency (the page as bodiless, as window) or after it had been channeled (for the sake of efficiency) into a decorative ornamentation (where it typically helps make the author s lyric expressions more soothing, or more convincing). Second, to emphasize the importance of the Reader of Reading as the contingent context for value, or for the production (or reproduction) of meaning & thus, to allow a greater role for the body of the Reader. Because the Reader always has a body (& the chance for bodily experience). So in combination a vividly materialized writing (often materialized in quite strange or flamboyant ways, once the sounds & looks & spacing of words could escape from their helper role as mere interns to some representational authority); & a writing pulled away from its thralldom & centering fixation on the author
to open up a wider range of opportunities for the Reader: to be sovereign, to be free, & to be in motion. And expansive. Let s talk about two types of expansionism. And how to explain them. First, on the role of the Reader, the Readerly Body: we will want to come to terms with an expansive activism by the Reader. How literary writing encourages it, offering up the material it needs to work with (& a free space for enabling) its ABCs : (A) Thinking, (B) Loving, (C) Politicizing. Second, to explore how poetic texts operate, we can ask what threatens an expansive freedom for the Reader. Or what reduces it. This reveals the expansionism of the text, its intrusiveness, its directive impositions that can undercut bodily opportunities for a Reader s Thinking / Affection / Politics. So, if we are charting the hopes & implicit agenda of Language Writing, the relevant tasks make a pair: one), to encourage the Reader s expansive activism, & two), so that reading can flourish, to reduce the imperialism of the text. In both cases, what is to be done? Praxis involves a prescription. And prescription demands an explanation. To figure out your prescription for the writing, you need to take what you re trying to prevent & explain what motivates it. In other words, what s at stake? What depends on this expansionism of the text, on this intrusiveness facing the reader? What would change if the expansionism were undercut?
So, the question becomes: what kind of text or what features of literary writing pose the threat? The threat of an expansionist or an imperial text the pushy/aggressive/intruding/determining text, the text that closes off options. For (meeting the reproduction requirements of) the freedom of the readerly body, a prescription would involve preventing the imperialism of the text. To figure out how to do that, we need to explain the text s choices. With literary texts, we can ask: what explains the kind of production of meaning involved? What motivates it? On stakes, on the motive front, we can start looking at how meaning gets produced by making a distinction between Generic & Particularized. The Generic is the bare, or basic, unmodified status, with no distinguishing adjectives or brand names. The Particularized, on the other hand, includes the surplus or distinguishing features. With a particularized text (or textuality), its design makes possible a more specialized meaning or overall representation harnessed to lyric expression, autobiography, figurative depiction, symbolism, anecdote, narrative. And this suggests the kind of force that would be withdrawn by many different types of non-representational writing (just as they are in many different types of nonrepresentational visual art). But how far do you want to go with that withdrawal? How basic or departicularized do you want to get? By contrast to a particularized one, a generic (or generically meaningful) text is made from words working referentially. Words are able to mean. Words point; words carry semantic implications. But the text as a whole doesn t point outward toward a unified, determinate message or author or picture to which it is transparent. (Perhaps, as with
so-called Language Writing, with the individual words less organized around or according to their referential qualities & better equipped to show off their material body.) This makes for a more abstract text (or textuality) with the production of meaning sticking close to the surface or to the bare-bones differential structure of a language as a system. [And finally, at the extreme end of such a spectrum, sometimes even this basic semantic possibility is rejected leaving us swith a purer, nonreferential literature; again with many parallels in visual art.] If you say: the more particularized the text, the more forcefully its production of meaning confronts a Reader with an expansionist threat. If the representational text wants to claim for itself these more particularized kinds of sense, it likely needs to push out in an even more expansionist way. But if that outward push were circumvented or challenged by a more resistant, embodied reading the types of motivation & meaning that depended on that expansionism would be circumvented as well. On the other hand: the more generic the production of meaning, the more it reduces the motivation behind the threat to (or imposition on) the reader. But not completely. If the motivating (or stakes) of the text s outward push is purely generic, you d be saying that those generic features (of words claiming a semantic or referential vector) do still depend on expansion, that they still demand some boxing in or lassoing of the reader s experience. Without that outwardly extending force or authority, the reproduction requirements of the writing s generic motivation would not be met & the words might cease to mean at all.
[Here, we get to the extreme of a complete banishing of reference, of a completely nonreferential textuality. Yet with a whiff of isolationism and paranoia. Meaningless words or an illegible text might protect the experience of the reader, but only by reducing it to one of blank spectatorship not what we usually imply by reading at all.] Taking into account the body of an expansive reader will land us somewhere on this spectrum, somewhere between a drastic avoidance of reference at one extreme, and poetry s conventional embrace of representation at the other. And that s where so-called Language Writing comes in, hoping to enable a reader s freedom and expansiveness, by coming up with a prescription that fits its explanation of how texts operate: by taking up a position between the complicities of traditional representational literature, and the phobic avoidance of meaning altogether to give words the kinds of complicated collagings of referential meaning that can peacefully coexist with the full flowering of an embodied reading experience. And here (surprise, surprise) the argument pulls back the curtain to reveal the original source of some of the distinctions I m making: U.S. foreign policy strategy in the Cold War as a prescription for what to do about the Soviet threat, the threat of aggressive Soviet expansion. Just like with literature, that strategy that prescription required an explanation of the threat, of what motivated the Soviet expansion: of what aspects of Soviet existence depended on it & were at stake in its success; what features of the Soviet social order would be undermined if the expansion ended.
This became the touchstone for a big post-world War Two debate about American foreign policy. On one side were those who thought of the Soviet Union as a demonic force that was going to aggressively expand as long as it existed at all; & that since it was generically motivated, you could only curb the threat to the U.S. by a direct military attack on the Soviets. This became the (more conservative or extremist) strategy of Rollback (what we now call Regime Change, an unadmitted criminal aggression of our own). On the other side the dominant side of the debate were the U.S. liberals, who argued that Soviet expansion was motivated in a more particularized way. That Soviet mere existence didn t require it, but that particular (or surplus ) features of the Soviet social status quo at home did depend on it. To be precise: its brutal dictatorship depended on it, and the grip of Communist ideology depended on it. (And these were, not coincidentally, what was most detested about the Soviets.) And here s what became so attractive about this liberal explanation of Soviet policy: if it were true, you didn t have to risk triggering a world war by direct attack or by eliminating the enemy altogether because it wasn t the generic Soviet Union which motivated the threat. Instead, a Containment policy would suffice. By containing the Soviets (preventing their expansion by laying siege to them, hemming them in with U.S. military & political power), you would undermine what was motivating their expansion: not the generic country, but those particularized features of its social order (its dictatorship, its Communist ideology). By preventing expansion, thye motivating sources of the threat would be denied their reproduction requirements & they would gradually wither away.
And that s pretty much what happened in the Cold War although it took about 40 years. The prescription fit the explanation. And there s the parallel to the Reader s body in Language Writing & how its expansive surplus freedom is being secured. On the one hand, this is how it differs from more extremist attacks on literature s production of generic meaning, legibility & reference altogether. And, on the other hand, how it differs from almost all the more conventional types of poetry that allowed a representational text, or an author-centered romanticist text, to pressurize & shove the Reader around.