Hejinian, continued — Chant de la Sirène The Journal

Lyn Hejinian, “Social Meaning in…” continued

‘structuralist.’ Not a group but a tendency in the work of many.” [1] The epigraph introducing the poems is from Charles Olson; it states, “That which exists / through itself / is what is called meaning.”[2]

Simone White begins the prose work “Dear Angel of Death” that constitutes the second half of her 2018 book of that same title with these two sentences: “We are casting around somewhat desperately for an approximation of the human qualities which, for us, form the basis for true connection or near miss. We are cast about or away and must use a sense of qualities as belonging to ourselves and others to make an assay.”[2] Casting—imagining and taking parts so as to take part is a mode of existing that, in itself, demonstrates meaning. It is speculative and social. And, though not necessarily theatrical or dramatic, it entails performance. It is in performing that something—a group, an idea, a text—exists through itself, taking form.

David Graeber, in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, observes, “When Marxism, semiotics and the rest burst on the academic scene in the 1960s and ’70s, they were seen above all as ways to probe beneath the surface of reality. The idea was always to unmask the hidden structures of power, dominance, and exploitation that lay below even the most mundane and ordinary aspects of daily life.”[3] Language Writing from its inception in the early 1970s participated in the critical theory project, and it has continued to do so. Its focus has been on what Barrett Watten has called “Complex linguistic forms, such as poems.”[4] “Language then, for itself, but for the sake of us. To step outside of use.” It is thus that Steve McCaffery announces the consistent concern that runs through the contributions to a published forum that he edited and that appeared in 1977 in the pages of the Canadian journal Open Letter under the general title, “The Politics of the Referent.”[5] McCaffery’s term “use” there can be misleading, but he is gesturing neither toward creative-making (poeisis) nor toward expository or informational language; what he is referring to is the commodification evident in non-difficult literary writing, which deploys images, descriptions, tropes, and even grammatical forms whose meanings are predetermined and are congruent with, or seek to impose, societal norms (and forms of repression and control) on readers. They are, so to speak, the coin of the realm—the currency of the status quo and its ideology. It’s these given, established, and familiar meanings that make non-difficult literary writings easily consumable. As Silliman argues in the finale to his own contribution to the Open Letter forum, “Language-centered writing can take many forms”—which is to say, it is not a style, nor a genre. “It is first of all activity conscious of itself. Its attempt is the spelling out of all the deformations of language which result from the repressing mechanism of the commodity fetish. It discusses the world and does not describe it. It does not impose ‘reality’ on the reader by fiat. It calls attention to the words it is using. […] It is a politicized poem and not a ‘political poem’ (which is a counter-tendency occurring within the commodity fetish). It tells you that these words are empty until you fill them with your presence, reading them, being them. Together, you and these words could do anything.”[6]

During the same period in which poetics under the influence of Language Writing was taking a turn to language, politics was taking a neoliberal turn. David Harvey, in the concise (four page) “Introduction” to A Brief History of Neoliberalism, defines it thus: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”[7] Four key political events between 1978 and 1980 made it possible for the theory to be put into practice. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping shifted the Chinese economy “from a closed backwater to an open centre of capitalist dynamism” (Harvey, 1). In 1979, Paul Volcker became the head of the US Federal Reserve and instituted a monetary policy in accord with neoliberal values, and the following year Ronald Reagan was elected to the US Presidency and followed Volcker’s lead while adding some ideas of his own “to curb the power of labour, deregulate industry, agriculture, and resource extraction, and liberate the powers of finance” (Harvey, 1). The economic and political policies of nation after nation, either willingly or under economic coercion, turned to a neoliberal agenda, as did multinational corporations and international institutions, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization most prominent among them. Along the way, “Neoliberalism has […] become hegemonic as a mode of discourse. It has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey, 3). And, as Harvey adds, in something of a jeremiad, “The process of neoliberalization has […] entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers […] but also of divisions of labour, social relations, welfare provisions, technological mixes, ways of life and thought, reproductive activities, attachments to the land and habits of heart” (Harvey, 3). Through the 1980s and 1990s, the US expanded its influence in the developing world through loans, putting developing nations in its debt. And, as frequently happened, largely because of the way the loans were structured, the nations defaulted. The United States responded by rolling over the loans in exchange for “cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market laws, and privatization.”[8] Clear parallels to the austerity measures imposed on debt-burdened governments began to be seen in university policies in 2008-2009, in the wake of the economic crisis triggered by the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. The restructuring of universities saw cuts to individual academic departments (most often ethnic studies, art practice, gender and women’s studies departments, as well as departments of non-English languages and literatures); the closure of campus arts and multicultural centers; reduction through layoffs or furloughs of a number of campus staff and workers, many of whose jobs were outsourced to private companies; demands on individual academic departments to initiate revenue-generating programs (often in the form of market-oriented courses aimed at getting “bodies in chairs”); efforts to secure donations from private individuals or corporations, often for donor-named programs, buildings, or spaces within buildings; tuition increases and thus the expansion and intensification of student debt.

Neoliberal ideology developed out of the thinking of a group of economists, historians, philosophers, and business leaders who met in the spring of 1947 to form an organization dedicated to supporting free-market economic policies, freedom of expression, a political agenda committed to the values of what they termed an “open society,” and a transfer to free enterprise of services provided historically by governmental agencies. They named the organization the Mont Pelerin Society (or MPS), after the Swiss resort at which their first meeting took place, and they styled themselves as neoliberals to signal their espousal of the principle of freedom, and of free markets in particular, which, in this case, meant deregulation of business and creation of opportunities for entrepreneurialism without restrictions. The original idea for the society came from Friedrich Hayek, who, in his invitation to the initial gathering, spoke of working to end “state ascendancy and Marxist or Keynesian planning [that was] sweeping the globe.”[9] Milton Friedman, who later became the founder and principal theorist of the Chicago school of economics, was among the people at that first meeting, going on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976, a prize that the Mont Pelerin Society helped to establish, and to serve as economic advisor to the governments of both Margaret Thatcher and Reagan. In their “Statement of Aims,” issued on April 8, 1947, the members of the MPS declared:

Over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.[10]

The MPS continues to meet annually, or sometimes biennially, to this day and continues to exert enormous influence over economic policies globally. The title of the forthcoming (November 2021) Mount Pelerin Society meeting is “Advancing from the Crisis: Advancing the Future of the Free Society.”

“That most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression;”[11] it is with these words that the members of the Mont Pelerin Society, in their founding statement, anchored their ideology. Freedom. You can’t argue with that. It’s the apple pie of values. But what is it? Emile Benveniste, in the chapter titled “The Free Man” from his Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, points out that “The evolution which has produced [in German] frei ‘free’ […] starts […] from an Indo-European adjective which can be reconstructed as *priyos. […] This term indicates a notion of an emotional character which appears clearly in Indo-Iranian, where Sanskrit priya […] means ‘dear.’ […] But in certain idiomatic usages it refers to personal possessions and even to parts of the body. […] The result is that, according to the context, it can be translated sometimes by ‘his own’ and sometimes by ‘dear, beloved.’ […] On the basis of this ancient adjective, Slavic has coined a present denominative prijajo (Russ. prijaju) ‘to show oneself favorable, to show affection’, from which comes the agent noun prijatel’ ‘friend’, known in all Slavic languages. What was a personal qualification of a sentimental kind became a sign of mutual recognition.” Thus, “The term which in its first form expressed an affectionate relationship between persons, *priyos, took on an institutional sense when it became the name for the members of a kind of class ‘friendly society’ and later the denomination for a social status, that of ‘free’ men.” [12] It is on this basis that freedom, properly exercised, required doing good and fulfilling one’s obligations, neither of which, as Aristotle points out in Politics, are possible without a social context; to be free is to be an ethical citizen of the polis, a contributing member of a social group. In essence, then, to be free is to belong. And this is a very different thing from being the separate, independent, autonomous, individual that is imagined as being the free man of today—the one to whom things belong. Turning from the etymological connection between the conceptual and linguistic terrain in which “free” and “friend” are mutually construed, Benveniste takes up a related linguistic trajectory. “On the one hand [the Indo-European stem] *swe implies the membership of a group of ‘own people’; on the other it specializes the ‘self’ in its individuality. […] But at the same time the subjectivity is expressed as ‘belonging.’ The notion of *swe is not limited to the person itself; from the beginning it implies a tight and closed group which encompasses the ‘self.’ […] The situation which has been reconstituted by this connection reproduces the proper sense of Indo-European *swe, which implies both distinctiveness from all else, the isolation of the ‘self,’ the effort to separate oneself from everything that is not *swe, and also, within the exclusive circle thus marked off, the close relationship with those who form part of it.”

“The privilege to confuse, the privilege to refuse (canny familiarity with detachable pieces in an unforeseen design: for example a pseudonym), privileged stupefaction, dazzling, to eat one’s words. ‘You think when I said what I didn’t mean I didn’t mean it?’ A face comes out of hiding the minute you look the other way, a landscape of inner jargon deprived of the distinction between abstract and concrete.” —Carla Harryman, Property [13]

“Traditional and Critical Theory,” a long essay that Max Horkheimer wrote in 1937, was first published in English in 1972.[14] Critical Theory in its limited sense (and with the initial letters of both words capitalized) refers to both the theory and the methodology developed by the group of philosophers known collectively as the Frankfurt School. In its broader sense, the name critical theory, while alluding to Frankfurt School philosophy, refers to any social theory that involves reflexive analysis of structures of power and instruments of oppression and exploitation with the intention of challenging them. Ideology is one of the most powerful of those instruments of oppression and exploitation, and hence language may be deemed an appropriate object of analysis. I want to propose here that Language Writing, emerging as it did in the 1970s, participates in the critical theory project and does so intentionally and—and this is important—reflexively. In the opening sentences of Tjanting, Ron Silliman writes:

Not this.

What then?

I started over & over. Not this.

Last week I wrote “the muscles in my palm so sore from halving the rump roast I cld barely grip the pen.” What then?

This is a complex poetic gesture, rendered more complex as the work proceeds. Just a little further down the first page we read:

Last week I wrote “the muscle at thumb’s root so taut from carving that beef I thought it wld cramp.” Not so. What then? Wld I begin? […] I cld have gone about this some other way.

Wld it be different with a different pen?[15]

The motif of beginning—of beginning again—returns over and over throughout the 211 page volume, and the two-word recurring question “What then?” is its culminating sentence. Attention to processes, to effort, and to the political and socioeconomic substrate of quotidian life is continuous—which is one of the work’s points: processes, effort, and quotidian life are on-going. And the human individual is never merely an observer of them. Everyone is a participant. And to be aware of this is to be confronted with the fact that even as one takes a critical stance, one’s life, in its intellectual as well as in its quotidian activities, exists in tension with one’s inescapable participation in the status quo and its configurations of power and privilege.

“The two-sided character of the social totality in its present form becomes, for men who adopt the critical attitude, a conscious opposition” (Horkheimer, 207). They must be “wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members” (Horkheimer, 207). He (or she or they) [quoting Horkheimer again] “is suspicious of the very categories of better, useful, productive, and valuable, as these are understood in the present order, and refuses to take them as […] presuppositions about which one can do nothing” (Horkheimer, 207). Language Writing has frequently taken oppositional stances, though I would argue that what has been interpreted as opposition has often been, rather, a manifestation of intense, high-energy participation in social spaces where much is at stake. Nonetheless, it has often generated hostility rather than responsive engagement. But, as Horkheimer points out, “The hostility to theory as such which prevails in contemporary public life is really directed against the transformative activity associated with critical thinking. […] Among the vast majority of the ruled there is the unconscious fear that theoretical thinking might show their painfully won adaptation to reality to be perverse and unnecessary. Those who profit from the status quo entertain a general suspicion of any intellectual independence” (Horkheimer, 232).

On the spacious landing between two wide flights of stairs descending from the main doors of the central campus building students in the taiko performance group energetically beat their drums, signaling ferocity, vitality. Two years before Horkheimer wrote his “Traditional and Critical Theory” essay, a young (twenty-four-year-old) Albert Camus wrote in his notebook of “the furious passion for life which gives meaning to my days.”[16] Perhaps it was with the vivacity and athleticism of the students rehearsing a taiko performance outdoors in the twilight or Camus’s ardent passion for life in mind that one morning I wrote, “I can hardly concentrate on the poem, so powerfully does it fill me with a sensation of the fullness of life. I read it liberated from any need for absolute certainty. It denies the possibility of universal assent.”

Works devoted to theorizing literature (or the “theory of literary forms,” Gérard Genette’s alternative term for poetics) and to theorizing aesthetics more generally date back to classical Greek culture. What was new to poetics as it was emerging in the 1970s, at least in the US context, is the intensity of interest it was generating among poets themselves and the proliferation of works they devoted to it. Both in live presentation (notably in a series of talks curated and hosted by Bob Perelman and in talks given as part of the Naropa Summer Writing Program) and in publication, works on poetics and discussions of literary and aesthetic theory proliferated. They excited interest, and they often excited argument, as well. A short, incomplete list of major contributions to what Watten and I, in the subtitle of the anthology of works from Poetics Journal, termed “the expanded field,” must include these: Bob Perelman, curator, Talks 1977-1980 (live presentations, with later publication of some of the talks along with a transcription of conversations during or following them in Perelman, ed., Talks [Hills 6/7, 1980] and Writing/Talks: Poetics of the New [Southern Illinois University Press, 1985]); Anne Waldman and Marilyn Webb, eds., Talking Poetics from Naropa University: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Boulder & London: Shambala, vol. 1, 1978; vol. 2, 1979); L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978-1982; twelve chapbooks, two supplements, and a final bound volume, and a selection of works from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E subsequently republished in Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984]); Poetics Journal (1982-1998; ten volumes co-edited by myself and Watten, followed by A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, a selection of works from the journal [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013] and the online Poetics Journal Digital Archive, the entirety of Poetics Journal with the exception of three short essays, also from Wesleyan University Press [2015]); HOW(ever), a journal for experimental women’s poetry and accompanying author commentary, co-edited by Kathleen Fraser, Frances Jaffer, and Bev Dahlen (1983-1992), and followed by HOW2 (1992-present); Chain, co-edited by Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr (1994-2005; twelve issues, each devoted to a specific socio-literary topic); and Tripwire, a journal of poetics; founded in 1998 by Yedda Morrison and David Buuck, and continuing to the present under Buuck’s editorship (as its website states, “devoted to a counter-institutional exploration of radical and experimental modes of contemporary poetics, art, and cultural politics”). Around the same time, though only fragmentarily intersecting or interacting with the avant-garde initiatives mentioned above, publications such Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, co-edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusado Inada, and Shawn Wong (1974); and Umbra Magazine, with two issues edited by Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, and Tom Dent (1962, followed by Umbra Anthology: 1967-1968 and Umbra Blackworks, both edited by David Henderson; 1969,1970), and Umbra Latin / Soul (edited by David Henderson, Barbara Christian, and Victor Hernandez Cruz [1974]). What all of these publications have in common is a prominent social component. Apart from Perelman’s Talks series and two of the Umbra volumes, all were collaboratively edited, and all put an array of works and points of view into conversation with each other in a room or on printed (or internet) pages. And though Perelman’s series was curated by a single person, its very form (people, mostly poets, gathering in a gallery or loft space to hear a paper or improvisation by a fellow poet, or in one or two cases, a publisher of experimental writing) was social. Poetics, as it is being developed in these undertakings, was and remains a genre of and in social spaces.

In the fall of 1988, Social Text, a journal published by Duke University Press, published an essay collaboratively authored by six writers, all based in the San Francisco Bay Area and closely associated with Language Writing. The authors (Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Perelman, Silliman, Watten, and myself) titled the piece, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry”; without consulting the authors, the editors of Social Text added a subtitle: “A Manifesto,”[17] though it was not conceived of as such. It was written collectively over the course of several sessions in which the six of us met together in the living room of Watten’s and Harryman’s small Berkeley house. It opens as follows: “For anyone following American poetry over the last decade, it is evident that there has been an intense and contradictory response—from enthusiasm and imitation to dismissal and distortion—to our work. ‘Our work,’ in this instance, is part of a body of writing, predominantly poetry, in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde tradition. Its history, while not nearly as canonized as the earlier example, say, of Surrealism, has been generally acknowledged along these lines: around 1970, a number of writers, following the work of such experimenters as Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, began writing in ways that questioned the norms of persona-centered, ‘expressive’ poetry. […] For these writers, the interaction with others—primarily outside the universities—was exciting and affected the work of all” (Social Text, 261). This point is reiterated ten pages later, toward the end of the essay: “If there has been one premise of our group that approaches the status of a first principle, it has been not the ‘self-sufficiency of the sign’ or the ‘materiality of the sign,’ but the reciprocity of practice implied by a community of writers who read each other’s work” (Social Text, 271). The sociality that is being emphasized is not only that of the group; it is also a fundamental characteristic of the writings, diverse as they were, that members of the group were creating; it is what we saw as a primary feature distinguishing Language Writing from that of what, for the purposes of the essay, we identified as “the mainstream,” whose aesthetic values we saw as political values—what I would now in retrospect term neoliberal values—in disguise. We described the situation from a directly critical perspective: “The narrowness and provincialism of mainstream literary norms have been maintained over the last twenty years in a stultifyingly steady state in which the personal, ‘expressive’ lyric has been held up as the canonical poetic form. On analogy to the visual arts, where the ‘avant-garde’ is felt to be a virtual commonplace, the situation of poetry is as if the entire history of radical modernism—Joyce, Pound, and Williams notwithstanding—had been replaced by a league of suburban landscape painters. The elevation of the lyric of fetishized personal ‘experience’ into a canon of taste has been ubiquitous and unquestioned—leaving those writing in other forms and to other ends operating in a no-man’s-land in terms of wider critical acknowledgement and public support” (Social Text, 262). What was primarily at stake, however, was not the situation of the literary avant-garde but the domination of writing, and to some degree therefore of communication and community, by a pervasive bourgeois capitalist ideology that was underwriting hostility coming from critics both within the university and from those whom the mainstream advantaged. As we pointed out, “Certainly one of the nightmares of our more phobic critics has been that our work denies the centrality of the individual artist. After all, isn't it written without a stable authorial center or perceptible narrative ‘voice,’ in an anonymous, collective environment? The individual is seen as under attack, and this is largely true: the self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing in a number of ways” (Social Text, 263).

At the time we wrote “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of the Poem,” the perceived attack on the individual was seen as an attack against the very thing around and for which basic neoliberal moral values turned. All freedom was understood as individual freedom, all rights were understood as rights of the individual. The individual was the focal point of the moral universe. Without that individual at its center, freely moving about, freely shopping, freely thinking, freely expressing, the human world was unmanageable and incomprehensible. Poetry deprived of a persona-centric voice was incomprehensible. And it is here that theory becomes vilified by a mainstream underwritten by neoliberal ideology. Poetry unfolding without an individual voice at its center was simply inhuman. It was unyielding, unemotional, unpleasant, and, above all, it was wrong. A troubling righteousness suffuses the American idealization of the individual. And the hostility to theory—to critical theory—and to a poetry and poetics participating in critical theorizing continues to this day. The university makes much of its commitment to free speech, academic freedom, freedom of expression; it makes much of its commitment to individual empowerment and liberation. But, in practice, the university tends to be an engine of alienation. Hierarchical, systemically racist, and dedicated to perpetually replicating itself, it has no understanding of freedom in the very early and original sense that Benveniste tracks in his essay on “The Free Man”—freedom as belonging, freedom as a practice of and in commonality, sociality, mutuality.

“[T]o be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.” So say Stefano Harney and Fred Moten in their collaboratively authored book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, a text that can be read as critical theory and as a poetics for the undercommons, a space reclaimed from neoliberalism inside or outside the university.[18] Or, to be more precise, a place for study, which is not what we find often enough in the university in its current form. Studying, they argue, involves planning and eschews policy, which they distinguish thus: “Policy says that those who plan have something wrong with them, something deeply—ontologically—wrong with them.” Policy insists that they adopt “contingency, risk, flexibility, and adaptability to the groundless ground of the hollow capitalist subject, in the realm of automatic subjection that is capital.” “Planning,” on the other hand, “is self-sufficiency at the social level, and it reproduces in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of general antagonism” (Undercommons, 76). To some extent, this general antagonism is akin to what Horkheimer, in the passage I quoted earlier, calls “the critical attitude, a conscious opposition.”[19] But it’s more than that. As Harney says, in an interview published as an appendix to The Undercommons, the general antagonism is “[t]he riotous production of difference” which “cannot be tamed either by the feudal authority or social violence that is capitalism.” It is the mode of the undercommons, “where the aim is not to suppress the general antagonism but to experiment with its informal capacity,” the capacity for study. To this comment, Moten adds, “[S]tudy is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice” (Undercommons, 109-10).

What was said in the essay that appeared in Social Text thirty-three years ago remains relevant today, including its defense of theory manifest as poetics. “For us, theory, like writing, is speculative and dynamic as opposed to institutional or normative. In our use of it, we would emphasize the prospective and question the dogmatic, looking for options and constructive potentials rather than closure or limits. We propose not a ‘pure’ language but a ‘contaminated’ one, testing the relations among its constituent elements and forms, from which we do not exclude theory. This is as much as to say that our writing has committed us to more than we know; to admit theory into our practice is to imagine what is yet to be written” (Social Text, 269).

Author’s Note: This text was written for presentation at the online colloquy on “Poetics and the University in Crisis” (March 5-7, 2021). It takes Language Writing as a case study because of the historical moment in which Language Writing emerged, with the development of poetics as a prominent feature of it, but Language Writers are not by any means the first to articulate a poetics, nor the last. Even in the relatively recent past, such Modernist writers as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, and Louis Zukovsky made major contributions to the field of poetics. But the fact that Language Writing emerged in the 1970s at the same time as several other socio-cultural tendencies is important to my discussion above. It is also significant that a number of Language Writers have ended up in university teaching positions, which was not the case for the Modernists I’ve just mentioned. My thanks to Carla Harryman, Laura Hinton, Aldon Nielsen, Lauri Scheyer, Susan Schultz, Barrett Watten, and Tyrone Williams for convening the colloquy on “Poetics and the University in Crisis” and for inviting me to participate in it.

[1] Alcheringa (New Series, Volume One, Number 2; Boston University, 1975), 104.

[2] The text that follows was written for presentation at an online colloquy on “Poetics and the University in Crisis” (March 5-7. 2021). It takes Language Writing as a case study because of the historical moment in which Language Writing emerged, with the development of poetics as a prominent feature of it, but Language Writers are not by any means the first to articulate a poetics, nor the last. Even in the relatively recent past, such Modernist writers as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, and Louis Zukovsky made major contributions to the field of poetics. But the fact that Language Writing emerged in the 1970s at the same time as several other socio-cultural tendencies is important to my discussion below. It is also significant that a number of Language Writers have ended up in university teaching positions, which was not the case for the Modernists I’ve just mentioned. My thanks to Carla Harryman, Laura Hinton, Aldon Nielsen, Lauri Scheyer, Susan Schultz, Barrett Watten, and Tyrone Williams for convening the colloquy on “Poetics and the University in Crisis” and for inviting me to participate in it.

[3] David Graeber, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (NY: Palgrave, 2001), 30.

[4] Barrett Watten, from “Notzeit (After Hannah Hoch).” Unpublished MS. Reproduced by permission.

[5] Steve McCaffery, “The Death of the Subject: The Implications of Counter-Communication in Recent Language-Centered Writing,” Open Letter, Third Series, Number 7, Summer 1977, 61.

[6] Ron Silliman, “For Open Letter,” 92-3.

[7] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. My essay is much indebted to this book, and will be clear. It is cited hereafter in the text of the essay as Harvey.

[8] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 29.

[9] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society; accessed Feb 4, 2021.

[10] Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Pelerin_Society; accessed Feb 4, 2021.

[11] From founding statement of the Mont Pelerin Society, 1947; quoted in Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 20.

[12] Emile Benveniste, “The Free Man,” from Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society; trans. Elizabeth Palmer, 265-66. My thanks to the classicist J. Andrew Wein, who introduced me to the chapter.

[13] Carla Harryman, Property (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1982).

[14] Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (NY: Seabury Press, 1972; reprint NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 1975); cited in text as Horkheimer.

[15] Ron Silliman, Tjanting (Berkeley: The Figures, 1981), 11.

[16] Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942; tr. Philip Thody (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010), 58.

[17] Ron Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman and Barrett Watten, “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto,” Social Text, Autumn, 1988, No. 19/20 (Autumn, 1988), 261-275; cited hereafter in the essay as Social Text.

[18] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions and Autonomedia, 2013), 26; cited in text hereafter as Undercommons.

[19] Throughout The Undercommons, Harney and Moten deploy terms specific to their argument, and critical and critique, which they identify as badges of academic professionalization, are used with strongly negative connotations. “To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this not the most active consent to privatize the social individual? The undercommons might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, weary of it […]” (38).