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n (French,
Spanish, Galician),
13
Caroline Bergvalls Goan Atom (French),
14
Rosmarie
Waldrops A Key into the Language of America (Narragansett),
15
Anne
Blonsteins Scroll (German and French),
16
Cecilia Vicunas Unravelling
Words & the Weaving of Water (Spanish),
17
and Carla Harrymans
Mirror Play (German).
18
Moure has noted one ethical/political source of
the critique offered by the poly-lingual: To conduct a leakage out of ordin-
ary language, out of the mono-lingualismin ones own language that would
keep boundaries pure. . ..
19
The borders of own and not-own blur; there
is plurality, not purity, with many political implications. The poly-lingual
also sets up resonances beyond the semantic meaning of a word. Thus it is a
specic case of the general effect of poetry: its semantic excess, theorized as
the remainder by Jean-Jacques Lecercle.
20
For with only one language we
are not complete, but with more than one, we are not complete either; one
thereby enlarges cultural scope at the same time that such pluralizing is
never satisfying and always calls for more. So the question of an excess,
an untrackable, and paradoxically sometimes inarticulate remainder
within language is part of the plethora of social authorship.
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Anacoluthon and hetero-discursivity produce movement among
social discourses. Anacoluthon simply means lacking sequence in Greek,
and indicates the grammatical switching of horses in midstream of a sen-
tence: beginning a sentence in one grammar and ending it in another. A
feature of anacoluthon as a mode of social authorship is the employing
of multiple discursive ranges and disjunctive transpositions from one to
the other hence in any one poem, far from being in one mode, one register,
one stable voice, a writer is like an acrobat (John Ashbery a skater), a
Barthesean weaver of a wacky fabric, or someone who samples, like a
certain kind of contemporary DJ. Part of the strangeness and the interest
of the works written in the hetero-discursive mode occurs in non-sequiturs
and tonal shifts in which so many parts of a society are called up in one
spot, one poem, and one act of verbal practice. Ron Silliman, commenting
upon Ashbery, has recently described such hetero-discursivity: Multisour-
cing every sentence, if not every phrase, Ashberys poems characteristically
present a poly-vocalic gumbo of tones, sounds, terms. Flattening it out into
the single voice of a reader, any reader, generates an experience where the
listener never quite can tell where one source or voice begins another fades.
Nor always calculate what the shifts in register should approximate.
21
Charles Bernstein has several times spoken about this tactic of hetero-
discursivity, which in his work has a notably antic air involving puns,
echoes of popular poems, slogans, uses and misuses of poetic diction,
sonorous, sententious, euphuistic, learned vocabulary, cliche, all deployed
as mutually startling miscues. He has also called this method dysraphism,
or mis-seaming, another useful term for hetero-discursivity.
22
Harryette
Mullens book Muse & Drudge employs a blues-based quatrain to
contain the multi-vectoring ironic, forceful exuberance of mainly
AfricanAmerican discourses (folk sayings, historical allusions, theory,
puns, vernacular idiom, jump rope rhymes), making what Mullen calls a
recyclopedia.
23
The metaphors of mongrel and miscegenation used by
Mullen and her recent critics (like Elisabeth Frost) have a long history of
nasty social power in the US; here, poetry denitely torques or deturns
the ideological offence of such terms to hetero-discursive pleasure.
One might say that hetero-discursivity (like generic hybridity) pre-
vents or interrupts getting either writer or reader situated in any one dis-
course; again plurality and plethora are goals of this kind of social
authorship. By such swift shifts among language realms the economy,
the war (there always seems to be one), science, advertising, cant phrases,
pop music, ofcial justications these works dramatize the interplay
between ideology, social spaces, and language. There is some sense that
making poetry out of these discourses places them, even masters them,
given that we often feel powerless as they ood over and through us,
and given that we have (due to social smallness) less and less chance to
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have an effective dialogue with them (in the Habermasian sense), because
we are not equal partners in his idealized, agora-like exchange. In this sense,
poetry occasions resistance to our colonization by the discourses of our
putative masters. Poetic counter-mastery can involve cynical bitterness
of tone, ebullience, comedic pursuit, or elegant atness, but, in many of
these cases, the hetero-discursivity that pluralizes the sound made in the
poem, and makes the author a plural entity, brings an imaginary weight
of critical sociality against our problematic cultures. This streaming
between discursive realms propelled and supported by the structure or
syntax of the poems harries those discourses. Thus poetic work, as Erin
Moure notes, is civic work.
24
Another kind of social authorship is a neo-reportage (or, as Jena
Osman has called it in her inuential thinking on this issue, documentary
poetics).
25
Reportage as a practice in poetry seems to have at least two
points of origin. One is in Charles Reznikoff, employing an austere
method and ethics in selecting from law reports. Another origin, Mass
Observation in England, was activated in the 1930s by a poet and a socio-
logist to create a subject place, a generic space for literary work inected
with investigative documentary and to create the possibility for popular
writing, history, and ethnography from the bottom up. What I mean
by the use of the term neo-reportage for contemporary poetry is a
lateral scanning, via descriptive realism and focused reportage, across a
vast horizontal territory of social, political, economic, and quotidian
materials. Features of reportage in social authorship include the rejection
of poetic justice (right distribution of rewards) of any ending in the
sense of a telos that is, not a shaped narrative. First-person ego has
been made into an all-seeing, third-person eye, as in strategies of realism.
Barrett Wattens Progress (1985, repub. 2005), as a poem with a docu-
mentary ethos, torques the Poundean an epic is a poem including history
into something like an epic; it is a poem including the present information
as if it were history, but skewed by refusing to narrate or to interpret. It is
built of over 900, ve-line stanzas, each of which ends with suspension
points that can be imagined as evoking all the functions of ellipsis in punc-
tuation: omission, trailing off, leaving out, and, strangely enough, joining,
as if the three dots were a string between beads. The encyclopedic impulse
of this work (with its analogues in modernist long poems) is expressed by a
scanning of informational horizons near and far, indeed, pluralizing
horizons, and scanning indiscriminately, by which I mean without
assigning any descriptive unit to any already existing hierarchy of value.
This uncompromising goal is described by Watten as subtract an idea
from thinking. . .; an idea means a foregone conclusion or a particular
goal, a paradigm of ttedness.
26
The attempt to write as if there were no
social codes organizing meaning nor epistemological codes nor narrative
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codes (etc.) gives rise to a text highly invested in resistance and negativity.
To say Progress is therefore an ironic title barely begins to cover things; it
really develops as a rigorous aversion that, at the same time, becomes a
principle of continuity.
27
The issue is precisely movement (tallying, enu-
merating) without any upticks of development or telos or goal, or improve-
ment what the word progress sometimes means. Wattens Progress also
involves multiple puns on the word states which has numerous meanings
as a noun about conditions, circumstances, positions, as well as social rank
and public power, and as a verb meaning to declare. Hence the work, for
instance, continuously mentions names of actual national states, states of
mind, states of being, states of confusion, and states of matter. Progress
crosses state because a progress is actually a state journey made by a sover-
eign, who is a recurrent I in this work, and again ironically so. This I is
sovereign only by virtue of its claim to agency in investigative, unresolved
writing.
8. Conclusion
No form has any intrinsic content, any intrinsic politics. To understand
any use of form is to discuss the situated and locally specic. Forms are
all situated practices to analyse; they are all tactics lled with former uses
that can be seized, apprehended, torqued, and put to use again. Any
complex cultural object, possibly any cultural object, has multiple dimen-
sions, many social bearings. Critical emphasis and critical need (historically
proportioned themselves) will read these materials in a variety of ways. So
there is no one way to read these strategies; it is just that all of them right
now drastically pluralize author functions in texts.
In calling attention to these features and texts, I want to recuperate the
transformational aesthetic, intellectual, and social energy of radical modern-
ism, to begin the process all over again, because the kinds of revolutions in
consciousness and social understanding urged by modernists have not been
completed. A century begun so well, with struggles and some gains around
social justice, in terms of class, gender, ethnicity, and decolonizations, with
hopes for the modernizing project of economic distribution, human rights,
and social justice, has recently ended, and generally badly, with the failure of
most revolutionary regimes; genocides major and minor (if such a termcan
be appropriate); exploitations that seemendless and unchecked; fundamen-
talist re-repressions of women, homosexuals and others, non-pragmatic,
non-stewardly notions of leadership plunderers and bandits instead of
governments; murderous rogue claims as politics, a gap between global
north and south so acute that it is a kind of enslavement in all but the
name, and the loss of cultural and biodiversities. Then there is our
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intermittent colonization by commodities and the media, uneven yet
persistent. It could be worse, of course.
But I am taking the failure of modernity, and the parallel compromise
of cultural modernisms to be the large, perhaps unspecic, but palpable,
political crisis of the last decades. The ethical trajectory of these cultural
products in a revivied critical post-avant tradition is a way of recuperating
modernism from its own lost promise. To say this more polemically, to
deturn modernism away from its conservative and authoritarian elements
and turn it into the path of liberatory arousals and responsible understand-
ing, to imagine sociality and pluralism. Artistic practices of a number of
contemporary writers already show considerable sociality and pluralism.
Literary criticism should be able to comprehend these practices, moving
beyond considerations of a purely aesthetic, autonomous experience that
ignore social meanings. Any purely formalist understanding needs to be
completed by interpretative analyses of the historical and ethical dimen-
sions of the literary act.
Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
Acknowledgements
This article was prepared for delivery at the conference Authorship and the
Turn to Language, Universitat Tubingen, Germany, 14 December 2005.
I am very grateful to the convener of the conference, Professor Barrett
Watten, Wayne State University (then a Fulbright professor at Tubingen),
for giving the opportunity to attend this conference.
Notes
1 Michel Foucault, What is an Author in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlei-
fer (eds.), translated by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Contemporary
Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies (New York: Longman, 1989),
pp. 269 & 264.
2 Ibid., p. 264.
3 See Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 2003) and Juliana Spahr, The Transformation (Berkeley: Atelos, 2007).
4 But also perhaps the text in dissemination paper, binding, font the
physical look of text, some of which authors may choose, and which are
certainly part of what a reader registers and reads.
5 Antony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 42.
6 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 142.
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7 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marble paper: toward a feminist history of poetry, ML
Modern Language Quarterly, 65.1 (2004), pp. 102104. Also in Blue
Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press, 2006), pp. 102104.
8 DuPlessis, Blue Studios, pp. 102104.
9 Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), p. 146.
10 Ibid.
11 Tony Lopez, About Cambridge, http://jacketmagazine.com/20/lopez-about.
html [accessed 10 December 2005].
12 Rodrigo Toscano, Platform (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003).
13 Er n Moure, O Cidada