Ron Silliman is a wild rebel of the signifier
"Language is material and primary and what's experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations." Steve McCaffery
I want to talk about Ron Silliman’s Book, Tjanting, as well as his views on how politics and class fit into poetry. How does Silliman think poetry can help the lower class, or promote political change in America? What is so political about writing poetry that people might like but that nobody understands? Why does he call them paragraphs when there is no unifying subject matter? If language is a commodity, whose meaning has become transparent, how does that effect real-life oppression and hegemony among humans?
Tjanting is a book that exemplifies Silliman’s idea of “The New Sentence.” One of his fundamental goals is to make the sentence the basic unit of the poem. By doing this, he subverts the importance of the line-break, which has always been a key poetic element. By focusing on the sentence, Silliman is able to control the syllogistic function of language. Because we run into seemingly unrelated or disparate sentences, one after another, we no longer trust the context of any single sentence, and thus, a syllogistic disruption occurs. As we stutter-step along this horizontal axis of sentence accumulation, we begin to come to terms with the fact that stopping and backing up to search for a context to fit the words we are currently reading, does little to reveal one. The only space we have to experience syllogism or comparison is in the space between the sentences. In this sense, meaning is achieved through the Jakobsonian version of “combination,” as opposed to “selection.” In his book North of Intention, Steve McCaffery quotes Jakobsen when talking about the role of a poet:
The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent. Why do we need this reminder? . . . Because along with the awareness of the identity of the sign and the referent, we need the consciousness of the inadequacy of this identity; this antimony is essential, since without it the connection between the sign and the object becomes automatized and the perception of reality withers away. (16)
Tjanting is a book that exemplifies Silliman’s idea of “The New Sentence.” One of his fundamental goals is to make the sentence the basic unit of the poem. By doing this, he subverts the importance of the line-break, which has always been a key poetic element. By focusing on the sentence, Silliman is able to control the syllogistic function of language. Because we run into seemingly unrelated or disparate sentences, one after another, we no longer trust the context of any single sentence, and thus, a syllogistic disruption occurs. As we stutter-step along this horizontal axis of sentence accumulation, we begin to come to terms with the fact that stopping and backing up to search for a context to fit the words we are currently reading, does little to reveal one. The only space we have to experience syllogism or comparison is in the space between the sentences. In this sense, meaning is achieved through the Jakobsonian version of “combination,” as opposed to “selection.” In his book North of Intention, Steve McCaffery quotes Jakobsen when talking about the role of a poet:
The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical with its referent. Why do we need this reminder? . . . Because along with the awareness of the identity of the sign and the referent, we need the consciousness of the inadequacy of this identity; this antimony is essential, since without it the connection between the sign and the object becomes automatized and the perception of reality withers away. (16)
These beliefs, which Silliman is informed by are: one, there is a failure in the semiotic system and two, this failure leads to a watered-down “perception of reality,” because humans fall into a pattern of taking words for what they are supposed to mean, and not what they can mean. Silliman also believes that the only way for a word to truly act as a signifier, without the intrusion of an overbearing signified, is to disrupt any narrative or syllogistic flow by clustering group of dissimilar sentences together. What they have in common is that they are sentences, and the sentence is the most important kind of linguistic unit, according to Silliman. He talks about his approach in a 1985 interview with Modern American Poetry:
For me, then, the question of procedure is not one of seeking a "correct," or valorized device (e.g., the "new sentence"), but of taking a stance toward language, the activity of composition, and reality . . . In practice, this places the decision over any given procedure in advance of the "actual writing." With Tjanting, it took me more than eight months to go from my first rough sketches of what a piece built on the concept of the Fibonacci number series might look like to the composition of a two-word first sentence, "Not this.”
Following the progression of the Fibonacci number system in the composition of Tjanting, Silliman wrote a 19-paragraph work spanning almost 200 pages with the following number of sentences--and some of these sentences are fragments-- in each paragraph: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181. Whereas the first eight paragraphs are on the first page (15), the nineteenth paragraph spans 79 pages, nearly 42% of the whole. (Taken from http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html)
Here is an example from Tjanting (1981):
Forcing oneself to it. It wld've been new with a blue pen. Giving oneself to it. Of about to within which what without. Hands writing. Out of the rockpile grew poppies. Sip mineral water, smoke cigar. Again I began. One sees seams. These clouds break up in the late afternoon, blue patches. I began again but it was not beginning. Somber hue of gray day sky filled the yellow room. Ridges & bridges. Each sentence accounts for all the rest. I was I discovered on the road. Not this. Counting my fingers to get different answers. Four wooden chairs in the yard, rain-warpd, wind-blown. Cat on the bear rug naps. Grease sizzles & spits on the stove top. In paradise plane wrecks are distributed evenly throughout the desert. All the same, no difference, no blame. Moon's rise at noon. In the air hung odor of ammonia. I felt disease. Not not not-this. Reddest red contains trace of blue. That to the this then. What words tear out. All elements fit into nine crystal structures. Waiting for the cheese to go blue. Thirty-two. Measure meters pause. Applause. (12)
I would rather not look at individual lines and attempt to extract meaning from, attribute to, link things up etc. . . Obviously, it can be done. There are references to capitalism and class. The most common word in the book is bus. There are too many important issues regarding Silliman’s poetics. Politics, for one. I have had great difficulty in understanding exactly how Silliman is using the word “politics,” when he talks about a work of poetry becoming political. He seems to use the commodification of language to, on one hand, illustrate the transparency of words (a bad thing), and on the other hand to draw a real-life parallel between the hegemony of language, which has evolve with and because of a capitalist (political) system. A capitalist MONETARY SYSTEM. Silliman discusses both of these systems, one linguistic, and one monetary, almost interchangebly, so that it is sometimes difficult to picture how, for example, the paragraph is an example of real-life class struggle.
Steve MacCaffery says something that helps me link the politics of capitalism with the consumption of language, which has become a commodity:
Language Writing involves a fundamental repudiation of the socially defined functions of author and reader as the productive and consumptive poles respectively of the commodital axis. The main thrust of the work is hence political rather than aesthetic, away from the manufacture of formal objects towards a frontal assault on the steady categories of author and reader, offering instead the writer-reader function as a compound, fluid relationship of two interchangeable agencies within sign production and sign circulation. (15)
From this I see how Language poetry is political in the linguistic sense, including the role of language as commodity, but I’m not yet sure how it affects real-life class issues. McCaffery mentions in a footnote, the analogy between linguistic reference and commodity fetishism in the Marxist sense. Marx believed the entire process of capitalism to be a kind of fetishism, whereby a fixation of extreme desire is the driving force. In Ron Silliman’s essay “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,” there is a detailed discussion of this:
Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the “mystical” and “mysterious character” Marx identified as the commodity fetish; torn form any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities . . . Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. (8)
And what is the “preferred reality of capitalism? Hegemony? Is Silliman saying that people choose what words to use based on the word’s position within the capitalist hierarchy? Some kind of word totem pole?
Another statement that does not convince me of is the mechanism by which a language becomes influenced by capitalism, was made by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, quoted by McCaffery. They attempt to sum up the details of a paragraph from Silliman’s essay and do a good job of it; the problem is that I’m not sure sure Silliman has properly supported his own argument. Here are Andrews and Bernstein:
One major preoccupation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Has therefore been to generate discussion on the relation of writing to politics, particularly to articulate some of the ways that writing can act to critique society. Ron Silliman’s early essay, “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,” . . . applies the notion of commodity fetishism to conventional descriptive and narrative forms of writing: where the word -- words -- cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities leading us to a world outside or beyond them, so that words -- language -- disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical picture of a world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity. (110)
The problem for me is that this statement does not help me understand exactly how capitalism is encoded into our language and vice/versa. I understand the way words “disappear, become transparent, leaving the physical picture of a world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity,” but that statement only draws an analogy between capitalism and language, much the way Freud did with capitalism and certain psychological functions, included fetishism. It doesn’t explain, as Silliman tries here, I think also unsuccessfully, that capitalism is written into language in a way that is somehow detrimental:
What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality. (11)
Let’s start with the phrase “capitalist stage of development.” Is Ron talking about the stage at which words become commodified, or is he talking about the point at which capitalism in the political, not linguistic sense, begins to affect language? The next few lines deal with the subordination of the signifier, which Silliman believes lead to the invention of realism, which he calls “the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.” The “developments” he refers to include the aforementioned rise of the novel and other literary movements that impacted word usage. When he says these “developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language . . .” I couldn’t help but ask myself: isn’t any historical event, large or small, tied to the function of reference in language? He goes on: “ . . . which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.” So, what does the capitalism of American life have to do with the referentiality and commodification of language? HOW is language transformed?
Later, Silliman finds himself on the same subject: “This process, the overwhelming of the signifier by the signifed, the increasing transparency of form in the face of an ever more hierarchically organized content, is not limited to what are normally recognized as the language arts.” (16) What, exactly is the content that is being hierarchically organized? The subject matter of daily life? And why is capitalism bearing down on it so hard? This question has not been sufficiently answered by Silliman. The relationship between linguistic capital and political capital still seems like an analogy or metaphor, which is ironic, considering what McCaffery has to say about the role of metaphor in Language poetry: “Metaphor is seditious precisely because it loses that which it purports to retain, replacing the unequivocal relation of the word to truth with skew, breach and uncertainty.” (206) This points back to linguistic commodification, whereby one word is traded in for another. When when a metaphorical comparison occurs, some of the meaning from each word is lost, in return for an “improved” signified. Silliman quotes Robert Gluck, who attempts to describe the difference between two groups of people:
At several Movement readings I was interested to see members of the audience come up afterwards and say where the writer had got it right . . .and where the writer had got it wrong. I want to contrast this with the audience that admires writing as if it were a piece of Georgian silver, goods to be consumed. (24)
A couple of things strike me about this passage. First, when Gluck says the writer “got it right,” he refers to a kind of consumption the artist experiences. An artist is rewarded, at the minimum, by a feeling of achievement at the creation of his work. With regard to the observer/participant of the art -- when one “gets” anything that is ethereal or ephemeral, they desire to nail down a meaning for the abstract construct somewhere within their mind. To comprehend, in the understanding, containing and controlling something that was previously wild and unknown. Also, with the idea of “getting something right,” is the idea of hitting the target (thus penetrating), dominating, securing ownership of a given idea. An artist “hits the target,” with the artwork, and the consumer ingests a visual serving of the product, while assigning meaning to, and taking ownership of the idea of the product. So it seems Gluck was actually talking about two kinds of consumption.
The main irony I find with Ron Silliman is not his willing participation in a capitalist system he fundamentally disagrees with; if you’re going to live in America, you have to make a concession, which I cannot hold against him. Ron Silliman is an incredibly smart man who adroitly navigates a sea of theoretical discourse, while mapping unknown waters along the way. The conversation in which he participates utilizes its own code, not unlike the individual codes each one of us brings to any poem we read, or the codes found within poems, as Silliman says: “What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers.” (25) The last phrase “social composition of the receivers” is problematic for me. Does he mean racial/ class diversity of a given group, or the way each individual is socialized? Either way, he seems to be taking a non-inclusive approach. There’s nothing wrong with the effort to improve the chances of the proletariat becoming better-educated -- and that might not be Silliman’s goal -- but to take up the socialist cause by using an elitist code system seems very ironic. When I say “elitist code system,” I am referring not to Silliman’s poetry, but to his rhetoric. The average Joe is excluded not from the poems, but from the essays involving structuralist theory. So, the biggest irony is that Silliman talks about requiring the “social” code for interpretation of various poetry -- a poetry he espouses to be stripped of burdensome referents, while assuming anyone will be able to “hang” with his dense language.
Silliman does manage to buck the capitalist system and stick it to the man in a couple of ways. First, with his poetry which challenges the hegemony of the line break, the semiotic system etc . . . Second, while he might be a cog in the wheel of 9-5 corporate America, he manages to extend his middle finger to the hegemony of American academic poetry, by not participating in academia. I’m sure he does a few lectures here and there, and he has done a large amount of criticism, but his success as a poet is not contingent upon the same things as other “career” poets, most of whom hold teaching positions. At least, he doesn’t have to worry about winning awards and publishing papers to maintain his influence. He seems to have long ago laid the groundwork for his reputation as a great intellect. I’m sure he is proud of the fact that, as the word and poetry have become commodified within the capitalist system, he has been able to write, publish and be recognized outside of academia. The question is, how far outside? The poetry he writes is unquestionably academic in the sense that scholars are the ones writing articles and dissertations about it. It is also academic because we can talk about it using structuralist theory. So, while he might not be a part of the academy, his work is and, consequently he relies on the English programs around the country to sell his own books. He doesn’t deny this. I’m not going to speculate the level of gratification he gets out of selling a book of poems, a capitalist product, but it’s safe to say he cashes the check.
After reading what I just wrote, I realize I can finally put together the three elements of poetry, politics and capital, but only within the context of academia and publishing. Here’s what Silliman has to say about it: Because capital, of which there is so little in poetry, is necessary for the elements of network formation, competition exists between networks [transgeographic] and scenes [specific places]. Underneath lies a hidden assumption of the hierarchical ordering of these groups, and the idea that one can be the dominant or hegemonic formation according to some definition, at least for a period of time. Definitions vary, but major components include monetary rewards, prestige (often called influence), and the capacity to have one’s work permanently in print and being taught. (29)
Here, Silliman points out what goes on in and among English grad departments. “Competition exists between the networks.” There are people who want to win contests and be on other people’s A-list, which translates to a capitalist model of behavior. Even with the huge number of poetry programs there are today, it is still a small community of people. I perceive and have always perceived a hierarchical structure in the poetry world, what little of it I have known over the past fifteen years.
Silliman goes on to rail against the corporate giants of poetry -- the anthology publishers, and this tirade reminded me of a kid in a punk band complaining about corporate rock music. Then I realized what an apt analogy it was, because with poetry and punk music, we have two forms of expression that were both at one point (and poetry at many points) somewhat underground movements. While poetry has the distribution network of colleges, and small presses, punk music has it’s own small labels and niches of distribution. The major distinction I see, is that music is a more readily consumable product than poetry. Even the musicians who claim they don’t want to “sell out” to big record labels are still creating a product. Which is why, if they get the CHANCE, they will make the product for the person who gives them the most money. A piece of music will always seem more like a “product,” than writing, because there are more steps that go into it’s production -- which is the reason you hire a “Producer” to make a record. Obviously there was no internet when Silliman was writing, so he couldn’t address the issue of empowerment through computer technology, but both the poetry and the underground music industry have gone through internet revolutions. Farther down in his essay, Silliman writes:
Here, the question is not whether a poet will be read in five or fifty or five hundred years, but whether that poet can and will be read by individuals able and willing to act on their increased understanding of the world as a result of the communication. (30)
He seems to be getting closer to giving me concrete example of capitalism writing itself over language, but he’s still not clear as to if he wants a reader to receive an actual political message or rallying cry from poetry. If this is the case, it is appropriate to use the word “communication,” but odd in light of what had appeared to be Silliman’s message, that communication was out of style. My words.
THE STRUGGLE
As I have made clear by now, it is difficult to understand what Ron Silliman means when he speaks about politics in poetry. Poetry Critic Elena Kim has said :
Silliman organizes his personal poetics around a specific audience constituency which would render a "philosophy of practice in language" effective. Directed to a specific, bourgeois (or declassed bourgeois) readership, educated and informed by literary history, Silliman thereby grounds his vision in a program placed "into the context of conscious class struggle." This class-specific, even gender-specific19 program tailors defamiliarization devices to the consumer/spectator through specific literary codes and frames of reference which reveal contexts of meaning and the dependency of those meanings upon certain assumptions and exclusions inscribed within the social. Silliman recognizes the overlapping of social identities in any potential audience, but nevertheless considers the relationship between work and context to be vital, and for that relationship to determine the tactics necessary towards the the long-term goal of "undermining the bourgeoisie.” (Taken from: http://home.jps.net/~nada/language4.htm)
With regard to Silliman’s writing, and I can see how several of Kim’s terms would apply. A program that “tailors defamiliarization devices to the consumer/spectator,” and “overlapping social identities.” Yet I fail to see how shaking up language is placed “into the context of conscious class struggle,” or undermines the bourgeoisie. I see how it could be rebellious, but not necessarily subversive. When we compare the following description of the class struggle by Silliman with Kim’s comment, we will see that she was more wordy, but somehow so much more specific:
Poetry in America reflects struggle carried out, unfortunately, in an unorganized and often individualist manner. This struggle is as much one between audiences as it is between poets (or, to be precise, it is one between social formations, including, but never limited to, economic classes, from which audiences are composed around individual authors). It is class war--and more--conducted through the normal social mechanisms of verse. (31)
Is he talking about the struggle of the class, or the struggle of the writer? If he’s talking about class, suggesting class is topic of concern for most poets, I would say that is conjecture on Silliman’s part. If he is talking about the struggle of the writer I would say it’s ALWAYS done in an individualist manner, with the exception of newspapers. Then, he says he wants to be “precise,” and he is anything but. The struggle is “between social formations including . . . economic class, from which audiences are composed around individual authors.” Evidently he wants us to be thinking about “social formations,” which is pretty vague, but I follow him when he says that certain people will tend to read certain authors. I don’t, however, see why Silliman needs to call it “class war,” and then conflate the two things right down to the last sentence: “the normal social mechanisms of verse.” What could those be? The verse of society is not poetry, so it seems to me that if a class war is being conducted, it is being done through the linguistic evolution of the spoken word. In other words, I believe there is more violence done among humans because of class-related differences in speech, than because of the slippage of signifiers in the latest Danielle Steel novel. This point is a distinction Silliman fails to make. In fact, he rarely uses language that brings any physicality to what he’s talking about, so picturing a “real-life” enactment of, well, ANYTHING class-related or otherwise is difficult. One example he does use to good effect in the essay, is that of the mass-market novel:
The function of the commoditized tongue of capitalism is the serialization [Sartre’s term for automization] of the language-user, especially the reader. In its ultimate form, the consumer of a mass market novel such as Jaws stares at a “blank” page (the page also of the speed-reader) while a story appears to unfold miraculously of its own free will before his or her eyes. p.13
This is about as concrete as he gets. The “blank” page of the common novel is a good analogy for Silliman’s earlier use of the term “transparancy.” What I don’t understand is why Silliman doesn’t make any concessions to the fact that there are people who just don’t want to spend time with language the way he does, with poems or criticism or whatever. Some people just like reading fast, trashy novels. I think Silliman is okay with that, but it seems like he’s looking at everyone and going “STOP PERPETUATING THE RELIANCE ON THE GODDAMN REFERENT, YOU UNEDUCATED IMBECILES!”
CONCLUSION
By pointing out all of the questions I have with Silliman’s theory, I don’t mean to suggest he is a sloppy thinker or writer. As I said in the beginning, I really like his poetry, and I find his theory very interesting, but there has always been confusion surrounding the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. It’s very difficult to ask anyone, especially Silliman to tell you what L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is all about, without getting a long answer. I like his ideas about the capitalism and politics of language, I just wish he would have drawn some more distinct lines between the abstract and the brick-and-mortar.
Works Cited
Books:
McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention. Ed., Karen MacCormack. New York, NY: Roof Books, 2002
Silliman, Ron. New Sentence, The. New York, NY: Roof Books, 1987
Silliman, Ron. Tjanting. Austrailia: Salt Press, 2002
Websites:
http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html
http://home.jps.net/~nada/language4.htm
Following the progression of the Fibonacci number system in the composition of Tjanting, Silliman wrote a 19-paragraph work spanning almost 200 pages with the following number of sentences--and some of these sentences are fragments-- in each paragraph: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181. Whereas the first eight paragraphs are on the first page (15), the nineteenth paragraph spans 79 pages, nearly 42% of the whole. (Taken from http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html)
Here is an example from Tjanting (1981):
Forcing oneself to it. It wld've been new with a blue pen. Giving oneself to it. Of about to within which what without. Hands writing. Out of the rockpile grew poppies. Sip mineral water, smoke cigar. Again I began. One sees seams. These clouds break up in the late afternoon, blue patches. I began again but it was not beginning. Somber hue of gray day sky filled the yellow room. Ridges & bridges. Each sentence accounts for all the rest. I was I discovered on the road. Not this. Counting my fingers to get different answers. Four wooden chairs in the yard, rain-warpd, wind-blown. Cat on the bear rug naps. Grease sizzles & spits on the stove top. In paradise plane wrecks are distributed evenly throughout the desert. All the same, no difference, no blame. Moon's rise at noon. In the air hung odor of ammonia. I felt disease. Not not not-this. Reddest red contains trace of blue. That to the this then. What words tear out. All elements fit into nine crystal structures. Waiting for the cheese to go blue. Thirty-two. Measure meters pause. Applause. (12)
I would rather not look at individual lines and attempt to extract meaning from, attribute to, link things up etc. . . Obviously, it can be done. There are references to capitalism and class. The most common word in the book is bus. There are too many important issues regarding Silliman’s poetics. Politics, for one. I have had great difficulty in understanding exactly how Silliman is using the word “politics,” when he talks about a work of poetry becoming political. He seems to use the commodification of language to, on one hand, illustrate the transparency of words (a bad thing), and on the other hand to draw a real-life parallel between the hegemony of language, which has evolve with and because of a capitalist (political) system. A capitalist MONETARY SYSTEM. Silliman discusses both of these systems, one linguistic, and one monetary, almost interchangebly, so that it is sometimes difficult to picture how, for example, the paragraph is an example of real-life class struggle.
Steve MacCaffery says something that helps me link the politics of capitalism with the consumption of language, which has become a commodity:
Language Writing involves a fundamental repudiation of the socially defined functions of author and reader as the productive and consumptive poles respectively of the commodital axis. The main thrust of the work is hence political rather than aesthetic, away from the manufacture of formal objects towards a frontal assault on the steady categories of author and reader, offering instead the writer-reader function as a compound, fluid relationship of two interchangeable agencies within sign production and sign circulation. (15)
From this I see how Language poetry is political in the linguistic sense, including the role of language as commodity, but I’m not yet sure how it affects real-life class issues. McCaffery mentions in a footnote, the analogy between linguistic reference and commodity fetishism in the Marxist sense. Marx believed the entire process of capitalism to be a kind of fetishism, whereby a fixation of extreme desire is the driving force. In Ron Silliman’s essay “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,” there is a detailed discussion of this:
Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the “mystical” and “mysterious character” Marx identified as the commodity fetish; torn form any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities . . . Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. (8)
And what is the “preferred reality of capitalism? Hegemony? Is Silliman saying that people choose what words to use based on the word’s position within the capitalist hierarchy? Some kind of word totem pole?
Another statement that does not convince me of is the mechanism by which a language becomes influenced by capitalism, was made by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, quoted by McCaffery. They attempt to sum up the details of a paragraph from Silliman’s essay and do a good job of it; the problem is that I’m not sure sure Silliman has properly supported his own argument. Here are Andrews and Bernstein:
One major preoccupation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Has therefore been to generate discussion on the relation of writing to politics, particularly to articulate some of the ways that writing can act to critique society. Ron Silliman’s early essay, “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,” . . . applies the notion of commodity fetishism to conventional descriptive and narrative forms of writing: where the word -- words -- cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities leading us to a world outside or beyond them, so that words -- language -- disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical picture of a world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity. (110)
The problem for me is that this statement does not help me understand exactly how capitalism is encoded into our language and vice/versa. I understand the way words “disappear, become transparent, leaving the physical picture of a world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity,” but that statement only draws an analogy between capitalism and language, much the way Freud did with capitalism and certain psychological functions, included fetishism. It doesn’t explain, as Silliman tries here, I think also unsuccessfully, that capitalism is written into language in a way that is somehow detrimental:
What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality. (11)
Let’s start with the phrase “capitalist stage of development.” Is Ron talking about the stage at which words become commodified, or is he talking about the point at which capitalism in the political, not linguistic sense, begins to affect language? The next few lines deal with the subordination of the signifier, which Silliman believes lead to the invention of realism, which he calls “the illusion of reality in capitalist thought.” The “developments” he refers to include the aforementioned rise of the novel and other literary movements that impacted word usage. When he says these “developments are tied directly to the function of reference in language . . .” I couldn’t help but ask myself: isn’t any historical event, large or small, tied to the function of reference in language? He goes on: “ . . . which under capitalism is transformed, narrowed into referentiality.” So, what does the capitalism of American life have to do with the referentiality and commodification of language? HOW is language transformed?
Later, Silliman finds himself on the same subject: “This process, the overwhelming of the signifier by the signifed, the increasing transparency of form in the face of an ever more hierarchically organized content, is not limited to what are normally recognized as the language arts.” (16) What, exactly is the content that is being hierarchically organized? The subject matter of daily life? And why is capitalism bearing down on it so hard? This question has not been sufficiently answered by Silliman. The relationship between linguistic capital and political capital still seems like an analogy or metaphor, which is ironic, considering what McCaffery has to say about the role of metaphor in Language poetry: “Metaphor is seditious precisely because it loses that which it purports to retain, replacing the unequivocal relation of the word to truth with skew, breach and uncertainty.” (206) This points back to linguistic commodification, whereby one word is traded in for another. When when a metaphorical comparison occurs, some of the meaning from each word is lost, in return for an “improved” signified. Silliman quotes Robert Gluck, who attempts to describe the difference between two groups of people:
At several Movement readings I was interested to see members of the audience come up afterwards and say where the writer had got it right . . .and where the writer had got it wrong. I want to contrast this with the audience that admires writing as if it were a piece of Georgian silver, goods to be consumed. (24)
A couple of things strike me about this passage. First, when Gluck says the writer “got it right,” he refers to a kind of consumption the artist experiences. An artist is rewarded, at the minimum, by a feeling of achievement at the creation of his work. With regard to the observer/participant of the art -- when one “gets” anything that is ethereal or ephemeral, they desire to nail down a meaning for the abstract construct somewhere within their mind. To comprehend, in the understanding, containing and controlling something that was previously wild and unknown. Also, with the idea of “getting something right,” is the idea of hitting the target (thus penetrating), dominating, securing ownership of a given idea. An artist “hits the target,” with the artwork, and the consumer ingests a visual serving of the product, while assigning meaning to, and taking ownership of the idea of the product. So it seems Gluck was actually talking about two kinds of consumption.
The main irony I find with Ron Silliman is not his willing participation in a capitalist system he fundamentally disagrees with; if you’re going to live in America, you have to make a concession, which I cannot hold against him. Ron Silliman is an incredibly smart man who adroitly navigates a sea of theoretical discourse, while mapping unknown waters along the way. The conversation in which he participates utilizes its own code, not unlike the individual codes each one of us brings to any poem we read, or the codes found within poems, as Silliman says: “What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers.” (25) The last phrase “social composition of the receivers” is problematic for me. Does he mean racial/ class diversity of a given group, or the way each individual is socialized? Either way, he seems to be taking a non-inclusive approach. There’s nothing wrong with the effort to improve the chances of the proletariat becoming better-educated -- and that might not be Silliman’s goal -- but to take up the socialist cause by using an elitist code system seems very ironic. When I say “elitist code system,” I am referring not to Silliman’s poetry, but to his rhetoric. The average Joe is excluded not from the poems, but from the essays involving structuralist theory. So, the biggest irony is that Silliman talks about requiring the “social” code for interpretation of various poetry -- a poetry he espouses to be stripped of burdensome referents, while assuming anyone will be able to “hang” with his dense language.
Silliman does manage to buck the capitalist system and stick it to the man in a couple of ways. First, with his poetry which challenges the hegemony of the line break, the semiotic system etc . . . Second, while he might be a cog in the wheel of 9-5 corporate America, he manages to extend his middle finger to the hegemony of American academic poetry, by not participating in academia. I’m sure he does a few lectures here and there, and he has done a large amount of criticism, but his success as a poet is not contingent upon the same things as other “career” poets, most of whom hold teaching positions. At least, he doesn’t have to worry about winning awards and publishing papers to maintain his influence. He seems to have long ago laid the groundwork for his reputation as a great intellect. I’m sure he is proud of the fact that, as the word and poetry have become commodified within the capitalist system, he has been able to write, publish and be recognized outside of academia. The question is, how far outside? The poetry he writes is unquestionably academic in the sense that scholars are the ones writing articles and dissertations about it. It is also academic because we can talk about it using structuralist theory. So, while he might not be a part of the academy, his work is and, consequently he relies on the English programs around the country to sell his own books. He doesn’t deny this. I’m not going to speculate the level of gratification he gets out of selling a book of poems, a capitalist product, but it’s safe to say he cashes the check.
After reading what I just wrote, I realize I can finally put together the three elements of poetry, politics and capital, but only within the context of academia and publishing. Here’s what Silliman has to say about it: Because capital, of which there is so little in poetry, is necessary for the elements of network formation, competition exists between networks [transgeographic] and scenes [specific places]. Underneath lies a hidden assumption of the hierarchical ordering of these groups, and the idea that one can be the dominant or hegemonic formation according to some definition, at least for a period of time. Definitions vary, but major components include monetary rewards, prestige (often called influence), and the capacity to have one’s work permanently in print and being taught. (29)
Here, Silliman points out what goes on in and among English grad departments. “Competition exists between the networks.” There are people who want to win contests and be on other people’s A-list, which translates to a capitalist model of behavior. Even with the huge number of poetry programs there are today, it is still a small community of people. I perceive and have always perceived a hierarchical structure in the poetry world, what little of it I have known over the past fifteen years.
Silliman goes on to rail against the corporate giants of poetry -- the anthology publishers, and this tirade reminded me of a kid in a punk band complaining about corporate rock music. Then I realized what an apt analogy it was, because with poetry and punk music, we have two forms of expression that were both at one point (and poetry at many points) somewhat underground movements. While poetry has the distribution network of colleges, and small presses, punk music has it’s own small labels and niches of distribution. The major distinction I see, is that music is a more readily consumable product than poetry. Even the musicians who claim they don’t want to “sell out” to big record labels are still creating a product. Which is why, if they get the CHANCE, they will make the product for the person who gives them the most money. A piece of music will always seem more like a “product,” than writing, because there are more steps that go into it’s production -- which is the reason you hire a “Producer” to make a record. Obviously there was no internet when Silliman was writing, so he couldn’t address the issue of empowerment through computer technology, but both the poetry and the underground music industry have gone through internet revolutions. Farther down in his essay, Silliman writes:
Here, the question is not whether a poet will be read in five or fifty or five hundred years, but whether that poet can and will be read by individuals able and willing to act on their increased understanding of the world as a result of the communication. (30)
He seems to be getting closer to giving me concrete example of capitalism writing itself over language, but he’s still not clear as to if he wants a reader to receive an actual political message or rallying cry from poetry. If this is the case, it is appropriate to use the word “communication,” but odd in light of what had appeared to be Silliman’s message, that communication was out of style. My words.
THE STRUGGLE
As I have made clear by now, it is difficult to understand what Ron Silliman means when he speaks about politics in poetry. Poetry Critic Elena Kim has said :
Silliman organizes his personal poetics around a specific audience constituency which would render a "philosophy of practice in language" effective. Directed to a specific, bourgeois (or declassed bourgeois) readership, educated and informed by literary history, Silliman thereby grounds his vision in a program placed "into the context of conscious class struggle." This class-specific, even gender-specific19 program tailors defamiliarization devices to the consumer/spectator through specific literary codes and frames of reference which reveal contexts of meaning and the dependency of those meanings upon certain assumptions and exclusions inscribed within the social. Silliman recognizes the overlapping of social identities in any potential audience, but nevertheless considers the relationship between work and context to be vital, and for that relationship to determine the tactics necessary towards the the long-term goal of "undermining the bourgeoisie.” (Taken from: http://home.jps.net/~nada/language4.htm)
With regard to Silliman’s writing, and I can see how several of Kim’s terms would apply. A program that “tailors defamiliarization devices to the consumer/spectator,” and “overlapping social identities.” Yet I fail to see how shaking up language is placed “into the context of conscious class struggle,” or undermines the bourgeoisie. I see how it could be rebellious, but not necessarily subversive. When we compare the following description of the class struggle by Silliman with Kim’s comment, we will see that she was more wordy, but somehow so much more specific:
Poetry in America reflects struggle carried out, unfortunately, in an unorganized and often individualist manner. This struggle is as much one between audiences as it is between poets (or, to be precise, it is one between social formations, including, but never limited to, economic classes, from which audiences are composed around individual authors). It is class war--and more--conducted through the normal social mechanisms of verse. (31)
Is he talking about the struggle of the class, or the struggle of the writer? If he’s talking about class, suggesting class is topic of concern for most poets, I would say that is conjecture on Silliman’s part. If he is talking about the struggle of the writer I would say it’s ALWAYS done in an individualist manner, with the exception of newspapers. Then, he says he wants to be “precise,” and he is anything but. The struggle is “between social formations including . . . economic class, from which audiences are composed around individual authors.” Evidently he wants us to be thinking about “social formations,” which is pretty vague, but I follow him when he says that certain people will tend to read certain authors. I don’t, however, see why Silliman needs to call it “class war,” and then conflate the two things right down to the last sentence: “the normal social mechanisms of verse.” What could those be? The verse of society is not poetry, so it seems to me that if a class war is being conducted, it is being done through the linguistic evolution of the spoken word. In other words, I believe there is more violence done among humans because of class-related differences in speech, than because of the slippage of signifiers in the latest Danielle Steel novel. This point is a distinction Silliman fails to make. In fact, he rarely uses language that brings any physicality to what he’s talking about, so picturing a “real-life” enactment of, well, ANYTHING class-related or otherwise is difficult. One example he does use to good effect in the essay, is that of the mass-market novel:
The function of the commoditized tongue of capitalism is the serialization [Sartre’s term for automization] of the language-user, especially the reader. In its ultimate form, the consumer of a mass market novel such as Jaws stares at a “blank” page (the page also of the speed-reader) while a story appears to unfold miraculously of its own free will before his or her eyes. p.13
This is about as concrete as he gets. The “blank” page of the common novel is a good analogy for Silliman’s earlier use of the term “transparancy.” What I don’t understand is why Silliman doesn’t make any concessions to the fact that there are people who just don’t want to spend time with language the way he does, with poems or criticism or whatever. Some people just like reading fast, trashy novels. I think Silliman is okay with that, but it seems like he’s looking at everyone and going “STOP PERPETUATING THE RELIANCE ON THE GODDAMN REFERENT, YOU UNEDUCATED IMBECILES!”
CONCLUSION
By pointing out all of the questions I have with Silliman’s theory, I don’t mean to suggest he is a sloppy thinker or writer. As I said in the beginning, I really like his poetry, and I find his theory very interesting, but there has always been confusion surrounding the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement. It’s very difficult to ask anyone, especially Silliman to tell you what L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is all about, without getting a long answer. I like his ideas about the capitalism and politics of language, I just wish he would have drawn some more distinct lines between the abstract and the brick-and-mortar.
Works Cited
Books:
McCaffery, Steve. North of Intention. Ed., Karen MacCormack. New York, NY: Roof Books, 2002
Silliman, Ron. New Sentence, The. New York, NY: Roof Books, 1987
Silliman, Ron. Tjanting. Austrailia: Salt Press, 2002
Websites:
http://www.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/finksilliman.html
http://home.jps.net/~nada/language4.htm