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Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

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SOURCE: Watten, Barrett. “Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.” In In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman, pp. 599-612. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

[In the following essay, Watten focuses on Surrealism in postwar American art and how the Language Poets incorporated it into their methodology.]

Method in American art after the war incorporated numbers of Surrealist concepts. Traces of automatism and objective chance fuse in the renegotiated value for “the self.” That recognition and the self are equivalent terms is coded into a wide range of art work. Logically, “the method that is no method,” which so many artists have claimed, is consistent with the dominant ideology, aesthetic and otherwise, of the time. The method of no objects, the method of many objects, and the method of the reconstituted object all have their postwar forms, as critiques. The dialectical frame is absent; the predictive potential of method degenerates into the condition one is in. The only place for discipline to go has been technique. Where Breton argued for “the self” as an historical inevitability, that point of reference has become a static absolute. And it is difficult to call into question—it rhymes with common sense. Bill Berkson describes the 50s art environment in this quote from “Talk” (in Talks, Hills 6/7, ed. Bob Perelman [Spring 1980], pp. 14-15):

O'Hara's reference to art, any art … is: Who does it. It's not granite critical terminology. What strikes me reading any of his criticism or poems, is that his terminology for art is a terminology of social life. And his terminology for social life could also borrow from the stockpile of art criticism. That seems to make living in the total language more possible, make it total, rather than have specialized languages for special experiences. … A curiosity of art production is that it's done by people. You name the name and call up a body of work.

Looking for a way out of this “real-time” self has led to a minor reaction in the name of Surrealist method. Philip Lamantia's glossary entry on “Poetry” in the Rosemont edition of Breton's What Is Surrealism? (London: Pluto, 1978) makes this claim:

Surrealism's fifty years of poetic evidence demonstrate the initial steps taken toward this supreme disalienation of humanity with its language, an emancipatory leap in opposition to the civilised debasement and fragmentation of language by reason, that is, language conditioned to serve as aesthetic object, submission-to-reality, mirror-trickery, everyday speech, pseudo-revolutionary mystification, personal confession, conscious self-expression and other idiocies—all of which, I insist, can be summed up in the self-condemned monstrosity that was Ezra Pound, his emulators and what generally passes for poetry and good writing in this country.

Here the American takes on the European mentality whole, and the violence of the rejection is equal to the pathos of the position without any access to its specific time and place. Williams saw a similar dynamic in Poe, and he went on optimistically about the proletarian writer H. H. Lewis in an article in The New Masses (1937): “When he speaks of Russia, most solidly in the tradition, not out of it, not borrowing a ‘foreign’ solution. It is the same cry that sent Europeans to a ‘foreign’ America and there set them madly free” (in New Masses [New York: International Publishers, 1969], pp. 257-63). It is a matter of record that Surrealist energies were transferred to New York during and after the war. But Lamantia's attack, twenty or fifty years late, is an image of stasis; the work of the Surrealists has already been coded into many of the aesthetic options he rejects. The beginning for further extention of method is in the reflexiveness of “the self.”

A reading of a number of the early articles in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E yields a series of reflexive positions. That “the distancing device is the staff of life” (Hugo Ball, 1919) is again true of a number of writers here. But the distance, in addition to being cultural, is a part of the method itself; the differentiation of meanings produced calls into question the person at the center. The mediator ultimately is directed to a larger scale.

It is significant that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E opens its discussion (vol. 1, no. 1) with a statement by Larry Eigner. In “Approaching things / Some Calculus / Of Everyday Life …” the point of departure for writing is the position of the writer in situ. There is an absolute identification with day-to-day life; experience is the language medium for Eigner:

No really perfect optimum mix, anyway among some thousands or many of distinctive or distinguishable things (while according to your capacity some minutes, days or hours 2, 4 or 6 people, say, are company rather than crowds), and for instance you can try too hard or too little. But beyond the beginning or other times and situations of scarcity, with material (things, words) more and more dense around you, closer at hand, easier and easier becomes invention, combustions, increasingly spontaneous.

Writing is a structure of response or evaluation (“to find the weights of things”) within the context of a present language:

Well, how does (some of) the forest go together with the trees. How might it, maybe. Forest of possibilities (in language anyway) - ways in and ways out. Near and far - wide and narrow (circles). Your neighborhood and how much of the world otherwise. Beginning, ending and continuing. As they come, what can things mean? Why expect a permanent meaning? What weights, imports?

In Eigner the implication of structure is in the way words appear on the page. The poem “is a made thing,” but there is insight into the structure of experience in the way that it is made. Beginning with “care to find as it may be perceived,” the poem extends beyond this—“so a method is glimpsed, by the way.”

In Clark Coolidge's “Larry Eigner Notes,” immediately following, the homage to another writer appears as notetaking for a re-entry into Coolidge's own work. Here, as in much of his criticism, Coolidge is looking for points of recognition or congruence. In so doing he transposes the reflexiveness of language and experience in Eigner into values seen in language “as such.” “I do not think of Eigner.” Coolidge's approach in general preserves a romance of language taken as a whole; there is a useful exclusion of any interpretation in this stance. An operator in a language medium looks at others doing similar work; finally the operators disappear and one language looks at another. The terms Coolidge uses in talking about Eigner are the terms language would use in talking about itself:

an invisible & steadying “is” behind everything … all particles in the pile soon to reach / nounal state … the word “air” & its immediate prepositioning … these “scenes” don't exist, never have … the poem is built // each line / equals / its own completion // and every next line / its consequence … wholes are made only by motion … Each poem sights into a distance of all the others following … word-activation of the imagination in the act of seeing … a synthesis of presence.

Here “the self” has become generalized as “language,” or, put another way, “the self” has exploded and disappeared. According to Coolidge, “Writers will now have to focus from a greater distance still subject to everything.” The mediating persona has been abandoned.

The opposite tack, though in fact connected, locates writing as a specified mediator in relation to an organic continuity. Nick Piombino's articles, as “Writing and Free Association” (vol. 1, no. 1), look for a reflexiveness that would have therapeutic value:

The method of self-disclosure called “free association” wherein one writes or speaks all one's thoughts in consecutive order (also sometimes called “automatic writing” in literary criticism) is comparable to serious attempts to read, write and understand poetry that directs attention to the totality of the thinking process. Memories and awareness of the present collapse into an experiential field composed of verbal presences which can be re-sounded for various interpretations and alternative directions.

Writing here has a literalness of purpose. Value, rather than inhering in a made thing, is given by personal use. This is possibly the most radical statement of “process” poetics to date. In the work of Robert Kelly, Theodore Enslin, and others, writing imitates a highly literary, derived notion of process. For Piombino, the poem is a process of the use of language in a practical sense. Rather than an exemplary, exalted self, as in Breton, Piombino proposes a quotidian, commonsense self, where the methods of writing or psychoanalysis are applied not as exercises in collective myth-making but as procedures that will “get results.”

In “A Short Word on My Work” (vol. 1, no. 1), David Melnick writes, “I doubt that any statement will mediate Pcoet and its audience.” Pcoet is written in a style close to what the Russian Futurists called zaum, “transrational language.” Language is broken down below the morphemic level to letters of the alphabet, bits of debris. According to the Formalists, this kind of writing is motivated by an overplus of meaning on conventional planes; the need for pure expression is at odds with the available means. By randomizing phonemes or disrupting word forms, Melnick presents a sound texture of qualitative absoluteness not threatened by “meaning”:

What can such poems do for you? You are a spider strangling in your own web, suffocated by meaning. You ask to be freed by these poems from the intolerable burden of trying to understand. The world of meaning: is it too large for you? too small? It doesn't fit. Too bad. It's no contest. You keep on trying. So do I.

In a simple dialectic of sense and non-sense, “trans-sense” language proposes an organic meaning or wholeness apart from either. Melnick separates sound from reference in language to produce an acoustic spectacle in the reading of the text. This strategy is elucidated in a remark by Robert Smithson on the nature of abstraction, which for him is “a representation of nature devoid of ‘realism’ based on mental or conceptual reduction … [that] brings one closer to physical structures within nature itself.” Melnick not only avoids the reduction of “realism” but that of “abstraction” as well, in order to render both the world and his work into physical wholes. An uninterrupted “nature” is the end product of Melnick's text—a return to things as they are by means of a language without false literary mediation.

In Zeno's paradox, the commuter never gets home because of the parcellization of the distance. In the “Zeno's paradox of biomorphism (or organic form),” fallen language never arrives at either the self (in Piombino) or the world (in Melnick), in spite of its endless refractions. Steve McCaffery operates a kind of synthesis of these two problematics. His “solution” can be exemplified by a performance (as one of the Four Horsemen) in which he poured Alpha-Bits (a cereal in the form of letters) on the ground from a ladder and then physically read them by rolling around on them while making noise. This was intended as a kind of “deconstruction” of the text (the complete text being in the cereal box, perhaps). Here the physicality of language (stated by means of creative vocalization in the style of Schwitters or by destruction of its “object status,” the letters) is argued against the false reification of the commodity. McCaffery's aesthetics are consistent with this analysis; in “Repossessing the Word” (vol. 1, no. 2) he is quoted:

Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, which is to say the occultation of the human relations embedded in the labour process, has been central to my own considerations of reference in language—of, in fact, a referentially based language, in general—and to certain “fetishistic” notions within the relationship of audience and performer.

The identification of reference, and of normative grammar behind that, with the commodification of language might be true in a given time and place. For example, the French bourgeois education received probably approached this kind of social coding. But writers in the present would be lucky to have had the lids on that tight. While toying with the idea of an essential absolute (reference = alienation), McCaffery's values are perhaps better seen as a part of a performance dynamic, of the flow of energy between performer and audience:

To demystify this fetish and reveal the human relationships involved within the labour process of language will involve the humanization of the linguistic Sign by means of a centering of language within itself; a structural reappraisal of the functional roles of author and reader, performer and performance; the general diminishment of reference in communication and the promotion of forms based on the object-presence: the pleasure of the graphic or phonic imprint, for instance, their value as sheer linguistic stimuli.

“A whole person in a whole world” is here a kind of fictional premise for an acting out, one in which energy is released within specified formal bounds. The question of whether this energy in fact transforms is mediated by the irony of the dramatic presentation. Here the artist is taking himself apart for his art; still there is the danger that dissociative methods repeat themselves, continually giving the same results.

Beyond such absoluteness, the strategy of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E has often been to “provide information.” Simple lists are juxtaposed with extreme convolutions. For example, there have been various bibliographies: literary magazines, current journal articles, featured writers, “recent readings,” and so on. The overall editorial procedure might be seen to parallel these—there are a panoply of views, a multi-axial reference system, a system of poetic relations. Many articles in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E give evidence of being one of “an endless number of points of view”; method is rarely given a full space for development but is, rather, represented. The various possibilities are located on their appropriate file cards, ready for quick recall. From “Articles” (vol. 1, no. 3):

Ideology & Consciousness. No. 1, Easter 1977: “Marxism and Linguistics,” “Theories of Discourse,” “Ideology and the Human Subject.”


International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. March 1977: “Machine understanding of natural language.”


Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. January 1978: “Hearing ‘words’ without words: Prosodic cues for word perception.”


Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Fall 1977: D. Kuspit, “Authoritarian Abstraction.”

There is a kind of professional librarianship (special collections) operating here. Meanings, rather than being developed, are referred to-at the reference desk. So the radical poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E are mediated by the commonsense functionalism of a professional role. Perhaps this is symptomatic of a cultural fact—that the intellectual is himself commoditized, by the university system.

If professionalism has atrophied, the avant-garde has exploded. Peter Schjeldahl has commented, roughly: “Not in the Surrealists' wildest dreams could they have imagined the life we live now,” in regard to the New York art scene in the 70s. In fact, not in the wildest dreams of the New York art scene could the methodological rigor of the Surrealists be imagined. As an example, Bernadette Mayer's St. Mark's writing workshop has produced another kind of list, of “Experiments” (vol. 1, no. 3):

Construct a poem as though the words were three-dimensional objects (like bricks) in space. Print them on large cards, if necessary.


Cut-ups, paste-ups, etc. (Intersperse different material in horizontal cut-up strips, paste it together, infinite variations on this).


Write exactly as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper & dont stop.


Attempt tape recorder work, that is, speaking directly into the tape, perhaps at specific times.

Here there is a proliferation of techniques. The overall equivalence of activity leads to a “state” in (real) time in which particular motives are effaced. Inspiration might be constant. Technique for Breton, on the other hand, was dialectic—automatism was a paradigm for method rather than an end in itself. The logic of inspiration, itself to a degree “objectified,” was in its timely approach to a larger scale. While the advantage of Mayer's techniques is their adherence to the quotidian, there is no further integration. The “permanent avant-garde” vaporizes, leading to more conventional roles. As actually happened—in the course of Mayer's later editing of United Artists, the stylistic opening-up returns all these techniques to “the self.”

The specter of “too much possibility/not enough necessity” appears likewise to Bruce Andrews in his review of John Wieners's Beyond the State Capitol/Cincinnati Pike (vol. 1, no. 1):

AND how (and where) is consternation in the realm of reason a confrontation of the unknown, and do we know it?


Or just, “You think I'm normal, they do a lot of things to my mind”?: a senseless indecipherable deluge, where nothing contextualizes an other thing?


Not a frame outside, and not a kernel inside? Are we all collage, all dense, tensed, & unlocatable?


The soundless permeation of madness upon sanity: would this be the quandary gotten by viewing the language as the cure for artistry?


As a rebuff to social order, to emotional and perceptual order?

As in Coolidge's “Eigner Notes,” one language is looking at another. But while language and writing in Eigner are stable, in Wieners the forms of writing are breaking down. Andrews eyes this breakdown in the form of a perpetual question: “Is this my reading?” “What have we got here?” Here the psyche is fending off an incursion by an “other”; Dali's “paranoia-criticism” comes to mind. The skepticism or questioning is both consciousness and its projection, a blank wall that words (both exterior and interior) bounce against. “Confusion? Decor? Meaning? Memory? Body? Space? Rhetoric? Reality?” The poet mediates by insistence on such a mode of questioning; by taking himself apart he places his judgment in the world. Thus it is appropriate that Andrews is dealing with Wieners, who is likewise taking himself apart. But the identification is complex; where Coolidge locates another artist in Eigner, Andrews admits to “phenomena” in Wieners as much as “art.”

The “exploded self” entering the world carries with it a critique based on its own organization. The inner argument is reciprocal, obviously; poetic reference is not only a question of “the world in the work” but “the work in the world.” In a crude sense the negotiation with data taken in at the outset conditions the means for answering back. If in Andrews the response is skepticism, in Ron Silliman it is a passion for explanation. In an early article, Silliman wrote: “What happens when language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development …” as the first term in an argument concerning alienation and reference. This causality is most possible in a subjective perspective—the only place where “language” and “capitalist stage of development” can both be given equivalent ontological status. It is only the extention of the writer's language into the world that can accomplish the desired equivalence of terms; so the underlying motive of the explanation is the elaboration of a new poetics. In his piece on Walter Benjamin, “Benjamin Obscura” (vol. 1, no. 6), Silliman writes:

The obliteration of the gestural through the elaboration of technology occurs across the entire range of cultural phenomena in the capitalist period. It is the principle affective transformation of the new material basis of production. Guttenberg's moveable type erased gesturality from the graphemic dimension of books. That this in turn functions to alienate the producer from his or her product is tangible even to authors who compose on the typewriter: to see one's text in a new typeface (inevitably asserting different spatio-visual values) is almost as radical a shock as first seeing oneself on film or videotape, or initially hearing one's voice remarkably other on a tape recorder.

Locating “affect” in the literal writing process is not gratuitous here. Rather than arguing “between texts” (as in the case of numerous Marxist critiques), Silliman extends himself through the medium of alienated texts by means of his own literary “production.” Where Andrews identified with a text breaking down into language (in Wieners). Silliman places broken down, peripheral, alienated language from any number of sources at the heart of his writing procedure. There is a proliferation of facts in Silliman's work (“Revolving door. A sequence of objects …”), but these alienated things are not only given as paradigms of content. Their use is in their identification by the writer as the essential problems of “the self.” The mind that thinks its way into the world of things is the same mind that perceives things as having argued their way into existence. Exterior causality becomes the same as the writer's interior romance. Finally, what can be written is no different than what can be thought or perceived.

The “explanatory fiction” of Silliman's criticism is motivated as an extention outward; in the case of the reading of Benjamin, the desire is to reconcile newspaper typography or tape recording (the self objectified) with the pen in hand (the writer at work). At the heart of this method is the belief that the word, even as it is taken in by the subject, is an other. The passion for explanation in Silliman is an act of compensation for the autonomous word; in the act of writing the word is returned to the world, though this time the writer too is in it. Here the gradual movement of the skeptical self toward identification with its objects begins to take on its truly constructive potential, despite the difficulties of the method.

In the development of method in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the increasing reflexiveness of the writer occurs parallel to a new value given to exterior fact. The dialectic that Breton saw as somehow taking the poet away into the clouds of a final realization (as in the state of mind achieved by Nietzsche) arrived at a stasis of method at the exact point where exterior reality itself underwent a change. The dialectic kept the upper hand, but one wonders what the world would have been like “after” Breton's revolution had been accomplished, anyway. The failure of Surrealist method was prefigured, and this perception from the outset was part and parcel of the absoluteness. That foreknowledge does not appear in the positions taken in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, possibly because the scale of foreknowledge at this point is simply beyond that of the individual. Rather, there is a day-to-day reality in which the extremes of identification partake, and on which method builds, through the means, either referential or purely linguistic, of writing itself. In this sense the answer is yes, a language corrector can be a generator of more language and of future possible acts. The idea of revolutionary suicide has been abandoned by means of a consideration of the power of words.

But what does this reflexiveness sound like when placed next to the Surrealist “purity of tone”? It would be interesting to juxtapose the writing itself of Surrealism next to examples of work being done now. This is from section 9 of “Soluble Fish,” the automatic text that Breton included with the first Manifesto (Manifestoes of Surrealism [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1972], pp. 65-66):

Foul night, night of flowers, night of death rattles, heady night, deaf night whose hand is a contemptible kite held back by threads on all sides, black threads, shameful threads! Countryside of red and white bones, what have you done with your unspeakably filthy trees, your arborescent candor, your fidelity that was a purse with dense rows of pearls, flowers, so-so inscriptions, and when all is said and done, meanings? And you, you bandit, you bandit, ah, you are killing me, water bandit that sharpens your knives in my eyes, you have no pity then, radiant water, lustral water that I cherish! My imprecations will long follow you like a frighteningly pretty child who shakes her gorse broom in your direction. At the end of each branch there is a star and this is not enough, no, chicory of the Virgin. I don't want to see you any more, I want to riddle your birds that aren't even leaves any more with little lead pellets, I want to chase you from my doorway, hearts with seeds, brains of love.

This is a highly structured work, even though it involves a considerable dislocation of image. But there is a consistent voice, and a consistent address to an other; one can imagine the narrative voice in Maldoror, although in this case the voice is turned inside out—a kind of Klein-bottle effect of a continuous surface is achieved. Compare the continuity of statement in this prose poem to that of “Cult Music,” by Carla Harryman (Under the Bridge [San Francisco: This, 1980], p. 31):

Got worn out screaming in the theater as if words could be a substitute for hard work; furthermore, the soft line of the jaw by pampering leans into steaming table: mutton, fish, greens and potatoes. Fed period music in a boxcar. Something infantilism—roams around, captures monsters, wants a lot. A great mind to waste. Surrounded by fleshy hulks and rocks that move toward voids and purple swamps. It's pink. Bird maps secured. The sky is turquoise. We always find the thing we do not seek. Eyes to intersections, the artifice's mercurial stuckness on the wall. A converted mausoleum. Fish heaps moving under feet. Dread of serene continent, webs, mites inland, an intoxicated community, rides into glory of sun, cars simmer into destination (or an arena) (the freeway is disguised). Entwined in the stone limbs the statues preen to the waves instead of cotton and synthetics or the organdy effusiveness of the sailor at port. The spine curved in right above the ass which was strong and perfect.

Here the writing is concerned with the evaluation of each sentence. The thought procedes up to the moment of the next thought; unlike Breton's high rhetoric, it's also capable of stopping. There is a tension between this mindfulness and a good deal of “automatic” content. The image content, though extremely interior, is still given a distance and particularity; there is also much more distance to the “you.” Compare to this excerpt from a poem of Breton's, “Vigilence” (Selected Poems, trans. Kenneth White [London: Cape, 1969], p. 63):

At the hour of love and blue eyelids
I see myself burning in turn I see that solemn
                    hidingplace of nothings
That was my body
Probed by the patient beaks of the fire-ibis
When it is finished I enter the invisible into
                    the ark
Paying no attention to the passers-by of life
                    whose dragging footsteps echo in the distance
I see the ridges of the sun
Across the may-blossom of the rain
I hear human linen being torn like a great leaf
Under the nails of absence and presence in con-
                    nivance

The subject of this poem is transformation, though the image given is to some extent impeded, evoking rather the desire for transformation. The syntax is accretive; each line could be another of a sequence of events; the poem appears to be always coming out of itself. The transformation is in the creation, by linear means, of an imagistic tableau. A contemporary counterexample is “In the American Tree,” by Kit Robinson (Down and Back [Berkeley: The Figures, 1978], pp. 9-10):

A bitter wind taxes the will
causing dry syllables
to rise from the throat.
Flipping out wd be one alternative
simply rip the cards to pieces
amid a dense growth of raised eyebrows
But such tempest (storm) doors
once opened, resistance fades away
and having fired all the guns you find you are left with a ton of butter,
Which, if it isn't eaten by some lurking rat
hiding out under the gate, may well be picked
up by the wind and spread all over
The face you're by now too chicken to admit is yours.
Wheat grows between bare toes
of a cripple barely able to hold his or her breath
And at the crack of dawn
we howl for more
beer. One of us produces
A penny from his pocket
and flips it at the startled thief
who has been spying on her from behind the flames
That crackle up from the wreck.
The freeway is empty now, moonlight
reflecting brightly off the belly of a blimp,
And as you wipe the red from your eyes
and suck on the lemon someone has given you,
you notice a curious warp in the sequence
Of events suggesting a time loop
in which bitter details repeat
themselves like the hands of a clock
Repeat their circular travels in a dream—
like medium you find impossible to pierce:
it simply spreads out before you, a field.
Now you are able to see a face
in the slope of a hill,
tall green trees
Are its hard features,
a feather floats down
not quite within grasp
And it is Spring.
The goddess herself
is really
Feeling great.
Space assumes the form of a bubble
whose limits are entirely plastic.

What is transformation in this poem? It would not seem to be a specially valued state or a state to be inferred from the images. There is a definite arbitrariness in the work; certainly there are levels of diction the Surrealists would never have used. But although the landscape is mutating, the driver is always in control of the car. The attention is directed to the progression in the poem, and the image content is undercut and distanced by that fact. Illusion comes with a tag. The transformation in Robinson's poem is not the coming into being of the image but of something even deeper—the perception of mind in control of its language. Distance, rather than absorption, is the intended effect.

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