:Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewExperimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge. Natalia Cecire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xxii+293.Alex StreimAlex StreimJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe criticism associated with the Language school—a name deriving from Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’s short-lived magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E—casts a long shadow over contemporary poetry and poetics. While that magazine ran only from 1978 to 1981, it helped organize an oppositional approach to poetic practice and theory that lasted for several decades and continues to magnetize scholarly interest. The Language ethos (albeit more various than the moniker can signal) might usefully be defined in the negative: as a critique of poetry invested in the illusion of a unitary speaking subject and inattentive to the materiality of language. A key element of Language writers’ polemic was their valuation, on political grounds, of “experimental” writing over writing conceived of as mainstream or traditional. Natalia Cecire’s first book joins a list of others interested in the history of experimentalism and in the claims of Language poetry, specifically.1 Cecire’s contribution is unique in how it focuses us to the ideological operations of Language’s most significant discursive tool—the language of experiment. The preface begins boldly: “There is no such thing as experimental writing.” But she immediately qualifies the claim, noting that “‘experimental’ is a word that still has enormous power and meaning; it does work. In that sense, it’s A Thing” (vii). Cecire’s interest is historically specific; she is focused on the work the word “experimental” did in the late Cold War literary era, in particular. But what she finds beneath the term itself also gives us a way of understanding post–Cold War trends in poetics.Cecire’s purpose is simply stated: “The question that I most wish to unfold across these chapters is why ‘experimental’ means ‘good’” (viii). To answer that question, she borrows Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s notion of epistemic virtue—the idea that modes of knowledge production can be ascribed positive ethical (and political) character. The phrase is Foucauldian, but Cecire’s account leans perhaps more significantly (if only briefly) on Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 account of the “crisis of legitimation” facing the sciences (3). Late twentieth-century poets, Cecire argues, co-opted the self-legitimizing rhetoric of science by repurposing the language of experiment for both themselves and their literary ancestors, retroactively producing an “experimental” literary tradition reaching back to the first decades of the twentieth century (3). In Cecire’s telling, experimental literature is thus a (white) recovery project, and so doubly periodized—a 1970s–1990s theoretical recasting of a diverse set of early twentieth-century practices. That formal diversity has rendered the category a difficult one to define. Instead of simply attempting a taxonomy of that diversity of forms, however, Cecire asks how a single aesthetic category came to encompass such a wide variety of forms in the first place. Her answer is that “experimentalism” is not, in fact, a timeless formal category, but rather a historically specific, ethico-epistemological one. “Experimental” writing, for Cecire, can appear in any genre or form, just so long as it exhibits some kind of epistemic virtue.Experimental describes four such virtues: flash, objectivity, precision, and contact—all of which are politically contradictory, or, in Cecire’s phrase, “undecidable” (the book’s chapter structure recalls Sianne Ngai’s parsing of culture in terms of original aesthetic categories) (115). In each case, Cecire focuses on one canonical member of the so-called experimental tradition whose poetry exhibits the virtue in question (Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams, respectively) and then surrounds that figure with an archive not typically claimed by the experimental tradition, but which also exemplifies that virtue. Rereading the canonical figures in terms of particular epistemic virtues, Cecire is able to show us what exactly has made each writer available to inclusion in the experimental tradition in the first place, and then complicate the supposed political virtue naturalized by the experimental designation (for if “experimental” can “serve as a proxy for ‘politically radical,’” the particular epistemic virtues that comprise experimental belonging cannot [39]). But by broadening the archive of writing that exhibits those virtues beyond the familiar suspects, Cecire effectively complicates her own critique of experimental recovery, suggesting what an experimental recovery more aware of its true criteria might yet encompass. To my mind, this is an epistemic virtue of her own: she critiques something by thinking with it, ultimately regrounding it in sturdier intellectual terrain.The first virtue, “flash,” is “a set of values aimed at the management … of too much information,” especially of information pertaining to population sciences (50). An overwhelming mélange of genres exhibits this virtue, including the sketch, flash photography, data visualization, the diorama, and imagistic poetry; so Cecire’s account is nearly as sublime as the kind of data she is talking about. “What they [the genres] hold in common,” she concludes, “is an aesthetic strategy for controlling the sublime scale of information and rendering it communicable” (59). Cecire’s own strategy for controlling the sublime scale of the flash archive is not unlike the aesthetic strategy she describes. Flash achieves “comprehensiveness through partialness and selection,” while Cecire explains this relatively baggy virtue by shedding light on one of its modes of appearance: the examples she gives are implicated with instantaneousness, vision, and “effects of light and dark” (56, 50). The chapter ranges from Jacob Riis and the magnesium flash photograph, to Stephen Crane’s “terse epigrams,” to Pound’s poetry of the “luminous detail”—all of which are articulated (though not fully explained) by the idea that they leverage symbolic differences between lightness and darkness (53, 73). Her rereading of Pound’s most famous line—“petals on a wet, black bough”—as a chiaroscuro effect cousin to the language appearing in contemporary naturalist fiction is a revelation, one of the book’s many surprising contextualizations of canonical poetry in the epistemological unconscious of the day (75).The next virtue, “objectivity,” is the most canonical of the epistemic virtues. Cecire follows Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in defining objectivity “in the negative, as the containment of subjectivity and its potential incursions on reality” (84). This chapter is composed primarily of a reading of Gertrude Stein’s story “Melanctha,” both in the context of her neuroanatomical research at Harvard-Radcliffe and Johns Hopkins, and in terms of contemporary ideas about objectivity. It offers a particularly compelling account of the story’s peculiar syntax. By “amping up its use of function words and increasing syntactic structure,” Cecire argues, “the syntax of ‘Melanctha’ performs the clarity-through-obscurity that also underwrites [Gottlob] Frege’s theory of objectivity” (110). The reference here is to Frege’s Begriffsschrift (concept writing) (1879), which “use[d] an objective language to mitigate ‘the specter of psychologism,’” and which Stein’s language approximates (106). Throughout the book, Cecire compares and contrasts the virtues to each other, a tactic that helps to sharpen the edges of the categories. “Flash and precision,” for instance, “constitute inversions of one another, operating through similar part-whole logics but in different directions”; “similarly, objectivity and contact are each concerned with distance as a measure of epistemic security—one requiring distance … the other requiring proximity and touch” (23). The reading of Steinean objectivity in terms of its difference from flash is particularly clarifying: “There are no shortcuts … in reading ‘Melanctha’; there is no possibility of summary or condensation, no picture worth these thousand-word portraits, no desire for flash” (117).The next virtue, “precision,” is the erudite opposite to the more popular flash. It is also queer. Chapter 4, bookended by readings of the Tiller Girls and the Ziegfeld Follies, considers the epistemological-ethical substrate of Marianne Moore’s famed “precision.” “In its tendency to undecidably teeter on the edge of epistemic virtue and vice,” Cecire argues, “precision draws on both sides of [the] bifurcated history of the secret of sex, and it is for this reason that precision so consistently correlates with sexual unease” (136). Although Cecire seems to deduce this reason for correlation from the correlation itself, the fact that precision and sexual unease operate in cognate and perhaps connected ways nonetheless feels descriptively true. Once again, brilliant close readings at once describe and theorize the syntax: “Precision, so often achieved, in Moore’s poems, through elaborate grammatical subordination at the expense of a grammatical core, takes on the qualities of ‘the spectacle of the closet’; the mark of insignificance or superfluity is also the sign of something queer” (140). In a deliberate slippage, the chapter quietly transitions from precision’s association with queer deviance to precision’s association with political domination: “Just as the camera makes the flower of girls,” Cecire says of the photo of a dance formation of “withholdingly celibate, machinic,” and precisely organized female bodies—“so the bomber makes a flower of its target” (145, 146).The final virtue Cecire explores is “contact … an epistemic virtue wherein touching or physical contiguity with the material world guarantees the knowledge status of the language that emerges from that touching” (161). The main figure here is William Carlos Williams, and the main scientific coordinate is “the newly fieldwork-oriented discipline of anthropology, which had, under the influence of Bronislaw Malinowski in Britain and Franz Boas … moved away from the comparatism of Emile Durkheim, James Frazer, and E.B. Tylor” (161). As in the other chapters, Cecire cuts to the core of Williams’s well-remarked relationship to the relevant science: both he and modern anthropology share a reliance on the “epistemological guarantee” of contact (161). That virtue is what separates Williams from a figure like Zora Neale Hurston, who was also explicitly interested in anthropology, but who does not get taken up as experimental, because, as “a collector of ‘lies’—[she] was not terribly interested in performing epistemic virtue at all in her writing” (163). The formal attribute of interest to Cecire once again pertains to syntax: Williams’s use of parataxis, or concatenation, “is a nonstyle, a form of formlessness, and thus telegraphs the commitment to the ‘naked word’ that Williams claims for contact” (168). And once again, this epistemic virtue masks a political vice, insofar as contact “reenacts the first [settler colonial] contact that it disavows” (170).Experimental, then, successfully exposes the ideological operations of the making of a tradition. It seems safe to say, however, that the divide between experimental and mainstream poetry has shrunk, and with it the stakes of critiquing and clarifying the discourse in which that war is waged. Cecire’s story explains the correlation between the “experimental” and the good. But do critics continue to invest the “experimental” (when they use the term at all) with political goodness? It is a testament to the power of Cecire’s analysis that the answer may not matter. For if “experimentalism” as an aesthetic term entailing vaguely radical politics has fallen out of favor, other categories seem to have arisen (and might yet arise) to achieve a similar ideological effect. One feature of contemporary poetry, for instance, is the ubiquity of work claiming to be “documentary.”2 If experimental poetry was an idea wrung from an era of Cold War, slaughter in Vietnam, and legitimation crises in the sciences, documentary (sometimes recast as “witness”) poetry is, perhaps, an idea appropriate to an era of “slow violence” and its exposure on social media (Cecire herself ends the book with that phrase, borrowed from Rob Nixon) (200). Cecire has left the contradictions inhering in “experimental” exposed to view. The work done by “documentary”—by way, perhaps, of its own set of epistemic virtues, or by an extension of the ones Cecire introduces—requires its own unveiling. Cecire’s argument is, in the first place, particular to its case; but it is also a method to transport.Notes1. See Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton University Press, 2011); Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons, and Brian McHale, eds., The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (London: Routledge, 2012); Alex Houen, Powers of Possibility: Experimental American Writing since the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2012); Srikanth Reddy, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2012); Timothy Kreiner, “The Long Downturn and Its Discontents: Language Writing and the New Left” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2013); Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Ben Hickman, Crisis and the US Avant-Garde: Poetry and Real Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2015); and Peter Middleton, Expanding Authorship: Transformations in American Poetry since 1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2021). From this list, the concern with Language appears to be a predominantly masculine affair.2. For historical accounts of contemporary documentary poetry, see Joseph Harrington, “Docupoetry and Archive Desire,” Jacket2, Oct 27, 2011, https://jacket2.org/article/docupoetry-and-archive-desire; Jill Magi, “Poetry in Light of Documentary,” Chicago Review 59, no. 1/2 (Autumn 2014 / Winter 2015): 248–75; Michael Leong, Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020); and Sarah Ehlers and Niki Herd, “North American Documentary Poetry and Poetics,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1261. 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