Prefigurative Poetics: Language Writing’s New Sentence and the Politics of the New Left

Abstract

This article argues that prefiguration is an essential concept for understanding the postwar avant-garde’s affiliation with social movements. Against the backdrop of important recent arguments that link Language writing to the failings and inner conflicts of the 1960s, this essay claims that Language writing was bred out of a complex dialogue with the New Left as both a result of a disillusionment with political speech and an attempt to carry on the New Left’s democratic experiments. I show how the technique invented by Ron Silliman and other American West Coast poets called The New Sentence not only was a way of posturing in the established language of the New Left, but actively sought to continue the political legacy of the 1960s in much more direct ways than previously acknowledged. Most importantly, the New Sentence inherited the notion of prefigurative politics and the hopes that such a politics, if transferred to poetic form, could enact change by constructing an alternative model of society. As a merger between New Left politics and institutional critique, the New Sentence—and other avant-garde strategies after ‘68—prefigures new ways of life through aesthetic form.