Trevor: since both you & Robin have askded about Prynne's prose it seems
like it'd be a good idea to post an extract from his critique of Language
poetry. I'll type in a bit below. Since Mr Pain seems to be misconstruing
most of Robin's original post, I should perhaps preface by saying that
Prynne's critique is a response to early Language polemic/theory, which had
tried to construct a homology between the operation of language in
bourgeois society & the political/economic structure of that society (and
thus implying that poems written according to different economic
models--e.g. that promote the reader's freedom to interpret along the lines
of a "general economy", in the term taken from Bataille by Steve
McCaffery--were therefore politically radical). This particular plank of
Language's platform--which many more people than Prynne have found
unsatisfactory--has mostly been withdrawn by its practitioners: while
you'll find it in, e.g. Bernstein's _Content's Dream_, you won't see it in
_A Poetics_ or _My Way_.

Another thing I'll note: the idea of "irreducible objecthood" seems to me
uncontroversial. The word-as-object (its sound, its shape on the page) is
being distinguished from its discursive _use_ (meaning). Similarly, the
irreducible objecthood of things might be their "thingness", versus, e.g.,
their particular _use_ within human society.

Prynne below.

N


Nate & Jane Dorward
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109 Hounslow Ave., Willowdale, ON, M2N 2B1, Canada
ph: (416) 221 6865

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...I'd not myself dissent from the project to write out or over the
precursory collusions of representation at the stage of the implied
contract for acts of reading. To restore the frontal or phonic
accidentalism of speech modalities is already a transforming act of
intelligence, through use of the page rather than the air-stream, and to
bring back the one across the generic grids of the other can be to set
outer frames around conditions of astonishing concentration and
transitivity. My own practice, however unstable and inconsistent, would
scarcely allow me to deny this, though in fact I can think of instances
where I'd still do what I'd also refute. But in the political question of
reference to a world in which social action is represented linguistically
and its consequences marked out by economic function and personal access to
social goods (justice, freedom, brown bread), the ludic syntax of a
language system is mapped on to determinations and coercions which by
invasion cast their weights and shadows parasitically into the
playing-fields. I do not believe that 'freedom' from this aspect of the
social order is more than illusory, and this rather flimsy illusion I find
in rather many texts included in, for example, the _American Tree_
collection. No free signifiers: no unvalorised process: no free lunch!
     Your own defence against this foreclosure upon a de-referenced sign
system has been to argue ('a serious entailment', devolving I presume from
Barthes via Silliman) that the text is released from its fixed displacement
out of a function-relation, its tokenised status as fetish, by being given
over to readers as a class of individuals actively installed in the
position of controlling the choices of their own consumption, to be renamed
as production: the _open_ text, the _inventive, selective_ reader, free to
opt for useful waste or wasteful utility. But my own clumsy response to
this is to press several questions, all disputing the quality and
competence of the freedom claimed to be thus established. Isn't it the
classic freedom to eat cake, to diversify an assumed leisure and to choose
out of a diversity which is precisely the commodity-spectacle of a
predisposed array, clearwrapped in unitised portion control? Isn't the
supermarket the correct analogy, where the consumer is generically trained
to value a freedom of choice precisely fetishised by the brand alternatives
of late capitalism, the wonderfully smart play of vacuity by which the
reader of the labels can rustle up preference, advice, loyalty, thrift, all
the bound emotional habits of an old humanism now afloat in the play of
signs within which the consumer's arbitration is a highly efficient
instrument to maintain market saturation and to ration the efficiencies of
decision control? A committed free-market apologist would indeed approve
the commoditised nature of every consumable advantage; but if it is at all
accepted that distributive justice cannot adequately be modelled on a plan
of competitive demand management with added cosmetic 'choice', then the
cosmetics of choice become the most dangerous elements: they destroy
vigilance and all sense of an interconnected general good by seeming to
provide a rewarding increase in benefits for those defined as deserving
(earning) (acquiring) them.
     And thus the presiding analogies press in on the reader, whose
activity as a consuming agent within the product field is coded by
market-access entitlements like education, leisure, the investments of
readiness; so that spontaneous liberating acts of choice, free selection
and undetermined employment of word assemblies, must for sure be
contaminated both by how language works in this larger politicised and
fiscalised system and also by how the choice itself is cosmetic and
self-endorsing because its generic confines are so strictly predetermined.
What a few individuals do doesn't matter, because they are statistically
insignificant: that seems to underwrite the freedom to be left alone with
one's anomalous behaviour. But if the reader isn't to be harmlessly
marginalised, but to have some power of indirectly altered return to the
pressure of social experience upon the sign system mediating its
interpretations, then for reading 'not to matter' is for a tacit
reading-frame to trash out the whole event. And within an efficient
economy the small instances of functional inefficiency have, of course,
their statistical justifications, because if a potentially influential
class can be quieted by inexpensive and containable pleasures then the cost
of that is no problem (valorised loss, as you say: 'executive toys').
     The mandatory liberation then is the liberal's mandate, and it
de-activates the radical irony which I believe is a fundamental task of any
skeptical reader, not to cruise and choose without also knowing what you
are set up to do, checking the price-tag as you tremble with leveraged
completion.



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