Conference on the Left/Conference on the Right

Conference on the Left

Assembling Alternatives

August 29-September 2, 1996

what a weird deserted place New Hampshire is
–Robert Grenier

A great deal of sociological analysis is sure to follow us here…
–Charles Bernstein

“Assembling Alternatives,” gathered writers to the University of New Hampshire, a few days before school began. Organized by Romana Huk, “Assembling Alternatives” was, essentially, a meeting of poets and scholars affiliated with “language writing.” A significant number of the participants are represented in Douglas Messerli’s anthology of language writing and its antecedents, From the Other Side of the Century, published by Sun and Moon Press.

Although there are multiple practices of language writing, Bob Perelman, in The Marginalization of Poetry, stitches a loosely fitting coat anyone associated with the movement could wear. Language writers practice:

breaking the automatism of the poetic ‘I’, and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal devices; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to open the present to critique and change. (13)

These writers claim a genealogy that includes The Stein Era, Russian Futurists, Surrealists, Black Mountain Poets and the New York School.

Although language writing began to appear as poetry and theory in the early 1970s, it was during the Reagan years that the movement gained prominence. A foundational scholarly work was Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy, first published in 1981. Charles Bernstein played anthologist in a collection of language writing, “A Language Sampler,” for The Paris Review in 1983. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, was published in 1984, and the anthology of language writing edited by Ron Silliman, In the American Tree, was published in 1986.

Language writing emerged as cultural anti-Reaganomics, attacking, through radical form and leftist critique, the conservative movement that counted its blessings under the sign of the dollar.

Since the eighties, through the seemingly boundless production of its practitioners, language writing has developed an international reach. “Assembling Alternatives” included writers from Ireland, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, and China.

The success of language writing as a resistance discourse raised an important question during the conference: What happens to the anti-establishment after its establishment? Many in attendance were affiliated with universities. Charles Cantalupo, in his talk, characterized the conference as “the anti-academic academy.”

Also at issue was the relationship between theory and poetry. The two have always been closely linked in language writing, if not constituting a seamless web. If language poetry challenges a reader, “Produce the text yourself,” the theory says, “I’ll help.”

Bob Perelman’s talk, and the first chapter of The Marginalization of Poetry, turns on this very issue. In it, he calls for:

…a physically
and socially located writing where margins
are not metaphors, and where readers
are not simply there, waiting to
be liberated

The theoretical discourse located in New Hampshire wasn’t nearly as seamless as the couplets in plain language that composed Perelman’s poem/essay. Frequently, presentations were interrupted by elisions, “I’ll skip this part”; “Time will not permit me to adduce”; “I won’t read this poem but what it says is…”; “I’ll jump now right to the conclusion.” The poetry readings were at night, after the critical sessions, as if exploding out of the fissures of theory. To be sure, the packed schedule of each day – from 8am to past midnight – can account for some of these fissures.

But, to a larger degree, these gaps in argument point to a more acute discomfort: when can reference justly do the work of our words? Are these gaps signifiers of the otherness of poetic language? Is there an aporia between the poetic utterance and all other attempts at uttering/muttering /mothering/fathering/furthering words into being? Why cannot reference be trusted to recross that aporia as poetry?

While elisions exposed the problem in referring to the non-referential, repetition served to keep the referrals within the established rhetoric. Stock phrases functioned as shorthand for argumentative assumptions:

“interrogate the nature of language itself”
“open up new subject positions”
“poetry of the stable subject”
“the commodification of language”
“the structure of late capitalism”
“this commercial, consumer culture”

This is not to say these phrases aren’t part of valid arguments. They are. But they also constitute the speech of the corporate will in language writing. Theoretical positions become reified and codified as oft repeated phrases. These phrases become sites of association within the assembly. They function as commodities in an alternative economy – with its own balance sheet, its own account. What Barrett Watten notes about some mainstream poetry in Total Syntax applies here, “attempts at an extra-social position, specifically one defined apart from the commodity system, often lead directly back to the market” (117).

Adorno’s insight that all identity is ideological also applies. Questions of identity and identification within the movement charged two moments during the conference.

The first was Steve McCaffery’s pyrotechnic reading. Realize: this is a poet who once spilled AlphaBits from the top of a ladder and then rolled around the floor making phonics. At the conference, it was McCaffery’s witty, referential poem that brought the house down. It plowed its way through poets and theory turning on, referring to, the very proper nouns people wore pinned to their chests in the audience. It was a brilliant performance of a joke. The punchline was identity.

The next afternoon, Bob Perelman read and discussed, “The Marginalization of Poetry.” During the discussion, he stated that discursive writing practices, “were getting kinda old.” His call for change was immediately attacked. Critics accounted for Perelman’s call-to-change as a result of his position as a member of the late capitalist academy – who would no longer interrogate the nature of language itself.

“I teach high school students such work and they are thrilled by it” pointed out another critic, shocked that language writing should be called obsolete, when it was just starting its cultural work.

The attacks on Perelman were about identification–discursive linguistic practices have been so long associated with leftist politics in language writing (perhaps uncritically so), that when Perleman changes aesthetic, he is accused of political betrayal. The attacks were conservative at the root – arguments in defense of the status quo.

Language writing is now well established. And because it is taught in high schools, and, for example, at a community college in Central Missouri, it is changing how literature is read and writing is written. These changes have been brought by the prodigious output of quality writing distributed through the movement’s network into the poetry market – language writing is, in a way, entrepreneurial. Its influence is proportionate to the innovation and labor that has gone into its construction.

Indeed, the straw man, altar native, of language writing–mainstream academic poetry–has become less and less important in relation. Mainstream poetry is just one poetic discourse among many. The strawman is scattered in the scattering of poetries.

Language writing, not poetry of the Authentic Voice of the Unitary “I,” will seed poetries in the 21st century. And because language writing includes the discourse of literary history, literary history will be written on language writing.

In addition, language writing has engaged the formidable intellect of Marjorie Perloff. She has closely followed the evolution of language writing, placing it in the context of 20th century avant-garde art.

Perloff was a primary source of energy at the conference–animated, interested, involved. So was Charles Bernstein.

Bernstein is the poet conjured/conjugated by Khlebnikov’s “Invocation by Laughter” (a joyous blossoming of play with morphemes and the root of “to laugh,” i.e.: “O laughensteins laughing in laughganistan…”). Bernstein does what Artaud praised the Marx Brothers for – disruption through humor. He takes culture through a “comic spin cycle,” introducing the chaos of laughter into the orderworn “necroid ideocracy.”

Although long associated with the movement, and seemingly, a ringleader, Bernstein, in a recent interview, argues his way out of group identity:

community is as much what I want to get away from–reform–as form…Being inside, a part of, is often far less striking than being left out, apart…If I resist the idea of literary community, while working to support the “actual existing” communities of poets among which I find myself, it is because I want to imagine reading and writing and performing and listening, as sites of conversation as much as collectivity. (Community and the Individual Talent)

By attending to the real, “actually existing” communities, and not the “idea” of collectivity, Bernstein manages to avoid the politics of group identity. Bernstein’s ethos is energy while constructing, dissembling humor while inside the construction. His position prevents him from substituting a familiar critique for an ethical stance.

Tim Woods, a Welsh writer, examined the role of ethics in language writing. Citing Levinas, Woods offered an ethics of responsibility in the face of the other. Our response to the other, whether we gaze or listen, is the site of the ethical. And when we hear a voice, Woods argued, it is a voice that cannot be thematized.

Woods’ argument spoke to another dilemma in language writing. How to address the historical oppression of “others” when critique begins with the dismantling of identity? Is not the voice of the oppressed, processed through a materialist critique, already “thematized”?

This is the issue Miriam Nichols from Canada addressed. Nichols argued for the role of reference in forming a political poetry –specifically, poetry that refers to place. “The political,” she said, “is the return of the repressed. The landscape never left.” In other words, place gathers temporal actualities that are sites of oppression and keeps them from being overwritten. At the local site, Nichols explained, the political can be given, as in Peter Culley’s poetry, a powerful voice. But, when poetic discourse is discursive, the specificity of place is paved over by totalizing ideology.

What made Woods and Nichols’ presentations important was that they opened powerful alternatives – to mainstream poetry, and to its alternative on the left. These alternatives can be used to “construct a possible future” (Watten 41).

Nichol’s discussion of reference in relation to alternatives poetries was prescient. During the readings there was a sense that poetic structures were becoming more referential. Barrett Watten read from a series called “Bad History.” Bob Perelman read from “Fake Dreams.” In these and other works, a formal structure–history, dream, allegory–thickens with paradox, linguistic play, and irony. Yet, a familiar form remains. Perhaps as an alternative to the abstract, mathematical formal structure of some language writing (a poem like Tjanting, for example), pre-capitalist literary forms – dream vision, folk tale, nursery rhyme, allegory–will attempt to hold resistance discourses.

More importantly, Woods and Nichol’s presentations cleared a site for ethos in radical poetry that is not merely a rehearsal of political positions that have long been occupied.

The difficulty of sketching a poetry of ethos when the “I” has been dispersed through critique is apparent – ethos is predicated on agency. Materialist thinkers often treat agency as if they were misers – they say they’ve got little and have none to give away.

But regardless of how many ways the self is split and constructed by structures that exist before the subject, at a moment of choice, ethos gathers, collects the selves, and binds them into the singular act. At the site of the self, the “I,” alternatives assemble, then we choose one in order to act. Carla Harryman spoke of millennial thinking that “qualifies its hope with anxiety.” For ethos, the hope is that the act is just, the anxiety is that the act may be already determined before it’s done.

Wittgenstein noted that an “agent is not a locus of representation, but…one who is engaged in practices.” The practice of a poethos would not be a predetermined set of actions to be represented. It would be a reminder of an idea that closes Perloff’s latest book, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” Poethos would be a preparation for being in the world. It would be a poetics that prepares identity and meaning for their last, best chance at radical reconstitution–when the self disappears out of the word, into the act.

Works Cited

Conference on the Right

Maintaining Momentum

Sep 21-23, 1996

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher.
–John W. Gardner

[Students] simply don’t have the education and skills to survive in today’s workforce.
–Elizabeth Dole, Secretary of Labor, 1989

“Maintaining Momentum,” gathered educators, industry leaders, and vendors of educational material to San Antonio. Organized by the National Tech Prep Network, the conference was designed to update members on changes in the Tech Prep and School-to-Work movement, and generate ideas for implementing these programs in secondary and postsecondary schools.

Tech Prep is an education program called for in the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technological Act of 1990 (Perkins II). Perkins II attempted to mandate educational reform in order to:

make the United States more competitive in the world economy by developing more fully the academic and occupational skills of all segments of the population…through concentrating resources on improving educational programs leading to academic and occupational skill competencies needed to work in a technologically advanced society.

Tech Prep is one of many programs developed in the history of federal vocational education legislation. It traces its genealogy to the first decade of the 20th century. At that time, labor unions and progressives like Jane Addams decried the generalist nature of public education and called for more resources to help students achieve gainful employment. That reform movement culminated in the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, which set stringent guidelines for publicly funded vocational education (Greenwood 7-16). Since that time, vocational education has continued to be a lively site for educational reform.

In 1984 Congress passed the Carl Perkins Vocational Education Act (Perkins I), a descendent of the Smith-Hughes. This particular movement surfaced during the same time of the study A Nation at Risk, the damning critique of public education published in 1983. Perkins I specifically targeted disadvantaged populations and called for a reevaluation of vocational education in light of the restructuring of the American economy.

Perkins II reflected a more directive approach than Perkins I, with specific programs to be funded. Dale Parnell, in his foundational The Neglected Majority(the 75% of high school students who do not go on to baccalaureates) provided the rationale for Tech Prep: why educate all students as if they are preparing for college when most of them aren’t?

Essentially, Parnell called for an education that would lead to the production of competent workers who had been educated contextually-that is through relevant, “real-life” contexts. Most often, these “real-life” contexts could be found in workplaces. Parnell called for, and the Perkins II attempted to encourage, an “application rich” (Parnell 11) education for those of the neglected majority.

The political orientation of such a movement, although characterized here as “the right,” is tricky. There is a populist, anti-elitist tone to it. Parnell attacked the conservative back-to-basics battle cries of William Bennett as being elitist and ignorant of the plight of the majority of students. Daniel Hull, another leading proponent, calls Tech Prep “reform for working people” (33). Universities are seen as sites for the education of a privileged class, disconnected from the scene of “real work.” Parnell notes, “More and more Americans have come to recognize that a Ph.D. in history or a master’s in Art Appreciation will not necessarily result in a promising job in the future” (Politics 97).

On the other hand, the call for “applied academics”–academics led by the contexts of the marketplace–signify the movement’s subservience to capitalism, which forms such privileged classes in the first place. Where the Horace Mann model of education would focus on “democracy” in a “capitalist democracy,” the Tech Prep model would focus on “capitalist.”

Parnell calls for a seamless web in education characterized by “context, connectedness, continuity” (15). Students help to produce their own education because they can see a connection between schoolwork and “real work.” Parnell believes “we have allowed education to become disconnected from real life, real work, real citizenship” (13).

In the Tech Prep philosophy, the ideal context for learning is economically located. The quality of the “real” that Parnell calls for can be found at work. What counts for reality is what can be counted in an accountant’s book.

At “Gaining Momentum,” during a presentation, a teacher/consultant related that when his advocacy for applied academics meets with resistance, he replies, “Look, I’m trying to save your job here.” In other words, educators will be evaluated in terms of the prevailing market standards-efficiency of their process and the quality of their product. Just as if they were manufacturers cranking out widgets.

The subtext is that teachers should fear downsizing in the name of innovation and efficiency as any middle manager would.

In manufacturing, quality is measured by the rate of defect, efficiency (in part) by productivity, inventory, and turnaround time. And even though these functions have analogues in education, business measures them statistically. To implement applied communications (read: English), for example, a quality, efficient education would be measured as the successful completion of a series of predetermined routines that could be tracked numerically.

Of course, if the educator is at the forefront of reform, a code writer, there is less fear of being re-engineered out of a job. And because there is money to be allocated for these programs, it is in the educator’s best interest to meet the requirements of the grantor of money–in this case the federal government.

To be a member, then, of the reform–to feel secure in employment, is to speak the code-the phrases that signify allegiance with the program. At “Gaining Momentum” these phrases included:

“teaching literature that is relevant”
“open up new skills for technical jobs”
“context-based learning”
“ill-prepared worker”
“the competition of global markets”
“the elitist model of education”

The use of these phrases extended to the numerous merchants at the conference: purveyors of videotape series, textbooks, computer programs. The proliferation of commodities points to the fundamentally economic nature of educational reform-who gets the money this time and where will it be spent?

In its Foucauldian analysis of political power, the American Vocational Association’s (AVA) book, The Politics of Vocational Education, relates that one of the goals of a reform movement is to “Create a class whose interest it is to continue the program” (13). The book provides a rhetoric for how to do this-from lobbying the federal government to building popular support.

The corporate will of those implementing the reform will work to gain support for the movement because it is in their self-interest to do so. But because educational reform is frequently enacted legislatively, politicians intervene. The corporate will, then, sets itself up in Washington as a lobbying effort.

Tech Prep was revised by President Bill Clinton, no doubt with the help of lobbyists, in the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994. School-to-Work is based on the belief that:

The workplace in the United Sates is changing in response to heightened international competition and new technologies…which are shrinking the demand for and reducing the earning power of unskilled labor.

In response, the Act proposes to:

establish a national framework within which all states can create statewide school-to-work systems that are part of comprehensive educational reform…to facilitate the creation of a universal, high quality, school-to-work transition system…to identify and navigate paths to productive and progressively more rewarding roles in the work force…to utilize workplaces as active learning environments in the educational process by making employers joint partners with educators…

School-to-Work is run jointly by the Secretaries of Labor and Education and augments Tech Prep with systems to help students better prepare for the workforce. It calls for career awareness to begin as early as possible and no later than 7th grade. In addition, it mandates market analysis which would enable educators to determine which skills students should acquire in order to gain local employment.

Whereas Tech Prep contained an implicit critique of Bill Bennett’s anachronistic education philosophy, Phyllis Schlafley’s ultra-conservative group, The Eagle Forum, vociferously attacks School-to-Work. To the Eagle Forum, School-to-Work represents unprecedented federal intrusion in public education-while bemoaning the fact that the Act doesn’t mandate learning how to read through phonics.

Although the Eagle Forum’s view lacks consistency (and one gets the impression the members of the Forum desire a theocracy rather than a corporate oligarchy), there ought to be concern about such programs.

When education is shaped by market demands, “Instead of being subjects for the objects, we become subjects to the objects” (qtd. in Perloff Wittgenstein). Students are taught under the sign of the dollar.

Of course, business-education partnerships do not include the promulgation of workers’ rights or techniques for organizing unions–employers help make curriculum and employers seek compliant workers. A businessman puts it succinctly in a recent edition of Tech Directions, in an article on business/education partnerships, “we look for people who know how to behave.”

What is best for employers, though, might not be best for the employees, or the economy. School-to-Work/Tech Prep ignores what’s necessary to keep the economy growing-creativity, risk-taking, independent thinking. These qualities move the entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurship is the only way to be a progressive capitalist-you leap, momentarily, out of the system by creating what the system lacks. The monad shakes loose from the calculus of already existing market structures.

The writing practices encouraged in Tech Prep and School-to-Work assume that there is no way out of these structures. Reality is not a Borgesian library; it is a corporate flow chart. In applied communications, careers provide the hermeneutics for literature: “Write a memo from Beowulf to Hrothgar detailing how he will solve the Grendel Problem”; “Write a want ad that Willie Loman would respond to”; “Write a Crimestoppers script for the murder of an Algerian in The Stranger.”

The irony is that the left is often criticized for its materialist analysis of literature. But where the left reads literature as a way to criticize the economic system, applied communications lets the economic system set up a franchise on the literature’s site. Literature’s apologia is only the way it can be related to work. This again illustrates the belief that reality is constituted economically. Period. The period in which we live.

In repressing the ability of literature to disrupt and challenge, applied communications reduces English Instruction to a series of rhetorical exercises written on the commonplaces of business. Texts become sites where the student’s imagination is given its market function.

The idea of universal career-oriented education renders agency as an economic function. The students’ purpose is to fill a preexisting economic slot that is identified through counseling, testing, and market analysis. The seamless web begins in elementary school when students begin to choose and then train for a career, and doesn’t end until they retire some 60 years later.

This is an acquiescence to market forces that would have us believe there is no agency outside of the economic, no potential outside of wage-earning. The student is thematized as a worker and work is the theme of education.

To be sure, it is bad history to assume that School-to-Work and Tech Prep represent the final victory of base capitalism over the ideals of imagination and creation. These programs frequently expand, entrench, then become extinct.

Nor can we deny that education ought to lead to satisfying work. All beings must labor in order to continue being. And education should be able to effectively reach the 75% of students who do not go on to college. (Although the quality of life would probably improve if all competent plumbers were adequate philosophers.)

Social programs like School-to-Work and Tech Prep are necessary, but there is no necessity in being myopic mimics of an assembly of business practices that are often themselves questionable.

Perhaps education ought to not only supply students with the skills necessary to succeed in the job market, but also provide students with the tools that would enable them to re-program the market in such a way as to bypass the circuits of greed and oppression that produce so much human waste. Instead of preparing students to step out of the classroom into the economy, students would be able to step out of the economy, into a class of their own production.

Works Cited