Writing and Method
Charles Bernstein was the coeditor, with Bruce Andrews, of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which they produced in chapbook format from 1978 to 1982. Radical in style as well as content, the essays they published (and often commissioned) were intended to blur the distinction between poetry and poetics, writing and theory. This blurring of genres, and its larger philosophical justification, is developed in many of Bernstein’s essays, which have since been collected in several volumes. Influenced by Anglo-American philosophy (particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein and his American interpreter, Stanley Cavell) and continental philosophy (Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology appeared in translation in 1976), Bernstein takes up the long-standing debate between philosophy and literature, arguing for the literariness of philosophy and for the philosophical importance of literature. Citing predecessors from Montaigne and Thoreau to the manifestos of the avant-garde, Bernstein argues, in the first half of his essay, that literary writing should be taken as philosophically serious. In the second half of the essay (available in the online archive), Bernstein elaborates on a basic problem common to philosophical and poetic writing: that of unexamined, normative uses of language whose unquestioned status can have an atrophying impact on thinking. To investigate, rather than assume, forms of philosophy or poetry at their most fundamental level as writing is what Bernstein means by “method.”
1. The Limits of Style / The Possibilities of Phenomena
An inquiry into the differences between philosophical and literary writing practices is of value insofar as it can shed light on both the nature of philosophy and poetry and, more importantly, on the development and implications of such genre or professional distinctions within writing and thinking. For what makes poetry poetry and philosophy philosophy is largely a tradition of thinking and writing, a social matrix of publications, professional associations, audience; more, indeed, facts of history and social convention than intrinsic necessities of the “medium” or “idea” of either one. So such an inquiry will end up being into the social meaning of specific modes of discourse, a topic that is both a stylistic resource for the writing of poetry and a content for philosophy.
Philosophy has traditionally been concerned with the nature of the world and the possibilities of human knowledge of it; in a large sense, the nature of perception, phenomenon, objects, mind, person, meaning, and action. Richard Kuhns, in his book about the affinities of philosophy and literature, Structures of Experience, writes, “Philosophy asks ‘What makes experience possible?’ and ‘What makes this kind of experience possible?’ Literature establishes the realities for which philosophy must seek explanations.” Kuhns bases the distinction between philosophy and literature on the appeal each makes, the address of the text. Philosophy is involved with an appeal to validity and argument (i.e., to impersonal, suprapersonal, “objective” abstractions, to logic) and poetry with an appeal to memory and synaesthesia (i.e., to the reader’s own experience). Kuhns, then, is suggesting two different, though interrelated, modes of discourse. “Philosophy” requires “logical” argument and noncontradiction as basic textual modes of discourse; “poetry” seems to reject argument as essential, though of course it may “incorporate” argument. —Even were I to accept Kuhns’s traditional distinctions, which I do not, I would add that poetry can focus attention on the structure of meaning by the exemplification of structures of discourse—how the kind of discourse effects what can be said within it.
Another traditional distinction between philosophy and poetry now sounds anachronistic: that philosophy is involved with system building and consistency and poetry with the beauty of the language and emotion. Apart from the grotesque dualism of this distinction (as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional!), this view imagines poetry and philosophy to be defined by the product of their activity, consistent texts in the one case, beautiful texts in the other. Rather, philosophy and poetry are at least equally definable not as the product of philosophizing and poetic thinking but, indeed, the process (the activity) of philosophizing or poetic thinking.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his “Self-Portrait at 70” (in Life/Situations) argues that while literature should be ambiguous, “in philosophy, every sentence should have only one meaning”; he even reproaches himself for the “too literary” language of Being and Nothingness, “whose language should have been strictly technical. It is the accumulation of technical phrases which creates the total meaning, a meaning which,” at this overall level, “has more than one level.” Literature, on the other hand, is a matter of style, style that requires greater effort in writing and pervasive revision. “Stylistic work does not consist of sculpting a sentence, but of permanently keeping in mind the totality of the scene, the chapter … the entire book” as each sentence is being composed. So, a superimposition of many meanings in each sentence. —Sartre’s remarks are interesting in this context because he so clearly exemplifies the poetry/philosophy split, being equally known for his fiction and nonfiction. Yet for me, Being and Nothingness is a more poetic work than The Age of Reason in the sense that I find it more a structural investigation of perception and experience—“being”—whose call is to “memory and synaesthesia,” while the novels often seem to exemplify various “problems” using a rationalistic appeal to argument and validity.
Indeed, if one takes it to be a primary philosophical problem—many philosophers of course do not—that the description (ontology) of events, persons, experiences, objects, etc., are at issue, and it is not just a question of axiomatizing types of these things, then forms of art not only “define the structure of human experience” as Kuhns has it but investigate the terms of human experience and their implications. Then poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena. The motto for this might come from Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations: “We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is directed not toward phenomena but, as one might say, the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.”
As a result, the genre or style of a writing practice becomes centrally a question of method, rather than a transparent given of form. It is this understanding of philosophy that led Heidegger in his later work to reject philosophy and instead call for instruction in “true thinking” (in What Is Called Thinking), or has led Stanley Cavell, recently writing on Emerson, to talk of the relation of mood to philosophic inquiry. Or what has led so many poets to feel the need to reject philosophy outright as a ground for poetry, as Craig Watson recently commented, saying that it sentimentalized a picture of perception. The answer to that is that of course people do get attached to their systems: but this should not subvert seeing the possibilities for method itself, for system, for ways of looking at perception. In Walden, Thoreau writes, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates…. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success…. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men…. The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?” Which I cite partly for that last sentence—the centrality of method.
If philosophy is to be characterized as a form consisting of clearly exposited arguments whose appeal is to the logic of validity, then it would systematically be limited by the limits of expository practice. I don’t think it makes sense to restrict philosophy to this particular mode of discourse both because it would rule out some of the best work in philosophy and because it suggests that reason’s most “clear” expression is exposition. Rather it seems to me that, as a mode, contemporary expository writing edges close to being merely a style of decorous thinking, rigidified and formalized to a point severed from its historical relation to method in Descartes and Bacon. It is no longer an enactment of thinking or reasoning but a representation (and simplification) of an eighteenth-century ideal of reasoning. And yet the hegemony of its practice is rarely questioned outside certain poetic and philosophic contexts. On this level, I would characterize as sharing a political project both a philosophical practice and a poetic practice that refuse to adopt expository principles as their basic claim to validity.
For both poetry and philosophy, the order of the elements of a discourse is value constituting and indeed experience engendering, and therefore always at issue, never assumable.
In some sense these are just issues of style; a style is chosen and it is not to the point simply to be evaluative about which is best intrinsically. But to acknowledge that there are philosophical assumptions that underlie given stylistic practices about the nature of reason, objects, the world, persons, morality, justice. At a certain historical moment certain paths were chosen as to the style that would express a quasi-scientific voice of reason and authority—even though, as Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, this “normal” science language cannot account for the paradigm shifts central to scientific progress—a voice that was patriarchal, monologic, authoritative, impersonal. The predominance of this authoritative plain style (taught in such guides as Strunk and White) and its valorization as a picture of clarity and reason is a relatively recent phenomenon and its social meaning will no doubt be clarified by a careful tracing of its origins that would be a central project for the historian of social forms. Morris Croll has elucidated an earlier stage of these developments in his account of the rise of the anti-Ciceronian prose style in the late sixteenth century, a development in some ways paralleling such current critiques as this one of contemporary expository forms in its rejection of a static predetermined formality and its attempt “to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking.” Montaigne most clearly exemplifies this movement, especially in terms of his methodological awareness of the implications of style: “I stray from the path, but it is rather by license than oversight. My ideas follow each other, but sometimes it is at a distance, and they look at each other, but with an oblique gaze…. It is the lazy reader who loses track of the subject, not I…. I keep changing without constraint or order. My style and mind both go a-vagabonding…. I mean my matter should distinguish itself. It shows sufficiently where it changes, where it ends, where begins, where resumes, without interlacing of words, of conjunctions, or connectives introduced for weak or negligent ears, and without glossing myself.”
No doubt the history of our contemporary plain styles, with their emphasis on connectives, a tight rein on digression, and a continuing self-glossing, a history that could be traced to the last 100 years, would need to account for the effect of industrialization and mass literacy in order to explain the particular tendency toward greater and greater standardization. But the crucial mechanism to keep in mind is not the content per se of current preferred forms versus possible alternatives but the mechanism of distinction and discrimination itself that allows for certain language practices to be legitimized (as correct, clear, coherent) and other language practices to be discredited (as wrong, vague, nonsensical, antisocial, ambiguous, irrational, illogical, crude, dumb …). This “mechanism of exclusion” is described by Michel Foucault in relation to the designation both of the “criminal” and the “insane,” with the comment that it is the mechanism itself and its techniques and procedures which were found useful in creating and preserving the predominating hierarchical power relations of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie (as well, it should be added, as the twentieth-century Soviet state). It is not, then, the intrinsic meaning of the particular distinction that is crucial, not, that is, the particular standard but standardization itself. “What in fact happened … was that the mechanisms of exclusion … began from a particular point in time … to reveal their political usefulness and to lend themselves to economic profit, and that as a natural consequence, all of a sudden, they came to be colonized and maintained by global mechanisms and the entire state system. It is only if we grasp the techniques of power and demonstrate the economic advantages and political utility that derives from them … that we can understand how these mechanisms come to be effectively incorporated into the social whole.” Part of the task of a history of social forms would be to bring into visibility as chosen instruments of power what is taken as neutral or given. Part of the task of an active poetry or philosophy is to explore these instruments by a critique of their partiality and to develop alternatives to them that can serve as models of truth and meaning not dependent for their power on the dominating structures.
The contemporary expository mode was adopted because it effectively did the business of the society’s vested interests, by its very mode quelling the sound of oppositional language by equating coherence with mannered and refined speaking. In this context, Sartre tells the story of La Cause du peuple, a Paris newspaper that the government actively seized, arresting its editors, in the 70s because, unlike the leftist Les Temps moderne, Sartre’s own paper, it did not speak in the language of bourgeois discourse but had accounts by workers in their own sharper language of rebellions and atrocities throughout France. I think the outrage against accepting black English diction in a school context is a similar instance of a threat to the legitimizing function served by standardization.
The questions are always: what is the meaning of this language practice; what values does it propagate; to what degree does it encourage an understanding, a visibility, of its own values; or to what degree does it repress that awareness? To what degree is it in dialogue with the reader and to what degree does it command or hypnotize the reader? Is its social function liberating or repressive? Such questions of course open up into much larger issues than ones of aesthetics per se, open the door by which aesthetics and ethics are unified. And so they pertain not only to the art situation but more generally the language of the job, of the state, of the family, and of the street. And my understanding of these issues comes as much from working as a commercial writer as from reading and writing poetry. Indeed, the fact that the overwhelming majority of steady paid employment for writing involves using the authoritative plain styles, if it is not explicitly advertising, involves writing, that is, filled with preclusions, is a measure of why this is not simply a matter of stylistic choice but of social governance: we are not free to choose the language of the workplace or of the family we are born into, though we are free, within limits, to rebel against it. Nor am I therefore advocating that expository writing should not be taught; I can think of few more valuable survival skills. “But if one learns to dress as the white man dresses one does not have to think the white man dresses best.” And again the danger is that writing is taught in so formal and objectified a way that most people are forever alienated from it as Other. It needs, to appropriate Alan Davies’s terms, to be taught as the presentation of a tool, not mystified as a value-free product, in which the value-creating process that led to it is repressed into a norm and the mode itself is imperialized. Coherence cannot be reduced to the product of any given set of tools. This will not necessarily entail that all writing be revolutionary in respect to style or even formally self-conscious about it—though that is a valuable course—but rather that styles and modes have social meaning that cannot be escaped and that can and should be understood.
This understanding should lead to a very acute sense of the depletion of styles and tones in the public realm of factual discourse, including in professional philosophy and the academy in general, but also newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV. Indeed, even within the predominant styles of contemporary philosophy, few of the tones and moods that potentially exist within the chosen style are utilized to any great extent. Indeed, the only significant alternative to the neutral-toned plain style of most philosophical writing of the present time is the weightier tone of judiciousness; but rarely whimsical tones or angry, or befuddled or lethargic or ironic, as if these tones were moods that have been banished, realms of human experience thus systematically untouchable. Not only is the question of method suppressed, but even the possibilities of tone within the style are reduced!
All writing is a demonstration of method; it can assume a method or investigate it. In this sense, style and mode are always at issue, for all styles are socially mediated conventions open to reconvening at any time.
Yet, along with the depletion of styles and tones of writing is a repression of these categories as chosen elements. Appropriating a similar division by Barrett Watten, one might speak of concentric circles of technique, style, mode or genre, and method, each of these terms encompassing a sequentially larger circle that informs the possibilities for the categories within it. That is, a technique exists within the context of a style toward which it is employed, a style can be seen as an instance of a more general genre or mode, and a mode is informed by a still more general method that gives rise to it. Different works will show vastly different indications of these domains. A row of suburban houses, for example, may mask the uniformity of their style by slight alterations (personalizations) made by the individual owners. Art or movie reviewing, for instance, will usually focus on the style or technique and leave unexamined the prevailing assumptions of mode and method, either out of blindness to these aspects or out of a conviction that such issues are contentless or imponderable. Indeed much “normal” philosophy and poetry simply adopts a style and works on techniques within it, without considering either the implications of the larger modality or its methodological assumptions. On the other hand, a “constructive” mode would suggest that the mode itself is explored as content, its possibilities of meaning are investigated and presented, and that this process is itself recognized as a method.
One vision of a “constructive” writing practice I have, and it can be approached in both poetry and philosophy, is of a multi-discourse text, a work that would involve many different types and styles and modes of language in the same “hyperspace.” Such a textual practice would have a dialogic or polylogic rather than monologic method. The loss of dialogue in philosophy has been a central problem since Plato; Cavell, applying this to his own work, and that of Thoreau, talks about the dialogue of a “text answerable to itself.” Certainly, Philosophical Investigations is the primary instance of such a text in this century, and also a primary instance of taking this practice as method. & I can easily imagine more extreme forms of this: where contrasting moods and modes of argument, shifting styles and perspectives, would surface the individual modes and their meaning in illuminating ways and perhaps further Heidegger’s call for an investigation into “true thinking.” (Thinking is also a construction.) Indeed, I can imagine a writing that would provoke philosophic insight but keep essentially a fabric of dance—logopoeia—whose appeal would not be to the validity of argument but to the ontological truthfulness of its meanings.
Another alternative type of discursive work is suggested by the later writing of Laura (Riding) Jackson. Riding’s work has consistently investigated the limits of meaning and the limits of our forms of trying to mean. After twenty years of active poetic practice, she renounced poetry in 1938 as “blocking truth’s ultimate verbal harmonies.” Had she been a philosopher she might have made a similar renunciation, as, in a sense, Wittgenstein did toward the kind of discourse he and Russell had done in the early part of the century, or as Heidegger did make in his later writing where he characterized philosophy as at odds with “true thinking.” Riding’s renunciation cuts through distinctions of philosophy and poetry, suggesting that it is the professionalization of—the craft of—each that is the mistake. I’ve suggested here that if philosophy is reduced simply to a mode of employing argument then the attention shifts from what Riding might call “telling the truth of us all” to the technical perfecting of the mode itself, the kind of tinkering with the mechanics of given arguments, refining their formal elegance, that is apparent on any page of Mind. Yet this professionalization, Riding points out, is a danger in poetry itself, as the craft of fine expressiveness she feels necessarily supplants “the telling” that was poetry’s initial motivation for the poet. A view that is useful to consider if overly scriptural in its imagination of what this telling is. Riding’s appeal in The Telling is not to the internal validity of her argument, or to the beauty or virtuosity of her performance or expression, but to the truthfulness of what she is saying in respect to our own, as readers, experiences and memories. We refer back to “ourselves,” in that sense are made aware, conscious, of ourselves as readers; by addressing the reader, this work refuses to let its words disappear.
In his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes: “Aristotle, I have been told, has said that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry in the image of [humanity] and nature.” […]
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:6–16.
KEYWORDS: writing; philosophy; genre; method.
LINKS: Charles Bernstein, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing” (PJ 9); David Bromige, “Alternatives of Exposition” (PJ 5); Bromige, “Philosophy and Poetry: A Note” (PJ 3); Steven Farmer [Roberts], “Reading Eye Lets” (PJ 3); David Lloyd, “Limits of a Language of Desire” (PJ 5); Joseph Simas, “Bernstein’s Content’s Dream” (PJ 7); Michael Amnasan, “The Eclipsing Function of Full Comprehension” (PJ 6); Françoise de Laroque, “What Is the Sex of the Poets?” (PJ 4); Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, “Syn/Opsis/Taxis” (PJ 8); Lyn Hejinian, “An American Opener” (PJ 1); Kofi Natambu, “The Multicultural Aesthetic: Language, ‘Art,’ and Politics in the United States Today” (PJ 9); Ted Pearson, “Things Made Known” (PJ 10); Nick Piombino, “Towards an Experiential Syntax” (PJ 5).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (ed. with Bruce Andrews; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); Content’s Dream: Essays 1975– 1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986); The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (ed.; New York: Roof, 1990); A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Controlling Interests (New York: Roof, 1980); Islets/Irritations (New York: Jordan Davies, 1983); The Sophist (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987); Rough Trades (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991); Dark City (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994); Republics of Reality: Poems, 1975–1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 2000); With Strings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Girly Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); with Bruce Andrews, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman, Legend (New York: Roof, 1980).