Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. The word clinamen comes from Epicurus's disciple, Lucretius, whose Rerum Natura is homage and exposition of the Epicurean philosophy. The Greek word for swerve, parenclisis, doesn't appear in extant Epicurean fragments. I use swerve and clinamen somewhat interchangeably in the essays that follow. [BACK]
2. Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 113. [BACK]
3. The Epicurus Reader, trans. and ed. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), 54–55. [BACK]
4. Ibid., 54. [BACK]
5. Ibid., 32. [BACK]
6. The questions and distinctions Huizinga discusses are invaluable, but his insistence that play is irrational and ruled by narrow game logics that cut it off from "external" realities and ordinary life would deprive it of its primary role in all aspects of the invention of culture. [BACK]
7. Serge Schmemann, "U.S. Walkout: Was It Repudiated or Justified by the Conference's Accord?" New York Times, Sep. 9, 2001, 16. [BACK]
8. Ibid. The last two quotes are from comments by President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. [BACK]
9. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). [BACK]
10. I'm indebted to Leslie Scalapino for the phrase "rim of occurring" in her Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place (New York: Roof, 1994). I discuss this location of meaning in her own poetics in "Essay as Wager." [BACK]
11. That work resulted in three of the essays in this book, as well as the volume MUSICAGE (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). I later learned of two other uses of "poethics": one that I was told had to do with literature but that I've not been able to trace; the other Richard Weisberg's Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Weisberg wants an Aristotelian "poetic ethics" in which truth is recognized as inextricable from beauty of rhetorical style. Although I don't agree with the conflation of beauty and truth or with Weisberg's frank neo-Aristotelianism, his starting point is the important insight that, since law is made out of language, the style (which Aristotle parsed into ethos, logos, pathos) of that language is always significant. [BACK]
12. Nussbaum's sociopolitical ethic is posited on the idea of an essentially rational universal human nature with capabilities that should have the right to develop as fully as possible. The problem with this construction is that it fails to acknowledge the contextual contingency—and alterity—of the aspirations of those who are not part of Western rationalist value systems. For a full critique of Nussbaum's neo-Aristotelian universalism see two excellent essays by Jane Flax, "On Encountering Incommensurability: Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian Practice" and "A Constructionist Despite Herself? On Capacities and Their Discontents." Both are in Controversies in Feminism, ed. James P. Sterba (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 25–57. [BACK]
13. Interestingly, multinational economics has reinvigorated the major cities of the world. In their heterogeneity and power they have much more in common with the historical city-state and with each other's cultures than they do with the small town and rural areas in their own countries. [BACK]
14. "Form of life" is Wittgenstein's phrase for dense cultural practices that can be identified by their "language games"—rule- and use-governed linguistic habits. By foregrounding such practices, one might analyze just how parts of Bourdieu's habitus work. Foucault's analysis of "docile bodies" in Discipline and Punish is another productive model. [BACK]
15. I discuss this question in the last essay in this volume, "UNCAGED WORDS." [BACK]
16. Humorous here, as elsewhere in this book, connotes a connection with its ancient and medieval definition linked to fluids—in this case, fluid conceptual principles that in their propensity for shifts enable invention and change even in the midst of the most difficult and chronic struggles. [BACK]
17. It's become fashionable in sci-math circles to refer to this as complexity theory, but I like the idea of chaos with its history of redefinitions from (in Western terms) at least the first millennium B.C.E. on. [BACK]
19. An observation I owe to Brian Rotman's extraordinary book, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin's, 1987). It is from the starting point of his discussion of the vanishing point that I constructed my idea of the grammatical punctum as vanishing point toward which the syntactical momentum of sentence and paragraph race. See, e.g., "UNCAGED WORDS" in this volume. [BACK]
20. This idea is implicit in many of the essays in this volume; still on the level of an elaborated hunch, I attempt to give examples of how this works in the essay on Gertrude Stein. [BACK]
21. I elaborate on this in the essay "The Poethical Wager." [BACK]
22. "Composition As Explanation," in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla Dydo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 495. [BACK]
23. Throughout this book I use D.W. Winnicott's notion of "in-between zones" as the location of cultural poesis. [BACK]
24. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 53. [BACK]
25. Ibid., 56. [BACK]
26. For an illuminating discussion of some new forms of reading that recent poetries demand see Juliana Spahr's Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001). [BACK]
27. Nietzsche's aphorism #146 lurks here: "He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee" ("Apothegms and Interludes," from Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, trans. Helen Zimmern [New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1954], 466). [BACK]
28. Theodore Roethke. "The Waking," in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 108. [BACK]
THE POETHICAL WAGER
2. See D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock-Methuen, 1984). Of course, it's all "object relations." [BACK]
3. See the essay by that name in this volume for a discussion of these issues in relation to the work of John Cage. [BACK]
4. See more about Gadda in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in this volume. [BACK]
6. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1985–86 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 106. [BACK]
7. Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor (Berkeley: Creative Arts Books, 1982). See "The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein" in this volume. [BACK]
8. Calvino, Six Memos, 107. [BACK]
9. Ibid. [BACK]
10. Ibid., 108. [BACK]
11. Francis Ponge, The Power of Language, trans. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 8. [BACK]
12. See "Cybernetic Explanation," in Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1990), 410. [BACK]
WAGER AS ESSAY
1. In Piet Mondrian, The New Art—The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, ed. and trans. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). [BACK]
2. Tina Darragh, a(gain)2 st the odds (Elmwood, Conn.: Potes & Poets Press, 1989), unpaginated. [BACK]
3. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), 72. [BACK]
4. Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E.L. McAdam Jr. and George Milne (New York: Pantheon, 1964), 167. [BACK]
5. These two quotes are from Frame,Complete Essays, vi. [BACK]
6. Ibid., v. [BACK]
7. A very interesting picture of actively interpretive, intertextual renaissance reading practices is currently being reconstructed from evidence that includes visual representations of scholars at work, library reading tables and stands with multiple books open at once and/or sprouting book marks, and of course the presence of copious marginalia. See, particularly, William H. Sherman's John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). [BACK]
8. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 310. [BACK]
9. In the medieval Catholic Church curiositas was a sin. [BACK]
10. Kierkegaard also saw a form of intellectual play, irony, as a transitional mode between stages of moral development. See particularly his Stages on Life's Way. [BACK]
11. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 100. Winnicott's sense that creativity (the play of the active imagination) is what brings us into meaningful contact with realities beyond subjective space is what John Dewey simply terms experience. For Dewey the function of art is to restore a vivid connectedness to the world that we too often lose in cultures that tend to produce distracted, alienated adults. Winnicott's Playing and Reality and Dewey's Art as Experience can be read as working on the same problem—the life worth living. Interestingly, Dewey was skeptical of the kinds of play theories of art that stressed "make believe" origins of art in dream or fantasy states. He writes, "In art, the playful attitude becomes interest in the transformation of material to serve the purpose of a developing experience. Desire and need can be fulfilled only through objective material …. Art is production and that production occurs only through an objective material that has to be managed and ordered in accord with its own possibilities" John Dewey, Art as Experience [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989], 284–85). [BACK]
12. In Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). [BACK]
13. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 262. [BACK]
14. My critique of Judith Butler's use of "intelligibility" as a final criterion has, in part, to do with this. See ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in this volume. [BACK]
15. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 262. [BACK]
16. Ibid. [BACK]
17. See Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, esp. chap. 3, "Structures, Habitus, Practice," for a useful tool in thinking about habitually reinscribed "climates of thought" whose omnipresence and enormous power anyone interested in innovation and change worries about. [BACK]
18. In this Judith Butler is very close to Adorno. [BACK]
19. Gertrude Stein, "Composition As Explanation," in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 497. The Stein quotes extracted below are also from this essay. [BACK]
20. Perhaps in contrast to Adorno's declassified zone. [BACK]
22. Much of Waldrop's poetry is essayistic in form, as are her novels, insofar as they manifest their own contingency. [BACK]
23. Rosmarie Waldrop, "Alarms and Excursions," in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof, 1990), 45. For many years first-year students at Bard College have been reading this essay with excitement in the Language and Thinking program, entering their own alarms and excursions into conversation with her text and each other. [BACK]
24. Leslie Scalapino, Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place(New York: Roof, 1993), 67. [BACK]
26. Wallace Stevens to Hi Simons, Jan. 9, 1940, in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 349. [BACK]
27. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 9–10. [BACK]
BLUE NOTES ON THE KNOW LEDGE
1. G.E. Moore, "Proof of an External World," in Proceedings of the British Academy, 1939, 294–95. [BACK]
2. Both statements from Moore, "Proof of an External World." [BACK]
POETHICS OF THE IMPROBABLE
1. Rosmarie Waldrop,The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1986), jacket copy. [BACK]
2. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1985), 25. [BACK]
THE EXPERIMENTAL FEMININE
1. For discussion of the relation between invention and tradition in science see the work of Thomas Kuhn, esp. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973) and the title essay in The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). [BACK]
2. Euripides, vol. 3 of The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 645. [BACK]
3. To forget the agonistic, dynamic disequilibria of feminine/masculine that has from the start given the characteristic shape to Western culture can lead to untenable positions of, e.g., phallogocentrism. Freud, in his fascination with Greek mythology, did a very selective reading of it. See my discussion of recent phallogocentrisms among feminist theorists in ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in this volume. [BACK]
5. See, e.g., Rosemarie Waldrop's "The Ground Is the Only Figure, Notebook Spring 1996," in Impercipient Lecture Series 1, no. 3 (April 1997); and Ann Lauterbach's series The Night Sky (I–VII), which appeared in American Poetry Review from 1996 to 1999. [BACK]
6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 89. [BACK]
7. See Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983) for a fascinating discussion of the obsession of the Church fathers with the sin of curiositas (which I, not he, label feminine) and the necessity to justify a methodical curiosity as "preparation for the Enlightenment." [BACK]
8. Ibid., 159. [BACK]
9. Masculine-Feminine—fluid, dialogic, and migratory principles; Determinism-Freedom—most recently construed in terms of cultural construction rather than metaphysics; Order-Disorder—transvalued out of invidious comparison by John Cage's aesthetic (where they become intention and chance) and by Chaos theorists as the interdependent terms of all complex systems. [BACK]
10. In her brilliantly instructive and insightful account of ancient representations of women, Sowing the Body, Page duBois quotes the last lines of the character Clytemnestra in Iphigeneia in Tauris: "How know/That this is not a story merely told/That I may have relief from bitter pain?" Speculating, duBois goes on, "This story may be a lie; the narrative of the tragedy may be a lie; all stories may be lies to stop pain. So Euripides puts his own text into question" (164). [BACK]
11. Gertrude Stein, A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 505–6. [BACK]
12. Anna Kisselgoff, "Inspired by the Traditions of Africa but Ruled by a Contemporary Spirit," New York Times, Oct. 6, 1999, B-5. [BACK]
13. Stein, A Stein Reader, 496. [BACK]
THE SCARLET AITCH
1. This is the grand finale of Hegel's philosophy of history: "Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the Idea mirroring itself in the History of the World … the justification of God in History. Only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the History of the World [which is] essentially His Work" (Hegel, Philosophy of History, 457). For Lacan the symbolic, i.e., all of human culture, is in the name of the father, which is the source of all law. [BACK]
2. Francis Ponge, The Power of Language, trans. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 8. [BACK]
3. The French poet Dominique Fourcade has claimed this. For a discussion see ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:" in this volume. [BACK]
4. See Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Norton, 1988), 4–34. [BACK]
5. Ibid., 23–24. [BACK]
6. "She gained from many people the reverence due to an angel" (ibid., 25). [BACK]
7. This was published on the internet on the Edge Foundation Web site http://www.edge.org/documents, accessed 1999. Rotman's Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin's, 1987) is an extraordinary book on the history of ideas related to zero. [BACK]
8. See James R. Newman, "The Infinite Abelian Group of Angel Flights," in The World of Mathematics, 4 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 1543. [BACK]
9. For an interestingly different way of looking at these matters see Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Although I use very different conceptual coordinates and don't agree with its conclusions, I have found part 1 of this book, "The Semiotic and the Symbolic," very useful for thinking about ways in which modernist poetries had "to disturb the logic that dominated the social order" (83). [BACK]
:RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM:
1. My use of the word feminine reflects the cluster of attributes that have constituted its current cultural construction in the literature. I have no intention of identifying essential characteristics of a feminine nature. If such characteristics exist, I could not distinguish them from what is culturally inscribed. None of this is to imply that there are not temperamental attributes influenced by so-called hard wiring. Whatever these may be, however, they must exist in a range of degrees across genders, reflecting, e.g., the range of hormonal distributions. For my agonistic definition of male/female see "The Scarlet Aitch" in this volume. [BACK]
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). Parts of this essay are in conversation with Gender Trouble, which Butler asserts has been significantly superseded by her subsequent work, e.g., Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), but I've seen no real revision of the particular arguments in Gender Trouble that I'm addressing here. [BACK]
3. Dominique Fourcade has said this at many public occasions and in print. See, e.g., an interview in the literary journal Java, no. 17 (summer/fall 1998): 64–65. [BACK]
4. In Playing and Reality D.W. Winnicott makes this important distinction between imagination as playful "work," i.e., negotiating a reality principle, and fantasy, i.e., daydreaming without consequences. [BACK]
5. This movement from a picture theory of language to a use theory draws on and parallels Wittgenstein's move from the Positivist ambitions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations' use theory, where language is seen as an activity inextricably intertwined with forms of life. [BACK]
6. See Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 42–49, for an interesting discussion of the "deep realist bias of Anglo-American feminist criticism. An insistence on authenticity and truthful reproduction of the ‘real world’ as the highest literary values." [BACK]
7. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), for a wide-ranging analysis and critique of philosophical consequences of "mirror" theories of knowledge. [BACK]
8. For an important discussion of the way in which the feminist desire for epistemological grounding leads to the rejection of postmodern theory see Jane Flax, "The End of Innocence," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 445–63. [BACK]
9. See Foucault's discussion in Discipline and Punish (135–69) of the preoccupation with "details" and "little things" that is part of the discipline of "docile bodies." [BACK]
10. I wholly agree with Judith Butler's emphasis on the performative as enactment rather than expression but not its slide into performance—which is, I think, a back slide into an old female trap. [BACK]
11. I owe this idea to Jerome McGann, who, in correspondence, wrote of truth as "troth." [BACK]
12. In fact I want to argue that the most original and vital writing being done by women in this country today has come from a very different sort of literary tradition, one that has to do not with mirroring but with inventive poethical enactments. By the term poethics I refer to a practice of theory and literature that, following Wittgenstein, takes the primary force of language to be the way in which its uses are enactments, rather than portrayals, of forms of life. For discussions of this kind of poetic tradition see, e.g., Marjorie Perloff's Poetics of Indeterminacy, Poetic License, and Radical Artifice; Linda Reinfeld's Language Poetry; Charles Bernstein's Content's Dream and A Poetics; and Peter Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics. [BACK]
13. All of the leading lights in the received feminist canon have received prizes, awards, tenured professorships, endowed chairs from the literary and academic establishments. They are clearly not seen as fundamentally threatening to business as usual in the masculinized academy. [BACK]
14. I want to distinguish between "patriarchal"—which denotes masculinist authority in the hands of male persons, and which I take to be the closest male equivalent to "feminist"—and "masculine," which denotes traits found in women as well as men. [BACK]
15. See Freud's 1909 paper "Family Romances," which, although one of his briefest essays, securely seals the fate of his progeny to reenact their thralldom to his authority. My reason for conflating Freud and Lacan in a perplexity for women is that the authority of the "law of the father" is already fully established by Freud; Lacan has merely to append the phallic-symbolic with its linguistic permutations. [BACK]
16. This has been noticed as the only space left, in Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, for a feminine not yet under the law of the father to exist. Hence the premie nature of those modes generically identified with the feminine by the psychoanalytic French feminists—pre-Oedipal, precultural, prelinguistic, presymbolic, i.e., generally pre(mature?)—in the semiotic of "jouissance," unable to intermingle with cultural logics or to articulate itself linguistically. It is at this point that one must question the whole psychoanalytic structure, i.e., look outside it, no? Perhaps we must move forward into the "unintelligible" that is pushing at the developmental edge of what can be articulated rather than moving regressively into the prelinguistic, which can—by definition—never be articulated. [BACK]
17. See Peter Gay's revealing discussion of Freud's literary ambitions—with respect to Goethe and Schnitzler—in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. 51–55. [BACK]
18. That Freud was indeed both intellectually and morally courageous, as well as aesthetically and intellectually vital and brilliant, is reason for admiration but not necessarily persuasion. [BACK]
19. The multiple field of psychoanalysis has yielded other models that are enormously useful. D.W. Winnicott's is only one example. But mainstream feminism depends heavily on generic versions of Freudian-Lacanian theory. [BACK]
20. Kierkegaard, iconic ironist himself, (ironically?) makes the point that irony is necessary to productive critique but is not itself a move to a new form or stage of development. [BACK]
21. For an analysis of ancient Greek constructions of the feminine, and their movement from metaphor to metonymy, see Page duBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Janet Wolff writes interestingly of modernist and postmodernist constructions of the feminine in her Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). [BACK]
22. Italics here and in the two subsequent quotations are mine. [BACK]
23. My guess is that there were many women who ventured to write in experimentally creative feminine forms but that they were quickly silenced by the authoritative voices (parents, teachers, husbands …) around them: "This is incoherent and confused!" It certainly still happens today. [BACK]
24. This is a radical shift in the gendered demographics of experimental poetry that directly reflects societywide shifts in gendered demographics following WW II—medical and civil rights developments that made it possible for women to take control of their reproductive processes. [BACK]
25. In a more recent anthology of experimental poetry, Dennis Barone and Peter Ganick's The Art of Practice, twenty-three of the forty-five poets included
26. In post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory jouissance is the literal "je ne sais quois" experience of pre-Oedipal sensual pleasures. It is thought to be lost to direct articulation since its source is presymbolic and prelinguistic. It is also widely identified with the feminine, although Kristeva stresses that it has been experienced by, and is therefore available to, both men and women. [BACK]
27. This fact is lost to most linguistic scientists, which may be the reason why French psychoanalytic theories of language, with their reliance on Saussure, consign language to a rationalist symbolic realm. [BACK]
28. Tardos's text engages with a representative four (English, French, German, Hungarian) of the multiplicity of languages that articulate our globe, creating a web structure of cross-linguistic, intercultural "unintelligibility" that acts as a field of generous and suggestive semantic play. [BACK]
THE DIFFICULTIES OF GERTRUDE STEIN, I & II
1. Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining Room Floor (Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Books, 1982), 42. [BACK]
2. Gertrude Stein, How Writing Is Written, ed. Robert Bartlett Haas (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974), 24. [BACK]
3. Woolf, The Waves, 132. [BACK]
4. Ibid., 238–39. This is not the first time in The Waves that Bernard longs for a language that could be a description of Samuel Beckett's. [BACK]
5. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 523. [BACK]
6. John Upham's quote ends an article in the New York Times on the murder of two Dartmouth professors by two teenage boys from this small Vermont town. See New York Times, Feb. 20, 2001, A12. [BACK]
7. I owe an enormous debt to Ulla Dydo for this and other information surrounding the events of the summer of 1933 on which Blood is based, as well as for crucial help in constructing a sense of the literary context of the book. We had many conversations about this piece over a number of years. Dydo's skepticism about its value (based in part on Stein's own disavowal of it) led me to think through my strong attraction to it in much more detail than I might have otherwise. [BACK]
8. Ulla Dydo, manuscript of The Language That Rises: The Voice of Gertrude Stein 1923–34 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, forthcoming 2003). [BACK]
9. They are "The Horticulturists," "A Water-fall And A Piano," and "Is Dead." The first is unpublished; the others appear in How Writing Is Written. I take, from Ulla Dydo, the correct dates of the actual writing of these pieces to be 1933. (Haas gives the original publication date as 1936.) For more on the context of all four pieces see Dydo's The Language That Rises. [BACK]
10. This in instructive contrast to the sunny Our Town of Thornton Wilder, with whom she would become friends in the following year. Wilder acknowledged being influenced by Stein's The Making of Americans, to the point of saying his play was based on her work. Their interesting friendship is documented in Edward M. Burns and Ulla E. Dydo, eds.,The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996). [BACK]
11. Winnicott locates all creative cultural development in such "intermediate" zones, where precarious acts of play test definitions of reality. See esp. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Tavistock-Methuen, 1984). [BACK]
12. In contrast to those novels that are called experimental because of their psychological or psychosocial content. [BACK]
13. In this essay I am beginning to apply a conjecture about the fractal nature of Stein's compositions with words. This is a thought experiment that is a work in progress for me. I will be examining fractals and the self-similar patterns of Stein's writing in greater detail—in relation to information theory and ideas of autopoiesis—in a volume on Stein to be published by the University of California Press. That book will include selections of Stein's work that are particularly relevant to this kind of reading. [BACK]
14. See, e.g., "Why I Like Detective Stories" (which I discuss below) in How Writing Is Written. [BACK]
15. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), ix (italics mine). [BACK]
16. Stein, How Writing Is Written, 28–29. [BACK]
17. Ibid., 151. This is so close in spirit and language to John Cage's thought on the position of the contemporary artist (see esp. Cage's "Lecture on Nothing," in Silence [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961]) that I think it beautifully demonstrates Stein's influence—acknowledged by Cage—on his poetics. [BACK]
18. Tallique's debt to D.W. Winnicott and Michel Foucault is clear in this passage. [BACK]
19. The New York City Opera's year 2000 production of The Mother of Us All was a great triumph, praised by critics, playing to full houses in Lincoln Center. [BACK]
20. See Stanley Cavell, "The Fact of Television," in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John Hanhardt(Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1990). [BACK]
21. See the interesting essay "Gertrude Stein on the Beach," in Gerald Weissmann, The Doctor with Two Heads and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). [BACK]
22. All of Wallace's books are currently out of print. Terrible People was available only in a large-print edition (Leicester: Ulverscroft Press, 1967) in the Washington, D.C., area public library system. [BACK]
23. "Sentences," in How To Write (Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun and Moon, 1995). [BACK]
24. "Finally George A Vocabulary Of Thinking," in How To Write, 293. [BACK]
26. Gertrude Stein, Last Operas And Plays, ed. Carl Van Vechten (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 74–75. [BACK]
27. Ibid., 55. [BACK]
28. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein: Writings, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman, vol. 2, 1932–1946 (New York: Library of America, 1998), 127. [BACK]
GEOMETRIES OF ATTENTION
1. This textual score is in Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 109–10. Cage first performed it at the Artist's Club, New York City (according to his head note), in 1949 or 1950. [BACK]
2. Ibid., 109. [BACK]
3. Ibid., 109–12 (excerpted selections). [BACK]
4. Ibid., 113. [BACK]
FIG. 1, GROUND ZERO, FIG. 2
1. This essay is a revised version of one I wrote for presentation at the 1989 CageFest at Strathmore Hall in Rockville, Maryland. [BACK]
2. See, e.g., "The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein" in this volume. [BACK]
3. Cage was delivering his Norton Lectures (I-VI) at Harvard during the 1988–89 academic year. Audiences had difficulty with the sustained meditative, contemplative attention these performances invite. [BACK]
4. James Gleick discusses this in his book Chaos: Making a New Science(New York: Viking, 1987). Although the book was written for a lay audience, every scientist I know who's read it admires it greatly. [BACK]
5. Quoted in Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 115. [BACK]
6. John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 31. [BACK]
7. See Cage's discussion of why he dropped "form" as one of his compositional elements in John Cage and Joan Retallack, MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). [BACK]
8. See ibid. for a detailed discussion. [BACK]
9. Huang Po, "The Zen Teaching of Huang Po on the Transmission of Mind," in The World of Zen: An East-West Anthology, ed. Nancy Wilson Ross (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 72–73. [BACK]
10. In instructive agon with the Hegelianism he wanted to leave behind. Dewey spent most of his life as a philosopher advocating an "experimental attitude" in aesthetics, moral thought, and educational ideas. John Dewey was never entirely able to replace his early Hegelian roots with the almost Buddhist spiritual pragmatism he preferred in his later life. [BACK]
11. John Dewey, Art as Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 25. [BACK]
POETHICS OF A COMPLEX REALISM
1. John Cage, conversation with author, July 1992. [BACK]
2. See Martin Duberman, Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 102. [BACK]
3. Cage, conversation with author, July 1992. [BACK]
4. Descriptions from the MOMA "Summergarden 1992" program. In conversation the day before this performance, John Cage remarked that he had thought of "ASLSP" because of the passage toward the end of Finnegans Wake that begins, "Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing" (619ff.). A pianist preparing to play ASLSP might profit from this passage. One finds, "I'll wait. And I'll wait. And then if all goes. What will be is. Is is. But let them" (620); "Sft! It is the softest morning that ever I can ever remember me. But she won't rain showerly, our Ilma. Yet. Until it's the time" (621); "A gentle motion all around. As leisure paces" (622); "Softly so" (624); "So soft this morning, ours" (628). [BACK]
5. Mineko Grimmer's sculpture, created for violin performance of One6, consists of an inverted pyramid of ice encrusted with pebbles hung over a single piano wire stretched across a tank of water. As the ice melts, the pebbles fall into the water and, now and then, by chance, hit the piano wire. This has the remarkable effect of making the chance operations that produce the sounds visible. [BACK]
6. Michael Bach developed a new kind of curved bow for the playing of Cage's music, with a mechanism that allows the cellist to vary the tension on the hairs while playing. As has always been the case in the history of music, the dialogue between composer and performer, music and technology, continually opens up new possibilities. John Cage, shortly before his death, was composing a piece for Michael Bach, exploring new microtonal and other musical possibilities linked to bowing technique. He began composing while I was taping for MUSICAGE. His remarks on what he was doing are included in the conversations on music in that text. See John Cage and Joan Retallack, MUSICAGE: John Cage in Conversation with Joan Retallack, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 285–90. [BACK]
7. From Adorno's "Lyric Poetry and Society," quoted in Martin Jay, Adorno(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 155. [BACK]
8. Marjorie Perloff also points this out in a discussion of Lecture on the Weather in her book Radical Artifice (21–28). [BACK]
9. This is, notably, the metaphysical "traffic" of Epicurus's vision of the interplay of chance and determinism in the makeup of the universe. See my "High Adventures of Indeterminacy," in "Parnassus": Twenty Years of "Poetry in Review" (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1994). In his later years John Cage spoke often of "traffic" as the characteristic sound structure of contemporary life and therefore of his desire to incorporate it into the forms of his music. This was another part of his poethical imperative: to "make a piece of music in which we would be willing to live … a representation of a society in which you would be willing to live" (Cage, I–VI, 178). This meant working
10. In 1963 Lorenz published the groundbreaking paper "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow," Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences 20, no. 2 (March): 130–41. [BACK]
11. Gleick, Chaos, 198. See also David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. chaps. 10 and 11, "Turbulence: Strange Attractors" and "Chaos: A New Paradigm," 57–72. [BACK]
12. Both programs are in the C language and were developed by Andrew Culver. [BACK]
13. This difference will not be as great in a Cage performance, however, as in the mathematical model of a weather system, and it will not necessarily undergo a progressive magnification. See note 14. [BACK]
14. After a December 1992 conversation with James A. Yorke, director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the mathematician who coined the phrase chaos theory, I thought it seemed more accurate (within the language game of the current complex sciences) to describe the scores Cage submitted to chance operations as characterized by "deterministic randomness" (where randomness is the scientific term for the more colloquial chance) than "deterministic chaos." The critical difference between the mathematical behavior of what are currently called chaotic systems and the notation sound elements in a Cage score has to do with the degree and nature of predictability. In models of deterministic chaos there is a high degree of short-run predictability that degenerates (very quickly) into randomness, or increasingly amplified unpredictability, over time. In Cage's scores the degree of unpredictability remains constant. There is a built-in (to the ic and tic computer programs) equal distribution of randomness. The indeterminacy included in the notation and the permeability of performances to ambient sound and individual interpretations mean, however, that butterflies are continually flying into and transforming the atmosphere of Cage's compositions when they are realized in concert. (And in some cases there may be amplification of unpredictability in performance. See part V of my text.) This in turn means that Cage's music, as an aesthetic of weather, is closer in its structure to our everyday experience of weather than to the computer models in the complex sciences, which start with fewer variables and yield more discernible patterns. As James Yorke has said, "Weather is wilder than ‘chaos.’" Why connect Cage's aesthetic paradigm with chaos theory then? Because in all other respects, except that which makes the difference between a complex realist aesthetics and a mathematical model of complexity, it resembles this new scientific paradigm. [BACK]
15. I first came across this Smithson idea of "ruins in reverse" in Marjorie Perloff's The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 199. It is from Smithson's essay "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt New York: New York University Press, 1979). [BACK]
16. Cage published "Macrobiotic Cooking"—remarks and recipes—in Rod Smith, ed., Aerial 6/7 (Washington, D.C.: Edge Books, 1991). [BACK]
17. From "Autobiographical Statement," read at CageFest, Strathmore Hall, 1989. Published in John Cage, John Cage: Writer, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1993), 238. [BACK]
18. Cage and Retallack, MUSICAGE, 61. [BACK]
19. From remarks at CageFest, Strathmore Hall, Rockville, Maryland, 1989. [BACK]
20. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 163. [BACK]
21. David Ruelle and Floris Takens, "On the Nature of Turbulence," Communications in Mathematical Physics 20 (1971): 167–192; 23 (1971): 343–44. [BACK]
22. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). See her "Introduction: The Evolution of Chaos," 1–28. What Hayles is discussing in this book are structural, working definitions of chaos (i.e., methodological programs and their paradigms) in the sciences and images of chaos in contemporary literature (i.e., literature envisioning and referring to elements of chaos rather than formally exhibiting principles of its dynamics). I've been most interested in discussing this latter—formal experiments embodying and enacting some of the interesting characteristics of chaos and other complex dynamics in the contemporary avant-garde, e.g., Language poetry and, of course, the compositions of John Cage. [BACK]
23. It is interesting that Cage's nonperiodic music has also been seen as a failure of the experiment. [BACK]
24. What is perhaps most interesting in this is that Ruelle tells the story of Professor Chance in passing, without any of the rhetorical machinations—of, e.g., irony or allegory—one has come to expect when a stock narrative form confronts something stranger than its fictions. Either of these literary modes— irony, allegory—would empty this encounter with Professor Chance of its peculiar and complex contingency, even as it filled it with overdetermined, portentously simplifying meaning. "Professor Chance" as character in any kind of narrative fiction—and all narratives are fictions on one level or another—would be rendered memento mori to his own lost vitality as an unremarkable oddment of ordinary life. [BACK]
25. Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, 67. [BACK]
26. For example, in "Comment on the Relations of Science and Art"—a paper that begins, "For reasons which will appear, the problem of the avantgarde … has caught my interest in unexpected and, I hope, fruitful ways"— Thomas Kuhn writes: [BACK]
26. People like [E.M.] Hafner and me, to whom the similarities of science and art came as a revelation, have been concerned to stress that the artist, too, like the scientist, faces persistent technical problems which must be resolved in the pursuit of his [sic] craft. Even more we emphasize that the scientist, like the artist, is guided by aesthetic considerations and governed by established modes of perception. Those parallels still need to be both underlined and developed. We have only begun to discover the benefits of seeing science and art as one. (Essential Tension, 343)
28. See the discussion of this method of composing by means of the practical implications of the idea of time in Cage and Retallack, MUSICAGE. [BACK]
29. "Autobiographical Statement," CageFest, Strathmore Hall, 1989. [BACK]
30. Cage, conversation with the author, April 1992. [BACK]
31. Ibid. [BACK]
UNCAGED WORDS
1. For the Birds. These words may not be precisely John Cage's at all. They are taken from his conversations with Daniel Charles, which have, as text, an odd history. For the Birds is an English translation of a French transcription of interviews taped in English. The tapes were lost before they could be transcribed directly into English, and Cage himself said he didn't recognize much of the voice labeled "J.C." at the end of all that. So the puzzling over these words is not so much trying to get at what was originally said, which is clearly irrecoverable, as trying to make useful meaning of words that have the attraction of initiating a process of active "not-knowing," opening an edge in the mind, beyond which lie things not thought of before. This is an exhilarating notion, even if self-delusory. It has to do with the structure of the reading experience, the structure of language itself. [BACK]
2. Tosu is quoted in Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 37. John Cage, Empty Words: Writings'73–'78 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), 11. [BACK]
3. From manuscripts for "Mushrooms et Variationes," NYC–Tulsa, Okla.–Mountain Lake, Va., September–October 1983. [BACK]
4. John Cage, Art Is Either a Complaint or Do Something Else, in MUSICAGE: Cage Muses on Words, Art, and Music, ed. Joan Retallack (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), from part 2. [BACK]
5. Quoted in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 523. [BACK]
6. CageFest, Strathmore, Rockville, Maryland, 1989. [BACK]
7. Jasper Johns quoted in Cage and Retallack, MUSICAGE, 4. [BACK]
8. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 44–45. [BACK]
9. See "The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I & II" in this volume for a more detailed treatment of this work. [BACK]
10. C.S. Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 107. [BACK]
11. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 92–93. [BACK]
12. Quoted in Cage, Art Is Either, 4. [BACK]