Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3

In his first formulation of this "new depthlessness" or "waning of affect" (1984),11 Jameson voiced some regret over the passing of modernism. But by 1990 (the date of "Conclusion: Secondary Elaborations" to Postmodernism), he seems to find the passing of the modernist giants--Picasso, Kafka, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wright--the occasion of at least some satisfaction:

If the poststructuralist motif of the "death of the subject" means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism, with its "charisma" and its accompanying categorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the "genius" in the first place. Seen thus, the extinction of the "great moderns" is not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in information and more literate, and socially, at least, more "democratic" in the sense of the universalization of wage labor . . . This new order no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type . . . Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, postindividualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regrets, as Brecht might have put it: "woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges."--[P, p. 306]

At the same time, now that the exploratory poetries associated with the Language movement are more than twenty years old, Jameson's formulations (and related theories of the postmodern) have lost much of their edge. For, even if we set aside the work of mainstream poets like the American laureates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, Mark Strand and Rita Dove, even if we restrict ourselves to the poets of the counterculture represented in, say, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris's new Poems for the Millennium,13 differences among the various poets now strike us as more significant than similarities or group labels. Such counters as asyntacticality or the disappearance of the referent, or even the materiality of the sign cannot alter the simple fact that we can easily tell a Charles Bernstein poem from one by Steve McCaffery, a Tom Raworth sequence from one by Allen Fisher, a Maggie O'Sullivan "verbovisivocal" text from one by Susan Howe. More important: the breakdown of the high/low distinction, accepted as a cornerstone of postmodernism by the theorists of the seventies and eighties, is coming under increasing suspicion as common sense tells us that all artworks are not, after all, equally valuable (whatever valuable means), and that when, for example, Frank Sinatra is called, as he has been in the wake of his recent death, one of the great artists of the century, this statement is not really equivalent to the proposition that John Cage is one of the great artists of the century. For one thing, the two assertions call for different speakers. For another, they posit different contexts. The word great in any case, means something different in the two cases, as does the word artist. Even "one of" is unstable: Sinatra fans were comparing their idol not only to other "great" singers and movie stars but to tycoons of the American record industry, those savvy entrepreneurs who know how to market a given label. In the case of Cage, on the other hand, "one of" would refer to the international avant-garde market--the Hörspiele heard on German radio as well as the Zen art of Japan.

Then, too, contemporary poetics has not satisfactorily resolved the relation of what Jameson calls the "new depthlessness" to the "genius" position now occupied by those evidently deep (read complex, difficult) theorists, whose word is all but law. Indeed, even as Jameson rejects the image of the "great demiurges and prophets" like "Proust in his cork-lined room" or the "'tragic,' uniquely doomed Kafka" (P, p. 305), he cites, on page after page, names like Adorno and Althusser, Freud and Lacan, Hegel and Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard and Ernesto Laclau, not to mention the book's presiding deity who is, of course, Karl Marx. If genius theory is passé, if there is no such thing as unique style or authorial presence, why are these names so sacred? If Foucault has pronounced so definitively on the death of the author, why are we always invoking the name of the author Foucault? Again, if in the current climate we dare not claim canonical status for Beckett or Brecht, why does Walter Benjamin enjoy that status so readily?

In a recent essay for Bernstein's collection Close Listening (1998), Silliman speculates on this phenomenon. Silliman begins by restating his opposition to "the poem as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presentation of sincerity and authenticity that for several decades has been a staple of most of the creative writing programs in the United States."14 But, in reevaluating what he calls Barthes's "ritual slaying of the author" ("WS," p. 364), Silliman wonders whether Barthes's theory of text construction hasn't gone too far. The insistence, in "The Death of the Author," that ''the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted,'" is finally unsatisfactory: "The idealized, absent author of the New Critical canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that remains are the reports of other readers--call them critics--whose texts endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the self-knowledge of their texts as infinitely deferred, deferring, acts" ("WS," p. 365).

And where do these acts take place? Where else but in the university? As Silliman speculates:

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that while postmodernism in the arts has been conducted largely, although not exclusively, outside of the academy, the postmodern debate has been largely conducted between different schools of professors who agree only that they too dislike it. Thus the characteristic strategy of the ambitious critic and anxious graduate student alike is not the opening of the canons, but rather the demonstration of a critical move upon some text(s) within the already established ensemble of official canons . . . Once incorporated into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ventriloquist's dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend.
["WS," pp. 365, 368]

What matter who's speaking? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of the subject in lyric poetry. "The relation between agency and identity," writes Silliman, "must be understood as interactive, fluid, negotiable" ("WS," p. 371). It is a "relation between the poet, a real person with 'history, biography, psychology,' and the reader, no less real, no less encumbered by all this baggage. In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and reader that is triggered by what [Roman] Jakobson called contact, the power of presence" ("WS," p. 373).

11. See Jameson, "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review, no. 146 (JulyÐAug. 1984): 53Ð92.

12. Silliman, et al., "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto," Social Text, nos. 19Ð20 (Fall 1988): 264.

13. See Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1995, 1998).

14. Silliman, "Who Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading," in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Bernstein (New York, 1998), p. 362; hereafter abbreviated "WS."

Marjorie Perloff's most recent books are Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1992), Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996, 1999), and Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (1998). She is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.