Hejinian's "Deen":
Multiauthors and the Listserv
Read at Rust Books, Buffalo
29 August 2003
The
following is excerpted from the final section of “The Secret History of the
Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Between Discourse and Text” (chapter 2 of The
Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics). In the
chapter, I read a number of works of the Language School to show how the
movement from text to community takes place through the use of strategies of
“multiple authorship,” in which the work is positioned between two or more
authors, toward a horizon of collective practice or politics. Examples of
avant-garde multiauthorship in the Language School include: the collective
authorship of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other literary journals; Legend,
a multiauthored experimental poem by five authors; two poems written under the
title “Non-Events” by Steve Benson and myself; and Carla Harryman and Lyn
Hejinian’s collaborative novel The Wide Road. Michel Foucault’s
concept of discursive formation and Julia Kristeva’s dialectic of symbolic and
semiotic provided critical terms for the relation of text and community enacted
in works of the avant-garde. The avant-garde’s cultural politics, as
articulated in new genres of poetry and poetics, continue in the contemporary
form of the Poetics Listserv, which I discuss in terms of a representative month
of debate, seen as a form of multiauthorship.
Textual forms of multi-authorship such as Legend and The Wide Road predict a more recent form of avant-garde multiauthorship, the Poetics Listserv. I am referring specifically to the Poetics Listserv at the Electronic Poetry Center, SUNY Buffalo, available at http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc, even as this discussion may be extended toward a more general notion of the Listserv as a multiauthored form of textual practice in electronic media—a postmodern counter to the Great Conversation. While there are many listservs functioning on any number of topics in university settings—my university, for instance, publicly archives dozens of listservs—the importance of the Poetics Listserv is that it is a site where the radical strategies of the avant-garde have continued in a form of intersubjective dialogue. As a historical development of the Language School and more specifically of its forms of multiauthorship—and a site for a dialogue between many of its early members and a larger community—the Poetics Listserv continues the Language School’s radical questioning of authorship, genre, and community. Just as Russian Formalism and surrealism historically developed into specific forms of mass cultural or psychoanalytic theory, rather than ending in any “theory death,” the Language School continues in the Listserv as a form of intersubjective discourse based on its notions of radical textuality.
To begin to discuss the poetics of the Poetics Listserv, one should first note the heterogeneity of its forms of communication. If Roman Jakobson famously defined the poetic function of language as “the message for its own sake,” most of the messages on the Listserv discuss practical matters—advertising for poetry readings and publications, requests for contact information, notice of the availability of lofts and summer sublets, links to outside sites, and so on. Participants do not simply read avant-garde poetry and theorize about it. The poetics of the Listserv emerges, however, in the self-focusing of its messages around certain themes: the interpretation of avant-garde poetry; the nature of authorship and authority; the possibilities and limits of communities and institutions; and finally the political horizons of the poetics community. Often, the discussion focuses these questions around the definition of groups, particularly language-centered writing in its relation to other genres of poetry and to the nature of authorship. In order to explore the dynamics of the Listserv’s conversation around its self-focusing questions, I selected the month of April 1999 from its archive, which comprises 461 posts from 167 authors on 330 topics (there is a high degree of individuation on the Listserv, suggesting a paratactic social formation influenced by the Language School’s literary use of parataxis).
The month begins auspiciously enough, with a post titled “April is the cruelest month for poetry” by list owner Charles Bernstein, who calls for activities “against national poetry month as such” (post 1), leading to a number of absurdist proposals for noncelebrations of poetry throughout the rest of the month. A major topic of discussion for the month, however, appears a bit later in a post titled “class is” from Robin Tremblay-McGaw (post 6), which proposes a consideration of class in relation to the experience of shame. “Class” and its various subtopics will generate the most number of posts in the month (about 75); Kathy Lou Schultz continues the debate in post 13, seeing class as “one of the unspeakable, unnameable issues in American culture.” Other topics introduced or continued early on in the month include: Wendy Kramer on a mail art tribute to Ray Johnson (post 4); Maria Damon on the relation of poetry to cultural studies (post 8); an announcement for a new issue of the online journal Lagniappe (post 11); a report on San Francisco art activities by Taylor Brady (post 13); a request for contact information for Lyn Hejinian (post 14); notice of the publication of Pamela Lu’s Pamela: A Novel by Atelos Press, edited by Hejinian and Travis Ortiz (who posts the note, and then goes on to announce a publication party for the book and a reading by M. Mara-Ann and Jill Stengel; post 16); notice of a new e-journal from Canada, Para>poetics (Derek Beaulieu; post 19); and discussion of the Sackner collection of artists’ books (Brian Kim Stefans; post 20). This sampling of the first twenty posts gives an idea of the range and literariness of the discussion; deeper questions, such as the nature of class, occur in the context of a barrage of information, publicity, and small talk: the everyday life of poetics.
What Bernstein calls “a swirl of concerns” in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is evident here: a centrifugal/centripetal dynamic of information spinning away from a common thread but finally returning to define it. In April 1999, the common thread that seemed most central to the on-going group discussion was the nature of class, which immediately turned into questions of the nature of authorship (What class is Lyn Hejinian? [post 23]; what class am I? [post 125]) and of literary value (as Karen McKevitt puts it, “What are we really worth? What is my work worth? My time?”; post 33). Class leads to questions of interpretation: “Can one tell from Van Gogh’s sunflowers anything about the class of the artist?” (Charles Alexander, post 37), and of ideology: “Class after all is a heinous fiction that they/we maintain” (Linda Russo, post 57). Class intersects with a second important theme, Who owns the Listserv? (in a dialogue between Charles Alexander and Kent Johnson over the politics of exclusion [posts 41 and 52 et seq.]); it is also a point of contact with information about the US/NATO bombing of Kosovo, then in progress, which was vividly brought to the Listserv in a post by Serbian poet Dubravka Djuric on the closing of radio station B92 in Belgrade (posts 40, 50 et seq.). The thread of class, then, appears within the overall form of the discussion seen as the sum total of all its messages, from the most self-obsessed and literary to the most self-conscious and political. The level of seriousness of the discussion ranges from the absurdist proposal by Bernstein to resist National Poetry Month, and many procedurally generated works by Alan Sondheim (such as “Confessive-Repulsive Disorder,” which introduces language such as “I will push my dirty panties up into my hole” into the group’s psychodynamics; post 22), to the urgency of messages concerning the nature of class and the bombing of Kosovo.
I want to pursue a minor thread, but one of crucial importance for a self-focusing poetics, which emerged late in the month, after the discussions of class, Listserv politics, and Kosovo had peaked and begun to generate hybrids of various sorts. Class and literary politics fuse, in this sense, in Camille Roy’s assertion that “the langpo [Language poetry] equals theory equals white assumption which tends to dominate seems to me to rely on smoothed experience” (post 154). Jeffrey Jullich continues this line of thinking in relating class to the poetics of the material text (post 204); while Joe Amato links class and other forms of social grouping: “Of course, ‘class’ is about groups” (post 211); and Grant Jenkins links class to authorship: “Class is in some sense BEYOND the intention and control of the subject” (post 219). In an interesting digression, Michael McColl relates Raymond Williams’s notion of “structures of feeling” to forms of literary ambition (post 231). Groupings are also considered from the outside in Dubravka Djuric’s forward of a parodic list of reasons one might see oneself as a Serb, Croat, Kosovan, Yugoslavian, and so on, in which the nature of national identity is portrayed as absurdist or reactionary. The next post, by Bernstein, follows this thread with a notice of an international anthology (99 Poets/1999) that combines the grouping of an anthology with the rejection or suspension of national identity under the common banner of experiment. Tony Green links status and the writing of experimental poetry (post 261), while Maria Damon claims, “the freshest poetry comes from the lower margins” (post 275); and Michael McColl echoes this sentiment: “Marginalized groups tend to have riskier aesthetic positions” (post 307). Post 285, however, presents a new theme: Linda Russo’s substantial report of the April 1999 Barnard conference on women experimental writers, where the relation of lyric tradition to language-centered writing was much debated. One writer whose work received significant attention at the conference was Lyn Hejinian, and it is this context of the politics of recognition and the relation of authorship to group identity, that gave rise, through processes of condensation and displacement, to the poetic subtheme of interest here.
The subtheme, “Hejinian’s ‘deen,’” begins with a technical question by Jeffrey Jullich about the appearance of a “nonce” word in her Writing Is An Aid to Memory:
One thread that particularly fascinates me are her "half-words," so to speak. That is, she punctuates the book with truncated words, or fragments, such as "ness," "scription," "porated," "brating," etc. The "rule" is that it is always the first syllable that is deleted. It's as though the fragment were the left-hand-justified tail-end of a word hyphenated at the other side of the page (obviously).
Here's the problem. There's one—and only one—such "nonce" word that for the life of me, I can't figure it. It is "deen," in section 36:
an ordinary person depending deen
I wracked my mind and finally gave up. I could not think of any word, as for "mena" or "nishment" or "sume," that would complete "deen." In a final gasp, I checked my rhyming dictionary, which lists words backwards from last letter to first. And there is, in fact, a single word which it gives that ends in "deen": "dudeen." A dudeen is a short tobacco pipe made out of clay.
The thing is, I feel that "dudeen" is out of character with the timbre of vocabulary Hejinian uses throughout. True, there is "cladding," and a few other rare words but, for some reason, I don't feel satisfied that "dudeen" is the answer that completes "deen." (Post 302, “Hejinian: ‘deen’?”)
This radical self-focusing on the indeterminacy of a word in a particular work is out of character with much of the preceding discussion, but it stems directly from associations with it. Hejinian’s name had occurred several times earlier in the month; once with a request for contact information, indicating that she was not a participant in the list and not readily available to it (post 14); and once in post by Juliana Spahr that discusses her class background in relation to experimental poetry: “Her father was an academic administrator (a decent but not the best paying job), her mother a housewife. The New College, where she worked until recently, is known for its substandard salaries. She doesn't have an advanced degree. What is making her the symbol for middle (?) classness to these students? Is it because she doesn't in My Life put her self forward as a marginalized subject?” (post 23). The context of the Barnard event, coming after the lengthy debates on class, authorship, and community, set the stage for the micropolitics of Jullich’s question, which is immediately taken up as a locus of fascination in approximately a dozen posts.
There are really two questions being debated here: What is the meaning of “deen,” and what is the relation of that meaning to authorial intention, insofar as that may be determined through group consensus (the “we” of liberal polity and interpretive communities after Stanley Fish). The indeterminacy of “deen” thus becomes a moment of group definition, an empty center around which its swirl of concerns is articulated. Some of this discussion occurs through back channels, which are summarized by Jullich, who says he has been struck sleepless by the question and frustrated because he cannot locate Hejinian, through a name search, in order to ask her directly (post 319). In post 324, Tom Beckett wonders whether “deen” should really be “deem” (it appears as “deen” in both editions of the text), but concludes that “the undecideability of it is a pleasure too since so much of the book seems to be ‘about’ the sound and texture of language as felt experience.” Chris Piuma suggests “Aberdeen” (post 326); Gwyn McVay proposes, “it’s also Scots for something like trashed, used up,” as in the reel “The Muckin’ o’ Geordie’s Byre”: “The graip was tint, the besom was deen” (post 406); and Clai Rice locates an “interesting idiom recorded with the spelling ‘deen’ is ‘be deen with it’ meaning ‘be dying’” (post 450). But in general, higher order decisions are called on to make sense of “deen.” For Sherry Brennan (post 331), “deen” is a device that points to the possibility that many words in English may be truncated or incomplete, as “we make new words primarily by suffixes.” “The particular ways the poem cuts words and lines makes you . . . question whether any of the words are ‘whole.’ . . . The more you look at it that way, the fewer whole words there seem to be.” Grant Jenkins picks up this argument, suggesting that “there is no single, logical explanation”; “these words ARE whole and cannot be . . . either enciphered or deciphered.” Rather, they could be “fortunate ‘mistakes’ or ‘errors’”; “zaum-type syllables”; or “indeterminate, potentially never to be figured out” (post 340).
In a detailed synthesis, too long to be
fully accounted for here, Jullich summarizes the philological and interpretive
arguments for specific readings of “deen” and then goes on to discuss the
device of such “semi-words” in Writing Is an Aid to Memory, of which
he counts 84 (post 362). Jullich connects the use of such partial words to the
theme of memory in the book: “It is, of course, in the retrieval or
re-creation of missing beginnings that memory consists!” But the larger
question concerns the nature of indeterminacy, which is not “anything goes”
but “[has] to be filtered through a sort of triage and negotiated on
the strength of internal evidence.” This has political implications for the
politics of experimental writing: “The reader may be entrusted with the production
of meaning
. . . but there are productions that are fabrications, and there are productions
that are deductions/inductions.” The indeterminacy of “deen” proves
the necessity of an author, but only as determined in a process of weighing
alternative readings in collective discussion: “The belief-system, or ideology
I seem to be carrying, in remaining lukewarm to the solution of typo, is a
belief in the infallibility of the author that is stronger than my temptation to
impute the fallibility of oversight to [the publisher]”—author outranks
institution in his theory of new meaning. This is only possible, however,
because of the genuine indeterminacy of “deen”: “‘ Deen,’ then, is a genuine
case of not knowing which meaning to assign a word.” In the suspension of the
meaning of “deen,” as adjudicated by the consensus of the interpretative
community, the author function is reinscribed: in the need for an author to
guarantee meaning, but also in the fascination with/anxiety over the elusive
author, Lyn Hejinian, who cannot be contacted to give evidence of her intention.
“Hejinian’s ‘deen’” is not just a question of playing with words, though of course its appeal is partly due to that. It is also a moment of the reproduction of the author function within a community, a moment of the community’s own reproduction. “Hejinian,” then, as an author is as much a site for anxiety and speculation as her nonce word, “deen.” This may be seen in the Listserv’s attempt to contact her, assign her class identity, worry over her reception at the Barnard conference, and finally interpret her literary devices. A constructivist moment, then, may be discerned here in the foundation of a community of readers in the question of a precise textual indeterminacy—the textual absence given a placeholder by “deen.” Jullich is inspired because he believes he has discovered a secret that has eluded many on the Listserv: a way to solve the frustrating uninterpretability of the material text in a way that guarantees participation in a community of readers and, finally, authority. It is no accident, then, that when Gregory Severance, the publisher of an online zine, advertises the publication of eleven poems by Jullich, he promotes him as “the author of the April ’99 Poetics List posting: “D=E=E=N.” The graphic modification, here, points to the social production of authorship in the Language School—in my own speculative account, as a form of “need” for authorship in reverse—as a form of parodic confirmation. At the same time, the focus on the word “deen” occurs within the self-focusing of the Poetics Listserv within historical limits that exceed it—the crisis of the bombing of Kosovo as troublingly outside the limits of community discourse. Stephen Vincent supports this reading in his rebuttal to the entire debate as politically irresponsible: “I have been finding it somewhat amazing—in the pervasive darkness, the sheer hell of Serbia, Kosovo, and Colorado—that interesting minds are able to focus so obsessively on the meaning and function of Lyn’s ‘deen’!! To add an uncanny layer to all of this, my spell checker has just suggested I replace ‘deen’ with ‘Eden’ . . . as an aid to the memory of that mythic place (an unviolated America?) albeit buried way in the text” (post 393). As if in confirmation of this disclosure of a “lost America” in the text, a search engine provides further evidence that supports an encrypted meaning for “deen,” in a July 2001 post by Alan Sondheim of a procedurally generated text that discloses “deen” in the line: “yficeps ot deen on dnA .dne ,etiuq ton”—as “need” spelled backwards. In this sense, the absence holding the community together inverts a terrifying loss kept outside its form.
We may now return to the genealogy of the poetics of the Language School in terms of the politics of the multiauthored text, from Legend to the Poetics Listserv. As a moment where radical poetics comes together as both form and community, Legend’s formal dialectic between authorial subject positions within a totalizing discourse describes important aspects of the intersubjective politics/poetics of the Listserv, even as there are equally apparent differences of scale and intention. For one thing, Legend is entirely literary and self-focusing, while the Listserv has many practical tasks. However, it is not the case that the Listserv is a primarily homosocial community, nor that women do not participate in it; as the foregoing discussion should evidence, quite the opposite is true: many women have key roles in the discussions. But here Legend’s example of multiauthorship must be interpreted on another level: that of a discourse of poetry and poetics as basis for community. Where Legend may be all intersubjective contestation and disagreement, its transgression of what may be called the Law of the Author founds community as an interest held in common: poetry. In other words, the rejection of singular authorship accedes to a higher order of genre. The resulting Law of Genre that develops between authorial positions supercedes the Law of the Author, and its patriarchal violence, much as the mutual interests of the primal horde overturned the violent selfishness of the father. Therefore, we may look for a collective affirmation of poetry as genre as the real inheritance of an origin in avant-garde technique for the multiauthorship of the Listserv.
Excerpted from Barrett Watten, "The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Between Discourse and Text," chapter 2 of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003).