Spring 1999
Volume 25, Number 3 Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Silliman's Albany, Susan Howe's Buffalo
by Marjorie Perloff In his first formulation of this "new depthlessness" or "waning of affect" (1984), 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 giantsPicasso, Kafka, Proust, Frank Lloyd Wrightthe 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] I cite this passage at some length because its argument has been so thoroughly internalized in our own "advanced" discourses about the place of the aesthetic in our culture. The demise of the transcendental ego, of the authentic self, of the poet as lonely genius, of a unique artistic style: these, as we have seen, are now taken as something of a given. In their group manifesto "Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry" (1988), for example, Silliman, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten concur that "our work denies the centrality of the individual artist . . . The self as the central and final term of creative practice is being challenged and exploded in our writing." | |
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