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Poetic Inscriptions in Postwar America by Rebecca Gaydos a Dissertation Technologies of Expression: Poetic Inscriptions in Postwar America By Rebecca Gaydos A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Charles Altieri, Chair Professor Susan Schweik Professor David W. Bates Summer 2015 © 2015 Rebecca Gaydos Abstract Technologies of Expression: Poetic Inscriptions in Postwar America by Rebecca Gaydos Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Charles Altieri, Chair My dissertation argues that mid-twentieth-century American poetry was part of a multi- disciplinary effort to renegotiate the traditional boundary between living beings and manufactured forms. I depart from the prevailing understanding that postwar American poetry reprises Romantic “organic form,” claiming to the contrary that postwar poets cast the literary text as an inorganic but nevertheless animate organization—an exteriorized correlate of the poet’s vital processes. Instead of invoking the analogy between organic life and textual form as a way of naturalizing literary production, postwar poets endeavored to extend the category of life to man-made forms. Their effort to animate the artificial space of the poetic text is, I contend, a major contribution to a central problem of the postwar decades: namely, how to rethink nature and technology, organism and machine as non-oppositional pairings. I explore this problem as it unfolded across different discursive and creative practices—from the trans-disciplinary science of cybernetics, which modeled machinic intelligence after recursive, biological processes (rather than the abstract, representational capacities of the mind) to the poetics of the Projectivist and New York schools, which reconstituted the temporalities and rhythms proper to bodily life as graphic-verbal patterns on paper. Throughout, I argue that American poets and scientists, far from representing two antithetical cultures, were mutually invested in modeling life inorganically, that is, in designing dynamic, self-organizing configurations, and thereby upending the Aristotelian conception of the technical object as matter devoid of self-formative power. 1 Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the guidance, insight, and intellectual encouragement of my committee members: Charles Altieri, Susan Schweik, and David Bates. I would also like to express thanks to the many other wonderful professors I have worked with while at Berkeley, including (but not limited to) Cecil S. Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Mark Goble, Eric Falci, Dan Blanton, Stephen Best, and Paul Rabinow (with a special thanks to the Anthropological Research on the Contemporary for providing an exciting and experimental site of cross-disciplinary thinking and collaboration). The intellectual, emotional, and creative energy of my dearest friends and family members have been indispensable; my gratitude to Samia Rahimtoola, Irene Yoon, Thea Riofrancos, Roberto Miguel Reyes, Vanessa Wiencek, Natasha Wiencek, Ellen Moody, Miriam Grotte-Jacobs, Daniella Shina, my sister Katie Gaydos, my parents John Gaydos and Sophia Monat, my grandparents June Monat, Donald Monat, Henry Gaydos, and Sarjana Gaydos, and my partner Sanders Creasy. During my time as a graduate student, I have been fortunate to receive generous financial support from the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies, UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Council, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities (in conjunction with the Jacobson Memorial Fund), the American Council of Learned Societies and Mellon Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Last but certainly not least, I want to thank my incredible undergraduate students at UC Berkeley and San Quentin’s Prison University Project. i Table of Contents Introduction Toward a Technics of Expression 1 Chapter One Forms of Cybernetic Life: Charles Olson, Norbert Wiener, and the Typewritten Body 22 Chapter Two “A Line That May Be Cut”: Larry Eigner’s Bio-Writing 42 Chapter Three Systematicity and Spontaneity in Frank O’Hara 58 Chapter Four Writing the Body in the Age of Necropolitics 79 ii Introduction Toward a Technics of Expression Now, material, any material obeys laws of its own, laws recognizably given to it by the reigning forces of nature… We may follow them or oppose them, but they are guidelines, positive or negative… What I am trying to get across is that material is a means of communication. That listening to it not dominating it makes us truly active, that is: to be active, be passive. The finer tuned we are to it, the closer we come to art. —Anni Albers, “Material as Metaphor” Humanity is without qualities… it must invent, realize, produce qualities, and nothing indicates that, once produced, these qualities will bring about humanity, that they will become its qualities; for they may rather become those of technics. —Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1 What we wish to say is that there is a self-movement of expressive qualities. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, One Thousand Plateaus The Trouble with Expression In the world of contemporary innovative poetry, expression gets a bad rap. The editors of a recent anthology, Against Expression, trace an anti-expressivist aesthetic that runs from Mallarmé to Conceptual writing, sweeping up nearly every prominent twentieth-century avant- garde movement along the way. From Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to Kathy Acker’s punk porn to the mathematical procedures of the Oulipo writers to Kenneth Goldsmith’s transcriptions of traffic reports to NourbeSe Philip’s détournement of legal documents surrounding the slave ship, Zong—the through line connecting such varied projects is, the editors claim, a shared opposition to “ideologies of expression” (Dworkin xliii). But what is so bad about expression? Why do innovative poets and critics regard expression—arguably one of the most powerful organizing concepts in Romantic and post- Romantic aesthetic theory and practice—with such suspicion and disdain? Part of the answer lies in the way I have phrased the question, that is, in the historical fact that the very term “innovative” (or for that matter, “experimental,” “avant-garde,” “difficult,” “antiabsorptive,” to list just a few of the terms used to set certain contemporary poetries apart from “official verse culture”) has come to be distinguished against a conception of “poetry as the ‘lyric’ expression of a person” (Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption”; White 11). As we shall see, “lyric,” “expression,” and “person” form a much-used (and in the context of recent poetry criticism denigrated) conceptual triad, and it will be worthwhile to disentangle these concepts, or at least to think their interrelation critically and carefully. Pointing us in this direction, Gillian White’s book, Lyric Shame, interrogates “the poetic shame culture”— the slew of negative affects, most notably embarrassment, that surround our engagements with the objectionable other of modernist and contemporary avant-gardes: the “expressive lyric” (4). 1 White argues that “expressive lyric” is neither a genre nor a literary object, but an abstraction projected onto certain kinds of writing, a mode of reading (or of imagining someone writing) that perpetuates even as it seeks to critique the New Critical understanding of lyric poems as “expressive objects that ‘speak’ to the reader without, paradoxically, the reader’s need to understand anything of the history of the work’s production, reception, or circulation” (4, 2). In an effort to overcome “a decades-long discursive gridlock in the field of contemporary poetics,” a tiresome oscillation between defending or shaming “lyric” poetry identified with an “expressive speaking subject,” White looks to the work of poets who have been labeled conventional lyricists to find “new inroads” to “the problematic and interesting interpretive limit of the personal” (16, 6). What is touched on but not developed in White’s book is the question of how to understand not only the vexed status of the lyric subject, but more precisely, the discourses and practices that link subjectivity with expression and speech in such a way that the phrase “expressive speaking subject” becomes redundant—compressible into the single term “lyric.” As White points out, the recent energy around theorizing and debating the lyric has much to do with the fact that “lyric” no longer designates an identifiable generic category based in characteristics that inhere in specific cultural objects. But I also want to insist, contra White, that lyric and the shame that attends it is not simply a reading practice, an index of the conventions by which we articulate our tastes and socialities. Rather, the term lyric now invokes—and provokes—a range of questions, anxieties, and ambivalences concerning the status of the human in postindustrial modernity. To think through these concerns I choose to focus on expression—a term that seems to bear much of the weight in antilyric polemics (in fact poets, such as Sina Queyras, who wish to rehabilitate lyric often insist that 21st-century lyric “is not simply expressionism”) (n. pag.). Since expression, unlike lyric, does not have a history as a generic category, focusing on expression may help circumvent the increasingly insular nature (the in-fighting) of contemporary poetry and poetics criticism. And since expression is simultaneously
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