DESCRIPTION AS CHANCE OPERATION: STEIN, WILLIAMS, and AFTER Seth Perlow

DESCRIPTION AS CHANCE OPERATION: STEIN, WILLIAMS, AND AFTER Seth Perlow

In their early work, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams practice description as a kind of chance operation, an encounter with the contingency of whatever appears. To approach their descriptive poems as chance operations serves two purposes. First, it clarifies how their works influence more recent experimental writers, who more explicitly combine descriptive and chance-operational techniques. Second, it illuminates some perennial interpretive challenges that any descriptive text can pose. A provocative question about one of Williams’s most famous poems will make these interpretive challenges obvious. Here is the poem:

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens1

And here is the question: Why is the wheelbarrow red? Insomuch as this poem emphasizes language’s simple presentational capacity, the wheelbarrow and chickens signify nothing more than their own presence.2 Perhaps the wheelbarrow is red by chance. Williams might just as easily have described a green, blue, or yellow wheelbarrow, a group of brown or speckled chickens. One might claim that “green wheelbarrow” does not sound as good, nor look as good in the mind’s eye, but I will argue that descriptive writing presents us with details whose particularity outruns such formal or aesthetic considerations. The poem itself tends to sideline such considerations as well. It exemplifies a mode of literary description Criticism Fall 2020, Vol. 62, No. 4, pp. 573–598. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.62.4.0573 573 © 2020 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309

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that favors directness over embellishment and thereby attends to the happenstance of the present. I will later address the play of chance in this poem at greater length. For now, let the contingent redness of this wheelbarrow signal the operation of chance in Williams’s description. By pointing out the operations of chance in “The Red Wheelbarrow” and poems like it, I want to advance a specific claim about a certain kind of modernist description, while also developing a more broadly useful theory of chance and description. One might call the Williams poem an exercise in “flat” description, since it avoids figural and allegorical prin- ciples of order.3 Flat descriptions of this kind abound in Williams’s early work and in Stein’s, especially her Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (1914), as well as in some Imagist poems. Such works anticipate the abid- ing interest in descriptive procedures among midcentury experimental writers. My narrower point about the chance-operationality of certain modernist descriptions will thus clarify their influence upon these more recent writers. More broadly, to theorize description as a kind of chance operation produces some useful uncertainty about the meaning of “description” in the first place. Given the suspicions it arouses among literary scholars, one might view description as a presentational technique whose supposed directness and neutrality the skeptical critic will demystify, revealing the writer’s work as figural and allegorical after all. To unveil the ideologi- cal motives latent in one or another literary description has become such a common critical gesture as to feel automatic; its apparent inevitability hinders the study of descriptive writing. By addressing the chanciness of description, I join others in suggesting that an approach less dedicated to critique can help us to understand description more adequately and to do justice to descriptive artworks more fully.4 In what follows, then, “description” in general means the presentation to the senses of an appearance that corresponds with some actual or imagined referent. Consider it a species of mimesis. For “describe,” the Oxford English Dictionary offers “to portray in words or by visual representation.”5 The evident ambiva- lence between the verbal and the visual, common in studies of description, can be traced to the word’s root in Latin, dēscrībere, which means both “to represent by drawing” and “to represent (in speech or writing).” As I argue in the next section, the prevalence of visual figures in verbal descriptions makes it easier to discern the operations of chance in descriptive texts. This essay links scholarship about description with a less cohesive discourse about chance in the arts and nature. Chance has many synonyms— including accident, arbitrariness, coincidence, contingency, disorder, happenstance, luck, and randomness. There is no consensus about the

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respective meanings and interrelations of these terms. Writers use them inconsistently and idiosyncratically, producing what Robin Kelsey calls “a fertile muck of kindred notions,” not a stable taxonomy. Rather than try to resolve these ambiguities, I join Kelsey in preferring to move flexibly among “these various strains of chance and its cognates,” while still mark- ing their differences as carefully as possible.6 My only exception to this principle of flexibility is the term in this essay’s title, “chance operation,” which refers consistently to a method of artistic production that involves some element of chance, such as a roll of the dice. Beyond this term, I use whatever vocabulary seems locally appropriate, recognizing the complex interrelations of these terms as part of the interpretive difficulty this essay negotiates. Descriptions and chance operations might seem unrelated, since they involve different methods. But they raise similar hermeneutic challenges, indicating their deep affinity. Specifically, both descriptive and chance-operational texts blur the line between significant and meaningless details. For instance, if a poet composes by drawing words from a hat, then it makes sense to analyze the poet’s choice of this procedure, the specific lexicon put into the hat, and other factors; but to scrutinize the order of words in the resulting poem would seem absurd, since it reflects merely random selection. Descriptive artworks produce similar uncer- tainties when they record the contingent details of the present, the play of chance in the field of appearance. If a certain detail (e.g., the color of a wheelbarrow) appears by chance, then perhaps readers should not attribute much significance to it. Chance in description threatens the formal and allegorical reading strategies that ratify a work’s aesthetic value by assigning every last detail a place in some overarching order. To interpret description thus involves a similar uncertainty about how chance struc- tures the distinction between meaningful and meaningless details. This shared interpretive dilemma begins to indicate the connections between chance-operational and descriptive artworks. In a sense, the play of chance informs any description, no matter the medium or genre. The appearances we depict gain specificity against a backdrop of contingency. Description sustains an open attention to whatever appears, a responsiveness to the accidents of the present, unlike more motivated strategies such as selection, framing, arrangement, or figuration. Description differs more subtly from observation, meanwhile, because the latter connotes forensic or scientific searches for meaning in what gets observed, whereas descriptions often claim nothing about what they present. Even in totally fictive writing, the appearance of accidental details lends descriptions a sense of reality. As Georg Lukács admits, in an essay otherwise critical of description, “no writer can portray life if he eliminates

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the fortuitous.”7 Readers either regard the contingent details of a description as having no significance beyond conjuring this reality-effect, or they subsume the description into one or another system of order through which its meaning emerges. Such an order might be socio-historical, as when the items in a still-life reflect the painter’s milieu; or it might be aesthetic, as when the form of a description appears innovative. If a critic notes that the gratuitous contingency of a novelist’s descriptions enriches the world of the text, more powerfully immersing us, the critic thereby submits even contingency itself to an interpretive order. What would it mean to resist the revelatory gesture by which critics expose “mere description” as advancing an implicit judgment or showcasing a literary technique?8 It might mean acknowledging that description opens itself to the facticity of what appears, the immutable happenstance of the present. By making a case to view certain modernist descriptions as chance operations, I also want to advance a literary-historical point. Since the mid-twentieth century, several experimental writers have found ways to combine descriptive and chance-operational techniques. Such writers include Perec, Queneau, and the Oulipo, as well as Cage, Mac Low, and the Fluxus group.9 No one has persuasively explained why so many writers interested in chance operations after about 1945 also take an interest in the same kinds of flat description I find in Stein and Williams. By theorizing such descriptions as chance operations, it becomes possible to explain why writers interested in one so often pursue the other as well. To recognize the operations of chance in descriptive works by Stein and Williams will also provide a clearer reason why so many postwar experimentalists cite them as influences. Numerous studies have traced the lines of influence from modernist to midcentury avant-gardes, but this account of description as chance operation makes it possible to specify the logic of such influences.10 I will return occasionally to the midcentury scenes where the links between chance and description become more explicit— especially in the conclusion, which asks about the political legacies of modernist descriptions—but I aim primarily to give an account of how Stein and Williams practice description as chance operation.

The Glazed Gaze

Across media and genres, descriptions privilege vision over the other senses, so the visual sensorium organizes how people respond to the accidental details in a description. Writers can easily describe smells, tastes, sounds, and textures, but vision predominates in written descriptions to

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such an extent that we call “imagery” even those figures that invoke the other senses.11 The rubric of vision also enables philosophers to figure the tension between contingency and purpose in nature, to question whether natural orders emerge by chance. Philosophers traditionally consider the eye a revelatory tool of rational knowledge, associating it with clarity and prediction, but as we shall see, there are important philosophical links between vision and the contingency of appearance. The preeminence of visual tropes in descriptions by Stein and Williams does not simply make their writing more vivid, therefore, but also opens difficult questions about the natural relations between chance and order. Ideas about visual art have shaped the critical response to “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Some of the most influential readings compare the poem to a painting. For instance, J. Hillis Miller equates it with “an abstract expressionist painting.” Like such a painting, the poem simply “is what it is,” and it avoids “referring beyond itself in any version of traditional sym- bolism.”12 Writing a quarter-century later, Charles Altieri would mostly concur.13 For many critics, the analogy with painting helps to emphasize the literalism of the poem, its commitment to the material actuality of what it describes and of itself as a made thing. Hence, Hugh Kenner con- siders the poem “not contriving . . . but obligated by the immediate actual” and thereby giving readers “the opportunity to touch actualities.”14 He also points out that paint actually appears in the poem: “the rain glazes a painted surface.”15 Indeed, the analogy with painting helps to underscore the importance of the poem’s ninth word, “glazed,” around which the tensions between choice and chance get organized. Unlike rain, which comes when it will, glaze invokes the careful, stylizing work of a painter or potter or baker. One glazes a surface to make it please, yet in Williams’s poem the accident of rain does the glazing, lends the wheelbarrow that sheen of aesthetic care, of craft. The glaze of the wheelbarrow, then, figures the picture-perfect appearance of this scene as the result of nothing less contingent than the weather. The same keyword also appears at the very beginning of the other modernist description I will address, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. There too, “glazed” helps to raise questions about the relation between craft and contingency. Stein divides the first two sections of Tender Buttons into subsections, each with its own heading. The book starts like this:

A carafe, that is a blind glass.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system

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to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Glazed glitter.

Nickel, what is nickel, it is originally rid of a cover.16

Much can be made of this passage—and already has. As I argue below, the sheer diversity of interpretations Tender Buttons has occasioned results from the book’s interest in contingency and disorder. But for now, simply note the appearance of “glazed” in these opening moments of Stein’s descriptive “spectacle.” Here “glazed” modifies not an unassuming wheelbarrow but “glitter,” a substance little in need of brightening enhance- ment. The word appears right after a passage that seems to comment on the mimetic work of description. The “arrangement” of words in Tender Buttons develops “a system to pointing,” a deictic structure that points us to objects, food, rooms. If the book’s contents seem carefully arranged, then perhaps it is “not unordered” after all, not as interested in chance as I claim. Then again, the same sentence mentions “not resembling,” but the work of resemblance, of descriptive presentation, is the book’s central motiva- tion. Tender Buttons offers no easy resolutions to such ambiguities. These opening phrases about order, arrangement, and resemblance do, however, invite the same gloss of “glazed” as the word gets in the Williams poem. In both Stein’s text and Williams’s, “glazed” provides a visual figure for the tension, latent in any description, between chance and mimetic craft. This word signals that the scenes in these texts might have been intentionally staged. Or more specifically, it invokes the difficulty of telling which parts of a description might be accidental, which orchestrated. The wheelbarrow’s aesthetically pleasing sheen suggests that Williams did not merely happen upon this idyll but arranged it himself. In a sense, of course, he cer- tainly did stage the scene, since he chose to describe this particular tableau with these particular words. To say so, however, leaves us powerless to tell what glazed the wheelbarrow, the rain or Williams’s imagination. This distinction matters: scholars view these early descriptive works by Stein and Williams as efforts to remain in contact with the actual, as exercises in what Kenner calls “obedience to seen things,” so the intervention of an aestheticizing hand would alter how we view their work.17 The word “glazed” encapsulates this anxiety that a description might not keep faith with the actual. It figures this anxiety in terms of plastic arts, the glaze of the painter or potter. The word thereby sets up the visual sensorium as a site for the encounter between chance and aesthetic design.

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The visual arts and the eyes themselves provide enabling terms in which to consider the chanciness of what appears. Indeed, the visual sensorium shapes our ideas about chance in both aesthetic production and reception. In the context of production, to compare written description with painting or photography underscores a vital distinction between two postures an artist might take in producing a description. On one hand, description seems to occasion a passive and receptive attention to whatever one sees and describes; on the other, the figural devices of art seem to demand more active and potentially deceptive presentational strategies. This distinction between passive/receptive and active/deceptive postures informs the most familiar critical responses to description. For instance, a critic might argue that a given still life painting does not merely describe its subject but enables the painter to make some social or aesthetic point; this interpretation reveals that an ostensibly passive/receptive act of depic- tion in fact conceals active/deceptive tactics. By corollary, many believe that a camera automatically captures whatever appears before the dispas- sionate lens, making photography a common example of passive/receptive description. Photography can require just as much skill and technique as painting, but the camera seems to embody a passive receptiveness uniquely able to capture the play of chance.18 As Roland Barthes puts it, the “fatality” of the photograph, the fact that every photograph is of something, “involves Photography in the vast disorder of objects,” leading us to ask, “Why choose (why photograph) this object, this moment, rather than some other?”19 Photographs make it easier to perceive the contingency of the innumerable details that constitute a description, including the contingency of the photographer’s decision to take a certain picture at a certain moment. “Photography,” Robin Kelsey writes, “is prone to chance” because it “records whatever is before the camera, giving the stray and trivial the same treatment as the main and essential.”20 Like Barthes, Kelsey notes that “chance becomes a limit on responsibility,” casting photographs as passively captured rather than intentionally crafted: “Has the person who has accidentally taken a superb photograph made a work of art?”21 However one answers such a question, the automatic function of the camera enables photography to keep faith with the actual and thereby to reflect the play of chance more directly than other art forms. Some writers emulate the automatism of photography and, by doing so, seek to gain for literature a more direct responsiveness to chance. Many of the same writers who offer painstakingly microscopic descriptions also develop procedural, automated writing techniques. Alongside other motivations for this proceduralism, it endows their writing with the mechanistic power to capture minute details, much like the camera,

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and thereby to reflect more fully the contingency of what appears. From the Situationist and Oulipo movements in Europe to Fluxus and John Cage’s circle in the US, and from these midcentury innovations to recent conceptual and postconceptual writing, those who develop chance-operational procedures also frequently undertake exercises in passive description, efforts to note the presence of whatever appears without attributing some meaning to it.22 So extensive is the literary tradition of procedural descriptions that it has become possible to identify subgenres within this class, such as descriptions of strangers in public or of the objects on a table. Some of the latter works invoke still life painting or portraiture—such as John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) or the innumerable novels and poetry collections that have “still life” or “still life with X” in their titles.23 Among the more explicitly procedural descriptions of objects on a table, there is Georges Perec’s “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table” (1976), in which the author notes that his “table becomes cluttered with objects that have sometimes accumulated there purely by chance” and gives examples of such.24 Similarly, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1966), by Daniel Spoerri and collaborators, gives iterative descriptions of the objects on a table. To theorize description as a kind of chance operation helps to explain why so many experimental writers interested in the latter are also attracted to the former: both techniques aspire to a mode of automatic capture whose closest analogues are the camera and other passive mechanisms of visual capture. This connec- tion does not originate in the midcentury avant-garde, however, but in the work of modernists such as Stein and Williams, whom the postwar experimentalists often claim as precursors. Turning now from aesthetic production to reception, the visual sensorium and the eye itself have provided philosophers with means to figure the contingency of the natural world. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant discusses the eye in order to illustrate teleological judgment, which comes after his more famous theory of aesthetic judgment. Kant defines teleological judgment as “judgment about the purposiveness in things in nature, which is considered as a ground of their possibility.”25 Teleological judgment occurs when we perceive something in nature as if it were designed for some purpose. It thus enables Kant to reconcile the apparent contingency of nature with the order of rationality. He describes the eye as an example:

E.g., by saying that the crystalline lens in the eye has the end of reuniting, by means of a second refraction of the light rays, the rays emanating from one point at one point

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on the retina, one says only that the representation of an end in the causality of nature is conceived in the production of the eye because such an idea serves as a principle for guiding the investigation of the eye . . .26

Kant argues that we understand the function of the eye by thinking as if it were intentionally designed to serve the purpose of seeing. Even though the eye’s formation “is entirely contingent,” not guided by some higher purpose, “I nevertheless think in its form and in its construction a necessity for being formed in a certain way.”27 To describe how the lens focuses light is to impute a purpose for it. Teleological judgment enables us to make sense of nature by regarding it as if it had purposes. We do not judge all natural objects this way. A rock, for instance, can serve “to build something upon,” but we “cannot on that account say that it ought to have served for building.”28 One might just as easily use it for something else. “Only of the eye,” Kant writes, “do I judge that it ought to have been suitable for seeing.”29 In this way, the visual apparatus and its central organ, the eye, provide Kant with a privileged figure for the kind of judgment by which we separate chance from necessity, accident from purpose. Kant argues that “if we did not ascribe such an agency” to nature, if we did not think as if nature had purposes, then it would appear to us “as a blind mechanism.”30 Just as we understand the eye by positing an intentionality in nature, so does the possibility that nature is merely accidental invoke a threat of blindness. Kant is not the first to cite the eye as evidence against the operation of chance in nature.31 But by linking teleological judgment with aesthetic judgment in the third critique, Kant bridges the seeming purposiveness of nature with more recent questions about chance in artworks. Kant’s account of teleological judgment sets the stage for an ongoing debate about whether the natural world is fundamentally contingent and accidental or orderly and predictable. Often a person’s views on this question implicitly determine their attitudes about chance-operational art. On one hand, scientists routinely use natural phenomena to generate random numbers. Sources of randomness in the physical world include Brownian motion, radioactive decay, quantum entanglement, variations in atmospheric pressure, and even the complex shapes inside lava lamps.32 Such phenomena suggest that nature is fundamentally random. If you think so, then you might view chance-operational art as mimetic in some sense. The most radical and persuasive argument in this direction is Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude (2006), which does not merely describe the universe as contingent but absolutizes contingency.33 Even basic laws of logic and physics, according to Meillassoux, are subordinate to the radical

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contingency of existence; the value of pi or the rule of noncontradiction could change at any moment and for no reason at all. Others, however, assert that the universe is fundamentally orderly or, even if entropy pre- vails, that the human perspective necessarily imposes a certain order. For example, the ethnomethodologist Harold Garfinkel argues that the collective project of social order functions as a “plenum,” a shared and minimally stable analytic space.34 Troublingly, such fundamental dis- agreements about the determinacy or chanciness of the universe often remain unarticulated, even as they substantially influence the claims people make about chance-operational art (and about chance in general). This debate started among the pre-Socratic philosophers. Though it will not soon come to resolution, a clearer statement of the disagreement illuminates its stakes. The scholarly reception of chance-based art provides no consistent set of premises from which to theorize the chanciness of description. Some claim that chance operations open a gateway to the unconscious. Others connect chance with Buddhist metaphysics. According to some, chance makes it possible to cleanse artworks of individual biases and motives; still others see chance as a way to reclaim individual freedom from social or historical predetermination.35 In an essay on chance-based art, George Brecht declares, “There is no absolute chance or random event.”36 He offers no evidence for this claim, and later in the same essay he asserts that “we cannot exhaustively describe the causal structure of any real system” because the world is too complex and chaotic.37 Erich Auerbach, meanwhile, equates randomness with everydayness through phrases like “random everyday life” and “a random, everyday, real world”—an equation to which we will return in the conclusion.38 Auerbach praises Virginia Woolf and other modernists because their descriptions invoke “the random contingency of real phenomena.”39 Randomness here signals the reality of whatever gets described. But later in the same discussion, Auerbach notes the modernists’ “confidence that in any random fragment plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its fate is contained and can be portrayed.”40 This confidence entails a very different attitude, for it implies that random details finally get subsumed into a fatalistic order of meaning, or at least they do in good art. Inconsistent, unarticulated, and often unjustified ideas about the orderliness or chanciness of the world have made the discourse about chance in art less cohesive than it might otherwise be. Despite the lack of clarity or consensus, those hop- ing to understand the operations of chance have frequent recourse to the visual register, where mechanisms including the camera and the eye help to structure our ideas about the contingency of appearance.

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Dependence, Chance, Interpretation

Poetic descriptions in what I call the flat style, those that do not attribute meanings to whatever they describe, pose significant difficulties for interpretation. A closer look at Williams’s wheelbarrow poem will illustrate how the play of chance leads to these difficulties. Here is the poem again:

so much depends upon

a red wheel barrow

glazed with rain water

beside the white chickens

The production of meaning from this poem depends upon multiple operations of chance. The first strophe seems to emphasize necessity, rather than chance, but it might instead privilege the latter. On the most intui- tive reading, the poem starts by noting a vague but important reliance, a dependence. Hugh Kenner observes that the poet “has cunningly not said what depends.”41 Apparently “so much” works as an intensifier, meaning “a great deal.” Subsequent lines describe the things depended upon: a wheelbarrow, some chickens. This agricultural equipment gives a synecdoche for the whole farm, so one might read the poem as a minia- ture pastoral or georgic. But the opening lines also invite a reading more sensitive to the contingency of appearance. As Kenner anticipates, one can read “so much” as an intensifier but also as a diminishment or dis- missal; it can mean “only so much,” a small amount, or suggest “so much for,” which signals depletion or relinquishment. The meaning, of course, depends upon what you make of “so much”—as well as what you make of “depends.” Just as “so much” can intensify or diminish, so can “depends” name different relations. Charles Altieri discusses “how resonant the word ‘depends’ becomes, when we recall its etymological meanings of ‘hanging from’ or ‘hanging over,’” and he reads this “dependency” as a way to explore new “models of intentionality.”42 But nothing in the poem hangs from or over anything else. A more colloquial formulation suits better:

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the chickens do seem to hang around. Indeed, many have read this as a poem of hanging around, of mere presence. Likewise, the more colloquial meanings of “depends” comport with the poet’s preference for idiomatic speech and his interest in the play of chance.43 In a phrase like “I depend on you,” the verb indicates reliance of the sort that Kenner and many others perceive in this poem.44 The two common biographical readings emphasize this sense of dependence. According to the first, the physician Williams saw this scene out a window while making a house call for a sick little girl.45 Through a kind of highly idiosyncratic metonymy, the wheelbarrow and chickens might stand for the medical care upon which the girl depends—while also, perhaps, invoking the poet’s uncertainty whether his patient would survive. The second biographical reading, more plausible because it comes more directly from the poet, identifies the wheelbarrow and chickens as belonging to an African-American neighbor of Williams’s.46 By this account, the famous scene becomes visible to us through the same gestures that make people of color invisible. But in this case too, as I argue below, the poet’s encounter with a wheelbarrow and chickens appears more or less accidental. Another familiar sense of “depends” invokes this sort of contingency, as in the phrase “it depends.” In the poem, the meaning of “depends” depends upon how determined or accidental you consider the relations among “so much,” the wheelbarrow, and the chickens. Even when readers favor the more determinate meanings of “depends,” the resulting interpretation will have depended upon these contingent ways of reading “so much” and “depends.” To put it another way, the appearance of chance details in “The Red Wheelbarrow” outstrips any possible allegorical reading of the poem. Grant hypothetically that the opening lines prevent reading the poem as simply contingent description, that they frame it as a praise of rural sim- plicity, or a veiled note of affection for the poet’s neighbor, or whatever. Even then, the poem’s descriptive lines open further questions about the relation between “depends” and the contingency of what appears. If “so much” truly does depend upon a wheelbarrow, does it matter that it is red? Or that the chickens are white? What about the fact that it has just rained? To what extent do the contingencies of the weather, or indeed the wheelbarrow’s having been left out in the weather, factor into the relation of dependence the poem describes? The particulars of the description out- run any reasonable account of the poem as a testament to a specific relation of dependence, and this excess refers us to the chanciness of description itself. Attractive details like the glaze of rainwater and the color red do contribute a certain poetic effect, but they still have an indeterminate relation to any statement or argument the poem might seem to make. The

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operation of chance in this poem’s descriptive work makes it difficult to say how and why its meaning depends upon one detail or another. Some critics view the chanciness of a text as an invitation to read more closely. Auerbach takes such a position above, where he treats the random details in literary descriptions not as signs of meaninglessness but as tokens of the actual. Jacques Derrida more explicitly regards chance as a spur to interpretation. He describes a “hermeneutic compulsion” that leads us to assign fatalistic significance even to the most accidental details so that the play of chance will not disrupt our analysis.47 Citing Freud, he links this hermeneutic compulsion with the desire “‘not to let chance count as chance but to interpret it.’”48 So powerfully does chance unsettle normal ways of reading that those who seek meaning in random details begin by deciding that such details are not random after all. I want to linger with this tricky interplay between randomness and meaning in order to ask what kind of hermeneutics might resist the urge to liquidate every chance detail into a fatality of meaning.49 “Language,” Derrida writes, “is but one among those systems of marks that . . . increase simultaneously the reserves of random indetermination and the powers of coding and over-coding.”50 He recognizes that although the “competition between randomness and code disturbs the very systematicity of the system” of meaning, nonetheless this competition also “regulates that system’s play in its instability.”51 Far from making interpretation impossible, chance loosens up signifying systems, and interpretation plays with this slack. Chance thus seems as much an enabling condition of critical analysis as it is a destabilizing threat. Others have argued that a text’s meaning necessarily refers to the inten- tional choices of its author.52 Any accidental traits of an artwork, by this view, cannot contribute to its meaning. The traditional impulse to econo- mize an artwork’s details under some principle of order—whether in the unity of the author’s intention, the system of aesthetic norms, or some other rubric—rules out the possibility of acknowledging a chance occur- rence as such. To involve contingency in an interpretive practice, instead of transmogrifying it into the fatality of meaning, is to risk two negative consequences. First, it might rob the artwork of its status as the expression of an aesthetic lawfulness.53 Second, it might inaugurate an interpretive crisis because any detail to which the critic might attribute special meaning could turn out to be the result of chance, signifying nothing. This attitude casts interpretation as a process of organizing facts around an aspirational ideal of stable and determinate meanings; it views the play of chance as a threat, rather than an enabling condition. To read a description such as Williams’s in this more traditional way, one need only make a series of claims about how the poet organizes his

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text to produce a meaning. Readings of this kind often focus on the shape or sound of language. One might note, for instance, that each strophe of the poem is shaped like a little wheelbarrow, a subtle calligram.54 As to sound, I suggested above that the wheelbarrow is red by chance, but perhaps Williams means to produce a homophonic pun on the past par- ticiple “read.” Every time one encounters this grapheme, “wheelbarrow,” it is read on the page in black and white: it is read, not red. If this pun enables the poem to comment on reading, then perhaps the dependence it describes is a dependence upon poetry. Peter Baker thus associates this poem with some lines Williams wrote decades later, which indeed claim that so much depends upon poetry: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”55 In this famous maxim, the vagueness of “what is found there” recalls the equally sketchy “so much” in the wheelbarrow poem. If the point of the wheelbarrow’s color is that it is read, then perhaps Williams means to say that so much depends upon the things one reads in poems. These rather facile interpretations may seduce with the appearance of close formal attention, but they leave too many loose ends. The potential for a pun is well and good, but why the white chickens? Why the rainwater? Flat descriptions like this present an excess of random details that escape the critic’s efforts to make the text conform to a system of meaning. Readings of the kind just modeled do not seem wrong, exactly, so much as partial and, well, random. The fact that a descriptive text can host such a plurality of readings indicates the importance of chance in its presentational work.

Stein, Forms, Futures

Chance plays important roles in Gertrude Stein’s most influential descriptive text, Tender Buttons. The readings below trace the operations of chance, first, in the form of Stein’s text and, second, in the book’s critical reception and its influence upon more recent experiments in poetic description. Stein’s attentiveness to the contingencies of literary form enables her to open challenging questions about the relation between form and genre. Her book’s openness to a remarkably wide variety of interpretations, meanwhile, helps to explain why it remains such a land- mark in the development of descriptive poetics. To call Tender Buttons a work of description reflects the book’s guiding impulse, its presentation of objects, food, and rooms without ascrib- ing systematic meanings to them. Stein’s manuscripts reveal that she

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considered subtitling the book “Studies in Description.” This phrase does appear on the rear flyleaf of the first edition, where an ad for the publisher’s list in “Belles-Lettres” calls the book “Studies in Description by Gertrude Stein.”56 In response to the book’s descriptive manner, critics have often compared it to painting, especially to the cubist paintings of Picasso and other notable friends of Stein.57 This analogy, though not without its merits, has often forestalled more direct consideration of the challenges particular to verbal description—for instance, the difficulty of avoiding assertive rhetoric in favor of the presentational flatness I have identified in Williams. By calling Tender Buttons a work of “flat” description, I do not mean to call Stein’s writing plain or unmannered—far from it—but only to emphasize how powerfully the book resists figural or allegorical readings that try to find general meanings or assertions in its descriptions. A passage midway through Tender Buttons warns against supposing that it makes some kind of argument: “Claiming nothing, not claiming anything, not a claim in everything” (TB 38). By avoiding active verbs, Stein performs the nonassertive posture she describes; if there is “not a claim in everything,” then perhaps this fragment itself counts as a description of Tender Buttons, rather than a claim. Earlier on the same page, a one-sentence paragraph emphasizes the reduction of language to its presentational function: “Suppose there is a pigeon, suppose there is.” The reiteration has a deflationary effect. The presence of a pigeon (or a wheelbarrow) amounts to just that. Tender Buttons describes a chaos of objects that happen to be lying around. Among many other things, we encounter “a substance in a cushion,” “Mildred’s umbrella,” “A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin,” “a tree” (TB 11, 15, 67, 71). The book does not submit its contents to any strong organizing principle, nor does it ascribe a definite meaning to its descriptions. The final sentence of Tender Buttons, which seems to strike a note of closure, proves as accidental as the rest of the book. The very last words offer a summation: “all this makes a magnificent asparagus and also a fountain” (TB 76). Given all the culinary images in Tender Buttons, perhaps we should read the whole book as a Dadaist recipe for asparagus. But what about the fountain? The book says far less about landscape design. An enterprising reader might map the juxtaposition of asparagus and fountain onto the broader interplay between domestic and public spaces in Tender Buttons. Another might investigate the agricultural and logistical systems that made asparagus available in European cities around 1912–13, thus connecting the asparagus with Juliana Spahr’s reading of commerce and commodification in the book.58 Such readings might edify and delight, but they do not stabilize the play of chance in Stein’s

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work, the contingencies with which interpretation necessarily contends. Readers can suggest what “all this” description of Stein’s might “make” or amount to, but maybe she just happened to eat asparagus that day and not, say, broccoli. Maybe she happened to write in view of a fountain and not, say, a topiary. The rhetorical drawing of conclusions, which “all this” signals, might encourage readers to look for distinct assertions, but here too, the particular objects seem contingent, secondary to the descriptive momentum of the language. Even the last sentence’s position at the end of the book proves contingent, not Stein’s choice. In her correspondence with the publisher, Donald Evans, Stein indicates that the “Objects” section should come at the end of Tender Buttons, with “Rooms” in the middle and “Food” at the start. Evans appears to have established the standard order (“Objects, Food, Rooms”) without Stein’s approval, and Stein had no opportunity to review proofs before the book went to press. The archive does not reveal whether Evans rearranged the sections on purpose or by accident. Either way, Stein at first wanted that sentence about the asparagus to fall near the middle, at the end of “Rooms” but prior to “Objects.” Given that the sentence appears where it does by chance, the notes of closure we hear might be illusory. If the “Objects” section appeared last, as Stein planned, then Tender Buttons would end with this: “A jack in kill her, a jack in, makes a meadowed king, makes a to let” (TB 31). The appearance of “makes” suggests that we might hear notes of closure here too. Can the word’s presence in the final sentences of both “Objects” and “Rooms” be an accident? Perhaps Stein associates the word with conclusion. Whatever one makes of these possible signs of order, the final sentence of Tender Buttons reflects the play of chance across multiple registers of the book. Chance operates in Tender Buttons not only through the clutter of objects Stein describes but also at the level of form. The book highlights the accidental effects that print technologies and generic conventions have upon poetic form. Like many prose poems, this book troubles the distinction between verse and prose. Especially in the first edition of Tender Buttons, Stein’s repetitive syntax combines with narrow pages and wide margins so that recurrent phrases align vertically, making a visual pat- tern. The eye-rhymes produce a vertical sense of visual form more common in verse. Here is a passage as it is formatted in the first edition:

The time when there are four choices and there are four choices in a difference, the time when there are four choices there is a kind and there is a kind. There is a kind. There is a kind. Supposing there is a bone,

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there is a bone. Supposing there are bones. There are bones. When there are bones there is no supposing there are bones.59

Recurrent phrases happen to align below one another, emphasizing the page’s vertical axis, a hallmark of verse. This effect has nothing to do with the meanings of words or their shapes, only with the way Stein’s phrasing falls across the page. The eye-rhymes result from her syntactic choices, but she cannot have chosen where they appear, since their frequency and locations are contingent upon page width, text alignment, typeface, and other technical factors. In this sense, the eye-rhymes result from a chance operation that folds Stein’s prose against itself at the arbitrary interval of page width. Other chancy formal effects remain stable across editions of Tender Buttons. For instance, although the book is formatted as prose, it contains multiple series of short paragraphs that look like verse. Consider this series of “Chicken” passages:

Chicken.

Pheasant and chicken, chicken is a peculiar third.

Chicken.

Alas a dirty word, alas a dirty third alas a dirty third, alas a dirty bird.

Chicken.

Alas a doubt in case of more go to say what it is cress. What is it. Mean. Potatoe. Loaves.

Chicken.

Stick stick call then, stick stick sticking, sticking with a chicken. Sticking in extra succession, sticking in. (TB 54–55)

The visual sparseness and patterning make this passage look like verse, but these effects emerge from the same prose formatting conventions operative throughout the book. In this respect, Tender Buttons joins a

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host of other modernist works that experiment with print formatting, its visual and material infrastructures, to develop innovative literary forms.60 Among the most iconic works of this kind is Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” When it debuted in Poetry magazine in 1913, the poem’s title was set in small, block capitals similar to those used as subsection headings in Tender Buttons the following year.61 Aurally, meanwhile, the “Chicken” passage has an incantatory rhythm but also contains a less arbitrary figure: the repeated “alas” sounds like “Alice,” Stein’s partner, so the poet may call Alice “a dirty bird.” Pamela Hadas reads Tender Buttons as a chronicle of Stein’s alienation from her brother Leo in favor of Alice.62 So “Alas a dirty word” makes her lover’s name taboo, and “alas a dirty third” calls Alice a third wheel, disrupting the siblings’ relationship. If Alice is a dirty bird, perhaps she is a “chicken,” in which case Stein’s “sticking with a chicken” means she will stick with Alice. The whole of Tender Buttons can be read as an epithalamion, but the play on alas/Alice remains con- fined to this passage. Even here, chance outpaces the ordering impulses of formal interpretation. Why mention “Pheasant”? Why “Loaves”? Why the archaic spelling of “Potatoe”? These words mean something more than how they look and sound. This excess emerges from the play of chance at multiple registers in Tender Buttons. The operations of chance in Tender Buttons do not make interpretation an exercise in absurdity. Quite to the contrary, the book’s engagement with contingency increases critical possibilities. Tender Buttons has occasioned an impressively diverse array of scholarly responses. Juliana Spahr recognizes the book’s capacity to host divergent interpretations:

It has been said that it presents “a woman-centered, revi- sionary spirituality.” That there is “increasingly explicit” dildo imagery, and also that it is about oral sex with a cir- cumcised penis, and then there is a clitoris that is rubbed with a rubber cock too. Others argue it is about a woman’s nipples. No, still others reply, it is about the early buddings of a plant.63

When Spahr refers to Tender Buttons as “a possible description of a domestic space,” the emphasis should be on “possible” rather than “domestic,” where it usually falls.64 The book supports a striking variety of interpretations. In an especially influential reading, Marjorie Perloff emphasizes the book’s power to “manifest the arbitrariness of its discourse” and thereby accommodate varying responses.65 While Perloff associates the book’s contingent play of verbal forms with the arbitrariness of the sign, I

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argue that the play of chance in Stein’s descriptions refers more directly to the chaos of objects, food, and rooms she describes. Tender Buttons teaches us that its particulars could easily be otherwise. The challenge is not that nothing sure can be said about the book. It’s that altogether too much can be said about it. Through its interpretive malleability, Tender Buttons seems to anticipate the contingencies of its own legacy. One such contingency is the book’s significant influence upon experimental writers from the postwar years to the present. Although Stein gained fame well before her death in 1946, Tender Buttons and other challenging early works remained largely unappreciated until writers in the postwar vanguards began to celebrate them. Tender Buttons turned an especially decisive corner in December 1978, when an issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine opened with a feature called “Reading Stein.” The editors reprinted a few vignettes from Tender Buttons, followed by “replies” by Michael Davidson, Larry Eigner, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Jackson Mac Low, and others. Although the respondents took different approaches to reading Stein, their convergence around Tender Buttons solidified the book’s status as an influence upon a great deal of experimental writing since the mid-twentieth century. The inheritors of Stein’s techniques bring into sharper focus what makes her work so innovative, including her efforts to combine descriptive and chance-operational methods in Tender Buttons and related texts. Since midcentury, a wide range of experimental writers have sought to combine descriptive and chance-operational techniques—from Cage, Mac Low, and the Fluxus group in the postwar era to the Language writers and conceptualists more recently. To recognize the operations of chance in descriptive works by Stein and Williams thus clarifies two issues. First, it clarifies the nature of the influence these two modernists have upon the many writers who claim them as precursors. Although scholars have long acknowledged that Stein and Williams influenced midcentury and later avant-gardes, this link between descriptive and chance-operational writing makes it possible to specify what the writers in this lineage have in common. Second, it helps to explain why so many of the recent writers who take an interest in flat description also explore chance-based techniques: they inherit both methods from their modernist predecessors. After 1945, this combination of descriptive and chance-operational methods becomes common among the European avant-gardes as well, where it often takes a more political cast. Guy Debord and other Situationists, for example, practice the dérive as a means to track the interplay of chance and determinacy in the spaces of everyday life.66 Similarly, writers in the Oulipo such as Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau

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combine rule-based procedures with exhaustive descriptions of whatever accidentally appears.67 Through such techniques, both groups develop politically salient critiques of everyday life. They contribute to an emer- gent discourse about the politics of the ordinary that gained traction with the uprisings of May 1968 and remains influential today. These writers sel- dom name Stein as an influence, preferring Mallarmé and the Dadaists. By situating the early work of Stein and Williams alongside these European trajectories, however, it becomes easier to see their contributions to a broader history of literary experiments with chance and description. Recent scholarship about the politics of description has focused on social-scientific precedents and has not fully considered these precursors from the European avant-gardes, nor the roles that chance can play in politically inflected theories of description. Perhaps the most famous commentary on the politics of description, Georg Lukács’s “Narrate or Describe?” (1936) attacks description partly because of its chanciness. As noted above, Lukács acknowledges that “no writer can portray life if he eliminates the fortuitous.”68 He recognizes that the “arbitrary detail” or the “accidental meeting” gives fiction its verisimilitude, but this chanciness also signals the political hazard of descriptive writing (115). Lukács views the embrace of arbitrariness as a sign of political quietism. He complains that “social problems” posed in descriptive fiction “are simply described as social facts, as results,” and he accuses such writing of “passive capitula- tion to . . . fully-developed capitalism” (113, 146). Unlike description, narrative conveys “the interaction of struggle among people,” without which “everything in composition becomes arbitrary and incidental” (134). The successful writer, Lukács argues, “must go beyond crass accident and ele- vate chance to the inevitable” by integrating the contingencies of everyday life into a causally ordered narrative, one that centers on “the turbulent, active interaction of men,” the agentive “struggle” that gives narrative its meaning (112, 126). This influential critique anticipates the key terms of much subsequent writing about description. The postwar experimentalists mentioned above would agree with Lukács that chance informs the politics of descriptive writing, but they take a more positive view of this fact. Lukács believes that chancy descriptions, if not subsumed within narrative action, lead to a politically retrograde absurdism, but the European writers embracing description for political reasons view chance as a means to disrupt or defa- miliarize our habitual perceptions. Similarly, recent scholars of description share Lukác’s view that it sidelines human agency, but unlike him, they see this as an advantage. For instance, Heather Love praises social scientists who “focus neither on individual agency nor on deep social

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structure,” for their system- and surface-oriented descriptions provide alternatives to the neoliberal modes of critique that remain grounded in traditional notions of personhood and action.69 Such attenuated disagree- ments about the political values of description have obscured an emerging consensus about the importance of chance in descriptive writing. As we have seen, the political meanings of description emerge in terms of its relation to the ordinary. To recognize the chanciness of description clarifies this relation. For theorists of the everyday such as de Certeau and Lefebvre, to focus on ordinary details does not distract from the drama of political struggle, as Lukács suggests, but brings critical attention to the contingencies of everyday life that have become so banal as to seem inevitable.70 Recent theorists of description likewise affirm its ordinariness, but they avoid suggesting that description makes ordinary life more available to critical scrutiny. Rita Felski, for instance, complains of a bina- ristic tendency: writers either deride the ordinary as a realm of alienation and distraction (Lukács, Heidegger), or they embrace the ordinary as a site of unending critique and demystification (de Certeau, Lefebvre, the Situationists).71 Seeking a third way, Felski suggests that “it is time, perhaps, to make peace with the ordinariness of daily life,” to abandon critical hermeneutics in favor of descriptive strategies that remain in touch with the ordinary instead of seeking to transform it through demystify- ing attentions.72 As Heather Love notes, Felski’s “embrace of the ordinary” supports her broader “attempt to articulate a political vision that does not rely on negativity,” on the transformational energies of critique.73 Nevertheless, Felski and her fellow travelers continually have to insist that making peace with the everyday is “not a matter of moving beyond politics.”74 They too perceive a threat of quietism in ordinary descriptions. Indeed, Love sees even overtly political descriptions, such as those chroni- cling everyday racism, as “threatening to turn contingent relations into social facts,” threatening to paint the everyday with the colors of inevitability from which Lukács recoils.75 The latent tensions between chance and necessity thus continue to inform our understanding of ordinary descriptions. I will close by suggesting that an account of description as chance operation can resolve some of these political ambivalences—though perhaps not in the way today’s descriptivists would prefer. To point out the chanciness of description might seem to reintroduce the critical negativity that Love believes description can help us avoid. After all, if the contents of a description seem accidental, then Felski’s posture of placid acceptance might get displaced by an anxious fixation on the meaningless contingency of appearances. But perhaps this sense of ontological contingency

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opens precisely the third way of addressing the everyday that Felski seeks. When an ordinary description—say, of a wheelbarrow or a carafe— responds to the play of chance, we can neither view its details as inevitable “social facts” nor fully sublimate them into a system of hidden meanings that the critical reader unveils. Description calls our attention not to a system of latent or encoded meanings but to the fundamental chanciness of what is. This perception might help us to imagine that things could just as well be otherwise—a motive for political action—but without discon- necting us from the facticity of the actual, where we encounter this play of chance in the first place. For this reason, to view description as a kind of chance operation might open politically attractive paths for today’s descriptive writers.

Seth Perlow teaches American literature and media studies at Georgetown University. He is the author of The Poem Electric: Technology and the American Lyric and editor of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition.

NOTES

1. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, facsimile edition (New York: New Directions, 2011 [1923]), 74. 2. On Williams’s pursuit of a “purely” descriptive language, see Zachariah Pickard, “William Carlos Williams, Description, and the Avant-Garde,” American Literary History 22, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 85–108. 3. I adapt “flat description” from Bruno Latour, using it to identify literary descriptions that elude the attribution of hermeneutic depth. As Heather Love suggests, Latour’s “embrace of flatness” might join Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between thin and thick description to form a nascent typology of descriptive strategies. Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 378. See also Heather Love, “Close Reading and Thin Description,” Public Culture 25, no. 3 (2013): 401–434; and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4. See Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, “Building a Better Description,” Representations 135, no. 1 (2016): 1–21. 5. “describe, v.,” sense I, Oxford English Dictionary Online. 6. Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 5. 7. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Merlin Press, 1970), 112. Writing a year before Lukács, Paul Valéry sees description as chancy in its production: “All that a description amounts to is an enumeration of the parts or aspects of a thing seen, an inventory that can be drawn up in any order, thus introducing an element of chance into the execution.” He believes descriptions lack intellectual substance, but he acknowledges that their arbitrary order reflects the contingency of perception. “What could be truer, more natural than this

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go-as-you-please,” he asks, “since . . . truth itself is accident?” Paul Valéry, “Degas, Dance, Drawing” (1935), The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 12: Degas, Manet, Morisot, ed. Jackson Mathews, trans. David Paul, Bollingen Series XLV.12 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 154, 76. 8. For a history of “mere description” in the pejorative sense, see John Gerring, “Mere Description,” British Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (October 2012): 721n2. 9. The work of Marcel Duchamp also anticipates these midcentury experiments with chance. See Jessica Prinz, “‘Betwixt and Between’: Duchamp and Williams on Words and Things,” William Carlos Williams Review 28, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall 2008): 79–100. 10. On the (dis)continuities between modern and postmodern American poetry, especially with reference to Stein and Williams, see Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Marjorie Perloff, 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). 11. Ruth Webb and Philip Weller trace the predominance of the visual in descriptive poetry as far back as Aristotle, who “uses the adverbial phrase ‘before the eyes’ (pro omma- thon) as a concrete synonym for the abstract notion of ‘vivid(ness)’.” Webb and Weller, “Descriptive Poetry,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Fourth Edition, ed. Roland Greene, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 349. 12. J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 9. 13. Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 231. 14. Hugh Kenner, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 54, 59. 15. Kenner, A Homemade World, 59. 16. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition, ed. Seth Perlow (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 11; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as TB. 17. Kenner, A Homemade World, 53. 18. Heather Love identifies the same photographic metaphor for descriptive objectivity in the work of Ryle and other social scientists: “By turning oneself into a camera, one could—at least ideally—pay equal attention to every aspect of a scene that is available to the senses and record it faithfully.” Love, “Close Reading,” 407. 19. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981), 6. 20. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, 1, 6. 21. Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance, 9, 2. 22. For examples of the confluence between proceduralism and descriptive writing around midcentury, see Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951); and La Monte Young, ed., An Anthology of Chance Operations (New York: La Monte Young & Jackson Mac Low, 1963). For more recent examples, see Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010); and Caroline Bergvall, et al., eds., I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2012).

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23. Lukács views descriptive writing as “a vain competition with the visual arts,” which renders people as “mere still lives.” Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?”, 138. 24. Georges Perec, “Notes Concerning the Objects that are on my Work-table,” in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, ed. and trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 1999), 145. See also Georges Perec, “Still Life / Style Leaf,” trans. Harry Mathews, Yale French Studies 61: Towards a Theory of Description (1981): 299–305. 25. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. 26. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 37. 27. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 40. For the word here translated as “contingent,” Kant’s original German gives “zufällig,” which can also be translated as “accidental.” Indeed, the root “zufall” is a loan translation from the Latin “accidens.” 28. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 40. 29. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 40. 30. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 234. 31. See, for instance, the Boyle lectures by Richard Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism (1692); and by William Derham, Physico-Theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from His Works of Creation (1711–12). Both give the human eye as evidence of the divine creator’s intentionality. 32. Lava lamps support the production of cryptographically sound pseudorandom numbers that are used to secure a substantial portion of traffic across the internet. See Joshua Liebow- Feeser, “Randomness 101: LavaRand in Production,” CloudFlare Blog, November 6, 2017, https://blog.cloudflare.com/randomness-101-lavarand-in-production/. On quantum entanglement as a source of randomness, see Peter Bierhorst, et al., “Experimentally generated randomness certified by the impossibility of superluminal signals,” Nature 556 (2018): 223–26. For free random numbers generated from atmospheric noise, see True Random Number Service operated by Randomness and Integrity Services at www.random.org. 33. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008; originally 2006). 34. See Harold Garfinkel, “Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. In and as of the Essential Quiddity of Immortal Ordinary Society, (I of IV): An Announcement of Studies,” Sociological Theory 6, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 103–109. Commentators refer to the argument of this article as “Parsons’ plenum.” 35. For an introduction to the scattered discourse on chance in art, see the anthology Chance, ed. Margaret Iversen, Documents of Contemporary Art series (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 36. George Brecht, Chance-Imagery, Great Bear Pamphlets (New York: Great Bear, 1966), 2. 37. Brecht, Chance-Imagery, 9. 38. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 44, 137. 39. Auerbach, Mimesis, 538. 40. Auerbach, Mimesis, 547. 41. Kenner, A Homemade World, 57.

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42. Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, 233. 43. Williams experiments with chance not only in his descriptive poems but also in Kora in Hell (1920), a series of improvisatory vignettes. 44. Kenner, A Homemade World, 59. 45. This story lacks reliable sourcing. Its popularity confirms how the poem fosters a desire for some extrinsic frame to stabilize its meaning. See Alice Major, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2011),119; and Lezlie Laws Couch, “‘So Much Depends’ . . . on How You Begin: A Poetry Lesson,” The English Journal 76, no. 7 (November 1987): 32. 46. Sergio Rizzo, “Remembering Race: Extra-poetical Contexts and the Racial Other in ‘The Red Wheelbarrow,’” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 34–54. 47. Jacques Derrida, “My Chances / Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronnell, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 367. 48. Derrida, “My Chances,” 367. 49. I am indebted to Jeffrey T. Nealon for the term “fatality” as designating a hermeneu- tically intensive response to the random and banal. See Nealon, “RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 1 (Autumn 2013): 109–132. 50. Derrida, “My Chances,” 345. 51. Derrida, “My Chances,” 345. 52. The most influential statement of this case is Stephen Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 723–742. 53. Theodor Adorno describes the interplay between chance and intention this way in Aesthetic Theory, where the question of art’s aesthetic lawfulness plays out in terms of its intentionality. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24–27, 149–156. 54. Jessica Prinz makes the same observation, calling it a commonplace. Prinz, “‘Betwixt and Between,’” 92. 55. William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. II: 1939–1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 318; Peter Baker, Modern Poetic Practice: Structure and Genesis (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 28. 56. Seth Perlow, “A Note on the Text,” in Tender Buttons, 95. 57. In one of the first scholarly readings of Stein, Edmund Wilson analogizes Tender Buttons with cubist painting. Numerous others have since agreed. Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), 242. 58. Juliana Spahr, “Afterword,” in Tender Buttons, 109–127. 59. Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms (New York: Claire Marie, 1914), 36. 60. See Jerome J. McGann, Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 61. See Bartholomew Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e),” Journal of Modern Literature 32, no. 2 (2009): 20–40.

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62. Pamela Hadas, “Spreading the Difference: One Way to Read Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons,” Twentieth-Century Literature 24, no. 1 (Spring, 1978): 57–75. 63. Spahr, “Afterword,” 112–113. 64. Spahr, “Afterword,” 110. 65. Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1983), 101. 66. See G.-E. Debord, “Théorie de la dérive,” internationale situationniste 2 (Dec. 1956): 19–23. Far from invoking chance as anarchistic, Debord writes that “chance is naturally conservative and tends, in a new setting, to reduce everything to habit and to an alterna- tion among a limited number of variants” (20; my translation). 67. See, for example, Georges Perec, “Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien,” Cause commune 1 (1975): 59–108. 68. Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?”, 112; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 69. Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 375. 70. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984 [1980]); and Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: The Three-Volume Text, trans. John Moore and Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 1991 [1947–1981]). 71. Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 79–80, 94–95. On the link between ordinariness and descriptive phenomenology, see Rita Felski, “Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics, eds. Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 193–201. 72. Felski, Doing Time, 95. 73. Heather Love, “Critique is Ordinary,” PMLA 132, no. 2 (2017): 369. 74. Love, “Critique is Ordinary,” 369. 75. Heather Love, “Small Change: Realism, Immanence, and the Politics of the Micro,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (September 2016): 435.

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