[GENERIC PRONOUN] CREATES: ANARCHISM, AUTHORSHIP, EXPERIMENT DANI SPINOSA A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, ONTARIO MARCH 2015 © DANI SPINOSA, 2015 ii Abstract First and foremost, my work develops a postanarchist literary theory that repositions the reading and writing of experimental texts as activist practice. Following the most recent trends in anarchist theory and political philosophy, postanarchist literary theory merges the primary concerns of classical anarchism with shifts in the conceptions of power and the State born out of postmodern and poststructural theory. Focusing specifically on the ways that the experimental text complicates the traditional relationship between author and reader, my project emphasizes how these experimental texts make manifest the role of language in a radical conception of the common. The concept of language as a part of the common is one shared, implicitly, by all the poets in my project, in some form or another, and to account for both the aesthetic and political anarchism of their experimental approach to authorship and readership, my dissertation takes on an experimental form. As both an insurrectionary tactic and a means of navigating the potential limitations of a more traditional print-based dissertation form, my project was first produced as a series of short single-author chapters linked through hypertext, and these were distributed via an open-access blog which invited reader contribution via interventionary comments. Ultimately, my project sees a theory of alternative and experimentation in action in experimental poetic texts that are either implicitly or explicitly concerned with an anarchist activist practice on the level of the disruption of the author-function. We can see the intersection of postanarchism and poetry in the way John Cage reappropriates source texts in “62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham” (1973), or the way Jackson Mac Low writes to and rewrites Gertrude Stein in The Stein Poems (2003): both authors seek to defamiliarize language for anarchic ethical ends. This intersection is represented differently in Denise Levertov’s call for readerly responsibility in The Jacob’s Ladder (1961), or in Robert Duncan’s call for readerly community iii in his Passages sequence (in Bending the Bow [1968] and Ground Work [1984,1987]). It becomes radically feminist in the experiments with authorship seen in the revisionist appropriations of Susan Howe (Bibliography of the King’s Book, or, Eikon Basilike, 1993), the indeterminacy of Erin Mouré (Pillage Laud, 1999), the racialized Language work of Harryette Mullen (Sleeping with the Dictionary, 2002), and communal politics of Juliana Spahr (Response, 2000). Working to establish a nascent but important postanarchist literary theory, this project reads and writes through each of these texts to show that postanarchism can and should be used as a literary theory that works to make the acts of reading, writing, and thinking about experimental texts part of an anarchist activist practice. While I have selected texts that explicitly challenge the authorial role and its concomitant political problems, it is my hope that my project brings to light the availability and importance of postanarchism as a theory of reading, and thus, of reading all literary texts. Ultimately, this project argues that these authors or individual texts themselves are less important to my project than the way that my readings (rather than interpretations) of them help to illuminate the shortcomings of a critical literary theory that, as of yet, has not and cannot account for the changing face of popular resistance movements (anarchist or otherwise). For this reason, while I have, for the most part, selected texts that actively seek to disrupt the conventions of authorship and authorial intention, I have also chosen to examine both poets who are explicitly anarchist (Cage, Mac Low, Duncan, and to an extent Howe) alongside political authors who are not anarchist (Levertov, Spahr, Mullen). It is my hope that this selection of authors exposes both the necessity and the limitless possibilities of postanarchism as a literary theory. iv Acknowledgments I would like to thank so many people for their help with this project! First, I owe more thanks than I could possible give to my supervisor, Dr. Andy Weaver, for his dedication to this project, his countless hours of editing, meeting, and emailing, and for his emotional support throughout. If it weren’t for his decision to play Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonate” on the first day of his “Introduction to Poetry” lecture so many years ago, I assure you this project would not have happened. My committee members have also been wonderfully supportive and diligent. I thank Dr. Stephen Cain for his keen eye for detail and his vast knowledge of the avant-garde. I thank Dr. Art Redding for being able to, in the friendliest and kindest way possible, call me on my bullshit. These two professors made me historicize and politicize always, especially when I wanted to just frolic in theory and silly poetry. I also owe thanks to my friends, family, and colleagues for their help with and support of this project. To start, thanks to Jesse Pajuäär, who has put up with much more of this ridiculous project than he ever expected, and who has done so graciously and thoughtfully. Without him, this projected would have twenty times more “in this way”s and “I would like to argue”s. Special thanks to Smalex Spinosa for finding the typo. Thanks also to Melissa Dalgliesh, Samantha Bernstein, Jonathan Vandor, Thom Bryce, Kate Siklosi, Matt Carrington, Sean Braune, and anyone else who commented on the website. Thanks to Jesse Cohn for being gentle with his emails and for spreading the word. Thanks to Priscila Uppal for (let’s be honest) just about everything. And, of course, thank you a hundred times to my parents, Marie and Jerry, for supporting this project emotionally, financial, and even more than once on Facebook. Without all of your help, I wouldn’t have finished this! Finally, my doctoral work was supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant. I thank them both. v Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ vi What is Postanarchism? A Brief Introduction ................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Making Noisy Analogies: John Cage and Jackson Mac Low ................................ 39 Chapter Two: Writing to the Common: Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov .......................... 108 Chapter Three: [a reader culture prefers both: Juliana Spahr and Harryette Mullen .................. 174 Chapter Four: Sleeping in the Library: Susan Howe and Erin Mouré ........................................ 245 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 323 Works Cited and Consulted ........................................................................................................ 335 vi List of Figures Figure One: John Cage, “Mesostic 1” ………………………………………………………….. 57 Figure Two: John Cage, “Mesostic 19” ……………………………………………..…………61 Figure Three: John Cage, “Mesostic 19 (detail)” …………………………………………….. 61 Figure Four: John Cage, “Mesostic 44” ……………………………………………..………… 65 Figure Five: John Cage, “Mesostic 1 (detail)” ……………………………………………..……78 Figure Six: John Cage, “Mesostic 1 (more detail)” ……………………………………………. 78 Figure Seven: John Cage, “Mesostic 25” ……………………………………………..……….. 83 Figure Eight: John Cage, “Mesostic 25 (detail)” ……………………………………………..…84 Figure Nine: John Cage, “Mesostic 31” ……………………………………………………….. 84 Figure Ten: John Cage, “Mesostic 31 (detail)” ……………………………………………..… 85 Figure Eleven: John Cage, “Mesostic 30 (detail)” …………………………………………….. 90 Figure Twelve: John Cage, “Mesostic 46 (detail)” ……………………………………………. 94 Figure Thirteen: John Cage, “Mesostic 31 (detail)” ……………………………………………57 Figure Fourteen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 51……………………………………….. 246 Figure Fifteen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 78 ………………………………………… 295 Figure Sixteen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 54 ………………………………………... 297 Figure Seventeen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 56/7 …………………………………… 298 Figure Eighteen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 78 ………………………………………. 300 Figure Nineteen: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 58 ………………………………………. 301 Figure Twenty: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 82 …………………………………………302 Figure Twenty-one: Susan Howe, Eikon Basilike page 62 …………………………………… 313 Figure Twenty-two: Erin Mouré, Pillage Laud (1999) page 100 …………………………….. 321 1 “I’m sitting in a coffee shop while I’m typing this and I know this is NOT the common.” - Sean Braune “The common speaks: a conversation unfolds…” - Cesare Casarino, In Praise of the Common What is Postanarchism? A Brief Introduction