¤nd the passing of the modernist giants—Picasso, Kaf ka, Proust, Frank
Lloyd Wright—the occasion of at least some satisfaction:
[I]f the poststructuralist motif of the “death of the subject” means
any thing socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-
directed individualism, with its “charisma” and its accompanying cate-
gorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the “genius”
in the ¤rst place. Seen thus, the extinction of the “great moderns” is
not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer in in-
formation 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 charis-
matic type.... Such ¤gures no longer hold any charm or magic for
the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic 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. (306)I cite this passage at some length because its argument was so thoroughly
internalized in the “advanced” discourses of the nineties 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
were 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
concurred that “our work denies the centrality of the individual artist....
The self as the central and ¤nal term of creative practice is being challenged
and exploded in our writing.”^11 And, given the tedious and unre®ective claim
for the unique insight and individual vision that has characterized so large
a portion of mainstream poetry, the case for an “alternative” poetics remains
compelling.
At the same time, now that the exploratory poetries associated with the
Language movement are more than twenty years old, Jameson’s formulations
(and related theories of the postmodern) have lost much of their edge. For
even if we set aside the work of mainstream poets like the American laure-
ates Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass, Mark Strand and Rita Dove, even if
we restrict ourselves to the poets of the counterculture represented in, say,
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris’s New Poems for the Millennium,^12 differ-
ences among the various poets now strike us as more signi¤cant than simi-
larities or group labels. Such counters as asyntacticality or the disappearance
132 Chapter 7