gether in a single ¤eld all the traces by which the written text is constituted,”
is ¤nally unsatisfactory: “The idealized, absent author of the New Critical
canon has here been replaced by an equally idealized, absent reader. All that
remains are the reports of other readers—call them critics—whose texts
endlessly read textuality itself, whose claim to authority lies precisely in the
self-knowledge of their texts as in¤nitely deferred, deferring, acts” (“Who
Speaks” 365).
And where do these acts take place? Where else but in the university? As
Silliman speculates:
Perhaps it should not be a surprise, that while postmodernism in the
arts has been conducted largely, although not exclusively, outside of the
academy, the postmodern debate has been largely conducted between
different schools of professors who agree only that they too dislike it.
Thus the characteristic strategy of the ambitious critic and anxious
graduate student alike is not the opening of the canons, but rather
the demonstration of a critical move upon some text(s) within the al-
ready established ensemble of of¤cial canons.... Once incorporated
into an institutional canon, the text becomes little more than a ven-
triloquist’s dummy through which a babel of critical voices contend.
(“Who Speaks” 365, 368)Barthes could not, of course, have foreseen that the privilege he accorded the
reader (“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single
‘theological’ meaning”) would so easily turn into the form of ventriloquism
Silliman describes. But as those of us in the academy know only too well,
this is precisely what has happened. “We know now” (“On sait maintenant”):
we who are critics can practice our virtuosity on this or that poem, which is
consequently accorded secondary status—hence the elevated status of Der-
rida or Deleuze vis-à-vis Beckett or Kaf ka.
What matter who’s speaking? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the role of
the subject in Language poetry. “The relation between agency and iden-
tity,” writes Silliman, “must be understood as interactive, ®uid, negotiable”
(“Who Speaks” 371). It is a “relation between the poet, a real person with
‘histor y, biography, psycholog y,’ and the reader, no less real, no less encum-
bered by all this baggage. In poetry, the self is a relation between writer and
reader that is triggered by what [Roman] Jakobson called contact, the power
of presence” (373).
I ¤nd it interesting that Silliman, once an outspoken critic of the formalist
lyric poem, here invokes the name of the great Russian Formalist critic. A
134 Chapter 7