ground events that complicate what is seen in the foreground? Was theirs a
“rationalized objective space”—a space of nascent capitalism?
Such theory buzz, like the current spate of what I call Big-Name Collage—
the large theoretical essay or even poem that is no more than a collage of
nuggets by Big Names—Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben, Cixous and Kris-
teva, Deleuze and Baudrillard—without any real analysis of what the phi-
losophers in question are actually arguing—is problematic, because this par-
ticular form of “innovative” writing may well alienate the very readership
it hopes to capture. That readership is, I think, more attuned to speci¤c is-
sues, as when Mullen tries to walk the mine¤eld between the particular
idiolects or, as Jeff Derksen has called them, “communolects” of our increas-
ingly multilingual society;^30 for those “communolects” now have every thing
to do with the one revolution that really has occurred in our own time—
namely, the habitation of cyberspace. This is not the place to discuss the po-
etic experiments—and many of these really are experiments in that they fail
as often as they succeed and are replaced by more adequate models—on Web
sites like Kenneth Goldsmith’s UbuWeb: Visual/Concrete/Sound Poetry, but
clearly, two important things are happening.^31 The ¤rst is the increasing visu-
alization of poetic text—a visualization that is by no means new but has been
recon¤gured in important new ways in works like Johanna Drucker’s The
Word Made Flesh or Susan Howe’s Eikon Basilike. The second is a form that
I call, for want of a better name, “differential poetry,” that is, poetry that
does not exist in a single material state but can vary according to the medium
of presentation: printed book, cyberspace, installation, or oral rendition.
In the performative work of Laurie Anderson and Suzan-Lori Parks, Joan
Retallack and Caroline Bergvall, for example, the issue is less the referen-
tial fallacy, as it was for McCaffery in the mid-seventies, than it is the semio-
sis of the verbal/visual ¤eld itself, where words and phrases can be moved
around, recon¤gured, and assigned to different slots so that the “poem” has
a variety of different forms. In a piece called “RUSH (a long way from H),”
for example, Caroline Bergvall has designed a text you can access and activate
on the Electronic Poetry Center Web site or read in book form, but it can also
be seen and heard as performed and videotaped for the Internet, in which
case temporality becomes an important determinant of meaning.^32 As a bar-
stool monologue cum brawl, interrupted and quali¤ed by visual diagrams,
media argot, and verbal breakdown, “RUSH” puts an ingenious spin on such
pub monologues as that of Lil’s “friend” in The Waste Land.
Is it “innovative”? Is it, in Bergvall’s words, “kindajazz or excitingly pas-
sée”? Well, there are surely Dada precedents for this performance model, and
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 173