essences and transcendent realities that feel to them to be constraints on
their desires and limitations on their power and pride. When they are
reduced to praising their materials (cor-ten steel, for instance), it is
because of the absence of other criteria of value—and is, in their own
terms, actually an illegitimate appropriation of the real properties of
nature. In a sense, the only legitimate postmodern art genre is concep-
tual art; its only legitimate virtue, novelty. As Dave Hickey puts it, with
his typical brio—I like the guy’s style, actually—“in the twentieth cen-
tury that’s all there is, jazz and rock’n’roll. The rest is term papers and
advertising... bad taste is real taste... and good taste is the residue of
someone else’s privilege.”
In “language poetry,” the linguistic equivalent of “conceptual art,”
the realities and essences that are shunned are the basics that make lan-
guage language—meaning, reference, grammar and logic—and the for-
mal shapeliness that makes poetry poetry—meter and narrative
coherence. These constraints are too humiliating for bold and trendy
postmodern writers. The poet and critic Paul Lake, in a brilliant recent
essay included in this volume, compares their technique to that of the
academics in Jonathan Swift’s Lagado, the imaginary island in
Gulliver’s Travels. These savants, weary of the plodding conventionality
of ordinary language, have created a sort of computer, wherein a lexicon
of words on wooden blocks is randomly recombined by turning a set of
cranks, whereupon a team of clerks write down whatever combinations
seem to make some sort of sense. These fragments are then printed in
folio volumes, which constitute a Borgesian library of universal wis-
dom. Here novelty is assured by the effortless recourse to blind chance.
To change the metaphor slightly, it is as if, taking the rules of language
to be tyrannical impositions, we resorted to making up random sound-
combinations, as babies do when they babble—waboo! ooga! lalala!—
under the impression that they must contain mysterious meanings never
yet thought, because after all the “words” are not in any dictionary. The
neat trick is that if one has tame critical theorists who will convince the
public that the words do have meanings that everyone who is on the
inside of the art world understands immediately, then the public, afraid
of appearing stupid and uncouth, will pretend to find meanings there
too, artists will be encouraged and come to believe that the public is
actually enjoying their work, and so the great sting operation continues.
Even so, this analogy understates the breathtaking scope of the con
game: for the meaning is that there is no meaning, because meaning is a
hegemonic patriarchal europhallogocentric mystification invented by
rich white heterosexual males.132 Frederick Turner