for example, to study the relation of literary to so-called ordinary language,
to determine the respective role of author and reader in the interpretation of
a given text, and to establish the ways in which individual texts speak for
their culture. For Barthes and Derrida, as earlier for Benjamin and Adorno,
Bataille and Blanchot, innovation as such was of little interest. Benjamin, for
that matter, had no use for the Dadaists who were his contemporaries, dis-
missing them as instigators of little more than “a rather vehement distrac-
tion,” designed “to outrage the public.”^2 And Adorno regarded most of what
passed for “new” ¤ction or poetry as little more than kitsch.
Accordingly—and this is an important aspect of the Language move-
ment, which stands squarely behind so much of contemporary “innovative”
poetry—the “new” rapprochement between poetry and theory that we ¤nd
in the ¤rst issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1978), and in such equally im-
portant journals as the San Francisco-based This and Hills, and the Canadian
Open Letter—all these now a quarter-century old^3 —had less to do with in-
novation per se than with the conviction on the part of a group of poets,
themselves keenly interested in philosophy and post-structuralist theory,
that poetics was an intellectual enterprise, deserving a larger place than it
had in the Creative Writing classroom of the seventies.
Consider the symposium edited by Steve McCaffery, published in the Ca-
nadian journal Open Letter in 1977 and reprinted by Andrews and Bernstein
as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Supplement Number One, in June 1980. T he sym-
posium was called “The Politics of the Referent”; it includes McCaffery’s
“The Death of the Subject: The Implications of Counter-Communication in
Recent Language-Centered Writing,” Bruce Andrews’s “Text and Context,”
Ray DiPalma’s “Crystals,” Ron Silliman’s “For Open Letter,” and Charles
Bernstein’s “Stray Straws and Straw Men.” Although three of the above were
to be reprinted in their authors’ own books on poetics, these early versions
are revealing.^4 For so quickly did their authors soften their stance that the
1980 Supplement begins with the editorial disclaimer: “It seems worth re-
membering, in looking back on these essays, that the tendencies in writing
McCaffery is talking about under such headings as ‘language-centered’ are
as open to the entrapments of stylistic ¤xation as any other tendency in re-
cent poetry.”^5 And when McCaffery came to revise “The Death of the Sub-
ject” for his collection North of Intention (1986), he declared, “I was never
happy with the title and both it and much of the content have been revised.
The essay, whose original thoughts and materials were gathered through the
mid-seventies, concentrates on a partial aspect of Language Writing: a con-
cern primarily with the morphological and sub-lexemic relations present
and obtainable in language. A decade later I can safely speak of this concern
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 157