and the two actions are permitted to become a simultaneous experience
within the activity of the engager” (8). “Reading” is thus “an alternative or
additional writing of the text.” Indeed—and here the Marxist motif kicks
in—“Linguistic reference is a displacement of human relationships and as
such is fetishistic in the Marxian sense. Reference, like commodity, has no
connection with the physical property and material relations of the word as
a grapheme” (3). Direct communication, on this count, is the hallmark of the
commodity fetish. Thus, “to remove the arrow of reference,” to “short-circuit
the semiotic loop” (9) becomes a political rather than a merely aesthetic act.
In his “Text and Context,” Bruce Andrews reinforces this notion, dismissing
referentiality as the misguided “search for the pot at the end of the rainbow,
the commodity or ideology that brings ful¤llment” (Supplement 20).
As the Utopian manifesto of a twenty-eight-year-old poet, “The Death of
the Subject” inevitably overstated its case. The call for “unreadability” and
“non-communication,” for example, was largely exempli¤ed by sequences of
disconnected word fragments and isolated morphemes, as in the citations
from Andrews, Clark Coolidge, and Barbara Baracks, the latter giving us a
two-column poem like
stint grits
darts ¤le
gratis ways to ¤t tins
dapper angle
ill appleMcCaffery calls on us to “produce [our] own reading among the polysemous
routes that the text offers” (Supplement 4), a challenging invitation, even
though, as soon became apparent, less stringent readers than McCaffery
himself took him to mean that one reading would be just as good as an-
other. Moreover, the rejection of all “instrumental” language as commodity
fetish in favor of a poetic paradigm that, if we are to trust McCaffery’s ex-
amples, includes only the most extreme form of wordplay, fragmentation,
decomposition of words, and absence of all connectives, as in Andrews’s
“mob cuspid / welch / eyelet / go lavender / futurible” (5), could be seen as
excessively dismissive of alternate ways of composing poetry.
But despite McCaffery’s Ubulike iconoclasm, his basic premises—and
this is the irony—were by no means as extreme or as new as both the propo-
nents and opponents of Language poetics would have had us think. What
McCaffery and Andrews (19) call the “referential fallacy” takes us right back
to Roman Jakobson’s central thesis that in poetry the sign is never equiva-
Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents 159