politics and poetics 73the text and divergence of poetic language from public discourse
had a political agency. Bernstein suggests that language must be
seen as ‘not accompanying but constituting the world’.^39 The
premises of the tendency create an overall focus upon the reader
as a ‘co-producer’ of the text, which would appear to align the
tenor of their poetics neatly with Roland Barthes’s identifi cation of
the ‘writerly text’.^40 Barthes suggests that the writerly text can be
understood as ‘ourselves writing’ (p. 5 ), and characterises its goal
as a desire ‘to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a pro-
ducer of the text’ (p. 4 ).
Bernstein’s essays refute language as a vehicle of direct media-
tion. His early poetics stress a suspicion of the language of
public discourse, and suggest that there is a troubling relationship
between the hierarchies of language’s rule-governed conventions
and authority. The relationship between convention and a rhetori-
cal address, he suggests, can be located as an attempt to master lan-
guage. This link between rhetoric, rule-governed conventions and
public discourse has for Bernstein an explicitly political dimension.
He stresses that once ‘we consider the conventions of writing, we
are entering into the politics of language... Convention is a central
means by which authority is made credible.’^41 Before equating
Bernstein’s poetry with the refutation of all rule-governed princi-
ples in language, it is clear that the poet considers not all conven-
tions and authorities as ‘corrupt’ (p. 222 ). Instead he proposes that
‘It is essential to trace how some uses of convention and authority
can hide the fact that both are historical constructions rather than
sovereign principles. For convention and authority can, and ought,
serve at the will of the polis’ (pp. 222 – 3 ).
Bernstein’s comments indicate that a critique of convention is a
legitimate method for revealing an authority which perhaps does
not serve the polis. But can we begin to link this ambition to the
writing of poetry? In an early essay, he suggests that the disruption
of established rules of grammar and syntax is linked with a political
agency, in effect opening the text to an affi rmation of language as a
shared commonality:
Prescribed rules of grammar & spelling make language seem
outside of our control. & a language, even only seemingly,