This text is part of a b2o Review dossier on Charles Bernstein’s The Kinds of Poetry I Want.
Withstanding the Horror of What We Are: Charles Bernstein’s “bent studies” Beyond the Loops of Intentionality
Kacper Bartczak
I am not American. I am Polish. I speak Polish and American English. I read Polish and English. At times, when I think better of myself, I read German. For example, the Austrian German of Wittgenstein’s early diary entries, lined side by side with their English counterparts, thanks to the loving work of Marjorie Perloff. So I shuttle between the bilingual recto and verso on the pages of this book, and I read. My reading then is in – what – English or German? Or maybe it is still in Polish? And what about the shuttling itself? Is it Polish, German, or English? Hopefully – none. Still, I am not American. But what is America, or where is it?
Emerson (2001, 126) wrote about those who live in conformity: “Their every truth is not quite true. . .every word they say chagrins us.” Charles Bernstein is an American in a sense that is completely lost on vast areas of our contemporary culture. It is a culture of some large scale malaise, the core horror of which is the undermining of the American project I have learned and taught about for all my life. To my grief and chagrin, I sense, feel, and hear about this undermining, almost on a daily basis now, even here, in my home on the outskirts of Łódź, Poland. Bernstein is American in one of those senses that Stanely Cavell speaks about when he envisions America as a goal or idea yet to be arrived at. A large part of striving to arrive at that place consists in continual strife against the conformity of established ways of speaking and thinking. Cavell (1989, 69) quotes Emerson on conformity, in his New Yet Unapproachable America, as part of his elaboration on the idea of self-reliance, which, as Cavell also demonstrates, is a form of “aversion [as] conversion.” At a different place, Cavell (2003, 113) calls this stance “aversion [as] the countering of diction,” an act of inquiring into the condition of our conditions. Drawing on those core sources, the always-already open American canon, Bernstein (2011, 78) creates his plea for “a poetics of poetics,” or a poetic practice which he wants to be “provisional, context-dependent, and often contentious” (2011, 75). Those whose truths and words “chagrin us”, more so today than any at any other time in the last century or so, live in a place they call America (or Poland, for that matter, as their counterparts do over here), without realizing that they dwell in a state of insulation, creating a culture marked by “its inability to listen to itself” (Cavell 1989, 69). But America, this new yet unapproachable place, is elsewhere.
There exists a region of vitalist reverberation that consists in the skill of participating in the excesses available to the human speaking organism, in which the separation of word and object, mind and body, thought and action fall off as dead weight of stale arguments. This is a truly American region, where word and world meet beyond the philosophical conundrums of reference or argument based in rule-based, conditions-laden epistemologies and ontologies. In his essay “Finding as Founding,” Cavell (2003, 114) connects this mode of being to “[Emerson and Thoreau’s] vision that the world as a whole requires attention, say redemption, that it lies fallen, dead.”
Much more than any physical region, this America is a non-geographical, redemptive predisposition, in which a state of attentive inclusiveness is achieved, which the Polish scholar Tadeusz Sławek (2014) called “the community of the world,” in a book length study under this title. Within this larger community, all forms of matter – humans, non-humans, language, the beliefs or criteria shaped in it, and material objects – are brought to their proper life, back from where their lie stagnant when left to norms. The America in question is not a place, then, but a mode of active predisposition which conjures up a region. As Lyn Hejinian (2000, 153) wrote, in this region “the materials of nature speak.”
But how do they do it? Are they all, and at any given time, endowed with life and vibrancy of their own, without human agency, as some contemporary post-humanist thought sees it? Or is there an alternative way, one that by-passes the discussions around the limits of the anthropomorphic, some sort of alternation in our seeing the nature/culture divide? Bernstein’s “poetics of poetics”, or poetics of performance, his poetico-philosophical ongoing program in which the event of the poem, its intense “Now./ Not now. / And now. / Now” (2016, 300), as Bernstein puts by way of quoting Gertrude Stein, affords an exhilarating entry into this alternative. His is a continuation of the Emersonian, Whitmanian, Thoreauvian, Jamesian (I mean William James, whose “radical empiricism” stands, among other influences, behind Hejinian’s thinking about poetry) and finally Cavellian program of relearning to inhabit the world by relearning our own condition of being language using animals.
It is a continuation by radicalization. One of its effects is keeping linguistic innovation in the poetic game long after the dissipation of all sorts of linguistic turns that dominated humanities toward the end of the previous century. Another is such rechanneling of that program that it can now inform swaths of contemporary multi-national poetics. Finally, Bernstein’s contribution is in making us attend more closely to some of the key concepts in Cavell’s discourse, notably those related to the notion of poetic object and, intentionality, and its meaning or meaningfulness. If the materials of the worlds truly spoke, what would they say? And would we be able to understand them? Whose would be the intention that stirs those utterances and what would be the intended meanings?
With all of its rampant diversity, its refusal to fall in line with any generic categorization, Bernstein’s latest title, The Kinds of Poetry I Want, continues that line. The Cavellian themes are not prominent, and yet they inform the volume unmistakably. We hear them first in the very title. Its semantic and grammatical form is a ruse, a promise of an answer that will be both fulfilled and broken. It will be broken, because after reading the volume we will understand that there is no poetry that Bernstein wants, or prefers, that could by kept within the boundaries of a kind, a category, or a genus. And yet, this very erasure of the essentialist conceptual scheme standing behind the idea of the “kind” of any linguistic utterance, particularly one that wants to be poetic, the erasure that bursts out the available conceptual bounds, is precisely the kind of poetry Bernstein has wanted and has taught many of us to want too.
The kind of poetry Bernstein wants, is an intensification of the main line of what I understand to be American – the art that helps the human linguistic organism to make its way amidst forms of boundless excess, learning to appreciate it, to see it as a political model, sustaining one’s vitalist position, without getting pulverized by chaos. Names and categories exist in Bernstein’s discourse as temporary and provisional energetic nodes that serve as grist for the situation of the poem. They often become preposterous mock catalogues demonstrating to us the futility of trying to arrest the poetic flow – they are madness in response to our madness of classification. One example is a poem titled “Solidarity is the name we give to what we cannot hold” (Bernstein 2010, 221-23). It is a parody of the urge to classify poets and poetries. Yet, the speaker paradoxically becomes a poet by denying throngs of the categories – aesthetic, theoretical, geographical, political, others – of poets miraculously, and, as we can see, preposterously, amassed by the existing discourses.
This method is echoed in the current publication in a piece called “No Hiding Place.” A long list of lines beginning with the phrase “I thought language poetry was” revisits and reasserts the various aspects or characteristics that might have been used to describe Language poetry. Some of those may be funny or non-sensical, for example: “I thought language poetry was sympathy without tea” (Bernstein 2024a, 36). Most, however, seem to originate from earlier discourses of theoretical debates around Language poetry, in which they had been used with a clear intent to signify stable meanings. And yet, when amassed in the new piece, the characteristics seem to work against each other. A melee of features results. Its very profusion annuls the project of arriving at a final shape of the object in question. The text returns us to the very heart of the anti-programmatic ideal of Language poetry, which was an avant-garde without a set of rules, more a site of communal language-oriented practice and an ongoing inquiry into the question of its maintenance and livelihood than a pursuit of a program.
It is in such apparently self-absorbed linguistic passages, where the foregrounded aspects of language – grammar, word choice, rhetorical productivity – create an impression that the world has been obliterated by discourse, that the world in fact returns, much more vividly than in topical poetry. In another early poem, a short piece called “The Kiwi Bird In The Kiwi Tree”, we read: “I want no paradise only to be / drenched in the downpour of words, fecund, with tropicality” (2010: 142). These become a “fundament be-/yond relation, less ‘real’ than made” (142), which leads us to Bernstein’s insistence, pronounced elsewhere, that poetry is a difficult faith in having a world by agreeing that writing is its own reality. In another early text, Bernstein (1986, 50) writes: “I want in my writing a texture of wordness opaque and alone.” This one also which carries an epigraph from Thoreau: “I was determined to know beans.” While the title plays with the idea of the palpable presence of the objects of the world, the suggestion here, an idea in which Bernstein takes after Cavell, is that no particularity – no direct contact with the materials of the world – is possible without the textured wordiness founding our actions in the world. That is why, “these words, or those in poems, are not used to describe events in the world that have already occurred…. but to attend to the internal event that is taking place in it” (50). In other words, it is only within the event of the poem, an artificial space of its attentiveness, that the world has its truest event itself.
The event of the poem is Bernstein’s version of the Thoreuvian and Cavellian call to reinhabit the world by redeeming it from the conformity of settled meanings. This theme appears early in the new volume, in the opening text-performance – a piece densely marked by erasure and elision – titled “Ocular Truth and the Irreparable Veil.” Interestingly, its dense elliptical play quite openly gets us in the vicinity of the Emersonian/Cavellian thematics. Its mock epigraph, a disfigured utterance – “Nature is too much with us, [ellipsis in the original text] or [ellipsis in the original text], / Little we see in culture, that is” (Bernstein 2024a, 3) – is a mini-vortex recycling themes from Thoreau. It is only by remaking our culture and actively reimagining it that we can find the right measure of our distance or proximity to nature. In other words, if we treat culture as an artificial thing, we should see nature as such too, beyond the limit of the myth of the given. The aversion to this myth is signaled in the very first line of “Occular Truth”: “’Deficit’ is always the given, [ellipsis in the original text] fate, [ellipsis in the original text] acknowledgement / [ellipsis in the original text] of limitations or blindness” (3).
Here, the given is “deficit”, but also “fate”, what Emerson theorized long ago as necessity and limitation. The composition of the line works with the truth value of this statement but also away or around it, through a rhythm of elisions. As a result, the existing argument enters an altered space. This is Bernstein’s own version of the aversive practice of “finding as founding,” a Cavellian device, now performed on the Cavellian/Emersonian material. It resurfaces openly later in the poem, in one of its few more complete, least elliptical paragraphs, in which Bernstein connects the Cavellian thought to his own post-secular reimagining of religion without the absolute. In this model, the living word is Emersonian “life”, a permanent avoidance of being based in declarations. The existing words, discourses, utterances are enabled, by the event of the poem arranged by Bernstein, to reenter their proper state of the flow, in which they live by acquiring a new connective aura in a new environment. Hence, in the fragment in question, rather than proposing a discussion on the issues of the absolute or its non-existence, the poem proposes itself, its own space, or “body” (the very next piece in the new volume is titled “The Body of the Poem”). In it, the question of the absolute is replaced by the “urgent task of finding, and making, truth: Finding by making, making by finding, finding by founding, making by foundering” (Bernstein 2024a, 8). If general or abstract concepts, such as the absolute, are included in the work catalyzed in this new space, so is the existing transcendentalist textual and conceptual corpus. Echoed, and distorted, the Cavellian discourse is fed into the event of the new poem, which thus rescues it from congealing into a final truth, or meaning as settled cognitive content. It is performed, as Bernstein would say, with the hope of obtaining a new spin.
Cavell himself will return in the book, in a section called “Shadows…”, where Bernstein offers a memory of his teacher. He focuses on Cavell’s method of teaching a philosophical text by bringing words, phrases and sentences alive through treating them as script, staging them. If a philosophical text has a point germinating in it, if it has a cognitive content, it can only exist in, with, and through the linguistic material it was originally composed in. Philosophy must be relived in its own materials and for that purpose it must be rehearsed, like music, improvised like a composition, in front of a new audience: “He turned phrases of Thoreau’s around the way Miles Davis turned a musical phrase of Irving Berlin’s ‘How Deep Is the Ocean’ or Thelonius Monk (a favorite of his) lifted and reworked the chord changes of ‘Blue Skies’” (Bernsten 2024a, 72). Teaching philosophy becomes a practice of “sounding” the language – that is the material – of its source, a method which fleshes out Thoreau’s original action, as it was theorized by Cavell: “By sounding the sentences of Walden, Cavell was able to sound the limits and possibilities of his thought, as Thoreau had sounded the depth of Walden Pond” (73). In an earlier piece, Bernstein (2024b, 274) said that through his method Cavell succeeded in “making the words [of Walden] his own and making them ours, too, as active listeners” (emphasis added).
What happens when the language of a text, such as the text of Thoreau’s Walden, is made “ours”? First off, there is felt a removal of the line dividing the text of philosophy from the text of creative literature. The text becomes a multidimensional object in the process of its coming into being and we are now able to participate in it – in the event of its unfolding meanings. We enter the area of the Cavellian concept of the intentionality of the artistic object. Philosophy is at its best when it can be treated as a poem, or another object of art, about which we know, as Cavell puts it, that they were “intended”, or “meant”, in a sense that they were meaningful to us as creators or recipients (the line between the two gets fuzzier and fuzzier the deeper we proceed in the process). In Cavell’s reading, what Thoreau managed to do was to bring language – the ordinary language of men in the street – back to the state of aliveness. Reinstating vital exchanges between objects of the world, his own finite bodily condition and his language, Thoreau returned us to an awareness of our responsibility for the habitat, a space that the Polish scholar, Tadeusz Sławek called “the community of the world”. Such community comes to life in a space which only comes to being through an act of care and commitment. The position of the subject in this act is of exactly the same kind that Cavell describes when he talks about the intentionality of the objects of art, such as poems.
This argument is presented in Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say, a study about which Bernstein (2024a, 72) confesses in the new publication that it “completely absorbed him,” immediately when it was published. Cavell argues, partly against the New Critics, that an object of art is made of materials, but the task of the recipient is to find a mode of seeing how they were part of an action that was a form of care for them. It is this care that he calls “intention” – a kind of position on the part of the creator, to be re-enacted by the recipient, which treats the material of the new object as endowed with meaning. It is important, however, to pause and consider the meaning of what Cavell means by the terms intention and meaning. Objects of art are materials, which, like ordinary language of the street for poets, or everyday objects or paint for visual artists, are suddenly bestowed upon with special attentiveness. Cavell (1976, 197) asks: “Could someone be interested and become absorbed in a pin or a crumpled handkerchief,” and goes on to explain that, in the case of an artist, this would not be an ordinary sort of interest or absorption. Much more than that, such absorption, intended to result in turning the materials in question into objects of art, must have been a form of enhanced care: “Objects of art [do] not merely interest or absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them” (Cavell 1976, 197-98). This attentiveness is at the heart of what Cavell treats as the nexus of meaning and intention: “we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people… the ‘mean’ something to us” (198). Within the space of the art object, the materials become “meaningful”. However, importantly, this meaning is not the same as the cognitive value of utterances: “they mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do” (198, emphasis added). He then reinforces this point, later in this important paragraph, by adding: “A work of art does not express some particular intention as statements do” (198). Instead, works of art “celebrate the fact that men can intend their lives at all” (198). This sense of the concept of meaning and intention is at the heart of the vibrant creative line that leads from Thoreau to Bernstein, and it is crucial to the position that I signaled above, one that is expressed in Lyn Hejinian’s calling for a kind of poetry that will let “the materials of nature speak”.
The subtlety and complexity of this line becomes more clear when we put is side to side with the way the concept of intention is used by the argument of a group of scholars referred to as intentionalists. Cavell is sometimes called upon by them as an ally who has helped clarify the vexed problem of the intentionality of the work of art, by showing intentionality to be a position that is shaped as we move deeper into the work of art. But the attempt to recruit Cavell to the intentionalist camp seems to narrow down his general point, and more particularly, his reading of the American transcendentalist position, formulated in Emerson and Thoreau, and adapted to the shapes and forms of contemporary poetry, the poetry that has digested the findings on the nature of language-world relations offered not only by its historical lineage (from Romanticism, via modernist experimentation, to its continuations), but also by large areas of philosophy (Wittgenstein and Heidegger, especially, in the case of Cavell, a group adumbrated by Derrida in the case of Bernstein) and attendant literary theory.
In the seminal essay “Against Theory,” which inaugurated the intentionalist position, Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp argued against the understanding of intention and interpretation offered, through his reading if Husserl, by E. D. Hirsh, on the one hand, and Paul de Man’s deconstructive radical separation of literary language from intention and meaning on the other. It is the Hirsh part their argument that interests us at this point. Let us recall the basics. Language is not random noise – ran Michaels and Knapp’s main line of argument, which is fundamentally ontological. It is a form of intentional action, an act behind which stands an intended position of the person who speaks. Should a bunch of sticks or other materials, washed out on beach sand by the ocean look like letters, or even more surprisingly like lines of a poem, we should resist the sense of wonder, get back to our better sense, and recognize the pattern for what they are, on their fundamental ontological level, which is nothing else than a bunch of sticks, not a text, so reading the patterns for poetry would be naïve and childish. The bits and pieces of matter on the sand have been aligned into a pattern only resembling writing; they are not writing, because writing and language in general is matter organized into a code in which the message is intended by an agent capable of such intending. Our very ability to read a text rests on the initial act of generous endowment: prior to proper reading, or communication in general, stands our decision of circumscribing groups of signs and putting them generously inside the set or class of intended communication, which in practice means positing the intentional speaker as their originator. To read groups of noises as language at all is to be “already committed to a characterization of [their producer, or their very source] as the speaker of language” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 726). This position entails intentionality. A speaker is a speaker of language, not just a primate producing inchoate babble, when we posit intention to communicate. For or a group of marks or sounds to be recognized as language, “we must already have posited a speaker and hence an intention” (726).
Further, intentionalists take a purist stance on the identity of intention and meaning. In this, they radicalize E. D. Hirsh’s Husserlian position, and press for sticking to the latter’s starting point of identifying the meaning of the text with the author’s indented meaning, and thus eliminating interpretation thought of as an activity that requires a theory-based method. In that Husserlian position, the meaning of the text “is, and can be, nothing other than the author’s meaning” which, so the argument goes, “is determined once and for all by the character of speaker’s intention” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 725). However, against Hirsch’s own argument, Knapp and Michaels draw a more radical conclusion from it. Since we already read a text as text, not a freakish coagulation of chaos into text-resembling chaos, and further assuming we guess the meaning of the text, we also immediately have the author’s intended meaning, as one and the other are the same: “The recognition that what a text means and what its author intends it to mean are identical should entail the further recognition that any appeal from one to the other is useless” (725).
This is not to say that they deny the fact of the indeterminacy of utterances. However, on their view, the problem is trivial. Even if there is a margin of indeterminacy, it is limited, if one sticks consistently to Hirsch’s own initial drawing an equal sign between meaning and intention. Indeterminacy is eliminated, when we simply go on and add “information about the intention” (Michaels and Knapp 1982, 726, emphasis original). For Knapp and Michaels this is as far as we should go and Hirsh errs when he chooses to reach further by proposing that the author’s intended meaning be recuperated by the project of the theory of interpretation. Arguing against the formalism of the New Critics, Hirsh went a bridge too far by mistakenly imagining “a moment of interpretation before intention is present” (726). “But if meaning and intention really are inseparable,” they add “then it makes no sense to think of intention as an ingredient that needs to be added; it must be present from the start” (726). The only thing we do on the way from indeterminacy to determinacy is to gather more information about the speaker. The authors of “Against Theory” were struck dumb by Hirsch’s failure to see the consequences of his own argument: “In one moment he identifies meaning and intended meaning; in the next moment he splits them apart” (Michaels and Knapp 725). The split is a trap, a Pandora’s box, a calamitous moment of letting into play the risky business of interpretation as an activity severed from the intentional structures of the creator’s mind and requiring a theory, thus condemning utterances and texts to the catastrophic indeterminacy of meaning, a separation from the monolithic identity of meaning and intention, writ large in the fundaments of the ontology of the text.
This is one of those positions in which the apparent seamlessness of reasoning masks throngs of problems. What does it really mean to “add information about intention”? Moving from ordinary language communication to the space of the work of literature itself, especially contemporary literature, we are facing very often a plurality or at least a strong disturbance of the unity of the speaker. The limitation of the arising indeterminacy by simply adding more information about the speaker becomes a task that often misses the point about contemporary poems. And, further, what about the necessary difference between the author and speaker, highlighted already by the New Critics, or the empirical and implied authors, theorized by W. C. Booth (1961), the difference whose indeterminacy was shown as inherent to the work of literary texts by the entirety of deconstruction, not just Paul de Man, but also Jacques Derrida? Problems mount.
In order to bring their argument an inch closer to the experience of modern literature, from modernists to the present day, intentionalists needed to clarify that they were not after the primitive idea that texts are governed by contents of the author’s mind prior to the creative process. The solution is found in G.E.M. Anscombe’s theory of action. Michaels utilizes it in order to demonstrate that intention should not be mistaken with one of the causes prior to the text. Instead, it is rather a modality of proceeding with the action of composition. Anscombe’s argument belongs in the area of the philosophy of action, and Michaels (2016) presents it condensed in the formula “I do what happens”. The model is complex, as Michaels himself admits, requiring us to see beyond some initial positions that seem contradictory, but it seems to encapsulate something that confirms Michaels initial position – the identity of meaning and intention.
With Anscombe’s on board the model is now enriched with an analysis of what happens in the act of composition. In short, the action makes sense only if it is governed by a difficult equilibrium: the unity of the mind’s internal sense of its intentions and of what happens outside of it. In meaningful action, and, by extension, in artistic composition, one obtains an organic coherence between one’s (internal) sense of where one is going with the materials utilized in the process and with what happens to those materials for the external viewer. The philosophical argument itself is complex, but a core element remains consistent with Michaels’ initial argumentation: for an action to count as meaningful, there needs to be a strict accord – even if it be completely unavailable to the external observer – between the internal mental state (intention) and the external result of action (what happens to the materials). Michaels sums up Anscombe’s complex discussion of meaning and intention by describing a situation where the full meaning of an outward bodily gesture (giving someone a hug while having really intending the gesture as strongly ironic) is only apparent when we have access to the internal intention: “you can’t have what she calls ‘a correct account of the man’s action’ without knowing not exactly what he was thinking but rather what he was meaning” (Michaels 2016).
This is also the point of tangency with Cavell, as seen by the intentionalists. For Cavell, as we have seen, objects of art make sense when we see properly how they were meaningful to the artist. Moreover, those areas of meaningfulness are only uncovered, according to Cavell, when we allowed the work to “direct you further into the work” (1976, 227). For the intentionalist camp, this position signals a strict alignment of the work of art as action, external form, and internal intention. They read Cavell to derive a picture of the seamless alignment of meaning, intention, material form of the work, all of which are corelated to constitute immanent purposefulness of the work. Concluding his discussion of how works of art “are a celebrat[ion] of the fact that men can intend their lives at all,” Cavell calls upon Kant’s concept of “purposiveness without purpose” (1976, 198). This treatment of Kant by Cavell is appropriated to the Marxist/Hegelian perspective by Nicholas Brown (2019, location 321), who says: “The way to the meaning of a work lies not away from the work to its intention understood as an event in the mind of the artist, but into the immanent purposiveness of the work. Meaning, then, is never a settled matter; it is a public ascription of intention.” Brown connects this idea to the Cavellian vision of the intentionality of the work of art, its “ensemble of immanent, intended form” which is the primary “fact about artworks for as long as there have been artworks” (location 321). The key word here is “fact.” The immanent unity of form, intention, and meaning awaits there to be discovered. As such it is itself exempt from discussion. As Brown says, this perennial “fact” about artworks, is “not itself an interpretation” (location 321). Interpretation, then, is merely a phase. At the end, literatures offers facts of meaning.
This kind of intentionality is a fair way of placing works of art and their materiality firmly within the arena of the social discourse. The fact that a work of art is an intended composition, an arrangement of materials – words, paint, other – in a given shape, and that the artist intends the materials to be recognizable to the community, as well as his or her arrangement of them to appeal to them, suggesting various possible meanings – all this is rather indisputable. But the intentionalist insistence on the identity of intention – so conceived – and meaning, strikes one as too rigid and narrow when confronted with vast areas of contemporary poetry. What about works of art in which the publicly available and recognizable materials are used in ways that simply defy the everyday protocols of meaning making, the established ways, conventions and language games within which meaning – understood as recognizable cognitive content – is available?
For instance, how does one approach a works such as Joseph Cornell’s box composition or a poem by John Ashbery, for that matter. In both of these, the intentional side of the work – understood along the lines we have seen accepted by Cavell and the intentionalists – is quite clear: a box by Cornell or a poem by Ashbery will use publicly available materials (discarded bits and pieces of various props or objects in the case of one and platitudinous expressions in the case of the other), the intention being clearly to work with them, the work being meaningful to the artist, a position that in turn is likely to make them “meaningful” to the recipient, sparking their intense interest, care, awe. Both Cornell and Ashbery create arrangements of materials which are “intended,” if we think of intention along such lines, with the help of Michaels and Anscombe’s discussions. However, in the case of at least some works of art this model conflates the “meaningfulness” of the work, occurring for both the artists and the receiver, with its “meaning.” Coming back to Cornell, or Ashbery, or Bernstein, for that matter – can we really move smoothly from the intentionality-as-meaningfulness arising in the work to the meaning based on the intentionality of a subject envisioned as a unitary entity? Unlike the original arrangements of materials utilized in a Cornell box, an Ashbery poem, or a Bernstein poem-as-performance, these artistic objects are composed precisely for the purpose of doing something to the original meaning: undermining it, verifying it, distorting it beyond recognition, mocking it, at times shattering it completely, erasing it, and often undermining the unity of the cognitive operations which obtain in normal communication processes. The ultimate result of those actions is laden with a range of indeterminacy not to be eliminated by finding any information about the creator.
Cavell’s elaborations on what Thoreau was doing at Walden are instructive again. The goal of Thoreau’s action was to leave behind the area of communal meanings which were felt by him to have already degenerated into life-obstructing dead weight. The method was to bring oneself back to the scenes and situations where the linguistic ability of the human organism is recovered. Cavell’s Senses of Walden abounds in passages in which the effort goes to show how Waldens’ project of healing himself and the community of the depression called “quiet desperation” requires finding a position where language is reassumed in all of its wild unpredictability. The narrator of Walden is an experimental poet, who, like Whitman and Dickinson, does not so much speak, as relearns to do so, which really means that he devises a new language, one which his neighbors would not yet be ready for.
It is of paramount importance to notice, as Cavell does profusely, that the endeavor often entails getting lost, losing not only objects, but even the sense of purpose. “The writer comes to us from a sense of loss,” says Cavell (1992, 51), but this condition is not so much overcome in the course of the experiment, as fully explored, embraced, and lived. Here, what Cavell (2003, 110) called, after Emerson, “finding as founding,” signals a constant dialectic of getting closer to the self and doubting it: “the fate of having a self… is one in which the self is always to be found; fated to besought, or not; recognized, or not” (Cavell 1992, 53). The self becomes one of the materials of the world, and it is reconfigured and reexamined. Cavell again: “the first step in attending to our education is to observe the strangeness of our lives, our estrangement from ourselves” (55). Frequent scenes in Walden show the narrator wandering aimlessly, roaming the woods, sensing one’s own wildness. The stated “business” of the author in his Walden is to “live deliberately” (Thoreau 1992, 61), to reexamine one’s human finitude, which means to re-find one’s present moment. Thoreau wanted to: “improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too” (11). This is a project of building one’s own sense of temporality, one’s own “now,” definitely a forerunner to Bernstein’s “now” of the poem. But such actions ultimately mean an entry into strange spaces where what we call meanings simply fall off. Here is one example from Walden: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what—how—when—where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips” (188). The “what-how-when-where” is the whirl of the unitary subject’s intentional sphere at its existential level – the conundrums and messiness of our daily engagements. The “dawning nature” of the fragment is a suspension of that loop.
It is worth noting, too, that such estrangement of the self also means the defamiliarizing estrangement of the materials of the world. Thoreau attends to bits and pieces of nature, sometimes with clear purposiveness – whenever he is involved in building, measuring, planting. But there moments of sheer wander or just suspension of practice, as when he stretches on the sheet of ice to observe air bubbles beneath it. The extended passages of the text which depict such proto-actions are interesting instances of lifting the inanimate matter and making it enter the area of discourse. Commenting on Thoreau’s actions, Tadeusz Sławek (2014: 46) states that Thoreau’s operations in the domain of Walden strip what we know to the raw and “bare existence,” a formulation that echoes Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life”. Further, Sławek also says, fully assuming the voice of Thoreau, or sounding Thoreau’s voice for his listeners, the way Cavell does in Bernstein’s reminiscences, that, when engaged in such baring down existence to its bones, “I have my being on the ‘edge’ of words,” where I am “in community with the cacking ice” (46). Stretched on the sheet of ice, and then carving its piece to better examine it, Thoreau does not – whatever the intentionality of the act itself may be – produce meanings. Instead, he does precisely what W. B. Michaels advised us against doing – disregard ontological boundaries and treat the accidental materials of the world as text. This is where “letting the materials of nature speak” begins. The action is past the divisions between the linguistic/intentional and non-linguistic/non-intentional. Instead, this is precisely what Cavell (1992, 53) called “an exploration”, in which “you do not know beforehand what you will find,” a revision of the conditions which condition not only the received epistemologies but also ontologies. It is only in this mode that Thoreau can enter an area in which “materials of nature speak,” as a result of which he confronts general linguisticity – not meanings but the general potential of meaningfulness, a mode of action which spills beyond the unity of the intentional subjects. Rather than revisiting a specific “language” – a monolithic loop of meanings and intentions – Thoreau enters a wildness the interaction with which teaches him that there is an endless variety of ways in which to speak.
What Thoreau does to the materials of the world found in nature, Bernstein does to the materials of language found in our world. His “now” of the poem is what “nature” was for Thoreau, a suspension, or better, a bursting out of the intentional loop. The point of which he has been making us aware is that the materials of language constitute a set that is much bigger than words, phrases, sentences. Treated as they are in “the kind of poetry he wants,” materials of language burst out, proliferate, hybridize and morph in spaces that obliterate the separations between the eyes of our minds and the so called external world; they become this world, which is a world whose course is determined by us, animals endowed the gift of communication. But the gift is the task. What Thoreau did to the materials of nature, Bernstein is doing to the materials of language – he lets them speak, again.
Which is also to say that he brings them to life. Reading the texts of intentionalists on the role of the works of art in public discourse, one learns a great deal about how important they are to the political significance of art. However, there is also in those writings a sense of a closed loop. The immanence of form, intention, and meaning keeps the producer and receiver in the terrain of the public debates almost too rigidly. The work of art itself becomes, on the intentionalist reading, such a limited area, the limitations concerning not only the meaning of the work – this question now finally being settled by establishing the fact, not to be disputed in this discourse, of the unity of meaning and intention – but also the status of the artist, his or her self-knowledge. It is right to admit that the creative process is capable of instigating an organic unity – a modality of bringing form, intention and the dynamics of the process itself into a unison. However, by adding “meaning” to the mix, one easily ends up with a sense of stinginess, as if we were robbing art of a larger generosity we should expect of it – not a meaning, but an opening into meanings, or bursting of what we know, including the author’s self-knowledge.
It would be fair to say, for example, that strong, even magnetic or mesmerizing unity of intention, action, and form was achieved, in the paintings of Jackson Pollock. And it would not be very difficult to describe this unity – in fact this is mostly what art critics have been, rightly so, doing when dealing with this kind of art. But having arrived at accurate descriptions of those amazing artistic fits, are we now ready to admit that we have thus arrived at their “meaning”?
And what about the artists’ knowledge of themselves, one that attends the formula “I do what happens”. Crucial to Michaels and Anscombe’s theory of intentional artistic action is that the artist – the kind of artist immersed in the emergent intentionality of the work, not one misguided by the intentions held in their mind prior to the work – still knows what they are doing. Michaels (2016) stresses repeatedly, in relation to Anscombe’s formula, that, despite some apparent contradictions, that is “committed [to the idea] that an intentional action is something that I know what I am doing without observation.” However, any good artist will tell you that, indeed, when caught in the process, they “know what they are doing.” Some of them would call it being in the flow. Perhaps the strongest, most intense varieties of such immersion happen to the artists who employ bodily movement, such as dancers. When successful, they definitely know what they are doing, even with their eyes closed.
But is this really the kind of knowledge of the self that is called upon in utterances we produce in other areas of the social discourse – political debates, social issues, court cases, family disputes, etc. etc.? Even more importantly, should it be this same kind of self-knowledge – the kind of self-assertive knowledge of the self which we are obliged to call upon as we fulfill our obligations to the discursive, argument oriented moments of our lives? Isn’t it the case that the current social and cultural chaos is amassed precisely because what everybody around us seems to be so busily doing is to assert and reaffirm what they always already know about themselves? And, even worse, that this kind of self-knowledge is not altered, let alone changed, even when it features as an ingredient of the creative process, it being totally co-opted by the existing political stances?
Bernstein’s model offers a much needed respite, a disturbance of those continuities. Instead of using the space of the poem’s creative process to reassert his (or his readers’) identity and position on “meanings,” he organizes events which push the participants into the edges of the debates now at session. The event of the poem occurs by means of the materials of those debates, but is not contained within them. Spatial metaphors fail here. Materials are simply so turned that we were able to observe a different dimension – the strangeness of ourselves as we are normally engaged with them.
Thoreau’s existence “at the edge of the word” becomes the event-of-the poem as part of what Bernstein (2016, 297) called his “bent studies,” which is “to move beyond ‘the experimental’ to the untried necessary, newly forming, provisional, inventive.” The even-of-the-poem is the primary device and probing tool in this anti-program. The source of the concept is Poe, with his insistence that a poem be a purely aesthetic event. Bernstein explores this program, by showing it consistent with the practice of a line of poets that transgresses the trite divisions between epochs. In his argument, Poe is joined by Dickinson, Whitman, and Stein, all of whom busied themselves not with “meanings”, but with organizing poetic space “where meanings are,” the “now” of the poem. The point – the intention – is to view the dynamic chaos of the existing social debates, and, more particularly, to become more attuned to the deeply masked struggle between rationality and madness that goes behind the masks of official debates. Bernstein’s poems as performances thrive on that edge.
Let us review some examples, starting with the issue of self-knowledge. “Poets are fakers / Whose faking is so real / They even fake the pain they truly feel,” says the speaker of a piece called “Autopsychographia,” from the volume Recalculating (Bernstein 2013, 3). True and safe enough – we almost feel that we read a classical aphorism. But things soon get muddy: “And for those of us so well read / Those read pains feel O, so swell / Not the poets’ double header / But the not of the neither”. A doubleness gets involved, but also lack, introduced with the intense punning of the phrase “not of the neither,” very close to “know of the nether” – the active kernel of vacuity. This bit, place irritatingly right at the black heart of the poem interferes intensely with any sense of the unity of meaning and self. The interference is reinforced by the fact that the poem is a translation of a piece by Fernando Pessoa, a writer notorious for fictionalizing autobiography. Do poets lie about their lives? They do, necessarily so, the poems, as forms of this falsity, being truer events of their lives than any normative autobiography could envision. There is a higher level of interaction between truth and falsity, one that exceeds the confines of the debates about meaning and intention, on which the falsity of the poetic event is the best version of what happens, an impossible merger that is underscored at the end of this short poem:
And so the wheels go whack
Ensnaring our logical part
In the train wreck
Called the human heart (3)
Whose life is being celebrated here–Pessoa’s? Bernstein’s? Their poetic representatives? Is the whole business one of treating the blatant falsity of the poetic reports as the highest form of truth, a final resolution to the classical battle of mind vs. heart? It is not enough to say that a poem, or a translation of one, is just a “fiction” of the self, a necessary one, as Wallace Stevens would have insisted. Bernstein raises the stakes. What if the literary piece is not a poetic condensation of the tensions that rift an individual life, perhaps even that of the poet’s. Instead, a poem like this one battles against any attempt at reducing that individual life to a statement whose truth value would be continuous with statements whose truth and meaning might be required on other social occasions, such as writing one’s autobiography, where one shows how one’s life was beset by contradictions. Whatever the meaning that might be offer by “Autopsychographia,” it will not be found in the intentional sphere of a subject emergent in the compositional process, because no such unitary subject takes shape. The play of doubleness does not resolve to a unity, this being prevented, as I have noted, the kernel of sheer negativity active at its center. It is this active negativity that is preserved, saved from the intentional stances, so much needed in the other areas of our lives, where we argue points.
In the writing belonging to the area of the “bent studies,” the order of the day is not to offer meanings, but to instigate meaningful bursts of meanings and convince the reader to hold on to the blast wave. This is precisely what has been happening in Bernstein’s recent books. His innumerable poems, speeches, essays, parodies, travesties, improvisations work with the existing protocols of meaning and rationality, as if he wanted to give them a check-up. The poems become vortexes of positions, where the rational meets its other, sense is shown as meshed up with nonsense, the serious with ludicrous, etc. Ultimately, however, bent studies is a plea for the necessity of withstanding this chaos, endlessly taking up the task of finding one’s way within it. There is a madness in this writing, one that exceeds even the various familiar formulas or clichés which see art as madness controlled. On the contrary, is the profusion of Bernstein’s output really “a controlled” form of madness? Neither when dealing with the entire body of the bent studies, at their current shape, nor when dealing with their individual instances, can we be entirely sure if we are dealing with madness tamed by method or something else. Ane yet, the whole bet of the project is that this is precisely what we now need.
Let me finish with one other example. In a poem called “On Election Day,” also from Recalculating, we go over a series of statements of what is found to happen on such an auspicious date. The syntactic parallelism of the form brings to mind Whitman’s catalogues – his tireless lifting of the endless scenes of human diversity so that they become part of a larger structure, not just the poem, but the poem-as-state. But where Whitman aimed at unity, Bernstein’s offer is the opposite. His catalogue is a litany of materials whose emotional, factual, generic or cognitive status simply never adds up. In the poem, Bernstein (2013, 55) opens with a plain, if a little surprising line: “I hear democracy weep, on election day.” What follows is a cauldron of plain fact (“the sister does her washing”), nonsense (“the frogs croak so fiercely, you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth” or “cats take tea with the marmoset”), poetic metaphorization (“Your eyes slide, on election day”), poignant observation (“The streets are filled with brokered promise”), a metaphysically tinged confession (“Slowly, I approach the voices dark”), comedy (“the sperm cannot find the egg”), and so on. Among this tumult, there is the fact of the vote being open to all: “the miscreant’s voice the same as saint’s”. All of those acts are followed up or preceded by weeping.
Does the poem celebrate democracy’s secular creed – the centrality of the ritual of voting? To an extent, it does. But it also contains an element of mourning whose tone is indeterminate. Is the weeping serous or comical? The more preposterous eventuality is that the mourning might actually be real. Democracy in the poem proves a burlesque, a pageant of of imperfection. But treating any such statement as the meaning intended by the subject who is emerging in the action of this poem would be a solution obtained at the expense of other possibilities. Even more importantly – is there a unitary subject emerging in the space of this poem, one who fully knows what they are doing? On the contrary, there is no level of the poem at which it reduces the tension between the tone of mockery and of the elegiac.
Yet even if we were finally able to learn the tension – after all, life is full of contradictions, and democracies especially tend to produce messy realities – there lurks a level which, surprisingly, stands against that messiness. What do we make of the lines which touch on the burden of metaphysics? Why are the dead so closely listening in on the chaos, and why are there so many premonitions of death or dying? Democracy, a secular device, enters the post-secular dimension, where our daily uncertainties and mess negotiate the certainty of nothingness. There is not one, but several levels of contradictoriness in this poem. Perhaps it is the very impossibility of containing this kind of plurality in any unitary structure of meaning and intention that the poem enacts. Such could be its ultimate defense of democracy – a system ambitious enough to ask that we withstand the impossibility of the closure of meaning and intention, in various dimensions of our lives, individual, social, political, metaphysical.
Bent studies is poetry’s venture beyond the necessary level of meanings onto the even more necessary reexamination of the sanity of the rituals which spawned them. Democracy might be a masked duel of sanity and madness. The bad news, then, is that it is vulnerable to schemes of well-informed lunatics, skillful at posing as the guardians of sanity. Commenting on Poe, the alleged founder of “bent studies,” Bernstein (2016, 308-309) wrote: “Poe’s uncanny revelation is that the insane are perfect mimes of rational order… They have convinced us that they have overcome the insurrection of the lunatics and restored order.”
But the real point of Bernstein’s writing is that the two camps are not so easily told apart. There is no platform from which to offer the final judgement. The point is to withstand the horror – the Real element of democracy – without succumbing to the false promise of its attenuation. It is this skill that is asked of us lest we slide into a different kind of horror, one of truth revealed. The writing of the field of bent studies is the necessary practice in this hard and bitter skill.
References
Bernstein, Charles. 1986. Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2010. All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Bernstein, Charles. 2011. Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2013. Recalculating. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2016. Pitch of Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2024a. The Kinds of Poetry I Want. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bernstein, Charles. 2024b. “Out Walzed Stanley.” In Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind, edited by David LaRocca, 273-276. New York: Bloomsbury.
Booth, Wayne C. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Brown, Nicholas. 2019. Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism. Kindle edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1989. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 1992. The Senses of Walden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Edited by David Justin Hodge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2001. “Self-Reliance.” In Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris, 120–37. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Hejinian, Lyn. 2000. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Michaels, Walter Benn, and Steven Knapp. 1982. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8 (4): 723–42.
Michaels, Walter Benn. 2016. “‘I Do What Happens’: Anscombe and Winograd.” NonSite.org, no. 19. https://nonsite.org/i-do-what-happens/
Sławek, Tadeusz. 2014. Henry David Thoreau: Grasping the Community of the World. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang AG.
Thoreau, Henry David. 1992. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. 2nd ed. Edited by William Rossi. New York: Norton.