My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

frame loc~
Lost Wages, Nev., Nov. 13-Riddick Bowe, the 25-year-old challenger from
Brooklyn outgunned Evander Holyfield through 12 gritty rounds to win the
undisputed world heavyweight title ... Afterward, when the decision was
announced, a weary Holyfield was asked whether he wanted a rematch.
"No," he said, "I think I'm finished."
The New York Times
A specter is haunting the literary academy: the growing discrepancy
between our most advanced theories and institutionally encoded proscriptions
on our writing and teaching practices.
I diagnose the problem as "frame lock", a kind of logorrheic lock jaw,
or sandy mouth, or bullet-with-the-baby-not-just-quite-then-almost-outof-reach,
as a mood swinging under a noose of monomaniacal monotones,
the converted preaching to the incontrovertible, the guard rail replacing
the banisters, stairs, stories, elevation, detonation, reverberation, indecision,
concomitant intensification system.
Frame lock, and its cousin tone jam, are the prevailing stylistic constraints
of the sanctioned prose of the profession. No matter that the content
of an essay may interrogate the constructed unity of a literary work
or a putative period; may dwell on linguistic fragmentation, demolition,
contradiction, contestation, inter-eruption; may decry assumptions of
totality, continuity, narrative progression, teleology, or truth and may
insist that meaning is plural, polygamous, profligate, uncontainable,
rhetorical, slippery or sliding or gliding or giddy and prurient. The keepers
of the scholarly flame, a touch passed hand to hand and fist to mouth
by generations of professional standard bearers and girdle makers, search
committees and admissions officers, editors and publishers, maintain,
against all comers, that the argument for this or that or the other must
maintain appropriate scholarly decorum.
Theory enacted into writing practice is suspect, demeaned as unprofessional.
But that is because theory so enacted ceases to be theory-a
body of doctrine-insofar as it threatens with poetry or philosophy. The-