My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

FRAME LOCK 91
ory, prophylactically wrapped in normalizing prose styles, is protected
from the scourge of writing and thinking as active, open-ended, and investigatory.
The repression of writing styles in the literary academy is
enforced by the collusion of scholars, theorists, administrators, and editors
across the spectrum of periods and methodologies. PMLA would prefer
to publish poets writing in the patrician rhetoric of the nineteenth century
about the exhaustion of poetry than to permit actual poetic acts to
violate its pages. While many of the most innovative of the profession's
theorists and scholars sit on the board of PMLA, the publication persists
in its systematic process of enforcing mood and style control on all its articles
and letters, as if tone or mood were unrelated to argument and meaning.
Difference and otherness: these values ring hollow if they are not
applied, also, to our own productions and articulations. If PMLA-a no
doubt easy but nonetheless representatively obtrusive target-is strictly
whitebread, the radical claims for diversity made within its pages seem stifled
or neutered.
Professionalism and career advancement are the bogeymen of frame
lock. Dissertations must not violate stylistic norms because that might
jeopardize our young scholar's future. "Let them be radical in what they
say but not in how they say it."-Such is the pragmatic, and characteristically
self-fulfilling, argument that is made. The point here, as in most
initiation rites, is to be hazed into submission, to break the spirit, and to
justify the past practice of the initiators. Professionalization is the criteria
of professional standing but not necessary professional values; nor are our
professional writing standards at or near the limits of coherence, perception,
edification, scholarship, communication, or meaning. Underneath
the mask of career-minded concessions to normalcy is an often repressed
epistemological positivism about the representation of ideas. While the
philosophical and linguistic justifications for such ideational mimesis-for
example the idea that a writing style can be transparent or neutral-have
been largely undermined, the practice of ideational mimesis is largely
unacknowledged and, as a result, persists unabated.
In order to explore unsanctioned forms of scholarly and critical writing,
graduate students and new faculty need to be protected against the
arbitrary enforcement of antiquated stylistic constraints. Yet even those
in the profession who are sympathetic to these new-and indeed not-atall
new-writing forms may believe that one's initial professional work
should be stylistically orthodox, with innovations considered only in later
work. This argument is akin to the idea that art students should first learn
anatomy and figure drawing before they embark on more expressionist or
abstract work. As a generalization, there is no merit to this argument
(while of course specific individuals may benefit from different experi-