My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

~tein' s Identit~
What is identity and why is there so much of it?
Any cultural production can be viewed through the lens of its sociohistorical
circumstance. To ignore such contexts is to deny the social
truths of the work. Yet such contexts are inadequate to establish a work's
identity.
Identity is a play, according to Gertrude Stein in "Identity A Poem", her
1935 reworking as a play for puppets of some of parts of The Geographical
History oj America, or The Relation oj Human Nature to the Human Mind. Stein's
puppet show shows identity as an acting out rather than as an inner state;
externally animated, not innately fixed.
Stein did not narrativize her otherness any more than she naturalized it
and that makes her a suitably uncomfortable subject for those who would
read her in terms of group-identity poetics. Stein's work eludes thematic
and biographist projections in its demonstration that forms, structures,
syntax, and style may also signify identity's puppet show. This may begin
to account for how Stein's triple distance from the ascendant culture (gender,
sexual orientation, ethnicity) is related to her radical breaks from traditional
notions of meaning, literary tradition, explanation, and linearity.
Stein questions identity constructions, she does not affirm identity. Her
syntactic and grammatic investigations show how language forms consciousness,
how our words make as well as reflect experience.
In literature, genre, with its etymological roots suggesting both genealogy
and gender, is a fundamental site of identity politics. Throughout her career,
Stein plays with, in the sense of reforming and reformatting, genre,
genealogies, and genders. "Identity A Poem" is an essay, a play, a poem; it
mixes verse and prose lines.
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