My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

THE RESPONSE AS SUCH 181
tribution to aesthetics and the philosophy of language as well as providing
a cogent application of her theoretical investigations to the visual and
verbal arts of the modernist period.
Drucker provides a powerful critique of repression of the semantic contribution
of the visible forms of writing, particularly typography, in the
French philosophical and linguistic tradition from the structuralism inaugurated
by Ferdinand de Saussure through such poststructuralist philosophers
as Jacques Derrida. Drucker forces us to rethink a basic repression
of the materiality of language (sight and sound) that had gone unchallenged
not only within the French traditions and their American counterparts,
but also within the separate literary traditions of New Criticism (and
their successors) and the formalism of such art critics as Clement Greenberg
and Michael Fried. No one before Drucker has made such a comprehensive
statement on this issue, although her study follows in the wake
of Significant work in this area by Gerald Janacek, Marjorie Perl off, Mary
Ann Caws, Willard Bohn, and Dick Higgins.
After its opening sallies against the windmills of linguistic dematerialization,
The Visible Word settles into a more practical task: proving models
for "close lookings" at the visual text of poems. As a preface to this task,
Drucker presents an illuminating reading/looking at the interplay between
the verbal and figural/visual elements of the inaugural work for modernist
visual poetry: Mallarme's Un Coup de des. In what proves to be a keynote of
her anti-reductive interpretive style, Drucker insists that Mallarme's visual
figuration is abstract and antimimetic, so that it cannot be translated into
namable or sketchable equivalents. This resistance to interpretive closure,
however, is not just a feature of Un Coup de des but, Drucker argues, a feature
of the destabilization inherent in visual-verbal interactions of the radical
modernist typographic works that are the focus of her study.
With Mallarme as the starting point, Drucker proceeds to reintegrate
the common aesthetic and procedural approaches to materiality in modernist
visual and literary art in order to establish experimental typography
as a modern art practice. At the same time, Drucker aims to reverse the
separation of the "purely visual" from the literary, which, she notes,
becomes a foundational idea in much modernist criticism. In so doing, she
charts how this highly problematic separation has played itself out in
terms of representation versus presence, faktura versus autonomy. Drucker's
revisionist history also questions the common misconception that radical
modernist art is primarily concerned with "formal values for their own
sake". By debunking such generalizations, she shifts the terms of discussion
onto "the structure of relations among elements of signification".
In laying down the groundwork for interpreting typographic works,
Drucker stresses the distinction, already present in Gutenberg's printing,