My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

44 WHAT'S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT?
tion is too important to be left to educators; though poets, politicians, and
educators may exercise a valuable function when they elucidate how poetry,
politics, and learning can be hyperactivated in everyday life.
Our political and academic culture of imposed solutions at the
expense of open-ended explorations, of fixed or schematic or uniform
interpretive mechanisms and political platforms versus multiple, shifting,
context-sensitive interventions, splits off the "bad" poetic from "good"
rigor and critical distantiation. Such splitting eclipses reason in its uncontained
denial. Out of fear of the Dark, we turn our back to the lights we
have at hand, in hand.
With justification, we have removed poetry-the "Iiterary"-from any
privileged status as an object of study but have not enlisted the poetic as
an allied interpretive activity. Because of the lingering hold of reductive
rationalism, we have administered to art the one-two punch: neither valuing
it, Romantically, for itself nor valuing it for its critical and cognitive
function.
My point is not to relegate criticism or literary theory to secondary status.
I agree with Fish and others that the new interpretive approaches
change the objects of study. Rather, I am insisting that art not be reduced
to secondary status, the "object" of critical projection, but understood as
an irreplaceable method of interpreting culture, including other artworks-"poetry
as discourse" in Antony Easthope's useful formulation.
The poetic-the aesthetic-the philosophic-the rhetorical: these
intertwined figures dissolve into the art of everyday life, the multiple and
particular decisions and revisions, recognitions and intuitions, that make
up-constitute-our experiences of and in the world. The poetic is not
simply another frame of interpretation to be laid down next to the psycholinguistic
and sociohistorical. The poetic is both a hypoframe, inhering
within each frame of interpretation, and a hyperframe, a practice of
moving from frame to frame.
Such hypertextuality offers not a theory of frames-a supervening or
hypotactic ordering principle-but an art of transition through and
among frames. Call it the art of parataxis, where the elements set side by
side are critical methods rather than images or ideas: an art of practice,
which provides not answers but paths of reading and provisional connections
among these paths. The alternative to frame fixation is context sensitivity;
that is, allowing different contexts to suggest different interpretative
approaches while at the same time flipping among several frames, or
at the least, acknowledging the provisionality of any Single-frame
approach. The poetic is not a master frame, able to reconcile incommen-