My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

W HAT' 5 ART GOT TO DOW I T HIT? 45
surable approaches. Rather, poetry has its expertise in encompassing
incommensurable elements without getting locked into anyone of themi
this, anyway, is a strain of poetry that goes back to Blake and Heraclitus
and forward to many writers-poets and critics, scholars and theoristsin
our own time.
It is not theory that has supplanted criticism or art but rather an axiometric
solution-focussed theory that marks a continuity from literary to cultural
studies, over and against the heterogeneous traditions of critical theory
and aesthetic practice associated with such anti positivist writers as
Barthes and Cavell, Coffman and Creeley, de Certeau and Mayer, Federman
and Ashbery, Clifford and Irigaray, Debord and Hejinian, Mac Low
and Feyerabend i add your name here.
Of course, it is possible for any writer's work to be turned from practice
to doctrine and surely this is what has happened to the work of many of
the governing Proper Names of structuralist and poststructuralist theory.
It is not surprising that literary professionals might prefer answers to
questions, explications to evocations, doctrine to introspection, probity
to pleasure. But this system of preferences and inclinations, this habitat (or
habitus) of professionalism, in Pierre Bourdieu's sense, is un theorized,
uncritical. The habitat of professionalism marks not a substantive position
but a self-justifying apparatus of control.
While one of the defining axioms of cultural studies is the death of the
author, the authors of cultural studies seem to exempt themselves from the
full effect of this theory, much the way a queen might be exempted from
her own decrees. The theory death of the author seems to apply to other
people's authors.
If we are to understand, following Bourdieu, that the value of a work of
art is determined by the same system of discriminations-class-based dispositions
or tastes-that determines the differential value of styles of furniture
or dresses or table manners, then why not apply this to Bourdieu's
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste? Why not demystify the
social scientific claim for his theory and see his book as a commodity
whose status is determined by its role in the professional habitat to which
he belongs? On such a sociometric reading, on what basis do we make a
distinction between Bourdieu's empirical analysis and that found in consumer
surveys in Elle or Ladies Home Journal. Put another way, Is Fredric}ameson's
writing on postmodernism a symptom of postindustrial capitalism?
For those who wish to model cultural and new historical and psychoanalytic
studies on the social sciences, these questions will seem merely
silly. It is literary authors who are the product of their period, while social
scientists are able to maintain their authority and, not unimportantly, their