My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

46 WHAT'S ART GOT TO DO WITH IT?
status as authors and professors, because their methods immunize them
from becoming subjects of the historical forces within which they operate.
My method immunizes me against nothing, accelerating my subjection to
the inultivectoral forces I am periodically digested by. My signifying
behavior is eclipsed by the semiotic maelstrom I feel myself falling, slipping,
tumbling, and twirling into. The only distance I know the one from
me to YOU; yet it's enough to ground me in the runes of what I would otherwise
imagine could be my possession. For there is nothing other than this
grounding in "communities of discourse", a language play of hide and seek.
& this makes me count my judgment, learn what making judgment is.
Signifying practices have only art from which to copy.
The idea that a statistical or objectifying orientation, or else a tone of disinterested
probity, raises criticism or theory above the level of cultural artifact
is profoundly ahistorical; nor is there any reason to suppose that this
has changed in the age of cultural studies. Art and critical writing can be
sites of social and aesthetic resistance. Yet both share the tendency to conformism
and complacency. Typical profeSSional criticism, like the dominant
forms of verse and visual arts, reifies more than resists. Against its
most advanced theory, such writing retains the illusions of voice and its
authority, in blissless compliance with received standards. Its authors are
not so much dead as operating on automatic pilot and it is as if cries to
wake them are jammed by the control towers.
This is not an unregulated process. Norms are strictly enforced by a system
of hazards and penalties for those who drift outside the narrow stylistic
confines of official critical discourse. And what justifies this monologic,
tone-jammed prose? Not the intrinsic virtues of the style since the
threats of being unmarketable or unpublishable are internally enforced
professional criteria, part of a system of self-regulation, in Foucault's sense,
that gains its legitimacy by being able to enforce a distinction between
acceptable and unacceptable discursive manners. The need for discipline
preexists the particular distinction that gives content to the discipline.
Thus the poetic as a negative space is necessary to give disciplinarity to
disinterested scholarship or rigorous theory.
Research and analysis can exist independent of the forms in which they
are represented but cannot, finally, remain unaffected by them. The governing
principle of the plain style of much critical prose is that it should
be as neutral as possible, that it should not call attention to itself. Untidy
thoughts and facts must be made to conform to this "anti"rhetoric, if not
by the author then by the interventionist editorial practices of professional