Articles & Essays   Book Reviews Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 19 Number 1, April 2018

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Cosmopolitanism and Internal Difference:

The Enduring Strangeness of My Life

 by

Brian Glaser

Abstract

This article situates Lyn Hejinian’s revision of My Life in the context of conceptual poetry, and argues that the radical non-expressiveness of recent conceptual work makes the strange subjectivity at play in Hejinian’s text newly important. By looking at the crisis in contemporary cosmopolitanism with respect to how to positively imagine a global community as an alternative to the nation, I suggest that cosmopolitan theories that emphasize openness to the stranger as the basis of community can find a concrete instance of estranged subjectivity in Hejinian’s text. The essay ends with a review of contemporary criticism of My Life, suggesting that the context of twenty-first century cosmopolitanism makes newly available a valuable aspect of the enduring strangeness of subjectivity in My Life.

 

Keywords: Lyn Hejinian, Language poetry, conceptual poetry, cosmopolitanism, estrangement

 

Introduction

Conceptual poetry is issuing a challenge to the relevance of some of the classics of Language poetry. In the context of the procedural works like Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day or Fidget, which realize in their constraints the aim to be fully uncreative and non-expressive, the challenging of conventions of subjectivity manifest in such works as Lyn Hejinian’s My Life can seem incomplete or partial.[1] The non-narrative approach to autobiography of My Life, one that seemed radical in its genesis, can seem less grounded in an exemplary and coherent aesthetic in the context of conceptual works in which the very idea of expression is negated. In Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff tells the story of this challenge from the imagined perspective of Kenneth Goldsmith:

 

At the same time, from his vantage point the Language school, with its emphasis on non-referentiality and the dissolution of the first-person lyric mode, was itself still rooted in aesthetic issues no longer fully relevant. Whereas poetry anthologies and blogs continue to this day to debate the relationship of experimental to traditional, raw to cooked, “post-avant” to the “school of quietude” (Silliman’s terms), it must have seemed to Goldsmith . . . that as in Duchamp’s case, the time had come to do something else. (164)

 

Perloff is focused primarily on works that use citation and quotation as a way of avoiding the theater of originality while still preserving the standards of art that allow some works to qualify as the products of genius. But one need not be interested in the concept of genius to register the force of her suggestion for understanding the contemporary position of Language poetry. Her situating that poetry in the context of conceptual poetry leads one to ask: what’s really at stake anymore in the experiments in strange subjectivity in such a classic as My Life? In the light of more radical experiments in non-subjective writing, why read this text anymore? Or, if that question seems too radical, I think we are invited at the very least to confront this question: how should we read Hejinian’s most widely known work in such a context?

 

There are already a good number of answers in the critical literature to the question of what as readers to make of My Life, and I will review some of them at the end of this essay. But none of them situates Hejinian’s work in the context of conceptual poetry. I would like to offer in this essay the argument that what we might call the strange subjectivity in Hejinian’s text makes it able to register some aspects of contemporary existence that are beyond the range of conceptual poetry. Reading perhaps somewhat against the grain of literary history, I would offer that in the context of the more extremely extrapolated versions of Language poetry’s resistance to the conventions of poetic subjectivity, as this is manifest for instance in conceptual poetry, the innovatively subjective elements of some works of Language writing become valuable in a newly visible way.

 

“I propose,” wrote Hejinian in 1988, a few years after the lengthening revision of My Life, description as a method of invention and of composition. Description, in my sense of the term, is phenomenal rather than epiphenomenal, original, with a marked tendency toward effecting isolation and displacement, that is towards objectifying all that’s described and making it strange (138).

 

In this passage, I would suggest, we can find the key to the impulse of My Life. Moving from description to strangeness is a form of liberation, an imaginative accomplishment. Particularly in the context of the emotionally descriptive passages of the work, we can see that the work of non-narrative self-expression in the text moves Hejiniian as a psyche in the direction of a strange experience of herself. This is what she aims for, and this is what, I hope to show in a reading of the text, she quite meaningfully accomplishes. This strangeness is something that is accomplished in the process of parataxis and ostranenie. And in the progression of the text there develops a rhythm in which this form of liberating strangeness is perceptible.

 

Before I discuss this form of estrangement, however, I want to suggest a context in which Hejinian’s Language poetry form of strangeness is important to an urgent social movement in a way that conceptual poetry cannot quite be. This is in relation to the ideals of contemporary cosmopolitanism. As I will seek to show in the first section of this essay, there is something of a crisis in the current movements of cosmopolitanism, one in which a keen sense of the paradigm to be avoided as a source of community—nationalism—does not correlate to a positive sense of how this cosmopolitan community, and, perhaps most importantly, its ideals should be imagined. This is where Hejinian’s form of estranged selfhood is particularly worthy of continuing attention. For her text can offer an experience of the strangeness of selfhood that emblematizes a concrete instance of estranged selfhood for those who would found their ideal of cosmopolitanism on openness to the stranger.

 

So in the parts of the essay that follow I first seek to analyze the crisis of community in contemporary cosmopolitanism and its theorists in the literary arts and humanities, and then to show how My Life represents through parataxis a kind of strangeness or ostranenie in relation to the artist’s self that can be a concrete instance of the forms of openness to the stranger that could offer a positive foundation for a cosmopolitan community. In the final section of the essay I return to the field of literary criticism, reviewing the existing critical literature on My Life and suggesting that new forms of innovation become important about Hejinian’s text when it is seen in the context of conceptual poetry and the challenges of contemporary cosmopolitanism.

 

Contemporary Cosmopolitanism in Crisis

There are many cosmopolitanisms. This is all to the good. But it is also a challenge to those who would closely identify with the term. In the Western discourses of cosmopolitanism of which I am aware, most often the stance or identity is adopted as a way of signaling and standing for a community that will challenge the limiting, dangerous tendencies of nationalism. But if cosmopolitans are clear about what they wish to avoid or critique, there is nevertheless a vagueness in many instances around the positive terms through which a cosmopolitan community can gather and define itself. As Craig Calhoun puts the matter:

 

There are, however . . . potential lines of confusion built into the idea of cosmopolitanism. . . . First, does it refer to what is common to the whole world and unites humanity? Or does it refer to appreciation of the differences among different groups and places? (429)

 

Calhoun’s questions cut to the heart of the challenges facing contemporary cosmopolitanism. There is simply no ready idea of a community that will offer at once a global unity and at the same time honor the many forms of difference that help make subjects who they are. This challenging absence is described by Bruce Robbins this way:

 

A concept that would stand for the proper ethical attitude toward global connectedness and would do so no matter what particular cultural vantage point one viewed the global connectedness from—such a conception is conceivable but is not an obvious match with any presently flourishing position, at least one that can withstand critical scrutiny. (10)

 

Robbins is keen to identify a position that will allow for a concerted protest against what he calls the “perpetual war” of American foreign policy, and so he looks at national forms of belonging as a necessary evil to which the cosmopolitan identity offers a welcome point of critical distance.

 

But as Gerard Delanty sees it, this tension between more concrete conceptions of local or national community and more vague sources of unity as cosmopolitan subjects is constitutive and to be welcomed:

 

Cosmopolitanism is not a straightforward product of globalization, but arises out of the encounter of the global with the local or national. In this sense, then, it exists in relations of tension and in transformative dynamics; it is not a given condition or a goal to be reached. In other words, cosmopolitanism exists within all societies and can be seen as a transformative process of immanent transcendence (127)

 

For Delanty, the absence of strong positive terms to describe a cosmopolitan community has as its result a “tension” that is to be lived with, even embraced, as each individual or local community finds a different path of immanent connection to the trans-national whole. But others see such a loose imaginative structure as revealing what Robbins calls a kind of complacency or even a symbol of status that makes the project suspect:

 

That cosmopolitanism as an outlook on the world—rather like globalism—can be read as a form of cultural capital, bound up within and reproduced through a Western middle-class value system is evident . . . (De La Rose, 3)

 

Even if one agrees with Delanty about the possibility of a kind of immanently transcendent cosmopolitanism, the fact remains that without specifying the terms of such an immanence there will be a limit to the political and philosophical substance that can be given to the community imagining itself in such a way.

 

One does not want to be too rigid or run the risk of conservative hostility to the concept by insisting too much on the consequences of this vagueness. But it is also important to acknowledge that there are candidates for the positive terms that Robbins and De La Rose would have us seek. One of them is offered by a number of thinkers in the field. This idea is to make the difference embraced by a cosmopolitan community itself the marker of belonging. The strangeness of the stranger is what makes him or her recognizable as a co-participant in the cosmopolitan community. This involves an act of imagination, as suggested by Miriam Sobré-Denton and Nilanjana Bardhan:

 

the imagination as a social and moral force can contribute towards a sense of cosmopolitan peoplehood wherein the Self can imagine coming together with the cultural Other in a form of “one-in-anotherness” to accomplish larger social and global justice goals through cosmopolitan communication. (85)

 

The irreducible otherness of the Other is precisely the aspect or aspects that must be embraced if there is to be a coherent sense of global community and an alterative to local and national forms of belonging.

 

The most famous and influential spokesperson for this point of view is Kwame Anthony Appiah. His extended consideration of the ethics of the cosmopolitan project, titled Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, seeks to establish a number of the critiques of cosmopolitanism. But central to the book is the theme of finding common ground with strangers:

 

The problem of cross-cultural communication can seem immensely difficult in theory, when we are trying to imagine making sense of the stranger in the abstract. But the great lesson of anthropology is that when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree, but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end. (98-9)

 

Appiah adds to the picture painted by Sobré-Denton and Bardhan the idea that we are all just a thoughtful encounter away from meaningfully connecting with a stranger and having our world views importantly shaped by the specificity and fellow-feeling created by that encounter. Connecting with strangers is not an abstract business, and it depends on more than the imaginative kind of engagement that Sobré-Denton and Bardhan argue for. Connecting with strangers is a natural human emotional act. Indeed for Appiah, it is at the center of any credible contemporary idea or morality.

 

So engaging with the stranger and in some way overcoming, imaginatively or actually, the boundary separating self from other is one of the legitimate answers that contemporary thinkers offer to what I have called the crisis of cosmopolitanism. And this is where Hejinian’s form of strange subjectivity can be of worth to the project. For if one is, either imaginatively or actually, to engage with the strangeness of the stranger with whom one shares a cosmopolitan community, experiencing that strangeness as inextricably connected to her very being, her subjectivity, will offer grounds for honoring that difference at the same time as one seeks to articulate a bond with that subject. To be strange in one’s poetic self-representation, even to be a stranger to oneself, fosters a respectful engagement with the other who must imagine a connection. To be a stranger to oneself, as I would argue Hejinian’s My Life shows a subject to be, is to be in a position to find common ground with other strangers as well, and beginning from there allows one to move either imaginatively or actually in the direction of cosmopolitan community.

 

This calling on the strangeness of the other as it is exemplified by her own strangeness to herself can augment the various roles that critics have seen literature to play with respect to the advancement of cosmopolitan communities. Two examples of this project might suffice to show what I consider to be the originality of my argument for Hejinian’s contribution. Mark Bracher draws on cognitive science to bolster his support for Martha Nussbaum’s argument that there are three crucial beliefs that foster what he calls “compassion for strangers” (5). Reading literature is a matter of learning to abandon conceptual schemas that interfere with the perception of strangers as in need of compassionate involvement. But this understanding of the other is unfortunately often blighted by a Western arrogance that defines the other in terms of powerlessness or suffering rather than acknowledging the various experiences and kinds of identity of those others, the many forms of relatedness and being that each individual possesses. There is a problematically reductive prejudice in describing the other first of all as an object of compassion. A picture of literature’s contribution to cosmopolitan that depends first of all on generating schemas for compassion is not sufficiently attuned to the individuality, the uniqueness, indeed the strangeness of the other.

 

A similar problem runs through Cyrus R. K. Patel’s Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination. Patel argues that great literature helps readers to overcome estrangement from others and provides grounds for seeing “difference as an opportunity for personal growth” (10). In his view, “part of what makes a ‘great’ piece of literature great is its cosmopolitan engagement, its ability to represent to a reader difference and otherness in ways that create both empathy and the distance necessary for judgment” (23). As with Bracher’s account, I would argue, Patel’s argument for the contribution of literature to cosmopolitanism depends too much on the idea of overcoming the obstacles to empathetic forms of identification and not enough on honoring the forms of otherness with which one feels, or at least imaginations, a connection as part of a cosmopolitan community.

 

So in what follows I hope to show how Hejinian’s text offers an alternative to forms of cosmopolitanism that rush, in my judgment, to ignore or overcome difference, an alternative that is available because of the way that her text instantiates what I would call, following Emily Dickinson, a kind of internal difference. To be a subject is already, for Hejinian, to be a stranger, to be a stranger to oneself, and so relating to oneself in this way makes it possible to find a common ground with a cosmopolitan community that is not undone by difference because it is in fact constituted by it. To be a stranger in the imaginative and concrete way Hejinian is in her poem is to be prepared for a cosmopolitan community that does not efface the stranger because there is actually no other sort of person to be.

 

Hejinian’s Strange Subjectivity

There are moments in My Life which describe straightforwardly the experience of being a stranger to oneself. The process of retrospection, however abstract it might be, at times reveals Hejinian’s sense of the strangeness of the subject she knows through memory, younger versions of herself: “I am a stranger to the little girl I was, and more—more strange” (75). This is one way the text records subjectivity as a form of estrangement. But perhaps more powerful, and certainly more prevalent, are her moments of reflection on past emotions in such a way that they are removed from any potentially narrative explanatory context. I will focus on two such emotions as they recur in her text: fear and love.

 

There are many mentions of fear, especially in the early section of the text. In the first section of the work, she writes: “Anxiety is vigilant. Perhaps initially even before one can talk, restlessness is already conventional, establishing the incoherent border which will later separate events from experience” (8). It is not entirely clear here from the context whether the vigilant anxiety is a parent’s or a newborn’s—but that is the point. Through parataxis, the emotion is left to stand on its own in the network of discourse of the poem. Because it is not narratively situated, this anxiety sits in an unclear relationship to the “restlessness” that is “already conventional.” There is no obvious interpretive thread running through the two sentences, and this makes for a kind of estrangement from the emotion described, a sense of experiencing it without interpreting it in the larger discursive, psychological terms that might turn its force as an emotion into a move in a teleological story of subjective becoming. Parataxis gives the emotion the power of the inexplicable, the strange.

 

There are a number of similar instances in the early going of the poem in which parataxis makes anxiety or fear into an occasion of the strange. In the sixth section, Hejinian writes, “I was an object of time, filled with dread. I lifted the ice cream cone to make certain no spider was webbed in the cone. Sculpture is the worst possible craft for them to attempt” (19). To be an object of time is to be vulnerable to change and mortality, but it is not at all clear that this is the source of the dread described. It could be a fear of spiders, as is suggested by the next sentence. And instead of developing either of these two possibilities, Hejinian moves on to a theme that is a strain to relate to the discussion of dread, the choice of crafts and the challenge of sculpture. The stories that could explain her dread are suggested but abandoned, left as incomplete aspects of a self-understanding that is not totalizing. I would suggest that this is because of the way Hejinian imagines herself, a younger version of herself, in this poem. The stories one might call upon to explore and assimilate powerful emotional experiences are not of interest to her. There are other possible ways of acknowledging an emotion, which is in this case to describe it and then move on to other ideas, experiences and fragments of stories. The experience of reflection on emotion is the experience of finding contexts in which it is not so much explained or interpreted but is rather treated as powerful and strange, not to be explained away or understood in a formulaic way.

 

There are a number of other uses of parataxis to render fear strange. “It is possible to be homesick in one’s own neighborhood. Afraid of the bears. A string of eucalyptus pods was hung by the window to discourage flies” (22). Here again the emotion is somewhat free floating, not directly attributed to any one. It suggests a story—where did the fear of bears come from, and how did the fearful person react? But these questions are ignored by the quickly-moving attention of the writer. Indeed in this case the fear itself interrupts a previous, brief focus on another emotion: homesickness. The emotions follow each other, but they are not contextualized in any literal sense. They are a form of internal difference, interrupting and being interrupted by the flow of experience and retrospection, a flow which nowhere settles on a final term or narrative or method for understanding.

 

A similar effect of evoking a sense of strangeness with respect to emotions is present in this book with respect to love. “I was experiencing love, immensely relieved,” she writes in the twentieth section of the book. “It was, I know, an unparticular spirit of romance. She apologizes and seizes us in the grip of her inadequacies. Giving the back-up o.k. to the loaded semi” (55). The effect of parataxis here is related to but somewhat different from the way it was used in the sections about fear. There the break from sentence to sentence was an occasion of more or less total rupture, leading to an isolation of the emotion from any explanatory narrative context. Here the effect is one of potential connection or explanation. The experience of love is narrated and then followed by a judgment about it. Then comes an apology, which may be for the “unparticular spirit” of romance, but which is not very clearly connected to it. The strain of connecting each of the three sentences grows not weaker but stronger as the potentially explanatory contexts proliferate. And thus when the next sentence is about a semi going in reverse, there is a kind of comic release to the effort of tracking the speaker’s course of retrospection. Explanations, self-understanding have been playfully suggested but finally abandoned, and this leaves the emotion of love to be expressed in a way in which all of its strange power is left untamed by stories or theories about it or about the subject doing the retrospection.

 

So there are a number of ways that the text uses parataxis in relation to emotions to preserve for them a kind of strangeness and to keep for the project of retrospection a freedom from conventional stories of personhood. This is something that conceptual works do not do. Their non-expressive methods leave them without the kind of emotional substance that Hejinian has recourse to and which she can present in its waywardness and difference. And this makes her an exemplary subject for a cosmopolitanism that would found its sense of community on openness to the stranger.[2] What could better prepare one for or dispose one to connection and community with the stranger than the sense of being—with the energies of one’s imagination engaged—a stranger to oneself?

 

Interpretive Contexts

Before ending I’d like briefly to review the interpretive reception of My Life and suggest the value of interpreting the text as embodying a kind of strange subjectivity. This should allow me to give more substance to the suggestion that those experiences of estrangement are fruitful for contemporary cosmopolitanism in a way that conceptual poetry cannot be. Thus far, I would suggest, criticism of the poem has neglected this possibility in favor of celebrating the non-expressive dimensions of the poem. Three influential critics argue that the text is radically non-expressive and empowering to the reader because of its indeterminacy.

 

Craig Dworkin praises the work for its non-expressive “incomprehensibility”:

 

Ultimately, the visual pleasures of the irrevocably puzzled surface of the quilt offer a model for a reading of My Life that values the very “incomprehensibility” so often objected to in contemporary writingand so well illustrated by the deliberately fractured and fractal nature of Hejinian’s work. (59)

 

The deliberate fractures are to be celebrated by means of an analogy with a popular art form of the nineteenth century. Dworkin’s metaphor is original, but in the context of conceptual poetry’s non-expressive strategies, such a term as “incomprehensibility” fails to register the ways in which Hejinian’s text is carrying out an experience of elaborated estrangement. Praising the text for what it doesn’t do becomes less coherent in the context of conceptual poetry.

 

Similarly, Juliana Spahr celebrates a kind of indeterminacy that she sees the text as using to empower the reader:

 

My Life, through its attention to alternative and multiple ways of telling, refuses to invoke the transparent language conventions that often compose autobiography. It does not allow its readers to ask and then decide who Lyn Hejinian is but instead places them squarely within a representational crisis that forces them to attend to and interrogate their ways of interpreting and reading themselves. (143-4)

 

The representational crisis is presumably the by now familiar one in Language poetry, in which language becomes a field of disturbance of representation and coherence. For Spahr this is liberating to the reader, because he or she is pressed by analogy to reflect on his or her own processes of meaning-making. But again the celebration of what is not there in Hejinian’s text—a writer’s subjectivity—seems less significant for a tradition of poetry that includes conceptual work in which expression itself is radically negated.

 

Perloff in one of the first essays on My Life makes a similar argument:

 

That something else [going on in the work] may be defined as the creation of a language field in which “identity” is less a property of a given character than a fluid state that takes on varying shapes and that hence engages the reader to participate in its formation and deformation. (122)

 

So we have three critics who value the text for what it doesn’t do as much as for what it does do. In fact the two are very closely related. The absence of what Perloff calls “identity” becomes, through a process that none of the three critics explain in much detail, a source of liberation for the reader.

 

These three critics published their arguments in the 1990s, and so it’s probably unfair to expect them to have anticipated the challenge from conceptual writing, which has gained notoriety only in perhaps the last fifteen years or so. But their arguments do help us to see why the form of strange subjectivity that impels the text remains important. By seeking out a range of emotional experiences and memories to write about, Hejinian makes possible a form of being estranged from oneself that no conceptual work can offer, and that strangeness is in itself a challenge to the perceptions of the reader. Instead of being invited merely to interpret experience, as the celebration of her indeterminacies would have it, the text invites us to participate in an estrangement that can be a source of value for those who would call on literature to intensify and deepen the force with which a cosmopolitan community can be imagined.

 

Works Cited

 

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.

 

Bracher, Mark. Educating for Cosmopolitanism. New York: Palgrave, 2013. Print.

 

Calhoun, Craig. “Cosmopolitanism and nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 14.3 (2008): 427-448.

 

Delanty, Gerard. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2009.

 

De La Rose, Sybille and Darren O’Byrne. “Introduction.” The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities. Sybille De La Rosa and Darren O’Byrne, eds. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (1-9). Print.

 

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

 

Dworkin, Craig. “Penelope Reworking the Twill.” Contemporary Literature 36.1 (1995): 58-81. Print.

 

Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. Print.

 

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

 

Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: UC Press, 2000. Print.

- - -.    My Life. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987. Print.

 

Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius. U of Chicago P, 2010. Print.

- - -.    “’The Sweet Aftertaste of Artichokes. The Lobes of Autobiography.’” Denver Quarterly 25.4 (1991): 116-128. Print.

 

Robbins, Bruce. Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. Print.

 

Sobré-Denton, Miriam and Nilanjana Bardhan. Cultivating Cosmopolitanism for Intercultural Communication. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

 

Spahr, Juliana. “Resignifying Autobiography.” American Literature 68.1 (1996): 139-159. Print.