Table Of ContentExperimental
HSM HHopkOinsP StKudIieNs inS M odSerTniUsmDIES IN MODERNISM
Douglas Mao, Series Editor
HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERNISM
HSM HOPKINS STUDIES IN MODERNISM
Experimental
American Literature and the
Aesthetics of Knowledge
Natalia Cecire
Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore
© 2019 Natalia Aki Cecire
All rights reserved. Published 2019
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xix
1 Experimental 1
The Double Period of Experimental Writing 2
Language: Representing and Intervening 9
Epistemic Virtues and the Abstraction of
Knowledge 14
Romantic and Other Precedents 24
Experimental Writing Is a White Recovery Project 29
The Language of the Future 39
2 Flash 48
A Momentary Gleam of Light: Flash’s Time 51
An Abstract of the World: Flash’s Condensation 57
Black Riders: Flash’s Chiaroscuro 65
Faces in the Crowd: Figuration, Redemption,
Information 69
3 Objectivity 81
Bad Scientist: The Harvard Psychological Laboratory
and Bottom Natures 84
Camera Work: Vision and Female Objectivity 91
“To Make Confusion Clear”: Wandering and
Objectification 100
Seeing Clear: Portraits and Repetition 115
vi Contents
4 Precision 118
The First Grace of Style 122
Natural History; or, the Principle That Is Hid 127
Open Secrets of the Natural World 133
Various Scalpels 141
Distrust of Merits 155
5 Contact 160
Contact and First Contact 163
Nakedness and the Form of Contact 167
Recovery, Salvage, and the Untimeliness of
Contact 173
The Final Frontier 180
Coda. Future Texts 186
Notes 201
Bibliography 249
Index 285
Preface
There is no such thing as experimental writing, and this is a book about it.1
When I began this project as a graduate student in the San Francisco Bay
Area, several years ago, I quite understandably believed that experimental
writing was A Thing, with an intellectual genealogy crossing the sciences
and the arts that I could, with enough pluck, trace. I thought I could histori-
cize American experimentalism by picking up the trail that Language writers,
including a beloved advisor, had left me: Pound, Stein, Williams, Zukofsky,
Olson, Creeley, Coolidge, okay. I assumed that this would involve a forward-
moving trajectory and a single, contiguous historical period, albeit with iso-
lated antecedents further in the past. What I learned was: yes and no.
“Experimental” is a word that still has enormous power and meaning;
it does work. In that sense, it’s A Thing. The argument of this book, though,
is that the work “experimental” does is bound up in a series of ideologies
about writing, language, aesthetics, politics, knowledge, science, and above
all, modernity, many of which have been seriously thrown into question by
the people who think about each of these things for a living. As a conse-
quence, this book on one hand maps the ideologies that gave experimental-
ism its power and, on the other hand, argues that, in fact, much of the work
that “experimental” does is not tenable, or shouldn’t be.
Let’s take science, just for starters—a contentious, emotionally charged
concept that carries twin connotations of virtue and danger. The consensus
among historians of science is that science is, well, historical. That means,
in particular, that it’s not autonomous, not isolated from the material con-
ditions under which it’s conducted, the politics of who is allowed to do it or
whose observations are counted as legitimate and whose are not, or the
social conditions that shape what does and does not look like verification in
a particular place and time. Bruno Latour’s pithy formulation of this princi-
viii Preface
ple is that “we have never been modern”—by which he means that nature
has never been separable from culture.2 That’s easy enough to accept in the
abstract, but the implications are slightly more challenging: that there is
no scientific result that is not at least in part a result of the historical con-
ditions that made it; that we can hope for goodness in the sciences but
never purity, never autonomy. This doesn’t square with the formalist ac-
count of “the” scientific method that many of us were taught in school or
the earnest belief that (Western, modern) science “carv[es] nature at its
joints” (usually because it “works,” as evidenced in consumer technologies
—never mind that many other things also “work”).3 So when, in literature,
“experimental” is used to mean “scientific” (in whatever sense), often what
is happening is that aesthetic autonomy is being snuck in through the back
door in the form of scientific autonomy—an autonomy that never really ex-
isted. And more: our belief in scientific autonomy is a historical product of
several processes, including nineteenth- and twentieth-century pro-science
advocacy that aimed to formalize and institutionalize these knowledge
practices as authoritative. I am not saying anything new to even a casual
reader of history of science by pointing this out; I am only considering its
logical consequences for literary history. Insofar as it operates as a proxy for
aesthetic autonomy, we can therefore understand the making of scientific
autonomy as part of the history of literary experimentalism.
My aim in this book, then, is not so much to offer an account of what
experimentalism “really” means as to examine where we get the idea that
it means anything in the first place—or why we would want literature to do
epistemological work at all. The question that I most wish to unfold across
these chapters is why “experimental” means “good,” when it does mean good
(which it often does). When does “experimental” mean aesthetically good,
epistemologically good, politically good—and when does it mean making
one kind of goodness a proxy for, or guarantee of, another?
My method is more or less to take Language writing and the “experi-
mental” discourse around it at its word when it claims that certain early
twentieth- century writers were experimental, to ask what that means, and
to ask what made that writing available to such a reading—without, how-
ever, endorsing the implications of calling these works experimental, with
an analytical (indeed, critical) eye toward the virtues of experimentalism. I
focus almost entirely on early twentieth-century writers (sometimes dipping
back into the Gilded Age) who have come to be canonized as “experimen-
tal,” with a few edge cases. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos
Preface ix
Williams, who appear in chapters 2, 3, and 5, are central figures in the stan-
dard story of who is an experimental American writer. A few others are edge
cases or typically appear in different discourses: Stephen Crane and Jacob
Riis, considered alongside Pound; Gottlob Frege, considered alongside Stein;
Marianne Moore, readily admitted to the “experimental” canon when named
but almost never considered central, whom I examine alongside the chore-
ographer Busby Berkeley and a few others in chapter 4. In this way, I take
three pillars of a retrospective genealogy created in the 1970s and 1980s
and fill around them with contemporaries who seem to me to be part of the
same pattern.
It is important to note that none of these writers called themselves ex-
perimental with any regularity. Instead, something about their writing, think-
ing, and historical milieu made them a usable past for later writers who
were very much invested in the idea of being experimental. My approach,
then, understands these writers’ experimentalism palimpsestically, as be-
longing in part to their moment and in part to the way that they were later
read (and misread). In this, I build on Leif Sorensen’s insightful exploration
of the ways that literary “recovery” produces objects that are of two periods
at once—the period of their making and that of their recovery. I understand
the experimental “lineage” as a recovery project, parallel to but distinct
(often excruciatingly distinct) from feminist, Black, Chicano, and other re-
covery projects. I thus read this early twentieth-century writing in relation
to the epistemic virtues that it performs, which are, I argue, the key to un-
derstanding how the idea of experimental writing came to function in such
contradictory ways. In particular, epistemic virtues explain why experimen-
talism so often succeeds in confusing varieties of goodness, such that the
“politics of form” could, for a time, come to be associated more with the
writers I study here—writers whose politics generally range from muddled
to terrible—than, say, more overtly political writers such as Lucille Clifton
or Adrienne Rich.
Epistemic virtues organize this book and help to unfold the bases on
which experimental writing has been valorized. I borrow the term “epistemic
virtue” from the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison,
who in their 2007 monograph on objectivity explain it as a value containing
ethical as well as epistemological valences. The performance of epistemic
virtue works to bring specific practices under the sign of science (that is,
knowledge with a privileged purchase on reality). “Objectivity,” for exam-
ple, is never neutral; in the production of scientific knowledge, objectivity
