I should be reading,

but this was too provocative for me to sit any longer. An intervention must be made! :) I've been reading The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship by Bakhtin and Medvedev (Johns Hopkins, 1991). First, I'll briefly summarize the points made on pages 86-88 in the section entitled "The Apophatic Method of Determining the Characteristics of Poetic Language." 1. The formalists began with the notion that there are two distinct language systems: poetic language and practical language. 2. The formalists defined poetic language not by what it is but by what it is not (i.e., practical or communicative language). 3. This method is flawed and basically useless; we must define poetic language positively. The section ends: "In theology the apophatic method is understandable: god is unknowable, and it is therefore necessary to characterize him by what he is not. But we do not understand why a positive characterization cannot be made of poetic language" (88).

First, let me say that, a la Ferdinand deSaussure, all things are defined by what they are not (e.g., a glass is a glass because it is not a cup or a mug), so Bakhtin and Medvedov's anger and frustration, which is obvious from the diction, concerning this should more aptly be pointed at sign systems rather than the formalists. Given this, what Bakhtin and Medvedov consider to be the formalist's "method" is actually a description, not an argument but an observation. But let us not become preoccupied with this debate. In the next section Bakhtin and Medvedov clarify why they hold that this "method" has no value: "according to the formalists [...] poetic language only forces the perception of the already created, but imperceptible and automatized, construction" (89). In other words, they take the formalists' belief that poetic language should/does "make the construction of language perceptible" (Scklovskii), makes language difficult, foreign or alien, etc. as a way in which they lock themselves in to an endless cycle since "all that it will provide is the negation of some positive aspect of practical language" (87). By defining through difference, Bakhtin and Medvedov argue, one gets nowhere. They see this way of thinking about things as no different from asserting that similarities are important: "both assertions are equally arbitrary" (87). I don't see how this can be true. To examine similarities is to falsely believe that anything can be the same. Nothing is similar; everything is different: this is the radical (yet only because people have assumed for so long that things can be essentially the same) thing I feel we must all come to realize.

I have just one more note about these few pages. Bakhtin and Medvedov argue that all of this [what has been described above] "led the formalists to an important and fatal conclusion: if the only difference between poetic and practical language is that the construction of the former is perceptible owing to the negative devices enumerated above, then poetic language is absolutely unproductive and uncreative" (89, italics added). I only have one comment on this passage: exactly! (ed. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith. Against Expressionism: An Anthology of Uncreative/Conceptual Writing, Los Angeles: Make Now Press, forthcoming)