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46 charles bernstein Writing and Method Charles Bernstein was the coeditor, with Bruce Andrews, of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which they produced in chapbook format from 1978 to 1982. Radical in style as well as content ,the essays they published (and often commissioned) were intended to blur the distinction between poetry and poetics, writing and theory. This blurring of genres, and its larger philosophical justification, is developed in many of Bernstein’s essays, which have since been collected in several volumes. Influenced by Anglo-American philosophy (particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein and his American interpreter, Stanley Cavell) and continental philosophy (Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology appeared in translation in 1976), Bernstein takes up the long-standing debate between philosophy and literature,arguing for the literariness of philosophy and for the philosophical importance of literature. Citing predecessors from Montaigne and Thoreau to the manifestos of the avant-garde, Bernstein argues, in the first half of his essay, that literary writing should be taken as philosophically serious. In the second half of the essay (available in the online archive), Bernstein elaborates on a basic problem common to philosophical and poetic writing: that of unexamined, normative uses of language whose unquestioned status can have an atrophying impact on thinking.To investigate , rather than assume, forms of philosophy or poetry at their most fundamental level as writing is what Bernstein means by “method.” 1.The Limits of Style / The Possibilities of Phenomena An inquiry into the differences between philosophical and literary writing practices is of value insofar as it can shed light on both the nature of philosophy and poetry and, more importantly, on the development and implications of such genre or professional distinctions within writing and thinking. For what makes poetry poetry and philosophy philosophy is largely a tradition of thinking and writing, a social matrix of publications, professional associations , audience; more, indeed, facts of history and social convention than intrinsic necessities of the “medium” or “idea” of either one. So such an inquiry will end up being into the social meaning of specific modes of discourse, a topic that is both a stylistic resource for the writing of poetry and a content for philosophy. Philosophy has traditionally been concerned with the nature of the world and the possibilities of human knowledge of it; in a large sense, the nature of writing and method 47 perception, phenomenon, objects, mind, person, meaning, and action. Richard Kuhns, in his book about the affinities of philosophy and literature, Structures of Experience, writes,“Philosophy asks ‘What makes experience possible?’ and ‘What makes this kind of experience possible?’ Literature establishes the realities for which philosophy must seek explanations.” Kuhns bases the distinction between philosophy and literature on the appeal each makes,the address of the text. Philosophy is involved with an appeal to validity and argument (i.e., to impersonal, suprapersonal, “objective” abstractions, to logic) and poetry with an appeal to memory and synaesthesia (i.e., to the reader’s own experience ).Kuhns,then,is suggesting two different,though interrelated,modes of discourse. “Philosophy” requires “logical” argument and noncontradiction as basic textual modes of discourse; “poetry” seems to reject argument as essential , though of course it may “incorporate” argument. —Even were I to accept Kuhns’s traditional distinctions, which I do not, I would add that poetry can focus attention on the structure of meaning by the exemplification of structures of discourse—how the kind of discourse effects what can be said within it. Another traditional distinction between philosophy and poetry now sounds anachronistic: that philosophy is involved with system building and consistency and poetry with the beauty of the language and emotion. Apart from the grotesque dualism of this distinction (as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional!), this view imagines poetry and philosophy to be defined by the product of their activity, consistent texts in the one case, beautiful texts in the other. Rather, philosophy and poetry are at least equally definable not as the product of philosophizing and poetic thinking but, indeed , the process (the activity) of philosophizing or poetic thinking. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his “Self-Portrait at 70” (in Life/Situations) argues that while literature should be ambiguous, “in philosophy, every sentence should have only one meaning”; he even reproaches himself for the“too literary”language of Being and Nothingness, “whose language should have been strictly technical. It is the accumulation of technical phrases which creates the total meaning, a meaning which,” at this overall level...

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