Strategizing the Ordinary

Review Article JED RASULA Strategizing the Ordinary Marjorie Perloff. WittgeJ1stein's Ladder. Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary University of Chicago Press 1996. xviii, 286 $us27.95 cloth While Wittgenstein's Ladder does not purport to surveyor assess the current theoretical landscape, its protagonist is made out to be an avatar of the following concepts: contingency, the everyday, cultural production, serial form, praxis as value, and decomposition of the centred subject. PerloH's success prompts certain questions: Is the theoretical environment of academe so pervasive that its issues insinuate themselves into any responsible scholar's work, even when not specifically evoked by way of theoretical charter? Or might it be that the university environment is especially porous to issues of public concern, such that even a scrupulously dose reader and literary historian like PerloH - whose work is generally uninflected by political rhetoric- will come to the conclusion (in this case quoted from the artist Joseph Kosuth) 'Ethics and aesthetics are one' (242)? As with Perloff's other works, Wittgenstein's Ladder is a web of affiliations, a network swelling to potential dynasty. Here the radiant cluster of her vortex consists of Wittgenstein, Gertrude Stein, Beckett, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Creeley, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joseph Kosuth; and along the way she demotes Bertrand Russell, Marinetti, Stanley Fish, and Lyotard (whose relevance to her project, however, she misconstrues). Certain omissions appear obvious, given the subtitie, 'Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary': James Joyce, and Frank O'Hara (whose absence is striking, given that Perloff once published a monograph on his poetry). Given her long-standing enthusiasm for language poetry, Perloff's evasion of the work of Bruce Andrews is conspicuous in this context; nnd the poetry of Leslie Scalapino, Norman Fisher, and Charles Stein, among others, would contribute a telling Buddhist orientation to the problem of the decentred subject, a topic which Hejinian's work is awkwardly forced to signify by itself. The most troubling lacuna here is Don Byrd's major study The Poetics of the Common Knowledge (1994), whiCh not only makes pragmatic and enlightening use of virtually the same co-ordinates from Wittgenstein, but UNIVERSITY Of TORONTO QUARTERLV, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 3, SUMMER 1998 716 JED RASULA elaborately addresses as apoetics the philosophical consequences of 'the strangeness of the ordinary/ and does so in the context of the dissident lineage in American poetry. There is no rectifying so blatant a gap (though I would hope to see PerIoH address Byrd's account some day), other than to urge readers of Wittgenstein's Ladder to seek out Byrd's Poetics. Byrd's book, no less than Perloff's, can be seen as a prolonged scrutiny ofWittgenstein's speculation, 'Why do I not satisfy myself that 1have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don't. This is how I act' (Perloff, 114). Perloff's approach to Wittgenstein is an extension of her long-standing interest in modernism (The Futurist Momel1t and The Poetics of Indeterminacy being most salient): 'Wittgenstein comes to us as the ultimate modernist outsider, the changeling who never stops reinventing himself' (7). Her reading of the Tractatus as a war book is audacious and convincing. The persuasiveness of her readings of specific texts, along with her documentation of dozens of works 'written under the sign of Wittgenstein' (6), would appear to put this enigmatic Viennese in the ascendancy for any further reflections on twentieth-century art. But there is a dimension to Wittgenstein's presence that cannot be so tidily accommodated to modernism, even so elastic a modernism as Perioff espouses. By confining her historical scope to the twentieth century, she omits instructive precedents, not least of which is the uncannily Wittgensteinian milieu of the Jena Romantics and their adamant 'unphilosophy.' Fortuitously, Andrew Bowie's study of the pertinence of this legacy makes not only a valuable, but I would say necessary, supplement to Perloff's claims on behalf of the ordinary. The point is not that Wittgenstein rehashes German Romanticism (nor does Bowie make such a suggestion, though reading his book alongside PerlafE'sit is striking how closely...