Content’s Dreams: Essays 1975–1984 by Charles Bernstein (review)

philosophy behind all his essays. "Understanding the mechanisms of the symbolic in which we move means being political. Not understanding them leads to mistaken politics." And, we might add, mistaken politics leads to amoral and tyrannical worlds or, worse, deluded ones. Travels in Hyperreality marks Eco's attempt to avoid that fate. His is a trip worth taking, and a good read, too. Jordan Tamagni Content's Dreams: Essays 1975-1984 Charles Bernstein Sun and Moon Press; 465 pp.; $11.95 (paper) It is one of the scandals of our literary culture that the so-called "language" writers have been so scrupulously ignored by virtually all establishment editors, pundits, critics, and upholders of public taste. Charles Bernstein must be accounted a major literary theorist of his generation, but don't expect to find his articles in The New York Times or his poetry in The New Yorker. These essays range over a wide number of topics: the idea of representation , the fallacy of value-free, "objective" prose, canons of good taste, and such contemporary artists and writers as Arakawa, Louis Zukofsky, and Clark Coolidge. Throughout the collection, Bernstein offers a multivalent analysis of the various kinds of political discourse of our time. Bernstein's ideas are critical for any worker in the theatre because they assume language as act, as gesture, within the realm of performance. Bernstein sees performance as an everyday cultural phenomenon, as the field of a pervasive theatricalization that serves the interests of a deeply layered and politically repressive system. In a very real sense the "language" movement constitutes a spirited attack on all orders of official public decorum which, despite its facade of enlightened liberalism and toleration, is in these terms only a cabal of multinational interests, greed, sexism, racism and, in sum, Baudrillard's war of the nation-state against its own population . The reckless anarchy and good humor of essays like "Three or FourThings I Know About Him," the precision of "Living Tissue/Dead Ideas," and the sheer wacky openendedness of "The Conspiracy of 'Us' " present the possibility of a kind of criticism we see too rarely in the theatre, a benighted and provincial art still dominated by what Edward Said has termed a "discourse of structure and refinement." We need more of Bernstein's kind of intellectual wildness in the theatre. Mac Wellman 96 ...