The Language of Inquiry

A Common Sense

A Common Sense In various conversations over the years, Charles Bernstein has taken exception to my use of the term theory to apply to anything that poetry does. In part, as I understand him, he objects on the grounds that theory detaches itself from the object of its scrutiny and pretends to authority over it. And I suspect that he might also share Ludwig Wittgenstein’s view that theory has no practical value. (“For me,” Wittgenstein is quoted as saying, “a theory is without value. A theory gives me nothing.”)1 Having myself posited theory as a near-synonym for thought, I wanted to examine more carefully the problem that Charles Bernstein and Wittgenstein had identified, and the invitation to prepare a new paper on Gertrude Stein gave me an opportunity to do so. It seemed to me that the “meditative ” mode of the most difficult of Stein’s works, Stanzas in Meditation, might elucidate the problem, to the extent that there is one, with theory. What Wittgenstein meant in his denouncement of theory is that theory, as he uses the term, does not provide the rationale or justification for what we do. Nor is it a prerequisite for understanding. “Are people . . . ignorant of what they mean when they say ‘Today the sky is clearer than yesterday’? 355 Do we have to wait for logical analysis here? What a hellish idea!”2 Theory, then, for Wittgenstein is directly opposed to practice. Theory is a rope employed where a link is lacking: “Things must connect directly, without a rope, i.e. they must already stand in a connection with one another, like the links of a chain.”3 As Ray Monk in his biography of Wittgenstein points out, “Wittgenstein ’s abandonment of theory was not . . . a rejection of serious thinking , of the attempt to understand, but the adoption of a different notion of what it is to understand—a notion that . . . stresses the importance and the necessity of ‘the understanding that consists in seeing connections.’”4 In seeing connections? It would be ludicrously arrogant for me to dispute Wittgenstein on semantic grounds, but it seems to me that this is precisely what theory does. And this is, indeed, different from what practice does— which is to make connections, to forge links. Theory asks what practice does and in asking, it sees the connections that practice makes. Poetic language, then, insofar as it is a language of linkage , is a practice. It is practical.5 But poetry, insofar as it comments on itself (and poetic form is, among other things, always a poem’s self-commentary), is also theoretical. Theoretical thought examines, theoretical thought makes meaningful. It takes into account and in doing so it makes what it is thinking about count. But there is a difference between thinking about and thinking, and thinking itself is meaningful too. Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation is a poem in which thinking takes place in and of itself. It posits thinking as an “in and of” activity— a mindfulness, a casting of the mind in action. Neither in practice nor in theory is thinking separate nor separating; it is precisely the opposite, a mode of nonseparation, of conjunction. Stanzas in Meditation is, in this regard, a practice of theory and a theory of practice. The conference, “Gertrude Stein at the Millennium,” at which this paper was given was itself a model of conjunction. It took place on February 5–7, 1998, at Washington University in St. Louis, and was curated by Steven 356 / The Language of Inquiry Meyer, who decided in favor of emphasizing the artistic character of scholarship . In addition to Marjorie Perloff, Ulla Dydo, and Catherine Stimpson, all notable Stein scholars, participants included Joan Retallack, Jacques Roubaud , Stan Brakhage, Harryette Mullen, Kenneth Koch, William Gass, and Anne Bogart (under whose direction both a play about Gertrude Stein and a play by her were performed). Publication of the proceedings from the conference will hopefully take place in the near future. If I liked what it is to choose and choose It would be did it matter if they close and choose But they must consider that they mean which they may If to-day if they find that it went every day to stay And what next. What is it when they wonder if they know That it means that they are careful if they do what they show And needless and...