Mark Dery on Fri, 25 May 2001 03:25:31 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Striking at the Heart of the Grammar Police State |
Such axe grinding! Such score settling! Such hair-on-fire fulminating about the grammar police's plans to stomp the ePoetry out of the "language" (I use the term advisedly, in deference to Ken) and pack off to Safire's resettlement camps every free spirit whose effusions are simply too, like, wired, d00d---too *now*, too *retribalized* (props to McLuhan) to be shackled by the mind-forged manacles of your deadening conventions, Grammar Man. Why, Nettime hasn't been so lively since Mark Stahlman's last installation of the Protocols of the Elders of Barlow. Still, a few reasonable voices, unburdened by lovingly nursed grudges and personal fatwahs, struggle to make themselves heard, first and foremost Ken Wark's. Amid the hail of rotten eggs and ad hominem invective, a vitally important issue can be glimpsed: 1. IS A CALL FOR CLARITY AND CONTEXT IN NETTIME POSTS REALLY A TROJAN HORSE FOR A CULTURAL-CONSERVATIVE AGENDA WHOSE ULTIMATE GOAL IS THE IMPOSITION OF SOUL-SHRIVELING GRAMMATICAL AND STYLISTIC STANDARDS INTENDED TO SUFFOCATE ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, AVANT-GARDE INNOVATION, AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY (BE IT AFRICAN-AMERICAN, DIASPORIC, FEMINIST, NON-ANGLOPHONIC "ENGLISHES," OR WHATEVER)? Obviously not. One can be a grammatical/stylistic conservative *and* a political liberal/radical. Noam Chomsky and William Safire---whose politics (Safire's) I find puerile, whose grammar columns I find dryly amusing, and whose style I find enviably lucid, on balance---are brothers under the skin when it comes to their mutual insistence on brevity and clarity in writing. I take my masterful style wherever I can find it, from James Baldwin to Jello Biafra, Katha Pollitt to Georges Bataille, Mike Davis to Samuel Delany, Christopher Hitchens to David Brooks. It's one of life's cruel jokes that moral slime molds (like Celine!) can, at their best, write peerless prose that scalds the mind's eye and sears the brain, while earnest progressives, on the side of the angels, can turn out writing so grammatically mangled and stylistically clotted that reading it guarantees all the effortless pleasures of snowboarding through quick-drying cement. This bitter irony should in fact be a balm for the souls of post-structuralists, for whom the obsolescence of binary oppositions is a received truth. Tarring as a paleoconservative Babbitt anyone who argues in favor of grammatical and stylistic standards is the first refuge of the knee-jerk ideologue. Here as elsewhere, the old bourgeois/boho dualism simply doesn't serve us anymore. In fact, I'd argue that the pro forma boho argument---namely, that the defense of grammatical and stylistic standards is inherently elitist and reactionary (an argument that is getting a little creaky in the joints after being dragged around the dancefloor by over a century's worth of avant-gardists)---too often masks the *parallel elitism* of the avant-garde, whose contempt for the clueless booboisie was a salient of intellectual life throughout the modern age. Insisting on the fundamental importance of *self-expression*, in writing, the vanguardist argument consigns to the dustbin of history (in ironically WIRED-esque style!) those who Don't Get It. The burden of responsibility is shifted from writer to reader. In contrast, insisting on the primacy of *communication* in writing seems to me inherently democratic (or at least populist). Let's return to the scene of the crime: Sondheim's post, which I seized on as emblematic of an unfortunate tendency on Nettime. The post in question was expressive, in its own way, but not effectively communicative. How was the reader to know that the speaking subject was shifting, from line to line? Was the "I" Sondheim, or each animal, or some transcendental poster child for Nature, encompassing all the creatures in Sondheim's Whitmanesque epic catalogue? What was the source of the material in quotes? The debate, here, isn't about whether language is a figment of the linguistic imagination---which is, incidentally, separate from the "englishes" debate. There's the notion that language is really a theoretical extrapolation of disparate instrumental effects, on the ground. There's the notion that "official" language, scrutinized up close, reveals itself to be a heterogeneous collection of dialects, professionalized argots, and the like. There's the notion that, in the Net age, local corruptions of English are subverting and appropriating it even as English becomes the lingua franca of a creeping corporate monoculture, the world over. To my mind, none of these arguments really relates to the issues raised by the Sondheim post, which wasn't an interrogation of the essential nonexistence of language, nor a challenge to the hegemony of an "official" version of the Mother Tongue (like, say, the BBC's standard English). Rather, it was one man's (quasi-autobiographical?) attempt to come to grips with Homo sap's unhappy tropism toward anthropomorphosis---our tendency to see our glory reflected in the eyes of the beasts of the field, or to ventriloquize them as furry actors in our morality plays. My point was apposite: Nettime isn't a mirror, reflecting our diary entries and dream-journal jottings and Notes To Myself, in ASCII. It's one-to-many medium, with two thousand minds on the other end. There's a sweet irony in a post that decries the use of Nature as a mirror to reflect our world-view, yet replicates that very tendency in its self-absorbed style. This is the moment where the personal (style) *does* become political. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net