BUILDING A MORE POWERFUL VOCABULARY: BRUCE ANDREWS AND THE WORLD (TRADE CENTER) ICONOCLASM AND ITS DISCONTENTS Not many days after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the New York Times ran an article discussing the structure of the building and the possibilities of its being brought down by a larger and more thoughtfully placed explosion. It turns out not to be easy: apparently, each tower is built to withstand the impact of a fully loaded jet liner taking off. In addition to the strength of the structure, attackers would have to confront its complexity: there are twenty-one load- bearing pillars and they could not be reached simultaneously by the force of an explosion. In being destroyed, a particular section would in fact shield other areas by absorbing the impact. The timing and placement of the article is interesting in itself: it was a rapid-response anodyne to the spiral of geopolitical urban trauma while at the same time, under the cover of a discussion of engineering, it invited its readers to participate in transgressive calculations of how the Trade Center towers might actually be brought down. Translations of violence to paper are hard to make convincing. Literary revolutions may be hard to pull off on the page, but it is much harder to translate any of their energy from the page to the outside world. I am invoking the bombing here, however, to begin to consider the structure of the problem that Bruce Andrews has been confronting in his work over the last two decades and particularly in a recent book, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism). Andrews has been one of the more visible language writers, publishing over twenty chapbooks and books of poetry, and co-editing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine with Charles Bernstein in the late 70s and early 80s as well as The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. In his criticism he has been insistent on the politicization of poetry, attacking conventional writing as the signature of laissez-faire politics; his poetry has been highly disjunct in syntax, semantics, and typography. I Don't Have Any Paper marks a significant change in his work: while it is still resolutely antinarrative, it ventures into the most charged and obvious areas of contemporary politics in easily legible and very aggressive ways. In I Don't Have Any Paper the bombs may be verbal and their targets metaphorical, but the scale and complexity of what Andrews is trying to bring down presents him with a conundrum whose social geometry is similar to the physical geometry that ultimately contains a bomb blast: whatever he destroys tends to shield contiguous and remote areas. Of course, this is all just a metaphor. Does "destroy" here simply resolve to "ironize"? Before turning to I Don't Have Any Paper, I want to look at an article of Andrews', "Constitution / Writing, Language, Politics, the Body," that provides a good summary of his intentions, constructive and destructive, for writing. I will also cite two passages from his earlier and subsequent poetry; these will demonstrate the difficulties of linking radical politics with radical poetics. The article makes clear that Andrews does not share my perception of these difficulties and that, for him, writing and politics are to be one thing. Such strong claims have given quite a charge to the reception of language writing. The strength of Andrews' claims on politics will not, however, rule out messy complications. As is the case with any critique, the object of his dissatisfaction is in better focus than the kinds of activity he ultimately wants to see. He criticizes "conventional literature (the novel as exemplar)," whose goal, he says, "is clarity, transparency; the medium should go away, leave no trace," and instead be "a direct window on the world." This results in "a laissez-faire order, presided over by the invisible hand of language (as if it were hegemonic Great Britain in the nineteenth century.)" It leaves no room for change: "The world is already constituted, and that is that. Not this, but that" (155). Andrews asks, "If writing as an art activity is reduced to this, what are the political implications-- the politics of this, and I don't mean literary politics." Writing, that is, does not have a separable literary politics. The politics of normative writing are, he writes, complacency; they "reinforce the sinews and consequences of the social world--its facticity, its thickness, its naturalness, its obviousness, its massiveness, its resistance to change" (156). I'll leave aside for now the question of how reified Andrews' own dismissal of conventional literature is. After all, Ryder, Midnight's Children, and The Bonfire of the Vanities are all novels, but however direct or mediated a connection we might want to make between writing and politics, Djuna Barnes, Salman Rushdie, and Tom Wolfe would seem to represent very different political agendas. (Applied to certain areas of contemporary poetry, Andrews' critique of transparency seems to me more valid.) Against the inertia of normativity he proposes "a structuralist anti-system poetics" (157) that would disrupt transparent reference. His call for disruption is itself disruptive: a poetics of subversion. nomenclature ... / dishevel . Tumult verbal . secular violation . [. . . my ellipsis] uses bad language / anarchy otherwise . non-signs . To oppose the structural underpinnings by an anti-systematic detonation--dizzying ... elasticize ... by flashes ... non-signs ...scrambled--by a blowing up of all settled relations. sentence can dislocate . mangled matter" (158-9). But Andrews recognizes the problem that his call for such subversion raises. By its processes of interchangeability multinational capital has already produced a radical dislocation of particulars. Marx's "All that is solid melts into air" can in fact be read as saying that capitalism is constantly blowing up its own World Trade Centers in order to build newer ones. If this is true, then "to call for a heightening of these deterritorializing tendencies may risk a more homogenizing meaninglessness . . . an 'easy rider' on the flood tide of Capital" (159). This is a difficult position to avoid. As markets become saturated there is a steady demand for flashier items that are also firmly saleable. The processes of commodification are ubiquitous and can make the seque from Jackson Pollock to new formica patterns seem as inevitable as the seasons. In attempting to avoid such aesthetic innocuousness, Andrews pins his hopes on the body. It is not the site of identity or self-expression; rather, it is something of a utopian counterweight to the various registers of false rhetoric he feels surrounded by. He calls for a writing whose "reception is by bodies" (163); but this is not a writing which is "a blandly 'communicative' or 'expressive' act, for too often what is 'expressed' and 'communicated' is not the doer position but a previous social construction, of more and more dubious value" (162). Neither his earlier work nor a subsequent book, Tizzy Boost, are at all "blandly communicative"; the levels of disjunction are quite high. Here are two small samples: let me see if I can remember staccato mildews outings be hooked illusory workplace obstreperous schizophrenia & 'free' to not interested in warmth I'm dreaming extra evince singers move the side effects but as yet lesbians of the his cha Effort sucks duty get up get into get involved sound politics peristaltic jockey crotch down how many crawl manufactured in Hollywood male voices depiction obsolete ? from "I Guess Work the Time Up" ? The radius leaks back payments, we promise two fingers clever fronting plus or minus as if surface could luxury confiding tongues fail with failure, bacterial atonement ethics by its sound -- Tizzy Boost, section 19 It is difficult to assign excerpts any particular relation to any particular politics, especially excerpts like these. It might be possible to deduce from the vocabulary or from the syntactic rupture that Andrews' concerns are political. But it would be a fairly innocuous deduction, one that would be most likely to be made by those readers who are already prepared to grant such disjunct surfaces a politics; such readers would likely be those who know Andrews' poetry, his essays, and what he stands for. But for readers who are not familiar with Andrews the politics of such writing would probably be difficult to fathom. With I Don't Have Any Paper, on the other hand, the political dimension is much more obvious, and as a result the consequences are more obvious as well. It is a highly charged writing that bristles with problematic political statements at all points. But if I Don't Have Any Paper is so 'political' that all excerpts will show it clearly, to determine what Andrews' politics are in the book is another story. In my reading I want to keep in mind relations between two of Andrews' prior terms: "the doer position," implying a sense of social activism, and "a previous social construction," which I take to indicate inherited possibilities of identity. Between these two lies a large question: Is the political agency of poetry in Andrews' project compatible with any assertion of identity ? In I Don't Have Any Paper maintaining the "doer position" requires a high dosage of transgression. Verbal violence is continuous, occuring almost word to word. It's as if "previous social constructions"--older identities, normative phrases--are threatening to coalesce every moment. I'll start with a small phrase: "cathartic cuckold in ballroom needs no Hitler" [230]. One could call this humor, politics, performative rhetoric, or poetry, but it can also be read as a series of explosions targeted at what Andrews perceives as the clear windows of normative writing and the promises of culture value displayed behind those windows: "cathartic" is directed against notions of Aristotelian tragedy and, following from that, Arnoldianism, Great Books as foundation of university curricula; "cuckold" attacks marriage, faithfulness, sacramental heterosexuality, the pathos of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses; "in ballroom" is aimed at Lawrence Welk, respectable bourgeois sublimation; "needs no Hitler" attacks, I think, political rhetorics that posit Hitler as the absolute of evil that allows us to look at the Hitler-less present as relatively safe and sane. This is a lot of cultural structure to try to explode. The fact that almost every phrase in the book continues such demolition indicates how hard it is to achieve the impact Andrews wants. A basic conundrum surfaces: don't such attacks tend to reinforce their target at least as much as they explode it? It is a perpetually reemerging presence, there in every phrase. There is a great difference between reading the book and quoting a sentence from it; I don't know how my ventriloquy of Andrews's attacks will strike those who aren't familiar with his work. I Don't Have Any Paper is 250 pages long; each page is dense and the sentences or lines (the typography is a hybrid of prose and verse) are complex. By itself, "cathartic cuckold in ballroom needs no Hitler" could be read with Hitler remaining a firm moral term: the cathartic cuckold won't fall prey to fascism. But if it is read in bulk, construing the book for such resolutions won't work. The phrase occurs in the following context: grub sits sharp -- pull crabs from brainpan; the demolished call had Israeli diplomatic plates. Squint to think psychology becomes multinational; death to sin or sin to death semantic bluff. Jet jack video the dwarfs alone no wrongdoing by any judge -- neural tune, pope's nose--to the swift completion of their appointed rounds--cathartic cuckold in ballroom needs no Hitler. Maybe normal happiness is what I dread; treat all men with unspeakable contempt. [230] Another 'fascism' passage reads as follows: I love these obvious things. Please, darling my knees are on Marx -- and this is not indicative of what we most want -- we should have gone to multi-themes! Make the corrections with your fist in the socket, the transformation of Africa into a plantation for the commerical hunting of black skins -- diabetes. Brown & black sales pitch: the East is Red, milk makes you deposit. Poignant exile by screeching weekend Nazis, makeup for pets stupids wound; we're just the units of a self reproductive system--we're part of the methods. [150] I put scare quotes around 'fascism' because it seems that one of the goals of these passages is to neutralize the moral certainties around such words as "Nazis." Andrews's target is not some specific set of attitudes in the cultural and corporate Western world, but their sum: "psychology" has become "multinational"; the individual is "just a unit in a self-reproducing system." Andrews dreads, not just "normal happiness," but all laissez- faire acceptance of the boundaries of this unit. Taste is one of the principal bulwarks against which the writing hurls itself. On every page there are phrases such as "Tear-gas the middle class. Blondes have more enemas." (171) or "why don't I just squeeze some of my pimple juice into your herpes scar?" But grossness is just a subset of the larger desire for disruption of perceived systems of control. These include the largest social constructs (government, the law) as well as the details of these constructs (lawyers playing squash). But equally important targets for Andrews are the control-systems implanted within literacy: he is continually disrupting expectations for well-formed sentences, narrative, and consistent sequences of imagery: why don't I just squeeze some of my pimple juice into your herpes scar? Squash courts of the mind under penalty of law, total chaos! -- yeah -- cellular difficulty would sound great. Happy Pilgrim Trails to you! Slobs at the red bar -- cataracts! Dog-doo government is corrupt cough control through colonization, crucifix, big wampum. You just have no respect for people as cultural artifacts; I just lost my U.N. seat. (151) In such a corrosively ironic text, it is hard to take any phrase at face value; nevertheless I think it is safe to say that Andrews has no respect for people as cultural artifacts and that he is glad to have lost his U.N. seat. This signals a major divide between some multicultural and experimental writing, though great allowance must be made for nuances and outright exceptions. But--to make a stark comparison--when Andrews is compared with Maya Angelou a specific distinction will emerge. CULTURAL AND AESTHETIC IDENTITIES On most maps of poetry terrains, the distance between Andrews and Angelou makes for a very wide stretch, of course: their audiences, aesthetics, publishing networks, levels of cultural visibility are vastly different. But the question of political identity will make for a common focus. For Andrews the boundaries of the individual present no obstacle to the penetration of global capital: the individual is just a unit of larger forces. Formal innovation becomes a primary site of resistance; any nostalgia for individuality is insidious. For Angelou, the boundaries of the individual are the site of contestation. There is a true yearning to respond to The singing River and the wise Rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African, the Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The Privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the Tree. There are many reasons why Andrews will not be invited to read at any forseeable inauguration, but high on the list would be the intensity of his aggression towards such acceptance of the range of ethnic and cultural identities that Angelou's poem celebrates. The categories themselves and especially their aestheticization--Jew/Sioux; Greek/Sheikh; Teacher/Preacher--are primary targets of Andrews' writing. I Don't Have Any Paper was written before Clinton's inauguration; nevertheless, the following passage serves well as a hypothetical response to Angelou's multiculturalism and as an example of Andrews' anticulturalism: "We gave the Jews Israel so let's give Puerto Rico to the Palestinians & then have some Finlandization of Canada. Obvious algebraic suicide, am unopposed, squealch-a-roni platitudes as tinder box; would you prefer infantilization or pedestalization? Exception! Clean soot from punt" [189]. Andrews undoubtedly would define Angelou's poem as squealch-a-roni platitudes: a blandness that is ultimately a tinderbox. But what are his politics here, apart from critique? Does his writing take a position on the Palestinians, or French Quebec? If we take these sentences as discursive, and not as art, then they seem to say that nationalism is a dead end: "Obvious algebraic suicide." Identity politics, as I am reading this passage, offers poor alternatives. "Would you prefer infantilization or pedestalization?" I.e., Do you still beat your wife? Do you still read your Keats? But how read the politics of "Exception!"? Surely the individuality of American exceptionalism is exactly not what Andrews is touting. Not that we are supposed to treat any one sentence as the site of Andrews' position. But given the book's opposition to narrative and its insistent phrasal pulse, any one sentence or phrase becomes by default the recursive site of agency, whether political or literary. The passage retreats to a safe (pronounless) haven of exciting active sound, a kind of klangfarbenmelodie: "clean soot from punt." These last four words may remind some readers--they do me--of the percussive abstraction of Clark Coolidge's work. I want to turn briefly to a recent poem by Coolidge and Larry Fagin because it will shed light from a different angle on the troubling political terrain surrounding the intersection of formal experiment and identity poetics. It will also demonstrate that the tensions in I Don't Have Any Paper are not simply the result of a personal gripe. Coolidge and Fagin wrote a parody of Angelou's inaugural poem that uses an OuLiPo method of defamilization. Every noun Angelou used was replaced by a noun five words removed in the dictionary. Thus the passage I quoted earlier becomes: There is a true yawn to respond to The singing Roach and the wise Rock Crystal. So say the Ash Can, the Hippogriff, the Jetsam, The Afterbirth, the Native American Legion, the Sinner, The Catnip, the Musskellunge, the Freezer, the Great White Way, The Ipso Facto, the Quota, the Prima Donna, the Sheet, The Gavel, the Stovepipe, the Prawn, The Prism, the Homburg, the Taxi. They hear. They all hear The spatter of the Tree of Heaven. If Andrews is playing with fire in a decentered, all-over fashion, Coolidge and Fagin are, with these substitutions, picking up specific burning brands one after the other. Some of the changes are particularly charged: Asian = Ash Can; Native American = Native American Legion; Rabbi = Quota, etc. To any identifying reader these substitutions might feel like insulting jokes. But if one tried to ascribe a particular location to the source of the insult, it wouldn't be easy. This isn't Andrew Dice Clay joking about faggots, or a racist attack. It is the dictionary's random speech. If we allow ourselves the double vision that the parody assumes, the oddness of the results can be funny. The alphabetic proximity of "Catholic" to "Catnip" or of "Gay" to "Gavel" furnishes a compact display of the arbitrariness of language. And then there's a second level, on which the arbitrary suddenly becomes paradoxically meaningful. Being gay will mean, for the next few decades, dealing with courtrooms and gavels directly or indirectly; "stovepipe" is a surprisingly good nickname for "straight," both geometrically and with its New England crackerbarrel connotations. But we shouldn't lose sight of the basic fuel of the parody, which is a great dissatisfaction with the coalition of identities that Angelou is positing, and the emphatic rejection of its rhetoric that works with established cadences and symbols, not single words. I imagine that it was the specific inclusiveness of Angelou's poem, plus its being officially recognized as poetry by an incoming administration, that triggered the desire to pull the rug from under it. I doubt that it would have seemed like a particularly good idea to redo, say, Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time." But for all of its vocabularistic satire on names and specific identities, the subject position from which "The Unaugural Poem" is funny is itself specific: it is one where all resources of language are present and equally available: the writer must be able to take possession of all the words in the dictionary without any moments of alienation. There is one restriction involved, however: all particular identification has to be eliminated. Any investment in present tense collectivities--or to put it another way, any present tense political identity--is banished. To parody Angelou is to reject a unification of poetry and politics of a far different kind than Andrews calls for. But if political poetry is defined as having an effect beyond the purely literary sphere, then Angelou's unificiation has a much stronger grip on the title than Andrews' aggressiveness. Rock, river, and tree used as large symbols may grate on a spectrum of poetic sensibilities, but as political speech their vacuousness can be seen is strategic and as forming vehicles for more specific messages. She used her momentary political capital to recite a rhythmic call for a multicultural coalition with anti-militarist overtones. How much efficacy we want to grant these overtones is a question. Directly opposing such inclusiveness, Andrews trashes any autonomy of social parts based on race, class, gender, or sex: "Why should he like guys?--he's no lesbian" [276]; "Synapses hate grooves, they hate them = social relations are overrated. My mind . . . is not here today; when did the liberals run out of money? Defoliated hopes of the branding iron, all ethnicity is a virus; irony is for squares" [194]. Yet the consistent dismissal of identity doesn't alter the fact that Andrews is writing in a world that is as least as striated and segmented as Angelou's. It is hard to read for many lines without encountering markers of race, class, gender, or sex. But they are uniformly bent. Even though "irony is for squares," it is also Andrews' primary mode. (Note how even the outmoded "squares" is ironic.) A sentence such as "I'm deeply worried about the rapid pace of Israeli colonization of the West Bank" (162), while very probably true enough if we read the "I" as referring to the person of Bruce Andrews, comes off as one of the more ironic in the book. A much more "normal" utterance of the author- position would be: "Why did the Israelis let the Chrisitan militia into the camps? -- to impress Jodie Foster" (159). Bruce Andrews, the person, is in evidence in spots throughout the book. There are moments of wry-to-dour literary politics that can only be construed as personal: "I don't allow anyone to rewrite what I write; on the other hand, no one wants to read it" (175-6); "this is a conspicuously ignored avant-garde, that's for sure" (175); "This is not so-called language writing" (64). One small passage is straight autobiography. Despite Andrews' hostility to narrative, the following, with its temporal structure of writer looking back down the path that led to the present moment of writing, could almost be called a Bildungsroman--a short one, to be sure: "My graduate education, most of which I devoted to thinking about neo- marxist theories of advanced capitalism and imperialism, was entirely financed by a grant, awarded under the National Defense Education Act, NDEA, which was passed in 1958, in reaction to the Soviet Union's triumphant launch of Sputnik in 1957, putting a satellite in space ahead of the U.S. So: thank you, Nikita!" (180) But such moments allowing a reader to narrativize the person writing are anomalous. There is another dimension, however, where the writer is constantly present: the activity of Andrews' cultural aggression is impossible to ignore. Global capital, the ultimate target, is unlocalizable and can never be hit. This means that Andrews attacks the proximate target, the autonomy of the self, all the more fiercely. Breaking the individual from a unity into a unit is what is at stake when Andrews speaks of "making the corrections" with his "fist in the socket." This last phrase has two opposed readings. Either the writer is jamming his hand in where the lightbulb should go, in which case the aggressiveness is aimed inward, with the writer short-circuiting himself, or "the socket" is someone else's, say, the reader's eye socket. I find this double or split meaning symptomatic of a schism in his attitudes towards violence. LITERARY VIOLENCE He flirts heavily with registers of violence throughout the book, from the title onward. There is a continual intent to shock: for instance, the suggestion above to "transform Africa into a plantation for the commerical hunting of black skins." One could cull unleashed attack-phrases from just about any page: "Sharon Tate is not worth the math" [308]; "Africans would just be Causasians in heat" [223]; "sink the boat people!" [102]; "You know, kill the red man & you've got yourself a homeland, bro--it's called the little homeland concept" [302]; "why don't you just tie a mattress to your back?" (291). Such phrases attack whatever cultural identity is immediately in front of them, but Andrews denies that these are his words; he is not expressing himself: "Don't write down your thoughts; libido rests on laurels / difference engine--I'm just a trashy slow bitch; we haven't even been to this fucking wing yet" [75]. Rather than trying to join the center and make it more various, he is carrying out Lyotard's archetypal command to postmodern intellectuals to "wage a war on totality." Andrews's version of the slogan might be "Connections are wrong" [162]. To recall my earlier question--and Andrews' earlier worry--how can such a slogan be firmly separated from the homogenizing power of "the flood-tide of capital"? "Connections are wrong" isn't, at least in logical space, so very far from Adam Smith's fear of "combination," i.e., from union busting. But of course this is an absurd conclusion to apply to a writer of Andrews' leftist convictions. To quote from his criticism again: "writing . . . . can charge material with possibilities of meaning--not by demolishing relations but by creating them, no holds barred, among units of language" ("Constitution," 164). Reading through I Don't Have Any Paper makes it hard to put much credence in Andrews's interest in creating relations. Rather, "charge" becomes the key word. After a few pages, it is difficult not to read for hot spots--passages which are also more syntactically normative: Oh glaze me big! Bribe on the mend. Get a million dollars of business advice -- for a million dollars; chew gum til dream passes: perfect ear is no alarm. Crime teething hero God inhibits us all indifferently -- especially you!, adumbrates --so thin, so light, so crisp; fur stops a drain as Jesus taught, excuse my parole. Where's a battered woman--I want to beat her up? Control the budget & you have them by the predestined -- spectacle of double digit organs, blue violet with a hole in its middle. "One" cleans up the act. (193) For me, at any rate, the sentence about the battered woman stands out. How much credence are we supposed to put in that question mark? The rhetoric is indecisive. It's not "I want to beat up a battered woman" (which would be like Baudelaire's "Let's Beat Up the Poor"), but neither is it "Can we possibly understand the twisted feelings of someone who wants to beat up a battered woman?" It's hard to imagine Andrews is condoning abusive men, but what, besides triggering a conflicted response, does such a sentence do? In spite of my initial discussion of Andrews' critique of catharsis, is I Don't Have Any Paper to be read as simply cathartic, as a kind of megaphone for the political unconscious? Even though Andrews, unlike the bourgeois artist, avoids all hint of narrative or imagistic resolution, such a commitment to catharsis would bring him quite close to the essence of aesthetic appeal. Wouldn't that make the book art, in the separated liberal sense that Andrews attacks, and not politics? Such neo-Kantian enclaves have made attractive retreats in earlier cases. Andrews is nowhere as violent or virulent as Ce'line, and of course has not got into the kind of peril that made Ce'line, after being jailed for collaborating with the Nazis during World War Two and for writing his antisemitic pamphlets, take refuge in the neutral identity of artist. Andrews' frames of reference are more pulverized, but Ce'line's tone is not all that dissimilar: "[The Church is the] most shameless gambling joint for corn-holed Christianese the kikes have ever laid hands on." Beyond the tone, though, there is a glaring difference. When Andrews writes, "sink the boat people," he doesn't mean it--and thus finally could be said to write under the aegis of a Kantian disinterestedness, even though that leads to a liberal poetics of free play. On the other hand, when Ce'line wrote a phrase that became notorious, "Je vous Zay," punning on the French for "I hate you" ("Je vous hais"), his readers seem to have included a gang of fascist collaborators who later murdered Jean Zay, the Jewish Minister of Education targeted by the pun. Whether Ce' line meant it or not, they did, carrying an interested reading to its deadly conclusion. After the war and his own time in prison, Ce'line attempted to resuscitate his career. In Conversation with Professor Y, a fictionalized discussion of his work, he boasted fragily of "the magic, the sorcery . . . the violence also" of his writing (95). Certainly "violence," when ensconced in an aesthetic context, is a positive code-word for heroism: replays of the painterly violence of Pollock are now banal commodifications. Andrews acknowledges this problem in places. Would "I want educated oxen; hey, fuckhead, this is art" [153] be the positive, and "I limited my rebellion to mere gestures in the guidebook" [167] be the negative of Andrews's ironized allegiance to art as the master frame? Either way, we should remember the situation in which Andrews is writing. The wartime Ce'line published on the front pages of Vichy newspapers; Andrews is publishing in small-press books and magazines: what prestige they have is literary. The title, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism), suggests that speech, not art, is Andrews' liberatory goal. The only organizing principle of the one hundred sections of the book is that they are arranged by title, alphabetically. Andrews doesn't "have any paper" in that he does not believe in the complexities of deferral that it embodies. The constant insults, exclamations, and twists of common phrase, while they attack all images of subjectivity, are finally repeated assertions that the "doer position" is a vocal subject, that the doer is supposed to exist on the street, not the page. Is there a collectivity, present or future, this doer speaks for, or is the book an individual effort? Recall Andrews' call to "charge material . . . by [creating] relations . . . among units of language." Andrews emphasizes "charge"; but to me "units" seems finally more significant. If language is made up of units, broken apart as all things are by capitalism, and if nothing new is created beyond the horizon of the phrase or the sentence, then these new, charged units would still depend on capital for energy to band together in momentary transgression. The World Trade Center, in all its reified "facticity, thickness, naturalness, obviousness, massiveness, resistance to change," would be a necessary malefic magnet. To avoid this conclusion I think it is necessary to posit a writer whose actions do not take place in the present political landscape, a writer for whom the aesthetic sphere formed an autonomous space. Within this space, however, the notion of political art would be a metaphor if not an oxymoron. Andrews' politics in I Don't Have Any Paper are either literary or improbable. But I don't want to conclude by simply rejecting Andrews' project. While Andrews' attack on all identity (except that of writer- as-demystifier-of-all-subject-positions) leaves only a narrow margin for readers, nevertheless, the harshness of his attempts to write beyond race, class and gender should not endorse a retreat to more normative genres and content. The political impossibilities of the present are impossible to escape. They still surround and in fact constitute the kindest sonnets, the most coherent reminiscences, the most spontaneous bop prosodies, the deepest metacritiques of signification, the most admirable ethical lessons. . The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). . "Constitution / Writing, Language, Politics, the Body," in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Volume 4 (Open Letter, Fifth Series, No. 1), Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, eds. . "Confidence Trick," the last section of Give Em Enough Rope (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1987), the book prior to I Don't Have Any Paper, anticipates the rhetoric of the subsequent book. . Bruce Andrews, Give Em Enough Rope, 28. . Bruce Andrews, Tizzy Boost (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1993), n.p. . Bruce Andrews, I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992). Subsequent citations in text. . Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, The Unaugural Poem (Great Barrington: The Figures, 1993), n.p. . Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans Geff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 82. . Quoted in Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (New York: Columbia, 1982), trans Leon S. Roudiez, 176. . See Linda Orr, "Ce'line, Jean Jay, and the Mutations of Hate," in Ce'line, USA (South Atlantic Quarterly Vol 93, No. 2, Spring 1994), 333-344, and Alice Kaplan, French Lessons (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 189. 158