Approaching the Trans-subjective: How to Do Things with the MMPI

Abstract

This final chapter draws on the previous one and an engagement with Oren Izenberg’s On Being Numerous to see how Uncreative Writers’ interest in psychological instruments (especially the Rorschach Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) allows them to continue the investigation of “the structure of the self before the self’s knowledge of it” that the Language poets announced in the late 1980s. Again, reference to Adorno allows us to see how writers as different as Dan Farrell, Craig Dworkin and Katie Degentesh are involved as much in a utopian inquiry into the possibilities of transsubjectivity as they are in a critique of our own foreshortened understanding of subjectivity as it stands.