“Ill read ill said”: Faultlines in Contemporary Poetics as Ideology

Abstract

Imagine some latter-day friend of Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille, stumbling across the phenomenon of neo-modernist British poetry, and setting themselves the task of tracing the faultlines of this phenomenon as ideology.¹ What are the faultlines—the stumbling blocks, the critical constraints, or necessary limits—through which the writing and reading of British poetics is currently constituted?² Imagine said friend accepts this task and finds himself writing a critical description of the ideology with which his own work and the work of friends, relations, fellow-traveling comrades, and contemporaries is implicated. Beyond the painful generality of what passes for common sense among avant-garde communities of taste, the critical task is to trace ideological faultlines into the texture of the writing, tracing the ideologemes as signs, as active pressures at the level of formal negotiations, techniques, and styles. You discover that you are yourself complicit with the extended common sense of your disagreements. Tracing faultlines nevertheless allows some critical orienteering of force-fields and pressures that are too densely over-determined to be reduced to a general play of dialectical contradictions. Tracing faultlines through the concrete over-determination of writing practices also allows some characterization of the poetics in play, in part because contemporary practices of writing through contradiction generate differential and diffuse negativities, negativities in whichassertions and counter-assertions are staged rather than articulated.