Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective
Identity
by Juliana Spahr
University of Alabama Press
$49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper / 224 pages / ISBN 0817310533
Gracefully walking a tightrope between communal interpretation and
textual anarchy, Everybody's Autonomy locates empowering, socially
responsible reading practices in the synthesis of two uneasy bedfellows:
language poetry and identity politics. Spahr negotiates the space
between with close readings of avant garde subjectivities, forging
an important link between poetic practices too often defined—or
self-defined—as antithetical to one another. From Gertrude Stein's
polyglot ethnicity to Harryette Mullen's disjunctive signifyin(g),
from Bruce Andrews' and Lyn Hejinian's language writing to Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha's collage of resistance in DICTEE, Spahr connects
experimental texts with identity and subjectivity. The node between:
self-consciously disruptive language that forces moments of non-identification,
places where readers must recognize the limits of their understandings.
Spahr's introduction cogently summarizes her thesis, and is useful
regardless of a reader's interest in her detailed chapters on specific
writings. In places, she speaks to some of the concerns of critical
theory and pedagogy, discussing what kinds of texts encourage reading
practices both connective ("engage[d] with large, public worlds
that are in turn shared by readers") and anarchic ("self-governing");
in other places she speaks to some of the questions raised by cultural
studies, "propos[ing] a theory of reading that is in dialogue
with the concerns of race and ethnic studies." This theory of
reading privileges provisionality, recognition of and respect for
the limits of knowledge/ subjectivity, and cross-cultural and aesthetic
coalitions rather than assimilation. In her brief conclusion, Spahr
argues passionately for a turn away from normative reading and toward
the active cultural dialogue her model entails.
Only in her chapters on particular writings, however, does Spahr
detail the ways in which language writing can promote reading practices
both anarchic and connective. She asserts that texts such as Bruce
Andrews's "Confidence Trick" and Theresa Cha's DICTEE
are accessible not only to practitioners of the avantgarde, but also
to a more general audience. (The only example of such an audience,
however, is undergraduate literature students.) Once readers abandon
their propensity toward "normative reading and passivity of thought"—a
tendency enforced by traditional educational practices—then these
texts may inspire richly creative and highly provisional readings
that highlight the permeable boundaries of identity and subjectivity.
In developing this argument, Spahr extends an intellectual tradition
that runs from Hans-Georg Gadamer through North American language
writing communities, with important stops in Latin American conscientization
movements (such as Paulo Freire and Ernesto Cardenal's work with peasant
communities): arguing that the reader is, or should be, a co-creative
producer of texts. Spahr's contribution to this dialogue comes through
her close readings of Stein, Mullen, Andrews, Hejinian, and Cha, which
demonstrate convincingly the ways in which this co-creative meaning-making
process is inextricably bound up in issues of community: race, class,
gender, ethnicity.
Readers should note that Everybody's Autonomy identifies some
of the problems associated with passive, identificatory reading, and
it gives a few examples of writings that promote more active reading
processes, but the book does not pursue one of the key issues raised
in the introduction and conclusion: how traditional texts and educational
methods kill active, resistant reading practices, and how experimental
texts can help redress this problem. The first half of this equation
has been adequately documented elsewhere—the work of Jonathon
Kozol, Stanley Aronowitz, and Henry Giroux comes to mind, in addition
to the classic formulations of Neil Postman and Paulo Freire—but
the second part, the place of avant-garde literature in this project,
is a question that needs more development. The basic issue is how
to encourage readers to engage these texts, rather than putting them
back on bookstore shelves or faking their way through a fifty-minute
discussion on the one experimental work in American Lit 101. Spahr
does give one example of a classroom exercise she's used successfully,
but little else in the text points toward ways of overcoming the resistance,
inside or outside the academy, toward active reading of experimental
writing. One cause of this lacuna, no doubt, is the discursive requirements
placed on academic texts (especially dissertations and published monographs),
which privilege theory over practice and reward literary criticism
more than literary pedagogy. With four chronologically ordered chapters
offering detailed close readings, Everybody's Autonomy closely
follows the norms of its academic genre—ironic, considering that
the book is devoted to writing communities and practices sustained
outside the academy. In the spirit of provisional reading, though,
Everybody's Autonomy should be considered not the last word
on the topic but an important node that will prompt further connections
between experimental writing and co-creative reading.
