Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday

By Lyn Hejinian

Allegorical Moments is a set of essays dedicated to rethinking allegory and arguing for its significance as a creative and critical response to sociopolitical, environmental, and existential turmoil affecting the contemporary world. Traditionally, allegorical interpretation was intended to express an orthodoxy and support an ideology. Hejinian attempts to liberate allegory from its dogmatic usages. Presenting modern and contemporary materials ranging from the novel to poetry to painting and cinema to activist poetry of the Occupy movement, each essay in the book "begins again" with different materials and from different perspectives. Hejinian's generative scholarship looks back to experimental modernism and forward into a future for a vital, wayward poetry resistant to the crushing global effects of neoliberalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780819580863

Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian (Berkeley, CA) is a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She is author of numerous books including, Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, and the bestselling, My Life and My Life in the Nineties. She has been co-founder and co-editor of a number of publishing ventures and literary journals including Nion Editions, FLOOR, Atelos, Tuumba Press and Poetics Journal. She has had a long and distinguished career and is John F. Hotchkiss Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

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ALLEGORICAL

MOMENTS

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also by

LYN HEJINIAN

Tribunal (Omnidawn, 2019)

Positions of the Sun (Belladonna Books, 2019)

The Unfollowing (Omnidawn Books, 2016)

My Life and My Life in the Nineties (Burning Deck, 1980; Shark Books, 2003; Sun & Moon, 1987; Wesleyan University Press, 2013)

The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012)

The Wide Road (with Carla Harryman; Litmus Press, 2010)

Saga / Circus (Omnidawn, 2008)

Situations, Sings (with Jack Collom; Adventures in Poetry, 2008)

Lola (Belladonna, 2005)

The Lake (with Emilie Clark; Granary Books, 2004)

The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003)

On Laughter: A Melodrama (with Jack Collom; Baksun Books, 2003)

Slowly (Tuumba Press, 2002)

A Border Comedy (Granary Books, 2001)

The Beginner (Spectacular Books, 2000; Tuumba Press, 2002)

The Language of Inquiry (University of California Press, 2000)

Happily (Post-Apollo Press, 2000)

Chartings (with Ray Di Palma; Chax Press, 2000)

Sunflower (The Figures, 2000)

Sight (with Leslie Scalapino; Edge Books, 1999)

The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill (with Emilie Clark; Granary Books, 1998)

Wicker (with Jack Collom; Rodent Press, 1996)

The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes (Smoke-Proof Press, 1996)

Guide, Grammar, Watch, and The Thirty Nights (Folio, 1996)

Two Stein Talks (Weaselsleeves Press, 1995)

Xenia, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; trans. from Russian with Elena Balashova (Sun & Moon Press, 1994)

The Cold of Poetry (Sun & Moon Press, 1994)

The Cell (Sun & Moon Press, 1992)

The Hunt (Zasterle Press, 1991)

Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (The Figures, 1991; Wesleyan University Press, 2019)

Leningrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten; Mercury House, 1991)

Description, poems by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; trans. from Russian with Elena Balashova (Sun & Moon Press, 1990)

Individuals (with Kit Robinson; Chax Press, 1988)

The Guard (Tuumba Press, 1984)

Redo (Salt-Works Press, 1984)

Gesualdo (Tuumba Press, 1978)

Writing is an Aid to Memory (The Figures, 1978; Sun & Moon, 1996)

A Mask of Motion (Burning Deck, 1977)

A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (Tuumba Press, 1976)

EDITED VOLUMES

Poetics Journal Digital Archive (with Barrett Watten; e-book; Wesleyan University Press, 2015)

A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982–98 (with Barrett Watten; Wesleyan University Press, 2013)

Ghosting Atoms: Poems and Reflections Sixty Years After the Bomb (with Olivia Friedman; Consortium for the Arts and University of California Regents, 2005)

Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner’s, 2005)

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

Unless otherwise noted, text and compilation

© 2023 Lyn Hejinian

Cover and frontispiece art: Before the Seven Seas,

© 2020 Roberto Harrison; used by permission of the artist.

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed and typeset in Whitman by Eric M. Brooks

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

available at https://catalog.loc.gov/

cloth ISBN 978-0-8195-8084-9

paper ISBN 978-0-8195-8085-6

e-book ISBN 978-0-8195-8086-3

5 4 3 2 1

for

FINN,

MARKA,

AMITY,

DIEGO

stalwarts

of the IF

CONTENTS

Introduction

The Good Life of Lucy Church Amiably

Dear Sophia: The Intimate Excess of Philosophy

Prelude to the Curious

Mineral Freedom

What’s Missing from My Life

Figuring Out

The Shown

The Sneeze

The Sad Note in a Poetics of Consciousness

Wild Captioning

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Along comes something—

launched in context.

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INTRODUCTION

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Along comes something—launched in context; such was the first sentence of Reason, an essay written and published over two decades ago.¹ Less aphorism than announcement, the sentence became something of a leitmotif in my thinking for a period, and it reappeared in several poems. Now it is serving as the epigraph to this book. It speaks to what an allegorical moment might be.

The sentence came to me, so to speak, early one morning, fully formed and as if out of nowhere. But nowhere, even by its own terms, doesn’t exist; the sentence came from contexts, entered into contexts, and generated contexts. This was not something peculiar to that sentence; everything occurs in contexts (each with its multiple situations and temporalities), and all contexts themselves bear manifold contexts: past, present, to come, and all around. And these, in turn, alter contexts and initiate new ones.

Negotiating the amplitude of these reciprocal and inextricable interrelationships is incessant and ongoing, and it requires processes of interpretation. Most of these processes are unconscious, automatic, initiated by instinct or, and probably more frequently, out of social training and its associated ideologies.² Some of the interpretations are misleading or erroneous, whether intentionally or not. Most are simply of practical value—or of no particular value except insofar as they make possible our day by day (and night by night) living. One doesn’t speak of expertise in everyday life, for instance, though pretty much everyone has it to some degree, even while everyday life itself is hard to define and too multifarious to be adequately described. In its porosity, it accepts whatever arrives in it, and, in its plenitude, it obstructs attempts to assign it exemplification or location. It defies both metaphysical conceptualization and ontological specificity, even while it comprises the grounds for concrete existence and proffers life’s requisite materials and contextual relationships. Trivia and systems come together, such that everything can seem just the way things are—natural, necessary, ordinary, boring, inescapable, mandatory, and either comforting or oppressive.

Things of the phenomenal world—the things our senses can perceive and that we can experience—happen in time; they exist in a world of moments, some brief, some extended, all fleeting. This is a book about interpretive moments, moments in which meaning—sense—appears and is discovered. Such appearances, I would argue, can serve an allegorical function; they give us things that invite (or require) interpretation, and sometimes they give us a sense of what those things themselves interpret. This, then, is a book about the moments of such allegorizable appearances, or, to be specific, about some such moments.

It is not wrong to propose that there is an art of everyday life. Such an art is always relevant and always part of quotidian practice as we perceive and assess particulars of the public and private terrains we negotiate on a daily basis. I would propose, too, that turning attention to the interweavings and entanglements of thinking, insofar as it makes us conscious of and responsible to the entailments of thinking and its (our) contexts, is of urgent importance in this particular historical present. We are asked to think about more and more, and much—perhaps even everything—is at stake: for the future, most obviously; for the present, lest it become ever more destructive and include ever more suffering; and for history (whether immediate or distant), in which the present sits, at risk of producing ruins (as Walter Benjamin famously pointed out), but also generating contexts. And perhaps, at least in its artistic and other meaning-making practices, the allegorical moments that are launched, on the one hand from and on the other hand into, contexts, can recover or even produce meanings from them. I am, in other words, appropriating the term allegory to demarcate (or caption), however inadequately, ideas regarding meaning-making that acknowledge contexts, and to do so on the grounds of discontinuity. Or, to put it another way, I am positing the possibility of drawing interpretation out of meanings’ discontinuity, not to establish meaning as discreet and autonomous but to identify interpretation as a dynamic force propelling both everyday and aesthetic flow and recognizing meaning as something always to be made and always on the way.

This is not a scholarly book about allegory, despite its title. Allegory—instances of it as well as the notion of allegory per se—is a recurrent motif, but throughout, the motif is occasioned by things under discussion and by the character of the discussion, namely its interpretative intent. What’s of primary importance are moments of allegorization, not the allegories that make them, so to speak, momentous.

Allegorical moments are primarily situating moments. As such, at least in the contemporary world, they are transient. Even as allegories offer a changed point of view, they themselves undergo change, with the result that in attending to them—in moving from one moment to the next—digressions occur and are almost always welcomed. The digressive mode is an inevitable reflection of an attraction to the local, the at hand, an attunement to the specific, the concrete, the contingent. What follows is a pursuit of associations accompanied by a heightened awareness of the contextual. Digression, in this sense, is not errancy but an exercise of improvisation and exploration, motivated by restless curiosity, a surfeit of enthusiasm, and a quest for radical thought. It is, as the young scholar Mary Wilson puts it, a method of tracing new and unanticipated lines of connection that work against linear narratives of finality and consummation.³ The goal is resistance to and even the disabling of totalizing frameworks.

The irony here is inescapable. Allegories in most of their traditional manifestations have functioned on behalf of totalizing frameworks, not as instruments to dismantle them. The central problem with traditional allegory, especially in turbulent times, is that, most often in the form of personification, it serves ideology by bringing interpretation to a halt, and this is precisely what contemporary allegory—what one might term radical allegory—contests. It is (to use Angus Fletcher’s term) allegory without ideas, allegory independent of Platonic Forms; or to phrase it somewhat differently, allegory without rest. It is a catalyst for heterogeneity; or, rather, it is a catalyst for heterogenization. Allegorization is an event, not a thing, an activity more than an act, a process of engagement rather than a terminus of interpretation. As Charles Altieri puts it (in another context), The mind becomes an instrument for extending situations rather than controlling them.⁴

Allegory, then, often cast as a function rather than as a category or freestanding genre, emerges as an organizing but not entirely defining or determining motif in this book, which, in any case, did not start out to be a study of allegory. Angus Fletcher, in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, as well as Fredric Jameson, far more recently in Allegory and Ideology, have each written particularly generative examples of such a study. This book started, as The Language of Inquiry did before it, as a collection of essays. The essays included here were written over the course of two decades, and each was occasioned by an invitation or request, none of which reflected an interest in allegory. But, when choosing what materials to include here and thereby putting them in conversation with each other (a conversation that inevitably expanded on some of the essays’ recurring questions), it struck me that the interpretative dynamic present in the essays could aptly and productively be termed allegorical and that the result could occasion a radical rethinking of the trope as it functions in contemporary social and aesthetic contexts. The allegorical is not in itself a solely literary instrument; it is always conjoined to social and political concerns.

Fredric Jameson’s study of allegory is premised on a medieval theological system that identifies a four-step, or four-level, progression that we might term the allegorical process. The first, which Jameson calls literal or historical, is the matter at hand, the thing demanding analysis—whatever draws us up short as individuals and demands reflection and commentary (A&I, xv–xvii). The second stage in the allegorical process takes one to the presence of the secret or hidden meaning of the matter under consideration, a process that involves allegorical enlargement. At the third stage, a moral element is introduced and imposed on the understanding individual; this Jameson characterizes as the construction of subjectivity or the psychoanalytic. And the final stage is one he calls anagogical and consigns to a kind of ‘political unconscious’; it establishes an often unconscious or merely implicit narrative of history as such, a collective and political narrative always latent in conceptions of our own personal destinies (A&I, xv–xvii). I would term it more simply the political (or collective, social) level.

Allegory as traditionally utilized in this four-part process draws on a preexisting value system, one that furthers the moral or ethical judgments on which it’s grounded. But what if, instead, allegory were used to challenge that system and destabilize the grounds for such judgments, putting an array of values in play, dazzling the imagination’s firmament and demanding radical rethinking? As Angus Fletcher has noted, allegory is the authoritarian mode of literature and art and discourse, and its claim to be able to project permanent truths is perhaps its chief traditional claim. But the traditional claim is no longer valid, even in the eyes of someone whose early scholarship was so profoundly engaged with it. As Fletcher himself points out, There is a deep internal conflict, or evasion, at the heart of an ambivalent allegorical procedure that seems to contradict itself, by its very operations.⁵

My own claim here is that, with some exceptions, those who write about allegory, and most who practice it, don’t get how crazily supple and seditious it can be. Of course, it can be ideologically staid and coercive, monumentalizing the absolutely worst ideals and being boring in the process. But, as C. D. Blanton notes, Walter Benjamin can be helpful here, in grasping that there must be (appropriately) two modes of allegory. In one the referent or deferred term governs but does so from a position of anteriority, priority. It’s already given. Cheap or heavy-handed allegory. In the other, the governing term governs, but not from a position of anteriority. It arrives.⁶

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The essays in this book are generally addressed to works of art. Most of the works are identifiably literary, though the focus in one of the essays is on works by a visual artist and in another it’s on political activism (the implicit argument there being that this, too, may have intentional aesthetic purport). In The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Hal Foster proposes that art is allegorical in its impulse to exploit the gap between signifier and signified.⁷ As a categorical statement about art, this isn’t entirely convincing. I would suggest that it is not art but allegory that exploits—or creatively engages with—the gap between signifier and signified. Allegories are acts of interpretation, but ones that I hope, in my use of the term, turn allegory, as it is typically understood, inside out. My wish is to recuperate allegory from the death grip of ideology and perhaps (in the spirit of Angus Fletcher’s essay Allegory without Ideas) even from that of ideas (or Ideas), so as to free it in order to participate in proliferative processes of engagement, initiating détournements in the spirit of aesthetic activism.⁸

The contextual temporality in which détournements in particular, and aesthetic activism more generally, occur is closely akin to what ancient Greek thought termed kairos, which can mean time but also weather, wind, or even season; to be oton kairo ton is to be in season (or in [its] season).⁹ Kairos names a notion of time that is not schematic but practical. It means the right time or the key moment. Kairos is the moment that is opportune for some undertaking or action. Thus, for kairos to be recognizable, time, or temporal conditions, have to be interpretable. As Barbara M. Sattler observes, "Kairos as the appropriate or critical time has no connection with measurable time, and it is also not connected with the duration expressed by chronos. Its original meaning is ‘due measure,’ ‘proportion,’ ‘what is vital,’ which is then interpreted in a temporal sense to mean the critical time or opportunity to act…. What is characteristic of kairos is also that it has to be grasped quickly; otherwise the opportunity will be lost. As the critical time to do something now that will have important consequences for later, kairos intimately ties the present to the future."¹⁰

Kairos is not itself an allegorical moment, but it is a moment that the allegorical may seize as an opportunity for interpretation, reconfiguration, and resignification: a time of new meaning and thus new thinking. And the allegorical must make itself available—it must itself be opportune. It has to be available and recognizable if it is to function. Thus, inevitably, the allegorical enters into public spaces. And, no matter what else is happening in them, these are the sites of everyday life, much of whose activities are carried out without any thought to kairos at all. But the resulting tension between the significant and the insignificant lies precisely along the interface between the allegorical and its moment.

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Along comes something—launched in context; allegory was far from my mind when I first wrote that sentence. Why the interest in allegory now—why my interest and why that of others in whose theoretical and literary writings the term prominently appears? Certainly the interest does not emerge (or re-emerge) from nostalgia for a time when established truths did the work of making sense for us. Contemporary critical thinkers are more apt to make fun of purported truths (and the transcendent or universal meanings that they profess to generate) than to search for or espouse them. Truths have become an empty—a bankrupt—category; the purported meanings they produce have been commodified and instrumentalized without benefit to understanding or the common good. These are false meanings, of course, fostering false consciousness.

I was challenged to consider allegory, not because I thought it pertinent to my own work (in poetry and poetics), but in the context of teaching a graduate seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. The seminar had four iterations: The Turn to Language and the Writing of Everyday Life (2008), Late Capitalism and the Writing of Everyday Life (fall 2010), Allegories of Late Capitalism and the Writing of Everyday Life (fall 2014), and Allegorical Moments: Public, Private, and the Writing of Everyday Life (fall 2018). The notion of allegory came to the fore during the first version of the seminar. Each version had its own contextualizing focus, and the four differed from each other in many significant ways. Certainly the syllabus was markedly different each time, using, with one exception, different literary and theoretical texts and thus directing us along different trajectories of thought. The one exception was Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, the reading of which in each version of the seminar extended throughout the entire semester, one or more convolute per seminar session.

One can’t read The Arcades Project without encountering the allegorical as a concept. Understanding it—something that Benjamin does not make easy—became a challenge and, to some extent, it provided the dynamic quandary that motivated discussion in the seminar about substance and significations in contemporary experience. Benjamin attributed allegorical force to commodities, tracking the ubiquity of commodification and the ways it generates beliefs and desires, which is to say false meanings. This was and remains right. But Benjamin was talking about modernity as it made itself manifest in nineteenth-century Paris, and the various iterations of the writing of everyday life seminar took place in twenty-first-century North America. Benjamin’s discovery of allegory as a mode of critique and as a site of what we might term the pathos of history suggested wider application.

And, indeed, that seemed to be underway. Craig Owens’s two-part essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (published in October, vols. 12 and 13, 1980) and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art (published in Art Forum 21, no. 1, 1982) were followed some years later by Thinking Allegory Otherwise, edited by Brenda Machosky and published by Stanford University Press in 2010. And Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology, already mentioned above, represents yet another rethinking of allegory and the contexts in which it can exercise creative social, as well as aesthetic, power. These texts signaled a resurgence in the relevance of allegory for artists and critics alike, not least because the purposes for which the device was being utilized in contemporary aesthetic practices had shifted. It is allegory with a difference. And it represents a perspectival shift that has taken place, producing new modes of allegory and new functions for it to perform. Where traditional allegory tended to privilege situations or objects that might be personified, contemporary allegory engages in processes of critique and meaning-making. What holds interest are conditions, not so-called truths. Or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, modern allegory seeks out analogies between systems rather than the isolation of the individual object (A&I, 59).

That said, to this day the term is conventionally defined by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as: "1: the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence; also: an instance (as in a story or painting) of such expression, or, 2: a symbolic representation: emblem." Wikipedia’s definition is comparable (and simpler): Allegory is a rhetorical device in which characters or events in a literary, visual, or musical art form represent or symbolize ideas and concepts. In other words, symbolic characters or events come first, set with the task of bringing an intended concept, idea, or value to mind. The resulting, intentionally emblematic, situation takes on a totalized, transcendent character. Justice, poverty, sloth, mercy, etc., become eternal. But Angus Fletcher, whose 1964 book Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode remains a classic study of allegory as it was understood for several centuries, counters this in his more recent essay, Allegory Without Ideas, which appears in Thinking Allegory Otherwise: The allegory without ideas could make no appeal to universals and hence could never legitimately establish belief in imagined higher values…. This allegory without ideas … could not claim any serious degree of permanence in its meanings and interpretations, for as language changes with use, so does meaning … (AWI, 20). And Fredric Jameson goes one step further, writing, genuine allegory does not seek the ‘meaning’ of a work, but rather functions to reveal its structure of multiple meanings, and thereby to modify the very meaning of the word meaning (A&I, 10).

In working toward an understanding of contemporary, antihegemonic uses of allegory, one must consider allegory not in terms of images but as a function, an activity. And one must regard its uses, various though they are, as interpretative, contingent, and conditional—active and pertinent only within a particular context. Many past uses of allegory have depended on, or been committed to, an ideology.¹¹ They have tended to serve a pedagogical purpose on behalf of institutionalized and moralizing powers. This is exactly what my case for the allegorical would consider no longer tenable. The allegorical belies the existence of truth. It only seems to complete something. It can’t do that, no matter how hard it might try. What it does instead is to initiate something in relation to a context and propel it into consideration. The allegorical assembles, bringing different materials together interpretively as, to quote Charles Altieri, a dance of many ideas rather than a quasi argument devoted to a single cognitive purpose.¹² In doing so, it remains mobile, attaching itself to, and dependent on, appearances—both things that appear and the appearance, as well as apparency, of their doing so. What Benjamin examined in The Arcades Project was, in effect, cultural debris, remnants of quotidian life and the buildings through which people passed through it. The Arcades Project is, among other things, an archeological and an architectural study—a study, both Marxist and idiosyncratically theological, of the deracinated fragments of lost life and the fetishistic commodities of false life in modernity. For Benjamin, these shards are, potentially at least, allegorical insofar as they catalyze what he termed dialectical images. Cultural debris—commodities of yesteryear—are adamantly material, and largely impenetrable. They are perhaps synecdoches, but if so, they are scanty, damaged, and largely inadequate: parts that stand for a whole but a whole that is lost and irrecoverable. The commodity fragment, in this sense, provokes a situation of secrecy, and it is in this form that it becomes allegorical: as the site of its own secret, its meaning—immanent in the commodity rather than superficially evident about it—something other than, and in excess of, the obvious or expected.

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Allegory, at least as it was used until recent times, sought to impose coherence on a work or (and this is more important) on a depicted situation or event where, in contemporary understanding, multiple meanings, each with its own levels or spheres of purport, coexist, often generating contradictions and always disclosing the difference that inheres in every situation and every thing. The perspectival shift that we can discern in the functioning of allegory in contemporary aesthetic practices entails a semantic shift, one that refocuses on the other that is etymologically embedded in allegory, a word that comes from the Greek allos (other) + -agoria (speaking). Allegory is deployed not only (and not primarily) to mean something different from what is said but also (and more importantly) to signal the presence of difference (or of differences) per se.

To some extent, allegory here functions to produce polysemy, or at least to acknowledge it. But that polysemy need not always have a positive valence; it isn’t always a marker of a magnificent plethora of present possibilities, and it doesn’t always produce a dazzling epistemological excess, though sometimes it may do both. Steven S. Lee, in The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, addresses Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image from the perspective of a sociopolitical historicity: the dialectical image refers not to an actual image but to a particular way of seeing or reading—one able to detect past, thwarted utopias in ‘a thousand configurations’ of present-day life…. It captures history’s disappointments but also the unfulfilled hopes that persist alongside them. …¹³ The allegorical moment is one in which a dialectical image leaps into view. Or, as Benjamin puts it in On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, one of the most significant sections of The Arcades Project, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.¹⁴

Such a constellation can also be viewed as an intersection of contradictions (to borrow a term from Fredric Jameson (A&I, 277). One such contradiction is produced by the coexistence within a dialectical image and its allegorical moment of both temporal brevity and infinite extensibility, lack of long-term possibility and persistent potential. Curiously, even when casting a negative valence, there is a relationship, not necessary but possible, between an allegorical moment and what John Brenkman, taking the notion from Ernst Bloch, calls a concrete utopia, noting that utopias have a discontinuous history; they occur only sporadically and exist only briefly, but utopian ideals remain. Bloch, Brenkman says, meant by this that latent utopian possibilities are contained in the experiences of freedom and self-organization which social groups and classes possess, intermittently and fragmentedly, in their everyday existence, political practices, myths, and artistic endeavors. It is this last area (artistic endeavors) toward which Brenkman turns his full attention, arguing, as Bloch does, that utopia (however momentary or precarious) can be rendered concrete in a work of art: … concrete insofar as it stems from what is realized aesthetically in the artwork.¹⁵ Bloch’s characterization of a concrete utopia as it emerges, assembled into a thought-image (Denkbild), is as rich as it is complex:

Everyone knows them from [their] present existence—by the power of images which strike, stimulate, and illumine. Everyone meets them in works of art and in the situations and forms of conflict and resolution they feature; in the inexhaustible power of unequivocal symbols; and even in multi-ambiguous allegories…. The permanence and greatness of major works of art consist precisely in their operation through a fulness of pre-semblance and of realms of utopian significance. These reside, so to speak, in the windows of such works; and always in windows which open in the direction of ultimate anticipation: driving forward, soaring, or achieving towards a goal—which is never a mere land in the clouds above.¹⁶

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Allegory, activist aesthetics, everyday life: these, then, name key areas of concern in the essays gathered here under the rubric of allegorical moments. Those areas are inconsistently prominent in the essays, and in some of the essays they are no more than implicit. But they have been (and remain) recurrent features in the landscape of my thinking thus far in the twenty-first century. That thinking, and the literary and pedagogical practices that reflect it, can best be understood as a continuation of my work in poetics, and, for better or worse, that work has led my thinking in diverse directions.

This diversity of interests is partially the result of the intellectual and personal friendships from which I have immensely benefited during that same two-decade period, during which I was a member of the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Very soon after I took up that position, I discovered that every English department faculty member annually received research funds of $500–$1000. I asked Janet Adelman, the then chair of the department, what legitimately constituted research, and she replied that for poets, everything is research. There’s a certain truth to that, but everything is not a researchable category. Gertrude Stein, in Composition and Explanation, claimed that, in composing her first two books, Three Lives and The Making of Americans, there was a groping for using everything, but she did not clarify either the using or the everything.¹⁷

One cannot teach a course about everything, and one can’t write a book about everything. Indeed, at least according to the opening of John Ashbery’s The New Spirit, the first of the poems published in Three Poems (1972), the better course is to leave everything (or, to use his term, all) out: I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.¹⁸

The same year that Three Poems was published, the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York City exhibited the full-scale version of Bernadette Mayer’s monumental work, Memory. It included both a six-hour audio recording of Mayer reading the Memory text and the 1,100 photos she took to accompany it. As Mayer says in her brief prefatory note to the lavishly produced Siglio edition of Memory (which includes the full text and all 1,100 photos), I thought that by using both sound and image, I could include everything. But so far, that is not so.¹⁹ Of course; it never could be. But Mayer was not the only poet working in the 1970s and ’80s who posited a poetics espousing the inclusion of everything or, at least, of anything. Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading (whose first volume appeared in 1974), Ron Silliman’s Ketjak (published in 1974) and twenty-six-part The Alphabet (fragments of which began appearing in the 1970s and all of which is now available in a 952-page single volume [University of Alabama Press, 2008]), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts (the composition of which began in 1985) can all be cited as works of capacious inclusivity.

I won’t here try to make a case for encyclopedic desire or the encyclopedic aspirations that led to Mayer’s wish to include everything, or a slightly less ambitious alternative of including anything, in a literary work. But I do claim that being willing to be interested in much, though of course not everything or anything, offers enormous benefit to artists. In exercising such willingness, one risks mere superficiality and not only incomplete but downright inadequate understanding; one may find oneself perpetually skating on thin ice. I’m sure I’ve succumbed to both of those dangers, and many others besides. But the friends and comrades—students as well as fellow faculty members—who have inspired and then guided me as I pursued new and sometimes unlikely (as well as useless) interests have stimulated and also improved my thinking. They are many—too many to name here, though I hope they know who they are. My colleagues and students at UC Berkeley, as well as workers and staff members involved with various campus labor unions, have been of ongoing importance to the thinking reflected in the essays, though that thinking can in no way do justice to the better thinking that is characteristically theirs. They have toppled my idols, demolished most of my preconceptions, and kept my thinking restless and my thoughts incomplete. I am grateful beyond all expression for their encouragement of my intellectual digressions and for their willingness and ability to disturb my thoughts and forgive my ignorance.

It is, alas, undeniably the case that, during the more than twenty years since I began teaching at UC Berkeley, academic institutions in the US and elsewhere have turned increasingly conservative as they are submitted to restructuring by neoliberal socioeconomic interests. Nonetheless, it is also true that there are scholarly and creative thinkers working within those institutions who are fiercely opposed to neoliberal ideology and its agenda and who maintain spaces in which radical thought and intellectual adventure can flourish, thereby sustaining hope and providing grounds for happiness. They are rarely supported in this by higher administration, but they are often supported by campus workers, staff members, and—most importantly—by students. Among the faculty colleagues from whose intellectual friendship and ethical courage I have directly benefited, I want especially to thank Charles Altieri, Stephen Best, C. D. Blanton, T. J. Clark, Michael Mark Cohen, Kathleen Donegan, Eric Falci, Kevis Goodman, Abdul JanMohamed, Donna V. Jones, Steven S. Lee, Colleen Lye, Kent Puckett, Poulomi Saha, Emily V. Thornbury, and Hertha Sweet Wong for conversation, inspiration, and camaraderie.

Altogether, some seventy students participated in the graduate seminars that, ultimately, provided motivation and motifs for this volume. Every one of those students offered probing analyses and a willingness to proceed without assurances as to what the outcome of our investigations might lead to. Everyday life is not a terrain likely to offer assurances, much less certainties; it is hard to know it. Things fall together; things fall apart. There are patterns aplenty, but they are so many and so constantly intertwining that interpreting them is all but impossible. Committing oneself to four months of arduous study and extensive reading (we had three or four texts underway at any given time, representing different disciplinary approaches and different literary genres) without fear of the proliferating incommensurabilities and contradictions that emerged required intellectual courage; every one of the students had it, and they repeatedly bolstered mine.

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Though the essays gathered here are more closely interconnected than those of The Language of Inquiry (2000), Allegorical Moments can be read as a continuation of the work of that earlier volume. The two books are structured similarly. Both present a set of essays, each preceded by a headnote that offers additional ideas and materials and whatever information or afterthoughts have seemed appropriate and, hopefully, useful. Readers will notice that some of the headnotes are considerably longer than others. This is largely due to the fact that I had more to say retrospectively about some subjects than about others; though my thinking is always in a process of development, it has been, as Trotsky might say in a different context, a matter of uneven development. Both are volumes of essays on cultural production and poetics, addressed to diverse examples of aesthetic practice and, I hope, offering a range of ideas and approaches. I admit, however, that the notion of allegory moving through the essays contains more than a few contradictions. And I am aware that contradictions can often be a source of frustration, and as such they can be dispiriting. But my intention here is far from any wish to dispirit the reader. Quite the contrary: I want to celebrate contradictions and in such a way as to invite interpretative experimentation. And, since I am finishing this book in an era of multiple, catastrophic crises, I am willing myself to hope that the ruptures and gaps—the failures of resolution—that unremediated contradictions create may serve as apertures to new social possibilities, unimaginable thus far.

Despite the fact that an ongoing interest in what might constitute allegory in contemporary literary practices is present either implicitly or explicitly in these essays, nonetheless a noticeable degree of heterogeneity characterizes the contents of this volume. The ostensible focus of interest differs from essay to essay, and even within the individual essays (and most particularly in the essay on Barrett Watten’s poem Mode Z, a poem that is itself an engine of heterogeneity) digressions and interpolations occur, interrupting argumentation. This was a methodological choice. My goal has been to undertake thinking from within contradictions and the aporias they provide; such impasses are one and the same as the passageways in which thinking moves. Our thoughts inhabit contradictions. Our only escape from them is oblivion. And why opt for oblivion? Ultimately, as I see