Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics

Shira Wolosky
New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 3, Summer 2010, pp. 571-591
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2010.0018
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New Literary History, 2010, 41: 571591
Relational Aesthetics and Feminist Poetics
Shira Wolosky
F
eminist poetics has meant, rst of all, locating gender on the
map of traditional literary concerns. How is gender represented?
What are the places and possibilities of women authors and read-
ers? But this introduction of gender as a topic also implies an altered
aesthetics. The inclusion of gender requires different parameters for
understanding textuality as such: what constitutes a literary artwork and
our analytic engagements with it. Recognizing gender as a dimension
that must be considered in textual encounter, as fundamental to textual
constitution and experience, has aesthetic consequences.
The assumptions that dominated poetics in the twentieth century
have been largely formalist.
1
Roman Jakobson can be taken as a presid-
ing gure. His formalist distribution of constitutive linguistic structures
dened the poetic as exactly what did not refer beyond its own composi-
tion. Jakobsons systematic charting of the linguistic act as distributed
among reference (context), addresser, addressee, contact, code, and
then message as referring to linguistic structure, dened the aesthetic
proper as subordinating the interests of all other functions to focus on
language alone within the texts own construction, ultimately pointing
back to itself.
Such aesthetic self-reference has been challenged by a variety of
contemporary approaches, notably cultural studies. Yet cultural studies
tends to privilege ideological and historical formations, subordinating
textual composition to manifestations of the political. Instead, however,
of dening aesthetics in exclusionary termswhether these be historicist
or formalistwe can think of aesthetics as a domain of mutual inter-
relationship among the variable functions that go into its constitution
and experience. In such a relational aesthetic theory, Jakobsons func-
tions become mutually referring. The aesthetic dimension is dened
not as the exclusion of every other function or element to focus on the
self-referring art object, nor as the representation of any one of them;
but rather as the inclusion of the multiple terms of speaker and audi-
ence, contact and context in their many aspects and dimensions. The
aesthetic would not subordinate other references, interests, events,
new literary history 572
addresses and forms of reception to the self-consciousness of the art-
works own composition, nor would it remove them. Rather, it would
precisely project the interrelationship among the various functions
and the domains they address, engage, and concern as making up and
marking the composition of the text. The artwork would not bracket
out addresser and addressee, context, reference, contact, and code, but
it would actively invoke each (although not always all) of these dimen-
sions, bringing them into interplay and interrelationship in a variety of
connections and modes of interaction.
Considerations of gender impel and require such a relational aesthetic.
Gender introduces a fundamental dimension into any art composi-
tion, implicating speaker and audience, imagery, and a wide range of
representations of the body, of sexuality, of gender-specic experiences
or locations, as these have been historically dened.
2
But gender also
breaks the boundaries of experiential and disciplinary domains. Gender
is a social, cultural, and historical category, with anthropological, psy-
chological, and political dimensions. The text, in incorporating gender,
necessarily incorporates material, historical, and social locations, cultural
paradigms, as well as ethical and political norms and congurations.
These conditions mark womens textsas they also mark mens textsin
ways, however, that attention to gender brings forward and underscores,
and that may otherwise be overlooked or denied. Once gender is admit-
ted as a constitutive element in textual formation, the text is necessarily
seen to engage a wide range of domains.
This introduction of gender as a category of aesthetic analysis thus
challenges the very notion of aesthetics as a separate and self-dened
sphere. The text instead emerges as an intersecting site of multiple
domains and discourses. In fact, one can claim that this is the specic
power of artto bring into contact and mutual interrogation the variety
of domains of experience and discourse: history, politics, philosophy,
psychology, religion, as each may situate or enter into a text. Literature,
in this sense, may be called a discourse of discourses, a language space
in which different realms, positions, and their articulation are able to
come into encounter and conict, dialogue, confrontation, disputation,
conrmation. It offers a space for the interrelation among a wide range
of domains. None of these can be reduced to any other, although the
question of domination may be prominent in a given text and may be
part of any textual experience.
These diverse interests and references then take their place in the
artwork as compositional elements. Form does not counter or negate
other constitutive aesthetic terms, but rather becomes the scene of their
contact or confrontation. The interrelationships into which they are
573 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
drawn, moreover, take on in poetry a particular character: that of gural
relationship. The specic mode in poetics that governs the relationality
among domains is the mode of guration itself. Poetic language is gural
language. Whatever enters a poetic text enters as a gure and performs
as a gure. In poetics, textual terms open into multiple, intersecting,
and crosscutting likenesses and unlikenesses, repetitions and contrasts,
representations, augmentations, negations, and retractions. This is the
way in which poetry brings levels of experience into mutual interroga-
tion, conrmation, disputation; by connecting each term, drawn from
a variety of positions and contexts, in a gural relation to others, each
becoming a gure foror against or withothers, through various
domains in their shifting relationships.
This vision of textuality as a relational and multidimensional encoun-
ter, interrogation, and renegotiation among gures is both dramatized
and impelled by feminist poetics. Gender emerges as deeply opposed to
enclosure. It opens the text into the different spaces that gender inhabits,
bringing them in as textual elements and not only as references. Gender
implicates psychology and history, politics and religion, anthropology
and ideology. Its recognition as a textual constituent opens the text
into these elds, with gender itself an ineradicable category of analysis.
Such analysis extends through the domains engaged in the text into
the contexts of both its production and experience, the histories and
cultures of its authorship, circulation, and audience. Feminist poetics
thus opens a path between formalism and historicity, the divided ways
of aesthetic theory
Two strong critical trends that can be drawn on in developing such a
relational aesthetic are Bakhtinian and Derridean theoretical discourses.
Both Bakhtin and Derrida have been inuential in feminist theory, but
their critical implications for gender theory can be further developed,
even where they themselves do not address gender (as Bakhtin in fact
does not)
3
and beyond the uses that have been made of them thus far.
Bakhtinian discourse theory opens the text to multidomain encounters,
while Derridean sign theory offers discussions of the gural status of
language that clarify the specically literary and aesthetic relationalities
among different domains within textual composition.
The entry of gender alters the eld of aesthetics. It also recasts the
discussion of gender itself. Rigid demarcations that have been assigned to
women, in both social and literary terms, are challenged when womens
texts are approached, and recognized, as a relational eld of multiple
domains. Divisions, especially, between public and private fail to hold.
The extent to which women have been relegated to a private sphere
has been a major arena of feminist investigation in not only literature
new literary history 574
but history, anthropology, philosophy, and political theory.
4
These dif-
ferent arenas, however, themselves intercross within literary (and other)
aesthetics in ways that womens writing, exactly as it engages gender as
a multidomain formation, underscores. In literature, the traditional
boundaries of gender are exposed and crossed, not least the boundary
of public and private realms. Literature, including poetry, has in fact
been one of the central fora in which women have participated in pub-
lic discourses as well as reecting on them. A feminist poetic exposes
gender as a social and public formation, with art being among its most
powerful representations. The result is a redrawing of the lines between
public and private, as well as between other arenas whose boundaries are
revised or challenged in the interrelationships that constitute art. As I will
briey show, this public discourse of poetry in its gendered and aesthetic
implications can be examined in the poetry of Marianne Moore.
I. Cultural Studies
Cultural studies, including its New Historicist variants, has challenged
the tenets of aestheticism as a formal, detached, and autonomous realm.
Insisting on art as a cultural practice and not an autonomous formal
object, cultural critics redraw the lines between formalism and historic-
ity. As Stephen Greenblatt describes it, a poetics of culture negotiates
and exchanges among contingent social practices, examining how the
boundaries were marked between cultural practices understood to be
art forms and other, contiguous forms of expression.
5
This method has
been a major impulse in feminist criticism. As Judith Lowder Newton
sums up, New Historicist methodology involves the juxtaposition of
cultural texts and the reading of cultural codes . . . in a cross-cultural
montage encompassing academic disciplines, advertising, sex manuals,
popular culture, diaries, political manifestoes, literature, and political
movements and events. Lowder further underscores that feminist work
in fact antedates New Historicism in often unacknowledged ways, in its
interests in political, social, and historical construction; and feminism
continues to overlap and intersect with New Historicist emphases and
practices.
6

Yet tensions remain strong between formal and political interests
within cultural treatments of aesthetics. Raymond Williamss denition of
aesthetics in Keywords emphasizes its sense of isolated subjective sense-
activity as the basis of art and beauty as distinct, for example, from social
or cultural interpretations. Or, as he writes in Marxism and Literature,
aesthetics and art separate themselves, by ever more absolute abstrac-
575 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
tion, from the social processes within which they are still contained.
7

Terry Eagleton recounts how traditions of aesthetic theory, although
grounded in the social-historical body, persistently tie aesthetics to an
idealist, ahistorical formalism, tracing its course from what he describes
as a rigorous formalism in Kant, through Friedrich Schiller, into a Sym-
bolist poetry that is seen as being in the presence of pure eidetic forms
of language itself, purged of any determinate semantic substance. If
not Marx, then Marxists tend to reduce the internal complexity of the
aesthetic to a direct set of ideological functions.
8
Yet Eagletons account
remains caught in the dualist construction that he seeks to overcome,
with the formal remaining a mode of ahistorical abstraction complicit
with the subjectivism of bourgeois culture. Aesthetics emerges as the
self-evasion of coercive ideology, an isolated enclave within which the
dominant social order can nd an idealized refuge from its own actual
values of competitiveness, exploitation and material possessiveness.
9
And
social order itself is conceived as a Marxist or Foucauldian domination
which art can only either reect or evade. As form, art withdraws either
in complicity or conformity to societys dominant modes.
10

Thus formalism continues its association with aesthetic autonomy,
while cultural approaches subordinate aesthetics to politics. As Winfried
Fluck has argued, cultural studies tends to erase the differences between
politics and aesthetics so that literary texts can have a direct political
function and the profession of literary criticism can be redened as po-
litical work.
11
Priority is granted to the political domain, which is itself
understood in terms of domination and resistance. Art is caught within
dominant institutional or disciplinary frameworks, which it resists by
countering hegemonic social formations by withdrawal from them.
12

Literary structures are either assimilated to ideological ones, or seen to be
shaped through resistance to them. As one critic puts it, a Foucauldian-
based poetics sets out to explore the possibilities for exchanges among
disparate elds in order to expose the political interests masked by
our ideas about order.
13
But as Rita Felski argues about feminist aesthetics, in an assertion
which can be extended to aesthetics in general, to simply read literary
texts in terms of their delity to a pregiven notion of female experi-
ence or feminist ideology is in effect to deny any specicity to literary
language and meaning, rendering literature redundant by reducing it to
a purely documentary function as a more or less accurate reproduction
of an already existing . . . political reality.
14
Max Webers remark about
religion also applies to literature: that it is mistaken to think it is a
simple function of the social situation of the stratum which appears as
its characteristic bearer, or that it represents the stratums ideology, or
new literary history 576
that it is a reection of a stratums material or ideal interest-situation.
15

Traditional discourses of aesthetics mark art as a separate sphere, even if,
as in Theodor Adorno, it is claimed to be historical in its very resistance
to history. Such separation has in the most recent critical discussions
been referred to as arts singularity.
16
Feminist-minded criticism has
on the whole resisted such aestheticist withdrawal, since questions of
gender necessarily engage historical, social, and political experience and
their representations and effects in art. A fully realized feminist poetics
would therefore address both the historicist forces that frame and enter
art and the formal, compositional ways in which they do so. A relational
aesthetics, which sees art as the space in which the diverse domains of
experience come into compositional form, offers such a poetics.
II. Bakhtinian Poetics
Bakhtinian theory, including its feminist variants, has often been
pursued in Foucauldian directions. Bakhtinian feminist criticism often
dualizes dialogics into opposing power relations of authority against
subversion, disciplinary order against revolt, obedience against resistance.
According to Dale Bauer, for example, society is a hierarchical structure
like Foucaults agencies of power. Participation requires obeying com-
munity rules, while even resistance can also be appropriated into the
interpretive community, manipulated or reabsorbed into community.
Only resistance is creative, and even resistance can be appropriated.
Teresa De Lauretis, too, speaks of strategies of writing and reading as
forms of cultural resistance.
17
All social life becomes either coercion
or resistance, as if identity arises out of some disconnected individuality,
which culture assaults rather than frames. And art is dened and judged
as it opposes cultural norms, when in fact art also necessarily draws on
them and has a very diverse range of relationships to them.
Bakhtinian theory itself posits a more varied sense of historicity and
of arts relation to it, and introduces critical tools that precisely dene
and examine the textual performance of these multiple terms. Bakhtins
discourse theory treats every word as drawing into the text its contextual
settings and past usages, its political, ideological, historical roles and
senses, in the disputes and agreements, contests and redenitions of
each words participation in multiple exchanges. The relationships that
emerge include not only domination and resistance, but also investment,
afrmation, intensication, modication, transformation. Within the
arena of almost every utterance an intense interaction and struggle
between ones own and anothers word is being waged, he writes, but
577 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
adds that this is a process in which they oppose or dialogically interani-
mate each other.
18
Interanimation includes opposition and struggle,
but also dialogical agreement, afrmation.
19
Language, as Bakhtin
(with Ferdinand de Saussure) emphasizes, is by denition social and
inherited. No one invents the words he or she uses, which are embed-
ded in context, situation, a history of usages. But this is not a barrier
to personal creativity and expression. On the contrary, it is its ground.
Language is inherited. It becomes ones own only when the speaker
populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates
the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention (DI
293). Bakhtins work opens avenues into linguistic/social communities,
showing no voice to be simply monological, however much it wishes to
achieve or impose unitary meaning. But this is true not only of resistance,
but also of participation, invocation, and transformation.
Bakhtin himself restricted his discourse theory to the novel, regarding
poetry, as he repeatedly states, as a purely extra-historical language, a
language far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life, a language
of the gods (DI 331). Born from the conjunction of Marxist histori-
cism and formalist aesthetics, Bakhtinian discourse theory transforms
Jakobsons formalist categories into interactive events within concrete
contexts and situations, in open and unnished exchanges. As Tzvetan
Todorov explains, Bakhtins theories redirected a formalist analysis of
language as signs governed by systematic structural relationships toward
texts as dynamic moments of exchanges situated in history and culture.
20

Bakhtin, however, never abandoned the formalist denition of poetry
as a pure language dissociated from the everyday cultural exchanges he
saw as constituting discourse in the novel. In the novel, words dialogi-
cally address, contest, invoke, and revoke each other across a range of
usages and contexts. But the poetic word is sufcient unto itself and
does not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic
style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien
discourse, any allusion to alien discourse (DI 285).
Nonetheless, the poem is not, as Bakhtins formalist background pos-
ited, a unitary, monologically sealed-off utterance which uses words so
that they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and
their connection with specic contexts (DI 29798). On the contrary,
poetic language is heterogeneous, even while certain poetic periods,
such as the neoclassical, tend to stylize language by pushing it toward
uniform registers. On the one hand, in poetry words are excised from
context, thrown onto the blankness of the page. On the other, these
words bring into the text all the links, connections, usages, etymologies
that connect them to general circulation. Words are at once released
new literary history 578
and tied, excised and reset, in ways that can radicalize the text as a space
of juxtaposition. Words are intensely incised and newly combined with
other words, bringing their contexts and senses into radical recombina-
tions that remain in many ways open ended.
Bakhtins term microdialogue points to such a recombinatory
poetics of the word: Relationships can permeate inside the utterance,
even inside the individual word, as long as two voices collide within it
dialogically (microdialogue . . .) (PDP 184). In this microdialogue, each
individual poetic word is a dialogized site, such that, as in the novel, each
word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially
charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions (DI 293).
The poetic word, too, imports these contexts of the words socially
charged life into the text, in open and unnalized conjunctions. Every
word that enters a poem is drawn from some domain which it carries
into the poem, where it resides alongside other words, likewise drawn
from, and drawing with them, contexts of usage. These juxtapositions
create dialogical relationships regardless of whether or not they are
voiced through a character, although characters are for Bakhtin central
to novelistic heteroglossia.
21
What creates meaning is the relationships
between words, which include sound and rhythm and other material
strata, but also contexts and histories that situate and mark each word
and that are then imported through the word into the text.
Bakhtins notion of speech genres extends the implications of mi-
crodialogue. He describes speech genres as a diversity of generic forms
of utterances in various spheres of human activity, such as chronicles,
contracts, texts of laws, clerical and other documents, various literary,
scientic and commentarial genres, ofcial and personal letters, re-
joinders in everyday dialogue and so on.
22
Speech genres invoke the
discourses of social groups as well as of ideologies, world views, beliefs,
and understandingsthe expressive planes of various belief systems
(DI 28990). They include bookish speech, popular speech, scientic,
journalistic commercial, . . . as well as. . . stylistic subcategories: dialecti-
cal words, archaic words, occupational expressions (SG 6465). Words
address and have addressesplaces where they are characteristically
encountered, which they historically, socially, culturally inhabit, within
the particular real conditions of speech communication. The mean-
ing of a word is then not xed and given, but always within an active
responsive position with respect to it (sympathy, agreement, stimulus
to action) (SG 86).
Bakhtinian poetics is thus invitational to, and not exclusionary of,
domains of experience and the languages of their conduct, involving
multiple responses including agreement and sympathy as well as
579 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
contest and resistance. Audience and author, history and culture and poli-
tics, textual circulation and distribution, all engage each other through
the formal distributions of the words drawn from each domain, in ways
that change in relation to each other as much as these positions do.
Not detachment or self-enclosure, but this multiplication of component
relationships constitutes aesthetic composition.
Literature, indeed discourse itself, is social, historical, political. But it
also shapes these dimensions in formal ways. Bakhtin does not eliminate
the aesthetic dimension, nor does he reduce it to culture or to cultural
conict. Feminist critic Josephine Donovan conrms a Bakhtinian his-
toricity in reiterating that literature exists in a political context and
therefore literary devices reect and refract the power differentials of
the authors society. But when she observes that style is not innocent
or neutrali.e. purely aesthetic, she still denes the aesthetic against
the historical as neutral and sees literary devices only as they reect
and refract power differentials.
23
But the aesthetic brings the political
into conguration with other dimensions, through both the interweav-
ing and counterweaving of its discourses with others.
III. Derrida: Figural Theory and Historicity
If Bakhtinian theory is often aligned with historicist analysis of power
relationships, deconstructive theory is characteristically seen as isolated
from historicist, cultural, and political interests. Paul De Man, for ex-
ample, argues for an unappeasable opposition between trope and
dialogism. Trope is self-reexive, autotelic, saying something about
language rather than about the world; while dialogism ventures to
address the ideological, social, exterior, and heterogeneous world.
24
De
Man here opposes deconstruction to Bakhtinian dialogics, seeing the
rst as positing unanchored signiers, the second as theorizing engage-
ment among discourses. This opposition is common. Bakhtin is held to
be political and social, while Derridean signiers point to each other in
a linguistic world cut off from anything beyond or outside it.
25
As Allon
White puts it, Bakhtin rescues literature from ahistoricism by placing it
in a sociological framework which thereby makes [it] responsive to an
historical and social comprehension of literature, whereas Derridas
deconstruction is purely metaphysical . . . insulated from the transfor-
mative and conictual social arena of speech events.
26

This aesthetic of enclosure reappears in feminist discussions, where
Derridas work is both enlisted and resisted in ways that can only be
touched on here. French feminisms criture feminine, particularly, re-
new literary history 580
stages the break between historicity and linguistic analysis, this time on
deconstructive and psychoanalytic grounds.
27
Its notion of a feminine
language dualizes by liberating, but also thereby isolating and oppos-
ing, womens discourses from norms of culture seen as restrictive so-
cialization. Feminine language opposes normative discourses, enacting
instead a nonreferential intradiscourse. Identifying the feminine with a
pre-Oedipal nonrational language against a structured masculine lan-
guage of socialized coercion, criture fminine has been widely criticized
as unhistorical and also restrictive in its approach to womens writing.
28

Here again, feminist theory itself threatens to reduplicate existing dis-
ciplinary splits between an empirically based sociology or history on
the one hand and a purely textualist literary theory on the other.
29
But deconstruction as a theory of signiers is not necessarily disengaged
and autotelic. It offers, rather, a theory of gures that redenes how
signiers mean both within the text and in relationship to contexts. In
Derrida, the denial of the signied as literal does not deny signica-
tion itself, nor does it simply disjoin signiers from historicity, materiality,
culture, or politics. Rather, Derridean sign theory offers avenues towards
integrating historicity and textuality, in ways that productively conjoin
with Bakhtins. In Bakhtin, compositional elements carry into the text
the associations, contexts, usages they serve outside it. Yet what happens
to them within the poetic frame is still distinctive: they take on gural
meanings, as metaphors, similes, inversions, contrasts, etc., of each other.
An analysis of the relationship among textual elements characteristically
pulls towards isolation. But Derridean theory, like Bakhtins, links textual
elements to the signifying chains of which they remain part.
Derridas own writings cross a daunting range of disciplines: phi-
losophy, psychology, law, politics, literature, art. This cross-disciplinary
practice also penetrates his theory and is intrinsic to his notions of signs
and their meanings. Derrida himself draws out the historical dimension
of signication. In his interview in Acts of Literature, he insists that his
notion of iterability is historical through and through, is indeed the
condition of historicity.
30
In Speech and Phenomena he speaks of the sign
as always connecting empirical existents in the world, arguing that
the body of speech, in empirically determined language, is not for-
eign to the nature of expression.
31
Derridas approach to the sign as a
diacritical inscription embeds meaning in processes of differentiation,
mutability, and multiplicity. These are the very conditions of history as
the site of meaning. The sign comes into meaning through its tracing of
changing relationships with signiers before and after it, in an ongoing
articulation of difference and connection that dene signs in relation
to each other. The absence of the referent and even of the signied
581 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
sense entails not the collapse of sense but rather its relocation within
chains of differential marks, which extend into all experience in
general.
32
As Diane Elam underscores, Derridean indeterminacy is not
the same thing as being condemned to the land of relativistic nihilism,
where political actionor any action for that matterbecomes impos-
sible.
33
Derrida similarly insists on the importance of context in the
title of his essay Signature, Event, Context, which projects a notion
of situated signication: identity can only determine or delimit itself
through differential relations to other elements.
34
Pregiven and xed
meaning is denied; but other meanings are opened up through differ-
ential relations that multiply but also delimit signication as embedded
in relationships within contexts. The role of context is determinant
(LTD 60). In his defense of Signature Event Context in Limited Inc, Der-
rida reiterates that while the written syntagma can always be detached
from the chain in which it is inserted or given and hence can break with
every context, nevertheless, this does not imply that the mark is valid
outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts
without any center or absolute anchoring (LTD 9, 12).
35
A signier, can
always be detached from one chain of signiers and inserted into
others. This is in fact how language works, how the ability to create new
utterances is possible (without iterability there is no language at all;
[LTD 101]). Language only means in context, but any context is never
nal, and so meanings multiply through new interreferences among
signiers in the specic chains that repeatedly but differently locate
them. As Derrida writes in Acts of Literature: We have available contex-
tual elements of great stability (not natural, universal and immutable
but fairly stable, and thus also destabilizable) which . . . allow reading,
transformation, transposition. There is possible play, with regulated gaps
and interpretive transformations . . . [a] spacing between the pieces . . .
which allows for movement and articulation, which is to say for history,
for better or for worse.
36
Rather than defeating or destroying meaning
or even releasing it into endless indeterminacy, Derridean sign chains
situate words to produce meanings, so that they are both stable and
destabilizing, in a play that remains, however, regulated. This not
only allows for movement and articulation for the possibility of his-
tory itself, but insists on it.
To say that there is no determinate signied fully and nally es-
tablished by either referent or intention points to a gural theory
with immediate implications for poetics. But this does not cut off from
extratextual signication, or render all meaning merely unstable. It is
true that there is no signied behind the utterances in that signi-
cation is enacted through them (LTD 65). Rather, signiers signify as
new literary history 582
they interrefer with other signiers, each as a gure for the others in
an open-ended chain. But Derrida here verges towards Bakhtin: on
the one side, in the historicist implications of Derridean theory, on the
other, in the formalist implications of Bakhtin. Bakhtin, too, speaks of
traces, links, chains, describing the dialogical dynamic of language as
it reaches into and reects social circles and forces as in fact made up
of traces, the linguistic changes in the language markers (linguistic
symbols) that are left behind in the language as a result of this social
forces activity (DI 293).
Bakhtins notion of speech genres further develops his concept of
signication through the (differentiating) linkage of signifying chains in
which meaning inheres not in pregiven terms but in their unfolding in
relation to each other. Thus in The Problem of Speech Genres, Bakhtin
speaks of the utterance as a link in a very complexly organized chain
of utterances (SG 69), a link in the chain of speech communication
(SG 84, 91, 93), as related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent
links in the chain of speech communion (SG 94). Conversely, Derrida
projects the reiterated signier as carrying with it usages, associations,
echoes from context to context: The import of context can never be
dissociated from the analysis of a text, and that despite or because
of this a context is always transformative, transformable, exportative-
exportable (LTD 79).
What emerges is a conception of meaning that is not dened by refer-
ence to something preestablished outside the text, whether historical
or ideological. Nor is the text envisioned as a closed framework, with
meaning the product only of its mutual, self-referring signs. As gural
chains, signiers do refer to other signiers, but these chains extend
beyond the text into their histories, cultural usages, ideological implica-
tions, personal meanings. Signs thus do not displace history, culture, or
the contexts in which they take placeit is this very notion of displace-
ment that causes a schizophrenic poetics that pits history against theory,
cultural experience against textual components. On the contrary, signs
presuppose just such contexts, even as they also articulate them. And
the text emerges out of interrelation between signiers, both within
and without the text, drawn from different domains that it then draws
in, opening up new possible relations among them. As Marjorie Perloff
comments, the Derridean signature as identifying mark counters the
closural rst-person metaphoric model of poetry. Signature marks the
specic conguration of a given text, in its relation to authorship and
also its distinctive trajectory of signiers that link elements within the
text to those in its contexts.
37
Derridean theory discloses how contextual
relationships are drawn into texts through signiers, linked in chains that
583 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
extend into usage, history, discourse, and how each signier stands as
a gure for the others. But this is not a static structure. Signier con-
notes not an inert sign, but signers, active speakers and writers, readers
and audiences who participate in the construction and interpretation
of signs, always in relation to each other in the trajectory of signifying
chains and events.
IV. Feminist Poetics: Marianne Moore
Both Bakhtin and Derrida point toward an inclusionary and relational
aesthetic with special consequences for a feminist poetics. In recognizing
gender as a constitutive element in any textual event, feminist poetics
multiplies the engagements of a text in historical, political, social, psycho-
logical, etc., experience. No text lacks gender. Gender(s) are inscribed
in any text as an ineradicable domain among and intercrossing with
others that together become constitutive elements within the textual
event. Once gender is admitted, it is impossible to sustain a merely
enclosed textuality. In Bakhtinian terms, women can be recognized as
what Bakhtin describes as different strata of society, using a particular
language because of educational, professional, and class differences,
as well as of course, the differences of gender itself.
38
Such feminized
discourses, in a historical, social, and political sense, draw into the text
womens distinctive social strata, roles, locations, activities, etc. These
discourses then enter into multiple gural relations as signiers, such as
those traced by Derrida in complex and ongoing articulation. Bakhtinian
theory conrms the multiple contextual links that enter into texts and,
in terms of poetics, act as mutually referring signiers along any number
of domains that are, in Derridean terms, brought into gural relation-
ship with each other. That gender, like other signiers, is not grounded
within pregiven signied meanings but rather emerges in what Derrida
calls in Choreographies a multiplicity of sexually marked voices is
part of the renegotiation of the very meaning of gender in its multiple
connections that literature both explores and furthers. Such renegotia-
tions of meaning, I have argued, ought not however to be taken as an
indeterminacy that erases context.
39
Rather, indeterminacy in this way
remains always a determinate oscillation between possibilities . . . that
are themselves highly determined in dened situations (LTD 148).
The overcoming of an aesthetic bifurcation between formalist/histori-
cist dichotomies has special signicance as well as grounding in womens
writing in that it challenges what has been a persistent assignment of
womens literature, as well as of their lives, to a private, as distinct from
new literary history 584
public, sphere. Womens poetry has been seen to lack the formalist
rigor of great art, but also to remain paltry in its historical and political
references. But womens writing, especially as gender itself becomes a
recognized parameter shaping its modes of address, representations of
the self, and social, political, and cultural references and implications,
emerges as a paradigm of cross-domain, relational aesthetics. A feminist
poetics is therefore a poetics that is engaged with gender and the multiple
dimensions this entails; one which, beyond the dualisms of historicity
and formalism, is constituted by their complex interrelationship.
To turn to an example: the writing of Marianne Moore demonstrates
such a relational, multidomain poetics. Formally experimental and
radically eclectic, Moore is distinctive for the heterogeneity of materials
she introduces into her texts, drawn from truly far-ung sources and
discourses, elite and popular, scientic and documentary, and also reli-
gious and ethical. Hers is a fully Bakhtinian multiple discourse. These
diverse materials are inscribed into her texts in ways that force attention
to questions of the interrelationships among them within the poem and
also, via the poem, into large cultural arenas. Moores work offers an
intense and particular nexus of aesthetic, cultural, political, religious,
and gendered dimensions, whose relationship to each other in the text,
however, remains poetically gural and intensely formalized.
Moores multiple discourses have been much discussed in terms of her
practices of quotation, collage, and mosaic. Cristanne Miller underscores
how Moores citations differ from those of other (male) modernists
in being drawn from ordinary rather than canonical sources, giving
no elevation to her verse. Miller explicates them as egalitarian and
collaborative, and indeed as epitomizing Bakhtinian heteroglossia but
in a specically feminist sense.
40
This feminized sense of heteroglossia
can be seen as part of the constitution of a gendered voice in Moores
work, a voice that reaches in its address beyond private domesticity, not
only because she, like other women authors, intend what she writes for
a public audience, but because of the public as well as private domains
Moores verse engages. It does so through references to the multiple
contexts recognized in her work, including history, politics, religion,
gender, and poetics itself; which she brings into relationship through the
poetics of making each a gure for the others, as analogies and antith-
eses, metonymies and ironies and so on. Gender itself is often in Moore
suggested obliquely: in the very fact that Moore is highly conscious of
being a woman poet, and in modes of address, self-representation, and
concerns associated with womens traditions and orientations.
585 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
To take one poem as text case: Moores Blessed is the Man brings
together into its discourse elds an extraordinary range of citations,
voices, references, and domains:
BLESSED IS THE MAN
who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer
the man who does not denigrate, depreciate, denunciate;
who is not characteristically intemperate,
who does not excuse, retreat, equivocate; and will be heard.
(Ah, Giorgione! There are those who mongrelize
and those who heighten anything they touch; although it may well be
that if Giorgiones self-portrait were not said to be he,
it might not take my fancy. Blessed the geniuses who know
that egomania is not a duty.)
Diversity, controversy, tolerancein that citadel
of learning we have a fort that ought to armor us well.
Blessed is the man who takes the risk of a decisionasks
himself the question: Would it solve the problem?
Is it right as I see it? Is it in the best interests of all?
41
A full explication of this text would be lengthy and exacting, but we
see that even in these opening verses, the political, the aesthetic, the
educational, the civic, the religious, and, implicitly (or is it explicitly?),
gender are brought to bear. The poems title and rst line cite the
rst Psalm, butor rather, andthis religious reference is at once
brought into the political arena. The rst quotations are, in the notes
that Moore attached to her poems, acknowledged as referring to con-
temporary political events involving Dwight D. Eisenhower (character-
istically intemperate) and, very signicantly, Abraham Lincoln, citing
Lincolns citation of William Lloyd Garrisons words declaring that in
his abolitionist campaign he will not excuse, retreat, equivocate; and
will be heard.
42
Projected here, then, are questions of political debate
and public service, as these in turn intersect (or fail to intersect) with
moral commitment and religious injunctionand religion was, in fact,
powerfully invoked in the abolitionist movement and in American public
discourse at large.
43

But the next stanza, in an apparent aside, turns to a different domain.
Ah, Giorgione! invokes aesthetics, by way of the master painter about
whom very little is known, whose work balances self-expression with mys-
new literary history 586
tery, and whose self-portrait is highly nonidealized, a representation of
self without ination. Here is a genius who knows that egomania is not
a duty. This gesture of modesty is among Moores most characteristic
and passionate principles, enacted in her poetics in myriad ways, serving
as a moral norm while also placing Moore in a tradition of womens self-
representation.
44
Modesty is one way in which gender is signaled in this
text, in a curious counterpoint to the allusion to the First Psalm which
names the man as he who does not sit in the seat of the scoffer.
One might venture that the man is (also) a woman, not in the generic
sense but as endowed and dened against egomania. This would also
apply to Lincoln in the public sphere and to praiseworthy artists in the
aesthetic one, including Moore herself as a female poet.
But the several realms of aesthetics and politics and gender themselves
are mutually guring, in ways that transform each as well as the prole of
gender itself. Moores intercrossing discourses at once challenge divisions
between disparate elds, the place of art among them, as well as core
geographies of gender as these have been assigned to, or rather, largely
excluded from, many areas and domains. Her citations and invocations
of the Eisenhower and Lincoln presidencies, of abolitionism with its
political as well as moral and religious involvements, rmly place her
as addressing and participating in public discoursepolitical, and also
moral, religious, and, as the poem afrms, aesthetic. Neither women nor
poetry prove as private as they are regularly assumed to be.
45

The next citations pursue this intercrossing of public life and gender
with civic policy and pedagogy. The phrase Diversity, controversy, toler-
ance is taken from the The Citadel of Learning, a work by James Conant
who, after serving as President of Harvard, went to Berlin as U.S. High
Commissioner. A review of this work was the source, the notes tell us, for
the Lincoln citation of William Lloyd Garrison, itself enacting a chain of
embedded and circulated discourses. Conants The Citadel of Learning is
expressly addressed to the academy as involved in, and reecting on, public
life and responsibility. Its citadel is armed against an authoritarianism that
betrays the energies and purposes of education. No one uses the word
unity, he writes, more frequently than those who are attempting to force
Soviet ideology. In opposition, he afrms that freedom and tolerance
go hand in hand in matters of the spirit. The absence of dissenters is
dangerous, and creativity in fact owers when there is dissension. In the
passage Moore cites, Conant asserts the necessity of diversity, controversy,
and tolerance [in] an intellectual atmosphere where vital differences of
opinion are not merely tolerated but encouraged.
46

The poem thus proposes and also enacts a discourse of address among
pluralist positions that are at once political, educational, public, religious,
gendered, and aesthetic. These domains are also interconnected, in
587 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
some cases directly, but in all cases metaphorically. Being a public per-
son is in some ways like being a painter and/or writer. Being a certain
kind of man is like being a certain kind of woman, both representing
ethical positions indicated in the poem. Each of these domains acts as a
gure for others, signifying across as well as respecting differences. The
poem pursues this complexly contrapuntal music of distinctive spheres.
It poses, in the political domain, the classic republican question: Is it
in the best interests of all? (quoting the then President Eisenhower).
But the phrase who takes the risk of a decision is quoted, as the notes
clarify, from a discussion of poetry: Poetry . . . must . . . take the risk of
decision, to say what we know, loud and clearand if necessary ugly.
Both politics and art require decision, but not willful self-assertion. Thus
both are betrayed when
Ulysses companions are now political
living self-indulgently until the moral sense is drowned,
having lost all power of comparison,
thinking license emancipates one, slaves whom they themselves have
bound.
Brazen authors, downright soiled and downright spoiled, as if sound
and exceptional, are the old quasi-modish counterfeit . . .
Here is the betrayal of aesthetic, public and moral principle. Brazen
authors refers to the indulgent selves who sacrice, in republican
discourse, public for private interestprivate lies and public shame.
This phrase invokes the whole tradition of civic virtue, here in the
negative form of those who betray both public freedom and private
liberty in order to be, in the poems rhetoric of the American Revolu-
tion, slaves whom they themselves have bound. Yet to praise liberty
is not to assume that license emancipates. Liberty is not mere license;
not everything is to be tolerated. The poems blessing nely balances
restraint with commitment.
Blessed, the unaccommodating man.
Blessed the man whose faith is different
from possessivenessof a kind not framed by things which do appear
who will not visualize defeat, too intent to cower;
whose illumined eye has seen the shaft that gilds the sultans tower.
The end of the poem collects together its various domains. Religious
discourse is reafrmed, but one in which faith is different from posses-
new literary history 588
siveness, different from claiming any single truth to the exclusion of
others. Religion instead, as Moore suggests in another inserted citation,
points to a kind not framed by things which do appear (Hebrews 11:3).
Religion, like literature, promises dimensions beyond the immediately
apparent, always pointing to further possible meanings and engagements.
This is one import of the poems concluding lines. The sultans tower
may refer to the opening of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a kind of
poetic vision. But sultan also recalls the poems political contexts. In
either case, the tower remains a beckoning vision, ever distant, never
nally possessed. It realizes what in Moore is (also) a gendered voice
reaching far across different experiences, linking them together, while
respecting the distinctness of each and her own from them.
This poem as both event and aesthetic thus draws together multiple
domains into relationships which mutually interact and refer; relation-
ships which are both gural and intercrossing, public and private, each
of which is distinct, yet variously and intricately linked. This is also the
poems compositional art. Gender emerges as a central and formative
dimension extending across other experiential arenas, situating posi-
tions within them and relationships between them. It becomes one
fundamental voice within a diversity which the poem at once proposes
and performs: the arena of discourses in which none is necessarily ex-
cluded but each can be heard and recognized. Moores poetics becomes
a public-discourse scene of negotiated meaning emerging among various
texts and voices, an interrelational eld of encounter and interrogation
among distinctive domains.
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
NOTES
1 Marjorie Perloff theorizes the poetic text in ways that open the eld so as to make
contact with the world as well as the word. See The Dance of the Intellect (New York: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1985), 181. But she is also ambivalent about arts reference to an
external reality even as its compositional thrust [also] undercut[s] the very referentiality
it seems to assert. See The Futurist Moment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 49.
2 For a review and discussion of denitions of woman see Toril Moi, What is a Woman?
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
3 The absence of gender in Bakhtin is raised by Wayne C. Booth, Freedom of Interpreta-
tion: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism, in Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on
His Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), and subsequently
by many others.
4 On the revision of the public/private division, see Shira Wolosky, Public Women,
Private Men: American Women Poets and the Common Good, Signs 28, no. 2 (2003):
66594.
589 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
5 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1988), 56.
6 Judith Lowder Newton, History as Usual? Feminism and the New Historicism, in
The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989).
7 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1985), 32; Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1977), 154.
8 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 86, 4.
9 Eagleton, Ideology, 9. Cf. Isobel Armstrongs critique of Eagleton as himself perpetrat-
ing the idealist aesthetic he is attacking in The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000),
3233.
10 Eagleton, Ideology, 252. Ian Hunter traces a genealogy of aesthetics as withdrawal
from the world as a sphere of mundane knowledge and action. This ethic of with-
drawal however persists in his own account of aesthetics as a means by which individuals
set themselves apart from ordinary existence and conduct themselves as subjects of a
heightened form of being. See Aesthetics and Cultural Studies, in Cultural Studies, ed.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 391,
361.
11 Winfried Fluck, Aesthetics and Cultural Studies, in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age,
ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
2002), 92. Cf. Ian Hunter: The task confronting the political analysis of aesthetics, there-
fore, is not to unmask it as the disguised expression of political domination (Aesthetics
and Cultural Studies, 358).
12 Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, A Hive of Subtlety: Aesthetics and the
End(s) of Cultural Studies, American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 428.
13 Laurie A. Finke, Feminist Theory, Womens Writing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press,
1992), 11. Cf. Terry Threadgolds discussion of Foucault, Feminist Poetics: Poeisis, Performance,
Histories (New York: Routledge, 1997).
14 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 8. Cf. Literature After Feminism (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 2003), 1314, where Felski argues against either/or claims regarding formal
versus historicist criticism.
15 Max Weber, The Social Psychology of the World Religions, in From Max Weber, trans.
and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), 267301,
269270.
16 See for example Derek Attridges inuential The Singularity of Literature (New York:
Routledge, 2004). Adorno has become a core gure in current New Aestheticist efforts
to recover formal engagement.
17 Dale Bauer, Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988),
xiiixiv, xi. Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesnt (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984),
7. Cf. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London:
Methuen, 1986), 13, more generally on Bakhtinian transgressiveness.
18 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1982), 354 (hereafter cited as DI).
19 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 184 (hereafter cited as PDP).
20 Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Min-
neapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 5455.
21 For Bakhtin, to become dialogical, utterances must become the positions of various
subjects expressed in discourse (PDP 183). Cf. DI 323.
new literary history 590
22 M. M. Bakhtin Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1986), 62 (hereafter cited
as SG).
23 Josephine Donovan, Style and Power, in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic, ed. Dale
Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), 85; cf. Diane Price Herndl,
The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic, in Bauer and McKinstry, Feminism, Bakhtin, and
the Dialogic, 724. Zoa Burr uses the term aesthetic to mean a hermetic inviolability
around the poem as aesthetic artifact versus a motivated utterance addressed to its audi-
tors. See Of Women, Poetry, and Power (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2002), 157.
24 Paul de Man, Dialogue and Dialogism, Poetics Today 4, no. 1 (1983):104105.
25 To take one inuential case, Paul Ricoeur distinguishes his own position from what
he calls a Derridean hypostasis of language which sets up language as an absolute.
The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, ed. Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart, (Boston: Beacon,
1978), 101.
26 Allon White, Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993),
150.
27 For an overview of deconstructive elements in French feminism see Toril Moi, Sexual/
Textual Politics (New York: Routledge, 1985), 96.
28 Julia Kristeva has particularly absorbed Bakhtinian discourses into psychoanalysis.
For the ahistoricity of French feminism, see Ann Rosalind Jones, Inscribing Femininity:
French Theories of the Feminine, in Making a Difference, ed. Gayle Greene and Copplia
Kahn (New York: Routledge, 1985), 80112; Domna Stanton, Difference on Trial: A Cri-
tique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, in The Poetics of Gender,
ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 15782; Moi, Sexual/Textual
Politics, 15657; Suzanne Juhasz, Adventures in the World of the Symbolic: Dickinson
and Metaphor, in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and
Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), 139162.
29 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 2; cf. 78, 30. Felski likewise questions Kristevas no-
tion of womens time as ahistorical (Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 150).
30 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992),
6364
31 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans David
B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), 30.
32 Derrida, Signature, Event, Context, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 318, 317.
33 Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1994), 31.
34 Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1988), 53 (hereafter
cited in text as LTD).
35 Cf. Signature, Event, Context, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton,
UK: Harvester Press, 1982), 317.
36 Derrida, Acts of Literature, 64.
37 Marjorie Perloff, Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject: Ron Sillimans Albany,
Susan Howes Buffalo, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 3 (1999): 432.
38 Diane Price Herndl, The Dilemmas of a Feminine Dialogic, in Bauer and McKinstry,
Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic, 10.
39 Derrida and Christie McDonald, Interview: Choreographies, Diacritics 12, no. 2
(1982): 6676, 76, 7273. See also Derrida, Spurs, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago, 1978).
40 Cristanne Miller, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority (Cambridge, MA; Harvard
Univ. Press, 1995), 17779.
41 Marianne Moore, The Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 173.
591 relational aesthetics and feminist poetics
42 Moore, Complete Poems, 289.
43 For further discussion, see Shira Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
44 Most discussions of Moore investigate this question of feminized modesty, as part of
Moores complex gender evasions as well as invocations and performances. Cristanne Miller
extensively reviews the question of Moores modesty, arguing that it ultimately grounds
her construction of an alternative authority, 32. Cf., eg., Miller, Questions of Authority,
323, 173. For a discussion of modesty as a feminized trope see Wolosky, Modest Claims,
in Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry 18001910, ed.
Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004).
45 Betsy Erkkila sees Moores seemingly ladylike timidity and modesty as mask[ing]
an ambition to invent herself as an American original; but also describes Moores poetry
as an assertive critique of social norms from a position at once ethical and historically
feminized. See The Wicked Sisters (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 1024. See also
footnote 4.
46 James Bryant Conant, The Citadel of Learning (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1956),
45, 7, 67.