(^{radically trivial}) CONTRACT—ual WRITING: In the Craftshop of the “Creative”

The work of the creative writing workshop lines up alongside that of the traditionalists in the English Department (e.g., the Jungians, the Yeatsians... ) as a bastion of reaction and the “anti PC” backlash. Creative writing is particularly useful for such a ruling class agenda because, since it is grounded in anti-intellectual categories like “intuition," “artistic intention," and “impartiality," it is able to re-legitimate these categories that have lost their legitimacy under present historical conditions. The creative writing program is presently the most secure and fortified “refuge” for those seeking to escape the contemporary crisis in knowledge and educational institutions. In Professor Steven Dobyns' “The Voices One Listens To” (AWP Chronicle, Feb. 1995), the creative writing workshop is posited as a site where the apparent arbitrariness of subjectivity (in fact, its implication in the history of class struggles)—the “chaos” of “other voices—can be erased through the elimination of positionality and the valorization of the transcendent authorial subject through categories like “impartiality." However, this demand for the removal of “bias” (a lack of objectivity) is a means for naturalizing the absolute exclusion of what he calls “partisanship” (a principled basis for political struggle). For Dobyns, the creative writing workshop is to be a site where “radical feminist, black, gay and Marxist poems” (p. 22)—i.e., all those “partisan” positions that can be grouped together as “disruptive” enough to require an “angry white male” backlash—can be recognized as non-"objective." Furthermore, Dobyns insists that it is necessary to root out the more “subtle forms” of partisanship, which “can be insidious." In other words, even the most minimal departure from “traditional” canonic norms (anything that even “hints” of—that can be “intuited” as—theoretical or political intervention) is to be rounded up, indicted and expelled. As such, the “workshop” is organized according to the logic of McCarthyism, locating “extremism” whether open or hidden: It thereby trains subjects to purge radical knowledges in the name of “questions” which transcend history. (Of course, only certain types of “bias” and “extremism” are singled out by Dobyns, in other words, “impartiality” proves to be “that partiality prevailing as universality” (Marx, Economic Manuscripts) whereby, for instance, the reactionary populism and localist and nationalist “realism” practiced by many members of the creative writing department, to take only one example, seems exempt).

but partiality...

The texts produced under the name The Radical Tangerine are merely “outbursts” which follow directly from the contradiction between the supposedly ahistorical, objective position argued for by Dobyns and the actual implication of this position in a whole series of class antagonisms determined by the contradiction between the relations and forces of production (i.e., the extension of wage-labor relations to the vast majority, which clashes with the socialization of labor, knowledges and institutions). Such antagonisms compel the “impartial” creative writer to recognize implicitly that his position is in fact very “biased," i.e., a partisan of specific race, class, gender, and sexual interests. Under such conditions, the creative writer “intuitively” realizes that parody remains the only way to reassert outmoded positions: parody allows this terrified subject to present himself as a “sane," moderate voice in the midst of a civilization in crisis, and to demonize “others” (radical feminists, blacks, gays, Marxists...) as the cause of this crisis. The “poverty” appropriated by parodic humanism ("to be free of the interpretive bias that is part of one's cultural conditioning"—much more “profound," of course, than the material poverty suffered by billions under global capitalism) is really a crisis in knowledge which implicates the bourgeois academy in the deepening crisis of profitability plaguing capitalist society; a crisis which is exploited by reactionaries like Gingrich and Dobyns in order to accelerate the accumulation of capital and exterminate all “answers” which displease the ruling class.