Use This Word in a Sentence: Experimental by Ann Lauterbach

Many years ago I read something by Noam Chomsky in which three disparate words -- "Constantinople" was one -- that seemed to have nothing in common were brought together in a sentence. Chomsky wanted to show how context and syntax -- that is, the structures of meaning -- are as malleable as they are unpredictable.

In the language game called the dictionary, the word path begins at expenditure, moves through expense accounts and expensive, ascends to the rose of experience, in all its variants, and then on to the secret garden itself: experiment. The two words, experience and experiment, share an etymological root; they are the flora of experiri, to try, and related to periculum, which includes both the idea of attempt and peril. The path proceeds on, somewhat perilously, to the expert and then to its final nettlesome destination, expiate.

Recently, I was introduced as an "experimental" poet. The word was uttered with disdain; I was being damned with the faintest of praise. In the tiny world of poetry, to be experimental is often taken to mean you have an aversion to form, rather than an aversion to conformity.

I was raised in a leftist/liberal environment. I went to a small progressive school founded on John Dewey's pragmatism. The etymological root shared by experience and experiment formed the fundamental, pedagogical ground. The idea was that by doing something one would come to understand it. This notion that the relationship between understanding and knowledge is mediated by experience was tied to an ethical vision in which individual engagement would extend outward into social and political realms. What fueled this extension from private to public would be a practical curiosity. Difference, that is, the unknown, would arouse curiosity rather than fear; problems would elicit a desire to find solutions. In this climate, cultural products, especially works of art, were viewed as essential and necessary agents; aesthetic experience was linked to a vocabulary of social change.

In his essay "Experience," Emerson uses the great phrase "this new yet unapproachable America." The spirit of this -- the new and the unapproachable -- begins to depict the space in which experimentalism exists. This gap is essential to the syntax of true experiment. It is the gap which Sacvan Bercovitch names when he writes about the American Jeremiad. "But the American Puritan Jeremiad ... made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England's Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. Denouncing or affirming, their vision fed on the distance between promise and fact." [1]

I take this gap between promise and fact to be the one between rhetoric and practice, between the language surrounding the creation of the "Euro," for example, and the economic competition and power which that new currency will unleash, approve and augment. It is the apparently insoluble distance between Israel and Palestine. Between promise and fact, between the new and the unapproachable, between known and unknown: the experimental is always between, like a hinge, a preposition. The risk, the peril, involved is that you may not make it across the suspension; the experiment may fail.

This willingness to risk failure seems essential.

To risk failure one needs a sense of unfettered play, the play that would allow a failure to become useful for the next attempt, that would in a sense recycle the disaster.

Nuclear waste cannot be recycled. It is the result of an experiment that should not have been undertaken.

I think perhaps science undertakes cool experiments and art undertakes hot experiments.

By hot I mean the kinds of formal discoveries which serve affective and spiritual needs; when the affective space is averted, the result is often experimentation for its own sake, self-conscious and self-referential, the aesthetic equivalent of narcissism.

One way to avoid arid experimentalism is for artists to draw their materials from a variety of sources, not from a single art form or a single "tradition." The tradition of the new is a dangerous precedent. The tradition of the old can be very useful.

Years ago, I went to a young artist's studio. He was just out of art school. He was working with an acrylic, matte, opaque, gray mucous color, which he had fashioned into grids. Everyone in those days was making grids. I felt a sense of entrapment and violation, looking at this inert work and listening to the young man natter on and on, giving a critique; he had no idea what the actual effect of his work was. At last I said, "You know, you are working in an exhausted iconography."

Poetry, according to Ezra Pound, is "news that stays news." It must be remembered that Pound, possibly the greatest example of modernist experiment, was a fascist. His fascism was the result of a misguided idealism marked by a peculiarly American ambition and cultural envy. [my note: this strikes me as somewhat irrelevant and it unduly ignores particular nuances about Pound and those times that play important factors in Pound's so-called fascism. Even if that were not the case, why "must" it be remembered? It would seem that one may also make instant judgments about uncomfortable art that confirms one's views.]

"Comforting art is art that you can make instant judgments about, that confirms your view," Sister Wendy, talking to Bill Moyers, remarks.

My friend Stacy Doris, a writer now in her mid-thirties, says she is meeting a lot of young people in their twenties who seem to have an extraordinary amount of knowledge about a lot of things; she takes this to be a result of the information age we are in, the fact that information is so easily accessed, at least by some.

I am interested in the relation between information and knowledge, the ways in which experience and experiment might link the two.

We need to be careful not to mistake technology for knowledge.

To experiment means you must put what you know at risk to what you do not yet know.

I began to give up conventional syntax, the logic of cause and effect, an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. Narrative had been ruptured once and for all. I wanted the gaps to show. When the gaps began to show, a new sense of isolated wholes, of complete gestures, began to replace old Aristotelian ideas of beginnings, middles, and ends. Insted, there was a sense of a linguistic mobile, turning through space-time. In this new dispensation, the hinges or places of contact became the most important location of meaning, as in music and in some abstract art. This seemed both more real and more natural to me.

My fear is that culture -- and by this I mean all forms of art -- is increasingly treated either as decor or entertainment. Art is not understood as a meaning-making structure which might provide a given culture with non-violent introductions to alternative modes of thinking about the real world, and which, furthermore, might offer forms of redemption, solace, compensation, and critique for individuals inhabiting that world.

As the values of the free market consume the world economy, as entrepreneurship becomes rampant, as mergers beget mergers like rabbits in Paradise, our cultural institutions appear to be weaker and weaker, less and less willing to embrace work that critiques capital's hegemonic boondoggle and proposes or poses questions rather than answers. Democracy, needless to say, has become synonymous with capitalism. Including minority voices is often simply a ploy, the fact of difference is mistaken for the fact of distinction, and volumes of silent lip service are being written. Access to power is not the same as power, and Afro-Americans, American Indians, Latinos, are not necessarily politcally, socially, or aesthetically progressive. I, for one, want to make a distinction between the poems of Maya Angelou and the music of Charlie Parker.

It is the pressure of experience, the fact of attention to experience, which leads to real, that is, authentic, experimentation; a willingness to adapt forms to contents, to contexts, in order to derive not so much new meanings as new ways of interpreting the unpredictable. Those who view form as static and reified are doomed to repetition, historical as well as personal. The constraints of form are the constraints of decisions and choices that are based on judgments, on interpretations of value. The new is not always positioned between the present and the future; the "new" is what revitalizes, reanimates, recycles, if you will, whatever is needed to go on going on. The new is always with us.

The fragments among which we live are, in my view, cause for celebration rather than lament, an astonishing invitation to create new ideas of coherence, where boundaries are malleable and permeable, so that inclusion and exclusion are in unstable flux. The fragment offers a possibility for vitality and variety -- multiple perspectives, disparate vocabularies. The fragment might lead to clusters, to molecular structures, collaborations, artifacts, and institutions that retain the curiosity and flexibility of youth without sacrificing the digested experience of maturity, so that generations and genders no longer see themselves as competitive with each other. Such clusters would be deliberate disturbances of classic or traditional categories, including, need I say, traditional and classic vs. innovative or experimental. The best experiments surely make use of, are derived from, the major as well as the minor, the conservative as well as the progressive. History has no use for these distinctions.

As long as we regret and long for lost syntheses, master narratives, complete views, and clear canons, we will be unable to imagine the institutions which will override greed, self-interest, and cruelty, all of which are always ready to assert their prerogatives, at the expense of the experimental.


This essay orginated as a talk given in May 1998 for a symposium, organized by Michael Brenson for the Rockefeller Foundation, in which I was asked to address the word "experimental."

1. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 23.


[from By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2000), edited by Molly McQuade]