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RICHARD POIRIER
so much has changed around it. The framers of the MLA ballot
designed to poll the members about a 1970 meeting in Chicago did
not recognize the changed contexts for words that a few months
earlier would have been neutral enough. They were appalled at the
evidence that their language expressed intentions they hadn't at all
meant to express. How did it happen that their wording confused
hotel space with political space and implied a primary concern with
the former? The critics of the ballot were astonished, perhaps in my
own case too self-righteously so, that anyone committed to the study
of language could think it possible, in the fall of 1968, to say or
write anything, especially on such a subject as Chicago, which would
not invite political readings.
That's a small example of what's meant by saying that no
one speaks as he once did and means what he once did: the
word Chicago had been made a political word. It was no longer
simply a geographic one. And it had been changed, that word, not
by an Academy, but by the Mayor of Chicago. He had made a geo–
graphic designation into a politically dirty word and an association
of language teachers was somehow supposed to ignore this fact about
its own language. Anyone could have been angered by
this
without
being aligned with the New University Conference (often described
as a faculty version of SDS), its proposals or its politics, though the
Chicago issue had the effect of greatly strengthening this grouping.
Anyone could have responded as I did who simply acted upon what
the MLA says it stands for - a devotion to literature and language.
The exercise of which didn't require even the reading of politically
"relevant" pamphlets but only, as a prelude to an encounter with
political language, some intense and alive reading of any writing of
any kind. It meant a developed capacity for watching performances
in language, the actions of words. What the difference about Chi–
cago revealed was a naivete, especially in an organization with a
declared "devotion" to language, about the necessity to treat lan–
guage almost as an antagonist, to struggle, to fight for control of it,
knowing that if you don't it can be given meanings that without
,your even guessing it will take control of you. The only condition
for avoiding disruption in MLA was for all of its members to accept,
as a necessary general condition, the very special condition by which
Mayor Daley tried to prevent the expression of struggle and dissent
