Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Participation by Parkinson Isabelle;

Author:Parkinson, Isabelle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474484350
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Stein’s Aberrant Authorship

These texts – the portraits circulated around the Armory Show, G.M.P., and Tender Buttons – reveal a vision of authorship as a process involving diffuse and multiple forces. Stein refuses to let the author coalesce as a single figure, and this, it seems, is the most troublesome aspect of her work for a cultural and political milieu in which the first unit of regulation is the citizen. The practice of group authorship, the dispersal of the authorial position and the indeterminacy of authorial identity trouble this construction and escape its system. Much of the frustration in reviews of Tender Buttons is about things not being in their place or escaping definition, and this has its most significant and provocative exemplification in the troublesome effect of the author escaping unitary enumeration and individuation. It is notable that anarchy is the political ideology repeatedly referenced in relation to Stein, despite the significance of socialism and other radical movements in US politics at the time. In these responses, anarchism stands, as Roosevelt also does for Democrat progressives, for the challenge to authority and regulation as such and for the fear of the permeation and proliferation of dangerous, unpredictable forces. The presentations of Stein’s body figure her as grotesque and abject, the resistance to her example and the horror expressed at the idea that her work might have some cultural sway reflect a fear of contamination, the emphasis on the seeming purposelessness of her work contribute to the image of a decadent elitism, and the assertions that she is a fraudulent infiltrator from elsewhere hint at a narrative of infection. These constituent aspects in the construction of Stein’s author figure present her as a dangerously amorphous, aberrant and degenerate influence, the obverse of the productive, efficient association of sovereign individuals whose energies can be managed to ensure the health and evolution of the national organism. This is the malign counterpart of social evolution, of the ideal of a carefully regulated cooperative community, of the vision of nation as a mobile fluid body of cells and germs. The healthy body of national culture must be protected against dysgenic influence and inoculated against cultural, social and political infection. Care for the national body becomes control of the body, and rights and protections create categories of exclusion. In American print culture, therefore, Stein becomes a signifier of the new artist and author as aberrant and illegitimate, onto which scepticism about and dismissal of the new practices are loaded, and it is here that the figuring of Stein as an inappropriate biological subject for author status is constructed and begins to circulate.

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