I sometimes hear about The Pink Guitar as a text of desire. A talisman. Hence, as experimentation and critical style is a topic of discussion, Mytili Jagannathan and Elisabeth Joyce asked me to write into this amazing space (HOW2 as a place to stand) and talk about this—this desire, this fact of my having done critical writing in an experimental style. What I am about to say is—it’s not just a style. It’s a method. Who gave me permission? How did I "do" it? As many questions as there are--here are what I think are some answers: Desire, need, and the political-cultural moment. Even reckless, but determined, I was willing to play and fail—I was already an artist. Although it took me years more to recognize this absolutely. What’s going on? I could give you a contradictory narrative. This would be very typical—compliant and resistant me inventing (or addressing) something. I knew this writing was risky—indeed "The Pink Guitar" essay discusses some of the negative reactions of some fairly annoyed, and momentarily powerful, people. (Some of whom were "in charge of" my tenure for my academic job--and against it, too.) Not a joke--of course there are potential negative impacts--some people are going to hate what you do, and possibly think you are self-indulgent or narcissistic (etc.) for choosing essay modes. Thus the risk of this kind of expression—the joy of it—must overcome and swamp prudence or narrow conceptions of what writing is, what a career is. Sometimes you have to wait to feel safe. Safer. It is a very subtle and situational decision. There is no simple "answer" that the past can give the present on this issue. But if you can stand (or can survive) that joyous impudence and imprudence, then proceed. But don’t forget that I was, during this same period, writing critical prose--in Writing Beyond the Ending and H.D.: The Career of that Struggle—prose and analyses that I also absolutely wanted to write. No one was making me do it, as if one kind of writing is better or truer or more authentic than another.

Of course, one is subject to professional pressures. If you jump track, write another way, writing "otherhow," you have to make sure that all your kinds of writing are excellent, tested out, I mean by an interior standard of solidity. That way if other people hate it, you will know how to measure it for yourself, on your own.

So I began with an essay not in The Pink Guitar (something from 1978 called "Psyche, or, Wholeness") and then wrote "For the Etruscans." But it wasn’t "prewritten"—it was a negotiation with materials arrayed. It came about this way. Having given a seminar at a Barnard Conference on Women and Society on the question (not the certainty) of "a" female aesthetic—a burning issue in 1979—I was asked to write it up. So I did. I now see the commitment to multiple citation and to recording many of the voices of that seminar as a mini-Arcades. A feminist Benjaminian Arcades. Although I was committed to collaging other people’s voices with my own as only one among many, in actuality it did not quite work out that way. Authorship is not dissolved by fiat. But that is why the "author" of that essay is myself and "Workshop 9"—the presence of interlocutors was crucial.

I was aware of using modernist "devices" for feminist purposes. The fluid form of talking, the enormously excited and participatory group of women for whom I was the seminar leader—writing into that fervent and palpable and aroused and debating female space was crucial. I was writing into a cultural and political need for analysis and the collection of evidence. Thinking was a real situation. It was a moment (this writing comes from a political and cultural moment). There was nothing willed about it. There was a politics of culture, and I was trying to name some part of it. But without distortion. For I also did not try to falsify or distort what I thought: that "feminine" writing tactics were the tactics that can be chosen by any non-dominant group. The rhetorics are situational, not essentialist strategies. This was not the popular finding then, when we were, in general, in the full bloom of a dynamic and rather absolute sense of female difference. Yet insofar as I was acting oppositionally—refusing patriarchal culture as a choice, I also chose to use the very rhetorics I discuss.

Letter writing to friends. Free writing for poetry. These were some sources. Teaching, as a social free association along the lines of investigation. I think what I did, in these essays, was to invent an intersubjective space, one between reader and text, between writer and reader, between author and evidence, between analysis and need. A looping of response. Not one of hierarchy or claims of controlling authority over a set of materials. And the central strategy of modernism--collage--was another source. I entered the practice of the field (a central strategy of the postmodern)--the creation of an extent or an area, a site in which things happen. Ludic things: Rhythms of apprehension. Stress shifting. Changeups. Carnivalizing analytic discourses. Mongrel, hybrid sounds. Placing the reader, as well as the writer, in a variety of subject places. Faceting. Dissolving the author into the sounds of the text. Making chaos, diversity, mélange. Constructing loose ends! Making there be a porous openness of thought, not a sealing over of thought. There is a loft in this method--and it is not just a style--it is a method. It is not willful writing as in "I will myself to do this because it would be a good thing." It is writing poised as art is on the cusp of willful willessness. To possess this possession, become dispossessed.

If I chose to create desire, attention, loose ends, and an endless intersubjectivity between others as equals (undo "the" binary—I have no goal but this), then I am putting a little bit of utopian change into writing. I am interested. I am interested in this. To change the hard, hard heart. The essay is anti-patriarchal writing as a method of investigation. The essay expresses the need to make something that gives pleasure. That is, aesthetic pleasure as political pleasure—transformation. To the degree that we all live in some form of political, economic, sexual, social and intellectual complicity with forms of the patriarchal, this choice of writing might not be possible. Or seem possible. Yet it is possible. The opening may be small. A pinhole. But it remains possible.