Language at the Level of the Sentence
Language at the Level of the Sentence
The two main avenues that language writing seems to have followed were exploring language at the level of the sentence or phrase and exploring language at or below the level of the word-to use Saussure’s terms: the syntagmatic and the pardigmatic axis. In this entry I will be discussing the first of these two modes: language at the level of the sentence. Language, as structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics tells us, works through a temporal accrual of meaning from one word to the next, one phrase to the next, one sentence to the next and so forth. This articulation of language into higher order meaning structures is exactly what language writing sought to interrogate. The hierarchical structures of society are mimicked by the hierarchical structures imbedded in language itself, and for many of the language writers in order to begin to systematically change the external hierarchies (social, political, interpersonal, sexual, etc.), the hierarchies of language and textuality (the uses language is put to) must be interrogated and made visible. The implications of this are wide ranging, but for the moment I would like to look at just one of them. The political-power relationship between/among the reader-the text-the author is one of the prime examples of hierarchical structures imbedded in language and textuality that, following this line of thought, needs to be exploded into view.
The relationship between author and reader through the text is normally one of disproportionate power . . . the author controls the nature of the text and the communicative act-the reader passively absorbs and “learns” from the author. The text than is the tool that the author uses to control the reader-text as means of oppression. By writing a piece of transparent prose that manipulates a reader’s response through rational and emotional triggers and thereby making the reader become absorbed into the story or argument, the author is engaging in an asymmetric power relationship with the reader. The reader in turn is ceding control to the author-willingly if the choice is made consciously to participate in an escapist activity, un-willingly if there is no alternative presented. Transparency in a text on the one hand seems to indicate a kind of direct communication between the author and the reader, and on the other is a means for the author to oppress and control the reader . . . denying the reader a level of agency or participation in the communicative act. So, how might a text be written in such a way to shift the power structures around to the point that the reader and the author have equal stakes in the communicative act . . . how might a text be written so that the text is not being used as a tool of oppression?
Charles Bernstein answers this question in his poetic essay “The Artifice of Absorption” with ideas centered around anti-absorptive techniques. If a text constantly reminds the reader that it is text, not direct communication, then agency is re-inscribed on the readers part in terms of the communicative act. 
Ron Silliman, I think, answers this question with his exploration of syllogism and narrative structures. He suggests that traditional prose “sentences take us not toward the recognition of language, but away from it” with their emphasis on a prolonged syllogistic movement and transparent integration into higher order units (82). Silliman suggests that language integrates at two separate levels: the simple sentence level or phrase level and the paragraph and above level (the last pointing to Stein’s “The difference between a short story and a paragraph. There is none” [How to Write 30]). Language integration works first at the level of grammar and then at a higher level that transcends simple linguistic units and move into “higher orders of meaning-such as emotion” (Silliman 87). This higher order of integration is the playground of fiction . . . it is the extended syllogistic movement between phrases and sentences created through the systematic use of anaphora and cataphora to create a complex web of sustained intention that results in large narrative and/or expository structures-prose. 
What Silliman saw was by manipulating things at the lower level of integration, one could interfere with the higher order integration in such a way that the higher order structures become “unit[ies] of quantity, not logic or argument,” in other words paragraphs become structures of form, not content. Content is clearly resolved at the level of the sentence and not above. All higher order integration of textuality is in the reader’s hands and entirely due to the reader’s efforts. One result of this halting of the syllogistic movement at the level of the sentence is that it points us back to language and the immediacy of a reader’s interaction with the text rather than towards higher order structures which tend to require a reader’s ceding of control. In the case of works produced using these New Sentence techniques, higher order integration is in the reader’s control (conscious or not), and not primarily a function of authorially coded endophora. Sentences become metrical units rather than logical ones. The interlocutors meet at the level of the sentence.
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentnece. New York: Roof Books, 1987.
Stein, Gertrude. How to Write. New York: Dover pubs, 1975.
