The foremost example of a contemporary American avant-garde poetry—at least as far as American academics seem to be concerned—is the body of writing that, since the brief run of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has come to be identified with that name. Aside from its prominence as an object of academic attention—or perhaps in part because of it—L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing has been particularly marked by its practitioners' efforts to construct a genealogy for their aesthetic principles. This effort has meant dislodging from their comparatively marginalized positions in literary history a number of key modernist res—Louis Zukofsky, Laura (Riding) Jackson, George Oppen, and Mina Loy, to name a few—and redefining those res as postmodernists avant la lettre. The re who looms largest by far in this reordering of the pantheon is Gertrude Stein. And the particular spirit of innovation she has come to represent in this postmodernist poetic tradition is likewise attributable in part to the cross-pollination among poets and academics associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing: a commitment to linguistic indeterminacy as an aesthetic value and principle of composition. 1
Take, for example, the lines "So great so great Emily. / Sew grate sew grate Emily" or "A go to green and a letter spoke a go to green or praise or / Worships worships worships" from Stein's 1913 poem "Sacred Emily," where her famous line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" first appears. 2 In lines like these meaning becomes indeterminate, the postmodernist argument runs, because we can't make out whether a word like "go" is being used as a noun or an infinitive or an imperative verb, or because we are confronted with the fact that the same sounds, like the instances of "so grat," can refer to different words with completely different meanings. For readers in search of Stein's postmodernism, ambiguities like these appear to be underscored by Stein's own remarks about the literary aims of her ruptured syntax, interchanged parts of speech, and homophonic puns. When, for instance, in her lecture "Poetry and Grammar" she extols the virtues of verbs, pronouns, and articles, she simultaneously repudiates nouns, insisting that the former are "varied and lively," able to "make mistakes" and "be mistaken," while the latter, being merely "the name of anything" do "not go on doing anything . . . and so why write in nouns." 3 Not surprisingly, Stein's criteria for hierarchizing the parts of speech—the degree to which those elements can yield variations and "mistakes"—have appeared to readers familiar with poststructuralist theory to constitute irrefutable evidence of her prescient commitment to linguistic indeterminacy in particular and the values of postmodernism in general.
The proper name, with its long philosophical standing as the one category of sign that, as Stein puts it, "never can make mistakes can never be mistaken" has been understood as the sign whose structure of meaning is the very paradigm of determinacy ("PG," 315). In deconstructive accounts of language (most prominently in the work of Jacques Derrida) however, proper names become the very paradigm of indeterminacy. Indeed, according to the Derridean theory of language that underwrites the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement's aesthetic, not only is the name intrinsically indeterminate, but insofar as it is imagined to represent the underlying structure of all meaning, it is also what defines the indeterminacy of the entire linguistic system. Stein's own account of names, which is most thoroughly elaborated in "Poetry and Grammar" and in her counterfactual history Four in America , does correspond to the Derridean one to the extent that the name becomes a paradigm for what all words do. Stein's theory, however, holds the name to be rigidly determinate. Moreover, far from renouncing the name's traditional poetics of determinacy in favor of a more modern (or postmodern, as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E affiliates would have it) poetics of indeterminacy, Stein's modernism is absolutely devoted to the name and the determinacy it entails. 4
For Stein, writing poetry at all necessitates recognizing its essential features, which for her means recognizing that poetry is "a vocabulary entirely based on the noun" ("PG," 327). And insofar as "a noun is a name of anything by definition," poetry's most essential feature proves to be its naming function (ibid.). Modernizing poetry, in turn, becomes a matter not of rejecting this naming function, but of exaggerating it and abstracting it into a formal principle of composition: "Was there not a way," Stein asks, "of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them" ("PG," 330). Contrary to the deepest desires of her postmodern audience, however, what is required for Stein's poetry to "mean names without naming them" is a logical formalism irrevocably at odds with both the phenomenological commitments of poststructuralist linguistics and the materialist commitments of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.
What if George Washington had been a novelist instead of a general? In asking hypothetical questions of this kind—"what if so-and-so had done things differently" or "what if such-and-such had happened differently"—we are usually interested in whether, if certain causal events had been different, history would still be the same. A familiar example of this type of hypothetical inquiry—versions of which can also be found in almost any science fiction story about time travel—are the "Peabody's Improbable History" segments from the 1960s Bullwinkle Show. In these episodes the genius dog Mr. Peabody and his hyper-enthusiastic sidekick Sherman use their "Wayback Machine" to travel back in time and encourage important historical res to fulfill their destinies. The premise of these "improbable histories" is rigidly deterministic; Mr. Peabody's "Wayback" adventures are always urgent precisely to the extent that subsequent history will depend on a re like George Washington completing some causally decisive act. Were there a "Peabody's Improbable History" about what would happen if George Washington were a novelist, Peabody and Sherman would no doubt disabuse Washington of his literary aspirations. The deterministic logic of their effort would operate under the assumption that were Washington to have been penning a romance instead of, say, crossing the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776, he never would have gone on to become "the father of his country" or the "first president of the United States," for America itself would have failed to materialize as a nation.
When Gertrude Stein addresses this question, however—that is, the question of what would happen if George Washington were a novelist—she is less interested in whether history would still be the same than in whether Washington himself would be the same. In other words, for Stein the hypothetical possibility of Washington's doing something different—writing novels instead of crossing the Delaware—raises the question of what changes in his identity, if any, that difference would bring. Both the standard interest in whether history would be the same and Stein's specific interest in Washington's identity derive from the idea that actions are highly determinate. According to the Peabody worldview, American history in general and George Washington's identity in particular would both be decided by Washington's military actions, so that his doing anything differently would change everything completely. Stein, on the other hand, far from believing that there would be a discrepancy in either American history or Washington's identity, obliterates the very idea of a discrepancy by suggesting that it could never exist to begin with. According to her there could never be a discrepancy for the simple reason that Washington, whether novelist or general, could never do different things.
In Stein's Four in America (composed 1931-34), George Washington appears as the fourth of her four. Like Washington, the other three—Ulysses S. Grant, Wilbur Wright, and Henry James—are American cultural icons. Stein makes the same basic argument for each: that they could not have been different from what they were. Each argument develops out of a hypothetical question: "If Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint what would he have done. If the Wright brothers had been artists that is painters what would they have done. If Henry James had been a general what would he have had to do. If George Washington had been a writer that is a novelist what would he do." 5 In the case of Washington, Stein shows how all the things that the general and statesman did—that is, all the things that make him the Washington we identify with that name—also characterize Washington the novelist. Being a novelist does not preclude Washington from being "the first president of the United States of America" or "the father of his country"; rather, these identifying characteristics are part of who he is as a novelist: "I can say what I have to say. George Washington did not write a play. He wrote at a novel every day. He who was the father of his country" (FA, 168). And thus it isn't that Washington remains the same despite doing different things; rather, he remains the same because as a novelist he does the same things he would have done as a general.
Stein reverses the formula with Henry James, making him a general instead of a novelist. The result is the same, however, if not more exaggerated, for James's acts as a general are not only coextensive with his acts as a novelist but identical to them, such that what he does as a general can only be described in terms of what kind of writing he does: "Remember that there are two ways of writing and Henry James being a general has selected both, any general has selected both otherwise he is not a general and Henry James is a general and he has selected both" (FA, 138). That George Washington and Henry James appear to be the same whether they are novelists or generals implies that they could not have been different from what they were, and Stein makes this point explicitly in the chapter on Wilbur Wright, where she asks what would happen if he had been a painter instead of an aviator: "If Wilbur Wright had been a painter, just like there are painters American painters would he have been different from what he was. Not at all" (FA, 86). Thus Stein produces in the answers to her hypothetical questions a different kind of determinism than we get in the standard answer to "what would have happened if." On the model of "Peabody's Improbable History," we locate the determinism in particular acts, such as building the Kitty Hawk or surprising the British troops on Christmas, in such a way that the acts bear a causal charge in relation to history and identity. For Stein, however, those same acts are not so much determining as themselves determined. In other words, she pushes the determinism even farther back, so that it's not a question of what you do determining both history and who you are, but rather a question of something else altogether determining what you do.
Indeed, the only way for there to be no discrepancy between a Washington who writes novels and a Washington who leads armies is if the mere fact of being Washington determines that you will write novels and lead armies. But what is the mere fact of being Washington? What is it about being Washington that determines the actions that Washington will perform? From the very beginning of Four in America, the answer is "George Washington," that is, the proper name itself, for as Stein puts it, names "denote character and career" (FA, 3). In these terms, it looks as though Stein is stating a rather extreme form of what would otherwise be a perfectly plausible explanation for the lack of discrepancy between the two Washingtons: that even in a hypothetical world where George Washington had chosen a career as a novelist, the name would still refer to the same man who was a general in the actual world. But Stein goes on to argue that all people named George, not just the hypothetical novelist and actual general George Washington, will be alike in some basic way, suggesting that far beyond denoting character and career, names determine them: "I have known a quantity of Georges, a quantity of Georges. Are they alike. Yes I think so. I may even say I know so. Have they the same character and career. Certainly certainly" (FA, 5). And just as all Georges will have the same character and career, so for Stein will all people named Paul and all people named Helen and all people named Marguerite and so forth, in such a way that the likeness of all those bearing the same name becomes the sign of their having been wholly determined by that name.
In Stein's catalogue of name-destinies, Paul is among those that fare the worst:
I have known a great many Pauls. One of them I have even tried to change the name, unsuccessfully. I know just what Pauls are like even though they differ. What are they like. They are alike that insofar as it is possible, nobody, that is not any woman ever really loves them. Now just think of that and think how true it is. None of them not one of them have been really loved by any woman. They have been married and sometimes not married, and anything can be true of them, but they have never, dear me never, been ever loved by any woman. That is what no Paul can say. [FA, 5]
For all Pauls to be destined not to be loved by any woman, it would seem that the power Stein has invested in the name would have to go well beyond the function of mere reference. After all, if the name were strictly a matter of reference, there would be no reason that a lovelorn Paul couldn't simply switch to some other name, one better suited to bring him the love he is missing. But when Stein says that the effort to change the name of one such Paul failed, she suggests that something about his having been named Paul makes him intrinsically a Paul-type person even if people no longer refer to him that way. Of course in this light, the idea that names determine character and career, becomes entirely implausible, not merely because it would take but one Paul being loved by a woman to disable the whole claim, but because it is unreasonable to imagine that a name could ever possess such power.
However, it turns out that while Stein is positively committed to a determinism of names, she is not committed to the impossibility of changing one's name. Indeed, her argument for name determinism is articulated most explicitly in a chapter of Four in America that is all about someone who successfully changes his name and, in doing so, also manages to change his character and career: Ulysses S. Grant. Given the hypothetical question that frames Stein's discussion of him—"if Ulysses S. Grant had been a religious leader who was to become a saint what would he have done"—we might assume that his story must follow the same rule that appears to govern the others, and that Grant the religious leader will turn out to be identical to Grant the general. But instead, Grant the religious leader proves to be a completely different man from Grant the general, and this discrepancy results from Grant's decision to change his name from Hiram Ulysses to Ulysses Simpson. The focus of the Grant chapter thus differs from the others in Four in America insofar as Stein's interest is less in whether Grant would be the same man if he were a religious leader instead of a general, than in whether he would be the same if he had kept the same name. In one respect, the answer is no, to the extent that Stein's reasoning will never allow Grant to become the general we identify with that name if he remains Hiram Ulysses. Hiram Ulysses, she argues, is destined to be a religious leader: "If he had remained Hiram Ulysses Grant would it, in the meantime, have had something to do with what he would do if he were a religious leader or saint. I mean by this, if he had been Hiram Ulysses Grant would he have been a religious leader or saint, would he have had to be. I cannot doubt it" (FA, 3). Since Hiram Ulysses will have had to be a religious leader or saint, by extension, then, it appears that once Grant has changed his name to Ulysses Simpson, he will have had to become a general.
If it is the name that denotes character and career, then two different names will denote two completely different characters and careers, which for Stein means that Grant's name change yields two completely different Grants: "You begin to see just by their name that Hiram Ulysses Grant and Ulysses Simpson Grant are not the same. This is the power of a name and a name is in war and a name is in religion. It is not the same name, and the name is not the same" (FA, 18). But this very discrepancy—the difference between religious leader Grant and general Grant, which looks on the surface exactly like the discrepancy that the chapters on Washington, James, and Wright seek to erase—is also what ensures that both Hiram Ulysses and Ulysses Simpson, like Washington, James, and Wright, could not have been different from what they were. In this respect the answer to the question of whether Grant would be the same if he had kept the same name is yes: Hiram Ulysses Grant could not have been different from the religious leader he was destined to be, and likewise Ulysses Simpson could not have been different from the general he was to be. The discrepancy that does emerge, therefore, is not an effect of there being one man with two different names, but rather of there being two different names, and hence, two different men.
If all Georges and all Pauls look roughly alike in their character and career, then Stein would seem to be making the argument by analogy that all Ulysses will look roughly like generals, and all Hirams, like religious leaders or saints. Or to reformulate this using Stein's terms, the name Ulysses denotes being a general, and the name Hiram denotes being a religious leader or saint. But if Stein's account of Grant adheres to the same logic that governs her accounts of Washington, James, and Wright—and I am arguing that it does—that logic would necessitate the possibility of both a Hiram who was a general and a Ulysses who was a saint. That is because Stein's understanding of career is abstract—closer to the sense of a trajectory or directional movement, like the career of a planet, than the particular sense of a vocation, like the military or the ministry. Two different careers in the vocational sense—general and religious leader—can thus be the same career in the abstract. For Stein, therefore, even if Hiram Ulysses were to be a general, he would still be the same person and do the same things he would do if he were a religious leader or saint, and likewise with Ulysses Simpson. The point is that by virtue of their different names, Hiram and Ulysses would be two different generals and two different religious leaders or saints.
By this logic, however, when Stein says that Hiram Ulysses Grant "would have had to be" a religious leader, the statement can only make sense if we understand the determinism it invokes to be dictated by something other than causality. To return to Washington, it can't be the case that George Washington must become a general because of his name, or, for that matter, that he must become a novelist, if only because by virtue of his name, Washington possesses the same character and career no matter which vocation he chooses. Similarly with Grant, the name Hiram can't exactly cause him to be a religious leader in any predictive sense, and neither can the name Ulysses cause him to be a general, but the name can mean that Hiram possesses a Hiram-type character and career whether he is a religious leader or general, and that Ulysses likewise possesses a Ulysses-type character and career. The name, in short, doesn't cause a given character and career; having that character and career are, for Stein, what it means to bear that name.
To read Stein's claim that names denote character and career as an expression of causality, then, is to miss the force of the term "denote." To denote, after all, is not to cause but to mean, and to mean in a certain way. In this respect, once naming becomes a matter of signification rather than causation, what I have been calling Stein's name determinism must be understood more properly as name determinacy. But what exactly is it that names do when they mean in the determinate way Stein proposes? My commitment to answering this question arises in part because Stein's idea of what names do, along with the highly specific kind of determinacy that it involves, is key to understanding her poetics. Equally important, however, is the bearing Stein's theory of names has on arguments that seek to align her work with a postmodern "poetics of indeterminacy." As I suggested in the opening section, Stein's theory of names and the poetics it entails are antithetical to the very possibility of linguistic indeterminacy.
Nevertheless it is easy to see, just taking the example of Grant from Four in America, how at least one form of indeterminacy can emerge with respect to proper names. Stein begins the chapter on Grant with the claim that "names have a way of being attached to those that bear them" (FA, 3). On the one hand, this claim encapsulates one version of the determinacy Stein asserts throughout the book; certainly in the case of Paul, who couldn't change his name, the name is about as attached to its bearer as it can get. Moreover, in being so attached, the name also invests Paul with all the character and career that it denotes, and the case is essentially the same with Washington, James, and Wright, each of whom, by virtue of his respective name, winds up with the same character and career even when his career differs from the one we ordinarily associate with the name. Grant's name, on the other hand, seems to be marked precisely by its ability to be detached from its bearer. Unlike Paul, Hiram Ulysses can change his name. It appears that as long as Hiram can change his name, he can, in effect, have any character and career, which suggests not only that Hiram can be anyone, but that anyone can be anyone, a sure sign of indeterminacy if ever there was one. But in Stein's account, anyone cannot be anyone, for the simple reason that a particular name, far from denoting any character and career, can only denote the character and career of its bearer. Thus Grant's name change does not in the end detach the name from its bearer; rather it introduces a new name attached to entirely different bearer. Stein's claim, then, stands firm: names truly do have a way of being attached to those that bear them. But what is the nature of this attachment? What exactly is it that names do?
There's an old academic joke that the Odyssey wasn't written by Homer, but by another Greek of the same name. Part of the joke, of course, is that it doesn't really matter who wrote the Odyssey—meaning who Homer was—because we understand the poem in principle to have been written by the man we know by that name. Thus, while we might discover that the name Homer refers to some other man than we had thought, the discovery would make no difference to our understanding that Homer wrote the poem in question. In this respect, Homer—like all four of Stein's Four in America—cannot be different from what he was. The difference is that in Stein's book, being called "George Washington" will be sufficient to identify the bearer of the name as the father of his country even if he is a novelist instead of a general, whereas the joke implies that other things besides bearing the name "Homer" are required for someone to count as the author of the Odyssey, requirements that apparently include being Greek and having written the Odyssey. In this case, the tautology is what provides the humor of the joke, such as it is. The humor revolves around identifying the reference for the name "Homer," and one of the criteria for identifying the reference is that in order to have written the Odyssey you need to have written the Odyssey. But the intrinsic claim of the joke—that to qualify as the bearer of the name Homer you need to satisfy a set of descriptive criteria—is not tautological, and it entails an important way of thinking about what names do, albeit the wrong one from Stein's perspective.
That Grant, Wright, James, and Washington, and, for that matter, Homer, "could not have been different from what they were" by virtue of their names already suggests one of the customary functions of proper names: the name is a convenient way of referring to the same person or thing at different times and in different situations. Indeed, both Stein's explicit claim that "names have a way of being attached to those that bear them" and her implicit claim that bearing a particular name means being a particular kind of person and thus being the same at different moments, can be understood to assign the proper name precisely this referential function. Moreover, once we define the name by the identity of its referent, then Stein's other claim about names, that they "denote character and career," follows directly, at least inasmuch as "character and career" constitute the descriptive criteria by which we ascertain that we are referring to the same object each time we use a given name. To illustrate this in terms of the Homer joke, aspects of Homer's character and career—"being Greek" and "having written the Odyssey"—function as the identity criteria by which we determine whether or not a particular person qualifies as the bearer or referent of the name Homer.
Stein herself seems to endow character and career with a similar capacity vis-à-vis Grant when she explains why Hiram Ulysses could not have done certain things that make up the biography of Ulysses Simpson:
Hiram Ulysses Grant would never have visited the Duke of Wellington he would never have had his daughter married to a European. Not he. And why not he. Because he was a tall thin man and he was drunk a little always often and standing and he was leading in religion in American religion, and he was not one any Duke of Wellington would have been writing to visit him because the Duke of Wellington would not have heard of him. [FA, 75]
Obviously the point of this passage is that marrying one's daughter off to a European and visiting the Duke of Wellington are constituents of a character and career that Hiram Ulysses Grant couldn't have had. And from this point it would seem easy to surmise that these constituents of character and career serve the same function in relation to the name Ulysses Simpson as "being Greek" and "having written the Odyssey" serve in relation to the name Homer. They are what will identify someone as the bearer of the name Ulysses Simpson, while another set of descriptive criteria will identify someone as Hiram Ulysses.
Thus, in the case of the Homer joke, we could say that the name Homer means the man who wrote the Odyssey, and that would be one version of how we might understand the claim that names denote character and career. But I want to argue that in Four in America, Stein doesn't think that the name Ulysses S. Grant means the man who visited the Duke of Wellington, or that George Washington means the man who was the father of his country in the same way that we could mean by Homer the man who wrote the Odyssey. There are two important reasons why, despite many superficial similarities, what Stein says names do can never correspond to what they do in the Homer joke, can never satisfy what I call the "identity-criteria" account of names.
First of all, the Homer joke implies that different names can be used to refer to the same thing. True, we may identify a man as Homer only if he fits a particular description—the Greek who wrote the Odyssey—but since what identifies the man is that description and not, ultimately, the name itself, the very logic of identity criteria dictates that the same characteristics may attach to a different name. This possibility arises in the setup to the Homer joke, where the proposition that the Odyssey wasn't written by Homer immediately raises the expectation that the punch line will involve a different name. Even if the name were to change, however, the identity criteria would necessarily designate the same referent. The whole point of Grant's name change, by contrast, is precisely that the same referent cannot bear two different names; as I have already explained, with each new name comes a new and different bearer. Thus, the fact that the names Hiram Ulysses and Ulysses Simpson correspond to what look like two different sets of identifying descriptions is necessary in Stein's account, whereas such a discrepancy would be purely contingent in the identity-criteria account. The second reason Stein's account cannot accommodate the idea of identity criteria comes back to the issue of determinacy. If we play by Stein's rules we won't want to call whoever married his daughter off to a European and visited the Duke of Wellington at some particular moment in history "Ulysses S. Grant"; rather, only someone we call Ulysses S. Grant will have been able do those things.
For Stein, in other words, character and career, instead of existing in some more or less direct relation to the name, are entailed by the inherent formal features of the name. More accurately, the character and career that a name denotes are a necessary (i.e., noncontingent) effect produced by this formal function of reference. To say that Stein thinks of a name as embodying reference as a formal function, rather than simply as pointing to particular qualities or objects, might on the surface look like a distinction without a difference, but the difference becomes clear when we view Stein's account of names within the standard terms of contemporary philosophical debates over what names do.
The central question in those debates is whether or not names carry a connotative sense above and beyond their specific referent, and what logical consequences the answer to that question holds for the truth-values of propositions. The mathematical philosopher Gottlob Frege makes one of the strongest arguments in favor of names having sense in his "Sense and Reference" . 6 According to Frege, the only way that identity statements involving two names for the same thing can be informative rather than merely trivial is if each of the names has a different sense. The famous example of this is the identity statement "Phosphorus is Hesperus," where both names refer to the same object—the planet Venus—but each has a slightly different sense, "Phosphorus" meaning "the morning star" and "Hesperus," "the evening star." Of course the point of remarking on the difference in sense between these two names is to emphasize not the difference itself, but rather the fact of there being any sense at all. Moreover, for Frege, "sense" is not just a discovery about how names work, it is to be understood as integral to how they work; if it weren't, a statement like "Phosphorus is Hesperus" would be equivalent to the statement "that planet is that planet." In other words, if sense were not integral to the name, we could simply substitute the referent for the name and suffer no loss of meaning, but in the statement "that planet is that planet" the information contained in the original identity-claim, "Phosphorus is Hesperus," has evaporated, leaving a mere truism.
The force of Frege's discussion is to establish sense as essential to the way names work. But once he has shifted our emphasis from reference to sense in this way, what then is the function of reference with respect to names? In the following passage, Frege describes a situation that, although presented as atypical, suggests the degree to which reference is understood by him to be a nonessential feature of names:
Combinations of symbols can occur that stand for something but have (at least so far) no reference, e.g., divergent infinite series. This can be avoided . . . by means of the special stipulation that divergent infinite series shall stand for the number 0. A logically perfect language (Begriffsschrift) should satisfy the conditions, that every expression grammatically well constructed shall in fact designate an object, and that no new sign shall be introduced as a proper name without being secured a reference. [GF, 70]
The problem here, according to Frege, is that certain symbols, that is, things that "stand for" other things (a species of names if ever there was one), do so without having any referent, which suggests that a name can have a sense which does not determine a referent, a condition in which all sorts of ambiguities may arise. This happens all the time in ordinary language, but one doesn't want it to happen in a "logically perfect" language, and so, according to Frege, to avoid "logical mistakes arising from the ambiguity of [such] expressions," it is necessary to secure them a reference by "stipulating" it (GF, 70). The fact that a reference can be stipulated would seem to suggest that it is a purely contingent property of names in Frege's account. But as I will show, the stipulation that Frege proposes for securing the reference of names in a logically perfect language is merely a practical requirement to avoid ambiguity. A similar principle of stipulated reference, once formalized, becomes for Stein the essential function of names. In her work this formalized referentiality not only makes any ambiguity or indeterminacy of sense impossible, it also—and this is in stark contrast to what it does for Frege—makes reference integral to the name. Reference becomes a defining feature of what the name is as opposed to a description of what it does. It is as if Stein were imagining Frege's idea of a symbol "standing for" something as a purely referential function, but one that did not involve any necessary relation to a referent—as if one could have reference without referents.
Thus "names have a way of being attached to those that bear them," I am arguing, is simply a way of articulating a state of denotation in which the concept of the bearer (the referent) becomes a formal property of the name itself (as the function of reference). And insofar as I am claiming that this is just another way of saying that reference (the designation of a bearer) is intrinsic to the name, then Stein's account of what names do would seem to counter Frege's by suggesting that names have only reference. Among Stein's contemporaries, Bertrand Russell is the exemplary proponent of this view in the context of the philosophical debate over what names do. Pointing to the identifying properties of "sense" as the essential explanation for why names can only refer, Russell argues that what Frege calls the "sense" of a name is basically a description that comes into play only when we fail to use a name "properly." According to Russell, if I were to say, for example, that Hiram Ulysses Grant changed his name and became Ulysses Simpson Grant, and you didn't know who Grant was, I would have to supplement my use of the name with descriptive criteria to help identify the reference. 7 "He was a general who won decisive battles in the Civil War," I might say, or "he became the eighteenth president of the United States." What such recourse to description means to Russell is that we are really using proper names only when we refer to things either that are present before us or with which we have had direct experience beforehand; only in the absence of such "acquaintance," to use Russell's term, do we employ descriptions. 8
In this respect, a statement about Grant is in fact a bad example, since Russell argues that with someone like Grant we couldn't have the kind of acquaintance required to make our use of that word count as an instance of naming. For Russell, "Grant" would belong instead to a certain category of names that are not names at all, strictly speaking, but rather descriptions in disguise:
You remember when Adam named the beasts, they came before him one by one, and he became acquainted with them and named them. We are not acquainted with Socrates, and therefore cannot name him. When we use the word 'Socrates', we are really using a description. Our thought may be rendered by some such phrase as, 'The Master of Plato', or 'The Philosopher who drank the hemlock', or 'The person whom logicians assert to be mortal', but we certainly do not use the name as a name in the proper sense of the word. 9
From this perspective, the descriptive function of a name like "Socrates" or "Grant" looks exactly like Frege's evidence for names having sense. Russell himself seems to support Frege's view when he claims that the vast majority of what we ordinarily think of as proper names are "really descriptions" (ML, 156). Indeed, so many names turn out to be "really descriptions" that finally Russell is left with only two that count as truly proper names. The demonstrative pronoun "this" and the personal pronoun "I" are the only terms capable, he suggests, of "stand[ing] for a particular with which one is acquainted at the moment" (ML, 162). The key difference between Russell and Frege lies in the relation between experience and the referential function of the name. For Frege, experience is eliminated from the reference of the name because, as in the case of the referentless names of mathematics, there need be no actual referent. For Russell, meanwhile, there can be no referential function without an actual referent, i.e., an object of experience.
Thus, even though Russell's account of names looks strikingly like Frege's insofar as most names turn out to be "truncated descriptions," his decision to limit proper names to only those that refer to things a speaker has actually experienced makes a profound difference with respect to the functions available for names in logical language (PL, 110). Whereas for Frege a name can occur in a "perfectly logical language" as long as it is secured by a reference, for Russell a perfectly logical language will never contain any names precisely because the proper name, strictly defined, can only ever refer. Of course, to the extent that Russell's proper names must of necessity refer to objects of acquaintance, the Fregean idea of a referentless name that could be provided with a stipulated reference becomes for Russell a logical impossibility. 10 Yet, that is the very kind of name that could work in a logical language, because it is the kind of name whose reference could be general rather than particular: "You can see why it is that in the logical language set forth in Principia Mathematica there are not any names, because there we are not interested in particular particulars, but only in general particulars" (PL, 63). As Frege's example of the name for a divergent infinite series suggests, stipulating a reference for something that cannot be an object of acquaintance makes it possible for the reference to designate a principle—what Russell would call a "general particular"—as opposed to a "particular particular."
For Russell and Frege alike, a logically perfect language requires an absolute adherence to principle, its representations never subject to the vicissitudes of experience. This commitment to pure abstraction is what leads Frege, on the one hand, to imagine a name that can "stand for" something without having an actual referent, and Russell, on the other, to insist that because names can only have actual referents, they can never be part of a logically perfect language. The whole force of logic is gathered, in other words, around the task of eliminating ambiguity and indeterminacy by way of eliminating experience from the objects of representation. Frege locates the origin of ambiguity in the sense of names rather than in their reference, insofar as the point of stipulating reference is to alleviate the problem of "logical mistakes arising from the ambiguity of expressions" (reference is designated, while sense is expressed). Russell also invokes sense—for which he uses the term "description"—as the source of ambiguity: "the description required to express [a] thought will vary for different people, or for the same person at different times" (ML, 156). Meanwhile reference becomes for both Russell and Frege an anchor amidst the transitory currents of sense: "The only thing constant (so long as the name is rightly used) is the object to which the name applies" (ML, 156). Of course, according to Russell the name is most often not "rightly used," so that its reference becomes indeterminate (who is Socrates? who is Grant?) and requires for its determination the descriptive identity-criteria that Frege calls "sense." Consequently, despite his insistence that reference—as opposed to sense—is the defining property of a name, Russell is finally as committed to the necessity of identity-criteria as Frege. 11
As different as these accounts are, both Russell and Frege cling to the idea that the referent, if not fixed by stipulation or ostension, becomes indeterminate and requires the set of descriptive identity-criteria to resolve the indeterminacy. But as long as reference is a function of identity, no proper name can ever be truly secure in its reference; we might always misdirect the reference. Moreover, if the proper name traditionally represents the most determinate relation there can be between a sign and its referent, and if the name is nevertheless essentially indeterminate, then all language will come to look as though it conforms to something like a basic law of indeterminacy.
That law of indeterminacy is the starting point for the critical approaches to Stein that view her texts as experiments in a kind of prescient postmodernism. Deriving their methodological authority from post-Saussurian linguistics and deconstruction, such approaches customarily argue for indeterminacy as a means of displacing various idealized forms of representation, including that of a rigid correspondence between sign and referent. For Jacques Derrida, the fantasy that indeterminacy serves to displace is precisely that of the proper name. The "Roundtable on Translation" in The Ear of the Other begins with the proposition that the proper name is a special case in language because of its untranslatability: "Any signified whose signifier cannot vary nor let itself be translated into another signifier without a loss of meaning points to a proper-name effect." 12 Of course, the correspondence between signifier and signified is not the same as the correspondence between sign and referent, for the former is productive of sense, while the latter is, obviously, a matter of reference. But for Derrida, the one slips easily into the other, and this slippage is necessary to produce the linguistic indeterminacy to which he is committed. In any case, Derrida imagines the proper name to be characterized by an "absolute command" of signifier over signified, and in order to construct what that command would look like in its purest form, he hypothesizes an idealized, "absolutely secret first name which functions all the time without our knowing it" and which "has nothing to do with my public proper name or with what anyone may know about me" (EO, 106).
Initially in Derrida's account, the function of this hypothetical secret name is strictly to address: without any conscious identification on the part of the speaker, the name, once uttered, simply "calls" to the bearer. Derrida gives as an example of how such a name would work a "moment" in the "conclusion of [psycho]analysis" when the analyst would find him or herself "addressing the patient using his or her most proper name, possibly the most secret," that is, "when the analyst would say to the patient 'you' in such a way that there would be no possible misunderstanding on the subject of this 'you'" (EO, 107). The point of making the purest proper name secret, of withholding it in principle from any form of knowledge, is to remove the name from the realm of experience, and hence, from any of the vicissitudes of experience that might detach the name from its proper bearer. The problem is that as soon as the name is uttered, which according to Derrida it must be if it is to fulfill its function of "calling" to its bearer, it enters a "system of relations" where "pure address is impossible": "I can never be sure when someone says to me—or to you—says to me 'you, you,' that it might not just be any old 'you'" (ibid.). The fact that even the secret name is subject to such uncertainty means for Derrida that uncertainty is essential to all linguistic signs:
I can never be sure that the secret address might not be diverted, like any message or letter, so that it does not arrive at its destination. This is inscribed in the most general structure of the mark. The proper name is a mark: something like confusion can occur at any time because the proper name bears confusion within itself. [ibid.]
In making the extreme instance of the proper name secret, Derrida appears to be doing something akin to what Frege does when he proposes the stipulation of reference. Like Derrida's effort to imagine a secret name, Frege's effort to imagine a purely logical reference protects the name from the ambiguities and indeterminacies of experience. The force of Derrida's deconstruction of the name, however, is to show that reference can never be an ontological property of the name (as it is for Stein); rather, reference becomes an epistemological effect that can only be produced by an act of linguistic exchange. The name, in other words, does not first have its reference and then enter circulation; it has its reference only by way of entering circulation. Consequently it is subject to all the vicissitudes of experience that make any mark signify differently in different contexts. In short, this means that any proper name can become a common noun. And the extent to which the proper name can, as Derrida says, "drift off course toward a system of relations where it functions as a common name or mark," is proof for him that all signs, including proper names, are always already adrift (OE, 108).
The consequence of seeing all proper names as common nouns in potentia is that the proper name is never really proper at all. In this respect, Derrida's argument is essentially Frege's in a much stronger form. If for Frege the fact that all names have sense as well as reference means that there is in the final analysis no substantial difference between a word like Phosphorus and a phrase like "the morning star," for Derrida the fact that a name and a common noun can be the same means that there can be no reference without sense. And for Derrida it is the inseparability of reference from sense that makes all signs indeterminate. Obviously the problem of differentiating sense from reference lies at the heart of all three of the philosophical accounts of names I have been discussing. It is what drives Russell's effort to distinguish the pronouns "this" and "I" from all other names; Frege's insistence that a logical language must stipulate reference; and Derrida's hypothesis of the secret name. In all three accounts, the attempt to separate reference from sense deconstructs because the name and its bearer are imagined to be striving (and inevitably failing) to remain the same as they migrate from context to context.
In "Poetry and Grammar" Stein's view of the name looks much like Derrida's. She seems to be making the argument that the common name, or noun, is merely a diminished proper name, an attenuation of the immediacy of reference:
Now actual given names of people are more lively than nouns which are the name of anything and I suppose this is because after all the name is only given to that person when they are born, there is at least the element of choice even the element of change and anybody can be pretty well able to do what they like, they may be born Walter and become Hub, in such a way they are not like a noun. A noun has been the name of something for such a very long time. ["PG," 214]
Here Stein seems divided on the question of how proper names relate to their common counterparts. On the one hand, the name appears utterly distinct from the common noun: it can be changed in ways that the noun cannot. But on the other hand, it looks as though all nouns begin as proper names, and only become less "lively" (and thereby more common) after they have been used "for such a very long time" that they are no longer possessed of the "element[s] of choice [and] change" they presumably had when they were first used. The notion of a baptismal advent of the name—whether it be a proper name or a common noun—is precisely the fantasy that Derrida aims to deconstruct by showing that no such privileged origin exists for the name, much less for the common noun. But while Derrida rejects the idea of there being an initial inception of the name, he is nevertheless committed to the idea that the name subsists through a history of use, that even though its meanings change from one context to the next, the name itself remains the same, gaining ever more distance from a retroactively idealized (and impossible) reference.
But for Stein the liveliness proper names have upon being given at birth or being chosen to replace other names functions not as a way of fetishizing an originary reference that is subsequently lost, but rather as a way of negating the very possibility of such a loss. Redefining reference this way, Stein gains precisely the opposite of what the originary-reference fetishist is forced to lament. If the originary-reference fetishist is sad because all proper names wind up as common nouns, Stein is happy because all common nouns can be made, through her own poetic invention, to work like proper names. The gain, in other words, is a means of alleviating the deadness that accrues to common nouns through use. But even if one wanted to imagine that Stein had solved this particular problem of names, a larger question remains: why does Stein care about names in the first place?
She gives her answer implicitly throughout "Poetry and Grammar," in which she emphasizes repeatedly that names are the stuff poems are made of: "now and always poetry is created by naming names the names of something the names of somebody the names of anything" ("PG," 234). If we accept Stein's notion that poetry has traditionally been a means of expressing one's love of an object, and if what one most often does in expressing love for a thing is to call out its name, poetry can be understood, Stein contends, as "a state of knowing and feeling a name" ("PG," 233). "You can love a name," she explains, "and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more, more violently more persistently more tormentedly. Anybody knows how anybody calls out the name of anybody one loves. And so that is poetry really loving the name of anything. . . . Yes any of you can know that" ("PG," 232). But names apparently become a great deal less lovable as they get used for other than purely baptismal or incantatory purposes, when they come to have sense as well as reference. In short, names become less lovable when they become nouns: "Nouns are the name of anything and anything is named, that is what Adam and Eve did and if you like it is what anybody does, but do they go on just using the name until perhaps they do not know what the name is or if they do know what the name is they do not care about what the name is" ("PG," 229).
For Stein, loss of interest in what the name is threatens poetry with a similar loss of interest. This leads her to question the viability of the noun as the basis of poetry: "Things once named the name does not go on doing anything to them, and so why write in nouns" ("PG," 210). But given that what Stein laments is a loss of interest in the name, she clearly retains a commitment to poetry being all about loving the name. What remains for her, then, is to imagine a way of keeping names in poetry without their falling prey to use: "Now that was a thing that I too felt in me the need of making [anything] be a thing that could be named without using its name. After all one had known its name anything's name for so long, and so that name was not new but the thing being alive was always new" ("PG," 330). We're already familiar with the idea of the thing named being new from Stein's account of Grant. Grant becomes new each time he gets a new name, to be sure, but Stein suggests an even deeper and more perpetual newness that is purely a function of Grant's being alive. That the name, in contrast to the life, is not new implies that through each successive use the name remains the same, and in this respect the problem of revitalizing poetry becomes a matter of revitalizing the name, of finding a way for the name to be new each time it occurs.
Stein looks to pronouns in particular for the model of such a renewable commodity. Pronouns "are of course not really the name of anything. They represent someone but they are not it or his name. In not being his or its or her name they already have a greater possibility of being something than if they were as a noun the name of anything" ("PG," 316). Here it looks as though Stein is eschewing the name completely, contradicting what I have been arguing thus far. But a closer look at what pronouns do will show that while they certainly are not names in the sense that Stein intends when she speaks of names being used, they nevertheless have everything to do with the kind of naming that she valorizes in both her account of Grant's name change and her account of poetry as the love of names.
If we think about Russell's choice of the pronoun "this" as one of two truly proper names, we can easily imagine that Stein values in the pronoun the function that Russell values: its capacity for pointing to an object that is present. Certainly the function of any pronoun is referential in this sense, even when its referent is simply another word. But if we thus construct the referential function as a relation between the pronoun and its referent, so that the pronoun is what we use when a thing is present and we want to point at it, it's hard to see how the pronoun could ever be understood as something in and of itself, as Stein wishes. It is, at best, a medium for viewing the object. Moreover, if we plug this deictic function back into Stein's account of what names do in poetry, we are right back where we started: with an originary production of a name that grows deader and deader each time we use it, much as a pronoun loses meaning if we repeat it too many times without restoring its referent.
But if we think of the pronoun, like the mathematical variable x, as essentially defined by its referential function, the pronoun no longer seems to suffer such a diminished fate. After all, if we square an x in one mathematical expression, and then times it by two in another, and then gave it a minus sign in another, we would hardly be inclined to regret that the x had somehow grown less lively or meaningful over the course of our different uses of it, and we certainly wouldn't say that its meaning had thereby become indeterminate. The reason that the x can never suffer a loss of meaning or be indeterminate is because in any given context, the value of x will always in principle be a matter of reference. We can see now why Frege would propose stipulation as a solution to the problem of ambiguity in expressions, for as soon as reference becomes a matter of stipulation, any possibility of ambiguity falls away. But Stein goes even further than Frege: by her logic, the particular reference of a variable at any given moment is less a matter of stipulation, than a matter of the variable itself being essentially identical to its referential function. 13 Reference, in other words, is an intrinsic feature of the variable insofar as it constitutes the condition of possibility that allows the variable to stand in for any particular referent. In this sense what the variable (and likewise the name) denotes is something like its own rule of operation, much as we might say that the pieces in a chess game denote their own rules of movement. But while we conventionally think of the value of x as stipulated at the outset of a mathematical operation and then as remaining the same throughout that operation, for Stein no matter how often x might appear, each successive use would have to be understood as presenting both a new x and a new value, even as x's capacity for reference remained unchanged.
If we think about the pronoun operating according to the logic of the variable, and then apply this model of reference to the function of names, it is easy to see how Stein would insist that Hiram Grant and Ulysses Grant are two completely different men. It is less easy, however, to see why George Washington the novelist would not be different from George Washington the general. In effect, they are different by the logic of reference, inasmuch as each occurrence of the name George Washington is a new instantiation of the reference the name entails. Yet this logic of reference also entails that Washington can never be different from what he was. There is no contradiction here: in each separate, successive moment of being named, Washington can only be Washington. By imagining names to possess the variability of pronouns, where any name becomes a wholly different term with each new use, Stein produces an unassailable distinction between sense and reference, so that even a common noun can retain the purity of the reference it embodies in any given moment of its use. 14 Thus, to return to Derrida for a moment: what constitutes from his perspective the phenomenological inseparability of sense and reference, and the consequent impurity of all reference, becomes from Stein's perspective a mere conflation arising from the failure to recognize that reference is what names are, not merely what they do. Moreover, only if the name is understood to be the same over the course of different uses, that is, only if it is understood as an object of continuous experience, can it be subject to the indeterminacies that Derrida proposes, and only then can the name be understood to revert to a common noun.
For Stein there is no question of the name reverting over time to the status of a common noun; the common noun instead acquires the logical function of the proper name each time it appears. Nowhere is her commitment to this understanding of the proper name more evident than in the famous line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose." The line appears to depict something very like the Derridean transformation of the referential proper name into the descriptive common noun. It begins, after all, with a name—the capitalized, article-free "Rose"—and predicates a description on it: what is Rose? Rose is a rose. But when Stein claims that "in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years," she is emphasizing not the attenuation of the proper name into its common noun sense, but rather a perpetual renewal of reference, rendering each instance of the noun, in effect, a proper name. 15 Like the stipulative variable, this "rose" has no memory. The reference is concentrated within each instance of the word, rendering it an autonomous, self-same entity. And once made an entity in this way, the word can finally become the proper object of the poet's love: "When I said A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," Stein writes, "[a]nd then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun" (L, 231).
The repudiation of nouns in "Poetry and Grammar" occurs initially as a way of rejecting a poetic tradition that Stein imagines has deadened literature by wearing nouns out. But even as her own project of modernizing poetry depends on identifying nouns as depleted names, her realization of that project depends not on rejecting names for their tendency to wither into nouns, but rather on revitalizing nouns by making them work like names—by making them "mean names without naming them." I have been arguing that the way names have of "being attached to those that bear them" involves a certain immediacy of reference that goes along with imagining the rose to be "red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years." But if that immediacy of reference is also what makes it possible to imagine caressing the rose as a matter of caressing the noun, that is, the name of the rose, then one might easily argue that what it means for the name of the rose to be so palpably physicalized is for the word itself to be valued as a strictly material object.
Not surprisingly, therefore, the single most prevalent gesture in the growing body of recent criticism emphasizing Stein's linguistic concerns is an insistence on the material features of words in her texts—particularly their sound, substance, and shape. Thus, in an early issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E that documents a series of poets' responses to Stein's Tender Buttons, Jackson Mac Low pays particular attention to his own physical experience of her words: "I go from word to word, seeing the shapes of the printed words, hearing the sounds inwardly, noting rhymes, assonances, alliterations." 16 MacLow's response is typical not only of the specific readings of Stein in that volume, but of the materialism that the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement has come to represent more generally. 17
Ron Silliman's version of that materialism, for example, laments "the disappearance of the word that lies at the heart of the invention of the illusion of realism and the breakdown of gestural poetic form." 18 For Silliman, this loss can be remedied by the disjunctive compositional practices—what he terms in a later essay "the new sentence"—of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, with Stein as a privileged predecessor. Silliman argues that "transparent realism" causes the word's purest materiality—its sound and shape—to disappear, for by "gestural poetic form" he apparently has in mind something akin to rhyme, rhythm, and measure: "It is precisely the expressive integrity of the gestural use of language which constitutes the meaning of the 'nonsense' syllables in tribal poetries; its persistence in such characteristics of Skelton's poetry as its rhyme is that of a trace" (NS, 11). But Silliman's commitment to "gestural poetic form" is not, as his comments might suggest, an effort to celebrate meaninglessness; rather, he imagines that the pure sound and shape of syllables can "constitute meaning." Moreover, meaning so constituted has as its overriding characteristic the familiar tinge of indeterminacy. In arguing for an analogy among three different forms of linguistic combination—the ways that syllables and phonemes "integrate" into words and phrases, words and phrases integrate into sentences, and sentences integrate into larger units of composition—Silliman insists on both a finite degree of commensurability among the materials of language and an infinite (and hence, indeterminate) range of possibilities for understanding them. He cites Tzvetan Todorov to make this point:
While in speech the integration of units does not go beyond the sentence, in literature sentences are integrated again as part of larger articulations [e.g., the paragraph], and the latter in their turn into units of greater dimension, and so on until we have the entire work. . . . On the other hand the interpretations of each unit are innumerable, for their comprehension depends on the system in which it will be included. [NS, 74]
But why should an insistence on the irreducible materiality of language go along with an insistence on its indeterminacy (or, in Todorov's formulation, the innumerability of its interpretations)?
It is easy to see why, once recognizing the materiality of language becomes a way of recognizing language as an object. And for Silliman's fellow L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E theorist Charles Bernstein, linguistic materiality translates quite precisely into linguistic objecthood, a pure physicality that, like Silliman's "gesture," constantly threatens to disappear:
The visibility of words
as a precondition of reading
necessitates that words obtrude impermeably into
the world—this
impermeability makes a reader's absorption
in words possible. The thickness
of words ensures that whatever
of their physicality is erased, or engulfed, in
the process of semantic projection,
a residue
tenaciously in-
heres that will not be sublimated
away. 19
The "thickness" of words refers quite literally to their dimensions on the page as physical piles of ink—in other words, to their status as marks. "The 'mark'," Bernstein writes, "is the visible sign of writing. / But reading, insofar as it consumes & / absorbs the mark, erases it—the words disappear / (the transparency effect) & are replaced by / that which they depict, their "meaning" ("AA," 64). The pathos of loss that Bernstein attaches to the mark is to be remedied, he argues, by "anti-absorptive" poetic practices that foreground the material features of words.
For Bernstein, as for Silliman, the privileged example of such antiabsorptive poetics is the chant or incantation, whose syllabic units are defined as such by their lack of semantic meaning. 20 Moreover, Bernstein (again sharing Silliman's view) insists that the resistance to semantic meaning does not "cede meaning" altogether ("AA," 10). Rather, he imagines a meaning whose function is experiential as opposed to semantic:
If the artifice [of a poem] is
foregrounded, there's a tendency to say that there
is no content or meaning, as if the poem were a
formal or decorative exercise concerned only with
representing its own mechanisms. But even when a
poem is read as a formal exercise, the dynamics &
contours of its formal proceedings may suggest, for
example, a metonymic model for imagining
experience. For this reason, consideration
of the formal dynamics of a poem does not necessarily
disregard its content; indeed it is an obvious
starting point insofar as it can initiate a
multilevel reading. But to complete the process
such formal apprehensions need to move to a
synthesis beyond technical cataloging, toward the
experiential phenomenon that is made by virtue of
the work's techniques. ["AA," 10-1]
For our purposes, the force of this passage lies not in the degree to which the "form" of a poem (i.e., the material of the poem) can yield an "experiential" rather than a semantic meaning; the real force lies in the absolute necessity and completeness of that displacement. When words become marks (or incantatory syllables), we have no choice but to experience them because—if we want to continue to apprehend them as material objects—we can no longer think of ourselves as reading them. That is, we can no longer think of ourselves as reading them because we can no longer think of them as language. 21
Of course, once words become marks, they will, as a function of their objecthood, yield innumerable experiences—as many as the subjects who view them and the times and circumstances in which they are viewed. Therefore, insofar as Bernstein wishes to see experience as type of meaning, indeterminacy would likewise seem to be a necessary consequence of his "anti-absorptive" poetics. But if a commitment to the mark does entail a commitment to indeterminacy, that commitment hardly counts as linguistic. Nevertheless, both Bernstein and Silliman (and a host of other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E affiliates) insist on reading Stein's poetry and poetics as predicated upon an acknowledgment of linguistic indeterminacy. I have already argued that her theory of reference with respect to proper names not only does not involve any claim to indeterminacy but is intrinsically antithetical to it. But this argument is mistaken if Stein's claim to have "caressed and addressed a noun" is a claim to have caressed and addressed a literal object.
 The reason there are so few "master-pieces" (of course Stein considers her own to be among the few), is "because mostly people live in identity and memory. . . . They know they are they because their little dog knows them, and so they are not an entity but an identity." 22 Certainly it's tempting to read Stein's insistence on that term "entity" as a concession to the idea that the nouns (and, for that matter, all the other parts of speech) in her writing have the status of objects rather than words. But in fact it is Stein's concept of identity that is closest to the relationship between experience and materiality that I have shown to be associated with objecthood.
The identity conferred upon us by our dogs is purely a function of experience, as Stein explains in The Geographical History of America: The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind . Over the course of that work's effort to enumerate what counts as human nature (namely all the behaviors and instincts we share with animals) as opposed to what counts as the human mind (namely all that is particularly human and, most importantly, associated with the creation of masterpieces), "identity" emerges, as one might guess, firmly on the side of human (and, for that matter, canine) nature. Your identity, Stein argues, is a function not of anything intrinsic or essential about you, but rather of there being some experiencing subject—any dog will do—to remember and identify you. Entity, by contrast, has nothing to do with memory or identity, and insofar as masterpieces attain their status by virtue of being entities (and not identities), what makes them masterpieces has nothing to do with any particular subject's experience of them. This is why, for Stein, personal letters cannot be masterpieces:
the letter writes what the other person is to hear and so entity does not exist there are two present instead of one and so once again creation breaks down. I once wrote in writing The Making of Americans I write for myself and strangers but that was merely a literary formalism for if I did write for myself and strangers then identity would take the place of entity. 23
The standard of value that determines whether a work is a master-piece—i.e., whether it is an entity—is therefore in no way determined by the response or experience of an audience. Or, to reframe this idea in the terms of our discussion of Bernstein and Silliman, a work of art is a master-piece, by Stein's account, precisely to the degree that it is not an object of experience. 24
Thus, when Stein writes that she has made a ring with her line "Rose is a
rose is a rose is a rose," what finally makes her rose "red for the first
time in a hundred years"—what submits that noun to her imaginative
caress—is not any particular material feature of the noun
capable of being felt by whoever might wish to caress it. The name of the
rose is not red because of anyone's experience of its redness. Moreover,
the name of the rose is not red by virtue of pointing to something
red. Rather than denoting a relation between the name and the redness of
its bearer, each "rose" in Stein's ring denotes instead a reference to
redness that inheres in the name. If Stein can "really caress" the
noun by rendering it as a name, it is neither the material form—the
petals and thorns—of the floral object it denotes nor the material
form—the sound and shape—of the word that denotes it. What
Stein caresses in caressing the "rose" is the immaterial form—the
very function of reference—belonging to the name itself.
Jennifer Ashton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is currently completing a book called Modernism Post Postmodernism: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Problem of Contemporaneity.
1. In addition to important essays by poets Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman, which I will discuss below, the following critical works are among the many that characterize Stein's language as postmodern, which is to say, as indeterminate: Marjorie Perloff, Poetics of Indeterminacy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); Ellen Berry, Curved Thought and Textual Wandering: Gertrude Stein's Postmodernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Alison Rieke, The Senses of Nonsense (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992). By contrast, for a recent attempt to extricate Stein from the grip of postmodernism, see Nicola Pitchford, "Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein's Tender Buttons," American Literary History 11.4 (Winter 1999): 642-67. Unfortunately, although Pitchford neglects to engage the postmodernizing accounts of Stein that appear in the context of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, she reinscribes Stein's style as postmodernist in exactly their terms. She does so by insisting that it foregrounds the materiality of the signifier (its "shape and sound")—a hallmark gesture of the kinds of arguments made by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E affiliates, and, as I will show, a gesture that is logically committed to indeterminacy .
2. Gertrude Stein, "Sacred Emily," in Writings: 1903-1932, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 387-96.
3. Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar," in Writings 1932-1946, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 313-4; hereafter abbreviated as "PG."
4. I have borrowed the phrase "poetics of indeterminancy" from Perloff's important work bearing that title.
5. Gertrude Stein, Four in America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947), 1; hereafter abbreviated as FA.
6. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, trans. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969); hereafter abbreviated as GF.
7. Of course, from Stein's point of view, to say that Hiram Ulysses became Ulysses Simpson would be nonsensical, since the one is a completely different person from the other and thus could not be said to "become" him.
8. For an extended account of the distinction between "acquaintance" and "description," see Bertrand Russell, "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," in Mysticism and Logic (1917; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981); hereafter abbreviated as ML.
9. Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (1918; LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1994), 62. Hereafter abbreviated as PL.
10. I am in a sense conflating Russell's reactions to different arguments about how names signify in the absence of any extension. Frege, as I have shown, argues for stipulating a reference for the name or denoting phrase, which is not the same as granting it any actual extension in the form of objects. Nevertheless, stipulating a reference does in effect stipulate the possibility of an object, which is why I argue that Russell's objection to the category of denoting phrases that have no extension (e.g., "the present King of France" or "the round square") effectively applies to the category of stipulated references in Frege as well. See Russell, "On Denoting" , in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert Charles Marsh (New York: Macmillan Company, 1956) 45-7.
11. My account of the commonality between Frege and Russell is indebted to John R. Searle, "Proper Names," Mind 67 : 166-73 and Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).
12. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 93. Hereafter abbreviated at EO.
13. Albert Cook invokes a notion of reference similar to the one I am arguing for in "Some Notes on Stein and Deixis," Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 91-102. Insofar as "deixis" is a term for Cook that emphasizes the principle of reference rather than particular referents, his argument is consonant with mine. But when he claims that the speaker of Stein's Stanzas in Meditation "can rest in the unswervability of deixis that language endorses" and also "occasionally incorporate Steinian ungrammaticalness," he fails to see that grammaticality (which is present even when it is violated) is the constant and necessary condition for the deixis he wishes to celebrate.
14. In Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), Charles Caramello sees Four in America as an exercise in what he calls "autoreferentiality" (169-200 passim). This term might be applicable to my understanding of how names function for Stein if the prefix "auto" signified the way in which names denote their own principle of operation. For Caramello, however, the term means "self" and the four res in Four in America provide a means for Stein to refer in code to her own cultural status as an artist.
15. Thornton Wilder, "Introduction," in FA, iv.
16. Jackson Mac Low, "Reading a Selection from Tender Buttons," in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 202.
17. A notable exception is Robert Grenier's accompanying response to Tender Buttons, which calls the effort to align Stein with L=A=N=G-=U=A=G=E poetry's materialist commitments a "creative misreading" (The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 206).
18. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1995), 12; hereafter abbreviated as NS.
19. Charles Bernstein, "Artifice of Absorption," in A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 86; hereafter abbreviated as "AA."
20. Bernstein cites Velimir Khlebnikov's "zaum poetry," which "uses words not found in any dictionary, derived . . . in a quasimathematical way, by joining various root syllables . . ." ("AA," 50).
21. My logic in this argument is heavily indebted to Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels's account of the relationship between words and marks in "Against Theory," Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 : 723-42.
22. Stein, "What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them," in Writings: 1932-1946, 360.
23. Ibid., 356-7.
24. Michael Fried's theorization of minimalist objects has been enormously important to my own understanding of the linguistic object in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing. See Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).


Oh look! A MiniTest::Spec::DSL module! Eat your heart out DHH.
Contains pairs of matchers and Spec classes to be used to calculate the superclass of a top-level describe. This allows for automatically customizable spec types.
See: #register_spec_type and #spec_type
Define an ‘after’ action. Inherits the way normal methods should.
NOTE: type
is ignored and is only there to make porting
easier.
Equivalent to MiniTest::Unit::TestCase#teardown.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 176 def after type = nil, &block define_method :teardown do self.instance_eval(&block) super() end end
Define a ‘before’ action. Inherits the way normal methods should.
NOTE: type
is ignored and is only there to make porting
easier.
Equivalent to MiniTest::Unit::TestCase#setup.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 162 def before type = nil, &block define_method :setup do super() self.instance_eval(&block) end end
Returns the children of this spec.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 145 def children @children ||= [] end
Define an expectation with name desc
. Name gets morphed to a
proper test method name. For some freakish reason, people who write specs
don’t like class inheritance, so this goes way out of its way to make sure
that expectations aren’t inherited.
This is also aliased to specify and doesn’t require a desc
arg.
Hint: If you do want inheritence, use minitest/unit. You can mix and match between assertions and expectations as much as you want.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 194 def it desc = "anonymous", &block block ||= proc { skip "(no tests defined)" } @specs ||= 0 @specs += 1 name = "test_%04d_%s" % [ @specs, desc ] define_method name, &block self.children.each do |mod| mod.send :undef_method, name if mod.public_method_defined? name end name end
Essentially, define an accessor for name
with
block
.
Why use let instead of def? I honestly don’t know.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 216 def let name, &block define_method name do @_memoized ||= {} @_memoized.fetch(name) { |k| @_memoized[k] = instance_eval(&block) } end end
Register a new type of spec that matches the spec’s description. This method can take either a Regexp and a spec class or a spec class and a block that takes the description and returns true if it matches.
Eg:
register_spec_type(/Controller$/, MiniTest::Spec::Rails)
or:
register_spec_type(MiniTest::Spec::RailsModel) do |desc| desc.superclass == ActiveRecord::Base end
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 114 def register_spec_type(*args, &block) if block then matcher, klass = block, args.first else matcher, klass = *args end TYPES.unshift [matcher, klass] end
Figure out the spec class to use based on a spec’s description. Eg:
spec_type("BlahController") # => MiniTest::Spec::Rails
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 128 def spec_type desc TYPES.find { |matcher, klass| if matcher.respond_to? :call then matcher.call desc else matcher === desc.to_s end }.last end
Another lazy man’s accessor generator. Made even more lazy by setting the
name for you to subject
.
# File lib/minitest/spec.rb, line 227 def subject &block let :subject, &block end


indexing
You can define indexes on documents using the index macro. For unique indexes provide a unique options, otherwise no option is necessary.
class Person include Mongoid::Document field :ssn index :ssn, unique: true end
You can define indexes on embedded document fields as well.
class Person include Mongoid::Document embeds_many :addresses index "addresses.street" end
You can index on multiple fields and provide direction.
class Person include Mongoid::Document field :first_name field :last_name index( [ [ :first_name, Mongo::ASCENDING ], [ :last_name, Mongo::ASCENDING ] ], unique: true ) end
Indexes can be sparse:
class Person include Mongoid::Document field :ssn index :ssn, sparse: true end
Indexes can be run in the background in cases where they may take some time:
class Person include Mongoid::Document field :ssn index :ssn, unique: true, background: true end
For geospacial indexes, make sure the field you are indexing is an Array.
class Person include Mongoid::Document field :location, type: Array index [[ :location, Mongo::GEO2D ]], min: 200, max: 200 end
You can have Mongoid define indexes for you on "foreign key" fields for relational associations. This only works on the relation macro that the foreign key is stored on.
class Comment include Mongoid::Document belongs_to :post, index: true has_and_belongs_to_many :preferences, index: true end
When you want to create the indexes in the database, use the provided rake task.
rake db:mongoid:create_indexes
Note that you must following standard Rails class and module naming and organization patterns in order for this to work properly with respect to namespacing and camel-casing.
Model # must reside in /app/models/model.rb MyModel # must be in /app/models/my_model.rb MYModel # must be in /app/models/m_y_model.rb Namespaced::Model # must be in /app/models/namespaced/model.rb
If you want indexes autocreated when the model classes are loaded, add this configuration option to your mongoid.yml. Note this is NOT recommended for any production environment.
defaults: &defaults
autocreate_indexes: true
dropping indexes
When you want to remove an index, it must be done using the MongoDB index name. Therefore if you create a range index on the birthday date coluumn in the Person model in the Rails console, you would do it like this.
:001 > Person.collection.ensure_index([['birthday',Mongo::DESCENDING]])
In order to delete that same index, you need to use the index name, not the index definition. The index name is birthday, but the index definition according to MongoDB will include an _1 for an Mongo::ASCENDING range index and a _-1 for a Mongo::DESCENDING range index. To remove the above index in the Rails console, you would enter the following.
:002 > Person.collection.drop_index('birthday_-1')


Most of the information for the class can be found here.
Reference unit circle.       Unit Circle
A guide through the semester of what you've learned.       Final exam review
Back


Nav Yug Samajic Seva Sansthan contribute immensely to global development by seeking to prove the quality of life for those whom poverty and disadvantage are a daily reality. This is achieved by devoting resources into advocacy campaigns aimed to represent the community and demand the interests of civil society to be recognized.


| code | description |
|---|---|
| derivative | description |
| docs | description |
| primary | description |
| protocol | description |
| source | description |
| code |
code: Folder containing all the source code used in the study (e.g., Python,
MATLAB, etc.)
|
|---|---|
| derivative |
derivative: Folder containing data files derived from raw data (e.g.,
processed image stacks that are annotated via the MBF tools, segmentation
files, smoothed overlays of current and voltage that demonstrate a particular
effect, etc.)
|
| docs |
docs: Folder containing all other supporting files that don't belong to any
of the other folders (e.g., a representative image for the dataset, figures,
etc.)
|
| primary |
primary: Folder containing all folders and files for experimental subjects
and/or samples. All subjects will have a unique folder with a standardized
name the same as the names or IDs as referenced in the subjects metadata file.
Within each subject folder, the experimenter may choose to include an optional
“session” folder if the subject took part in multiple experiments/ trials/
sessions. The resulting data is contained within data type-specific (Datatype)
folders within the subject (or session) folders. The SPARC program’s Data
Sharing Committee defines “raw" (primary) data as one of the types of data
that should be shared. This covers minimally processed raw data, e.g.
time-series data, tabular data, clinical imaging data, genomic, metabolomic,
microscopy data, which can also be included within their own folders.
|
| protocol |
protocol: Folder containing supplementary files to accompany the experimental
protocols submitted to Protocols.io. Please note that this is not a
substitution for the experimental protocol which must be submitted to
Protocols.io/sparc .
|
| source |
source: Folder containing very raw data i.e. raw or untouched files from an
experiment. For example, this folder may include the “truly” raw k-space data
for an MR image that has not yet been reconstructed (the reconstructed DICOM
or NIFTI files, for example, would be found within the primary folder).
Another example is the unreconstructed images for a microscopy dataset.
|
| metadata files |
|---|


Class TableReadOptions (2.4.0)
TableReadOptions(mapping=None, *, ignore_unknown_fields=False, **kwargs)
Options dictating how we read a table.
.. _oneof: https://proto-plus-python.readthedocs.io/en/stable/fields.html#oneofs-mutually-exclusive-fields
Attributes
| Name | Description |
| selected_fields |
Sequence[str]
Names of the fields in the table that should be read. If empty, all fields will be read. If the specified field is a nested field, all the sub-fields in the field will be selected. The output field order is unrelated to the order of fields in selected_fields. |
| row_restriction |
str
SQL text filtering statement, similar to a WHERE clause in a query. Aggregates are not supported. Examples: "int_field > 5" "date_field = CAST('2014-9-27' as DATE)" "nullable_field is not NULL" "st_equals(geo_field, st_geofromtext("POINT(2, 2)"))" "numeric_field BETWEEN 1.0 AND 5.0" Restricted to a maximum length for 1 MB. |
| arrow_serialization_options |
google.cloud.bigquery_storage_v1.types.ArrowSerializationOptions
Optional. Options specific to the Apache Arrow output format. This field is a member of `oneof`_ ``output_format_serialization_options``. |


Canada’s De Havilland gets 11 more turboprop orders at Dubai Airshow
TORONTO, Nov 19 — De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Ltd said today it had obtained 11 more orders for its Dash 8-400 plane at the Dubai Airshow, as it revives the recently acquired turboprop business from Bombardier Inc.
Aurora, a subsidiary of Aeroflot-Rossiyskiye Avialinii PAO, signed a letter of intent to purchase up to five Dash 8-400 aircraft, while the Republic of Ghana agreed to buy six aircraft during the Dubai Airshow, which runs between November 17-21.
ACIA Aero Capital Ltd also signed a conditional purchase agreement to buy three Dash 8-400 aircraft, the company said in a separate statement.
Longview Aviation Capital closed its deal for the Q400 turboprop aircraft programme from Canada’s Bombardier this year and revived its previous model name — Dash 8 —under a restored corporate brand of De Havilland Aircraft of Canada.
Yesterday Monday, De Havilland landed an order for 20 Dash 8-400 turboprops from lessor Palma Holding at the ongoing Dubai Airshow. — Reuters


--- title: "Week One - 35 Years of Growing" date: "2020-11-27 00:00:01 -06:00" categories: - garden-journal layout: "post" blog-banner: "35-years-of-growing.jpg" post-date: "Nov 27-30, 2020" post-time: "10:00 AM" blog-image: "2020-11-27-wh.jpg" published: true ---
By: Kate Randall, Red Butte Garden Marketing Communications Specialist
The Garden's story begins with Dr. Walter P. Cottam, founder of The State Arboretum of Utah and co-founder of what is now The Nature Conservancy.
Dr. Cottam joined the University of Utah as a botany professor in 1931, and began collecting and planting native plants in what became known as Cottam’s Gulch at a site near President’s Circle. Additionally, he proceeded to spend the next 30 years planting new and unusual trees throughout campus. In 1961, the Utah State Legislature formally recognized Cottam's impressive tree and hybrid oak collection by designating the University's campus landscape as the State Arboretum of Utah.Dr. Cottam was the first person in the nation to cross two species of oak from two different classes. Many of the tree species from his original study are still alive today in an area west of our Amphitheatre that we affectionately call Cottam’s Grove.
Today, the Garden’s horticulture staff maintain the collection of trees and collect the acorns each season to fulfill requests for these hybrids from other gardens and researchers from around the world.
As the University grew, so did the Arboretum's need for permanent public educational facilities and display gardens. In 1983, Ezekiel R. Dumke. Jr. and Richard Hildreth led the efforts to have the University dedicate 100 acres at the mouth of Red Butte Canyon for a regional botanical garden. The organization's name was changed from the State Arboretum to Red Butte Garden & Arboretum. The site provided an outstanding opportunity to showcase horticultural collections and to interpret the richly diverse natural area. This opportunity inspired the expansion of the Garden's mission to include not only horticulture but also conservation and environmental education.
The Garden formally opened to the public in 1985. In 1994, the Walter P. Cottam Visitor Center (funded by the George S. and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation) opened. Over the years other additions have been the Hemingway Four Seasons Garden, Fragrance Garden, Medicinal Garden, Herb Garden, Dumke Floral Walk, Children’s Garden, the Richard K. Hemingway Orangerie, an amphitheatre, gift shop, the McCarthy Family Rose Garden, and the Water Conservation Garden.
Today, Red Butte Garden has 21 acres of display gardens, natural areas, and over five miles of hiking trails. The Garden has grown into one of the nation’s pre-eminent botanic gardens with 200,000 annual visitors, over 10,000 members, and over 300 active volunteers. The Garden is renowned for its award-winning gardens, numerous plant collections, including its springtime display of over 500,000 blooming bulbs, outdoor concert series, and award-winning educational programs. It has become a place where people seek horticultural knowledge, family programming, volunteering, or a stunning natural setting for weddings and special events.
Learn more about the 35 Years of Growing, 35 Days of Giving campaign.


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Presentations and Papers
2015
2014
- “Social Networks and
Archival Context Project: A Case Study of Emerging Cyberinfrastructure,”
Tom J. Lynch. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 8:3 2014.
- “Social Networks and Archival Context: from Project to Cooperative Archival Program,”
Daniel Pitti, Rachael Hu, Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, and Adrian Turner. Paper submitted
to the Journal of Archival Organization. Special issue focused on EAC-CPF, co-edited
by Katherine Wisser (Simmons College) and Anila Angjeli (Bibliotheque nationale de France).
- “Social Networks and Archival Context: from R&D Project to Cooperative Program,” Ray
Larson et al. Information Access Seminar, UC Berkeley School of Information, February 14, 2014.
- SNAC R&D and CPP overview and new site preview, Daniel Pitti. Packard Campus, Library of
Congress, Culpeper, VA, May 27, 2014.
- Overview of SNAC R&D and CPP, Daniel Pitti. “Ontologies for Prosopography: Who's Who or Who
was Who?” workshop, Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, July 8, 2014.
- forthcoming “Establishing a Description and Access Cooperative: From Project to Program,”
John Martinez, Ray Larson, Daniel Pitti, and Brian Tingle. Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting,
Washington, DC, August 15, 2014.
- forthcoming “SNAC,“ Daniel Pitti, Fonds and Bonds: Archival Metadata, Tools, and Identity
Management Pre-Conference Special Session, DCMI International Conference on Dublin Core and
Metadata Applications, Austin, TX, October 8, 2014.
2013
- “Social Networks and Archival Context: Towards a Social Network of History,” Ray R. Larson,
Daniel Pitti, Brian Tingle, Yiming Liu, Krishna Janakiraman. Paper submitted to the
Social Networks and Data Mining minitrack of the HICSS conference (in review).
- “Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), Phase 2: Current Status
and Developments,” Daniel Pitti, Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner. Information Access Seminar, UC Berkeley
School of Information, February 1, 2013.
- Presentations on SNAC by Daniel Pitti at Archives nationales, Paris, France, February 21, 2013;
VIAF
Council meeting, Strasbourg, February 25, 2013;
and APEx
meeting Berlin, February 27, 2013.
- “Building infrastructures for archives in a digital world,” Daniel Pitti, Trinity College,
Dublin, Ireland, June 26-28, 2013.
- Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, New Orleans, August 2013.
- “Decoding the Digital: Technology, New Media and a Culture Consumed?” University of
Rochester, September 12-14, 2013.
- Association of Moving Image Archivists Annual Conference, Richmond, Virginia,
November 7-8, 2013.
- “Social Networks and Archival Context: Towards a Social Network of History,”
Ray R. Larson, Daniel Pitti, Yiming Liu, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner and Rachel Hu.
In PNC 2013 Annual Conference and Joint Meetings, Kyoto University, Japan, Dec. 11,
2013. p. 76.
2012
- “Historic Social Networks:
Prototype Access System”
by Brian Tingle | “The
Social Networks and Archival Context Projects: Status Report”
by Daniel Pitti and Ray Larson. Presentations at 2012 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting
- “The Management of Scholarly Identity: A CNI Workshop,” Daniel Pitti. Coalition for Networked
Information, April 4, 2012.
- “National Archival Authorities Infrastructure: Social Networks and Archival Context & National Archival
Authorities Cooperative,” Daniel Pitti. Cornell University Library Metadata Working Group Forum, April 20,
2012.
- “Projects
Aims to Build Online Hub for Archive Materials,”
Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2012.
- SNAC presentation by Daniel Pitti, Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner. Building a National Archival
Authorities Infrastructure
meeting, National Archives and Records Administration, May 21-23, 2012.
- “Archive Watch: Building a National Cooperative for Archival
Standards,” Jennifer
Howard, Chronical of Higher Education, May 22, 012.
- “Introduction to Linked Data: Connecting Our Collections,” Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner,
Catherine Wisser. Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (Association of College & Research Libraries)
Preconference, San Diego, CA, June 21, 2012.
- Digital Humanities Conference Hamburg, Germany “Facilitating Research through Social-Document
Networks” panel organized by Daniel Pitti (with Simon Agnès, BnF; Stefano Vitali, Soprintendenza
Archivistica per l'Emilia Romagna; Arnold, Kerstin, Bundesarchiv and APEx), July 17, 2012,
- “Solving Our Problems with Authority and Sharing: Current Developments and
Prospects, ” Ray Larson and Daniel Pitti. Society of American Archivists, San Diego, CA, August 11, 2012.
- “Social networks and archival context: findings and future research,”
Daniel Pitti. ICA Congress, Brisbane, Australia, August 22, 2012.
- “Social Networks and Archival Context Project,” Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, Adrian Turner.
Digital Library Federation, Denver, November 4, 2012.
- “Building an Archival Identity Management Network: Transforming Archival Practice
and Historical Research,” Daniel Pitti, Brian Tingle. Identity Management Session, Coalition
for Networked Information, December 7, 2012.
2011
- Webinar, for archivists and librarians affiliated with the Online
Archive of California, Adrian Turner and Brian Tingle. May 23, 2011.
- BioGraph, Krishna Janakiraman. Masters in Information Management and System Final
Project Presentation, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley, May 12, 2011.
- Daniel Pitti, Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, March 7, 2011.
- Ray Larson, Personal Archiving Workshop, San Francisco, February 25, 2011.
- Ray Larson, Friday Seminar, School of Information, UC Berkeley, February 4, 2011.
- “Web Information Quality and Name Authority Control,” Ray Larson. Evaluating Web Information
Quality and Credibility Panel, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 7, 2011.
2010
- Presentations at 2010 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, Daniel Pitti
- Presentation to the National Archivist and the Advisory Committee on the Electronic
Records Archive, Daniel Pitti. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., November 4, 2010.
- Brian Tingle, Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum 2010, Palo Alto, California, November 3, 2010.
- Ray Larson, Brian Tingle, and Krishna Janakiraman, Friday Seminar, School of Information, UC Berkeley, October 1, 2010.
- Brian Pitti, EAC-CPF: Moving Forward with Authority workshop, National Archives
and Records Administration, Washington, D.C., August 9, 2010.