We can look to Clement Greenberg, who writes in parallel about art to clue us in to a tactic of Stein's project:

The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the old masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only by implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.

Much as modernist painting draws attention to its insistent curiosity with a certain formal property (like color, or the flatness of canvas) to which it is bound, and that fact taken as its subject matter. In Stein's, that formal property is the functioning of grammar. Stein's writing privileges, in some sense, form over content - syntax itself is taken to be the subject matter over which Stein madly pores and iterates through; the contents of the sentences themselves suspiciously arbitrary or given to chance. The more senseless, absurd, or infantile, the greater the tension against the rationalizing power of syntax and the more heightened the poetic affect yielded.

In creating her work, Lezra claims, Stein is both offering herself as one-of-a-kind writer whilst also acknowledging that she is offering one of potentially many solutions to the task of meaning-making through writing.

The sense of desperate pleading in this particular sentiment comes across more deeply than in Lezra's title, which is made all the more prescriptive and potentially pedantic by the flourish with which he opens the piece.

After Judith Butler

Introduction of poetry to argument about sentences, paragraphs, and grammar comes out of left field here!

See my above comment: nice summary of the aporetic nature of grammar.

Fascinating and rich. The simplest implication here is that HTW poses the problem of where "the subject" is located: in the I that speaks grammar, or in the grammar that makes it possible to construct a speaking I?

This, too, is really opaque (speaking of opacity). I take it that Lezra's point is that a) economics and psychoanalysis co-evolve in Stein's era around analogous structures; b) that Stein tries to ground her move from singularity to example in a similar structure.

Cool move. Stein's (and many others') engagement of the value of words, the way signifiers are exchanged for signifieds, is implicated with economic decoupling of value from the "mystical constant" of gold etc. in the interwar period.

Tough sledding here. Roughly:

1. HOW TO WRITE implicated in "self-legitimation" to broader audience
2. passage from sentences to paragraphs tied to passage from singularity to exemplarity, to Stein being an example of a way to [write, speak, be, be read] rather than sui generis.
3. HOW TO WRITE part of temporality in which earlier works are retroactively made precursors to later works (ex: making of MAKING OF AMERICANS)
4. Stein's reading of Stein helps the "perfective" become "the infinitive"

Useful analysis of the initially confusing distinction Stein makes: grammar aligned with "affective and organic states."

Useful biographical context: HOW TO WRITE appears amid shift towards Stein's celebrity and outreach to lay readers. Hesitancy between "unruled reception" (lovely phrase) and construction of onramps to broaden access.

Somewhat Steinian exploitation of ambiguity in syntax here. How to read how to write can be read two ways, depending on syntax.

Does a masterpiece need to be at a disjuncture with the time it is situated within to be 'good'?

maybe something like "jouissance" -- there is a neccesary correlation between the feeling that sets us seeking pleasure and the innate instability of knowing who oneself truly is.

the outrage and disavowal that accompanies transgressive art can be understood as the pain of repressing what was a genuine aesthetic experience (perhaps ahead of its time)

The repetition has a manic quality to it, as if repeating an inscrutable thing many many times will make it lucid.

In the narrative arc of detective fiction, the motor of the story is the Whodunit, the Master Signifier that gives motion to all that unfolds. But if we know that the thing we're looking for is an empty set--someone who has ceased to be in the world-- we can proceed with that consistency at the very least. There's no delusion about seeking the very thing which cannot be known.

Everyone's too semiotically self-reflexive these days, Stein sez.

The fear is that identity, your subjective estrangement from language, will overshadow the artistic thing-as-such.

a 1:1 correlation of what is meant to what is understood cannot be wholly achieved through representation.

Stein seems to be exulting in the ability of modernist work to agitate familiar lines of understanding. Psychology, and an author's ability to create landscapes anchored in a rational understanding of the human mind, lose the irrational potency that makes them transcendental or sublime as works of art: the ability to activate that space beyond language or comfortable sense perception and invoke affect in an unusual way.

There is practical advice here - create for oneself and not for the conception of themselves that they see as lauded for their work. Perhaps it is warning against cockiness or an injunction to a certain form of meaning-making. If it is voyeuristic pleasure that motivates your art practice (not in any contemporary sense tho), or if it is for the critical appraisal that one applies themselves: it becomes possible that your art has lots its authenticity (that 'genius character' due to which 'important' work is archived in posterity).'School' is vague here so there may be two readings: she may mean small organizations of like artists organized into intellectual and productive working groups. More insidiously, one might read 'school' as the larger notion: the place of education. The institution is the final organized form of aesthetic principles, an entire combine of culture production

-Pedagogy cementing aesthetic norms, instilling continuity.

-Instruction and studio apprenticeship as vocational training.

-State-sanctioned exhibitions as apparatus with the power to valorize, archive, and amplify cultural products.

Stein is writing about her fondness for speech, but yielding that "talking has nothing to do with creation" of "masterpieces". Perhaps the joke is on us - Stein opens the piece noting of her decision to "write and read it" v. "talk [this lecture]"; but regardless of the cover given it is undeniable that her writing sounds an awful lot like the speech she has deemed ineffectual in artistic creation.

What makes it go dead? Recognition? As "beauty"?

everyone became consciously aware WWI as singular event for distributing the agreement in "composition," of recognizing the work of the "outlaw."

One of the most puzzling moments: romanticism is linked with 1914 and with a widespread linkage of sameness and difference. Is the idea that romanticism, as the first "modernism" in language, normalizes the idea of a break, of discontinuity in search of continuity?

Three principles of "composition": continuous present, beginning again and again, using everything. Unpack this for students.

Introduction of Stein's "continuous present," the idea of creating a rich, contingent space for the writer in the act of writing and the reader in the act of reading, a temporality that abolishes the neat past/present/future triad of traditional narrative.

Another motif that recurs throughout: composition creates a distance in space and time. We are here and its is "going to be there," appearing to us from a distance.

First occurrence of this motif: central principle of composition is repetition, is "beginning again," a phrase which Stein evidently loves for its poetic qualities as much as its investment in creating loops of time.

Side note: Stein's argument here is extremely close to that of Eliot's in his 1919 "Tradition and the Individual Talent," though Eliot is advocating for the "classic" rather than the newness of the new.

Temporality of "composition": the experimental artist disrupts and then is integrated into history as a "classic." Stein jokes (seriously) that "there is almost not an interval" between these two moments, that we forget that (for example) Picasso was an "outlaw" once he has become "classic" and "beautiful." It's certainly the case that a tour through MoMA is rich in examples!

New term. The discussion of war leads to the discussion of "composition" with "time-sense," temporality, the idea of the new art as making a break in time.

Beginning of a set of riffs on WWI narrowly and war more broadly: war as that which makes a break, produces difference. To this extent, modernism is deeply implicated with WWI and (perhaps) with war in general.

Stein emphasizes that "ways of looking" change, and the list of verbs emphasize the power of the "composition" to derange looking and make us see "the same thing" anew in ways that "make a difference."

This word "composition" will be THE keyword in the piece. Note how much S freights "composition" with here: a) it inserts a wedge between generations (i.e., each generation has its own "composition" that is authentically "new"); b) it's something that only those who "know it" perceive, thus internally splitting a generation between those who are down with its "composition" and those who lag.

This word "composition" will be THE keyword in the piece. Note how much S freights "composition" with here: a) it inserts a wedge between generations (i.e., each generation has its own "composition" that is authentically "new"); b) it's something that only those who "know it" perceive, thus internally splitting a generation between those who are down with its "composition" and those who lag.