prescriptive (pree-SCRIPT-iv) n., vt., vi., adj., adv., etc. ["ad. late L. præscriptiv-us"; loosely translated as: to have a tendency before writing.]
1 The first issue of The Transcendental Friend begins with an editorial that discusses, among other concerns, the ways in which poetry and poetics function as both prescriptive and non-prescriptive. This is paralleled by the way language is depicted in the editorial as both instrumental and non-instrumental. An example appears in the heading "What is 'That Numbrous Kind of Writing' Called Poetry?" Phrasing the issue in terms of a question creates a sense of ambiguity dispelled by the attempt in the editorial to partially articulate a particular poetics (however much this poetics may include the undefinability of poetry as one of its components). The set of quotations in the first section of the editorial reflect this equivocation, i.e., the use of Sir Philip Sidney's quote should be considered within the larger context of its appearance in his The Defence of Poesy, a text which was written with an intentional, and prescriptive, purpose: namely to argue that what is now called literature could and can have a positive moral influence on society.
1989 Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, 218. "For these [poets] indeed do merely make to imitate, and imitate both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved—which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them."
2 This tension between the prescriptive and non-prescriptive, the instrumental and non-instrumental, is the dilemma Jacques Derrida confronts in "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve," a discussion of Georges Bataille's political economics and its relation to his (and Derrida's) theory of language (for a closely related set of problematics, cf., Steve McCaffery's "Writing as a General Economy"). Like Bataille, Derrida wants to define language as fundamentally transgressive of intentionality and prescriptive theories of language (despite the ahistorical structural linguistic framework Derrida accepts a priori). But it's difficult to shake instrumental and referential language.
1978 Derrida, "From Restricted to General Economy," 261. "There is only one discourse, it is significative, and here one cannot get around Hegel. The poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to the absolute loss of its sense, to the (non-)base of the sacred, of nonmeaning, of un-knowledge or of play, to the swoon from which it is reawakened by a throw of the dice."
3 Perhaps a materialist poetics will need to turn Derrida on his head, and focus more on the first part of his quote. In other words, if, "There is only one discourse, it is significative," and language is also evaluative (cf. V.N. Voloshinov: "There is no such thing as word without evaluative accent." [103]), then discourse is both evaluative and significative. Or, one might twist this conclusion a bit to say that the descriptive is always to a certain degree prescriptive.
1973 Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 23. "Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e., with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of the class struggle."
4 In nearly all forms of language use, the listener does not hear words in themselves, or language in itself, but hears ideologies; it is one of the dangers of poetry that it oftentimes endeavors to efface this fact by foregrounding the materiality of the signifier and giving excessive attention to the formal device of the literary artifact. Here, the non-prescriptive becomes prescriptive.
1980 Stein, Stanzas in Meditation, 408.
The thing I wish to tell
Is that it makes no difference as well
As when there is this not this not to tell
To tell well or as well.
5 Meaning is not reducible to play, but to ideologies. For this reason, a poem has varying prescriptive effects which are dependent upon the social, economic and ideological circumstances of its production and reception. Thus, there can be no perpetual effect—political, cultural, aesthetic, or otherwise—for any individual poem or type of poetry. To talk about the politics of poetry may require more of a sociology of literature than an aesthetics, as a poem cannot be extracted from its historical context, and neither can the act of criticism evaluating it. In this regard, both poetry and criticism are site specific interventions.
1979 Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, 104. "The inheritance of the conceptual equipment which goes with the concerns of aesthetics constitutes the single most effective impediment to the development of a consistently historical and materialist approach to the study of literary texts."
6 The prescriptive in poetry can also open as an allegory onto a better future.
1980 Bambara, The Salt Eaters, 293. "The sky is lit by tomorrow's memory lamp.... New possibilities in formation, a new configuration to move with. A flood one moment in time could drown the earth, the next create fish farms in the deserts. The wind that lifts everything up this minute used to bury it all in the sand last time."
7 The prescriptive is a form of pedagogy. In terms of this pedagogical quality, language can be either dialogical or doctrinaire. The non-prescriptive as articulated within postmodernism—usually in theories of play, of irony, of chance, and the sliding signifier —frequently ends up as dogma. One alternative to this is a poetics recognizing the fundamentally prescriptive aspects of language and utilizing these in a practice rooted in mutually rewarding critical dialogue.
1970 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 65. "Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming—as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality."

Sources:
Bambara, Toni Cade, The Salt Eaters, Vintage Books, 1980.
Bennett, Tony, Formalism and Marxism, Methuen, 1979.
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 1971.
Derrida, Jacques, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve," in Writing and Difference, Chicago UP, 1978.
Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Continuum, 1970.
Kalleberg, Garrett, "The Pursuit of Poetry & the Numbrous Bridges of Error," in The Transcendental Friend, G. Kalleberg & H. Ramsdell, eds., www.morningred.com/friend/1998/03/pages/dialectic.html, 1998.
McCaffery, Steve, "Writing as a General Economy," in North of Intention: Critical Writings, 1973-1986, Roof Books and Nightwood Editions, 1986.
Sidney, Sir Philip, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, K. Duncan-Jones, ed., Oxford UP, 1989.
Stein, Gertrude, Stanzas in Meditation, in The Yale Gertrude Stein, R. Kostelanetz, ed., Yale UP, 1980.
Voloshinov, V.N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Harvard UP, 1973.


Alan Gilbert