Andrews and Bernstein note that language can never be wholly stripped of reference (they may be responding to Steve McCaffery's "Politics of the Referent" synposium, in which he discusses "the fallacy of the referent" and argues for "language as a highly complex play of signifiers detached from stable signifieds")
They write: "the idea that writing could be stripped of refrence is as troubling and confusing a view as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one-on-one, to an already constituted world of 'things.' Rather, reference, like the body itself [?], is a given dimension of language, the value of which is to be found, in its various extents, in the poem (the world) before which we find ourselves at any moment."
Retallack agrees: "It is clear that the word, in so far as it is a working part of a language, can never be totally object; can never be fully isolated and magnified, as under a microscope, laying bare its cellular structure"