Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 12

From the 1950s on, the postmodern poet Jackson Mac Low has developed numerous literary and performance strategies for employing the constructive potentials of poetic vocabulary, and he frequently uses vocabularies taken from the BASIC word list, among other sources. In a correspondence following the original publication of this essay, Mac Low questioned the label “postmodern” for his work.⁵² There are important periodizing distinctions directly resulting from the difference between a modernist use of poetic vocabulary (such as Zukofsky’s) and Mac Low’s, however. While Zukofsky’s work with poetic vocabulary was directed to the composition of formally autonomous texts, Mac Low’s chance-generated poems and texts for ephemeral performances argue for more contextual values. Zukofsky and Mac Low both enact a cultural politics based on a language-centered critique, but in Zukofsky’s work critical values are equated with the irreducible autonomy of the text while Mac Low’s insists on interactive, collective strategies for their realization. In the textual weaving of Bottom: On Shakespeare, for instance, Zukofsky thought he had “done away with epistemology” and achieved a condition of textual practice where “the words are my life.”⁵³ While equally involved in a life of words, Mac Low continually exploits the difference of texts from the real-time, historically specific conditions of their performance. Zukofsky produced an epic poem, “A,” that represents language and culture in the unfolding structure of autonomous form; Mac Low has written a large number of experimental works that include the possibility of their realization outside the confines of the text, but he has by no means contemplated an epic.

Mac Low’s poetry addresses the historical expansion of meaning in using poetic vocabularies derived from specific source texts and organized in target forms. But where for BASIC and Zukofsky the ethical consequences of poetic vocabulary are in its relation to the natural or cultural object status of its referents, the ethical consequences of Mac Low’s work, even when purely aleatorical, are in how they are to be performed in real-time situations. Such formal procedures for the generation of poetic vocabulary are evident in Mac Low’s 1955 “5 biblical poems,” which comprise his first composition of aleatorical or chance-derived poems by what he has more recently called “nonintentional” means.⁵⁴ Mac Low converts the text of biblical narrative by means of ostensibly value-neutral, random procedures into a disjunct text that provides, in turn, the basis for its final realization in performance. In translating the Old Testament into sequences of vocabulary and ellipses (to be performed as temporal gaps), Mac Low transforms the authoritative original into a source text that produces the target form of the printed text. This text becomes, in turn, source text for the final target form, the work’s performance. In what appears to be a reenactment of the textual project of romantic hermeneutics, the horizon of the text’s “original” meaning can thus only be realized in the historical act of the poem’s reinterpretation in a way that fuses the horizons of the original language of the Old Testament, the interference of the printed version, and the contemporary meanings of what has now been rendered as a neutral and pseudoobjective poetic vocabulary:

For the utmost saying . . . ⁵⁵

Where Zukofsky’s “Thanks to the Dictionary” draws meaning in to the opacity of textual form, Mac Low’s work pushes meaning outward via performance. Each target form will be realized at a point in time after the initial work on the source text, making both source text and target form historical. While the realization of the first target form (the printed text) involves the indeterminacy of chance procedures, that of the second target form (its performance) will be open-ended, the result of guided choices among performance options that Mac Low gives, in the 1985 version of his Representative Works, in a preface that accounts for the poem’s history and specifies parameters for its future. Mac Low’s use of the preface, like that of American modernist poet Laura Riding but to constructive rather than obfuscatory ends, is a constitutive part of his poetry. His work exists in a series that begins with the act of poetic composition from original source text to stages of realization and performance, augmented by interpretive framing and publishing history.

Mac Low’s prefaces often contain versions of boilerplate wording that he feels need to be prefixed (or appended) to virtually every one of his major poetic experiments. These are stage directives as much as interpretations — in other words, they specify how the interpretation of poetry should be considered in terms of its real-time agency. One result of Coleridge’s desynonymy of judgment and identification was to describe an ethics by which the creative acts of others could be appreciated: “To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate with loss of originality”;⁵⁶ the result was intended to have been the gentlemanly inculcation of value to be shared by those in the inner circles of culture (if not full membership in the national clerisy). Mac Low’s prescriptions for the public staging of his poetry in performance can be seen in relation to Coleridge’s moral imperative of taste. Rather than being simply didactic instructions for the realization of possible meanings, however, Mac Low’s prefaces are also a historical criticism of the kind of literary community Coleridge configured around the appreciation of poetry. For this reason, the directives for the performance of his poetry are not only technical but affective:

All words must be audible and intelligible to everyone present. Readers must listen intently to their own voices and (in simultaneities) to those of other readers and to all ambient sounds audible during a reading, including those of the audience, if any. Amplitudes are free, within the range of full audibility, but readers in simultaneities must never drown each other out or try to outshout each other. Words must be read soberly and seriously, but without fake solemnity or any other artificial type of delivery.⁵⁷

Mac Low reinterprets the “severer keeping” of poetry as reasonable rules for social conduct. The subjective investments of organic form that can give the contemporary poetry reading its mock sublimity (and interpretive latitude) are clearly corrected for here; the work’s multiple performers are no longer the isolated subjects whose expression matters so much in the usual staged reading scenario. Mac Low’s open form is to an important degree normative, but his scripted scenarios are a prerequisite for engagement in a public space encompassing more than private interests finding expression through lyric form.

Mac Low’s poetics thus move toward political notions of representation in their enactment of community even as they hold back from representation in the epistemological sense. Mac Low acknowledges as much in titling his 1986 collection Representative Works in homage, as he says in his preface, to Emerson’s essay “Representative Men,” but with the difference that it is the work rather than the man that is representative.⁵⁸ In Coleridge’s Biographia (and by extension the literary tradition it founds), while much can be said for language’s relation to subjectivity and judgment, values for representation in both epistemological and political senses are deferred to the sublimity of the encompassing form of poetic address. Otherwise put, that Wordsworth imitates common speech per se does not matter for a politics and is a dubious distraction for a poetics. For Hamilton, this is one reason why the commonsense or social aspect of desynonymy did not survive the failed transcendence that would account for the imagination. It also offers a reason for why private interests to be socially organized in relation to literary forms need not be grounded in representation — showing the Coleridgean basis of a liberal poetics that proposes self-expression as an inalienable right as long as it is mediated by acceptable form. Mac Low’s at times pedantic emphasis on the origins of his source texts, and his labored descriptions of the means of their translation into target forms, takes on value here against the liberal precedence of expressive form for represented content. In other words, Mac Low insists on the constructed nature not only of subjectivity but of community. In detailing the most basic presuppositions for the production of his works, Mac Low outlines a poetics of representation based on an ethics in which expression is seen as the reflexive enactment of values held in common by communities. This commonality of value can be seen as much in the selection of Mac Low’s source texts as in the performance of their target forms, as the provisional texts that mediate between the two take on their values for representation precisely in their open-ended possibility for collective realization.⁵⁹

Mac Low’s description of the musical source text and target form of “Machault” (1955), for example, offers a key to the politics of representation that is distributed everywhere in his poetry. Mac Low details the source of the language of the poem in a note:

Written in January 1955 at 152 Avenue C, New York 9, NY, by translating the pitches of Guillaume Machault’s motet QUANT THESEUS (p. 6 in Lehman Engel’s Renaissance to Baroque, Vol. 1 French-Netherlands Music, Harold Flammer Inc., New York, 1939), into a gamut of words from T.H. Bilby’s Young Folk’s Natural History with Numerous Illustrative Anecdotes, published by John W. Lovell Company, New York, copyright 1887, by Hurst & Co.⁶⁰

These sources exist in a world of texts at large; they are the randomly acquired materials of a secondhand bookstore, available to anyone and bearing with them prior histories of their realization in the name of a common good (the historical responsibility of Renaissance to Baroque; the educative pathos of Young Folk’s Natural History with Numerous Illustrative Anecdotes). What Mac Low achieves by mapping one text onto the other at first appears to celebrate their incommensurability, but it is precisely in the determination of its value in performance that the commonality of his text’s materials may be seen as a publicly available. Such language, rather than assuming an inaccessible interiority, is separated from the expressivist core of poetic form as it interprets its outside sources as equally available to anyone, like the detritus to be found in a secondhand bookstore:

it wits it it by the lasso)

tired animal.” tired lasso) it

wits it that it

it by lasso) that by that

the so lasso) lasso) tired lasso)

the by wits it

lasso) the lasso)

it it it lasso) lasso) by lasso) by lasso)

it by that it lasso) . . . (35)

The children’s book provides an arbitrary vocabulary, memorable for its marked curiousness, that is in turn used to overlay the musical sequence of the motet. The vocabulary taken from the book becomes the source text mapped onto the structure of the motet and making a new source text for the second target form, the poem as realized when read or performed aloud. It is important that poetic vocabulary is being given quasi-referential values by being assigned to particular notes in the motet. Say “lasso)” were to be assigned to B: it could be said to signify it within the total form of the poem. Because this is arbitrary, it is not yet a model for representation, but it asymptotically approaches one when the horizon of the textual world called up by the poem’s language is fused with the outer horizon of a common understanding. Where in Coleridge’s poetics the revelation of poetic speech expresses its own passion on analogy to the transcendental imagination, in Mac Low the possibility of transcendence is reconfigured in the collective act of performance structured by the contingencies of language. In its arbitrary but fixed referentiality, Mac Low’s poetic vocabulary represents an idealization of the common good — availability of knowledge and participation in value — when realized in the senses its source materials permit. In the poem’s performance, the world will be represented, even if referred to by an arbitrary language, with the horizon of our understanding produced by determinate acts. The outer horizons of collective performance make sense of the world whose temporal and spatial contexts were originally dissociated from Mac Low’s source materials.

The representation of common sense and understanding as not conventionally subsumed within communicative norms is crucial here. As a result, an open, nonnormative concept of experience becomes a primary site for the critique of representation, allowing for a radical freedom of action and interpretation within a horizon of stabilized meaning. Mac Low textualizes experience in this sense in a 1960 poem, “Night Walk.” Describing the construction of the poem’s vocabulary, he notes: “The words in ‘Night Walk’ are all taken from a list of 100, representing objects, actions, and states of mind remembered as having figured in an actual situation” (54) of everyday activity. Much like his isolation of discrete lexical nodes from the biblical text, the poem breaks up the (inaccessible) continuity of whatever may be called experience to produce a new, arbitrary vocabulary that must in turn be recombined within the new horizon of its performance. Values for this performance, like materials for its text, are specified through fixed and to a degree arbitrary rules; degrees of rapidity (from vvs = “very very slow” to m = “moderate” to vvr = “very very rapid”) and loudness (from ppp to f), along with durations of performed silences (in seconds), are indicated in notes to the side of the printed text. These directives create obstacles as much as guidelines for the text’s performance that set the isolated words even further apart, thus interfering with the horizon of interpretation:

ms/p	liking teeth hands bodies wondering constellations listening peace 9
m/mf	water ice eyes evening 6
vr/mf	clothing attention 4
ms/p	three o’clock hands knowing hair clouds learning tongues twigs sweaters 9
vr/p	attention sliding thankfulness friends stars coats warmth peacefulness bears 3
m/mp	quiet lips talking cheeks touching starlight seeing morning resting fingers 8
ws/mf	kissing talking stories smiling 5
mr/mp	sweaters looking delight ease morning trees ease kisses 42 . . . (60)

Apart from his performance instructions, Mac Low withholds punctuation in order to create relations of maximum syntactic ambiguity, demanding choices to be made (as they are understood as arbitrary) in the performance: “The line ‘Three o’clock hands knowing hair clouds learning tongues twigs sweaters’ could be read as one sentence . . . or as ‘Three o’clock. Hands knowing hair, clouds learning tongues, twigs learning sweaters.’ or in other ways” (55). While a vocabulary cannot change the rules of syntax (as a performer cannot change Mac Low’s directives), the performance itself confers value as the horizon for all possible interpretations that can be produced from the source text. In the poem as it is performed, all lexically coded experience is decompressed and expanded onto an interpretive horizon that is the condition of all particular experience — or at least, onto a horizon that extends from the knowledge of experience to be realized from any particular text.

Mac Low’s book-length collection of performance texts, The Pronouns, takes such a splitting of vocabulary and syntax to a logical extreme.⁶¹ In the dancers’ realization of the printed texts in performance, according to the author’s postscript, there will be “a seemingly unlimited multiplicity of possible realizations for each of these dances because the judgments of the particular dancers will determine such matters as degrees of literalness or figurativeness in interpreting & realizing instructions” (68). These instructions, it turns out, will be identical to the words of the poems themselves, which were composed in lines and stanzas from filing cards on which were inscribed “one to five actions, denoted by gerunds or gerundial phrases” and “with the help of the Rand table of a million random digits, from the 850-word Basic English Word List” (69; fig. 4).⁶² If it were not for Mac Low’s identification of language with action, of poetic text with strategies for performance, his use of the BASIC word list would come quite close to its originators’ technocratic ideal of limiting meanings by the use of an arbitrary vocabulary. The identification of source text with performance strategies, however, shows exactly how the presumed transparency of a fixed vocabulary must be first understood as opaque and only then interpreted according to an open process of arriving at collective understanding.

Processes of both desynonymy and resynonymy, the expansion and contraction of vocabularies, are at work here. The act of interpretation will involve an initial expansion of the possible meanings of the source text by the dancers (who arguably substitute for BASIC’s men of research), one that will then be recoded within the horizons of the performance. In the target form, the dancers’ decisions will be realized as a collectively held common sense — precisely the process Coleridge described as necessary for the construction of new meaning: “When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency, that the language does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense.” For Mac Low, it is the performance itself that creates the collective understanding that can authorize new meanings as common sense. Thus, in the move from source text to target form, he not only assigns referential meaning by virtue of arbitrary symbols but shows how the new meaning demanded by the opacity of these arbitrary symbols must be determined by an interpretative community. The enactment of the performances in real time creates a new horizon for the meaning of actions, even as the source texts for the performances are made in the assumption that unrealized actions may be referred to by substitute symbols. The words on the cards, thus, condense possibilities for action whose realization is necessary for their interpretation in the widest horizon. A similar process is at work in Ogden and Richards’s sense that a restricted vocabulary results in the greatest flexibility of meaning, so that substitute symbols and new meaning go hand in hand. The difference, again, is Mac Low’s new horizon of action.

4. Jackson Mac Low, three cards from “56 Sets of Actions Drawn by Chance Operations and from the Basic English List by Jackson Mac Low in Spring 1961,” the “action pack” used as source text for composition of The Pronouns.

In “9th Dance — Questioning — 20 February 1964,” Mac Low’s compression of action to substitute symbols that must be interpreted in their performance looks like this:

One begins by quietly chalking a strange tall bottle.

Then, questioning,

one seems to give someone something.

One reasons regularly.

Then one questions some more,

reacting to orange hair.

Soon, coming on by doing something crushing or crushing something

& giving an answer

& giving a simple form to a bridge

& making drinks

one ends up saying things as an engine would. (23)

This sequence, while arbitrary, is at the same time ultimately mimetic in Aristotle’s sense: poetry imitates the action of an event that it restages. In his postscript to The Pronouns, Mac Low sees his poetic vocation in just such Aristotelian terms: “to create works wherein both other human beings, their environments, & the world ‘in general’ (as represented by such objectively hazardous means as random digits) are all able to act with the general framework & set of ‘rules’ given by the poet — the ‘maker of plots or fables,’ as Aristotle insists” (75). But not everything is predetermined within these frames, much to their credit: “That such works themselves may lead to new discoveries about the nature of the world & of people I have no doubts.” There are two aspects of Mac Low’s aesthetic plots that go, in this sense, beyond Aristotle’s poetics. First, a more historicist theory of meaning is necessary to fully account for the ethical stakes of the work and its performance. This is clear in the persistent dating of different versions of Mac Low’s poems, prefaces, and books; in the production of the works themselves as datable events, thus yielding a time-valued theory of reading; and in Mac Low’s willingness to move instantaneously between epochal frames and microscopic performance decisions, aligning, for example, the historically utopian horizons of his text’s invocation of “doing your own thing” with the oppositional counterculture of the Vietnam era (75). Second, a historicist account of literary form is required for Mac Low’s theory of language, insofar as it shows how the creation of new meaning occurs through transformations of arbitrary source texts into collective target forms at specific historical moments (not only horizons but dates).

But here there is a contradiction not fully theorized by Mac Low that can be seen in his overall identification of poetic form with definition, “the general framework & set of ‘rules’ given by the poet.” For example, “Tree* Movie” is a conceptual poem (realized at successive intervals) in which a movie camera is set up to photograph a tree for “any number of hours.” But, as a note states, its referent is wholly arbitrary: “For the word ‘tree’, one may substitute ‘mountain’, ‘sea’, ‘flower’, ‘lake’, etc.,” and the poem would be the same. Dated 1961, the concept of the work as given in Representative Works anticipates Andy Warhol’s famous film Empire, which would then be, by definition (or according to the poet), an “unacknowledged [realization] of ‘Tree* Movie,’ with subjects other than trees”⁶³ — though Mac Low’s own realizations of “Tree* Movie” were in the 1970s. The transparency of definition (analogous to the literalism of many of Mac Low’s techniques) is telling here, and it inflects even work with seemingly opaque vocabularies such as “A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos” of 1980, where all possible lexical units made from the letters of her name are syntactically recombined to add up to an interpretative horizon that finally means the name itself. In other words, all horizons of meaning are predetermined in Mac Low’s specifications for substitute symbols, much as the self-evident reasonableness of the BASIC word list would finally specify values for the dancers’ performance of the texts. In “Converging Stanzas” of 1981, the reinscription of lexical substitution toward a predetermined horizon is carried out to a (fully acknowledged) terminal degree. This poem progressively reduces its operative poetic vocabulary from an original stanza of words randomly chosen from the BASIC English word list, which in turn becomes the source for random choices until the probability of any word from the first stanza appearing in the final stanza, except the surviving one, experience, gradually approaches zero. Language converges on experience in a total resynonymy:

experience experience experience experience experience

experience experience experience

experience

experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience

experience experience experience experience

experience experience

experience experience experience experience experience experience experience (102)

It is entirely appropriate, but equally fortuitous given the influence of chance operation on the resynonymy of poetic vocabulary here, that BASIC is lexically reduced to the ultimate horizon of experience (a pure form of which, without any other qualities, is produced by the reading of the poem). “Experience,” it turns out, was one of Richards’s central critical categories, a universal horizon against which particular poems are read:

Let us mean by Westminster Bridge not the actual experience which led Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not differ within certain limits from that experience.⁶⁴

“Experience” then will be, for Richards, the horizon of value toward which meanings of words will be addressed (as opposed to a more limited horizon of objects of experience). Mac Low might be surprised to see how “Converging Stanzas” produces not only a word central to the BASIC’s methodology but reproduces Richards’s argument for a horizon of experience “composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words,” as well.

In a 1985 interview, I asked Mac Low whether his choice of BASIC conveyed any judgment of that vocabulary’s scientistic, cultural, and objectifying motives; his answer was no, “I simply regarded the Basic English list as just another source of words.”⁶⁵ This may be contrasted to Kit Robinson’s choice of his selected vocabulary, the Dolch Basic Sight Word List. A certain adult-child dynamic, to say the least, is conveyed in the visual evidence of these words; the child is being asked to take them on faith, not to analyze them but to know them as such as they are read. What results in Robinson’s use of these words conveys a sense of playfulness, an optimistic buoyancy in putting words together in new combinations, as much as it evokes the regression of deliberately restricting language to words from a second-grade reader. For Robinson, the horizons of new meaning are as open as the processes of learning being imitated in the poem, even as the psychological consequences of an earlier stage of development are being retrospectively explored. For Mac Low, however, the specific values for the meaning and syntax that result in any given realization of his work may be discontinuous from the procedural regularities of language determined by his generative rules. The partial nature of Robinson’s chosen vocabulary allows for sudden breaks away from its established level of arbitrary substitution, yielding moments of nonparticipation that assuredly have as much ethical import as the plotted scenarios of Mac Low’s rule-governed performances — especially for a political liberationist such as Mac Low. It is precisely this difference between a psychological horizon for the selection of predetermined language, as opposed to a definitional one, that brought about the major shift in Mac Low’s poetics in the early 1980s, when he began to deemphasize what he now calls nonintentional procedures for more spontaneous and embodied improvisatory methods. Even so, his disciplined attention to desynonymy and resynonymy, the substitution and expansion of poetic vocabulary, in six decades of writing is revealed in the stunning examples of new meaning that he continues to create.⁶⁶ Mac Low’s production continues unabated, while we are only beginning to read the surface opacity of his texts in terms of the ethical ideas encoded in their transparent motives.