Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 14

The Language School is known for its production of material texts, but an equally important dimension, in fact the one that defines it as a school, is the way it constructs the relation between material text and literary community. In this chapter, I read a number of key works of the Language School to show how the movement from text to community takes place through the use of strategies of multiple authorship. Avant-gardes, in breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous author in favor of both the work and its reception within its community, frequently use such strategies, in which the work is positioned between two or more authors, toward a horizon of collective practice or politics. Examples of avant-garde multiauthorship developed by writers of the Language School taken up here include the collective authorship represented by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other literary journals; Legend, a multiauthored experimental poem by five authors; two poems written under the title “Non-Events” by Steve Benson and myself; and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s collaborative novel The Wide Road. Michel Foucault’s concept of discursive formation and Julia Kristeva’s dialectic of symbolic and semiotic provide critical terms for the relation of text and community enacted in works of the avant-garde. The avant-garde’s cultural politics continue in the contemporary form of the Poetics Listserv, which I discuss in terms of a representative month of debate, seen as a form of multiauthorship.