Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 15

The avant-garde has been characterized as being in a paradoxical historical situation: while it undertakes the overturning of the prior aesthetic order as an irreversible act, it cannot survive a reentry into history, as a form of representation, without losing either creative potential or critical force. As a critique of representation, it would follow from this argument, the avant-garde can only contradict itself as a stable form of representation. In academia, the historical contradiction of the tenured radical ironically indicates such a devolution of political agency, in moving from public sphere to educational institution, profession, and tenure. In radical politics, Leon Trotsky tried to counter the historical irony of the avant-garde party with a notion of permanent revolution that would be transparent to history, and that would not rigidify in any form of representation.¹ Significant tendencies of the historical avant-garde in Europe (surrealism central among them) saw their claims to political agency and cultural meaning in terms of a dialectics of representation in this sense.² But while a surrealist politics of desire has been a central example of the overcoming of stable forms of representation in the historical avant-garde, its particular claim to history, as a concrete form of representation or an identifiable style, risks suppressing its iconoclastic methods once it has achieved recognition. As a result of the seeming inevitability of the historical reversal of the avant-garde’s critique of representation, its political claims have often been seen as failed or irrelevant.

In his account of the structural logic of this “failure,” Paul Mann’s Theory Death of the Avant-Garde restages the analogy between political party and aesthetic tendency at a later historical period.³ In describing the avant-garde from his own historical moment — shortly after 1989, when the horizons of the political avant-garde seemed to have withered away along with the global realignment of the end of the Cold War — Mann describes the paradox of a radical tendency that has survived the death of teleology. The death of the avant-garde, as an end to history, is identified with a notion of theory that is abstract, nonreferential, and self-reflexive — an instance of negative totality that lacks any agency but the recuperation of its own failure. This is Mann’s concept of theory death: the devolution of avant-garde agency (in either political or formal terms) that transforms its material practices into an empty and self-confirming discourse — but one that continues as its mode of reproduction nonetheless. The avant-garde dies into theory simultaneously when its political critique turns into an empty circularity of discourse, and when its radical forms are reduced to commodities exchanged in the market and collected by museums. Such a movement away from material practice and toward discourse, in fact, provides the best definition of the avant-garde: “The avant-garde is a vanguard of this reflexive awareness of the fundamental discursive character of art” (6), a discourse derived both from its radical formalism (“as antitraditional art”) and its political tendency (“either an epiphenomenon of bourgeois cultural progress or an authentic revolutionary moment of opposition”). If the avant-garde proceeds by endlessly explaining its practice and fundamentally undermining any explanation, the result is entirely circular: “In the avant-garde art manifests itself entirely as discourse, with nothing residual, nothing left over” (7).

The radical critique of the avant-garde, in other words, both fails and reproduces itself at the instant it becomes a form of discourse: this is the paradox of its theory death. The paradox arises not only from the antinomy of representation (in which radical form congeals in representation and destroys any stability of representation) but from the failure of its theoretical excess as it enters discourse and is recuperated: “The discourse of the death of the avant-garde is the discourse of its recuperation” (14), which it has anticipated from the outset in overstating its case. In thus predicting “the effective complicity of opposition,” the failure of the avant-garde mimics larger historical processes of recuperation of radical politics (even as it offers itself up as an index to them?) in a “fatalism authored by nearly a century of recuperations, utopian movements canceled with depressing, accelerating regularity, new worlds turning old as if with the flick of a dial” (15). The avant-garde stages its “little death” at the end of history in a way that is “theory-total”: it is “the reflection and reproduction of the theoretical exhaustion of autonomy, progress, opposition, innovation” (67). Thus “there is no more crisis; only its exhaustion is critical. What we witness then is a crisis of the end of crisis . . . in which difference can be reproduced but can no longer be different” (115). In this notion of theory as index to the failure of radical tendency, we may see as well the traces of Mann’s moment of critique at the end of the Cold War, with its own theory death of failed utopia at the end of history.

The self-canceling perfection of Mann’s avant-garde posthistoire must account, even so, for an embarrassment: the continuing work of artists and writers who, seemingly unaware of their position, persist in avant-garde practice.⁴ At the very least, this persistence has led to an immense growth in the world’s inventory of avant-garde art; teleology over and done with, the record of material history may be all that remains of the avant-garde. Here Mann proposes a “second death” of the discursive formation of the avant-garde to account for its material forms: “The avant-garde is completely immersed in a wide range of apparently ancillary phenomena — reviewing, exhibition, appraisal, reproduction, academic analysis, gossip, retrospection — all conceived within and as an economy, a system or field of circulation and exchange that is itself a function of a larger cultural economy” (TD, 7). The avant-garde’s materiality thus represents a self-canceling process of self-perpetuating evaluation and review, a total emptying out of its critical force:

Every manifesto, every exhibition, every review, every monograph, every attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes in the critical arena, every attempt to advance the avant-garde’s claims or to put them to rest: no matter what their ideological strategy or stakes, all end up serving the “white economy” of cultural production.⁵

So much for the agency of the material text: in Mann’s view its surplus of interpretation, as practice, returns it to an empty “white economy” whose purism is stultifying. The critique of the material text short-circuits its potential for agency, even as it shows how it can never be seen as merely autonomous or self-sufficient: its claims are always discursive.

The irreducible materiality of the avant-garde, of course, may be interpreted in any number of ways: this is its necessary point of entry into discourse. To begin with, avant-garde discourse may be seen as derived from the materiality of its technique, its foregrounding of the material signifier: language, paint, sound as the foundation of its genres or media. Avant-garde materiality also enters discourse in its politics of breaking apart the frame, leading to an undoing of boundaries between work and world (in terms of both material practices and cultural logics) as an emancipatory critique. Finally, if avant-garde materiality reproduces the paradox of its avant-garde agency itself (as both interpretable and resistant to interpretation), it may, in its discursive recuperation, find itself by extension everywhere in a form self-reflexive critique, in an endlessly deferred politics of the signifier (Jacques Derrida is thus the philosophical counterpart to Dada after its theory death; 116). This reflexive movement from signifier to discourse, however, may also be seen from the perspective of the material text. Turning Mann’s analysis on its head, one may also conclude that at the moment of avant-garde theory death, it is (i) embodied in the material history of individual works; (2) transgressively enacted as a text between work and world; and (3) re-presented in a discourse of desire and negativity. Even if its theory death at the end of history undermines teleology, the avant-garde always claims a material form that, as provoking discourse, continues its logic of critique.

Mann’s death of the avant-garde, placing it within a horizon of theory that has little need for any specific history, might equally announce the birth of a new historical account of the avant-garde, one that goes substantially beyond two significant prior moments. In the first, a conventional Hegelian historicism sees the avant-garde as a moment of negativity or refusal that is recuperated either in a diachronic series (the teleology of modernism for Matei Calinescu or Renato Poggioli, leading toward the formal autonomy of literature or art) or in a synchronic totality (the reinforcement of art as institution for Peter Bürger, where critique is exhausted in redefining the nature of art itself).⁶ As Mann summarizes these positions, the avant-garde “illuminat[es] in retrospect the fact that the historical project of abolishing the bourgeois institution of art was itself nothing more than a phase of that institution’s development” (TD, 63). In the second, the recuperation of the avant-garde as an example of aesthetic practice is undermined by either a myth of originality that gives evidence of its parasitism on history rather than its autonomy (Rosalind Krauss) or by a cult of the artist whose agency is, in fact, prefigured by institutions (Donald Kuspit).⁷ Here, the negativity of the avant-garde is always co-opted by the affirmative culture of institutions, such that, in the end, it can only be defined by them:⁸ “What we witness here is less the truth or falseness of autonomous art than the autonomic functioning of the economy in which it must operate” (TD, 77). In proposing a matrix of theory as consequence of the death of the avant-garde, however, Mann actually works to preserve the agency of the avant-garde, whose negativity (either radical form or political agency) may now be distributed throughout the social totality as a critical force. Such a relocation of avant-garde agency within the totality of culture, even as discourse, is visible in concrete historical developments such as the influence of the Russian Formalists’ foregrounding of the material signifier on modern advertising (from El Lissitzky to the Bauhaus) and film (Sergei Eisenstein), as well as on modernist literary theory, or the example provided by surrealism of an antirepresentational politics of desire that influenced both the fashion industry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.⁹ While Mann’s discursive horizon of theory does not account, as it should, for constructions of cultural discourse, it still provides a way of understanding the agency of the avant-garde within a totality that may only begin with the death of its purported recuperation. The death of the avant-garde in this sense turns out to be an anticipatory figure for what I will call the constructivist moment.

Moving toward a consideration of the specific historical forms of the avant-garde, it is not surprising that Mann’s account of the Language School of poetry is as unapologetically prospective and historical as it is, even as he claims the avant-garde itself as over:

Even as these obituaries were peaking — around 1975, when the most was being said about how little there was to say — a network of so-called language-centered writers was emerging, largely in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Experimental, deeply critical of current poetic practice and the ideological character of ordinary and literary language, often theoretically militant about their nonreferential and writer-oriented poetics, with their own presses, distribution systems, reviewing apparatus, and public forums, they seem in every respect exactly the sort of group that would once have been considered avant-garde without question. And yet it is indeed difficult to apply this label to the language poets, for the cultural model it denotes seems awkward, outmoded, and exhausted. (TD, 32)

In the necessity to locate its work in a historical succession of avant-gardes, the Language School may be thus characterized as encountering its failure at the outset. As I wrote in 1985, “I, too, have been called a Surrealist” — and have been equally embarrassed by the ascription.¹⁰ A notion of the avant-garde carrying with it the dead weight of Calinescu and Poggioli’s rigid and prefigured historicism, as well as the live bruises of Krauss and Kuspit’s pronouncements on the avant-garde’s unoriginality, has indeed been an embarrassment. It has led to a renewed form of originary authorship, for one thing, whose politics are under revision if not unrecuperable, but which even in its negativity depends on conservative cultural institutions to give it publicity, legitimacy, and, finally, reward.¹¹ The question of definition, in any case, is central: the politics of the name avant-garde (as well as many names for the avant-garde) — as the moment of a recuperated and thus contradictory critique of representation — invokes a form of self-canceling negativity that undermines avant-garde agency at the same time that it is identified as its proper technique. Language writing, thus, is “so-called” by its advocates and detractors, indicating an ambivalence toward identity that has often been mistaken as a refusal of recognition.¹² As Bob Perelman has written, “Why didn’t we simply name this body of writing? While we were clearly dealing with the subject of language writing, we avoided that name.”¹³

Rejecting the nominal instability of “so-called language writing” as merely another instance of avant-garde paradox, we may look instead for a historical account of the evolution of its name. The term language-centered was first used in print, in the history of the Language School, in a head-note to “The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets,” Ron Silliman’s 1973 selection of recent work published in the ethnopoetic journal Alcheringa: “9 poets out of the present, average age 28 . . . called variously ‘language centered,’ ‘minimal,’ ‘non-referential formalism,’ ‘diminished referentiality,’ ‘structuralist.’ Not a group but a tendency in the work of many.”¹⁴ In the context of Alcheringa, “language-centered” connoted a culturally holistic notion of “total poetics,” in editor Jerome Rothenberg’s terms, as much as a linguistic turn to structuralist theory.¹⁵ By the mid 1970s, both “language poet” and “language writing” were in common use, descriptively and pejoratively, by virtue of the tendency’s emerging visibility first in San Francisco and then in New York; individual writers began to be described (or baited) as language poets in the late 1970s.¹⁶” In 1978, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, after some discussion with other writers, named their journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, spacing the letters with equal signs.¹⁷ The secret history of the equal signs begins here, with the question of the original intention of the name of the journal of a school that was seen as undermining authorial originality.

If the author is suspended in the naming of the journal, we may consider an alternate scenario to connect a view of language to the construction of the school. Of crucial importance is that the graphically modified noun language was used to name a journal that published articles about language-centered writing, so-called, rather than examples of it — a controversial claim on my part that depends on a distinction of genre between articles about poetics and examples of poetry (or between description and enactment as discursive modes). L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E stood as a name for a body of work that can be represented but only indirectly presented, in three senses: (1) examples of language-centered writing itself were not the primary content of the journal; (2) articles about language-centered writing were not identical to their referents, even if a horizon was imagined where sign and referent would meet; (3) as a result, the name of the aesthetic tendency that produced this referential schism would partake of the nonreferentiality of the work itself, which it represented, as it were, in absentia. Nonreferentiality, thus, was central to the discourse of the journal, not just the texts it referred to. Later, when asked, in an interview with Andrew Ross about the politics of the name, the editors provided this account of the relation between the name of the journal and that which it represents:

If we’re talking about the work we focused on in editing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, let’s first explode any notion of collective self-designation. Beyond a labelling tag, what could it possibly (and precisely) consist of? No single origin or destination or dominant style or ideology marks this diverse body of radical, or radial eccentricities. And its very heterogeneity, its swirl of concerns, is what gives it some insurance against a reductionist reception. . . . That kind of reception involves a taming, a domestication, a shoring up of the old walls (however flashily ornamented by a tokenism of the new, a kind of repressive desublimation). Any reading of this kind of poetry, however, would build some wedges against its smooth assimilation as just another addendum to the 20th century curriculum.¹⁸

In their account, the name stands as an arbitrary sign (in the Saussurean sense) for an unrepresentable “swirl of concerns”; this is an antifoundationalist, even antinomian, claim. This tendency toward an antinomian, antidefinitional poetics, opening on a permanent instability of reference, was immediately recuperated in the initial academic reception of language writing when critics Marjorie Perloff and Jerome McGann each used the name of the journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, as a definitional term for “language poets” and “language writing,” “so-called”¹⁹ — an act repudiated by six writers on the West Coast in the tendency who did not feel adequately represented by the journal’s name.²⁰ In Ross’s early critique, on the other hand, the material texts and networks, rather than the name, of the Language School are used to define it.²¹ At the very least, a politics of naming and being named has been central to its history, in at least three senses: in the development of its characteristic genres, in the emergence of its supporting theory, and in a permanent crisis of representation throughout its reception. Such a permanent crisis — and its capacity to continue spinning out a “swirl of concerns” — is precisely what Mann means when he says the avant-garde foregrounds “the fundamentally discursive character of art.”

Mann’s notion of theory death, then, occurred early in the history of language writing, beginning with the negative referentiality of the journal’s dispersed name and its relation to the emerging movement. What resulted has been a series of historical conflicts between the tendency and its names, between definitional terms like language-centered writing/language poet/language writing and proper names like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, indicating a dialectic of theory and practice that continues to evolve. The conflict over names based on language denotes, as well, not simply a kind of writing but a social formation, not just an aesthetic tendency but a group of writers split between its two major urban centers, San Francisco and New York, that gives a historical context for the displaced names of its theory death.²² Both cities had witnessed avant-garde formations in immediately preceding periods, with the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York School, and conflict remains over questions of cultural legitimacy and the avant-garde, as located either in the metropolitan center or on the marginalized coast.²³ There is thus a way in which language takes on a supplementary value in terms of the tendency’s divided social formation as a kind of placeless place, one of utopian fantasy and negative address from which, it may have been hoped, the work would emerge.²⁴ This movement, of naming and canceling the name, is not simply one of definition (of a specific method, technique, or style) but of a discursive formation — and it is here that Mann’s notion of theory death suggests a larger cultural poetics, not merely a stylistic tendency, emerging from the centripetal and centrifugal tensions of the school that was “made to be broken.”²⁵

Andrews and Bernstein, when questioned by Ross, propose first and foremost a question of word meaning as a counter to the inevitable theory death of academic reception. The fact that we cannot say what “language writing” is ought to force us to reconsider the conceptual framework (the conventional history of the avant-garde, for example) in which it is used. The referential indeterminacy of the material text is the primary guarantee of a politics of new meaning that resists its recuperation, as it generates considerations of new meaning itself in its own counterdiscourse. My own response to this question in the interview with Ross published in the same forum, on the other hand, focused on the relation of the name to the social formation of the group of writers being named — a historical rather than a definitional account of oppositional discourse. I likened the tension over the name of the group to the politics of the formation and dissolution of a group of anti-American student radicals in Nagisa Oshima’s film Night and Fog in Japan (1960). The film is a tragic history and psychological study of a radical group that placed itself at the margins of society, a micropolitics of the breakdown of oppositional consensus:

The form of belief that held together, violently, such a group of variously motivated individuals is, at the moment of its transformation, rendered objective — and at the same time the belief fails. Clearly individuals might continue to hold some of their collective beliefs . . . but the form of the group itself cannot survive objectification. It turns out that all along none of its members really understood what it was they were saying, even though it was said repetitiously and at length — in all-night discussions of political theory, in slogans at the barricades, and in tracts on revolutionary justice — while given meaning by the provocation of the group’s enemies outside. The centripetal movement of the group had revolved around a hollow center — as long as there was force and resistance to keep it in motion. This is very like the process of collective idea-formation in the arts.²⁶

Here, I am describing a dynamic of collective identity formation at a specific historical moment, one in which participants in a radical group are held together, in spite of their internal disagreements, in a form of negative solidarity in opposition to a common foe. What appears as the belief that holds the group together turns out to be, in fact, merely provisional. When the competitive tensions among the group lead to its inevitable undoing, one may ask, does its belief or the political moment cease to exist or have meaning?

There was indeed “a collectively held set of beliefs, and an absolute recognition of them,” among the poets who came together in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. These beliefs give meaning to the name Language School as it confers a historical status on the forms that were developed and used by writers in that group — but only after the initial moment of theory death in the naming of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. These forms of writing were as much discursive as authorial, both in shared assumptions of individual practice and in the counterinstitutions of publication, distribution, reviewing, and criticism that developed with the school’s emergence. In turn, these counterinstitutions, and the examples of cultural practice they provide, are historical; we may find in a politics of language that writes its own theory death the prescience of a historical reflexivity equally articulated in such real-time politics as alternative publishing and the Poetics Listserv. In what follows, I want to develop a fuller account of the politics of the name, signified by the equal signs separating the letters of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, for the Language School’s continuing development, seen as a combination of textual materiality and cultural discourse.