Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 16

To look for historical support — much needed in a post-theory death environment — for the importance of the avant-garde for cultural politics, one place to start is Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language.²⁷ In its reception, Kristeva’s thèse d’état has been valued for its derivation, after Jacques Lacan, of the material poetics of the semiotic, composed of the unintegrated remnants of the body in pieces at the moment of ego formation in the imaginary. Kristeva’s dialectic of semiotic and symbolic was equally informed by the literary currents of the 1960s in avant-garde critical journals such as Tel Quel, which saw the emergence of new genres of literary form as well as the reception of the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin.²⁸ But although Kristeva made central use of examples of the historical avant-garde, from Mallarmé to Joyce, in her account of literary semiosis, few critics have followed her lead by extending her discussion to include the contemporary, avant-garde.²⁹ While Kristeva’s work has been widely used by feminist critics, her privileging of examples from the historical avant-garde has been seen by some to reflect a masculinist bias.³⁰

One reason for Kristeva’s inability to develop a more thorough account of avant-garde poetics, this response suggests, is her shortsightedness regarding her literary examples. Although she wrote Revolution in Poetic Language immediately after a historical period in which many literary works that exemplified her notion of text were produced, her examples are canonically author centered, even in their reliance on avant-garde figures such as Lautréamont and Mallarmé, and thus do not fully respond to the cultural challenge to authority and subjectivity of May 1968 (she defended her thesis in 1973).³¹ As a direct consequence of May 1968, Kristeva’s theoretical account of authorial subjectivity depends on a breaking down of ego boundaries within a larger social matrix: “The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process and he appears only as a signifying practice, that is, only when he is absent within the position out of which social, historical, and signifying activity unfolds” (RPL, 215). In preserving authorship, however, her literary examples distribute this shattering of the ego in a double movement of analysis: she constructs a poetics of modernist autonomy as constituted by the heterogeneous but that only retrospectively (at the moment of its death?) opens up to it. So Lautréamont’s poetry can “be understood as [a] heterogeneous practice [of] the positing of the unary [sic] subject, and, through this unity, an exploration of the semiotic operation that moves through it” (218). Kristeva’s poetics of revolution thus falls short in not moving from autonomous form, however riven by the semiotic, to a development of multiauthored discourse as the necessary consequence of subject formation at a revolutionary moment: a suprasubjective subjectivity, a subject position that, even if impossible, embraces totality. Rather, it has led in its feminist reception to a poetics that contrasts the pre-Oedipal use of language by women experimental writers to the Oedipal reproduction of the masculinist canon.

An opposite account of the relation of subject to totality is given in Michel Foucault’s notion of discursive formation. As developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (written at the same time as the events of May 1968 and published in 1969),³² Foucault’s concept of suprasubjective discourse, which also partly originates in avant-garde practice, has proven productive not only for the epistemic methods of New Historicism but for the continued tradition of ideology criticism in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler. Foucault’s key concept of discursive formation begins by severing teleology from totality, via a Nietzschean reading of the destructive gaps and fissures that open up in positive history, and then goes on to construct a notion of discourse from relations of “regularity in dispersion” that will later become important for Laclau and Mouffe.³³ In his undoing of the unitary form of both subject and object, Foucault begins with a literary example: “The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse” (AK, 23). The constructivist moment, rather than any theory death, occurs in the discursive opening up of the form of the object. The relation between object and the discourse that constructs it, in turn, can only be known in terms of an order or series of objects, in a movement from a privileged object to objects in a series or held together in a group. On analogy to the segmented discourse of structural linguistics (the notion, from Roman Jakobson and others, of a speech chain made up of a series of equivalent syntactical units, and which is foregrounded in poetry),³⁴ Foucault’s discursive formation is a mode of organization of non-self-identical objects/subjects within an overdetermined field that is not founded by a presumed underlying regularity — but that, in the fact of relation, achieves it:

Two objects, or two types of enunciation, or two concepts may appear, in the same discursive formation, without being able to enter — under pain of manifest contradiction or inconsequence — the same series of statements. They are then characterized as points of equivalence: the two incompatible elements are formed in the same way and on the basis of the same rules; the conditions of their appearance are identical; they are situated at the same level; and instead of constituting a mere defect of coherence, they form an alternative. . . . They are characterized as link points of systematization: on the basis of each of these equivalent, yet incompatible elements, a coherent series of objects, forms of statement, and concepts has been derived (with, in each series, possible new points of incompatibility). (AK, 65–66)

At the same time, the notion of equivalence accounts for relations of similarity (based on resemblance) and contiguity (based on discursive proximity rather than essential likeness) in establishing an overdetermined field, which is thereby held together in a form of “regularity in dispersion.” This notion of equivalence is given important political interpretation in Laclau and Mouffe’s account of hegemony, but with the addition of a concept of social antagonism that gives the discursive formation its unity.³⁵ Later, Žižek will call for a “going beyond” of discourse analysis in developing this concept of antagonism.³⁶

Returning to literature, I want to pursue how a Foucauldian notion of equivalence suggests ways of moving from literary autonomy, of both book and author, toward a form of regularity in dispersion that may better account for the suprasubjectivity of avant-garde tendencies in relation to the impossible, even self-destructive, revolutionary subject positions that are its model. We may imagine that members of Oshima’s radical group are held together, in their conflicting interests, by virtue of just such a notion of equivalence, which refuses to surrender unlikeness and difference but that is articulated against an antagonistic other — the form of discursive hegemony (the U.S.-Japan Friendship Treaty) that they are opposing and which unites them in negative solidarity. The centripetal tendency of the group, its capacity for staying together, is a result of its elements’ overdetermination — the jouissance of forcing like and unlike together in the same series. Its centrifugal tendency (toward dispersion and history, the theory death that will make it only an example in the textbook of revolutionary politics) is its failure to hold together fundamentally opposed interests. (If this account is true, revolutionary politics will always end as temporarily sutured interests come apart, and by the same token may occur again and again, even after their theoretical death in 1989, because there will always be hegemonic forms of state power that cannot suture opposed interests.)

But what of the avant-garde? The analogy of the equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Foucault’s notion of equivalence should be obvious: in uniting a series of like and unlike individual letters together, the logo of the Language School’s first theoretical journal performs its “organized violence on language,” constructing equivalence as a regularity in dispersion, in its nomination of an avant-garde tendency.³⁷ (L is in fact not identical to A, except that both are letters; if they were truly identical, rather than discursively equivalent, we could not speak, or we could only say one thing: “L,” for example, or “A” — a transposition of Hegel’s refutation of identity into a text in which all letters say the same thing.) And L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E did indeed bring together a more disparate array of avant-garde writing (even if unified by techniques that privilege the letter or the material sign) than could be seen as expressing a single aesthetic position. Such a juxtaposition of like and unlike, however, does not simply release the name into a form of textual productivity, but provides a basis for the overdetermination of a discursive formation. This is evident in the form of the journal itself: due to considerations of space, but also to highlight the work’s ephemerality, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E presented authorial subject positions in the abbreviated, segmented form of short statements and notes, juxtaposed within the journal’s overarching form. This construction of a series of equivalent subject/objects was undertaken, as well, not only in the total form of the journal but in many of its categorical subgroups: features on individual authors; bibliographies of literary magazines; forums on selected political or literary topics, and so on. The emergence of something like a postmodern library science appears, for instance, in editor Bruce Andrews’s compilation of current “Articles,” “a Catalog/Bibliography of recent articles on language and related aesthetic and social issues, from 54 journals: Part One” (no. 3, June 1978), or in a forum on “Non-Poetry” where “a number of writers were asked to list or briefly discuss non-poetry books read recently that have had a significant influence on their thinking or writing” (no. 7, March 1979). The aesthetics of lists is balanced by an anti-institutional nonchalance of editorial style; the working relations of its two coeditors, Andrews and Bernstein, perform their version of Foucault’s “regularity in dispersion,” with Andrews personifying the former principle and Bernstein, no doubt, the latter (fig. 5).

It is important for the development of Language School poetics that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E did not publish primary texts, even as it questioned the boundary between poetry and poetics, text and discourse. The brief notes in the journal were about poetry and only secondarily instances of it. Evidence for this claim, which goes to the heart of an ongoing debate about the nature of genre in the poetics of the Language School, seems straight-forward: there are few if any instances in which the short theoretical pieces published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E appeared in their authors’ books of poetry — even if dismantling the opposition of theory and practice, expository prose and language-centered poetry, was often an explicit concern for many writers. This claim about the continuing relevance of genre to language writing is crucial: if language writing indeed succeeded in producing texts that do not have any generic specificity, the literariness that results would be transcendental rather than historically produced. To maintain the historical specificity of literature, it is necessary to have a notion of genre as produced in specific contexts.

5. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, no. 13 (December 1980), ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein.

We may consider the literary work, rather than theoretical claims, of the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as evidence here. The disruption of expository conventions in Charles Bernstein’s essay “Artifice of Absorption,” whose argument is broken into what may seem like free-verse poetic lines, is still addressed to the form of the essay: it was published in a book of essays.³⁸ While Bernstein frequently incorporates discursive language in books of poetry, his poetic effects are different from his expository ones simply because the transgression of expository norms still preserves them as a moment of negativity; poetic norms have different claims, whose transgression is dissimilar to that of exposition. Bruce Andrews has gone as far as any author toward a demonstration of a literary praxis that unites poetic language and exposition; the prose texts of I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) and the more poetic critical pieces in Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis may be read as producing similar textual effects. Again, however, the generic expectations of their material occasions (Shut Up is published by an alternative publisher; Paradise by a university press) preclude their being seen as antigeneric species of literature in identical senses. A relation of equivalence may be implied, but it is always a matter of discursive construction rather than identity.³⁹

6. Totters, no. 6 (October 1971), ed. Ron Silliman.

7. A Hundred Posters, no. 26 (February 1978), ed. Alan Davies (Cambridge, Mass.).

As an opposite example, This, the magazine of language-centered writing I edited from 1971 to 1982, presented primary texts rather than theoretical or secondary accounts. In the next chapter, I argue that This provided a historical context for a series of literary developments that were reflexively undertaken by more or less the same group of writers. This development occurred in terms of a dynamics of feedback, in which there was not simply an originary moment of definition or refusal but a continuous, dialogic practice out of which the forms of language-centered writing emerged.⁴⁰ Above all, this development was historical, helping to bring together the group of authors who made up the discursive formation of authorial subject positions in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, by reflexively denning the range of formal possibilities of their work. Other publications (figs. 6–15), such as Roof, A Hundred Posters, Ld-Bas, and Hills, as well as presses such as Tuumba and The Figures, were venues for the continuous emergence of the Language School in the 1970s, but in a different way from what took place in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.⁴¹ I am not, here, simply claiming that the form of an avant-garde magazine is sufficient to form a discursive series; rather, the little magazines themselves comprise such a series, with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E taking its cue from their discursive relationships in constituting a school. While an equivalence of authorial positions does describe L~A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s form of reflexive construction, it is also by rep-resenting literature as taking place elsewhere, from an outside being integrated within it, that the journal constitutes a Foucauldian discursive formation — in other words, there is an outside consisting of many published texts that were integrated into the journal. The concept of discursive formation thus provides an alternative to the negative totality of theory death, which is supposed to take place in a crisis at the end of the movement’s history, rather than at its moment of emergence. Theory death happened not in the literary origins of the Language School — which occurred with the development of new forms of writing in This and other journals — but in the consolidation of their initial reception as a school. Locating literature elsewhere, in elided origins or not, recasts the negativity of theory death as a locus of productivity within the utopian/dystopian nowhere of language. So it was that the utopian horizon of language — as constitutive of the cultural politics of the Language School — was reorganized as discourse, in a spatial condensation that provided a new site for cultural construction, if on the ruins of a more capacious imagination.⁴²

8. Roof, no. 4 (fall 1977), ed. James Sherry (New York).

9. Hills, no. 4 (May 1977), ed. Bob Perelman (San Francisco).

10. Oculist Witnesses, no. 3 (fall 1976), ed. Alan Davies (Cambridge, Mass.).

11. Slit Wrist, nos. 3/4 (spring 1977), ed. Terry Swanson (New York).

12. Miam, no. 6 (October 1978), ed. Tom Mandel (San Francisco).

13. Là-Bas, no. 7 (May 1977), ed. Douglas Messerli (Washington, D.C.).

14. Carla Harryman, Percentage, Tuumba no. 23 (September 1979), ed. Lyn Hejinian (Berkeley, Calif.).

15. This, no. 8 (spring 19/8), ed. Barrett Watten (San Francisco).

If L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is not simply the theory death of the agency of the letter in the discursive formation of the Language School, what is its relation to the literature it represents? Against a teleological model that ends in the premature theory death of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, I would like to investigate an alternative one, in a work of the same period that reconfigures the politics of authorship in a form of collective practice. Legend, collectively written by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman and published by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue in 1980, is located precisely in the place of utopian elsewhere/nowhere invoked by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s discursive formation of authorial subject positions.⁴³ While the journal was immediately recognized as representing an avant-garde tendency in its theoretical distance from literary form, Legend demonstrates new formal possibilities of writing in the dialogic, collective practice of its five authors (fig. 16). The counterhegemonic discourse asserted in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E by virtue of the missing referent of the work (that is, new poetic form) is enacted in Legend in various forms of language-centered textuality — generating a wealth of technical innovations, formal possibilities, and new meanings within a space of reflexive dialogue. If a series of like and unlike author positions are drawn together by the equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Legend’s demonstration of complex modes of writing necessarily entails a riskier, more difficult negotiation of group politics as it enacts the revolution of avant-garde poetry in new and productive forms.