Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 17

Legend is a text, lots of it — 246 pages, 8½ × 11, in twenty-six unnumbered sections. The work explodes the assumption of monologic authorship, dismantling and reconfiguring it in a series of multiauthored sections, each determined by the capacity of different techniques to construct meaning — in what seems not just an experimental but almost a scientific approach to writing, combining preexisting, improvised, and graphic elements in an open and evolving compositional matrix. In the work as a whole, an overdetermined textuality — literally the free play of the material text — results from the cumulative effect of its diverse array of formal procedures. These can be categorized in groups of single- or multiauthored sections: (i) single-authored statements (one per author, each exactly one hundred lines); (2) texts by two or three authors exploring specific modes of writing arrived at in the process of dialogic improvisation; and (3) a multiauthored collaboration that repeats the total form of the work in its final section. Individual sections may be grouped, as well, as texts whose dominants, or overarching devices, in Jakobson’s sense, are (i) thematic argument; (2) the exploration of the signifying potential of specified linguistic levels: sentence, phrase, lexeme, morpheme, phoneme; (3) the exploration of the signifying potential of graphic signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic; (4) forms of intertextuality created by mixing modes of signification that suspend authorial intention as they explore the space between subject positions; and (5) dialogic argument.⁴⁴ While the first three represent areas developed by many authors in the Language School in the period, the last two, implicit or explicit forms of dialogue, are foregrounded in Legend’s textual politics.

16. Cover of Legend (New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980).

The five single-authored sections (which, though unnumbered, are sections i, 4, 7, 12, and 17 of a total of twenty-six) provide an opening orientation and thematic continuity that the work gradually moves away from, toward a final horizon of collective authorship. Clearly, this formal progression is a political allegory, just as, in Oshima’s film, individual interests bound up in a group dynamic of radical tendency in its centripetal/centrifugal tension may move toward either dissolution or redefinition. In Legend, each author begins from a position of self-presentation identified with one-sentence propositions. Even if there is little of expressive subjectivity here, each author organizes a matrix of statements that bears his own idiosyncratic stamp, a form of legend to each one’s map of potential meaning. Bernstein’s section, “My Life as Monad,” which opens the book, is a de-centered portrait that juxtaposes irreducible units of language (“Nutshells”) with autobiographical accounts: “Transfixed in a dream state between 9 & 10 where I am just about awake & only the power of this dream unreeling in my head keeps my eyes shut as if saying ‘shut up & listen to this’ as I struggle to get up.” Material textuality is at once language as such and autobiographical material in the psychoanalytic sense; the textual processes at work here start to break down the polarity between them. Silliman’s section, the next in the single-authored set, demonstrates the use of monadic sentence units in paratactic series — what he notably theorized at the time as the New Sentence — which work to undermine normative sentence-level autonomy by means of the transgressive use of discursive anaphora.⁴⁵ Technically put, the NP nodes of Silliman’s sentences are occupied by the pronoun shifter it, which anaphorically shifts reference from the NP position by virtue of the indeterminate propositional content of the S node to the next linguistic level, discourse. I am arguing here that the referentiality of the pronoun it depends on its position within discourse, aligning with the indeterminate topic of Silliman’s poem, an “it” that is collectively held in common by members of the group, as well as at the sentence level. It becomes the topic of a discourse of one hundred sentences, referring to an emerging, collaborative product being constructed out of discrete prepositional units, in other words, the work as a whole (fig. 17). These are the first ten:

17. From Legend, section 4 (Sillirnan).

1. It is a five-pointed star in three dimensional space.

2. It is words.

3. It is a group, not a series.

4. It is the end of atomization.

5. It is deliberate.

6. It is the product of labor.

7. It is correspondence.

8. It is New York, Toronto and San Francisco.

9. It seeks the post-referential.

10. It dissolves the individual. (L, 14)

The work’s attributes, it turns out, construct a form of predication not specified by the unit structures of the New Sentence. In seeking the post-referential and dissolving the individual, they move toward a horizon of intertextuality that assumes, in a terminology that Kristeva derives from Edmund Husserl, a positing of the sentence as a unit of meaning she calls the “thetic.”⁴⁶ In Kristeva’s account, to achieve signification and ultimately enter into the symbolic (the order of language), the subject must separate itself from its object in the act of positing in what she calls the “thetic break,” bringing it into contact with the pre-Oedipal traces of the semiotic. Linguistic propositions are formed in the moment of the thetic break, which is associated with two moments in the formation of the ego: the Lacanian mirror stage, and the realization of the threat of castration. In a thumbnail sketch of these dynamics, “The gap between the imaged ego and drive motility, between the mother and the demand made on her, is precisely the break that establishes what Lacan calls the place of the Other as the place of the ‘signifier’ ” (48). Silliman’s use of the pronoun it occurs precisely at this intersection of propositional content and psychoanalytic form. The signifer it appears at the place of a gap in signification; it does not refer to any object, but rather opens up a gap in reference that is then displaced onto discourse as a whole. For Kristeva, this movement to intersubjectivity is a primary instance of the sociality of ego formation: “The subject is hidden ‘by an ever purer signifier,’ ” which may be identified as Silliman’s it, and “this want-to-be confers on an other the role of containing the possibility of signification” (ibid.). The thetic break (here the displaced anaphora of it) in the act of positing (which we may identify with the New Sentence in Silliman’s oeuvre, as well as with the sentence form in this example) marks “the threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic” (ibid.).

Just as intertextuality is constructed from the dialectic of symbolic and semiotic after the thetic break, so Silliman’s sentences, by means of their anaphoric displacement in a discursive form of intertextual predication (where what is referred to is precisely what is being held in common intertextually: it), dissolve toward their collective horizons, both formally and thematically. This social construction accedes to the symbolic insofar as Kristeva’s use of the term, unlike Lacan’s, describes “an always split unification that is produced by a rupture and is impossible without it” (49). In Silliman’s text, it is clear that the primitive sociality of split reference is not lost on him:

11. It is tribal.

12. It is male.

13. It is behavior.

14. It does not conceal.

15. It shares the labor but does not divide it.

16. It could do anything.

17. It is a poem. (L, 14)

The plot of Silliman’s formal allegory — of single sentences suspended within intertextual discourse — is thickening here, moving rapidly beyond the level of formal construction. A reading of a mere seventeen lines begins to bring together both the formal construction and political horizon of the work — revealing a metaleptic discourse (where moments of reference such as “it” can be said to refer only to the entire text) as site of a counterhegemony that breaks down individual boundaries, both of person and of writing.⁴⁷ The specific attributes of this intertextuality — the poetic as tribal, male, and collective for Silliman — are invoked in an allegory of form that clearly wants to exceed individual authorship.

This intersubjective allegory is also explored in DiPalma’s section. Where Silliman employs an abstract pronoun shifter it to arrive at the horizon of discourse, DiPalma opens his text to many pronouns, focusing on tensions between you and I, with positions along the way for he, she, and everyone. The propositional content of these sentences is, after Jakobson and Emile Benveniste, suspended in the shifting referentiality of pronouns, so that the status of the enounced subject (sujet d’énoncé) of DiPalma’s discourse is indeterminate in relation to its pronominal enunciation (sujet d’énontiation):⁴⁸

90. The only writing that interests me is my own.

91. I went into the orange grove, half weeping, half laughing, and completely drunk.

92. I give up and lean forward.

93. He liked to warm his brandy over a candle.

94. He had every possible phobia. (L, 38)

Is the subject position of the author represented by the self-reflexivity of “the only writing that interests me is my own,” or is the author revealed in the text of a Kewpie-doll starlet’s Hollywood memoir? The reader is not so gullible, DiPalma seems to say, that she will take at face value the propositional truth of either of these readings. In order to process such an abstracted use of pronouns — as standing in for other people as their textual representations — we must achieve the same horizon of intersubjectivity that is demanded by the strictly linguistic devices Silliman uses (the placeholding it). Both McCaffery’s and Andrews’s sections, while not linguistic allegories in the more technical senses of the first three, undermine the coherence of discourse by means of the incommensurability of sentence-level propositions. Each idiosyncratic sequence of disjunct propositions constructs a one-hundred-line discourse of a kind of social ideolect that draws on exterior, linguistic resources as well as authorial, subjective ones. In McCaffery, a sentence such as “95. One puts the ice cream to one’s bare chest first, then one wonders why” conveys a fascination with potential or indeterminate meaning that adds up to a form of reflexive inquiry:

96. We all thought of writing the i as an I, but then we realized how the one would be two and the other one, one.

97. He’s biting his nails as I continue writing.

98. Heraldry in Montana at the end of his seventieth year, after even the bed-sheets had been fossilized.

99. There was a particular speech from his muscles that he called reading.

100. The endless game was of names, and differences, and placement. (110)

On the other hand, Andrews’s form of textual practice is more outer-directed — an instance of what he has elsewhere called a language-centered “social work.”⁴⁹ A deliberate undermining of local coherence is formally enacted in the discursive dissonance of his propositional units, as well as in their refusal of sentence boundary, numbered framing, or punctuation. The high degree of propositional irony, or displaced reference, in Andrews becomes a social allegory, as well, as it makes language a counter for a deferred utopia in which negativity is inscribed in the gap opened up in the act of sentence-level positing. Propositions are autonegations in what amounts to an imitation of the thetic break:

Productive practice is SOILED — hence the angels of abstraction

I hope counteracts theatricality

I hope hones in

I hope hinge alterity with self-reference

I hope opposes didacticism in all its forms

even that of nostalgia

I hope exhibits ‘semic Trappism’

What scares me some? (L, 188)

Models of textual practice in the individual sections are collectively organized around a common project: to dismantle the limits and coherence of the authorial subject toward a wider politics. Kristeva herself could not be more in agreement with this strategy. In her “Prolegomenon” to Revolution, she writes: “The capitalist mode of production has stratified language into idiolects and divided it into self-contained, isolated islands — heteroclite spaces existing in different temporal modes (as relics or projections) and oblivious of one another.”⁵⁰ Avant-garde poetry, for her as well as in Legend, enacts a “signifying practice” that “refuses to identify with the re- 69 the secret history of the equal sign cumbent body subjected to transference onto the analyzer” and which refuses, as well, a Foucauldian discourse that ends up being “a mere depository of thin linguistic layers, an archive of structures, or the testimony of a withdrawn body” (15-16). Its practices enact a “shattering of discourse [that] reveals [how] linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject,” dismantling norms as it “displaces the boundaries of socially established signifying practices” (ibid.). The breaking apart of the unitary subject, of course, is a hallmark of Language School poetics; a wide range of authors in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E assert its centrality, though it can never be enacted, paradoxically, in the monologic discourse of a single author (even if this is at times attempted by both Bernstein and Andrews).⁵¹ The “unlimited and unbounded generating process” of signifiance that Kristeva calls for is, therefore, only really possible between subject positions, in a practice of intersubjectivity as well as intertextuality, as we see in the collective poetics of Legend. To account for the Language School’s synthesis of social practice and literary form, a third term is necessary, one that Kristeva develops in terms of the psychoanalytic dynamics of intertextual productivity, seen as an unconscious process as important as Freud’s notions of condensation and displacement:

To these we must add a third “process” — the passage from one sign system to another [that] involves an altering of the thetic position — the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one. . . . The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources,” we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic — of enunciative and denotative positionality. (RPL, 59–60)

In Legend, the thetic may be defined as the intersection of authorial subject position with sentence-level proposition: a form of positing that performs the thetic break and thus separates the semiotic from the symbolic. While many readers of Kristeva would identify her appreciation of avant-garde poetry with its imitation of her most famous concept, the maternal chora — the traces of embodied, pre-Oedipal subjectivity to be found in the sensory, affective, and proprioceptive substrate of language (and nearly everywhere in poetry) — Legend’s intertextuality is dialectical and suprasubjective, not simply a form of mimesis. How, then, do the mechanics of Kristeva’s transposition become a process of the unconscious? The merely exterior dimen sions of intertextuality, a mixing of sign systems from incommensurate social positions (as in V. N. Voloshinov’s notion of material ideology), does not account for the transformative claims made for it.⁵²

Kristeva’s concept of the chora, in fact, has come in for some justifiable skepticism from certain critics. For John Brenkman, the chora is a retrospective construction, a kind of analytic artifact, that is of dubious use in specifying a position for the pre-Oedipal mother.⁵³ While the somatic and graphic explorations of signs and language below the level of the meaning-bearing components (discourse, sentence, morpheme, phoneme) of Legend seem to invoke the chora, even to represent it directly, the dialectic of transposition in Kristevan intertextuality organizes unconscious processes in a different way. Kristeva’s thetic break, in this sense, constitutes the dialectic between symbolic and semiotic as a form of negativity that testifies to incomplete Oedipalization in the mirror stage. Thus the semiotic is a kind of leftover stratum of memory and affect that depends on the positing of the thetic as a propositional content that aligns with a given subject position; it is really only representable, for Kristeva, through a process that she calls the “second-order thetic” (RPL, 69). The payoff for identity politics, as well as for the dubious alternative of a nonidentity politics, would be that there is no construction of identity that does not, at the same moment, involve the somatic incommensurability of the semiotic. In giving voice to levels of language not organized by this positing of meaning, or within a single subject position, Legend allows us to see how unconscious processes work, at a linguistic level, to destabilize and reconfigure positionality. The range of techniques to produce this effect here is truly impressive and involves all levels of language in the traditional sense, as well as intersubjective dialogue and nonlinguistic signification. This shattering of the positing subject creates a space of negativity that may be identified with the utopian possibility of language, an opening of unconscious processes in language that evokes the necessary conditions for the repositioning of subjects in a form of community. Legend’s utopian community, then, starts with the dismantling of the thetic or positing subject position and ends in an intersubjective horizon that is realized in a form of multiauthorship.

The twenty-one multiauthored sections of Legend are carefully apportioned to its five authors. There are ten two-authored sections and an equal number of three-authored sections; no four-authored sections (because in that case one author would be left out?); and a final five-authored section that ends the work. While there are far too many devices to describe here, let alone to theorize, a quick account of the two-authored sections reveals a wide range of strategies at work. The first two-authored section (Silliman, DiPalma) constructs a kind of synthetic, atemporal chronology out of different series of dates (as well as different levels of interpretation). Some of these dates are world-historical, inescapable, and literary; others recondite, elusive, and coded. So in the last series of the section, we have dates for the closing of Black Mountain College, the Objectivist issue of Poetry, and the publication of On the Road, along with “1970 Communism in May, Buffalo, abortion, divorce” and “1926 Patricia Tansley, the second daughter, is born,” from Silliman’s autobiography. The authors are writing themselves into literary history, here, in a transgressively unlikely but actually efficacious way. The use of disjunctive series of referents, both public and private, as well as the violation of universal chronology, creates an aura of transgression as overarching affect if not semiotic chora (though Silliman’s mother is invoked). In section 5 (Andrews, Bernstein), intertextuality is spatialized and disordered in an improvised composition by field that shatters boundaries between subject positions (fig. 18). The location of the positing subject, here, is suspended in textual effects, some of which are derived from alienating social introjects (“an entire / superstructure of distinct and / peculiarly formed sentiments”) and others from logically contradictory or even physically impossible propositions (“it was as though I were trying to make an actual wetness / apart from water itself”). Section 6 (McCaffery, Silliman) cites both a vocabulary of one-syllable words and transcribed terms from ethnographic writing; this juxtaposition is brought together by means of nonlinguistic visual devices but is also framed by a well-known paragraph from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (fig. 19). An argument between two accounts of cultural politics occurs in a space created by the juxtaposition of Marxism and anthropology: “revolution / long / decayed” abuts its non-Western other in “Show your mother that tjurunga,” leading to a provisional conclusion: “Opoyaz, a popular front / is not a united one.” Opoyaz, the acronym of the Russian Formalists’ group in Petersburg, becomes a hinge between tribal ethnography and social revolution, combining both as a cult of masculine authorship that claims world-historical meaning. Language itself occurs in the place of the thetic break separating the symbolic (references to Marx and revolution) from the semiotic (opaque ethnographic terms).

Section 8 (DiPalma, Andrews) expands the domain of intertextuality to include word and image; against a series of popular illustrations likely taken by DiPalma from turn-of-the-century French pulp literature, Andrews constructs syntactical relations at the level of word and phrase within an open-field compositional matrix (fig. 20). The compactness of the image here becomes not a normative prototype but a moment of excess, while the visual disjunction of Andrews’s text identifies the horizon of the symbolic order with the mechanics of signification itself. Such a split positing of image and text creates a semantic field in which semiotic and symbolic elements augment, undermine, and interpret each other. A similar poetics of reciprocal interpretation, where transparency and opacity are seen simultaneously enhancing and destabilizing, is evident in section 9 (Andrews, Silliman (fig. 21). Where Andrews provides phrases and sentences that have the effect of a proposition (“Only measurements are clear”), Silliman counters by interpreting these statements at another textual level:

18. From Legend, section 5 (Bernstein, Andrews).

19. From Legend, section 6 (McCaffery, Silliman).

Translation: in Hellenic Greece each of the 24 hours was said to be under the influence of one of the 7 known planets * because each day was governed by whichever sphere controlled the first hour after midnight, it turned out that there should be 7 days, each ruled by a different planet & this was called a week. (L, 69)

Silliman’s “translation” implies that latent in the seeming neutrality of objective measurement lies the contingency of culture; he appears at pains throughout to find cultural referents for the neutral, pseudo-objective, and often theoretical language Andrews uses:

20. From Legend, section 8 (DiPalma, Andrews).

25. Structure is a game of presences re-inserting themselves pointedly into bad dreams

Translation: Morbius, the philologist, is the lone survivor of the initial expedition to the planet Altair 4, played by Walter Pidgeon * when a rescue mission arrives (whose members include Jack Kelly (the guy in Maverick who is not Jim Garner) and Earl “Police Woman” Holliman), old Morby unleashes the monsters of his Id, empowered by the non-physical cognitive capacities of the lost civilization of the Krel, compliments of the animation division of Disney Studios, to destroy them * the first film to utilize electronic music for its score * Academy Award for special effects (71)

It is not clear which is the more accurate index to the id, here — Andrews’s send-up of Kristevan semiosis, or Silliman’s camping on the paradigmatic 1950s Cold War B movie Forbidden Planet. The interpretive delights of this passage are many, bridging as it does the structure of the written text with an unconscious elsewhere of collective desire.

Many of the dual-voiced strategies, as in the Andrews/Silliman section, seem to be conscious of their own theory death — and making fun of it. If this were the bottom line of Legend’s effort to create transpositional or intersubjective discourse, we would be left with only an intellectual game (along the lines of the more mechanical efforts of the French OuLiPo, perhaps), enjoying the pleasure of the text but with the integrity of our subject positions nonetheless intact. There is an important range of effects in Legend, however, in which unconscious processes are registered beyond the level of such textual jokes. In a number of the sections that focus on graphic devices, weird congruences are invoked that, in their semiotic materiality, refuse symbolization. A dialectic between fragmented minus signs and bounded shapes, for instance, explodes the logic of propositions in section 13 (Andrews, DiPalma, McCaffery). A similar dialectic between word and graphic trace appears in section 25 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery). In section 15 (Bernstein, DiPalma, Andrews), words themselves are graphemic in their deployment on the page (fig. 22). Material textuality, organized spatially while foregrounded as nonlinguistic, breaks down the meaning-bearing elements of language into graphic signs in sections 17 (McCaffery, Bernstein [fig. 23]), 18 (McCaffery, Bernstein, DiPalma), 21 (DiPalma, McCaffery), and 22 (Silliman, Andrews, Bernstein). These sections, in fact, place Legend in relation to concrete poetry, an intertext that recalls the problematic characterization of Kristeva’s chora as mimetic (as she writes, “mimesis is, precisely, the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude”).⁵⁴ Rather, what is important here is the way nonlinguistic elements interact with meaning-bearing ones to unleash primary processes of semiosis in language. For instance, section 20 (Andrews, McCaffery) uses the device of Andrews’s handwriting to graphically construct a nonsensical mathematical notation that Lacan would have admired for its Witz. The equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E return, here, but with the added surplus of Andrews’s artful handwriting to indicate not only that reference and predication are nonidentical, but that their positing will never fully be symbolic insofar as they are materially embodied as texts (fig. 24). Likewise, in section 24 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery), McCaffery’s messier handwriting is used to cancel out a list of authors/geniuses/peers (nearly all of them men) to be found on a contemporary language poet’s bookshelf. Authorship becomes a form of self-canceling once again as latent motives of narcissistic aggression surface (fig. 25).

21. From Legend, section 9 (Andrews, Silliman).

22. From Legend, section 15 (Bernstein, DiPalma, Andrews).

23. From Legend, section 17 (McCaffery, Bernstein).

This dismantling of boundaries between self and other creates textual conditions for the overcoming of authorial positionality in Legend. Finally, sections where the interpersonal dimensions of this particular multiauthored collective are invoked present the most revealing interface between text and unconscious. This community, while partaking of Bernstein’s universalist proposal for “a more general, non-writing-centered, activity — namely, the investigation and articulation of humanness” — also occurs at the specific social moment Silliman describes: “That coming together of which this poem is the figure (five men in three cities using correspondence and discussion) is the legendary refusal [of the poets] to be banished [in The Republic].” Prohibition and “coming together” in a form of jouissance are here being explicitly linked. Even so, it is still surprising, more than twenty years after its publication, to find the high correlation of language with masculine sexual codes in Legend. Connotations sneaked in at the level of the word or phrase (“The dick is a housebuoy”; “We long to hold the butter in our mouths”; “Our gonads are an icon”) are also explicitly presented, as in section 11 (Bernstein, Silliman, McCaffery):

24. From Legend, section 20 (Andrews, McCaffery).

25. From Legend, section 24 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery).

Only what’s in a name?

Well, actually. A lot. especially in three I know. Dick for instance is short. for Richard and Richard. who I know is not. that short he writes short. stories. about. a man with a short. “dick” who claims that Dick is. not only short for. Richard but also just short. (for ridiculous). One Dick I know is really pretty. ridiculous and actually used. to call Bill, Billy, Dick Dick. in England is short. for detective but not a short detective. in England there are not short detectives but in my home. town there was a detective. inspector Melville Short (104)

As we say in school, this is self-evident. A “dick” has got to be “short,” but the fantasies associated with it go on and on. The pun here is hardly repressed at the level of content. This level of exploration of homosocial effects, aligning the Great Conversation of authorship with the Platonic erotics it inscribes, is avowed by Silliman in a remarkable dialogue with Bernstein that takes center stage in Legend’s construction of community:

[Silliman]: phallus is the first division (I want a poem as real as a lemon) & is the origin of instinct of which (this) writing is an acting out or objectification. . . . That coming together of which orgasm is the figure is the full word. Plato banished us in order to begin the draining of the word (as one would a swamp over which to build tract housing). . . . Your distrust of my use of the word phallic is one of its existence within a language of empty words in which it is now connected with the merely masculine and thus with all historic forms of oppression (women were banished long before poets). . . . I want people who happen to read the poem this is to understand that we were thoroughly aware of them when we wrote it, that we are five heterosexual men who habitually use the word love to describe our relationship to one another. That that coming together of which their reading this poem is the figure is phallic, the negation of banishment. . . . It is informed by our love for each other. (126-27)

For Silliman, as for Lacan, the phallus is both “the first division” into the symbolic order of gender and the “negation of banishment,” or the refusal of castration. Bernstein’s reply to Silliman (“ — oh, ron, silly person”) distances him from the latter’s vulnerable phallogocentrism — likely the theory death itself of the masculinist self-assertion of banished poets in the postmodern period, from Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg. Bernstein’s reply sees the problem of masculinity not as banishment (or castration) but as its excesses of power (“now so charged with so much oppressiveness [after so much political and literary abuse]”). Along the way to this reasonable (symbolic) response, however, he takes a turn toward a pre-Oedipal moment of the semiotic in a way that may be seen as a defense:

[Bernstein]: so what we have is a phallic that encompasses men & women? a ‘phallic’ that stands as a division principle, from which our selves come, from which language, that it is spoken among a many, emerges. in the beginning was one & we can remember it by looking inside ourselves, into (back to) our self-sameness. & the language of us is the body of this one. the conditions, now multiple. apart but a part. tongues wagging, a world of babble, cannot move us to forget. it’s to get a view of it: no ‘pre’-human unity (no myth) is wanted. in the beginning was silence: no ear, nothing to hear. in here we hear. the words are the scent of our usness. (127)

The phallic is not imposed (by division) but recovered through an intense introspection, back through memory traces that refuse phallic organization to a primal, originary moment. In refusing phallic division, and thus castration, Bernstein’s reflective fantasy links self-consciousness to a moment of the primal androgyne, in which a condition of non–self-division, thus of bodily wholeness not separated from the mother (“a phallic that encompasses men & women?”) is divided, leading to “language, that it is spoken among a many,” figured as “tongues wagging, a world of babble.” The penetrability that Silliman must avow as the basis for homosocial community, an opening up of defenses in the face of otherness as aggression, is one way of moving, in a form of transgressive violence, away from the stability of subject position. Bernstein’s response, recovering the semiotic traces of the body before phallic division, is another. In bringing both together in its construction of community, Legend gives a particular value to the equal signs that construct the discursive formation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: homosocial equivalence and the refusal of castration are linked in the construction of authorship, predicating a binding affect of love that is overdetermined as a defense against the violence of the symbolic order, replacing it with the less threatening aggressivity of pre-Oedipal narcissism.⁵⁵ What is authorship, we may ask, but a social construction in defense of the narcissistic self? It is from this imperative, not to perish at the thought of an other, that all utopian fantasies are built. Legend stages the undoing of its utopia even as it is being constructed.