Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 18

Legend invokes revolutionary subjectivity in shattering the bourgeois ego through its form of homosocial wish: the secret history of the equal signs in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Revolutionary subjectivity, a traumatic experience of negative totality in historical crisis that cannot be represented, is thereby held in common as it is displaced in containable aggressivity as a form of cultural praxis. It is this processing of the traumatic rupture of cultural revolution (as with the events of 1968, in both the United States and Europe) that motivates an approach to Legend through Foucault and Kristeva. The events of 1968 are arguably a common motivation for both The Archaeology of Knowledge and Revolution in Poetic Language, with Foucault fashioning forms of containment for suprasubjectivity in discourse, and Kristeva arguing for the psychological necessity, as well as cultural importance, of a puissance that will not be called to account by Oedipal law. The fantasmatic structures of both theoretical works and their relevance to the writing of the Language School in the 1970s suggest an unstable politics of narcissistic exchanges, much like that of Oshima’s radical group, as it forms itself and comes apart under pressure, in a politics staged in relation to oppressive hegemony and enacted in its undoing as historical trauma. Trauma, the inexpressible terror of revolution itself, is exteriorized by Foucault as the subject is displaced toward a social logic of subject position; it is interiorized for Kristeva in the thetic break as a primal scene of signification, which registers an implicitly social motivation. For her, in this way, the “signifier/signified transformation, constitutive of language,” is “indebted to, induced, and imposed by the social realm.”⁵⁶

Evidence of social motives, especially cultural revolutionary ones, for linguistic transformation, of course, are everywhere in Legend. When I asked Silliman about the meaning of the nonsense (or non-English) phrase “skem dettliata,” which immediately precedes his intensely homosocial dialogue with Bernstein, he offered this account:

In 1972, [a friend] & I visited my brother’s first neo-Christian commune up in the Petaluma area. In those days, the core event in group life was an evening meeting in which people “were given to speak,” tho we noted that only men ever did so and that there seemed to be much jockeying for position in what was said. . . . Speaking in tongues, glossolalia, was also a major element of the evening meeting. That phrase was the basic first riff of virtually every instance of it that we heard. It’s my literal transcription thereof. (Personal communication)

The eruption of the semiotic constructs a community of men “jockeying for position in what was said,” exactly the moment articulated, vertiginously, in dialogue with Bernstein. If the intersubjective poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E provides a formal homology to Foucauldian discourse, Legend demonstrates, in a deeply motivated way, the nature of poetic language in Kristeva’s account, even as it argues for three important correctives. First, in Legend the negativity of poetic language is not simply a matter of the eruption of primary process not subordinated to Oedipal law, but is the unstable relation of the narcissistic ego in a form of undoing in another. For the writers of Legend, homosociality is constitutive of their imagined community to the degree that it is based on a revolutionary wish: that the other will be the same as me, even as the “other” threatens “me” as an imaginary unity.⁵⁷ This narcissistic undoing in the other will come to take the place of what Zizek, following Laclau and Mouffe, has described as antagonism, the sublime object of ideological fantasy — but only when it has been discursively stabilized, as it has not yet been in Legend.⁵⁸ Antagonism, in any case, must be taken into account in any construction of a discursive formation. Second, Kristeva’s evidence of a split between symbolic and semiotic before the thetic break is given in the works of individual authors; as a result, their uses of literary form (even hybrid ones such as Lautréamont’s Poésies) may be too easily assimilated to the moment of imaginary positing in the thetic. To more accurately account for the relations of linguistic transformation to the social realm, revolutionary poetic language’s more important characteristic is its synthesis of intertextuality and intersubjectivity, which ought to have been developed in the canonical French authors Kristeva discusses. The modernist autonomy of literary form, as has been noted, places restrictions on Kristeva’s cultural critique.⁵⁹ Third, the subject of discourse and intertextuality enacted in Legend is exclusively masculine, and this is reflected as well in the theoretical accounts brought to it here. There is no place for gender in the early stages of Foucault’s career, while Kristeva’s positioning of the pre-Oedipal and “phallic” mothers still depends on a masculine subject for whom, “as the addressee of every demand[, the mother’s] replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in fact, the phallus.”⁶⁰

In Legend, it is evident, narcissism is not stabilized in feminine alterity; there is no position for woman. This lack of position for women (not even woman as lack) certainly qualifies Legends achievement of poetic language as collective discourse and exemplifies the sociality of what Kristeva calls, invoking Freud’s Totem and Taboo, a linguistic “phratry.”⁶¹ On the other hand, Legend is an important work — one of the dozen or so texts of the Language School in its formative period that may be read as a historical example. And its authors, from Silliman’s testimony and its centrality in the text, certainly knew what they were doing in constructing an imaginary community of male bonding. Beyond enacting a revolutionary subjectivity brought into collective relation by means of a homosocial wish, Legend can also be read as a wild and transgressive critique of the homosociality of culture, from Plato to Harold Bloom, in a form that is deliberately scripted as inadmissible to the Great Conversation, and that wears its banishment on its sleeve. But in order for Legend to be read — even more, in order for poetic language in the form of radical textuality to claim a viable politics — a significant negative reaction to the avant-garde among cultural critics, after three waves of feminism, must be acknowledged. One may even go so far as to say that Legend reveals, in almost pure form, the revolutionary masculinism that gave first-wave feminism its point of departure in the 1960s and 1970s, the widely resented incoherence of the New Left’s politics of gender.

This resentment can be seen in Rosemary Hennessy’s account of Kristeva, for example, in which her patronage of the avant-garde is politically suspect: “Kristeva’s formulation of the marginal forces of subversion has a romantic, even mythic, dimension, and it is this dimension which binds [her project] to some of the more conservative strands of modernism. . . . This trust in an individualistic avant-garde rather than anything that could call itself a revolutionary collectivity can be seen as part of a general intellectual backlash in the west [that] has its parallel in the clamor for a return to ‘family’ and a politics of self-help in other cultural registers.”⁶² Hennessy’s association of the avant-garde with the New Right, as well as her sense of entitlement to speak for collectivity in denial of the avant-garde’s actual experience of revolution (or Kristeva’s, for that matter), is self-centered and distorted. What ought to give pause for thought here, though, is the rejection of the avant-garde as a fantasy having nothing to do with the interests of women. Such a rejection can also be seen, in another register, among women writers associated with the Language School during the period in which Legend was written. When Carla Harryman was asked by Ann Vickery, in the course of the latter’s research on women writers and the Language School, about the possibility that her collaborative novel The Wide Road (written with Lyn Hejinian) was influenced by Legend, she responded:

I have been working on collaborations (albeit often in performance — but also textual) since the early to mid 70s, [so] The Wide Road is part of a process/practice that predates Legend. You could as easily argue that Legend was motivated by collaborations that preceded it, and that it was almost a reaction to the more open-ended interrogations of that early period — as if it wanted to foreclose on the possibility of on-going collaborative experimentation by constructing [a work] so definitively masculinist. [Legend] was one of the least interesting manifestations of collaboration vis-à-vis its process to me: that’s because of its monolithic (homosocial) affect, i.e., its intention seemed to create a monolithic edifice.⁶³

Harryman then goes on to describe her early collaborative work with a number of artists, in different genres and genders. The intensity of her rejection of Legend, here, is marked; as a “monolithic (homosocial) . . . edifice,” it offers no avenue in for the feminine reader, and she rejects it as an example either for collaboration or performance.

Legend certainly takes its place, even as a monolith, among a wide range of multi-authored collaborations in and around the Language School, from the 1970s to the present. The collective form of the magazines published in the period, of course, is evidence of this, but there are many other instances where an aesthetic of collective practice is concretized in individual multiauthored works. One such instance, described by Bob Perelman, involved a three-person group of collaborative writers in San Francisco (Perelman, Steve Benson, and Kit Robinson) who produced lengthy and unedited texts of free writing in relation to written source material read aloud by a member of the group (these sessions bear some relation to the automatic writing practiced by the surrealists in their collective practice). In Perelman’s discussion, the line “Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts” stands as an example of the material produced by this process; the line itself was then used by all three authors in different poems (and it appears in the final section of Legend as a kind of homage as well).⁶⁴ Steve Benson’s use of it appeared in a series of poems generated from this collaborative material in This 8 (1977), three years before publication of Legend and likely an influence on it. The line itself is crucial for the values of this textual practice; in what I am going to call the Brat Guts aesthetic, a certain masculine regression (a “brat” is an Oedipal subject position defined by its relation to the phallic mother of castration anxiety) spills its “guts” (the body, however, is still in pieces, fragmented, before the advent of the Mirror Stage and the ego’s imaginary limits) in a form of Kristevan textual productivite. It is important that this first stage of boundary disruption between masculine subject positions was followed by a moment of recuperation in which the material was reintegrated into single-authored works, although in Benson’s case the poetry that results shows the deep impact of this ego-shattering experience.

About this time, also in San Francisco, I was well aware of the Brat Guts project; though distant from it, I was curious to know what was going on. I visited a session once, but did not participate; even so, I remember feeling included. Somewhat later, I proposed to Benson, once the group’s project had ended, that we write a collaborative poem that would be made of two poems in intersubjective, if not intertextual, dialogue. We specified a certain number of stanzas and lines, but wrote relatively independently of each other. What resulted were two poems titled “Non-Events” which were published together as an issue of A Hundred Posters, edited by Alan Davies, in November 1978. On the title page it is clear that while the two poems are separately authored, the title “Non-Events” is held in common between authors (figs. 26–27). The rules for the poem were purely formal: each would have twenty-five stanzas of five sentences each; for Benson, the sentences would each be relatively autonomous, with the kind of indented sentence/line that Jack Spicer often used, while for me the sentences would make up regular eight-line stanza units, adding the additional rule that the five sentences would always make up eight lines. Thematic motivations for the work were not shared, although there was a partial overlap. In dedicating the poem to “B W,” Benson was toying, in his address, with accounting for his relationship to another male poet of the same initials as mine; the addressee, not only the subject, is split. My choice of the title “Non-Events” had to do with a heterosexual relationship; the poem’s textualization of desire was thus deeply ironic, even self-canceling. While clearly the homosociality of the Brat Guts aesthetic, and later Legend, influenced the intersubjective process between the two authors, there is an important difference in that Benson and I identified each other at the time with object choices of different genders, as much as with holding an object choice of the same gender in abeyance; our collaboration depended on an understanding of that difference. What resulted, in any case, was a loaded negotiation in which subject position and object choice were carefully separated and reconfigured in the form of the poem. There may have been, at some point, a typed version of both poems in which the stanzas interlocked, and the poem may have been written as a form of alternation from stanza to stanza. When the poems were finally published, however, they were separated, and both end up in respective collections from the period: Benson’s in As Is and mine in 1-10.⁶⁵

26. Steve Benson, from “Non-Events,” A Hundred Posters, no. 35 (November 1978).

27. Barrett Watten, from “Non-Events.”

Benson’s poem bears stylistic resemblance to the work of the Brat Guts group, and may even incorporate textual material — from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and Freud’s essay on Leonardo — taken from their collaborative sessions. Benson uses this material within an improvisatory form of erratic condensations and surprising coruscations of impeded narrative, but the poem’s textual play leads as well to more thematic areas that begin to find rich veins of material as cues for introspection:

In this case none other than a so-called infantile

memory,

and certainly a peculiar one. Odd things and

an odd time to remember: no memory of the period

you’re still being nursed

can be believed, but the idea of a vulture opening

Leonardo’s mouth with its tail

is so incredible, a construction that eliminates all

strangeness likes us better.

Benson’s open, improvisatory form collides with the resistance of his pre-given materials, resulting in a tortuous logic of self-distancing qualification that is discernible here in the jump from “infantile memory” to a “strangeness [that] likes us better.” Narcissistic undoing in the other and its relation to the infantile memory traces of the self arise as thematic frames for this passage. In other poems from the same period, such as “Echo” and “Narcissus,” Benson explores the dynamics of narcissistic subjectivity directly;⁶⁶