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I feel my “I” is much too small for me.

— Vladimir Mayakovsky

The contraction which is felt.

— William Carlos Williams

The Constructivist Moment is a series of essays, written over the past ten years, that address the gap between constructivist aesthetics and a larger cultural poetics. By constructivist aesthetics I mean, broadly put, the imperative in radical literature and art to foreground their formal construction; cultural poetics, discussed below, may be minimally defined as the reflexive relation of artistic form and cultural context. The essays take their primary examples from the work of American modernist and postmodern avant-gardes, contrasting them, on the one hand, with the art and writing of the 1920s Soviet Union and 1990s post-Soviet period, and on the other with aspects of modern and postmodern production that are usually kept outside the bounds of the aesthetic. The essays themselves continue the formal experiment or cultural intervention of their examples in arguing across disciplinary, historical, or generic boundaries, thus continuing the project of construction begun with their prior occasions. In putting this collection together from its separate occasions, my intention is to construct, by means of thematic juxtaposition, theoretical unveiling, and textual reading, a poetics that lays bare the device, in the sense of the Russian Formalists, of more than just the formal organization of the work of art. I seek perhaps not “the gold of time” after André Breton — as if there were a single standard that would endure throughout the ages — but “the currency of history” in relation to the radical formal meanings of the avant-garde. In order to achieve this currency, I alternate in these essays between two distinct aspects of the idea of construction: the principle of formal construction in modernist and postmodern literature and art (with the Russian constructivists, post-Soviet poets and artists, and American avant-gardes, from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to the Language School) and the principle of social construction in modern culture (from unrealized utopian visions to dominant social forms such as Fordism and alternative responses such as Detroit techno).¹ The sequence of essays in this book proceeds from essays located firmly in questions of poetics, however much they may contest traditional literary genres, toward contextualist and culturalist approaches to the meaning of radical forms.

My thinking on the question of social construction begins with literary examples from modernist and postmodern avant-gardes, as they reveal a discontinuity that is everywhere implicated in the kinds of cultural agency they pursue. The framing epigraphs from Vladimir Mayakovsky and William Carlos Williams above may give a sense of the literary stakes, historical and present, of this moment. I found both — as indices of larger aesthetic and cultural horizons — to be deeply generative when I first encountered them in the 1970s. “The contraction which is felt,” as a moment of self-negating self-disclosure, occurs as gap or eruption in the discontinuous prose of Williams’s Spring and All, that generic hybrid of poetry and prose which has been rightly seen as an important precursor of Language School aesthetics.² In that text, Williams is everywhere concerned with the gaps and fissures that make transparent communication both impossible and deeply desirable. Something is turning him away from his instrumental purposes, drawing him back to himself; he insists on finding this gap or fissure in the texture of his thinking:

All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through

fixation by

the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription.

Only when this position is reached can life proper be said to begin since only then can a value be affixed to the forms and activities of which it consists.

Only then can the sense of frustration which ends. All composition defeated.

Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding. (As published; 105-6)

Only when these gaps in discourse are realized — literally given as a void between words that is at the same time the “fixation by the imagination” of the world — can we aspire to “technique, that can have only a sequent value”; only then can we begin to construct. The position of poetry in Spring and All is given a precise value by the impossibility of its prose, which aligns with what cannot be said, not only in literature but in modern life itself.

We may contrast Williams’s self-undoing negation with Mayakovsky’s expansive fantasy. “I feel my ‘I’ is much too small for me” is the converse of Williams’s contraction; the expansion of the “I” occurs, even so, as a corollary to the poet as a “cloud in trousers,” a form of self as nonexistence. The source of this nonexistence in Mayakovsky’s futurist period — to begin with, the experience of the adolescent rejection at the hands of Maria, but also the streetwise nihilism of “I never want / to read anything. / Books? / What are books?” — will lead directly to the social command to construct, to social construction. The expansion of Mayakovsky’s “I,” beginning in self-negation, identifies social reality (“books”) with its own undoing, so that the assertion of “I” is a reordering of the world, the necessary precondition for his later, mid-1920s manifesto of constructivist poetics:

What then are the fundamental requirements for beginning poetic labor?

First. The presence in society of a problem which can only conceivably be solved through a work of poetry. A social command. . . .

Second. An exact knowledge of, or more precisely, an exact sense of the wishes of one’s class (or the group one represents) in this matter. . . .

Third. Material. Words. The constant restocking of the storehouses, the granaries of your mind, with all kinds of words, necessary, expressive, rare, invented, renovated, manufactured, and others.

Fourth. Equipment. The business equipment and tools of the trade. Pen, pencil, typewriter, telephone, a suit for visits to the doss-house, a bicycle for riding to editorial offices, a well-arranged table. . . .

Fifth. The skills and methods for processing words, infinitely personal, achieved only after years of daily toil: rhymes, meters, alliterations, images, an inelegant style, pathos, endings, titles, outlines, etc. etc.³

The constructivist moment of Mayakovsky’s undoing at the hands of woman, by which he enters into the nihilistic cloud of futurist aggressivity, stabilizes in this formulation as an equal balance between the material text — which Mayakovsky, ahead of the crowd as usual, sees as not only “words” but also “equipment” and “methods for processing words,” the state of technology in the modernist period in which he wrote — and cultural poetics. To align Williams and Mayakovsky here is thus felicitously reciprocal: we may discern a constructivist necessity in Williams’s valorization of Dada-inspired negativity (which is often only seen as a textual device), and we see as well the sources of social construction in the constitutive negation of the futurist avant-garde. “A wedding between Russia and the United States” — the thought is Williams’s, from the 1940s⁴ — reorients the negativity of the material text toward its social command: the construction of a future world. Such a fantasy, identified with a reading of American and Soviet examples, occurred frequently among members of the Language School during the formative period of the 1970s, and it continues in the present work’s revisionist inquiry into both historical avant-gardes.

This reciprocity, between self-consciousness and social command, extends from the dual nature of modernism — as a construction within modernity or a construction of it — to questions of methodology, of poetry and criticism. Poetry, like criticism, internalizes social and historical reflexivity within an artistic medium; while criticism, like poetry, is motivated by particular social and historical determinants, as it structures itself within them. What I am calling the constructivist moment is a dual concept that refers to a generative moment in poetics in which a work of literature or art takes shape and unfolds, and the critical valorization of materiality, reflexivity, and constructedness across the arts, from the movement labeled constructivism in the Soviet period up to the present. In this sense, constructivism — the artistic movement defined by Soviet artists of the 1920s like Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova, Iakov Chernikhov, as well as by literary and cinematic constructivists from the same period such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Brik, or Dziga Vertov, and as it led on to the formalist abstraction known as international constructivism in the 1930s in the West — may be an important point of departure, but it is not a baseline tradition to which everything refers. The reader is hereby warned: I am not writing a historical account or aesthetic genealogy of constructivism, Soviet or otherwise. There are many constructivist moments focused on here, from the opening discussion of poetry written by means of preconstructed lexicons to the concluding critique of Stan Douglas’s photographs of dystopian Detroit. My use of the concept then is heuristic as well as historical: indeed, the formal model of the example, which I develop as a central element of my discussion of constructivism, captures the general theoretical interest and specific historical reference of such moments, which function as examples as they provide sites for reflection and models for agency.

The constructivist moment thus combines the generative unfolding of a poetics with the imperative for critical interpretation: just as the work of art is constructed, so our interpretation of it must necessarily be a construction. As a concept, the constructivist moment is informed by the historical experience of social construction (Lissitzky’s design work for the 1930s propaganda journal USSR in Construction comes to mind),⁵ just as it depends on the way that meaning is constructed through retrospective determination or Nachträglichkeit (Freud’s generative paper “Constructions in Analysis” is the reference here).⁶ We may continue from this modernist point of departure to Foucault and consider the ways in which individuals, authors, or subject positions are constructed by social discourses, and the ways in which institutions provide the terms by which we construct meanings. The fate of poetics as it confronts these latter forms of construction, which are not as amenable to a homology between aesthetics and politics as a critique, is one of the crucial concerns of the present work. The concept of construction, in the modernist senses of Lissitzky or Freud, is too generative of new meaning or historical insight to allow it merely to lapse into the horizons of institutional frameworks for construction, as postmodern as their origins may be — in which what we can think or do is limited by the social texts or cultural discourses we are positioned within. At the same time, a poetic model for construction must take into account the formal structures ascribable to institutions, just as institutions must make room for forms of agency irreducible to their orders. If poetry and poetics are to survive in a cultural environment that is dominated by institutions, they must show themselves capable of addressing more than their own orders. And every revisionist critical school for the last thirty years has argued precisely this point, often leading to an inversion of values in which what once had been most high — the work of verbal art, the poem, the masterpiece — is replaced by the autonomy, in fact, of critique. Equally fallible has been the tendency of poetry and poetics to adhere to their own entrepreneurial zones of restricted production, often in abject denial of wider cultural contexts. The necessity here is to bridge this great divide, which has been so profitably enforced.

These essays thus aim to cross the chasm between works of literature and art and historical and cultural contexts: in an aesthetic sense, they entail an opening of form to contexts as a necessary development in the arts; in a critical sense, they address the rift between the purported autonomy of literature and art and cultural studies methodologies. Each of the essays in this volume explores one or several possible paradigms for thinking beyond this dual aesthetic/critical dilemma: to begin with, we may cite the exemplary relation of Soviet constructivism to the experience of postrevolutionary social construction in the 1920s — even as this heroic conjunction of the aesthetic and political is only one of several historical moments, which are not all derivable from the most socially engaged instance of the historical avant-garde. After George Kubler’s Shape of Time, the temporal and spatial relations between my chosen historical examples are often discontinuous:⁷ the argument moves — in anything but a linear or teleological manner — from the 1920s Soviet Union, to Louis Zukofsky’s poetic meditation on social revolution in the 1930s, to a group of 1950s Japanese student radicals disbanding with the defeat of their oppositional movement (from Nagisa Oshima’s film Night and Fog in Japan), to 1960s conceptual art in New York, to the formation of the Language School in the 1970s, the emergence of post-Soviet writers and artists in the 1980s, and finally the surfacing of Detroit techno in the 1990s. Given this discontinuity, a number of temporal and spatial congruences allow for reinforcing or contrastive arguments: between Soviet and American modernism; Fordism and Detroit techno; Soviet and post-Soviet culture; post-Soviet and postmodern aesthetics; the negativity of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and of the decline of urban Detroit. These temporal and spatial, historical and cultural, frameworks intersect with formal analysis and theoretical reflections on specific works of cultural production. The constructivist moment, as broadly and heuristically put as it may be, is always seen within its specific cultural circumstances; it is a fact of history as much as of form. What this means for contemporary aesthetics — in a series of examples from the textual politics of Jackson Mac Low, the Language School, and the Poetics Listserv; to the aesthetic utopias of Detroit techno and the dystopia of Stan Douglas’s photographs; and the intense subjectivity of Robert Grenier’s handwritten poetry or David Wojnarowicz’s writing and art — is that each occurs at the moment of a specific historical conjuncture.

Are there common concerns that unite the various analyses in an overarching aesthetic and critical account, given the discontinuity of the examples presented here? There certainly are: the first among these would be the relation between radical aesthetic form and revolutionary utopianism, from the Soviet period to the emergence of the Language School. Here the Soviet constructivists are the privileged example of the historical avant-garde, as opposed to, say, the Italian futurists (who often held protofascist politics), the German dadaists (whose project was as much fascinated as repelled by alienation effects in modernity), or the French surrealists (who rejected social construction as just another form of realism). Even as these moments of the historical avant-garde are related and not mutually exclusive, it is the convergence of the Soviet avant-garde with social history that makes it exemplary, and not for its betrayal by the Stalinist state, though that did occur. The Soviet avant-garde’s emphasis on the materiality of signification — the emphasis on the fabrication of painting for Malevich, the invention of an elementary vocabulary of visual representation for Lissitzky, the foregrounding of the literary device for Shklovsky, the construction of montage effects for Eisenstein, the materiality of social discourse for V. N. Voloshinov (such a list of parallel social/aesthetic projects could go on at length) — directly addressed the construction of social reality in the Soviet Union, in a collectively held fantasy that aesthetic form could be the model for a new social order. The Soviet period thus provides a model for theorizing the relation between materialist aesthetics and their social meaning — for instance, between the textual materiality of the Language School and its importance as a model of multiauthored communication on the Poetics Listserv, or between the utopian, collective values of Detroit techno and the city’s social history. The discontinuous analogy of these two Western examples with the model of the Soviet period is meant to foreground shared aesthetic responses to the historical ruptures of social modernity, based on the partial similarity of formal characteristics. Within each, capacious new forms of art redress a failure of social totality.

The constructivist moment itself becomes a second point of convergence between these discontinuous examples: a constitutive moment of negativity enacted in the form of a totalizing vision. In one chapter, which seeks out constructivist moments in a historical and generic sequence from El Lissitzky to Louis Zukofsky to Detroit techno, it is defined (albeit abstractly) in the following way: “The constructivist moment is an elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social negativity — the experience of rupture, an act of refusal — invokes a fantasmatic future — a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation. Constructivism condenses this shift of horizon from negativity to progress in aesthetic form; otherwise put, constructivism stabilizes crisis as it puts art into production toward imaginary ends” (192). It is this relationship, between historical crisis and the capacious unfolding of aesthetic form, that I explore in numerous contexts. The constructivist moment in this sense refers not simply to a historical moment of rupture, as with the formation of the historical avant-garde after the First World War or of the Language School after the Vietnam War, but to a rupture within modernity itself. It is a moment when the rationalized lifeworld comes undone, however briefly, and we are given a glimpse of the orders we are contained within. This is precisely what Stan Douglas’s photographs of posturban Detroit present: a rupture in the social fabric — after the historical crisis of the 1967 Detroit riots but also as a recurring moment of social reproduction — that is an immediate entailment of late capitalism where, as Marx famously predicted, “all that is solid melts into air” and megaprofits are to be made in social negativity.⁸ Perhaps the most univocal social command of critical theory, from the Frankfurt School to the ideology critique of Slavoj Žižek, has been the imperative to disclose social negativity in the midst of lived experience, and to return this perception to practical action. Radical literature and art can be seen as precisely a site for the unveiling of what eludes representation, and the forms of that perception may become models for action as well. The constructivist moment is thus a confrontation of aesthetic form with social negativity, both to disclose the nature of the system and to develop an imagined alternative.

If this moment of disclosure or confrontation is fundamentally generative, what can be said of the nature of the negativity that is taken up everywhere in this work? Is this negativity the tertium quid that unites the disparate topics of my analysis; if so, does it, paradoxically, convey a positive consistency? I have found this to be the most difficult question to address throughout my account, even as the various examples discussed and approaches used to discuss them circulate, often beyond any intention, around the concept itself. Everything depends on what different philosophical traditions make accessible in their account of negativity; it is here that theoretical engagement is most necessary. In retrospect — and negativity is most often disclosed in the course of retrospection, as when we realize only years later what bothered us at the time of some troubling event — I have employed six interlocking accounts of negativity in the course of my analyses: following Hegel, Foucault, Kristeva, Žižek, Lacan, and Heidegger. It is not my intention, nor within my present means, to distinguish the myriad entailments of negativity between and among these major traditions. I will simply propose that the systemic integration of the concept, the way in which it is articulated within the given philosophical prospect, is the best practical guide to its meaning and use. Hegelian negativity occurs in two senses in this work: the first is the familiar determinate negation of the dialectic, which I see directly limiting the historical meaning of avant-garde rupture by means of institutional recuperation, the sublation of a negative moment to a higher level. The second, in Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s vision of the “night of world,” returns negativity to a primal undoing that cannot be easily sublated; the question then arises how it might be stabilized in any form of aesthetic production. A Foucauldian account of the avant-garde (and such an account, though neglected, was crucial for Foucault’s intellectual history) would distribute negativity in discourse, much as Sade’s eroticism is redistributed as a discourse of power or Artaud’s madness defines institutions. With Kristeva, on the other hand, we are encouraged to see the avant-garde as a permanent site for the refusal of integration into the symbolic, by virtue of that excessive form of desire she terms the semiotic, which undoes representation in the “thetic break” only to rebind it through the “second-order thetic.” Žižek, in the school of Lacan, has a more schematic approach to the nature of negativity, which as the inaccessible kernel of the Real becomes a form of antagonism that undoes our self-consistency and leads directly to the capaciousness of suprasubjective fantasy. This account is most directly connected to the mechanism of the constructivist moment, and therefore it is invoked at numerous points throughout the discussion. Finally, I explore Heidegger’s repositioning of Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation and its possible connection to the historical avant-garde to identify negativity, as the thrownness of Dasein, in the aesthetics of the material text. In the work of Robert Grenier, which I read after Heidegger’s critique, the shattering of self in the limit situation of writing becomes a confirmation of Being — indeed, the only one possible. Is there, then, a hierarchy among these accounts of negativity within the traditions summarized here? One might best explore this question by comparing the entailments of each with the form of the argument at hand. In a reinforcing sense, it is the central role of the negative to allow for the work discussed here, and the manner in which it is discussed, to be seen as an open question. Otherwise put, it would not be possible to envisage an open work without negativity.

The constructivist moment, then, is positioned within a movement from the material text, seen as a consequence of the larger goals of radical art to lay bare the device of its construction, to a wider cultural poetics. The central concept of the material text is the site of a strategy to return what had once been an unquestioned locus of critical value, literature, to the material forms of culture. In part as a response to Walter Benjamin’s notions of the author as producer and of the aura that is destroyed in capitalist production, a textual turn developed in literary criticism that simultaneously reserved a place for more traditional literary scholarship, bibliographic history, textual editing, and even philology, while it opened up these disciplines with various examples of radical texts, from Emily Dickinson’s fascicles to the handwritten works of Robert Grenier.⁹ The textual turn, however, can be double-edged: while it responds to a demand for a materialist account of literature as cultural production, and while it often valorizes texts that have a significant potential for critical intervention, it also allows normative scholarly functions to proceed without regard for any motivations for the intervention of radical texts. At the same time, the textual turn has led to a number of new approaches to cultural articulation of texts, as in Jerome McGann’s notion of a radial text that leads to the epistemology of hypertexts, or Cary Nelson’s and Walter Kalaidjian’s recovery of material texts in the radical 1930s.¹⁰ Such work is a part of the widespread revisionist effort in modernist studies that began with a challenge to Anglo-American formalism and continued in numerous projects of historical recovery, particularly of writers of the Left, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and experimental women modernists. A disciplinary context for the effort has been established in the journal Modernism/Modernity and in the founding of the Modernist Studies Association. The material text is a site for expanding the idea of the literary corpus to include not only the traditional objects of literary analysis — published works of literature — but manuscript collections, small press editions, hypertext, and nonwritten materials in media such as audio- or videotape. Michael Davidson’s Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word demonstrates how the material texts of the avant-garde can be a site of expanded social meanings in this sense.¹¹ The material text also provides a new basis for a social or contextual reading practice in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, which applies a social philology or socially directed mode of close reading to the construction of historically specific racial, religious, and gendered identities that are exemplified in modernist texts.¹² My work makes common cause with the latter two approaches, as it seeks to develop specific historical and cultural entailments of the material text as critical agency. The material text is never a thing in itself; it circulates as a form of cultural critique.

My early criticism, in Total Syntax (1985) and an article titled “Social Formalism” (1987), may be seen as attempts, before the dawn of the material text (which itself had everything to do with the emergence of the Language School and its textual politics), to find models for avant-garde textuality within a larger syntax of cultural meaning.¹³ In placing the avant-garde at the center of a redefined literariness, the present work also follows recent revisionist accounts of the avant-garde, for example Astradur Eysteinsson’s Concept of Modernism, in which the avant-garde is valorized for its aesthetics of interruption, or in my present terms, negativity.¹⁴ The avant-garde has also been taken up by cultural materialist analyses that position its restricted productions in larger cultural patterns, as in Daniel Belgrad’s Culture of Spontaneity, where a widely shared privileging of immediacy is seen in literary, visual, and musical avant-gardes of the 1950s.¹⁵ Other studies developing culturalist readings of radical works of art include Walter Kalaidjian’s American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique, in which avant-garde aesthetics and Popular Front cultural interventions are seen as mutually informing (and where the rubric “the constructivist moment” first appeared); Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity, which breaks the male-centered mold of modernist textuality to identify culturally charged interventions by and of women in modernity; Janet Lyon’s Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, which reads the form of the avant-garde manifesto in relation to a much longer tradition, dating from the French Revolution, of emancipatory manifestos; and Aldon L. Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, which moves between literature and music to identify a previously unrecognized Afrocentric postmodern aesthetic.¹⁶

There is thus a range of work that recovers the cultural poetics of the avant-garde, and within which the present study is situated. The existence of this expanded field, however, has yet to provoke sufficient debate on the objects and methods of a cultural poetics — in the senses that the term has been used to describe the intersection between literary and cultural criticism until now. Originally associated with the New Historicism, and often seen as indebted to the historicism of Foucault, cultural poetics appears in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations to describe the reflexive relations between text and context in early modern literature and culture; Greenblatt defines the term in somewhat dissimilar ways at other points in his work, as I discuss below.¹⁷ A subsequent use, influenced by cultural studies methodologies, occurs in Kathleen Stewart’s Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics of an “Other” America, in which she describes a marginal discourse community in rural Appalachia in terms of its poetics of language use.¹⁸ The classical scholar Leslie Kurke, on the other hand, returns to New Historicist tradition in using the term to discuss the cultural politics of antiquity in her Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece.¹⁹ What is often missing from these approaches is a specific consideration of literary form; where poetics has generally been taken to derive from considerations of the way the literary work is made, as a form of representation, these studies reposition it in relation to social discourses that contextualize it, while ignoring the concretization of form. It is almost as if culture itself is being proposed as a text in the place where the poem had been; one could better describe such approaches as a kind of aesthetic anthropology that seeks to describe cultures themselves as artistic products — but without any kind of formal mediation. In seeking to restore a necessary relation between literary form and cultural discourse, my use of cultural poetics intends an approach not restricted to the New Historicism or Cultural Studies, as it preserves an important place for the formal construction of the work as a bearer of cultural meaning.

Before leaving the scene of an expanded genealogy, I want to pause to consider the derivation of my title, The Constructivist Moment. There is now a significant series of studies in the humanities that seek to explain a key concept of intellectual or cultural history (such as constructivism) by means of its specific enactment in historical events, political movements, or works. The series begins with J. G. A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, a study of Renaissance political theory.²⁰ Each new work in the series, however, seems to contrast its conceptual focus with that of a prior study: Marjorie Perloff’s moment is the early twentieth century in The Futurist Moment, a comparative account of European avant-gardes organized around the example of futurism.²¹ The next work in the series, James F. Murphy’s Proletarian Moment, a study of the debates around leftist literature and culture in the 1930s, moves away from the purely aesthetic focus of the avant-garde to discuss a socially engaged literature.²² Norman Finkelstein’s Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry, on the other hand, sees utopian politics of literature as immanent to questions of poetic form.²³ Recently, in a slight departure from the series, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain’s collection of essays The Objectivist Nexus focuses on the American Objectivist poets and their aesthetic innovations, cultural contexts, and philosophical implications not as a moment but as a nexus of multiple conjunctures.²⁴ This shift from moment to nexus is decisive; in retaining the earlier term, I want on the one hand to ground it in a rigorous account of what a concept of a punctual moment might entail, as a rupture of received cultural meanings that leads to innovative form. I want as well to preserve the concept of a moment as a retrospectively determined punctual event from which cultural forms may be derived, but not in the sense of any originary event. The notion of a moment, then, at the very least provides a way of theorizing punctual occurrences without recourse to originary explanations — which would include, apparently, my choice of title. There is a recently published account of epiphanies in literature, The Visionary Moment; my colleague at Wayne State University, Charles J. Stivale, has written an incisive essay on the high alienation of “The ‘MLA’ Moment”; and further following the lead of the moment into negativity and nonexistence, I have heard of a work in science studies called The Missing Moment, which addresses gaps and fissures in consciousness as they impact on claims to objectivity.²⁵

Part of the tradition of the introductory essay is to provide a guide to the work that follows in condensed and summary form. In order to position each of the essays in this work in relation to the larger project, and in terms of their presentation in a series, I have also written introductory headnotes that may be helpful in drawing out the contexts, motivations, and intertexts for each chapter. The concept of moment is central in terms of my own work’s construction: each chapter develops a series of textual or aesthetic examples in terms of their situatedness in a cultural or theoretical argument. The chapters are by no means presented sequentially: the first chapter to be written, and which directly addresses “the nonnarrative construction of history,” dates from 1990, but occurs in sequence as chapter 5. Chapter 6, “Negative Examples,” on the other hand, was only finished with the final draft of the text, and contains material from 2000 to 2002. The work’s thematic sequence, I hope, will appear as spatial, radial, and accretive rather than linear, accumulative, and teleological. Particularly the final chapter, “Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban Detroit,” is written in a nontraditional style of twelve linked but disjunct zones seen as specific areas of discussion. It both does and does not provide a concluding perspective from which to view what went before, and for similar reasons I have decided not to write a closing statement. My hope is that the relations between and among chapters, sections, examples, themes, analogies, and disanalogies will resonate with each other, and I do not want to preclude generative connections that may be made. This preference stems fundamentally from the sense of construction as I understand it, as wanting to preserve the ways in which the work is made and to encourage readings that might not have been anticipated. (Note: this is not the same as saying that the reader constructs readings, and that just any reading is as good as any other.) I want to show how the literariness of the material text is not simply an artifact of avant-garde formalism but may be seen as a moment of social construction, from the writing of the text to the processing of it, here and now. With that principle established, I will end by commenting on the status of the moment in its various constructions in each chapter.

The study begins with an approach to the poetics of the material text that shows how Coleridge’s concept of poetic diction led to modernist and postmodern uses of preexisting poetic vocabularies. In constructing an alternative genealogy of the material text, I turn to the promulgation of BASIC English by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the twentieth century. BASIC English was a generally unsuccessful but important attempt to create an English-language-based lingua franca, with a reduced vocabulary and syntax, for purposes of commerce and technological innovation. Clearly due to fascination with and horror of its politics of linguistic control, a number of modernist and postmodern writers were inspired by BASIC to develop poetic vocabularies (preexisting lexicons for literary works) as a basis for constructed literary effects, to be distinguished from subjective expression. The technology of BASIC English had socially conservative, even imperialistic, ends: it was an important early step in the promotion of English as a world language of science and commerce. Poets, however, turned this technological innovation to other, arguably oppositional and emancipatory, uses in foregrounding the materiality of signification to disrupt communicative ideals. A series of decisive moments thus constructs an argument by example: to begin with, the failed transcendental deduction of the subject of knowledge in Coleridge’s Biographia, which led to his historicist meditations on the relation of language to cultural meaning. Next, there is the invention of BASIC itself, out of a Coleridgean conservatism but also as a modern linguistic reform. Finally, modernist writers, from Joyce to Zukofsky, were attracted to BASIC as a compositional device; and Jackson Mac Low used it as a way of constructing poems and performance works in the postmodern period. The material text is thus constructed as series of political interventions in language, from Coleridge to Mac Low, that are historically situated.

“The Secret History of the Equal Sign” takes up the social formation of avant-garde communities, and their political moments of opposition and recuperation, in terms of their literary construction of a collective identity. There is an obvious moment of social construction in the formation of the Language School of poetry in the 1970s, which I characterize in terms of the intersubjective dynamics of its multiauthored collaborations. A Foucauldian notion of discourse, seen in the construction of the movement itself and as it was represented in the form of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, allows us to see how individual authors became author positions or moments in a collective discourse. A Kristevan concept of text, on the other hand, would characterize the avant-garde as distributing a moment of disrupted symbolization through the multiple significations of the semiotic; I used this moment to describe the dialectics of signification in Legend, a collaborative work by five authors published in 1980. A close textual reading of this complex work reveals its secret history: the narcissistic, homosocial space between personal and group identity. In two further examples of multiauthorship in the Language School, poetic texts by Steve Benson and myself, and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, the gap between authors becomes the generative motive for the constructed work. The politics of multiauthorship are further developed in an account of how multiauthored collaborations anticipated the form of collective identity constructed on the Poetics Listserv. A precise moment of discursive construction may be seen in an exemplary group discussion of an indecipherable word, suggesting how authorship may be reproduced in collective forms.

The origin of “The Bride of the Assembly Line” occurred literally as an epiphany, in which two reinforcing moments combined in the construction of its argument. In the first, after a long day at an academic conference at the University of Louisville in 1995, I found myself with friends listening to jazz late into the night at the Seelbach Hotel. On emerging from the bar into the hotel’s ornate lobby, I encountered the living vision of an instant: a thoroughly intoxicated bride, virtually held in place by the architecture of her dress, waiting patiently while swaying back and forth as the equally drunk groom negotiated the room. A few weeks later, on a tour of the Rouge River assembly plant of the Ford Motor Company, I imaginatively synthesized the appearance of the bride with the bachelor machines of its robotic welding stations, after the work by Marcel Duchamp: hence the title. Its moment was a lecture at the SUNY Poetics Program, which I used to argue the necessity of rethinking the conventional account of the relation between modernist poetics and social modernity. In so doing, I compared literary authorship from modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Language writers like Clark Coolidge to the authorship of modes of social organization such as Ford’s assembly line. My claim is that even the most radically formal or language-centered literature can be seen as reflexively engaged with cultural processes of modernity. I then discuss how Stein’s admiration of Henry Ford, Ford cars, and the mode of organization of the assembly line influenced her writing; the juxtaposition of Stein and Ford goes significantly against the grain of much Stein criticism, which separates her abstract use of language from cultural and historical motives. Authorship itself is under construction; I discuss how the sequential organization of the assembly line provides a positive paradigm, or even negative disanalogy, for modernist and avant-garde works and genres. The essay ends with a moment of pure presentation of poetic address in automated increments.

“The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzky to Detroit Techno,” the essay that gives this collection its title, is addressed to two discontinuous moments: the social formation of Soviet constructivist aesthetics in the work of El Lissitzky, and the emergence of the internationally recognized but locally unknown (until recently) genre of popular electronic music known as Detroit techno. A framework for this comparison is provided by a discussion of the situation of the avant-garde in cultural studies, which I experience on analogy to a border crossing between Detroit and the suburbs of Grosse Pointe. Another framework is provided by the modernist example, a literary form that helps explain the agency of Lissitzky’s abstract paintings, the Prouns, as well as how their formal values were reinterpreted in his later work in typography and design. With techno, the concept of literary example becomes an aesthetics of the sample, and we are in the postmodern terrain of simulacral, postauthorial pastiche. In an extended comparison, techno’s similarities to and differences from a prior example of the avant-garde, the constructivist visual artists of the 1920s Soviet Union as represented by the work of Lissitzky, are discussed in terms of both formal characteristics and social formation. Detroit techno is significant for its development of a constructivist, as opposed to expressivist, aesthetic among emerging African-American artists who, working far from the restricted codes and institutional reception of the avant-garde, are interested in innovative formal values. In invoking utopian fantasies and realizing them in a form that is open to many voices by means of sampling rather than dominated by a solo vocalist, Detroit techno constructed its own imaginary community in Detroit. It thus may be compared with the utopian and suprasubjective aesthetics at work in Soviet constructivist art of the 1920s in that both derive from prior experiences of revolutionary trauma or social negativity. In a detour through two poetic examples of constructivism, I identify the constructivist moment at the site of a stabilized negativity, whose values range from revolution to social alienation.

In “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History,” the constructivist moment is aligned with nonnarrative forms of representation, seen specifically in a historical series. In reading examples of the material text (poems by Lyn Hejinian and Jackson Mac Low) as nonnarrative, I show first how a redistribution of narrative is constructed in their textuality, and then how their forms of nonnarration may be imagined within an unfolding history. Nonnarrative as a form of historical representation may be more ubiquitous than is generally believed, as I go on to demonstrate in a discussion of the New Historicist anecdote and the accretion of the minimal units of history into larger narratives. The forms of nonnarrative may thus work as fundamentally constitutive elements in the construction of history, and I locate these nonnarrative forms of historical representation at moments of historical stasis or crisis. As an example of a nonnarrative poetics of stasis, I position the conceptualist painting of Erik Bulatov within the decades-long era of stagnation in the former Soviet Union under Brezhnev. For the nonnarrative poetics of crisis, I juxtapose the exemplary form of the New Sentence, which developed in the Language School in the 1970s, with the historical negativity experienced with the Fall of Saigon. The claims for a nonnarrative history are extended further in a discussion of how historical chronologies are organized and manipulated in public discourse, without any prospect of closure.

“Negative Examples” identifies a series of aesthetic uses of negativity through its positioning in the work of Slavoj Žižek and Michel Foucault, developing a non-Hegelian dimension of negativity in Heidegger that influenced both Foucault and Žižek. In the move from literature to social discourse, the negativity of the text is crucial for providing a moment in which construction, in both formal and contextual senses, can take place. The important differences between the concepts of negativity in the work of these three philosophers may help us to see the social meaning of the avant-garde in terms other than the familiar Hegelian logic of opposition and recuperation. The chapter begins by discussing the importance of negativity for Žižek, in his historical situation as an intellectual theorizing the fall of the Eastern Bloc as he experienced it. The examples of negativity Žižek uses in his arguments are grouped together in three categories: moments of historical negativity, attending the devolution of Second-World states; moments of aesthetic negativity, often discerned in discussions of classic American cinema; and moments of an encounter with sublime nature, seen in the Hegelian paradigm of the “night of the world” that Žižek develops in reading Heidegger. The latter example leads to a discussion of the ways in which modernist poets (Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Laura Riding) position their work in relation to negativity, and follows that aesthetic possibility through postmodern examples from conceptual art (Joseph Kosuth), to the New York School (Ron Padgett and Bill Berkson), to the Language School (in my own work). Two additional genealogies of the negative are given in the examples of Heidegger and Foucault: the former in his critique of Karl Jaspers’s “limit situations” and the possibility that his primordial concern for Being may have a source in the historical avant-garde, and the latter for his positioning of negativity as a unifying element of discourse, which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theorize as antagonism. Robert Grenier and David Wojnarowicz, two writers both invested in negativity, demonstrate the aesthetic uses of Heideggerian and Foucauldian negativities; while writings by Marjorie Welish and Carla Harryman show how such negativity is gendered.

“Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Ilya Kabakov” contrasts two versions of negativity in examples of post-Soviet literature and art. For Dragomoshchenko, the constructivist moment is immanent in the poetic text — he figures it as a nasturtium imagined as “burning” within the linguistic confines of description. Even so, Dragomoshchenko’s material textuality, seen through concurrent developments in post-Soviet science and aesthetics, is by no means stabilized in the sense that we understand it in the West. As in the related example of installation art of émigré artist Ilya Kabakov, Western categories such as the postmodern do not adequately describe the construction of post-Soviet subjectivity, after the prolonged moment of the anticipated devolution of the Soviet Union, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Kabakov’s installation Ten Characters records the ideological crippling of ten inhabitants of a Moscow communal apartment, predicting precisely the relation between ideological fantasy and negativity articulated by Žižek in a related but different historical moment. The nihilism disclosed in several of Kabakov’s deformed characters takes on a precise social and historical register in Soviet culture and epistemology, arguing against any overarching universal category of the postmodern within which his work may appear. Finally, “Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban Detroit” is positioned precisely as a Western counterpoint to the dystopian topography of the former Soviet Union. It is the parallel collapse of utopian fantasies, and the resulting foregrounding of negativity, that unites them. In this final essay, I present a speculative, even constructivist, account of the ways social space — specifically the collapsing, fragmentary, and divided social space of contemporary Detroit — may be seen in relation to the subject formation of those who live here. In twelve disparate zones of critical speculation, I approach a reading of Stan Douglas’s photographic essay on Detroit as an index to social negativity. For negativity, read absence: this is what binds us together.

— 5 May 2002