The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
than formally immanent. The opacity of poetic language enacts, in such a synthesis, a purposive deformation of communicative norms that may, in turn, change norms embedded in language (or provide new ones). In this sense, poetic language does not merely reinforce literary and cultural hierarchies but provides both vehicle and agency for a language-centered critique of meaning. Such a criticality may move beyond poetry to participate in processes of communication not restricted to literature as it identifies the making of new meaning with the kind of linguistic opacity we find when new terms are introduced in a lexicon. The shift from poetic diction to poetic vocabulary thus points toward a wider cultural frame for the constructive use of poetic language.
The constructive use of poetic vocabulary, the notion that a poem literally can be made from a predetermined, objectified lexicon, is a unique and historical contribution of American modernism and postmodernism. Examples of constructive devices based on language seen as exterior to poetic form exist in many literatures, but the notion that a poem can be made from a preexisting, objectified lexicon arose with American modernism. The claim I will make, not to be overstated, is that a notion of poetic vocabulary, not simply a matter of poetry’s linguistic materiality, emerged with American modernism, specifically in the work of Louis Zukofsky. There are, of course, many examples in the European avant-garde in which poetry is made from linguistic materials; consider Tristan Tzara’s notion that cut-up newspapers can be assembled in a poetic text that will, ultimately, resemble its nonintentional author. In the work of the French OuLiPo, language games may involve restricted lexicons and rules for their use, but this is not the same as making a poem from a preexisting, objectified lexicon.5 An important bridge between the two approaches is Anne-Marie Albiach’s French translation of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”–9, using a pre-existing vocabulary taken from the Everyman edition of Marx’s Capital.6 The argument that follows undertakes a kind of thought experiment to chart the emergence of the use of poetic vocabulary from its origins in the English romantics (better known for their promulgation of poetic diction) through a series of American modernist and postmodern poet/critics. There is a literary history of almost two centuries, exemplified in romantic, modernist, and postmodern moments, of how poetic language seen as object provides a linguistic means for cultural critique. Poets representative of each period — from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Louis Zukofsky to Laura (Riding) Jackson to Jackson Mac Low to a number of poets of the Language School — variously foregrounded the materiality of poetic language, both in explicitly critical terms and implicitly in their work.7
For the romantic poets, to begin with, poetic language was the locus for a negotiation between culturally emergent meanings and the stabilities of literary form. The inclusion of vernacular speech in Lyrical Ballads, as part of a larger cultural project of ballad collecting, is one example of such an aesthetic response to expanded cultural borders. The nuanced vocabularies of philosophy (as with the opaque terminology of the German romantics) and of science also put pressure on normative theories of meaning. Such a contestation may be seen in the contradictory insights and incomplete realization of the form of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Revisionist readings of the Biographia show how its attempt to reconcile language, literary form, and cultural value reflects an instability of meaning as much as it promotes conservative ideals of poetic autonomy. The instability of Coleridge’s account of poetic language is a part of an epistemological uncertainty that is at once historical and cultural. This uncertainty (also the source of its capacious possibility) is reflected in the many ways poetic language in the romantic period takes on values of opacity in relation to transparent norms of communication (as with the neoclassical conventions of the eighteenth century). Such foregrounding of linguistic devices — from Chatterton’s archaisms, Blake’s neologisms, Scott’s use of both archaism and dialect, Clare’s incorporation of regional usages, and Wordsworth’s objectification of common speech — reveals the unstable, expansive cultural moment of romantic poetry behind the concerns for language, meaning, and form in Coleridge’s account.
Coleridge ultimately wanted to stabilize the epistemological uncertainty of language by casting poetic form in the mold of transcendental reflection. While Coleridge’s anxiety about language led to a program for the inculcation of communicative norms and cultural values by means of literary form, one legacy of his poetics involved a reversal of this movement (even as much modernist poetry, from Yeats to John Ashbery, preserves the autonomy of form as the site for the identification of language with value). At the modernist moment of epistemological uncertainty, a theoretical concern with language tends also to place under erasure Coleridge’s privileged locus of critique, poetic form, in order to access more directly the relations between language and culture. An example of such a movement — from an assumption of the transparency and universality of poetic form to a critique based on the relations between language and culture — is evident in the invention and promulgation of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s BASIC English (seen as a complement to Richards’s parallel development of a normative account of poetry).8 As a vehicle not only for the contestation of received ideas about language and meaning but also for the use of linguistic norms as social control and imperial politics, BASIC bypassed the mediations of poetic form at the heart of the romantic (and much of the modernist) project. In so doing it acted out, in a historically significant manner but to a virtually absurdist degree, the linguistic legacy of romanticism even while reversing its polarities of language and cultural change. Where the romantic period saw an expansion of language that led to Coleridge’s valorization of poetic form as a solution to questions of value, BASIC’s restricted vocabulary would reduce possible meanings within ordinary language as a standard of value as well, but without the mediation of poetic form.
In polar opposition to the romantic fascination with linguistic expansion, BASIC (an acronym for “British American Scientific International Commercial”) wanted to stabilize questions of meaning not through the authority of literary form but by reducing the number of terms used in the language — the number of substantives, morphological inflections, and what it called verbal “operators” (fig. 1). Its goals were to restrict language to an optimal economy and transparency in order to simplify and clarify meanings; in the words of Richards (and in BASIC): “Basic English is English made simple by limiting the number of its words to 850, and by cutting down the rules for using them to the smallest number necessary for the clear statement of ideas. And this is done without change in the normal order and behavior of those words in everyday English.”9 In so doing, BASIC adapts Standard English for use as an international lingua franca; according to Ogden, English is the natural candidate for such a task because it “is the only major language in which the analytic tendency has gone far enough for purposes of simplification” — a conflation of morphology with linguistic history in the fact that, with a low proportion of morphemes to words, English developed as a “relatively analytic” language.10 Conveniently, English’s analyticity (and thus its object status and availability for poetic vocabularies) make it a perfect vehicle for international commerce, its high correlation between word and thing reflecting the reification of commodity capitalism. A summary of the structure of BASIC describes how it compresses meaning in a standardized vocabulary (which can optimally be printed on the endsheets of its instruction manuals):
The syntax was accompanied by a reduced vocabulary of 850 words in sets: 400 general words and 200 picturable words (600 nouns), 150 adjectives, 82 grammatical words, such as across, all, can, and 18 operators (such verbs as get and put). Operators had three roles: to replace more difficult words . . . to form phrases that would obviate other verbs . . . and to be part of a phrasal verb. . . . By such means, [Ogden] concluded that his operators could stand in for some 4,000 verbs.11
While BASIC advocates a transparency of communication in ordinary language rather than critically adjudicates the opacity of poetic language, its Coleridgean origins are clear — and not simply in the substitution of its language’s more available opacity for the difficulty of poetry. Coleridge wished to stabilize meaning in poetic form so that judgments of value could be grounded in a commonly held set of objects (the canon, in other words). The Coleridgean tradition continues, somewhat modified, in the demand for standard meanings of common terms that become, in turn, the basis for BASIC’s promulgation of a technocratic