The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
immanence as empty sublimity to at least a reconsideration of the epistemological stakes of desynonymy. In the work of a number of cultural as well as literary critics in the modern period — from Richards, William Empson, and Owen Barfield to Laura (Riding) Jackson and Raymond Williams (many of them grouped together under the rubric “Cambridge English”) — the question of poetic diction developed in Coleridge’s practical criticism extends to meditations on the larger question of a poetic vocabulary seen as not only adequate to meaning but also responsive to culture. BASIC English clearly had Coleridge as its precursor for his insistence on the “good sense” of words; the resynonymy rather than desynonymy that resulted depended on an emptying out of the sublimity of poetic form while maintaining the prestige of literary authority as the basis for the moral imperative of its semantics. In Coleridge, original thought expands vocabulary, which in turn will become habituated as the common sense of language, thus condensing the judgments of literary authority in everyday life. BASIC’s “men of research,” on the other hand, proposed a semantics of definitional substitution by which meanings would be collapsed into strings of predetermined symbols. This restriction of signification was motivated by concerns for both scientific specificity and normative communication; Ogden and Richards relate both in The Meaning of Meaning: “The recognition that many of the most popular subjects of discussion are infested with symbolically blank but emotionally active words . . . is a necessary preliminary to the extension of scientific method to these questions.”33 In the name of science as well as culture, BASIC’s operators proposed a linguistic hygiene that was socially regulative.
BASIC’s reversal of Coleridge’s poetics of desynonymy used a restricted vocabulary precisely because it would avoid the mutability of original meanings in being grounded in a set of terms that not only “men of science” but everyone should hold in common. In order to discriminate complex meanings, BASIC would begin by “symboliz[ing] references by means of . . . simple routes of definition. . . . We must choose as starting-points either things to which we can point, or which occur freely in ordinary experience” (127). Rather than devolving on the authority of literary discrimination, then, desynonymy would be put on an empirical basis that assumed the transparency of certain fundamental terms. But, as discussed above, the attempt to extend ostensive reference through strings of substitutive terms to precise technical senses in BASIC malfunctions precisely at the point of a polysemy that is a constituent of semantic change. Hopeless redundancy results from the attempt to patch definitions that involve mutating, unstable word meanings onto precise technical senses (as inevitably occurs with the semantics of many of the most simple words in the language).34 Rather than being able to specify and desynonymize meanings, BASIC’s capacity would be continually outstripped by increased load on its fundamental units. Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas shows just how many embedded idioms are engaged by a restricted vocabulary that can neither contain nor anticipate them.
BASIC tried to contain the expansions of meaning produced by mass culture and developing technology by the same means: a reduction of vocabulary. Its goal was a final transparency of language once it had been analyzed into minimal components: “For many purposes ‘dictionary-meaning’ and ‘good use’ would be equivalents. . . . The dictionary is a list of substitute symbols. . . . It can do this because in these circumstances and for suitable interpreters the references caused by the two symbols will be sufficiently alike.”35 The final test of BASIC’s desynonymy is thus to be found in an interpretive community, a scientistic version of the institution of Coleridge’s clerisy evident in the notion of “suitable interpreters” presumed to be “sufficiently alike.” BASIC, here, is designed to inculcate, through linguistic means, a norm of transparent subjectivity as it simultaneously adjudicates problems of meaning so that “we” all may agree. It is not surprising that a number of modern writers were drawn both to admire and contest Ogden and Richards’s claims to have authored a language-centered reform of modern society — both for its notion of the power of language to change the world, positively; and in reaction to its leveling of differences of perspectives within social modernity, negatively. The fascination of transition’s translation of Finnegans Wake into BASIC is therefore that it seems simultaneously to identify modernism with and distance it from the cultural authority of science. From the 1930s on, this interest continued among modernist and postmodern experimental poets, particularly Louis Zukofsky and Jackson Mac Low.
ZUKOFSKY’S DICTIONARY
BASIC’s conflation of modern science with cultural authority had a provocative effect on Louis Zukofsky, who wrote as a bilingual American Jew in the same period that Ogden and Richards were advocating suitable interpreters who would accept the necessity of restricting meaning through shared references. In several thought experiments on questions of language and meaning in experimental texts from the 1930s, Zukofsky explores the relations of poetic vocabulary to new meaning, focusing on dictionaries, definition, and meaning as cultural as much as epistemological concerns. While Zukofsky shared the modernist faith in science as giving the basis for objective reference, his cultural commitments led to an exploration of textual opacity quite opposed to that of BASIC’s linguistic transparency. His 1932 experimental text “Thanks to the Dictionary,” to begin with, brings together the materiality of cultural tradition in the language of the Old Testament with modernist improvisations based on passages chosen at random from the dictionary:
It was among these that David, disguised, betokening a hidden meaning, and emblematically seeking his man, David illuminating darkly the night’s fires he had wandered into, spoke affectionately: — My three un-equal and dissimilar axes with oblique intersections, I say this of you my crystal forms, your initial letter, in Egyptian a lionness, in Phenician called lamed means rightly an ox-goad. My time comes when it will be lagu, a lake! In English the sound of this letter will be one of the most uniform and changeless of the sounds in the language, especially prolonged so as to continue a syllable! It is not in my name nor will it be pronounced in folk. But you will hear it in holm, my labradorite, my feldspar, L, 50, L, 50,000 upon 50 thousands, when one will write in a city, attributively, as L roads, in the time of sounds and the — then — lighted passing of symbols. And, by the way, let’s make it liquid. . . .36
In this passage, Zukofsky produces an effect of textual difficulty whose overcoming will be virtually analogous to the heroism of David, “disguised, betokening a hidden meaning, and . . . seeking his man.” David’s speech, as an original moment of the language of the chosen people, moves from its biblical referent to a dictionary-based scatting that Zukofsky orchestrates as a witty parody of vocalized midrashic interpretation. David “speaks” a text derived from dictionary definitions under the letter l, whose “hidden meaning” in Cabbalist or any other senses clearly are intended to be unavailable to most interpreters. In contradistinction to BASIC’s operating manual, Zukofsky holds that suitable interpreters cannot be found who would find this text’s referents to be sufficiently alike.
Cultural differences, then, are proposed as motivations for the text’s opacity; the passage is stunning for its early prescience of a material poetics sited at the intersection of new meaning and cultural forms. The language of definition, rather than being seen in terms of substitute symbols, is called on to denote technical senses at the same time that it connotes divergent cultural references. The work goes on to alternate between David-as-textuality and dictionary-definition-as-meaning to create a poetic prose of mild irony and pathos that celebrates linguistic opacity. Definition is central to the text:
A visiter [sic] making a visit goes where it is visitable. Where it is visitable. IT makes visitation socially acceptable. The visiter lifts his vizor. He wears it naturally to protect his eyes. Moreover, when the visiter lifts his vizor, it is visual. And like a vista. IT has become visitatorial. . . . (279)
Here Zukofsky is parodying the ostensive definition at the heart of BASIC English at the same time that he draws attention to the criteria for suitable interpreters that come along with it. Agreeing on what is meant by the ostensive “IT” would make visitation — presumably, an agreed-on sense of embodied presence in meaning — “socially acceptable”; the Jew can leave his calling card on the dining