The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
to produce a new, arbitrary vocabulary that must in turn be recombined within the new horizon of its performance. Values for this performance, like materials for its text, are specified through fixed and to a degree arbitrary rules; degrees of rapidity (from vvs = “very very slow” to m = “moderate” to vvr = “very very rapid”) and loudness (from ppp to f), along with durations of performed silences (in seconds), are indicated in notes to the side of the printed text. These directives create obstacles as much as guidelines for the text’s performance that set the isolated words even further apart, thus interfering with the horizon of interpretation:
| ms/p | liking teeth hands bodies wondering constellations listening peace 9 |
| m/mf | water ice eyes evening 6 |
| vr/mf | clothing attention 4 |
| ms/p | three o’clock hands knowing hair clouds learning tongues twigs sweaters 9 |
| vr/p | attention sliding thankfulness friends stars coats warmth peacefulness bears 3 |
| m/mp | quiet lips talking cheeks touching starlight seeing morning resting fingers 8 |
| ws/mf | kissing talking stories smiling 5 |
| mr/mp | sweaters looking delight ease morning trees ease kisses 42 . . . (60) |
Apart from his performance instructions, Mac Low withholds punctuation in order to create relations of maximum syntactic ambiguity, demanding choices to be made (as they are understood as arbitrary) in the performance: “The line ‘Three o’clock hands knowing hair clouds learning tongues twigs sweaters’ could be read as one sentence . . . or as ‘Three o’clock. Hands knowing hair, clouds learning tongues, twigs learning sweaters.’ or in other ways” (55). While a vocabulary cannot change the rules of syntax (as a performer cannot change Mac Low’s directives), the performance itself confers value as the horizon for all possible interpretations that can be produced from the source text. In the poem as it is performed, all lexically coded experience is decompressed and expanded onto an interpretive horizon that is the condition of all particular experience — or at least, onto a horizon that extends from the knowledge of experience to be realized from any particular text.
Mac Low’s book-length collection of performance texts, The Pronouns, takes such a splitting of vocabulary and syntax to a logical extreme.61 In the dancers’ realization of the printed texts in performance, according to the author’s postscript, there will be “a seemingly unlimited multiplicity of possible realizations for each of these dances because the judgments of the particular dancers will determine such matters as degrees of literalness or figurativeness in interpreting & realizing instructions” (68). These instructions, it turns out, will be identical to the words of the poems themselves, which were composed in lines and stanzas from filing cards on which were inscribed “one to five actions, denoted by gerunds or gerundial phrases” and “with the help of the Rand table of a million random digits, from the 850-word Basic English Word List” (69; fig. 4).62 If it were not for Mac Low’s identification of language with action, of poetic text with strategies for performance, his use of the BASIC word list would come quite close to its originators’ technocratic ideal of limiting meanings by the use of an arbitrary vocabulary. The identification of source text with performance strategies, however, shows exactly how the presumed transparency of a fixed vocabulary must be first understood as opaque and only then interpreted according to an open process of arriving at collective understanding.
Processes of both desynonymy and resynonymy, the expansion and contraction of vocabularies, are at work here. The act of interpretation will involve an initial expansion of the possible meanings of the source text by the dancers (who arguably substitute for BASIC’s men of research), one that will then be recoded within the horizons of the performance. In the target form, the dancers’ decisions will be realized as a collectively held common sense — precisely the process Coleridge described as necessary for the construction of new meaning: “When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency, that the language does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense.” For Mac Low, it is the performance itself that creates the collective understanding that can authorize new meanings as common sense. Thus, in the move from source text to target form, he not only assigns referential meaning by virtue of arbitrary symbols but shows how the new meaning demanded by the opacity of these arbitrary symbols must be determined by an interpretative community. The enactment of the performances in real time creates a new horizon for the meaning of actions, even as the source texts for the performances are made in the assumption that unrealized actions may be referred to by substitute symbols. The words on the cards, thus, condense possibilities for action whose realization is necessary for their interpretation in the widest horizon. A similar process is at work in Ogden and Richards’s sense that a restricted vocabulary results in the greatest flexibility of meaning, so that substitute symbols and new meaning go hand in hand. The difference, again, is Mac Low’s new horizon of action.
4. Jackson Mac Low, three cards from “56 Sets of Actions Drawn by Chance Operations and from the Basic English List by Jackson Mac Low in Spring 1961,” the “action pack” used as source text for composition of The Pronouns.
In “9th Dance — Questioning — 20 February 1964,” Mac Low’s compression of action to substitute symbols that must be interpreted in their performance looks like this:
One begins by quietly chalking a strange tall bottle.
Then, questioning,
one seems to give someone something.
One reasons regularly.
Then one questions some more,
reacting to orange hair.
Soon, coming on by doing something crushing or crushing something
& giving an answer
& giving a simple form to a bridge
& making drinks
one ends up saying things as an engine would. (23)
This sequence, while arbitrary, is at the same time ultimately mimetic in Aristotle’s sense: poetry imitates the action of an event that it restages. In his postscript to The Pronouns, Mac Low sees his poetic vocation in just such Aristotelian terms: “to create works wherein both other human beings, their environments, & the world ‘in general’ (as represented by such objectively hazardous means as random digits) are all able to act with the general framework & set of ‘rules’ given by the poet — the ‘maker of plots or fables,’ as Aristotle insists” (75). But not everything is predetermined within these frames, much to their credit: “That such works themselves may lead to new discoveries about the nature of the world & of people I have no doubts.” There are two aspects of Mac Low’s aesthetic plots that go, in this sense, beyond Aristotle’s poetics. First, a more historicist theory of meaning is necessary to fully account for the ethical stakes of the work and its performance. This is clear in the persistent dating of different versions of Mac Low’s poems, prefaces, and books; in the production of the works themselves as datable events, thus yielding a time-valued theory of reading; and in Mac Low’s willingness to move instantaneously between epochal frames and microscopic performance decisions, aligning, for example, the historically utopian horizons of his text’s invocation of “doing your own thing” with the oppositional counterculture of the Vietnam era (75). Second, a historicist account of literary form is required for Mac