The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE EQUAL SIGN
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND TEXT
The Language School is known for its production of material texts, but an equally important dimension, in fact the one that defines it as a school, is the way it constructs the relation between material text and literary community. In this chapter, I read a number of key works of the Language School to show how the movement from text to community takes place through the use of strategies of multiple authorship. Avant-gardes, in breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous author in favor of both the work and its reception within its community, frequently use such strategies, in which the work is positioned between two or more authors, toward a horizon of collective practice or politics. Examples of avant-garde multiauthorship developed by writers of the Language School taken up here include the collective authorship represented by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other literary journals; Legend, a multiauthored experimental poem by five authors; two poems written under the title “Non-Events” by Steve Benson and myself; and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s collaborative novel The Wide Road. Michel Foucault’s concept of discursive formation and Julia Kristeva’s dialectic of symbolic and semiotic provide critical terms for the relation of text and community enacted in works of the avant-garde. The avant-garde’s cultural politics continue in the contemporary form of the Poetics Listserv, which I discuss in terms of a representative month of debate, seen as a form of multiauthorship.
AVANT-GARDE PARADOX
The avant-garde has been characterized as being in a paradoxical historical situation: while it undertakes the overturning of the prior aesthetic order as an irreversible act, it cannot survive a reentry into history, as a form of representation, without losing either creative potential or critical force. As a critique of representation, it would follow from this argument, the avant-garde can only contradict itself as a stable form of representation. In academia, the historical contradiction of the tenured radical ironically indicates such a devolution of political agency, in moving from public sphere to educational institution, profession, and tenure. In radical politics, Leon Trotsky tried to counter the historical irony of the avant-garde party with a notion of permanent revolution that would be transparent to history, and that would not rigidify in any form of representation.1 Significant tendencies of the historical avant-garde in Europe (surrealism central among them) saw their claims to political agency and cultural meaning in terms of a dialectics of representation in this sense.2 But while a surrealist politics of desire has been a central example of the overcoming of stable forms of representation in the historical avant-garde, its particular claim to history, as a concrete form of representation or an identifiable style, risks suppressing its iconoclastic methods once it has achieved recognition. As a result of the seeming inevitability of the historical reversal of the avant-garde’s critique of representation, its political claims have often been seen as failed or irrelevant.
In his account of the structural logic of this “failure,” Paul Mann’s Theory Death of the Avant-Garde restages the analogy between political party and aesthetic tendency at a later historical period.3 In describing the avant-garde from his own historical moment — shortly after 1989, when the horizons of the political avant-garde seemed to have withered away along with the global realignment of the end of the Cold War — Mann describes the paradox of a radical tendency that has survived the death of teleology. The death of the avant-garde, as an end to history, is identified with a notion of theory that is abstract, nonreferential, and self-reflexive — an instance of negative totality that lacks any agency but the recuperation of its own failure. This is Mann’s concept of theory death: the devolution of avant-garde agency (in either political or formal terms) that transforms its material practices into an empty and self-confirming discourse — but one that continues as its mode of reproduction nonetheless. The avant-garde dies into theory simultaneously when its political critique turns into an empty circularity of discourse, and when its radical forms are reduced to commodities exchanged in the market and collected by museums. Such a movement away from material practice and toward discourse, in fact, provides the best definition of the avant-garde: “The avant-garde is a vanguard of this reflexive awareness of the fundamental discursive character of art” (6), a discourse derived both from its radical formalism (“as antitraditional art”) and its political tendency (“either an epiphenomenon of bourgeois cultural progress or an authentic revolutionary moment of opposition”). If the avant-garde proceeds by endlessly explaining its practice and fundamentally undermining any explanation, the result is entirely circular: “In the avant-garde art manifests itself entirely as discourse, with nothing residual, nothing left over” (7).
The radical critique of the avant-garde, in other words, both fails and reproduces itself at the instant it becomes a form of discourse: this is the paradox of its theory death. The paradox arises not only from the antinomy of representation (in which radical form congeals in representation and destroys any stability of representation) but from the failure of its theoretical excess as it enters discourse and is recuperated: “The discourse of the death of the avant-garde is the discourse of its recuperation” (14), which it has anticipated from the outset in overstating its case. In thus predicting “the effective complicity of opposition,” the failure of the avant-garde mimics larger historical processes of recuperation of radical politics (even as it offers itself up as an index to them?) in a “fatalism authored by nearly a century of recuperations, utopian movements canceled with depressing, accelerating regularity, new worlds turning old as if with the flick of a dial” (15). The avant-garde stages its “little death” at the end of history in a way that is “theory-total”: it is “the reflection and reproduction of the theoretical exhaustion of autonomy, progress, opposition, innovation” (67). Thus “there is no more crisis; only its exhaustion is critical. What we witness then is a crisis of the end of crisis . . . in which difference can be reproduced but can no longer be different” (115). In this notion of theory as index to the failure of radical tendency, we may see as well the traces of Mann’s moment of critique at the end of the Cold War, with its own theory death of failed utopia at the end of history.
The self-canceling perfection of Mann’s avant-garde posthistoire must account, even so, for an embarrassment: the continuing work of artists and writers who, seemingly unaware of their position, persist in avant-garde practice.4 At the very least, this persistence has led to an immense growth in the world’s inventory of avant-garde art; teleology over and done with, the record of material history may be all that remains of the avant-garde. Here Mann proposes a “second death” of the discursive formation of the avant-garde to account for its material forms: “The avant-garde is completely immersed in a wide range of apparently ancillary phenomena — reviewing, exhibition, appraisal, reproduction, academic analysis, gossip, retrospection — all conceived within and as an economy, a system or field of circulation and exchange that is itself a function of a larger cultural economy” (TD, 7). The avant-garde’s materiality thus represents a self-canceling process of self-perpetuating evaluation and review, a total emptying out of its critical force:
Every manifesto, every exhibition, every review, every monograph, every attempt to take up or tear down the banner of the avant-gardes in the critical arena, every attempt to advance the avant-garde’s claims or to put them to rest: no matter what their ideological strategy or stakes, all end up serving the “white economy” of cultural production.5
So much for the agency of the material text: in Mann’s view its surplus of interpretation, as practice, returns it to an empty “white economy” whose purism is stultifying. The critique of the material text short-circuits its potential for agency, even as it shows how it can never be seen as merely autonomous or self-sufficient: its claims are always discursive.
The irreducible materiality of the avant-garde, of course, may be interpreted in any number of ways: this is its necessary point of entry into discourse. To begin with, avant-garde discourse may be seen as derived from the materiality of its technique, its foregrounding of the material signifier: language, paint, sound as the foundation