The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
the name, the editors provided this account of the relation between the name of the journal and that which it represents:
If we’re talking about the work we focused on in editing L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, let’s first explode any notion of collective self-designation. Beyond a labelling tag, what could it possibly (and precisely) consist of? No single origin or destination or dominant style or ideology marks this diverse body of radical, or radial eccentricities. And its very heterogeneity, its swirl of concerns, is what gives it some insurance against a reductionist reception. . . . That kind of reception involves a taming, a domestication, a shoring up of the old walls (however flashily ornamented by a tokenism of the new, a kind of repressive desublimation). Any reading of this kind of poetry, however, would build some wedges against its smooth assimilation as just another addendum to the 20th century curriculum.18
In their account, the name stands as an arbitrary sign (in the Saussurean sense) for an unrepresentable “swirl of concerns”; this is an antifoundationalist, even antinomian, claim. This tendency toward an antinomian, antidefinitional poetics, opening on a permanent instability of reference, was immediately recuperated in the initial academic reception of language writing when critics Marjorie Perloff and Jerome McGann each used the name of the journal, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, as a definitional term for “language poets” and “language writing,” “so-called”19 — an act repudiated by six writers on the West Coast in the tendency who did not feel adequately represented by the journal’s name.20 In Ross’s early critique, on the other hand, the material texts and networks, rather than the name, of the Language School are used to define it.21 At the very least, a politics of naming and being named has been central to its history, in at least three senses: in the development of its characteristic genres, in the emergence of its supporting theory, and in a permanent crisis of representation throughout its reception. Such a permanent crisis — and its capacity to continue spinning out a “swirl of concerns” — is precisely what Mann means when he says the avant-garde foregrounds “the fundamentally discursive character of art.”
Mann’s notion of theory death, then, occurred early in the history of language writing, beginning with the negative referentiality of the journal’s dispersed name and its relation to the emerging movement. What resulted has been a series of historical conflicts between the tendency and its names, between definitional terms like language-centered writing/language poet/language writing and proper names like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, indicating a dialectic of theory and practice that continues to evolve. The conflict over names based on language denotes, as well, not simply a kind of writing but a social formation, not just an aesthetic tendency but a group of writers split between its two major urban centers, San Francisco and New York, that gives a historical context for the displaced names of its theory death.22 Both cities had witnessed avant-garde formations in immediately preceding periods, with the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York School, and conflict remains over questions of cultural legitimacy and the avant-garde, as located either in the metropolitan center or on the marginalized coast.23 There is thus a way in which language takes on a supplementary value in terms of the tendency’s divided social formation as a kind of placeless place, one of utopian fantasy and negative address from which, it may have been hoped, the work would emerge.24 This movement, of naming and canceling the name, is not simply one of definition (of a specific method, technique, or style) but of a discursive formation — and it is here that Mann’s notion of theory death suggests a larger cultural poetics, not merely a stylistic tendency, emerging from the centripetal and centrifugal tensions of the school that was “made to be broken.”25
Andrews and Bernstein, when questioned by Ross, propose first and foremost a question of word meaning as a counter to the inevitable theory death of academic reception. The fact that we cannot say what “language writing” is ought to force us to reconsider the conceptual framework (the conventional history of the avant-garde, for example) in which it is used. The referential indeterminacy of the material text is the primary guarantee of a politics of new meaning that resists its recuperation, as it generates considerations of new meaning itself in its own counterdiscourse. My own response to this question in the interview with Ross published in the same forum, on the other hand, focused on the relation of the name to the social formation of the group of writers being named — a historical rather than a definitional account of oppositional discourse. I likened the tension over the name of the group to the politics of the formation and dissolution of a group of anti-American student radicals in Nagisa Oshima’s film Night and Fog in Japan (1960). The film is a tragic history and psychological study of a radical group that placed itself at the margins of society, a micropolitics of the breakdown of oppositional consensus:
The form of belief that held together, violently, such a group of variously motivated individuals is, at the moment of its transformation, rendered objective — and at the same time the belief fails. Clearly individuals might continue to hold some of their collective beliefs . . . but the form of the group itself cannot survive objectification. It turns out that all along none of its members really understood what it was they were saying, even though it was said repetitiously and at length — in all-night discussions of political theory, in slogans at the barricades, and in tracts on revolutionary justice — while given meaning by the provocation of the group’s enemies outside. The centripetal movement of the group had revolved around a hollow center — as long as there was force and resistance to keep it in motion. This is very like the process of collective idea-formation in the arts.26
Here, I am describing a dynamic of collective identity formation at a specific historical moment, one in which participants in a radical group are held together, in spite of their internal disagreements, in a form of negative solidarity in opposition to a common foe. What appears as the belief that holds the group together turns out to be, in fact, merely provisional. When the competitive tensions among the group lead to its inevitable undoing, one may ask, does its belief or the political moment cease to exist or have meaning?
There was indeed “a collectively held set of beliefs, and an absolute recognition of them,” among the poets who came together in the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. These beliefs give meaning to the name Language School as it confers a historical status on the forms that were developed and used by writers in that group — but only after the initial moment of theory death in the naming of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. These forms of writing were as much discursive as authorial, both in shared assumptions of individual practice and in the counterinstitutions of publication, distribution, reviewing, and criticism that developed with the school’s emergence. In turn, these counterinstitutions, and the examples of cultural practice they provide, are historical; we may find in a politics of language that writes its own theory death the prescience of a historical reflexivity equally articulated in such real-time politics as alternative publishing and the Poetics Listserv. In what follows, I want to develop a fuller account of the politics of the name, signified by the equal signs separating the letters of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, for the Language School’s continuing development, seen as a combination of textual materiality and cultural discourse.
POSTREVOLUTIONARY POETICS
To look for historical support — much needed in a post-theory death environment — for the importance of the avant-garde for cultural politics, one place to start is Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language.27 In its reception, Kristeva’s thèse d’état has been valued for its derivation, after Jacques Lacan, of the material poetics of the semiotic, composed of the unintegrated remnants of the body in pieces at the moment of ego formation in the imaginary. Kristeva’s dialectic of semiotic and symbolic was equally informed by the literary currents of the 1960s in avant-garde critical journals such as Tel Quel, which saw the emergence of new genres of literary form as well as the reception of the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin.28 But although Kristeva made central use of examples of the historical avant-garde, from Mallarmé to Joyce, in her account of literary semiosis, few critics have followed her lead by extending her discussion to include the contemporary, avant-garde.29 While Kristeva’s work has been widely used by feminist critics, her privileging of examples