The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
One reason for Kristeva’s inability to develop a more thorough account of avant-garde poetics, this response suggests, is her shortsightedness regarding her literary examples. Although she wrote Revolution in Poetic Language immediately after a historical period in which many literary works that exemplified her notion of text were produced, her examples are canonically author centered, even in their reliance on avant-garde figures such as Lautréamont and Mallarmé, and thus do not fully respond to the cultural challenge to authority and subjectivity of May 1968 (she defended her thesis in 1973).31 As a direct consequence of May 1968, Kristeva’s theoretical account of authorial subjectivity depends on a breaking down of ego boundaries within a larger social matrix: “The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process and he appears only as a signifying practice, that is, only when he is absent within the position out of which social, historical, and signifying activity unfolds” (RPL, 215). In preserving authorship, however, her literary examples distribute this shattering of the ego in a double movement of analysis: she constructs a poetics of modernist autonomy as constituted by the heterogeneous but that only retrospectively (at the moment of its death?) opens up to it. So Lautréamont’s poetry can “be understood as [a] heterogeneous practice [of] the positing of the unary [sic] subject, and, through this unity, an exploration of the semiotic operation that moves through it” (218). Kristeva’s poetics of revolution thus falls short in not moving from autonomous form, however riven by the semiotic, to a development of multiauthored discourse as the necessary consequence of subject formation at a revolutionary moment: a suprasubjective subjectivity, a subject position that, even if impossible, embraces totality. Rather, it has led in its feminist reception to a poetics that contrasts the pre-Oedipal use of language by women experimental writers to the Oedipal reproduction of the masculinist canon.
An opposite account of the relation of subject to totality is given in Michel Foucault’s notion of discursive formation. As developed in The Archaeology of Knowledge (written at the same time as the events of May 1968 and published in 1969),32 Foucault’s concept of suprasubjective discourse, which also partly originates in avant-garde practice, has proven productive not only for the epistemic methods of New Historicism but for the continued tradition of ideology criticism in the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Slavoj Žižek, and Judith Butler. Foucault’s key concept of discursive formation begins by severing teleology from totality, via a Nietzschean reading of the destructive gaps and fissures that open up in positive history, and then goes on to construct a notion of discourse from relations of “regularity in dispersion” that will later become important for Laclau and Mouffe.33 In his undoing of the unitary form of both subject and object, Foucault begins with a literary example: “The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse” (AK, 23). The constructivist moment, rather than any theory death, occurs in the discursive opening up of the form of the object. The relation between object and the discourse that constructs it, in turn, can only be known in terms of an order or series of objects, in a movement from a privileged object to objects in a series or held together in a group. On analogy to the segmented discourse of structural linguistics (the notion, from Roman Jakobson and others, of a speech chain made up of a series of equivalent syntactical units, and which is foregrounded in poetry),34 Foucault’s discursive formation is a mode of organization of non-self-identical objects/subjects within an overdetermined field that is not founded by a presumed underlying regularity — but that, in the fact of relation, achieves it:
Two objects, or two types of enunciation, or two concepts may appear, in the same discursive formation, without being able to enter — under pain of manifest contradiction or inconsequence — the same series of statements. They are then characterized as points of equivalence: the two incompatible elements are formed in the same way and on the basis of the same rules; the conditions of their appearance are identical; they are situated at the same level; and instead of constituting a mere defect of coherence, they form an alternative. . . . They are characterized as link points of systematization: on the basis of each of these equivalent, yet incompatible elements, a coherent series of objects, forms of statement, and concepts has been derived (with, in each series, possible new points of incompatibility). (AK, 65–66)
At the same time, the notion of equivalence accounts for relations of similarity (based on resemblance) and contiguity (based on discursive proximity rather than essential likeness) in establishing an overdetermined field, which is thereby held together in a form of “regularity in dispersion.” This notion of equivalence is given important political interpretation in Laclau and Mouffe’s account of hegemony, but with the addition of a concept of social antagonism that gives the discursive formation its unity.35 Later, Žižek will call for a “going beyond” of discourse analysis in developing this concept of antagonism.36
Returning to literature, I want to pursue how a Foucauldian notion of equivalence suggests ways of moving from literary autonomy, of both book and author, toward a form of regularity in dispersion that may better account for the suprasubjectivity of avant-garde tendencies in relation to the impossible, even self-destructive, revolutionary subject positions that are its model. We may imagine that members of Oshima’s radical group are held together, in their conflicting interests, by virtue of just such a notion of equivalence, which refuses to surrender unlikeness and difference but that is articulated against an antagonistic other — the form of discursive hegemony (the U.S.-Japan Friendship Treaty) that they are opposing and which unites them in negative solidarity. The centripetal tendency of the group, its capacity for staying together, is a result of its elements’ overdetermination — the jouissance of forcing like and unlike together in the same series. Its centrifugal tendency (toward dispersion and history, the theory death that will make it only an example in the textbook of revolutionary politics) is its failure to hold together fundamentally opposed interests. (If this account is true, revolutionary politics will always end as temporarily sutured interests come apart, and by the same token may occur again and again, even after their theoretical death in 1989, because there will always be hegemonic forms of state power that cannot suture opposed interests.)
But what of the avant-garde? The analogy of the equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Foucault’s notion of equivalence should be obvious: in uniting a series of like and unlike individual letters together, the logo of the Language School’s first theoretical journal performs its “organized violence on language,” constructing equivalence as a regularity in dispersion, in its nomination of an avant-garde tendency.37 (L is in fact not identical to A, except that both are letters; if they were truly identical, rather than discursively equivalent, we could not speak, or we could only say one thing: “L,” for example, or “A” — a transposition of Hegel’s refutation of identity into a text in which all letters say the same thing.) And L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E did indeed bring together a more disparate array of avant-garde writing (even if unified by techniques that privilege the letter or the material sign) than could be seen as expressing a single aesthetic position. Such a juxtaposition of like and unlike, however, does not simply release the name into a form of textual productivity, but provides a basis for the overdetermination of a discursive formation. This is evident in the form of the journal itself: due to considerations of space, but also to highlight the work’s ephemerality, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E presented authorial subject positions in the abbreviated, segmented form of short statements and notes, juxtaposed within the journal’s overarching form. This construction of a series of equivalent subject/objects was undertaken, as well, not only in the total form of the journal but in many of its categorical subgroups: features on individual authors; bibliographies of literary magazines; forums on selected political or literary topics, and so on. The emergence of something like a postmodern library science appears, for instance, in editor Bruce Andrews’s compilation of current “Articles,” “a Catalog/Bibliography of recent articles on language and related aesthetic and social issues, from 54 journals: Part One” (no. 3, June 1978), or in a forum on “Non-Poetry” where “a number of writers were asked to list or briefly discuss non-poetry books read