The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
politics of authorship in a form of collective practice. Legend, collectively written by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery, and Ron Silliman and published by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue in 1980, is located precisely in the place of utopian elsewhere/nowhere invoked by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s discursive formation of authorial subject positions.43 While the journal was immediately recognized as representing an avant-garde tendency in its theoretical distance from literary form, Legend demonstrates new formal possibilities of writing in the dialogic, collective practice of its five authors (fig. 16). The counterhegemonic discourse asserted in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E by virtue of the missing referent of the work (that is, new poetic form) is enacted in Legend in various forms of language-centered textuality — generating a wealth of technical innovations, formal possibilities, and new meanings within a space of reflexive dialogue. If a series of like and unlike author positions are drawn together by the equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Legend’s demonstration of complex modes of writing necessarily entails a riskier, more difficult negotiation of group politics as it enacts the revolution of avant-garde poetry in new and productive forms.
LEGEND’S TEXT
Legend is a text, lots of it — 246 pages, 8½ × 11, in twenty-six unnumbered sections. The work explodes the assumption of monologic authorship, dismantling and reconfiguring it in a series of multiauthored sections, each determined by the capacity of different techniques to construct meaning — in what seems not just an experimental but almost a scientific approach to writing, combining preexisting, improvised, and graphic elements in an open and evolving compositional matrix. In the work as a whole, an overdetermined textuality — literally the free play of the material text — results from the cumulative effect of its diverse array of formal procedures. These can be categorized in groups of single- or multiauthored sections: (i) single-authored statements (one per author, each exactly one hundred lines); (2) texts by two or three authors exploring specific modes of writing arrived at in the process of dialogic improvisation; and (3) a multiauthored collaboration that repeats the total form of the work in its final section. Individual sections may be grouped, as well, as texts whose dominants, or overarching devices, in Jakobson’s sense, are (i) thematic argument; (2) the exploration of the signifying potential of specified linguistic levels: sentence, phrase, lexeme, morpheme, phoneme; (3) the exploration of the signifying potential of graphic signs, both linguistic and nonlinguistic; (4) forms of intertextuality created by mixing modes of signification that suspend authorial intention as they explore the space between subject positions; and (5) dialogic argument.44 While the first three represent areas developed by many authors in the Language School in the period, the last two, implicit or explicit forms of dialogue, are foregrounded in Legend’s textual politics.
16. Cover of Legend (New York: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E/Segue, 1980).
The five single-authored sections (which, though unnumbered, are sections i, 4, 7, 12, and 17 of a total of twenty-six) provide an opening orientation and thematic continuity that the work gradually moves away from, toward a final horizon of collective authorship. Clearly, this formal progression is a political allegory, just as, in Oshima’s film, individual interests bound up in a group dynamic of radical tendency in its centripetal/centrifugal tension may move toward either dissolution or redefinition. In Legend, each author begins from a position of self-presentation identified with one-sentence propositions. Even if there is little of expressive subjectivity here, each author organizes a matrix of statements that bears his own idiosyncratic stamp, a form of legend to each one’s map of potential meaning. Bernstein’s section, “My Life as Monad,” which opens the book, is a de-centered portrait that juxtaposes irreducible units of language (“Nutshells”) with autobiographical accounts: “Transfixed in a dream state between 9 & 10 where I am just about awake & only the power of this dream unreeling in my head keeps my eyes shut as if saying ‘shut up & listen to this’ as I struggle to get up.” Material textuality is at once language as such and autobiographical material in the psychoanalytic sense; the textual processes at work here start to break down the polarity between them. Silliman’s section, the next in the single-authored set, demonstrates the use of monadic sentence units in paratactic series — what he notably theorized at the time as the New Sentence — which work to undermine normative sentence-level autonomy by means of the transgressive use of discursive anaphora.45 Technically put, the NP nodes of Silliman’s sentences are occupied by the pronoun shifter it, which anaphorically shifts reference from the NP position by virtue of the indeterminate propositional content of the S node to the next linguistic level, discourse. I am arguing here that the referentiality of the pronoun it depends on its position within discourse, aligning with the indeterminate topic of Silliman’s poem, an “it” that is collectively held in common by members of the group, as well as at the sentence level. It becomes the topic of a discourse of one hundred sentences, referring to an emerging, collaborative product being constructed out of discrete prepositional units, in other words, the work as a whole (fig. 17). These are the first ten:
17. From Legend, section 4 (Sillirnan).
1. It is a five-pointed star in three dimensional space.
2. It is words.
3. It is a group, not a series.
4. It is the end of atomization.
5. It is deliberate.
6. It is the product of labor.
7. It is correspondence.
8. It is New York, Toronto and San Francisco.
9. It seeks the post-referential.
10. It dissolves the individual. (L, 14)
The work’s attributes, it turns out, construct a form of predication not specified by the unit structures of the New Sentence. In seeking the post-referential and dissolving the individual, they move toward a horizon of intertextuality that assumes, in a terminology that Kristeva derives from Edmund Husserl, a positing of the sentence as a unit of meaning she calls the “thetic.”46 In Kristeva’s account, to achieve signification and ultimately enter into the symbolic (the order of language), the subject must separate itself from its object in the act of positing in what she calls the “thetic break,” bringing it into contact with the pre-Oedipal traces of the semiotic. Linguistic propositions are formed in the moment of the thetic break, which is associated with two moments in the formation of the ego: the Lacanian mirror stage, and the realization of the threat of castration. In a thumbnail sketch of these dynamics, “The gap between the imaged ego and drive motility, between the mother and the demand made on her, is precisely the break that establishes what Lacan calls the place of the Other as the place of the ‘signifier’ ” (48). Silliman’s use of the pronoun it occurs precisely at this intersection of propositional content and psychoanalytic form. The signifer it appears at the place of a gap in signification; it does not refer to any object, but rather opens up a gap in reference that is then displaced onto discourse as a whole. For Kristeva, this movement to intersubjectivity is a primary instance of the sociality of ego formation: “The subject is hidden ‘by an ever purer signifier,’ ” which may be identified as Silliman’s it, and “this want-to-be confers on an other the role of containing the possibility of signification” (ibid.). The thetic break (here the displaced anaphora of it) in the act of positing (which we may identify with the New Sentence in Silliman’s oeuvre, as well as with the sentence form in this example) marks “the threshold between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic” (ibid.).
Just as intertextuality