The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
of their anaphoric displacement in a discursive form of intertextual predication (where what is referred to is precisely what is being held in common intertextually: it), dissolve toward their collective horizons, both formally and thematically. This social construction accedes to the symbolic insofar as Kristeva’s use of the term, unlike Lacan’s, describes “an always split unification that is produced by a rupture and is impossible without it” (49). In Silliman’s text, it is clear that the primitive sociality of split reference is not lost on him:
11. It is tribal.
12. It is male.
13. It is behavior.
14. It does not conceal.
15. It shares the labor but does not divide it.
16. It could do anything.
17. It is a poem. (L, 14)
The plot of Silliman’s formal allegory — of single sentences suspended within intertextual discourse — is thickening here, moving rapidly beyond the level of formal construction. A reading of a mere seventeen lines begins to bring together both the formal construction and political horizon of the work — revealing a metaleptic discourse (where moments of reference such as “it” can be said to refer only to the entire text) as site of a counterhegemony that breaks down individual boundaries, both of person and of writing.47 The specific attributes of this intertextuality — the poetic as tribal, male, and collective for Silliman — are invoked in an allegory of form that clearly wants to exceed individual authorship.
This intersubjective allegory is also explored in DiPalma’s section. Where Silliman employs an abstract pronoun shifter it to arrive at the horizon of discourse, DiPalma opens his text to many pronouns, focusing on tensions between you and I, with positions along the way for he, she, and everyone. The propositional content of these sentences is, after Jakobson and Emile Benveniste, suspended in the shifting referentiality of pronouns, so that the status of the enounced subject (sujet d’énoncé) of DiPalma’s discourse is indeterminate in relation to its pronominal enunciation (sujet d’énontiation):48
90. The only writing that interests me is my own.
91. I went into the orange grove, half weeping, half laughing, and completely drunk.
92. I give up and lean forward.
93. He liked to warm his brandy over a candle.
94. He had every possible phobia. (L, 38)
Is the subject position of the author represented by the self-reflexivity of “the only writing that interests me is my own,” or is the author revealed in the text of a Kewpie-doll starlet’s Hollywood memoir? The reader is not so gullible, DiPalma seems to say, that she will take at face value the propositional truth of either of these readings. In order to process such an abstracted use of pronouns — as standing in for other people as their textual representations — we must achieve the same horizon of intersubjectivity that is demanded by the strictly linguistic devices Silliman uses (the placeholding it). Both McCaffery’s and Andrews’s sections, while not linguistic allegories in the more technical senses of the first three, undermine the coherence of discourse by means of the incommensurability of sentence-level propositions. Each idiosyncratic sequence of disjunct propositions constructs a one-hundred-line discourse of a kind of social ideolect that draws on exterior, linguistic resources as well as authorial, subjective ones. In McCaffery, a sentence such as “95. One puts the ice cream to one’s bare chest first, then one wonders why” conveys a fascination with potential or indeterminate meaning that adds up to a form of reflexive inquiry:
96. We all thought of writing the i as an I, but then we realized how the one would be two and the other one, one.
97. He’s biting his nails as I continue writing.
98. Heraldry in Montana at the end of his seventieth year, after even the bed-sheets had been fossilized.
99. There was a particular speech from his muscles that he called reading.
100. The endless game was of names, and differences, and placement. (110)
On the other hand, Andrews’s form of textual practice is more outer-directed — an instance of what he has elsewhere called a language-centered “social work.”49 A deliberate undermining of local coherence is formally enacted in the discursive dissonance of his propositional units, as well as in their refusal of sentence boundary, numbered framing, or punctuation. The high degree of propositional irony, or displaced reference, in Andrews becomes a social allegory, as well, as it makes language a counter for a deferred utopia in which negativity is inscribed in the gap opened up in the act of sentence-level positing. Propositions are autonegations in what amounts to an imitation of the thetic break:
Productive practice is SOILED — hence the angels of abstraction
I hope counteracts theatricality
I hope hones in
I hope hinge alterity with self-reference
I hope opposes didacticism in all its forms
even that of nostalgia
I hope exhibits ‘semic Trappism’
What scares me some? (L, 188)
Models of textual practice in the individual sections are collectively organized around a common project: to dismantle the limits and coherence of the authorial subject toward a wider politics. Kristeva herself could not be more in agreement with this strategy. In her “Prolegomenon” to Revolution, she writes: “The capitalist mode of production has stratified language into idiolects and divided it into self-contained, isolated islands — heteroclite spaces existing in different temporal modes (as relics or projections) and oblivious of one another.”50 Avant-garde poetry, for her as well as in Legend, enacts a “signifying practice” that “refuses to identify with the re- 69 the secret history of the equal sign cumbent body subjected to transference onto the analyzer” and which refuses, as well, a Foucauldian discourse that ends up being “a mere depository of thin linguistic layers, an archive of structures, or the testimony of a withdrawn body” (15-16). Its practices enact a “shattering of discourse [that] reveals [how] linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject,” dismantling norms as it “displaces the boundaries of socially established signifying practices” (ibid.). The breaking apart of the unitary subject, of course, is a hallmark of Language School poetics; a wide range of authors in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E assert its centrality, though it can never be enacted, paradoxically, in the monologic discourse of a single author (even if this is at times attempted by both Bernstein and Andrews).51 The “unlimited and unbounded generating process” of signifiance that Kristeva calls for is, therefore, only really possible between subject positions, in a practice of intersubjectivity as well as intertextuality, as we see in the collective poetics of Legend. To account for the Language School’s synthesis of social practice and literary form, a third term is necessary, one that Kristeva develops in terms of the psychoanalytic dynamics of intertextual productivity, seen as an unconscious process as important as Freud’s notions of condensation and displacement:
To these we must add a third “process” — the passage from one sign system to another [that] involves an altering of the thetic position — the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one. . . . The term inter-textuality denotes this transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another; but since this term has often been understood in the banal sense of “study of sources,” we prefer the term transposition because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic — of enunciative and denotative positionality. (RPL, 59–60)
In Legend, the thetic may be defined as the intersection of authorial subject position with sentence-level proposition: a form of positing that performs the thetic break and thus separates the semiotic from the symbolic. While many