The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
with its imitation of her most famous concept, the maternal chora — the traces of embodied, pre-Oedipal subjectivity to be found in the sensory, affective, and proprioceptive substrate of language (and nearly everywhere in poetry) — Legend’s intertextuality is dialectical and suprasubjective, not simply a form of mimesis. How, then, do the mechanics of Kristeva’s transposition become a process of the unconscious? The merely exterior dimen sions of intertextuality, a mixing of sign systems from incommensurate social positions (as in V. N. Voloshinov’s notion of material ideology), does not account for the transformative claims made for it.52
Kristeva’s concept of the chora, in fact, has come in for some justifiable skepticism from certain critics. For John Brenkman, the chora is a retrospective construction, a kind of analytic artifact, that is of dubious use in specifying a position for the pre-Oedipal mother.53 While the somatic and graphic explorations of signs and language below the level of the meaning-bearing components (discourse, sentence, morpheme, phoneme) of Legend seem to invoke the chora, even to represent it directly, the dialectic of transposition in Kristevan intertextuality organizes unconscious processes in a different way. Kristeva’s thetic break, in this sense, constitutes the dialectic between symbolic and semiotic as a form of negativity that testifies to incomplete Oedipalization in the mirror stage. Thus the semiotic is a kind of leftover stratum of memory and affect that depends on the positing of the thetic as a propositional content that aligns with a given subject position; it is really only representable, for Kristeva, through a process that she calls the “second-order thetic” (RPL, 69). The payoff for identity politics, as well as for the dubious alternative of a nonidentity politics, would be that there is no construction of identity that does not, at the same moment, involve the somatic incommensurability of the semiotic. In giving voice to levels of language not organized by this positing of meaning, or within a single subject position, Legend allows us to see how unconscious processes work, at a linguistic level, to destabilize and reconfigure positionality. The range of techniques to produce this effect here is truly impressive and involves all levels of language in the traditional sense, as well as intersubjective dialogue and nonlinguistic signification. This shattering of the positing subject creates a space of negativity that may be identified with the utopian possibility of language, an opening of unconscious processes in language that evokes the necessary conditions for the repositioning of subjects in a form of community. Legend’s utopian community, then, starts with the dismantling of the thetic or positing subject position and ends in an intersubjective horizon that is realized in a form of multiauthorship.
The twenty-one multiauthored sections of Legend are carefully apportioned to its five authors. There are ten two-authored sections and an equal number of three-authored sections; no four-authored sections (because in that case one author would be left out?); and a final five-authored section that ends the work. While there are far too many devices to describe here, let alone to theorize, a quick account of the two-authored sections reveals a wide range of strategies at work. The first two-authored section (Silliman, DiPalma) constructs a kind of synthetic, atemporal chronology out of different series of dates (as well as different levels of interpretation). Some of these dates are world-historical, inescapable, and literary; others recondite, elusive, and coded. So in the last series of the section, we have dates for the closing of Black Mountain College, the Objectivist issue of Poetry, and the publication of On the Road, along with “1970 Communism in May, Buffalo, abortion, divorce” and “1926 Patricia Tansley, the second daughter, is born,” from Silliman’s autobiography. The authors are writing themselves into literary history, here, in a transgressively unlikely but actually efficacious way. The use of disjunctive series of referents, both public and private, as well as the violation of universal chronology, creates an aura of transgression as overarching affect if not semiotic chora (though Silliman’s mother is invoked). In section 5 (Andrews, Bernstein), intertextuality is spatialized and disordered in an improvised composition by field that shatters boundaries between subject positions (fig. 18). The location of the positing subject, here, is suspended in textual effects, some of which are derived from alienating social introjects (“an entire / superstructure of distinct and / peculiarly formed sentiments”) and others from logically contradictory or even physically impossible propositions (“it was as though I were trying to make an actual wetness / apart from water itself”). Section 6 (McCaffery, Silliman) cites both a vocabulary of one-syllable words and transcribed terms from ethnographic writing; this juxtaposition is brought together by means of nonlinguistic visual devices but is also framed by a well-known paragraph from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire (fig. 19). An argument between two accounts of cultural politics occurs in a space created by the juxtaposition of Marxism and anthropology: “revolution / long / decayed” abuts its non-Western other in “Show your mother that tjurunga,” leading to a provisional conclusion: “Opoyaz, a popular front / is not a united one.” Opoyaz, the acronym of the Russian Formalists’ group in Petersburg, becomes a hinge between tribal ethnography and social revolution, combining both as a cult of masculine authorship that claims world-historical meaning. Language itself occurs in the place of the thetic break separating the symbolic (references to Marx and revolution) from the semiotic (opaque ethnographic terms).
Section 8 (DiPalma, Andrews) expands the domain of intertextuality to include word and image; against a series of popular illustrations likely taken by DiPalma from turn-of-the-century French pulp literature, Andrews constructs syntactical relations at the level of word and phrase within an open-field compositional matrix (fig. 20). The compactness of the image here becomes not a normative prototype but a moment of excess, while the visual disjunction of Andrews’s text identifies the horizon of the symbolic order with the mechanics of signification itself. Such a split positing of image and text creates a semantic field in which semiotic and symbolic elements augment, undermine, and interpret each other. A similar poetics of reciprocal interpretation, where transparency and opacity are seen simultaneously enhancing and destabilizing, is evident in section 9 (Andrews, Silliman (fig. 21). Where Andrews provides phrases and sentences that have the effect of a proposition (“Only measurements are clear”), Silliman counters by interpreting these statements at another textual level:
18. From Legend, section 5 (Bernstein, Andrews).
19. From Legend, section 6 (McCaffery, Silliman).
Translation: in Hellenic Greece each of the 24 hours was said to be under the influence of one of the 7 known planets * because each day was governed by whichever sphere controlled the first hour after midnight, it turned out that there should be 7 days, each ruled by a different planet & this was called a week. (L, 69)
Silliman’s “translation” implies that latent in the seeming neutrality of objective measurement lies the contingency of culture; he appears at pains throughout to find cultural referents for the neutral, pseudo-objective, and often theoretical language Andrews uses:
20. From Legend, section 8 (DiPalma, Andrews).
25. Structure is a game of presences re-inserting themselves pointedly into bad dreams
Translation: Morbius, the philologist, is the lone survivor of the initial expedition to the planet Altair 4, played by Walter Pidgeon * when a rescue mission arrives (whose members include Jack Kelly (the guy in Maverick who is not Jim Garner) and Earl “Police Woman” Holliman), old Morby unleashes the monsters of his Id, empowered by the non-physical cognitive capacities of the lost civilization of the Krel, compliments