The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
electronic music for its score * Academy Award for special effects (71)
It is not clear which is the more accurate index to the id, here — Andrews’s send-up of Kristevan semiosis, or Silliman’s camping on the paradigmatic 1950s Cold War B movie Forbidden Planet. The interpretive delights of this passage are many, bridging as it does the structure of the written text with an unconscious elsewhere of collective desire.
Many of the dual-voiced strategies, as in the Andrews/Silliman section, seem to be conscious of their own theory death — and making fun of it. If this were the bottom line of Legend’s effort to create transpositional or intersubjective discourse, we would be left with only an intellectual game (along the lines of the more mechanical efforts of the French OuLiPo, perhaps), enjoying the pleasure of the text but with the integrity of our subject positions nonetheless intact. There is an important range of effects in Legend, however, in which unconscious processes are registered beyond the level of such textual jokes. In a number of the sections that focus on graphic devices, weird congruences are invoked that, in their semiotic materiality, refuse symbolization. A dialectic between fragmented minus signs and bounded shapes, for instance, explodes the logic of propositions in section 13 (Andrews, DiPalma, McCaffery). A similar dialectic between word and graphic trace appears in section 25 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery). In section 15 (Bernstein, DiPalma, Andrews), words themselves are graphemic in their deployment on the page (fig. 22). Material textuality, organized spatially while foregrounded as nonlinguistic, breaks down the meaning-bearing elements of language into graphic signs in sections 17 (McCaffery, Bernstein [fig. 23]), 18 (McCaffery, Bernstein, DiPalma), 21 (DiPalma, McCaffery), and 22 (Silliman, Andrews, Bernstein). These sections, in fact, place Legend in relation to concrete poetry, an intertext that recalls the problematic characterization of Kristeva’s chora as mimetic (as she writes, “mimesis is, precisely, the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude”).54 Rather, what is important here is the way nonlinguistic elements interact with meaning-bearing ones to unleash primary processes of semiosis in language. For instance, section 20 (Andrews, McCaffery) uses the device of Andrews’s handwriting to graphically construct a nonsensical mathematical notation that Lacan would have admired for its Witz. The equal signs of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E return, here, but with the added surplus of Andrews’s artful handwriting to indicate not only that reference and predication are nonidentical, but that their positing will never fully be symbolic insofar as they are materially embodied as texts (fig. 24). Likewise, in section 24 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery), McCaffery’s messier handwriting is used to cancel out a list of authors/geniuses/peers (nearly all of them men) to be found on a contemporary language poet’s bookshelf. Authorship becomes a form of self-canceling once again as latent motives of narcissistic aggression surface (fig. 25).
21. From Legend, section 9 (Andrews, Silliman).
22. From Legend, section 15 (Bernstein, DiPalma, Andrews).
23. From Legend, section 17 (McCaffery, Bernstein).
This dismantling of boundaries between self and other creates textual conditions for the overcoming of authorial positionality in Legend. Finally, sections where the interpersonal dimensions of this particular multiauthored collective are invoked present the most revealing interface between text and unconscious. This community, while partaking of Bernstein’s universalist proposal for “a more general, non-writing-centered, activity — namely, the investigation and articulation of humanness” — also occurs at the specific social moment Silliman describes: “That coming together of which this poem is the figure (five men in three cities using correspondence and discussion) is the legendary refusal [of the poets] to be banished [in The Republic].” Prohibition and “coming together” in a form of jouissance are here being explicitly linked. Even so, it is still surprising, more than twenty years after its publication, to find the high correlation of language with masculine sexual codes in Legend. Connotations sneaked in at the level of the word or phrase (“The dick is a housebuoy”; “We long to hold the butter in our mouths”; “Our gonads are an icon”) are also explicitly presented, as in section 11 (Bernstein, Silliman, McCaffery):
24. From Legend, section 20 (Andrews, McCaffery).
25. From Legend, section 24 (Andrews, Silliman, McCaffery).
Only what’s in a name?
Well, actually. A lot. especially in three I know. Dick for instance is short. for Richard and Richard. who I know is not. that short he writes short. stories. about. a man with a short. “dick” who claims that Dick is. not only short for. Richard but also just short. (for ridiculous). One Dick I know is really pretty. ridiculous and actually used. to call Bill, Billy, Dick Dick. in England is short. for detective but not a short detective. in England there are not short detectives but in my home. town there was a detective. inspector Melville Short (104)
As we say in school, this is self-evident. A “dick” has got to be “short,” but the fantasies associated with it go on and on. The pun here is hardly repressed at the level of content. This level of exploration of homosocial effects, aligning the Great Conversation of authorship with the Platonic erotics it inscribes, is avowed by Silliman in a remarkable dialogue with Bernstein that takes center stage in Legend’s construction of community:
[Silliman]: phallus is the first division (I want a poem as real as a lemon) & is the origin of instinct of which (this) writing is an acting out or objectification. . . . That coming together of which orgasm is the figure is the full word. Plato banished us in order to begin the draining of the word (as one would a swamp over which to build tract housing). . . . Your distrust of my use of the word phallic is one of its existence within a language of empty words in which it is now connected with the merely masculine and thus with all historic forms of oppression (women were banished long before poets). . . . I want people who happen to read the poem this is to understand that we were thoroughly aware of them when we wrote it, that we are five heterosexual men who habitually use the word love to describe our relationship to one another. That that coming together of which their reading this poem is the figure is phallic, the negation of banishment. . . . It is informed by our love for each other. (126-27)
For Silliman, as for Lacan, the phallus is both “the first division” into the symbolic order of gender and the “negation of banishment,” or the refusal of castration. Bernstein’s reply to Silliman (“ — oh, ron, silly person”) distances him from the latter’s vulnerable phallogocentrism — likely the theory death itself of the masculinist self-assertion of banished poets in the postmodern period, from Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg. Bernstein’s reply sees the problem of masculinity not as banishment (or castration) but as its excesses of power (“now so charged with so much oppressiveness [after so much political and literary abuse]”). Along the way to this reasonable (symbolic) response, however, he takes a turn toward a pre-Oedipal moment of the semiotic in a way that may be seen as a defense:
[Bernstein]: so what we have is a phallic that encompasses men