The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
language, that it is spoken among a many, emerges. in the beginning was one & we can remember it by looking inside ourselves, into (back to) our self-sameness. & the language of us is the body of this one. the conditions, now multiple. apart but a part. tongues wagging, a world of babble, cannot move us to forget. it’s to get a view of it: no ‘pre’-human unity (no myth) is wanted. in the beginning was silence: no ear, nothing to hear. in here we hear. the words are the scent of our usness. (127)
The phallic is not imposed (by division) but recovered through an intense introspection, back through memory traces that refuse phallic organization to a primal, originary moment. In refusing phallic division, and thus castration, Bernstein’s reflective fantasy links self-consciousness to a moment of the primal androgyne, in which a condition of non–self-division, thus of bodily wholeness not separated from the mother (“a phallic that encompasses men & women?”) is divided, leading to “language, that it is spoken among a many,” figured as “tongues wagging, a world of babble.” The penetrability that Silliman must avow as the basis for homosocial community, an opening up of defenses in the face of otherness as aggression, is one way of moving, in a form of transgressive violence, away from the stability of subject position. Bernstein’s response, recovering the semiotic traces of the body before phallic division, is another. In bringing both together in its construction of community, Legend gives a particular value to the equal signs that construct the discursive formation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E: homosocial equivalence and the refusal of castration are linked in the construction of authorship, predicating a binding affect of love that is overdetermined as a defense against the violence of the symbolic order, replacing it with the less threatening aggressivity of pre-Oedipal narcissism.55 What is authorship, we may ask, but a social construction in defense of the narcissistic self? It is from this imperative, not to perish at the thought of an other, that all utopian fantasies are built. Legend stages the undoing of its utopia even as it is being constructed.
MULTIAUTHORS (M)
Legend invokes revolutionary subjectivity in shattering the bourgeois ego through its form of homosocial wish: the secret history of the equal signs in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Revolutionary subjectivity, a traumatic experience of negative totality in historical crisis that cannot be represented, is thereby held in common as it is displaced in containable aggressivity as a form of cultural praxis. It is this processing of the traumatic rupture of cultural revolution (as with the events of 1968, in both the United States and Europe) that motivates an approach to Legend through Foucault and Kristeva. The events of 1968 are arguably a common motivation for both The Archaeology of Knowledge and Revolution in Poetic Language, with Foucault fashioning forms of containment for suprasubjectivity in discourse, and Kristeva arguing for the psychological necessity, as well as cultural importance, of a puissance that will not be called to account by Oedipal law. The fantasmatic structures of both theoretical works and their relevance to the writing of the Language School in the 1970s suggest an unstable politics of narcissistic exchanges, much like that of Oshima’s radical group, as it forms itself and comes apart under pressure, in a politics staged in relation to oppressive hegemony and enacted in its undoing as historical trauma. Trauma, the inexpressible terror of revolution itself, is exteriorized by Foucault as the subject is displaced toward a social logic of subject position; it is interiorized for Kristeva in the thetic break as a primal scene of signification, which registers an implicitly social motivation. For her, in this way, the “signifier/signified transformation, constitutive of language,” is “indebted to, induced, and imposed by the social realm.”56
Evidence of social motives, especially cultural revolutionary ones, for linguistic transformation, of course, are everywhere in Legend. When I asked Silliman about the meaning of the nonsense (or non-English) phrase “skem dettliata,” which immediately precedes his intensely homosocial dialogue with Bernstein, he offered this account:
In 1972, [a friend] & I visited my brother’s first neo-Christian commune up in the Petaluma area. In those days, the core event in group life was an evening meeting in which people “were given to speak,” tho we noted that only men ever did so and that there seemed to be much jockeying for position in what was said. . . . Speaking in tongues, glossolalia, was also a major element of the evening meeting. That phrase was the basic first riff of virtually every instance of it that we heard. It’s my literal transcription thereof. (Personal communication)
The eruption of the semiotic constructs a community of men “jockeying for position in what was said,” exactly the moment articulated, vertiginously, in dialogue with Bernstein. If the intersubjective poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E provides a formal homology to Foucauldian discourse, Legend demonstrates, in a deeply motivated way, the nature of poetic language in Kristeva’s account, even as it argues for three important correctives. First, in Legend the negativity of poetic language is not simply a matter of the eruption of primary process not subordinated to Oedipal law, but is the unstable relation of the narcissistic ego in a form of undoing in another. For the writers of Legend, homosociality is constitutive of their imagined community to the degree that it is based on a revolutionary wish: that the other will be the same as me, even as the “other” threatens “me” as an imaginary unity.57 This narcissistic undoing in the other will come to take the place of what Zizek, following Laclau and Mouffe, has described as antagonism, the sublime object of ideological fantasy — but only when it has been discursively stabilized, as it has not yet been in Legend.58 Antagonism, in any case, must be taken into account in any construction of a discursive formation. Second, Kristeva’s evidence of a split between symbolic and semiotic before the thetic break is given in the works of individual authors; as a result, their uses of literary form (even hybrid ones such as Lautréamont’s Poésies) may be too easily assimilated to the moment of imaginary positing in the thetic. To more accurately account for the relations of linguistic transformation to the social realm, revolutionary poetic language’s more important characteristic is its synthesis of intertextuality and intersubjectivity, which ought to have been developed in the canonical French authors Kristeva discusses. The modernist autonomy of literary form, as has been noted, places restrictions on Kristeva’s cultural critique.59 Third, the subject of discourse and intertextuality enacted in Legend is exclusively masculine, and this is reflected as well in the theoretical accounts brought to it here. There is no place for gender in the early stages of Foucault’s career, while Kristeva’s positioning of the pre-Oedipal and “phallic” mothers still depends on a masculine subject for whom, “as the addressee of every demand[, the mother’s] replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in fact, the phallus.”60
In Legend, it is evident, narcissism is not stabilized in feminine alterity; there is no position for woman. This lack of position for women (not even woman as lack) certainly qualifies Legends achievement of poetic language as collective discourse and exemplifies the sociality of what Kristeva calls, invoking Freud’s Totem and Taboo, a linguistic “phratry.”61 On the other hand, Legend is an important work — one of the dozen or so texts of the Language School in its formative period that may be read as a historical example. And its authors, from Silliman’s testimony and its centrality in the text, certainly knew what they were doing in constructing an imaginary community of male bonding. Beyond enacting a revolutionary subjectivity brought into collective relation by means of a homosocial wish, Legend can also be read as a wild and transgressive critique of the homosociality of culture, from Plato to Harold Bloom, in a form that is deliberately scripted as inadmissible to the Great Conversation, and that wears its banishment on its sleeve. But in order for Legend to be read — even more, in order for poetic language in the form of radical textuality to claim a viable politics — a significant negative reaction to the avant-garde among cultural critics, after three waves of feminism, must be acknowledged. One may even go so far as to say that Legend reveals, in almost pure form, the revolutionary masculinism that gave first-wave feminism its point of departure in the 1960s and 1970s, the widely resented incoherence of the New Left’s politics of gender.
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