The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
a larger cultural poetics. By constructivist aesthetics I mean, broadly put, the imperative in radical literature and art to foreground their formal construction; cultural poetics, discussed below, may be minimally defined as the reflexive relation of artistic form and cultural context. The essays take their primary examples from the work of American modernist and postmodern avant-gardes, contrasting them, on the one hand, with the art and writing of the 1920s Soviet Union and 1990s post-Soviet period, and on the other with aspects of modern and postmodern production that are usually kept outside the bounds of the aesthetic. The essays themselves continue the formal experiment or cultural intervention of their examples in arguing across disciplinary, historical, or generic boundaries, thus continuing the project of construction begun with their prior occasions. In putting this collection together from its separate occasions, my intention is to construct, by means of thematic juxtaposition, theoretical unveiling, and textual reading, a poetics that lays bare the device, in the sense of the Russian Formalists, of more than just the formal organization of the work of art. I seek perhaps not “the gold of time” after André Breton — as if there were a single standard that would endure throughout the ages — but “the currency of history” in relation to the radical formal meanings of the avant-garde. In order to achieve this currency, I alternate in these essays between two distinct aspects of the idea of construction: the principle of formal construction in modernist and postmodern literature and art (with the Russian constructivists, post-Soviet poets and artists, and American avant-gardes, from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to the Language School) and the principle of social construction in modern culture (from unrealized utopian visions to dominant social forms such as Fordism and alternative responses such as Detroit techno).1 The sequence of essays in this book proceeds from essays located firmly in questions of poetics, however much they may contest traditional literary genres, toward contextualist and culturalist approaches to the meaning of radical forms.
My thinking on the question of social construction begins with literary examples from modernist and postmodern avant-gardes, as they reveal a discontinuity that is everywhere implicated in the kinds of cultural agency they pursue. The framing epigraphs from Vladimir Mayakovsky and William Carlos Williams above may give a sense of the literary stakes, historical and present, of this moment. I found both — as indices of larger aesthetic and cultural horizons — to be deeply generative when I first encountered them in the 1970s. “The contraction which is felt,” as a moment of self-negating self-disclosure, occurs as gap or eruption in the discontinuous prose of Williams’s Spring and All, that generic hybrid of poetry and prose which has been rightly seen as an important precursor of Language School aesthetics.2 In that text, Williams is everywhere concerned with the gaps and fissures that make transparent communication both impossible and deeply desirable. Something is turning him away from his instrumental purposes, drawing him back to himself; he insists on finding this gap or fissure in the texture of his thinking:
All this being anterior to technique, that can have only a sequent value; but since all that appears to the senses on a work of art does so through
fixation by
the imagination of the external as well internal means of expression the essential nature of technique or transcription.
Only when this position is reached can life proper be said to begin since only then can a value be affixed to the forms and activities of which it consists.
Only then can the sense of frustration which ends. All composition defeated.
Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding. (As published; 105-6)
Only when these gaps in discourse are realized — literally given as a void between words that is at the same time the “fixation by the imagination” of the world — can we aspire to “technique, that can have only a sequent value”; only then can we begin to construct. The position of poetry in Spring and All is given a precise value by the impossibility of its prose, which aligns with what cannot be said, not only in literature but in modern life itself.
We may contrast Williams’s self-undoing negation with Mayakovsky’s expansive fantasy. “I feel my ‘I’ is much too small for me” is the converse of Williams’s contraction; the expansion of the “I” occurs, even so, as a corollary to the poet as a “cloud in trousers,” a form of self as nonexistence. The source of this nonexistence in Mayakovsky’s futurist period — to begin with, the experience of the adolescent rejection at the hands of Maria, but also the streetwise nihilism of “I never want / to read anything. / Books? / What are books?” — will lead directly to the social command to construct, to social construction. The expansion of Mayakovsky’s “I,” beginning in self-negation, identifies social reality (“books”) with its own undoing, so that the assertion of “I” is a reordering of the world, the necessary precondition for his later, mid-1920s manifesto of constructivist poetics:
What then are the fundamental requirements for beginning poetic labor?
First. The presence in society of a problem which can only conceivably be solved through a work of poetry. A social command. . . .
Second. An exact knowledge of, or more precisely, an exact sense of the wishes of one’s class (or the group one represents) in this matter. . . .
Third. Material. Words. The constant restocking of the storehouses, the granaries of your mind, with all kinds of words, necessary, expressive, rare, invented, renovated, manufactured, and others.
Fourth. Equipment. The business equipment and tools of the trade. Pen, pencil, typewriter, telephone, a suit for visits to the doss-house, a bicycle for riding to editorial offices, a well-arranged table. . . .
Fifth. The skills and methods for processing words, infinitely personal, achieved only after years of daily toil: rhymes, meters, alliterations, images, an inelegant style, pathos, endings, titles, outlines, etc. etc.3
The constructivist moment of Mayakovsky’s undoing at the hands of woman, by which he enters into the nihilistic cloud of futurist aggressivity, stabilizes in this formulation as an equal balance between the material text — which Mayakovsky, ahead of the crowd as usual, sees as not only “words” but also “equipment” and “methods for processing words,” the state of technology in the modernist period in which he wrote — and cultural poetics. To align Williams and Mayakovsky here is thus felicitously reciprocal: we may discern a constructivist necessity in Williams’s valorization of Dada-inspired negativity (which is often only seen as a textual device), and we see as well the sources of social construction in the constitutive negation of the futurist avant-garde. “A wedding between Russia and the United States” — the thought is Williams’s, from the 1940s4 — reorients the negativity of the material text toward its social command: the construction of a future world. Such a fantasy, identified with a reading of American and Soviet examples, occurred frequently among members of the Language School during the formative period of the 1970s, and it continues in the present work’s revisionist inquiry into both historical avant-gardes.
This reciprocity, between self-consciousness and social command, extends from the dual nature of modernism — as a construction within modernity or a construction of it — to questions of methodology, of poetry and criticism. Poetry, like criticism, internalizes social and historical reflexivity within an artistic medium; while criticism, like poetry, is motivated by particular social and historical determinants, as it structures itself within them. What I am calling the constructivist moment is a dual concept that refers to a generative moment in poetics in which a work of literature or art takes shape and unfolds, and the critical valorization of materiality, reflexivity, and constructedness across the arts, from the movement labeled constructivism in the Soviet period up to the present. In this sense, constructivism — the artistic movement defined by Soviet artists of the 1920s like Aleksandr Rodchenko, El Lissitzky, Varvara Stepanova, Iakov Chernikhov, as well as by literary and cinematic constructivists from the same period such as Velimir Khlebnikov, Viktor Shklovsky, Osip Brik, or Dziga Vertov, and as it led on to the formalist abstraction known as international constructivism in the 1930s in the West — may be an important point of departure, but it is not a baseline tradition to which everything refers. The reader is hereby