The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
of constructivism, Soviet or otherwise. There are many constructivist moments focused on here, from the opening discussion of poetry written by means of preconstructed lexicons to the concluding critique of Stan Douglas’s photographs of dystopian Detroit. My use of the concept then is heuristic as well as historical: indeed, the formal model of the example, which I develop as a central element of my discussion of constructivism, captures the general theoretical interest and specific historical reference of such moments, which function as examples as they provide sites for reflection and models for agency.
The constructivist moment thus combines the generative unfolding of a poetics with the imperative for critical interpretation: just as the work of art is constructed, so our interpretation of it must necessarily be a construction. As a concept, the constructivist moment is informed by the historical experience of social construction (Lissitzky’s design work for the 1930s propaganda journal USSR in Construction comes to mind),5 just as it depends on the way that meaning is constructed through retrospective determination or Nachträglichkeit (Freud’s generative paper “Constructions in Analysis” is the reference here).6 We may continue from this modernist point of departure to Foucault and consider the ways in which individuals, authors, or subject positions are constructed by social discourses, and the ways in which institutions provide the terms by which we construct meanings. The fate of poetics as it confronts these latter forms of construction, which are not as amenable to a homology between aesthetics and politics as a critique, is one of the crucial concerns of the present work. The concept of construction, in the modernist senses of Lissitzky or Freud, is too generative of new meaning or historical insight to allow it merely to lapse into the horizons of institutional frameworks for construction, as postmodern as their origins may be — in which what we can think or do is limited by the social texts or cultural discourses we are positioned within. At the same time, a poetic model for construction must take into account the formal structures ascribable to institutions, just as institutions must make room for forms of agency irreducible to their orders. If poetry and poetics are to survive in a cultural environment that is dominated by institutions, they must show themselves capable of addressing more than their own orders. And every revisionist critical school for the last thirty years has argued precisely this point, often leading to an inversion of values in which what once had been most high — the work of verbal art, the poem, the masterpiece — is replaced by the autonomy, in fact, of critique. Equally fallible has been the tendency of poetry and poetics to adhere to their own entrepreneurial zones of restricted production, often in abject denial of wider cultural contexts. The necessity here is to bridge this great divide, which has been so profitably enforced.
These essays thus aim to cross the chasm between works of literature and art and historical and cultural contexts: in an aesthetic sense, they entail an opening of form to contexts as a necessary development in the arts; in a critical sense, they address the rift between the purported autonomy of literature and art and cultural studies methodologies. Each of the essays in this volume explores one or several possible paradigms for thinking beyond this dual aesthetic/critical dilemma: to begin with, we may cite the exemplary relation of Soviet constructivism to the experience of postrevolutionary social construction in the 1920s — even as this heroic conjunction of the aesthetic and political is only one of several historical moments, which are not all derivable from the most socially engaged instance of the historical avant-garde. After George Kubler’s Shape of Time, the temporal and spatial relations between my chosen historical examples are often discontinuous:7 the argument moves — in anything but a linear or teleological manner — from the 1920s Soviet Union, to Louis Zukofsky’s poetic meditation on social revolution in the 1930s, to a group of 1950s Japanese student radicals disbanding with the defeat of their oppositional movement (from Nagisa Oshima’s film Night and Fog in Japan), to 1960s conceptual art in New York, to the formation of the Language School in the 1970s, the emergence of post-Soviet writers and artists in the 1980s, and finally the surfacing of Detroit techno in the 1990s. Given this discontinuity, a number of temporal and spatial congruences allow for reinforcing or contrastive arguments: between Soviet and American modernism; Fordism and Detroit techno; Soviet and post-Soviet culture; post-Soviet and postmodern aesthetics; the negativity of the fall of the Eastern Bloc and of the decline of urban Detroit. These temporal and spatial, historical and cultural, frameworks intersect with formal analysis and theoretical reflections on specific works of cultural production. The constructivist moment, as broadly and heuristically put as it may be, is always seen within its specific cultural circumstances; it is a fact of history as much as of form. What this means for contemporary aesthetics — in a series of examples from the textual politics of Jackson Mac Low, the Language School, and the Poetics Listserv; to the aesthetic utopias of Detroit techno and the dystopia of Stan Douglas’s photographs; and the intense subjectivity of Robert Grenier’s handwritten poetry or David Wojnarowicz’s writing and art — is that each occurs at the moment of a specific historical conjuncture.
Are there common concerns that unite the various analyses in an overarching aesthetic and critical account, given the discontinuity of the examples presented here? There certainly are: the first among these would be the relation between radical aesthetic form and revolutionary utopianism, from the Soviet period to the emergence of the Language School. Here the Soviet constructivists are the privileged example of the historical avant-garde, as opposed to, say, the Italian futurists (who often held protofascist politics), the German dadaists (whose project was as much fascinated as repelled by alienation effects in modernity), or the French surrealists (who rejected social construction as just another form of realism). Even as these moments of the historical avant-garde are related and not mutually exclusive, it is the convergence of the Soviet avant-garde with social history that makes it exemplary, and not for its betrayal by the Stalinist state, though that did occur. The Soviet avant-garde’s emphasis on the materiality of signification — the emphasis on the fabrication of painting for Malevich, the invention of an elementary vocabulary of visual representation for Lissitzky, the foregrounding of the literary device for Shklovsky, the construction of montage effects for Eisenstein, the materiality of social discourse for V. N. Voloshinov (such a list of parallel social/aesthetic projects could go on at length) — directly addressed the construction of social reality in the Soviet Union, in a collectively held fantasy that aesthetic form could be the model for a new social order. The Soviet period thus provides a model for theorizing the relation between materialist aesthetics and their social meaning — for instance, between the textual materiality of the Language School and its importance as a model of multiauthored communication on the Poetics Listserv, or between the utopian, collective values of Detroit techno and the city’s social history. The discontinuous analogy of these two Western examples with the model of the Soviet period is meant to foreground shared aesthetic responses to the historical ruptures of social modernity, based on the partial similarity of formal characteristics. Within each, capacious new forms of art redress a failure of social totality.
The constructivist moment itself becomes a second point of convergence between these discontinuous examples: a constitutive moment of negativity enacted in the form of a totalizing vision. In one chapter, which seeks out constructivist moments in a historical and generic sequence from El Lissitzky to Louis Zukofsky to Detroit techno, it is defined (albeit abstractly) in the following way: “The constructivist moment is an elusive transition in the unfolding work of culture in which social negativity — the experience of rupture, an act of refusal — invokes a fantasmatic future — a horizon of possibility, an imagination of participation. Constructivism condenses this shift of horizon from negativity to progress in aesthetic form; otherwise put, constructivism stabilizes crisis as it puts art into production toward imaginary ends” (192). It is this relationship, between historical crisis and the capacious unfolding of aesthetic form, that I explore in numerous contexts. The constructivist moment in this sense refers not simply to a historical moment of rupture, as with the formation of the historical avant-garde after the First World War or of the Language School after the Vietnam War, but to a rupture within modernity itself. It is a moment when the rationalized lifeworld comes undone, however briefly, and we are given a glimpse of the orders we are contained within. This is precisely what Stan Douglas’s photographs of posturban Detroit present: a rupture in the social fabric — after the historical crisis of the 1967 Detroit riots but also as a recurring moment of social reproduction — that is an immediate entailment of late