The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
and megaprofits are to be made in social negativity.8 Perhaps the most univocal social command of critical theory, from the Frankfurt School to the ideology critique of Slavoj Žižek, has been the imperative to disclose social negativity in the midst of lived experience, and to return this perception to practical action. Radical literature and art can be seen as precisely a site for the unveiling of what eludes representation, and the forms of that perception may become models for action as well. The constructivist moment is thus a confrontation of aesthetic form with social negativity, both to disclose the nature of the system and to develop an imagined alternative.
If this moment of disclosure or confrontation is fundamentally generative, what can be said of the nature of the negativity that is taken up everywhere in this work? Is this negativity the tertium quid that unites the disparate topics of my analysis; if so, does it, paradoxically, convey a positive consistency? I have found this to be the most difficult question to address throughout my account, even as the various examples discussed and approaches used to discuss them circulate, often beyond any intention, around the concept itself. Everything depends on what different philosophical traditions make accessible in their account of negativity; it is here that theoretical engagement is most necessary. In retrospect — and negativity is most often disclosed in the course of retrospection, as when we realize only years later what bothered us at the time of some troubling event — I have employed six interlocking accounts of negativity in the course of my analyses: following Hegel, Foucault, Kristeva, Žižek, Lacan, and Heidegger. It is not my intention, nor within my present means, to distinguish the myriad entailments of negativity between and among these major traditions. I will simply propose that the systemic integration of the concept, the way in which it is articulated within the given philosophical prospect, is the best practical guide to its meaning and use. Hegelian negativity occurs in two senses in this work: the first is the familiar determinate negation of the dialectic, which I see directly limiting the historical meaning of avant-garde rupture by means of institutional recuperation, the sublation of a negative moment to a higher level. The second, in Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s vision of the “night of world,” returns negativity to a primal undoing that cannot be easily sublated; the question then arises how it might be stabilized in any form of aesthetic production. A Foucauldian account of the avant-garde (and such an account, though neglected, was crucial for Foucault’s intellectual history) would distribute negativity in discourse, much as Sade’s eroticism is redistributed as a discourse of power or Artaud’s madness defines institutions. With Kristeva, on the other hand, we are encouraged to see the avant-garde as a permanent site for the refusal of integration into the symbolic, by virtue of that excessive form of desire she terms the semiotic, which undoes representation in the “thetic break” only to rebind it through the “second-order thetic.” Žižek, in the school of Lacan, has a more schematic approach to the nature of negativity, which as the inaccessible kernel of the Real becomes a form of antagonism that undoes our self-consistency and leads directly to the capaciousness of suprasubjective fantasy. This account is most directly connected to the mechanism of the constructivist moment, and therefore it is invoked at numerous points throughout the discussion. Finally, I explore Heidegger’s repositioning of Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation and its possible connection to the historical avant-garde to identify negativity, as the thrownness of Dasein, in the aesthetics of the material text. In the work of Robert Grenier, which I read after Heidegger’s critique, the shattering of self in the limit situation of writing becomes a confirmation of Being — indeed, the only one possible. Is there, then, a hierarchy among these accounts of negativity within the traditions summarized here? One might best explore this question by comparing the entailments of each with the form of the argument at hand. In a reinforcing sense, it is the central role of the negative to allow for the work discussed here, and the manner in which it is discussed, to be seen as an open question. Otherwise put, it would not be possible to envisage an open work without negativity.
The constructivist moment, then, is positioned within a movement from the material text, seen as a consequence of the larger goals of radical art to lay bare the device of its construction, to a wider cultural poetics. The central concept of the material text is the site of a strategy to return what had once been an unquestioned locus of critical value, literature, to the material forms of culture. In part as a response to Walter Benjamin’s notions of the author as producer and of the aura that is destroyed in capitalist production, a textual turn developed in literary criticism that simultaneously reserved a place for more traditional literary scholarship, bibliographic history, textual editing, and even philology, while it opened up these disciplines with various examples of radical texts, from Emily Dickinson’s fascicles to the handwritten works of Robert Grenier.9 The textual turn, however, can be double-edged: while it responds to a demand for a materialist account of literature as cultural production, and while it often valorizes texts that have a significant potential for critical intervention, it also allows normative scholarly functions to proceed without regard for any motivations for the intervention of radical texts. At the same time, the textual turn has led to a number of new approaches to cultural articulation of texts, as in Jerome McGann’s notion of a radial text that leads to the epistemology of hypertexts, or Cary Nelson’s and Walter Kalaidjian’s recovery of material texts in the radical 1930s.10 Such work is a part of the widespread revisionist effort in modernist studies that began with a challenge to Anglo-American formalism and continued in numerous projects of historical recovery, particularly of writers of the Left, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and experimental women modernists. A disciplinary context for the effort has been established in the journal Modernism/Modernity and in the founding of the Modernist Studies Association. The material text is a site for expanding the idea of the literary corpus to include not only the traditional objects of literary analysis — published works of literature — but manuscript collections, small press editions, hypertext, and nonwritten materials in media such as audio- or videotape. Michael Davidson’s Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word demonstrates how the material texts of the avant-garde can be a site of expanded social meanings in this sense.11 The material text also provides a new basis for a social or contextual reading practice in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, which applies a social philology or socially directed mode of close reading to the construction of historically specific racial, religious, and gendered identities that are exemplified in modernist texts.12 My work makes common cause with the latter two approaches, as it seeks to develop specific historical and cultural entailments of the material text as critical agency. The material text is never a thing in itself; it circulates as a form of cultural critique.
My early criticism, in Total Syntax (1985) and an article titled “Social Formalism” (1987), may be seen as attempts, before the dawn of the material text (which itself had everything to do with the emergence of the Language School and its textual politics), to find models for avant-garde textuality within a larger syntax of cultural meaning.13 In placing the avant-garde at the center of a redefined literariness, the present work also follows recent revisionist accounts of the avant-garde, for example Astradur Eysteinsson’s Concept of Modernism, in which the avant-garde is valorized for its aesthetics of interruption, or in my present terms, negativity.14 The avant-garde has also been taken up by cultural materialist analyses that position its restricted productions in larger cultural patterns, as in Daniel Belgrad’s Culture of Spontaneity, where a widely shared privileging of immediacy is seen in literary, visual, and musical avant-gardes of the 1950s.15 Other studies developing culturalist readings of radical works of art include Walter Kalaidjian’s American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique, in which avant-garde aesthetics and Popular Front cultural interventions are seen as mutually informing (and where the rubric “the constructivist moment” first appeared); Rita Felski’s Gender of Modernity, which breaks the male-centered mold of modernist textuality to identify culturally charged interventions by and of women in modernity; Janet Lyon’s Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern, which reads the form of the avant-garde manifesto in relation to a much longer tradition, dating from the French Revolution, of emancipatory manifestos; and Aldon L. Nielsen’s Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, which moves between literature and music to identify a previously unrecognized Afrocentric postmodern aesthetic.16