The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
is thus a range of work that recovers the cultural poetics of the avant-garde, and within which the present study is situated. The existence of this expanded field, however, has yet to provoke sufficient debate on the objects and methods of a cultural poetics — in the senses that the term has been used to describe the intersection between literary and cultural criticism until now. Originally associated with the New Historicism, and often seen as indebted to the historicism of Foucault, cultural poetics appears in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations to describe the reflexive relations between text and context in early modern literature and culture; Greenblatt defines the term in somewhat dissimilar ways at other points in his work, as I discuss below.17 A subsequent use, influenced by cultural studies methodologies, occurs in Kathleen Stewart’s Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics of an “Other” America, in which she describes a marginal discourse community in rural Appalachia in terms of its poetics of language use.18 The classical scholar Leslie Kurke, on the other hand, returns to New Historicist tradition in using the term to discuss the cultural politics of antiquity in her Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece.19 What is often missing from these approaches is a specific consideration of literary form; where poetics has generally been taken to derive from considerations of the way the literary work is made, as a form of representation, these studies reposition it in relation to social discourses that contextualize it, while ignoring the concretization of form. It is almost as if culture itself is being proposed as a text in the place where the poem had been; one could better describe such approaches as a kind of aesthetic anthropology that seeks to describe cultures themselves as artistic products — but without any kind of formal mediation. In seeking to restore a necessary relation between literary form and cultural discourse, my use of cultural poetics intends an approach not restricted to the New Historicism or Cultural Studies, as it preserves an important place for the formal construction of the work as a bearer of cultural meaning.
Before leaving the scene of an expanded genealogy, I want to pause to consider the derivation of my title, The Constructivist Moment. There is now a significant series of studies in the humanities that seek to explain a key concept of intellectual or cultural history (such as constructivism) by means of its specific enactment in historical events, political movements, or works. The series begins with J. G. A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, a study of Renaissance political theory.20 Each new work in the series, however, seems to contrast its conceptual focus with that of a prior study: Marjorie Perloff’s moment is the early twentieth century in The Futurist Moment, a comparative account of European avant-gardes organized around the example of futurism.21 The next work in the series, James F. Murphy’s Proletarian Moment, a study of the debates around leftist literature and culture in the 1930s, moves away from the purely aesthetic focus of the avant-garde to discuss a socially engaged literature.22 Norman Finkelstein’s Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry, on the other hand, sees utopian politics of literature as immanent to questions of poetic form.23 Recently, in a slight departure from the series, Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain’s collection of essays The Objectivist Nexus focuses on the American Objectivist poets and their aesthetic innovations, cultural contexts, and philosophical implications not as a moment but as a nexus of multiple conjunctures.24 This shift from moment to nexus is decisive; in retaining the earlier term, I want on the one hand to ground it in a rigorous account of what a concept of a punctual moment might entail, as a rupture of received cultural meanings that leads to innovative form. I want as well to preserve the concept of a moment as a retrospectively determined punctual event from which cultural forms may be derived, but not in the sense of any originary event. The notion of a moment, then, at the very least provides a way of theorizing punctual occurrences without recourse to originary explanations — which would include, apparently, my choice of title. There is a recently published account of epiphanies in literature, The Visionary Moment; my colleague at Wayne State University, Charles J. Stivale, has written an incisive essay on the high alienation of “The ‘MLA’ Moment”; and further following the lead of the moment into negativity and nonexistence, I have heard of a work in science studies called The Missing Moment, which addresses gaps and fissures in consciousness as they impact on claims to objectivity.25
Part of the tradition of the introductory essay is to provide a guide to the work that follows in condensed and summary form. In order to position each of the essays in this work in relation to the larger project, and in terms of their presentation in a series, I have also written introductory headnotes that may be helpful in drawing out the contexts, motivations, and intertexts for each chapter. The concept of moment is central in terms of my own work’s construction: each chapter develops a series of textual or aesthetic examples in terms of their situatedness in a cultural or theoretical argument. The chapters are by no means presented sequentially: the first chapter to be written, and which directly addresses “the nonnarrative construction of history,” dates from 1990, but occurs in sequence as chapter 5. Chapter 6, “Negative Examples,” on the other hand, was only finished with the final draft of the text, and contains material from 2000 to 2002. The work’s thematic sequence, I hope, will appear as spatial, radial, and accretive rather than linear, accumulative, and teleological. Particularly the final chapter, “Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban Detroit,” is written in a nontraditional style of twelve linked but disjunct zones seen as specific areas of discussion. It both does and does not provide a concluding perspective from which to view what went before, and for similar reasons I have decided not to write a closing statement. My hope is that the relations between and among chapters, sections, examples, themes, analogies, and disanalogies will resonate with each other, and I do not want to preclude generative connections that may be made. This preference stems fundamentally from the sense of construction as I understand it, as wanting to preserve the ways in which the work is made and to encourage readings that might not have been anticipated. (Note: this is not the same as saying that the reader constructs readings, and that just any reading is as good as any other.) I want to show how the literariness of the material text is not simply an artifact of avant-garde formalism but may be seen as a moment of social construction, from the writing of the text to the processing of it, here and now. With that principle established, I will end by commenting on the status of the moment in its various constructions in each chapter.
The study begins with an approach to the poetics of the material text that shows how Coleridge’s concept of poetic diction led to modernist and postmodern uses of preexisting poetic vocabularies. In constructing an alternative genealogy of the material text, I turn to the promulgation of BASIC English by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the twentieth century. BASIC English was a generally unsuccessful but important attempt to create an English-language-based lingua franca, with a reduced vocabulary and syntax, for purposes of commerce and technological innovation. Clearly due to fascination with and horror of its politics of linguistic control, a number of modernist and postmodern writers were inspired by BASIC to develop poetic vocabularies (preexisting lexicons for literary works) as a basis for constructed literary effects, to be distinguished from subjective expression. The technology of BASIC English had socially conservative, even imperialistic, ends: it was an important early step in the promotion of English as a world language of science and commerce. Poets, however, turned this technological innovation to other, arguably oppositional and emancipatory, uses in foregrounding the materiality of signification to disrupt communicative ideals. A series of decisive moments thus constructs an argument by example: to begin with, the failed transcendental deduction of the subject of knowledge in Coleridge’s Biographia, which led to his historicist meditations on the relation of language to cultural meaning. Next, there is the invention of BASIC itself, out of a Coleridgean conservatism but also as a modern linguistic reform. Finally, modernist writers, from Joyce to Zukofsky, were attracted to BASIC as a compositional device; and Jackson Mac Low used it as a way of constructing poems and performance works in the postmodern period. The material text is thus constructed as series of political interventions in language, from Coleridge to Mac Low, that are historically situated.
“The Secret History of the Equal Sign” takes up the social formation of avant-garde communities, and their political moments of opposition and recuperation, in terms of their literary