The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
an obvious moment of social construction in the formation of the Language School of poetry in the 1970s, which I characterize in terms of the intersubjective dynamics of its multiauthored collaborations. A Foucauldian notion of discourse, seen in the construction of the movement itself and as it was represented in the form of the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, allows us to see how individual authors became author positions or moments in a collective discourse. A Kristevan concept of text, on the other hand, would characterize the avant-garde as distributing a moment of disrupted symbolization through the multiple significations of the semiotic; I used this moment to describe the dialectics of signification in Legend, a collaborative work by five authors published in 1980. A close textual reading of this complex work reveals its secret history: the narcissistic, homosocial space between personal and group identity. In two further examples of multiauthorship in the Language School, poetic texts by Steve Benson and myself, and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian, the gap between authors becomes the generative motive for the constructed work. The politics of multiauthorship are further developed in an account of how multiauthored collaborations anticipated the form of collective identity constructed on the Poetics Listserv. A precise moment of discursive construction may be seen in an exemplary group discussion of an indecipherable word, suggesting how authorship may be reproduced in collective forms.
The origin of “The Bride of the Assembly Line” occurred literally as an epiphany, in which two reinforcing moments combined in the construction of its argument. In the first, after a long day at an academic conference at the University of Louisville in 1995, I found myself with friends listening to jazz late into the night at the Seelbach Hotel. On emerging from the bar into the hotel’s ornate lobby, I encountered the living vision of an instant: a thoroughly intoxicated bride, virtually held in place by the architecture of her dress, waiting patiently while swaying back and forth as the equally drunk groom negotiated the room. A few weeks later, on a tour of the Rouge River assembly plant of the Ford Motor Company, I imaginatively synthesized the appearance of the bride with the bachelor machines of its robotic welding stations, after the work by Marcel Duchamp: hence the title. Its moment was a lecture at the SUNY Poetics Program, which I used to argue the necessity of rethinking the conventional account of the relation between modernist poetics and social modernity. In so doing, I compared literary authorship from modernists such as Gertrude Stein and Language writers like Clark Coolidge to the authorship of modes of social organization such as Ford’s assembly line. My claim is that even the most radically formal or language-centered literature can be seen as reflexively engaged with cultural processes of modernity. I then discuss how Stein’s admiration of Henry Ford, Ford cars, and the mode of organization of the assembly line influenced her writing; the juxtaposition of Stein and Ford goes significantly against the grain of much Stein criticism, which separates her abstract use of language from cultural and historical motives. Authorship itself is under construction; I discuss how the sequential organization of the assembly line provides a positive paradigm, or even negative disanalogy, for modernist and avant-garde works and genres. The essay ends with a moment of pure presentation of poetic address in automated increments.
“The Constructivist Moment: From El Lissitzky to Detroit Techno,” the essay that gives this collection its title, is addressed to two discontinuous moments: the social formation of Soviet constructivist aesthetics in the work of El Lissitzky, and the emergence of the internationally recognized but locally unknown (until recently) genre of popular electronic music known as Detroit techno. A framework for this comparison is provided by a discussion of the situation of the avant-garde in cultural studies, which I experience on analogy to a border crossing between Detroit and the suburbs of Grosse Pointe. Another framework is provided by the modernist example, a literary form that helps explain the agency of Lissitzky’s abstract paintings, the Prouns, as well as how their formal values were reinterpreted in his later work in typography and design. With techno, the concept of literary example becomes an aesthetics of the sample, and we are in the postmodern terrain of simulacral, postauthorial pastiche. In an extended comparison, techno’s similarities to and differences from a prior example of the avant-garde, the constructivist visual artists of the 1920s Soviet Union as represented by the work of Lissitzky, are discussed in terms of both formal characteristics and social formation. Detroit techno is significant for its development of a constructivist, as opposed to expressivist, aesthetic among emerging African-American artists who, working far from the restricted codes and institutional reception of the avant-garde, are interested in innovative formal values. In invoking utopian fantasies and realizing them in a form that is open to many voices by means of sampling rather than dominated by a solo vocalist, Detroit techno constructed its own imaginary community in Detroit. It thus may be compared with the utopian and suprasubjective aesthetics at work in Soviet constructivist art of the 1920s in that both derive from prior experiences of revolutionary trauma or social negativity. In a detour through two poetic examples of constructivism, I identify the constructivist moment at the site of a stabilized negativity, whose values range from revolution to social alienation.
In “Nonnarrative and the Construction of History,” the constructivist moment is aligned with nonnarrative forms of representation, seen specifically in a historical series. In reading examples of the material text (poems by Lyn Hejinian and Jackson Mac Low) as nonnarrative, I show first how a redistribution of narrative is constructed in their textuality, and then how their forms of nonnarration may be imagined within an unfolding history. Nonnarrative as a form of historical representation may be more ubiquitous than is generally believed, as I go on to demonstrate in a discussion of the New Historicist anecdote and the accretion of the minimal units of history into larger narratives. The forms of nonnarrative may thus work as fundamentally constitutive elements in the construction of history, and I locate these nonnarrative forms of historical representation at moments of historical stasis or crisis. As an example of a nonnarrative poetics of stasis, I position the conceptualist painting of Erik Bulatov within the decades-long era of stagnation in the former Soviet Union under Brezhnev. For the nonnarrative poetics of crisis, I juxtapose the exemplary form of the New Sentence, which developed in the Language School in the 1970s, with the historical negativity experienced with the Fall of Saigon. The claims for a nonnarrative history are extended further in a discussion of how historical chronologies are organized and manipulated in public discourse, without any prospect of closure.
“Negative Examples” identifies a series of aesthetic uses of negativity through its positioning in the work of Slavoj Žižek and Michel Foucault, developing a non-Hegelian dimension of negativity in Heidegger that influenced both Foucault and Žižek. In the move from literature to social discourse, the negativity of the text is crucial for providing a moment in which construction, in both formal and contextual senses, can take place. The important differences between the concepts of negativity in the work of these three philosophers may help us to see the social meaning of the avant-garde in terms other than the familiar Hegelian logic of opposition and recuperation. The chapter begins by discussing the importance of negativity for Žižek, in his historical situation as an intellectual theorizing the fall of the Eastern Bloc as he experienced it. The examples of negativity Žižek uses in his arguments are grouped together in three categories: moments of historical negativity, attending the devolution of Second-World states; moments of aesthetic negativity, often discerned in discussions of classic American cinema; and moments of an encounter with sublime nature, seen in the Hegelian paradigm of the “night of the world” that Žižek develops in reading Heidegger. The latter example leads to a discussion of the ways in which modernist poets (Wallace Stevens, Louis Zukofsky, and Laura Riding) position their work in relation to negativity, and follows that aesthetic possibility through postmodern examples from conceptual art (Joseph Kosuth), to the New York School (Ron Padgett and Bill Berkson), to the Language School (in my own work). Two additional genealogies of the negative are given in the examples of Heidegger and Foucault: the former in his critique of Karl Jaspers’s “limit situations” and the possibility that his primordial concern for Being may have a source in the historical avant-garde, and the latter for his positioning of negativity as a unifying element of discourse, which Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe theorize as antagonism. Robert Grenier and David Wojnarowicz, two writers both invested in negativity, demonstrate the aesthetic uses of Heideggerian and Foucauldian negativities; while writings by Marjorie Welish and Carla Harryman show how such negativity is gendered.
“Post-Soviet Subjectivity in Arkadii Dragomoshchenko