The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
the constructivist moment is immanent in the poetic text — he figures it as a nasturtium imagined as “burning” within the linguistic confines of description. Even so, Dragomoshchenko’s material textuality, seen through concurrent developments in post-Soviet science and aesthetics, is by no means stabilized in the sense that we understand it in the West. As in the related example of installation art of émigré artist Ilya Kabakov, Western categories such as the postmodern do not adequately describe the construction of post-Soviet subjectivity, after the prolonged moment of the anticipated devolution of the Soviet Union, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Kabakov’s installation Ten Characters records the ideological crippling of ten inhabitants of a Moscow communal apartment, predicting precisely the relation between ideological fantasy and negativity articulated by Žižek in a related but different historical moment. The nihilism disclosed in several of Kabakov’s deformed characters takes on a precise social and historical register in Soviet culture and epistemology, arguing against any overarching universal category of the postmodern within which his work may appear. Finally, “Zone: The Poetics of Space in Posturban Detroit” is positioned precisely as a Western counterpoint to the dystopian topography of the former Soviet Union. It is the parallel collapse of utopian fantasies, and the resulting foregrounding of negativity, that unites them. In this final essay, I present a speculative, even constructivist, account of the ways social space — specifically the collapsing, fragmentary, and divided social space of contemporary Detroit — may be seen in relation to the subject formation of those who live here. In twelve disparate zones of critical speculation, I approach a reading of Stan Douglas’s photographic essay on Detroit as an index to social negativity. For negativity, read absence: this is what binds us together.
— 5 May 2002
1
NEW MEANING AND POETIC VOCABULARY
FROM COLERIDGE TO
JACKSON MAC LOW
Until then I’ll type out here, surrounded by papers, dictionaries, file folders, notebooks, Coronamatic cartridges.
Is this the word “Coronamatic”’s first appearance in verse?
Would Eliot’ve allowed “Coronamatic” in his verse?
If so, under what circumstances?
– Jackson Mac Low, “56th Light Poem: For Gretchen Berger – 29 November 1978”
Toward a cultural poetics of the material text, I will begin with a construction of “the words themselves.” This chapter charts the development – in American modernist and postmodern poetry – of the use of preestablished, nonauthorial poetic vocabularies for literary composition. While Coleridge’s concept of poetic diction is normative and hierarchical in its selection of appropriate vocabularies for literature, what I am going to call poetic vocabulary is both open-ended and critical, allowing the new meaning of jargons, dialects, idioms, and technical senses into poetry. The emergence of the concept of poetic vocabulary may be discerned in a historicist reading of Coleridge’s account of poetic diction by means of the critical term desynonymy, which I will use to unlink Coleridge’s synthesis of the ethics of new meaning in experimental poetry (at the time, the poetry of the Lyrical Ballads) from his call for a readership of “suitable interpreters” (looking forward to his culturally conservative notion of a national clerisy) who would preserve – and enforce – distinctions between word meanings. Coleridge’s synthesis directly influenced the invention and popularization of BASIC English by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, who wished to reduce the vocabulary of English in order to create a universal second language that would be transparent to new meanings in science, industry, and commerce. Ogden and Richards’s experiment in modern linguistic hygiene was quickly noticed by modernist experimental poets, and in 1932 the expatriate journal transition published a translation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake into BASIC, thus placing side by side “the simplest and most complex languages of man.” As a modernist, Louis Zukofsky was also inspired by BASIC’s reduced vocabulary of 850 words, and in turn made literary works using preestablished vocabularies, such as his early experiment “Thanks to the Dictionary.” Zukofsky also wrote a critique of Ogden and Richards’s BASIC and continued to use delimited vocabularies in his experimental texts. In the 1950s, postmodern poet Jackson Mac Low directly incorporated the 850-word BASIC vocabulary in many experimental texts. In his work, vocabularies such as BASIC provide the source text that, through the application of compositional rules, yields the target form of his poetic output. This movement from source text to target form is reenacted in the reading and production of Mac Low’s work according to the careful instructions of his prefaces. In the target forms of Mac Low’s texts themselves, we may identify both an ethics of reading and a notion of community in the arbitrariness and constructedness of his pregiven poetic vocabularies.
POETIC VOCABULARY
Jackson Mac Low’s question for T. S. Eliot, whether the word Coronamatic could under any circumstances have occurred in poetry as Eliot understood it, marks an important paradigm shift in American poetics. While Mac Low was not the first American poet to consider language itself as a material for the construction of poetry rather than as a medium of communication, his poem is an explicit formulation of a historical shift from a paradigm of Anglo-American criticism known as poetic diction to one of poetic vocabulary. The concerns of poetic diction are Coleridgean, normative, and finally prescriptive; its modernist interpreter, Owen Barfield, bases his account of it on Coleridge’s dictum that “poetry is the best words in the best order,” i.e., “the best language.”1 In its capacity to incorporate “a steady influx of new meaning in language,” poetic form will give the rule for what meanings we can accept (181). Mac Low is thus accurate in asking whether Eliot would have “allowed ‘Coronamatic’ in his verse.” While poetic diction begins with the question of le mot juste, of the unification of diction and good sense as providing standards of style and efficacies of communication, it ends with a distinction between what language is appropriate to poetry and what is not. By virtue of poetic diction, poetry separates language into hierarchies of appropriateness: at the one end, not only a judicious choice of words but language separated from particular interest; at the other, jargons, dialects, and idioms whose interested discrepancies are beyond the pale of poetry as it is normally understood.2 In moving to a paradigm of poetic vocabulary, evident everywhere in the construction of his work, Mac Low registers the historical emergence of specific vocabularies: When did Coronamatic become a word, and how many years would it take for it to become available for poetry? Aligning the historical fact of emergence with different critical standards than have come down through the Anglo-American tradition since Coleridge, he queries the circumstances of the use of a word such as Coronamatic in terms that address poetry to a wider horizon of language. Language is no longer to be judged in terms of its appropriateness for poetic diction; rather, poetry will be judged by its relation to language, seen as more capacious than its form.
Poetry as a result becomes a site for asking questions about language rather than an enforcer of communicative norms. Poetry’s linguistic difference from the norms of transparent communication, of course, has been one of the most debated assumptions of twentieth-century literary theory. The turn to cultural studies, in one genealogy, begins here, with an attack on the cultural norms assumed in the autonomy of poetic language. In her account of the “poetic language fallacy,” Mary Louise Pratt argues that the opacity of poetic language, as a reinforcement of literary and cultural hierarchies by virtue of the presumed superiority of poetry to ordinary language, merely distorts or foregrounds the structural defects of normative communication.3 Proposing an ethics of communication that accounts for differences of usage, on the other hand, Michael J. Reddy claims that norms of transparent communication are linguistically embedded in habitual metaphors that poetry’s resistant language may expose and contest.4 Such views beg for a synthesis in which the difference of poetic language from the presumed transparency of ordinary language