The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten

influence on their thinking or writing” (no. 7, March 1979). The aesthetics of lists is balanced by an anti-institutional nonchalance of editorial style; the working relations of its two coeditors, Andrews and Bernstein, perform their version of Foucault’s “regularity in dispersion,” with Andrews personifying the former principle and Bernstein, no doubt, the latter (fig. 5).

      It is important for the development of Language School poetics that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E did not publish primary texts, even as it questioned the boundary between poetry and poetics, text and discourse. The brief notes in the journal were about poetry and only secondarily instances of it. Evidence for this claim, which goes to the heart of an ongoing debate about the nature of genre in the poetics of the Language School, seems straight-forward: there are few if any instances in which the short theoretical pieces published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E appeared in their authors’ books of poetry — even if dismantling the opposition of theory and practice, expository prose and language-centered poetry, was often an explicit concern for many writers. This claim about the continuing relevance of genre to language writing is crucial: if language writing indeed succeeded in producing texts that do not have any generic specificity, the literariness that results would be transcendental rather than historically produced. To maintain the historical specificity of literature, it is necessary to have a notion of genre as produced in specific contexts.

      5. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, no. 13 (December 1980), ed. Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein.

      We may consider the literary work, rather than theoretical claims, of the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as evidence here. The disruption of expository conventions in Charles Bernstein’s essay “Artifice of Absorption,” whose argument is broken into what may seem like free-verse poetic lines, is still addressed to the form of the essay: it was published in a book of essays.³⁸ While Bernstein frequently incorporates discursive language in books of poetry, his poetic effects are different from his expository ones simply because the transgression of expository norms still preserves them as a moment of negativity; poetic norms have different claims, whose transgression is dissimilar to that of exposition. Bruce Andrews has gone as far as any author toward a demonstration of a literary praxis that unites poetic language and exposition; the prose texts of I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) and the more poetic critical pieces in Paradise and Method: Poetics and Praxis may be read as producing similar textual effects. Again, however, the generic expectations of their material occasions (Shut Up is published by an alternative publisher; Paradise by a university press) preclude their being seen as antigeneric species of literature in identical senses. A relation of equivalence may be implied, but it is always a matter of discursive construction rather than identity.³⁹

      6. Totters, no. 6 (October 1971), ed. Ron Silliman.

      7. A Hundred Posters, no. 26 (February 1978), ed. Alan Davies (Cambridge, Mass.).

      As an opposite example, This, the magazine of language-centered writing I edited from 1971 to 1982, presented primary texts rather than theoretical or secondary accounts. In the next chapter, I argue that This provided a historical context for a series of literary developments that were reflexively undertaken by more or less the same group of writers. This development occurred in terms of a dynamics of feedback, in which there was not simply an originary moment of definition or refusal but a continuous, dialogic practice out of which the forms of language-centered writing emerged.⁴⁰ Above all, this development was historical, helping to bring together the group of authors who made up the discursive formation of authorial subject positions in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, by reflexively denning the range of formal possibilities of their work. Other publications (figs. 6–15), such as Roof, A Hundred Posters, Ld-Bas, and Hills, as well as presses such as Tuumba and The Figures, were venues for the continuous emergence of the Language School in the 1970s, but in a different way from what took place in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.⁴¹ I am not, here, simply claiming that the form of an avant-garde magazine is sufficient to form a discursive series; rather, the little magazines themselves comprise such a series, with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E taking its cue from their discursive relationships in constituting a school. While an equivalence of authorial positions does describe L~A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s form of reflexive construction, it is also by rep-resenting literature as taking place elsewhere, from an outside being integrated within it, that the journal constitutes a Foucauldian discursive formation — in other words, there is an outside consisting of many published texts that were integrated into the journal. The concept of discursive formation thus provides an alternative to the negative totality of theory death, which is supposed to take place in a crisis at the end of the movement’s history, rather than at its moment of emergence. Theory death happened not in the literary origins of the Language School — which occurred with the development of new forms of writing in This and other journals — but in the consolidation of their initial reception as a school. Locating literature elsewhere, in elided origins or not, recasts the negativity of theory death as a locus of productivity within the utopian/dystopian nowhere of language. So it was that the utopian horizon of language — as constitutive of the cultural politics of the Language School — was reorganized as discourse, in a spatial condensation that provided a new site for cultural construction, if on the ruins of a more capacious imagination.⁴²

      

      8. Roof, no. 4 (fall 1977), ed. James Sherry (New York).

      9. Hills, no. 4 (May 1977), ed. Bob Perelman (San Francisco).

      10. Oculist Witnesses, no. 3 (fall 1976), ed. Alan Davies (Cambridge, Mass.).

      11. Slit Wrist, nos. 3/4 (spring 1977), ed. Terry Swanson (New York).

      

      12. Miam, no. 6 (October 1978), ed. Tom Mandel (San Francisco).

      13. Là-Bas, no. 7 (May 1977), ed. Douglas Messerli (Washington, D.C.).

      

      14. Carla Harryman, Percentage, Tuumba no. 23 (September 1979), ed. Lyn Hejinian (Berkeley, Calif.).

      15. This, no. 8 (spring 19/8), ed. Barrett Watten (San Francisco).

      If L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is not simply the theory death of the agency of the letter in the discursive formation of the Language School, what is its relation to the literature it represents? Against a teleological model that ends in the premature theory death of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,