• 1 "Constructivist poetics" is a term borrowed from Barrett Watten. It brings together both the constr (...)
• 2 O TO 9 was a journal edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer that ran from 1967 to 1969. It sho (...)

1Rather than examine questions concerning the distribution of avant-garde poetics within the social field of culture, this essay looks at texts that encapsulate the issue of distribution self-reflexively, in their very writing. Such texts, so-called constructivist or contextual poetics, provide a lens to reframe and map out another, internal version of the question of distribution¹. The field of contextual poetics is composed of literary and artistic practices that disavow presuppositions of artistic autonomy and an unquestioned authorial voice. Its objects are predominantly composed through processes of collage, montage, and editing. Examples from art and literature range from the historical European and American avant-gardes (Russian constructivism, Dada, Futurism, American Objectivism in poetry, but also materialist poetics such as implemented by Francis Ponge in France, etc.), through the neo avant-gardes in literature (Tel Quel, American language poets) and in visual art (examples abound in conceptualism, and in its early form as a hybrid of art and writing, as published in the journal O To 9 for example)².

• 3 Howard Becker proposes the term "art worlds" to refer to the cooperative network of persons involve (...)

2Constructivist and contextual poetics can be understood to provide an internal configuration of the issue of distribution. Such forms are constituted through their relation to context, and rely on context for their material production, through different techniques of sampling, montage, or détournement. But they are also intimately dependent on contexts of reception for their very constitution as objects. Indeed, since Duchamp, context is clearly a framing mechanism that is constitutive of the object, defining the object according to the different world or worlds that it inhabits³. In addition, the means of interpreting such forms also relies on histories and contexts of interpretation, contexts that have evolved parallel to the forms themselves, and that in turn contribute to what we could call their ontology (barring the essentialism of that term). Although distribution and contexts of reception are not isomorphic, the latter can perhaps be understood as idealized zones of distribution, or at least projected, phantasmatic, or desired zones of contact with a public that does not always materialize at will. In this sense, the difference between distribution and contexts of reception could be framed as a difference of actuality and virtuality. According to that view, distribution would provide the means for the actual interpretative framing enabled by specific readers at specific times, thus tracing a history of reception as the framing process is enacted in the different moments and spheres of its distribution, through the poetic grapevine, by small presses, bookstores, and through university curriculums. Contexts of reception, on the other hand, can be conceptualized as virtual frames, which determine the very existence of the object, and inaugurate a virtual history of framing as the unfolding of the possibilities of the work’s interpretations and receptions. The question we ask in this text is what happens when the vagaries of framing not only determine the virtual existence of its object (as poetry, as text, as art, etc.), the different actualities of its reception, but are incorporated into the artistic process of production itself? What happens when these different instances of framing become the theoretical concern that the object intends to work through?

• 4 For an analysis of the agonistic context of the reception of early Language poetry in San Francisco (...)
• 5 For Tom Clark’s take on the controversy, see Clark T., 1987 and 1990.
• 6 For an overview of these debates, see for example Perloff M., 1996; McGann J., 1988; Bartlett L., 1 (...)

3The long poem by Barrett Watten entitled Progress proposes a form for such contextual reflexivity. First published in 1985 by New York’s Root Books, the text, according to Watten, received a "jolting reception" upon its appearance⁴. The controversy had begun with a review of Watten’s 1984 book Total Syntax by Tom Clark, a proponent of the Beats and longtime editor of the Paris Review. Clark took issue with Watten’s use of language and had assessed the work as "the kind of mumbo jumbo you’d hear from a guy who stumbled into a linguistics lecture one day, and walked out an instant expert the next" (Clark T., 1985a). The turn of phrase was quite successful in its polarizing effect. Responses were published the following week. The first was by the poet David Melnick who called the review "a campaign of misinformation against Barrett Watten and the language poets" (Melnick D., 1985). The other was by the linguist who’d been teaching the course in question, George Lakoff. He found the review "outrageous, both in its stupidity and its malice" (Lakoff G., 1985). Not only did he call Clark out for using erroneous grammatical arguments, but he criticized him for being ignorant of contemporary poetry in general. Lakoff and Clark then published a new salve in Poetry Flash, a Bay Area newspaper providing poetry event listings and reviews, widely read in the poetry community, and not aligned with a particular sub-field (although fairly traditional). The title of Clark’s piece, Stalin as Linguist, a quote taken from Watten’s Progress, fueled many heated responses (Clark T., 1985b). A later review of Progress by Ron Silliman gave the tone of these when he described the book’s reception as having occurred "with all the equanimity of an AIDS outbreak amid the Moral Majority (Silliman R., 1985: 12). ⁵." By labeling Progress a "contemporary poetic litmus test" in the title of his review, Silliman implied that Watten’s production operated as a decisive factor in the poetic field, crystallizing the issues and polarizing the debates around language poetry itself. In broad strokes, these concerned the self-reflexivity of language use, the role of theory, the emphasis on doing rather than interpretation, and the situatedness of writing in its context⁶.

• 7 There has been considerable debate around the political claims of language poetry. Some of the issu (...)

4Progress was republished in 2005 by Green Integer press, along with another long poem entitled Under Erasure. The new volume was accompanied by a preface by Watten describing his writing process, examining the poetics of the two texts and recalling the reception of both texts in retrospect. In the section of the preface that concerns Progress, Watten describes the work as a culturally concerned modern epic, distanced from the subject-centered lyric, yet which nonetheless struggles through issues of "poetic voice." The scope of this voice is vaster, he claims, and not restricted to the bounds of subjective individuality as determined by social, economic, cultural and biopolitical structures; it concerns the process of constituting forms of subjectivity of all kinds, from individuals, to cultural groups, and social spaces. The very struggle of this poetic voice for coherence, movement, or progress figures the larger social yearning for political progress and subjective emancipation. The book centers on the problem of post-utopian politics, following upon the demise of the political euphoria and enthusiasm of the 1960s. It is fundamentally concerned with probing what occurs after the revolutionary impetus has crumbled, when spaces for social experimentation have dwindled, and the ruling ideology has destroyed, or incorporated, its ancient enemies. What happens at the wane of the great horizons of revolutionary promise, it asks. What alternative forms of subjectivity can still hold positive sway after alternative social experimentations have failed? How can the political underpinnings of avant-garde writing—understood as action on the symbolic realm through transformations in language use with claims to social effects—be justified in a context in which the balance of power has shifted back in favor of the most conservative agendas⁷? What is to be done with the failed hopes of revolution? How can enthusiasm and belief be rekindled in the face of overwhelming odds?

• 8 See Williams R., 1983: 90-91. 

10As for culture, in 1973, it seemed that the sphere of action for revolutionary cultural organization was severely restricted, if not foreclosed. At the height of the postmodern, Watten seemed shut off from any meaningful reaction to the economic structures underlying the cultural. One effect of this was the foreclosure of the sense of historical development inscribed in the term culture itself⁸.

• 9 The tradition of the via negativa has a long history in both Western and Eastern theology. It refer (...)

18Despite its uncertainty, the progress of this unstable composite gestures nonetheless towards a horizon of transformation. It is as minimal as making sense, as maximal as social upheaval. Its promise has something to do with the proliferation and acknowledgment of difference, where singularities can be affirmed through their distinctive differential qualities. Read positively, the text’s jumble of meaning allows a voice to grow, sidestepping subjection to confining norms, and engaging instead with the unknown, the incomplete, the undescribed, the obscure or the negative. We can thus understand negativity as a fundamental openness, an escape from definition, a field of potential⁹. The forms such negative processes, or "contradictory productions" (131) of subjectivity might take are numerous.

• 10 On the role of the reader, see Andrews B. and Bernstein C., 1984, and in particular Jed Rasula’s es (...)

19One of these is symbolized by the widely circulated theory in radical formalist poetics of the indetermination of interpretation. Disruptions in language use, through parataxis or the new sentence, are meant to operate against the unquestioned orders of the symbolic. The way a subject constructs sense is thus both a decomposing of existing norms as well as the production of an experimental process. The newly emancipated reader thus supposedly occupies the site of production, instead of what had previously been deemed a passive state of consumption¹⁰. Progress explores the possibility of this indetermination of interpretation as the tenuous, awkward, mutable story of an "I" as it is solidified and rendered immobile by a specific instance of a "you," named in the text and differently materialized in its renewed interpretants.

• 11 "[…] what is this universal openness of possibility but a play of the imagination that is the enabl (...)

20Watten addresses the issue of interpretative indeterminacy in his preface, explaining that it fails in two important ways, thus defaulting on its emancipatory promises. First, because the reader never does make meaning purely out of the openness of the text, and second, because poetic autonomy never existed, so that readings are always made in relation to a culture at large¹¹. The temporary immobility of the shoreline of the I/you composite only displaces habitual, confined and more or less alienated recognitions of self imposed by social constraints. The mobile cultural context of involuntary recognition does not deliver emancipation, nor does the overturning of poetic structures lead to its promised liberative effects. What new readings might be made of the text merely add layers upon the cultural data which preexist them, without engaging fundamental change. Autonomy was never the case in the first place. Everything is determined by its context. Progress, given over to the historicity of its interpretative frames which do nothing but repeat the endless drone of confinement, is thus fundamentally uncertain.

• 12 "Here is private property, to be Expropriated for public use." (Watten B., 2004: 168).

23The revolutionary trappings of the avant-garde are of no help here. Neither are the emancipatory hopes of revolutionary community that have definitely waned in post-utopian 1982. The literalist utopia of objectivist poetics, in which the index enables a meeting of the territory with the map, feel too rigidly materialist, as well as somewhat essentialist, for it misses the groundlessness of the material itself. Presentism seems undermined by a certain order of economy, a gradation of the value of presence in time. Indeed, if there is a structural need for innovation in neoliberalism, as Frederick Jameson (1991) argues, then the present is reduced to a moment in a race towards endless and harried productivism. Finally, the possibilities inherent in the radical indeterminacy of interpretation are negated by the closure of the progress of reading. "Theme of the end of closure.../Interpreted/ends in new sleep." (159). The quandary is that economic relations subtend the entire project: writing, and its correlate, reading, imply a relation of consumption, literature circulates value. The originality of metaphor is nothing but the debt to be paid back in the construction of future regimes of legibility that shall be their return on investment. ("It is an original, meaning that value can take out a loan/to pay for time in advance/so anyone can process words." (160)) "This is an irritable art" (175) indeed, where the sharing, the building of meaning that might occur through the process of reading, in which the I becomes the you, is reduced to nothing but stops, habits, points, and the ‘you’ is restricted to the deciphering of closed meaning. The utopian impetus can go no farther than positing the poetic act as expropriating private property for public use. It does not undo the economic structuring of the self as private property¹².

• 13 "This is often what the use of the I in our work has involved—to propose, in the inherent terms of (...)
• 14 See on this issue the chapter “Critique et Clinique,” in Anne Sauvagnargues A., 2005, especially p. (...)

26In view of these lines, we can interpret Watten’s project as attempting an intensification of subjectivity. In that sense "Excite I," is a way to reject a negative context while spreading open subjective possibilities. This new open map of the self is meant to continue its process of intensification of subjective zones. It is meant to be circulated. It assumes the cold fact is that there is no other order of emancipation, no utopian outside or nonself, but only intensities of selfhood to be practiced against involuntary recognition¹³. All signs point to distinctions of power, say Deleuze and Guattari, following Spinoza's critique of signs. Indeed, for Spinoza, signs often lead us to take a principle of obedience for a model of knowledge. “[...] one only has to misunderstand an eternal truth, i.e. a composition of relations, in order to interpret it as an imperative.” (Deleuze G., 1988) That is why it is necessary to lay out a map of the contexts in which signs emerge. “Signs require first of all a pragmatics, the exposure of the relations of domination in which they are inscribed, that they serve and to the strengthening of which they often contribute.”¹⁴ If we cannot access the true composition of relations, a pragmatics of signs affords a way to relate to the unknown without enforcing obedience to preexisting forms. But in a hostile context, it is increasingly difficult to read this pragmatics of signs, especially under the regime of spectacle, where visibility is dangerous due to capitalism’s powers of recuperation. By engaging with context through negativity, Watten strategizes a resistance to the visible and to the clearly legible. His text is written following the disappointment of labor struggles in the industrialized countries, in a moment which sees the rise of dictatorships and neocolonialist regimes following upon the heels of the movements for national liberation in the global south. It is witness to the rapid spread of neoliberal economic policies via globalization, the heightening of negative mythologies of fear, sky wars nightmares, narratives of ecological disaster, economic depression and defensive individualism. It can no longer believe in the self-serving mythologies of progress in culture, so clearly is culture implicated in the pillage and servitude of globalized capitalism. In response, Watten’s Progress, as a serious attempt at making sense of our place in the world—"Then I mean I mean," (32)—demands that we review our own identifications. What it can provide is the emptiness to do so, what it calls poetry. "The poetry is this distance/Given in place of names." (101).