adventures in anglo-american magazines

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all images strung together : : click below to enter

Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942

Notes : : Introduction

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[1] Ron Silliman. "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets," Alcheringa, no. 2 (1975): 104-120. This essay is problematically (if most commonly) noted as the original collection of Language poetry. (While Bruce Andrew's eclectic collection in the 1973 issue of Toothpick, Lisbon, and the Orcas Islands, the writing in Barrett Watten and Robert Grenier's This, and a host of other little magazines are essential printed additions to the dialogic development of the writing already in play in Silliman's collection.)

[2] Critical battles over the definition and cohesion of "Language Poetry" were pervasive in the academic attention paid to these writers in the 80s. See, Michael Greer's article "Ideology and Theory in Recent Experimental Writing or, the Naming of "Language Poetry," boundary 2, no. 2/3 (1989): 335-355, for the most concise history of the unnecessarily convoluted definitional problems and polemics of "Language / language-oriented / L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry." For the remnants of the problematic naming, see the continuing popular confusion in the discussion page for the wikipedia entry "Language Poetry," http://enwikipedia/wiki/Talk:Language_poets, particularly subject heading: "The RETURN of the Hyphen; or is it an 'equal sign'?" As wikipedia warns, "This is a controversial topic, which may be under dispute." I use a capitalized "Language" throughout for adjectival flexibility and nominal clarity.

[3] As Silliman writes in his next major collection of Language writers, "Realism" for Ironwood 20 (1982) this moment plays an important role in both the naming of the Language "moment" and the formation of something less like a tendency and more like "group" of interconnected Language writers (See also Craig Dworkin's entry "Language Poetry" in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, (2005): http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/Editor/DworkinLanguage.pdf, 1-5).

[4] Dworkin, 2.

[5] See Silliman's recent "profile" at ChicagoPostmodernPoetry: http://chicagopostmodernpoetry.com/rsilim.htm.

[6] Jean-Michel Rabaté. The Future of Theory (Blackwell: Oxford, 2002), 36-46.) A sign of the temporal development cultural currency of structuralism at the time, this 1970 title, accurate to the conference of 1966 was soon inverted, the orange cover boldly exclaiming "The Structuralist Controversy" in big red letters, with a small white subtext of "The Languages of Criticism & the Sciences of Man" for the version reprinted in
1973.

[7] Rabaté, 38. These Foucauldian essentials aside, it should be noted, Rabaté's manifesto demonstrates the many ways "the image of structuralism presented in 1966 to the American public was clearly much more complex, sophisticated, and diverse in its epistemologies and strategies than what has often been said." (Rabaté, 42)

[8] An interesting study would compare the role of Form in relation to another great little magazine from Great Britain called Screen, which, begun in 1969—on the heels of Form's closing—would assume Form's role as a vanguard forum for English translation/importation of the structuralist dialogue. Taking Form's interest in an expanded cinema back to the screen, as it were, the pedagogical and methodological drive of the magazines similar, their aesthetics and politics, contrary.

[9] Poetic License, p. 28.

[10] "Close listening" is Charles Bernstein's term for a similar practice. See the his essay "Close Listening and the Performed Word," Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), .

[11] Perloff. Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 1-19.

[12] See Perloff's discussion of Fredric Jameson's "Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent and the Artificial Sublime": Perloff (1990), 21.

[13] Marjorie Perloff. Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 15.

[14] Perloff, (2004) 19. Additionally, this alignment with Perloff's differential reading would stand incomplete without invoking two D's: Duchamp and Deleuze, as she does. From her "Introduction: Differential Reading," citing Gilles Deleuze: Modern life is such that, confronted with the most mechanical, the most stereotypical repetitions, inside and outside ourselves, we endlessly extract from them little differences, variations and modifications. (Perloff, xxi)

[15] Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation," The Structuralist Controversy(1973), 273.

Back

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From “The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets” ed. Ron Silliman:

…it is the Word which is ‘the dwelling place’… it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections…

– Roland Barthes, 1953

From “The Mechanics for a Literary ‘Secession’” by Gorham B. Munson:

Form, simplification, strangeness, respect for literature as an art with traditions, abstractness…these are the catchwords that are repeated most often among the younger writers.

– Malcolm Cowley, 1922

Introduction

Introduction: Periodical Pastiche

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In a 1975 issue of Jerome Rothenberg's Alcheringa—a vibrant ethnopoetics magazine published through Boston University—Ron Silliman famously constructs the first attempts towards a terminology for a new "tendency" of American poets: "whose work might be said to 'cluster' about such magazines as This, Big Deal, Tottel's…Called variously 'language centered,' 'minimal,' 'nonreferential formalism,' 'diminished referentiality,' 'structuralist.'"¹ In this thesis, I take Silliman's characterization of this tendency quite seriously, and through it, explore the poetics clustering around little magazines such as This, Doones, Wch Way, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Letter, and Silliman's own Tottel's, long before this "tendency" became grouped under the problematic heading "Language poetry" in the 80s.² The common history of Language writing views Silliman's collection as the first gesture, a central event, towards a cohesive grouping of this strand of innovative America poetry.³ Aside from the sheer political force Silliman's polemic collection introduces to countercultural poetics in the mid-seventies, his collection also spurred the mimeo-dialogue among writers of "diminished referentiality" that began the distinctively group-forming, independent publishing economy of the Language poets.⁴ Looking very closely at this early gathering of Language writing, we will wonder what might have been written if the name 'Structuralist' had stuck instead of 'Language,' how one might approach a reading of this work through the passé shades of French structuralism, and what role this description played in relation to Alcheringa magazine and experimental letters of the early 70s.

To a reader familiar with the Language poets, the label "structuralist" is a stranger among more expected appellations: "minimal" (appropriate of Clark Coolidge, Robert Genier, or Aram Saroyan, for example), "language centered" (materialist poets like Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, and Ray DiPalma group under this description), or "diminished referentiality" (David Melnick and Barrett Watten are but two of many poets fighting the "tyranny of the sign" in English letters). Structuralism, on the other hand, is laden with over-quick associations: Saussure, Jakobsen, Levi-Strauss, then Lacan, Barthes, Althusser, Foucault; phrases like "pig/fig," "death of the author," or, as the English frenzy might have it, "Anglo-American Adventure"—truly, this ought sound strange as a title from Ron Silliman, an adventurous experimental poet taught under a second generation of San Francisco Renaissance writers in the Pound/Williams tradition.⁵

While re-imagining this early event of Language writing through a structuralist lens, I make no attempt to define either term--"Language Poetry" or "Structuralism"--which would be a quixotic venture unto itself. Instead, for a definitional inscription of structuralism, these pages work from François Dosse's excellent History of Structuralism, trans. Deborah Glassman, (Mineapolis: University of Minesota Press, 1997). For Language writing, Bob Perelman's The Marginalizaiton of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) has been essential, in addition to the definition of "Language Poetry" given most succinct and accurately in Craig Dworkin's encyclopedic entry (2005) mentioned above. These exemplary accounts have played in coordination with study of source texts ranging from Barthes' Critical Essays to Bernstein's Contents Dream, from John Hopkins' The Structuralist Controversy to Ron Silliman's In the American Tree—in differential opposition to a host of problematic historical articles on all sides.

To approach Alcheringa in 1975, it is necessary to return to a paper trail of the widely convoluted, cacophonously obscured historical relationship between the arts and what has come to be called "theory" in the United States. Toward this purpose, writing in the first seciton will cluster around the year 1966, a pivotal moment for theory as French structuralism arrived in the States though a conference at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, producing a book originally titled The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, published in 1970. An indicator of the importance of this event: in The Future of Theory Jean-Michel Rabaté ties the interpretive "knot" of 'Theory' around this "fatidic date."⁶ Signaling both the effective birth of a booming international structuralist discourse, and the death knell for "structuralism" proper in France, the text from this conference was hugely important for philosophical thought and practice, popping up in publications as diverse as radical poetry magazines like Open Letter and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and popular academic journals such as Yale French Studies or The Evergreen Review. For a measure of "the most fundamental issues" of the conference, Rabaté turns to the preface for its republication in 1973 wherein Deleuze is cited "to point out some commonalities of thought that would nevertheless bypass superficial divergences or last-minute mood swings:

'A cold and concerted destruction of the subject, a lively distaste for notions of origins, lost origins, recovered origins, a dismantling of unifying pseudo-synthesis of consciousness, a denunciation of all mystification of history performed in the name of the progress of consciousness and the unfolding of reason.'"⁷

In this thesis, I explore the appropriation, manipulation and radical praxis of these structuralist theories by two small magazines from within the context of the delirious international celebrity of structuralism in the late 60s and early 70s—implicitly questioning why these sources were interested in this sweeping phenomena, and consequently, how dramatic shifts in innovative poetry and poetics of this time may productively be considered as structuralist movements. For post-war English art and poetry, this structuralist moment finds distinction, or difference, in comparison to the long traditions of lyrical voice essential to both established and countercultural conceptions of poetry. From the Romantic tradition through Ezra Pound and the Black Mountain school projectivism—the cohesive subjective ego was the order of poetry. Language poetry is a moment of rupture, by index, its break illustrates exactly the momentous cultural reordering of philosophy—from phenomenology to structuralism—in the 60s and 70s.

This adventure may at first appear off track considering the 'canonical' roots of Language writing in Stein, Wittgenstein, the Futurists, John Ashbery and other anomalous challengers to the lyric voice: however, I hope to demonstrate that in addition to and complicating the influence of these various historical roots, the Language writers must be considered in light of structuralism, and indeed that this discussion of the "structuralist activity" of Language writing is a partlicularly luminous (and necessary) device. Similarly, it might be argued that the influence of theory on Language writing is often noted and thoroughly (if not excessively) explored. However with its post-boom fallout of popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, the structuralist paradigm has fallen from productive writing about the Language moment—here I hope to reinvigorate and reinvestigate Language writing's relationship to theory in the interplay between Language and structuralism, in difference to the phenomenological lyric voice.

Building this relationship we will first pick up a prescient Cambridge journal from 1966 called Form. An eclectic, self-reflexive magazine with a pedagogical project that mixed historic formalism, trendsetting structuralism, kinetic arts and structurally innovative poetry, Form is a fascinating entry point into a moment of structuralist theory, radical experimental writing of late sixties, and the role of the little magazine in the time of the 'mimeo-revolution.' Situated in 1966, Form provides an exciting material touch-base for adventures into this watershed moment for both the occasion of "the structuralist controversy" in the States and for the movement of powerful cluster of countercultural poets immediately preceding the Language poets—namely, the "New Americans." This diverse group named after Donald Allen's 1950 anthology reached an apex of dominance and a beginning of decline at Berkeley in 1965—a moment remarkably crystallized through the manuscript of Charles Olson's infamous drunken reading/performance published in 1966. The confrontation of these two forces seen through Form—in their positioning among the historical avant-garde/modernist projects and a breadth of experimental writing projects in the 60s—I argue, prepares an rejuvenated reading of Silliman's cluster of appellations in Alcheringa 1975.

Surprisingly, the first intersection of these two powerful currents (experimental English poetry and the structuralist discourse) can be traced precisely to this Cambridge magazine begun in the fertile summer of 1966. In the brief three-year, ten-issue run of Form, many translations of important structuralist papers were first introduced to an English audience alongside, or rather, within, a complex of historical and neo-modernist innovative artistic/poetic projects. From the pages of Form, the emergence of English concrete poetry was explored in conjunction with a critical importation of Brazilian concretismo; a neo-modernist project recuperated essential documents from the historical avant-gardes; the Black Mountain school received some of its first international scholarly recognition; a reflexive media theoretical commentary on the specificity and cultural role of the little magazine (through the history of 'great little magazines') was brilliantly pursued in pedagogical fashion—all of this strategically arranged by the editors page by page and issue by issue to provoke a dialogue the relationship of form(alism) to structuralism in the arts.⁸

Silliman's "The Dwelling Place" contends, as do most histories of Language poetry, that the most accurate and concise definition of a Language poetry 'group' is the consistent roster of writers whom published each other in a relatively closed economy of independently produced magazines—This, Hills, Tottel's, 100 Posters, Doones, Sun & Moon, Là-Bas, Roof, The Figures, Sentences, Joglars, Tuumba Press, and later, criticism-based journals like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Letter, and Temblor—these publications wrote, carried, and delivered the definition of the Language 'moment.' In a sense, one cannot remove the history these writers from the medium of the little magazine very literally—more precisely: the only way to understand the historical event of Language poetry is to look closely at the medium of the periodical—its formal characteristics and structural cohesion, how it relates (inter)texts in space-time, and the vast realm of questions around what is proper to the space of the magazine. For these questions, my adventures into these little magazines from the 60s/70s pay particular attention to the marginalia, the editorial commentary, the details of production and the structural relations of the contents in the magazine: the same close reading one would apply to the writing, which is itself always positioned in relation to the elements of the printing, its historical context, and its contemporaneous intertext. Thus, to prepare a reading of Silliman's naming/group-forming event for Alcheringa—in the full media-specific tendencies of its clustering—Form is almost too good an object for preparation: its arguments revolve around a similar recuperation of the historical avant-garde, it shares an interest in formally interesting, unemotive verbal art, it demonstrates a nuanced artistic understanding/appropriation of the rise of structuralist thought, and it presents a compelling argument about the form of the little magazine.

To see the cargo unloaded temporarily onto a dock, this dock, is to see the work in new contexts in which cumulative effects occur from beginning to end as well as more specific internal effects. So what surrounds a piece – before & after – again brings time, as its most actual presence, into play….

–Jed Rasula, introductory note to Wch Way 1 (1975)

Craig Dworkin opens his entry in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry (2005) with the following statement of a misunderstanding:

The discrepancy between the number of people who hold an opinion about Language Poetry and those who have actually read Language Poetry is perhaps greater than for any other literary phenomenon of the later twentieth century…Indeed, only a quarter-century after the phrase was first used, it has come to serve as an umbrella term for any kind of self-consciously "postmodern" poetry or to mean no more than some vaguely imagined stylistic characteristics – parataxis dryly apodictic abstractions, elliptical modes of disjunction – even when they appear in works that would actually seem to be fundamentally opposed to the radical poetics that had originally given such notoriety to the name "Language Poetry" in the first place."

Charles Bernstein often comments on this common confusion, stating that it would two years of intense reading for even the informed reader to begin to follow the distinctive poetics, politics, and polemics of the Language Poetry movement. Indeed, the bibliography of the Language poets is immense, multitudinous, riddled with contrary vectors, obscure texts, and idiosyncratic readings—from Gertrude Stein to Wittgenstein; casual references from Russian Formalism to Althusserian Marxism; hailing from the tradition of the modernist American triumvirate Pound-Williams-Zukofsky to Creeley-Olson-Duncan-(Ashbery); in reaction to New Criticism's institutionalized lyric verse and a vast array of emotive countercultural voices; colliding with the New York School on one end and Deep Image poetics on the other—and out from all of this, Language poetry emerged with a distinctive communication questioning activity and fairly tight arrangements of writers and limited-run publications—indeed, the Language poets are difficult to follow.

For me the historical past is a sort of gluey matter for which I feel an inauthentic shame and from which I try to detach myself by living my present as a sort of combat or violence against this mythical time immediately behind me. When I see something that might have happened fifty years ago, for me it already has a mythical dimension.

– Roland Barthes, in response to Paul de Man's critique
of "To Write: Intransitive Verb?" (1966)

Then, Marjorie Perloff writes in Poetic License: "Given this context, poetic discourse is that which most fully calls into question conventional writing practices and which defies the authority of the chronological model."⁹ In a sort of combat or violence, perhaps, to contemporary post-structural implications of Barthes mythical dimension of history, Perloff's writing practice seeks to confront this 'gluey' historical problematic though "close listening" and "differential reading."¹⁰

In her 2004 manifesto opening Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy titled "Crisis in the Humanities? Reconfiguring Literary Study for the Twenty-first Century," Perloff redefines this mode of "differential reading"—demanding a renewed pleasure in the questions—and the difficulties—of bringing seemingly opposed vectors of hermeneutic activity into play.¹¹ Perloff's pointed critique of post-structural "new New Criticism" dissects the "ironic preservation of the autotelic text" in contemporary criticism.¹² Often using Language poetry as a reference point, Perloff urges for a criticism that restores an interest in "the author's intention and reader's response."¹³ According to Perloff, the criticism of poetry must restore concepts from chapter 4 of Aristotle's Poetics: the excitement of discovery—a "pleasure of recognition" and a "pleasure of representation."¹⁴ Through these pleasures, Perloff renews a fascination of the text while avoiding the traps of post-structuralism's erasure of difference.

In line with Perloff's critique, in the first chapter, I offer the performance of a differential reading of a single historical artifact: the first issue of Form (1966). Listening closely to this item will replace the impossible act of elaborating a context for the multifarious textual sources, precursors, and thinkers important for the Language writing examined in the second chapter. Instead it performs a differential reading of a single issue of this magazine in its philosophical and aesthetic context in 1966—a year that marks a flashpoint for several of the most important strands of twentieth century philosophy and poetics. From this approach, if there is a context to be articulated, I would echo Jean-Pierre Vernant's understanding of 'context' as presented in 1966 at the Baltimore symposium: "every message implies a necessary complicity between the interlocutor and his audience."¹⁵ Further, if I acknowledge this context of necessary complicity in the composition of my staging of this work, it is to develop a discontinuous field for productive allusion, a predictable model for an unpredictable project. The Language writers would take this self-reflexive notion of an complicitous reader-writer context to construct new ways of questioning poetry, language, and the act of reading: I offer it here to argue for a productive exploration of disjunctive materials that elides a suffocating causal hermeneutic while remaining open to the dialogic echoes of the past.

In fact, the failing of this approach is exactly the loss of a drawn-out narrative of causal development: instead, looking at these two disjointed moments provides a device to cultivate a more adventurous (un-traversed) reading performance—each chapter structurally cohering on its own, with allusive interplay between the two. The particular (necessarily, my) composition of 1966 though Form is thus the foreground for a related textual event in 1975. Much is gained by looking at Form in this way: as a forum of careful provocation and exploration of many of the important issues and conversations shaping the work to follow, as a critical/theoretical work which analyzes the functions of the magazine through a magazine—the media that came to define the Language group of writers—but most importantly, from Form in 1966 we can begin to describe the language-altering structuralist break in philosophical thought. The "structuralist revolution" was, for these writers, truly revolutionary: the death of the author, the absence of the subject, a new artistic legitimization of scientificity, the serious application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the Althusserian resurrection of the Marxism—this revolution wrought unheard of changes for a conception of language, writing and the practice of verbal art. These changes, I argue, are essential for a reading of the formation of Language poetry constructed by Silliman in 1975.

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Robert Smithson, "Predictable Model for Unpredictable Project,"
The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam
(Berkeley: University of California, 1996), p. 333

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arrange
enough space
to play
an arrangement

…

to write:
to arrange
to have
everything

--Clark Coolidge,
(editor’s excerpts from) NOTES ON C, W & Z,
from Bruce Andrew’s fall 1973 issue of Toothpick, Lisbon, & The Orcas Islands

Print in Good FORM

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The first issue of Form was published in the summer of 1966. Its credo, written by an unidentified "editorial voice" which falls between geometric architect Philip Steadman, translator and concrete poet Stephen Bann, and art/poetry historian Mike Weaver—in italics, the "aims" emphasized in every issue follow precisely:

The aims of 'Form' are to publish and provoke discussion of the relations of form to structure in the work of art, and of correspondences between the arts."¹

From within this sentence, already we can read that the arrangement of "Form" as a periodical work itself (the aims of Form) was directed towards constructing an argument (to provoke discussion) about the relations of form and structure in the work of art. Thus, distinct from the pell-mell variety of unrelated articles in some traditional little magazines, Form stands as a coherent whole, a meta-magazine, an argument through commentary, arrangement, and citation: exploring the relations of form to structure in the periodical work of print. Later, I will argue this organizing can well be considered an instance of what Roland Barthes famously defined as "structuralist activity." Before continuing, however, perhaps I ought to separate preliminarily—in Barthesian fashion—form from structure: formalism 'decomposes' where structuralism 'decomposes to recompose a new object.'² Or, as Yve-Alain Bois will demonstrate, structuralism is a mode of criticism that "seeks to clarify the intrinsic structure of the work—not only how it is made (in the formalist version of this approach) but also how it means."³ In this chapter I aim to explore the ways in which a close reading of this open argument in and through Form—compellingly presented already in the first issue—provides engaging insight into an intertextual moment of experimental writing and continental philosophy in the watershed year of 1966.

Lifting the cover of Form to peek at the table of contents gives one a sense of the sort of argument Form intends to make. Alongside the directed "aims" of the magazine— relating form and structure—the magazine begins with "Film as Pure Form," a hitherto untranslated manifesto by Theo van Doesburg, which is followed by the first English translation of Roland Barthes' influential essay "The Activity of Structuralism." Immediately after Barthes comes "Experimental Aesthetics," a scientific essay on psychological experiments and the possibilities of codifying the structure of human aesthetic judgments (One might hear, immediately, the faint Cambridge snort of disapproval from Wittgenstein). After which, the contents jump to "Fernand Léger and the International Style," an investigation of an international aesthetics of post-WWI fragmentation by Duncan Robinson. Then, delightfully out of sync, falls a technical article on new technologies of computer rendering titled "Computers and Design" by Crispin Gray. All of this is followed by the first in a unique series of little magazine tributes called 'Great Little Magazines.' These segments conclude most issues of Form with full author indexes along with reprints of critical articles from little magazines— ranging from Secession in this first issue to Blues, G, Mecano, Ray, De Stijl SIC, Kulchur, and LEF throughout the run of the journal.⁴ The section on Secession consists of a complete (the first) full author index, a manifesto "The Mechanics for a Literary 'Secession" by maverick dada-modernist Secession editor Gorham B. Munson, "The Attempt" a poem by William Carlos Williams, a selection from Yvor Winters important "Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image," and finally Hans Arp's schizophrenic dadautobiography "Arp the Trapdrummer." The first issue of Form is concluded by three elegant concrete poems by Brazilian concretismo frontrunner Pedro Xisto.

I am compelled to quickly offer this laborious drive-by list of contents in impressionistic detail to invoke, from the onset, a sort of systematic electricity generated even in a quick reading of Form's particular engineering of a diverse array of articles from a disparate range of origins and sources. Additionally, it is important to locate this diverse group of materials in a single unit of space: above, a single paragraph, a small magazine like a black screen—such that these contents, represented in writing here, can exist simultaneously as a singular object and an expanding exploratory space—both systematic and historical. Now we will listen closely to these articles and their arrangement—with ears tuned to the intertextual repercussions that map these in an echolocation of the pivotal moment in 1966—bearing in mind that the term 'intertextuality' itself coined by the young Julia Kristeva in the same year, and that the codes of this coinage only work in cooperation with a nuanced reading of the particular situation of Form in its historical setting, artistic politic, and creative project.⁵ Thus the directions of the journal will provide a sort of expanding field into the complex of forces shaping, and finding shape in objects in all directions—problematized, but above all excited by, the contradictions of this array of interpretive echoes. However, to begin with, we can sketch a preliminarily flat chart of this periodical movement from the front cover.

The sparse black-and-white front cover features Theo van Doesburg's "schematic representation of a three-dimensional space, simultaneously agitated in all directions." In italics, an editorial note accompanies the diagram:

From 'Film as Pure Form' by Theo van Doesburg: 'schematic representation of a three-dimensional space, simultaneously agitated in all directions.' At right, movement towards a centre; at left, movement towards periphery. The black field represents the movie screen up till now.'

This editorial gesture presents the initial formation of an argument (along with a mode of argumentation) made through the tactical (an art—techne—of ordering —taktos) arrangements of citation, self-reflexive editorial meta-commentary, and experimental neo-modernist format. Indeed, as Joaquim Moreno notes in the blurb for Form from the recent Clip/Stamp/Fold exhibition of architectural little magazines from the 60s and 70s, "Form was probably the first 'meta-little magazine:' …Together with its theoretical postulates, the format of the magazine was also an experimental terrain, another opportunity to inquire about the relations between form and structure."⁶ As an 'experimental terrain' the cover presents many interesting points of reference for reading the magazine as a whole. Out from the white 9" by 9" modernist field, an editorial voice (from, by, :) directs the viewer through citation. Resting on top of van Doesburg's schematic rendering, the collection of essays in bold, followed by (seemingly less significant) authors, is printed in the still-new cosmopolitan simplicity of Helvetica.⁷ Competing with the italic editorial commentary to the right for authority of citation, this heterogeneous list of articles describes (and is in turn represented by) the "simultaneously agitated" space drawn from the schematic below. Indeed, the tidy white square of Form could well replace the black "screen up till now" as a space moving simultaneously "towards a centre" and "towards periphery." Permitted a short symbolic misreading, this movement could also well reflect the magazine's recuperation of peripheral modernist/formalist projects towards "a centre" of contemporaneous thought: namely the mounting structuralist wave—which is then pulled back towards, reinterpreting its formal antecedents. On the level of the sign (the black screen), it might be noted, this is a unit in a system already decentered: simultaneously agitated in all directions—Form is a sheaf of dense knots; pages of writing collected in a semi-glossy square; writing that aims to provoke a discussion of form to structure.

Correspondingly, in these pages, I hope to offer a sheaf of readings "simultaneously agitated in all directions" attempting something of what Marjorie Perloff demands of poetic criticism today: a closer reading that positions questions of theory, form and structure along with the problematic of history, culture and geography.⁸ Reading a magazine such as Form provides an ideal method for just such an agitated reading—an expanded reading of troubled productivity, a fascinated provocation of a discussion of the relation of the historical/cultural/authorial problematic to a reading of the text. As I hope to demonstrate with my reading Form, writing about magazines provides a dynamic opportunity to explore the tension between inventive post-structuralist dialogic reading and the historical nuance of "differential reading."

As Barthes would have it in his famously polemical 1964 interview "I Don't Believe in Influences": "to my mind, what is transmitted is not 'ideas' but 'languages,' i.e., forms which can be filled in different fashions; that's why the notion of circulation seems to me more appropriate than influence; books are 'currency' rather than 'forces.'"⁹ To which he would add both "I do not feel the need to arrange the uncertainties or contradictions of the past" and "There are many connections between history and literature, starting with writing itself. We must try—and this may be one of the tasks of criticism—to perceive these multiple connections, not in order to reinforce literature's isolation, but, on the contrary, to understand how it is linked by a chain of constraints to human misfortune, which is always literature's real object."¹⁰ "However, I repeat, negative or not, I don't believe in influences."¹¹ Currently, the stamp on the issue of Form I'm now viewing reads: "Columbia University / Libraries / JUL 18 1967 / Periodical Room." This transatlantic circulation of a material vehicle of text, interpreted though a stamp from July of '67 and the dialogic intelligibility of the text in April of '07—not an "authority," simply a circular memory.¹²

To return to the front cover of this first issue, one notices Form's numbering system appropriately figures the cover as the first page to the journal, the contents falling to the third page. The first in a series, the cover is also an introduction, an overture, and a sort of formal thesis statement for the issue to follow. Indeed, the first cover figures a thesis for the 10 issue arc of the journal: shuffling through the issues, mostly skinny, all around 35 pages in length, we see van Doesburg return in the cover to the ninth issue of Form, his picture accompanying a series of diagrams of 'the fourth dimension in Neoplasticism' under notes on Duchamp, Black Mountain College and the 60s New York magazine Kulchur. However, it is in the final issue of Form (no. 10) that we find the compelling mirror/conclusion to the arc of the argument begun by van Doesburg's formalist schematic of the time-space continuum: issue 10 features an diagram called 'project for cine-car' drawn by Alexandr Rodchenko for the Russian formalist magazine LEF. This cinematic automobile is concretely formed from the words roughly translated "GVK All Russi Rural XOZ"—the cinema traveling to rural outposts in all sectors. The simple car features two wheels, a big "B" and a large screen attached to what seems to be the front of the vehicle. The moveable image is an image that moves. Moves on. This final magazine includes Gerard Genette's "Structuralism & Literary Criticism," an article by Simon Cutts on concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, and important unpublished formalist essays from the 'Left Front for the Arts,' namely Brik, Arvatov, and Mayakovsky. Similar to the first issue's complex citational play with van Doesburg's schematic, this continuing discussion drives on (as the magazine itself literally circulates) while the same issues—form and structure in art and poetry—cycle through a stable singular screen, a square of white space that itself moves in time just as there is the simulacra of movement constructed in the succession images (pages).

But then, we must depart from this expanding theoretical space opening Form to read the diagram back into its functional place in van Doesburg's essay "Film as Pure Form."¹³ The first essay of the magazine, "Film as Pure Form" is preceded by van Doesburg's Elementarist sketch "From Surface to Space. Six moments of a space-time construction (with 24 variations), formation of a diagonal dimension."¹⁴ This is followed by an interesting translator's note by film historian and experimental filmmaker Standish D. Lawder. The note establishes—from the beginning—Form's dedication to the translation/recovery of unduly forgotten avant-garde texts. Lawder writes: ["Film as Pure Form"] has curiously received little attention, despite the fame of its author and the significance of his thesis, both in his day and ours.¹⁵ Thereby initiating Form's role as a pedagogical vehicle for both historical revisions (his day) and authority on contemporary art criticism (and ours)—van Doesburg's essay ought to be in translation because his thesis holds important consequences for the work of art in 1966. Further, Lawder cites the editors of Die Form as the authoritative voice, criticizing the lack of a "concrete placing of the problem of film" and a "concrete explanation of its means"—this editorial note thus emphasizes the problematic reception of the article's abstraction in 1929 even while foregrounding its vatic import for 1966.¹⁶ Thus, the article is contextualized as a historical artifact in the temporal moment of Die Form's publication, as an important forgotten document for contemporary art in 1966, and most importantly, as an object specifically curated by the editors of Form to initiate a future discourse on form and structure—notably, as the magazine continues, for the then burgeoning kinetic art and concrete poetry movements in Britain. Moments of a space-time construction.

The essay that follows is a manifesto for a future "total" film based on the constructive elements of the filmic medium: the orchestration of geometrically abstract, 'pure,' filmic elements—light, movement, space, time, shadow—constituting the concept of a 'pure film form' (rein gestaltender Film).¹⁷ Provoked by the exigency of a medium recently complicated by the introduction of sound (the essay was written in 1929), van Doesburg instead calls on the "completely constructivist, clearly elemental structure of a dynamic light architecture" to open "the space-time film continuum"—the fully immersive filmic space pictured on the cover to Form.¹⁸ Returning to the technical schematic represented on the cover, van Doesburg writes a vital description of the reconfigured artistic experience of this newly projected film space:

From this it follows that the spectator space will become part of the film space. The separation of 'projection surface' is abolished. The spectator will no longer observe the film, like a theatrical presentation, but will participate in it optically and acoustically.¹⁹

Thus the ultimate implications of van Doesburg's simultaneously agitated filmic project are utopic: towards the union of art and spectator, the avant-garde dream through van Doesburg's infrathin film. Similar to what Steve McCaffery would later appropriate from mathematics: the Klein worm—"a form which differs from conventional geometric forms in its characteristic absence of both inner and other surfaces" for a poetry "without walls," van Doesburg's essay works the expansion of pure forms into a larger structure that unites spectator and artistic phenomena.²⁰ This too reads well with Form's interest in the potential of the kinetic arts scene of the sixties, publishing on diverse synesthetes from the Russian kinetic 'Movement' Group in no. 4 to the 'Synthesis' Group from Czechoslovakia in no. 7—the interest in these intermedia happenings of a neo-avant-garde form the recuperation of modernist goals along with historical documents. And while much may be read towards this renewal, more interesting, perhaps, is precisely this focus on an active infrathin structure between media and spectator (or reader) dependent on, in this case by, new horizons (and new fusions) of optical and acoustic sense.

The new experiments, geometrically orientated, succumb to laws of an almost architectural structure for a multi-dimensional space. Thus, more scientific than artistic, they prepare the way for an orchestration of film to be developed in totally new and unsuspected dimensions.²¹

Approaching this question of a scientific orchestration of new and unsuspected art, and as an excellent indicator of the immediate American distribution of Form, we may turn to Susan Sontag's August 1966 citation of Form's translation of "Film as Pure Form" in her essay "Film and Theatre" for The Tulane Drama Review—importantly, the argument made by Form continues in Sontag's usage of "Film as Pure Form" as the model for a rendering of intermedia constituted by the relations of form and structure in the work of art. Sontag emphasizes van Doesburg's description of film as "a vehicle of 'optical poetry,' 'dynamic light architecture,'" and the realization of "Bach's dream of finding an optical equivalent for the temporal structure of a musical composition."²² Similarly bridging radical art of the 60s—John Cage, La Monte Young, Fluxus—to the avant-garde experimental synesthesia of figures such as Marinetti and van Doesburg, Susan Sontag complicates her placement of the theatrical/filmic line by emphasizing both the media specificity of formal construction (in poetry, or film, or theatre) and the contemporary exigency of intermedia exploration of structure.²³

The interest of Sontag and Form's in questions of theatre and film is symptomatic of a tendency towards exploration of intermedia in the mid-60s: productivity through cross-application of complimentary disciplines. Not unrelated to a general science of signs, from Black Mountain and Fluxus performance to concrete poetry and text art, writings toward intermedia often raise the questions of a comprehensive semiology of the arts. Take, for example, Nam June Paik's important piece included in a Great Bear Pamphlet (Dick Higgin's Fluxus press) titled Manifestos. Paik writes: "Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself has its origin in karma…formulated by Norbert Weiner in 1948 as 'The signal, where the message is sent, plays equally important role as signal, where message is not sent.' / As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions between and across various existing sciences."²⁴

While Paik is writing to refute the originality of McLuhan, his comments well apply themselves to Lacan's interest in cybernetics, as is so well demonstrated by Kittler's work on media discursive analysis. In 1966, it seems, even Neo-Dadaist Fluxus Happenings were compelled to explore regions "across various existing sciences," drawing analogy to a "science of pure relations" consisting of "signals" defined differentially in a play pf presence/absence.

But this, perhaps, is to expand the space a bit too far, van Doesburg's project sought an overall artistic form, a 'pure film form,' to transcend the structure of the relationship between spectator and art object. Fluxus, by contrast, used (or, as they say, uses) methods of comedic empathy, usually by emphasizing, or hyperbolizing, the artistic potential of everyday objects. Form's argument is to place these sorts of disjunctive historical moments together to produce exactly this open discourse—the multiple relations of modernist and avant-garde formalisms to structuralism and contemporaneous neo-avant-garde arts. It is not surprising, then, that Fluxus can meet van Doesburg through a series of historical articles Form published from/about Black Mountain College, the birthing ground for the 'happening,' chance-based procedural operations, and many key figures for Fluxus (Ray Johnson, George Brecht, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, et al.).²⁵

Notes : : Print in Good Form

2002-07-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

[1] Editorial note, Form, no. 1 (1966): p. 3.

[2] Paraphrased from Barthes, Roland "The Activity of Structuralism," (as Stephen Bann translates the title of a shortened version of the essay M. Barthes wrote for Les Lettres Nouvelles in 1963, as collected in 1964 for Barthes' Essais Critiques) or "The Structuralist Activity" (as the essay is translated by Richard Howard for the English version of Critical Essays published in 1972).

[3] Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), ix.

[4] These magazines range from a constructivist/Futurist 'Left Front of the Arts) in Soviet Union of the 1920s (LEF) to eclectic criticism and poetry from New York in the 60s (Kulchur)—they are ordered above as they appeared, one for each journal with the exception of two issues (6 and 7) devoted to De Stijl.

[5]

[6] Joaquim Moreno, Clip/Stamp/Fold: Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, http://www.clipstampfold.com/.

[7] In a parallel history, one might ironically chart the meteoric rise of the Helvetica typeface, peaking in the 60s for the design world, before it became popularly considered overused in the 70s, garish in the 80s, and pervasive through the 90s: however, there is evidence that properly used Helvetica remains fashionable today. See Lars Müller, Helvetica: Homage to a Typeface, (Self Published, 2002).

[8] Perloff. (1990), 21.

[9] Barthes. The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York, 1985), 27.

[10] Barthes (1985), 27-28.

[11] Barthes (1985), 27.

[12] Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Hill and Wang: New York, 1975),
36.

[13] Originally published as "Film als reine Gestaltung" in Die Form 4, no. 10, (1929): 241-248. (Standish Lawder, Translator's Note, Form, no. 1 (1966): 5).

[14] Form, no. 1 (1966), p. 5.

[15] Lawder, 5.

[16] Lawder, 5.

[17] Theodore van Doesburg, "Film as Pure Form," trans. Standish Lawder, Form, no. 1 (1966): 7-8.

[18] Van Doesburg, 8-9.

[19] Van Doesburg, 11.

[20] Steve McCaffery, "Diminished Reference and the Model Reader," North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 20-21.

[21] Van Doesburg, 11.

[22] Susan Sontag. "Film and Theatre," The Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 1, (1966): 25. For some time, all useful ideas in art have been extremely sophisticated. Like the idea that everything is what it is, and not another thing. A painting is a painting. Sculpture is sculpture. A poem is a poem, not prose. Etcetera. And the complementary idea: a painting can be "literary" or sculptural, a poem can be prose, theatre can emulate and incorporate cinema, cinema can be theatrical. (Sontag, 37.)

[23] Nam June Paik, Manifestos, ed. Dick Higgins (reprinted on UbuWeb in the ubuclassics series, www.ubu.com ), 25. Another influential gathering of writers in 1966, Dick Higgins' Manifestos further solidified the evolving Fluxus movement by gathering conceptual artists like Alan Kaprow and Diter Rot, countercultural poets John Giorno and Jerome Rothenberg, and even Emmett Williams, several of these concrete poets were involved with Stephen Bann's important Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology of 1967.

[24] Black Mountain appears in exactly half the issues of Form (nos. 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9).

2002-06-14T23:07:00.000-07:00

Structuralist Activity / The Activity of Structuralism

2002-04-14T22:40:00.000-07:00

Van Doesburg describes the fate for the "three most important stages of creative activity—imitation—description—formation (Imitation, Darstellung, Gestaltung)"… "Formation is always the goal… As soon as creative initiative sets in, the course is altered, and what began as reproduction shifts into the sphere of creativity. Reality grown into a kind of super-reality."¹ For van Doesburg, this creative 'super-reality' consists in "the reduction of essential elements (Elementarisierung)," for Barthes, these essential forms are positioned differentially, and reconstructed in an "activity of structuralism."²

A harsh transition. Indeed, the abruptness of turning a page between articles—ought to bridge van Doesburg's manifesto and Barthes' 1963 essay 'L'activité structuraliste' translated for the first time as "The Activity of Structuralism." Before continuing with the article, there are important readings of this version of the title translated by Stephen Bann for Form, in difference to the widely anthologized version of the essay translated by Richard Howard as "The Structuralist Activity."³

Unlike 'The Structuralist Activity,' 'The Activity of Structuralism' endows Barthes' article with more authority, more manifesto-like power: this is the activity of structuralism; it promises to describe the activity (of structuralism) in its completeness. Moreover, "Structuralism" could be read as the acting element—as though Roland Barthes is going to explain the activity structuralism objectively carries out in the words to follow. By contrast, 'The Structuralist Activity' transmits an openness of possible 'structuralist activity,' inserting a person—the structuralist—engaged in an activity, offering an example of activity pursued by the structuralist in general or Roland Barthes in particular. The slight reordering of the title is nothing short of the difference between an exuberant scientism of 1964-1966 and a retrospective nuance from the vantage of 1972. These small differences in title reading compound word by word through motivated translation—"The Activity of Structuralism" appropriated by Form, and translated by an adventurous concrete poet as a structural-artistic manifesto bursting with excitement in 1966 is thus hugely different than "The Structuralist Activity" in Critical Essays (Howard, 1972), European Literary Theory & Practice (Gras, 1973), or monolithic contemporary omnibuses like Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory (Harris, 1992) and Critical Theory Since Plato (Adams, 1992). But even as I mention this now, as though lingering on 'The Activity of Structuralism by Roland Barthes / Translated by Stephen Bann' in the upper left hand corner of the two page spread o the essay, before exploring Barthes' article below and without beginning to treat the issues of either structuralism or its activities, it is to attend, from the beginning, to the unavoidable and curious afterlife of Barthes' article in its multiple appearances from 1963 to 1966 to 1972 present. In a presentation on the surreal ethnographic magazine Documents at the recent Clip/Stamp/Fold symposium of little magazines, Spyros Papapetros pointed out Freud's maxim that the "periodical is always a reprint" of an original document, each time refigured in a "multiplicity of afterlives"—for Barthes' "L'activite structuraliste" we will proceed, looking at just one of these multifarious afterlives, tactically employed in Form.⁴

But this is all too sudden, almost presumptuous, perhaps I should start again—the transition from van Doesburg made less abrupt via an italicized editorial introduction in the marginal space immediately left of Barthes' essay:

This is a slightly shortened version of an article which M. Barthes wrote for 'Les Lettres Nouvelles' in 1963, and which was reprinted in his collection of 'Essais Critiques' (1964). It provides a new model for the relationship of the work, the artist and the world, which is relevant to much contemporary literature and art, as well as to the examples given. The poems of Pedro Xisto, featured elsewhere in this magazine, are a case in point.⁵

From its editorial onset, then, Barthes' essay is framed as a "new model for the relationship of the work, the artists and the world"—a schematic description of the "structuralism" Abraham Moles will apply to Vasarely's Op Art in Form, no. 9 (1969) as "the doctrine which has come to seem the distinctive philosophy of the modern world."⁶ New in every sense, and at hand (relevant) for application to the arts—the very activity of structuralism itself quite literally shifting the structural relationship of art, the artists, and the world. The program most visible here: the discussion about the relations between form and structure is for Form a discussion of the model structuralism supplies for contemporary literature and art.

Beginning with van Doesburg's idealistic formalism in "Film as Pure Form," the magazine first reveals it's bearing in the discussion of the relation of these two elements. Perhaps the most interesting contemporary exploration of the relations of formalism and structuralism in the work of art is Yves-Alain Bois' introductory essay "Formalism and Structuralism" for the tag-team tome Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism.⁷ Curiously, Bois begins in 1971 with Barthes' seminar in the history of semiology—the seminar itself made strange by Barthes' autobiographic emphasis of Bertolt Brecht's influence on his first semiological work: Mythologies (as opposed to beginning with Saussure, as he does in 1957). The strangeness, it turns out, is important: Bois recalls Barthes' distinction between Brecht's "extreme attention to the form of Nazi texts, [the seamless flow of their rhetoric] which he followed word for word in order to elaborate a counterdiscourse" to Lukács' "fetishization" of realist novels—a "restricted" formalism that "remains at the superficial level of form-as-shape," much like the New Critical autotelic text seen by Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenburg.⁸ Brecht's formalism—hand in hand with the self-reflexivity and anti-illusionism of modernism—demonstrated that "language was not a neutral vehicle… but had a materiality of its own and that this materiality was always charged with significations."⁹ Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example).¹⁰ From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes' famous dictum: "a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it."¹¹ Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two "formalisms"—Lukács' "restricted" morphological formalism, versus Brecht's formalism of historical-structural signification—is "essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism)."¹² This is exactly the (p)retrieval Form makes in 1966.

Form, like Bois, constructs a reading of Barthes that re-emphasizes "the historical link between modernism and the awareness that language is a structure of signs" in part of a movement to situate structuralism within the "broader formalist current in twentieth century thought."¹³ Form's desire for a formalist / modernist / structuralist conversation can quickly be read into the choice to select "L'activite structuraliste"—an essay Barthes wrote to establish the absence of difference "between the structuralism of the scholar on one hand, and, on the other, literature in particular and art in general"—as the paradigmatic essay for understanding structuralist theory.¹⁴ It is not surprising then, that Bois also employs Barthes' essay in his ingenious structuralist staging of Picasso's Cubism—blurring together Formalist development, Saussurian linguistics, and Roland Barthes' "structuralist activity"—for Bois, "structuralist activity" is used to retroactively declare the "structuralism" of Picasso' Cubism. This argument begins with a discussion of Picasso's Bull's Head as a structuralist exploration of Jakobson's linguistic distinctions for metaphor (here, the likeness of the bull's head) and metonymy (the conjunction of bicycle parts). A double activity, Bois claims that the piece was not only structurally engineered, but that it also performed a structural analysis if the figurative tradition of Western art through its very mode of construction. From this point in 1944, Bois jumps back to 1912, when the Synthetic Cubism of Picasso's Guitar (explained as a differential transformation of space into sculptural material) through a sort of decomposed ostranenie helped "the first literary critics who can be called structuralists—the Russian Formalists…develop their theories…before they even heard of Saussure, [or] what the Swiss scholar had called the 'arbitrary nature of the sign.'"¹⁵ Through a system of functional oppositions, Picasso's Guitar, transforms a void into a sign for the skin of the guitar and a paper cylinder into a sign for its hole, entering space—now infrathin between spectator and artwork—into a profound questioning of the artistic experience, opening totally new and unexpected dimensions of the spectator space: the only interpretation appropriate to Picasso's work (and indeed the methodology constituted by Cubism), Bois argues, is the activity of structuralism.

Like Picasso's Guitar, the structuralist activity of Form involves the oppositional function of absence, space, and omission. Returning to the editorial note "This is a slightly shortened version," a reading of "The Activity of Structuralism" demands investigation into how, exactly, the essay way decomposed for its "slightly shortened version." At first, it seems, this shortening is aesthetic: the essay fits neatly into Form's four standard columns of text per page, exactly filling a two page spread; the only two page spread of the magazine without image, disruption, or extended marginal commentary—Barthes' text stands for itself. To get this clean effect, first, the space between paragraphs had to be removed, the essay runs on as eight long streams of words, each left-justified and of equal height. But the space, for Barthes, signifies: its absence, signifies—"The Activity of Structuralism" has no internal edges, is fluid text, a single element in the structure of Form—its garment gapes only at the edges of the pages, abutting the rest of Form.

In the original article and "The Structuralist Activity," this is not the case. The structure of the essay includes an introductory section, distinct from the body of the essay: this first section, often quoted, begins "What is structuralism? Not a school, nor even a movement (at least, not yet), for most of the authors ordinarily labeled with this word are unaware of being united by any solidarity of doctrine or commitment."¹⁶ It proceeds to discuss Saussure with his signifier/signified and synchronic/diachronic pairings—the "spoken signs" constituting the "structuralist vision"—and concludes with the introduction of a 'common sign' of the 'structural man' (l'homme structural) defined by "his imagination"—"in other words, by the way in which he mentally experiences structure."¹⁷ This recourse to the structural man is part of Barthes desire find structuralism's "broadest description (if not its definition)," not to reduce structuralism a priori since it was, at that time (1964) "neither a school nor a movement."¹⁸ In English, this "broadest description" has often come to equate the definition of structuralism, in the essay's unending pedagogical circulation. This definition is built upon the space that punctuates the distance between the introduction of this structural man and the main body of the articles, which is concerned with an activity—defined by Barthes as "the controlled succession of a certain number of mental operations" within the imagination of the structural man.¹⁹

Form's 'slightly shortened version' takes up the essay here: excising the first section, the beginning of the main body, and all reference to "structural man"—which is instead uniformly translated as "the structuralist." Thus, the "activity," becomes much broader than the mental operations in a figurative structural man—ideal for literal artistic incorporation of Barthes' remarks. This shortening also removes all mention of Saussure and recognition of the 'spoken signs' of structuralist activity, and though these spoken signs naturally recur throughout the article, this version produces a structuralism with a linguistic vocabulary, but the heritage of this language relegated to background noise. Further, the opening question, its denial of a 'movement' and reasons for this broadest of structuralist definitions are not part of Bann's article.

Instead, "The Activity of Structuralism" begins manifesto-like: "The aims of all structuralist activity, in the fields of both thought and poetry is to reconstitute an 'object', and, by this process, to make known the rules of functioning, or 'functions', of this object."²⁰ Boldly, this statement imports the argument of the entire essay—for the expansion of structuralist activity into the field of literature and the arts—into the opening line. The translation "thought and poetry" for "réflexive ou poétique" is a far cry from Howards more accurate "reflexive or poetic"—Barthes, here, still considering the goals of "a certain number of mental operations."²¹ One could continue a productive word-by-word differential reading of these minute differences between these translations of Barthes essay, but skipping forward, the argument of Form is most clearly defined in its particular opposition to the articulation of agencement. Where this essential word, most often defined as 'layout' or 'organization' is strangely translated in "The Structuralist Activity" as 'articulation,' Form chooses 'arrangement.' This occurs after Barthes has written of the absence of either technical (technique: "the very essence of creation": a "recomposition in order that the functions may become apparent…the process that constitutes the work") or compositional differences between structuralists like Lévi-Strauss, J-P. Richard, and Troubetskoy and artists like Mondrian, Boulez, and Butor.²² From this he begins to articulate the two typical operations of structuralist activity: "dissection and arrangement" (découpage et agencement).²³ While both translations agree on dissection, Form's intention is alignment with compositional artistic practice, while Howard is cleverly embodying the word with (in this instance) the less precise speech-based character of structuralist composition (as utterance) in addition to retaining the joining of small connecting articles (as in joints and articles, from Latin articulus 'small connecting part'). Agencement, translated by Bann as arrangement, instead, closely ties the word to layout and organization, to the history of newspapers and magazines—to the technical art of arrangement, a structuralist tactics of printing.

Importantly, this alignment can be read into the structural composition of the magazine itself: Form is every bit as precise in "the orderly display of certain units and certain associations of units," as Butor or Boulez. Form's aims (this editorial use of 'aim' in its brief opening manifesto itself echoing Bann's version of Barthes' opening) of relating form to structure exactly mirror the structuralist activity that "seeks to relate to history not simply contents (a thing which has been done a thousand times), but also forms, not simply the material, but also the intelligible, not simply the ideological but also the aesthetic."²⁴ As for Barthes, these new structuralist relations are essentially "concerned less with assigning full meanings to the objects which it discovers, than with knowing how meaning is possible"—the provocation of a dialogue of the conditions for form and structure.²⁵

The final strange dissection Form performs on "L'ativite structuraliste" is the extraction of a single line, towards the end of the essay—in fact the concluding line in the main body, immediately before Barthes' introduces Hegel, the frisson of meaning, and the 'mantic' character of literary activity—one of Barthes' most famous lines, a paratactic conclusion: "Homo significans: such would be the new man of structural activity."²⁶ As before, Form here arranges a radicalized mimetic performance of Barthes' (in general, the structuralist's) elimination of the subject—even from Barthes' essay, Form is intent on removing l'homme from the composition of its pages. Through the thoroughly structuralist activity of this editing it could certainly be said that Form is "not magazine, possessor of particular meanings, but magazine the fabricator of meanings" (substituting magazine for man, as Form might).²⁷

This argument established, it is more important than ever to plug Barthes' essay back into the composition of Form to explore some of its inter-magazine microcosmic functions. As a "case in point" of the contemporary relevance of this structuralist model for literature and art, the editorial voice points the reader to the poems of Pedro Xisto, featured at the end of the magazine. Flipping past "Experimental Aesthetics," the Léger piece, "Computers and Design," and the Secession section.

From these three poems, the structuralist analogy is immediate and necessary. Xisto magnifies the simplest formal elements of language: each letter is magnified or repeated to unavoidable materiality. This denaturalization, an extreme ostranenie, finds meaning only through a play with the functions of each letter, full in a complex system of spatial, acoustic, and semantic forms—necessarily demanding new relations of the reader to the functionality of language: it questions the conditions through which meaning is possible, at what price and through what channels. All three foreground the signifier to explore multiple potential readings and meaning making functions: the first, a differential sheaf of meanings we could imagine as "yarn" woven into the word "yearn," which we so yearn to read in a meaningful form, even though it is always already broken into/formed out of yarn, year, yea, ye, or the simply present letter 'y' itself—in contrast to the absence of a single "e" destroying the word's bold cohesion.²⁸

The second presents the reversibility of words—"star" can always betray itself as "rats," which, with the small addition of an "o" can multiply the letters of 'star' into 'astro,' which itself can be revealed as "ostra" (Portuguese for oyster)—again foregrounding the spatial shape of the letters itself, the 'o' could well be a pearl in the oyster, the differential kernal locked in the cohesion of a word. Babel, finally, returns to Form's attack on the subjective "able" voice: the breath (abel) lost in a babbling rush of permutations of the letters 'b,' 'a,' 'b,' 'e,' 'l' which in turn present the simulacra of order, a precise grid equaling "b a b e l :"—babel is to ____ , where ____ is all possible lettristic permutations—ironically concluding babel : : babel, as though mathematic, "quod erat demonstrandum."

Notes : : Structuralist Activity / The Activity of Structuralism

2001-04-18T05:20:00.000-07:00

[1] Form (1966), 5.

[2] Form (1966), 5.

[3] Not translated again until 1972 in Roland Barthes. Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1972).

[4] Spyros Papapetros. Lecturing on Documents and the KBW for Clip/Stamp/Fold: Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, Princeton University, 4/23/2007.

[5] Form (1966), 13.

[6] Form, no. 9, (1969): 24.

[7] Yve-Alain Bois, "Formalism and Structuralism," Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 32.

[8] Bois, 33. Furthermore, Barthes was denying the claims of the antiformalist champions that formalist critics, in bypassing "content" to scrutinize forms, were retreating from the world and its historical realities to the ivory tower of a humanistic "eternal present." (Bois, 32)

[9] Bois, 33.

[10] See Françoise Gaillard's excellent "For a Political Roland Barthes," French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (Routledge: New York, 2001), 47-58.

[11] Bois, 32.

[12] Ibid, 33. The parentheses belong to Bois.

[13] Ibid, 33.

[14] Barthes, (1966) 13.

[15] Bois, 33-34.

[16] Barthes (Gras, 1972), 157

[17] Ibid, 157-158.

[18] Ibid. 158.

[19] Ibid. 158.

[20] Barthes (Bann, 1966), 13.

[21] Barthes (Gras, 1972), 158.

[22] Barthes (Bann, 1966), 13.

[23] Ibid, 13.

[24] Ibid, 14.

[25] Ibid, 14.

[26] Ibid, 14.

[27] Ibid, 14.

[28] For an extended meditation on the possible readings of an absent "e" see Perec's La Disparition.

2001-04-16T01:46:00.000-07:00

Bruce Andrews, Edge (1973) unpaginated

Next

The Ways of Alcheringa

2000-04-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

__________________________________________________________________

alcheringa [Arunta of Australia, alcheringa], n. 1. The Eternal Dream Time, The Dreaming of a sacred heroic time long ago when man and nature cam to be, a kind of narrative of things that once happened. 2. A kid of charter of things that still happen. 3. A kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant. v. 1. The act of dreaming, as reality and symbol, by which the artist is inspired to produce a new song. 2. The act by which the mind makes contact with whatever mystery it is that connects the Dreaming and the Here-and-Now.

-- adapted from W.E.H. Stanner

_________________________________________________________________

In the first number of the new series of Alcheringa ethnopoetics magazine, the editors—Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg—in 1975 renew their intentions to explore "the meaning of tribal cultures for Western urban culture" as the journal set out in 1970—these cultures are represented multifariously:¹

from all over the world, transcriptions and translations of oral poems from living traditions, ancient texts with oral roots, and modern experiments in oral poetry. There will be songs, chants, prayers, visions and dreams, sacred narratives, fictional narratives, histories, ritual scenarios, praises, namings, word games, riddles, proverbs, sermons. These will take the shape of performable scripts (meant to be read aloud rather than silently), experiments in typography, diagrams, and insert disc recordings.²

With characteristic exuberance for an array of ethnopoetics—the term itself coined in 1967 by Rothenberg to describe his work for his groundbreaking 1968 anthology of Technicians of the Sacred: a range of poetries from American, Africa, Asia & Oceania—in 1975, Alcheringa continues this life-long exploration of a "symposium of the whole," the diverse poetic project the irrepressible Rothernberg has been engaged in since the 1958 inception of his small "deep image" magazine Poems from the Floating World.

"From all over the world"—Rothenberg had just published two major anthologies in 1974: Revolution of the Word: A New gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945—an elaborate, eccentric, web of recuperated modernist weirdos like Abraham Lincoln Gillespie and Harry Crosby mashed-up with poets like Robert Duncan and Charles Olson—and American a Prophecy—a companion volume published with George Quasha, more expansive in scope, "from pre-Columbian times to present," and even more schizophrenic in content, bridging visual and oral modernist poetries and "primitive" ethnopoems. Rothenberg's tactics for these incredible collections worked successfully to challenge the New Critics' history of the Western, and indeed international, poetries through strange collisions of verbal experiments—from tribal chants to Dadaphonics, from Mina Loy to Jackson MacLow—Rothenberg's anthologies are adventurous in experimentation and overwhelming in scope. Telling of the 'counter-poetics' Rothenberg was engaged in (and inscribing his contemporaneous work for Alcheringa), the 'Pre-Face' to Revolution of the Word is worth recounting at some length: "The new groupings appearing in the mid-50s (Black Mountain, Beats, the New York school, deep image, concrete poetry, chance processes, etc.) re-explored the idea of the avant-garde…Poetry was transformative, not only of its present & future, but of its past as well. Primitive & archaic, esoteric & subterranean, non-western & foreign, each has a part to play in a greater 'great tradition' Wrote Gary Snyder: 'We are witnessing a surfacing (in a specifically 'American incarnation) of the Great Subculture which goes back as far perhaps as the late Paleolithic."³ In his anthologies, Rothenberg cultivates his vatic vision of this swelling of a 'Great Subculture'—from the historical avant-garde to the 50s neo-avant-gardes through his involvement with the various offshoots of countercultural postwar poetry.

Additionally, Rothenberg seeks "to challenge the literary-civilized framework by articulating a larger-than-literary/primitive/visionary tradition that shows up again in contemporary experiments with language & structure,"⁴ this challenge always bears an oral slant, once refered to as the "oral poetry movement," and its accompanying subjective voice.⁵ In the introduction to Revolution of the Word, Rothernberg writes "The thing was to get off on it, to hear one's mind, learn one's own voice. But the message clear & simple was to move. To change. To create one's self & thus one's poetry."⁶ In Revolution of the Word as in Alcheringa, the prevalent emphasis is on the "one's own voice," "oral poems… oral poetry," "meant to be read aloud rather than silently."

To this established ethnopoetic oeuvre, Rothenberg adds the following political aims of the new series of Alcheringa:

To these established topics will be added the problem of the sacred/powerful dimension of language and its possible restoration in English: just as we have desecrated the landscape, so we have carelessly depleted the potent resources of language. In tribal ontologies, cosmologies, and the poetries that present them may be found the answers, or the beginnings of the answers, to both these problems.⁷

One might view these "problems" with skepticism: how Rothenberg figure we have "depleted" the "potent resources of language"? This environmentalist justification (or, more darkly, a form of 'new resource extraciton' New wave colonialism) to returning to "tribal ontologies, cosmologies, and the poetries that present them," is in any case a new addition to Rothenberg's ethnopoetics. On a superficial level, the problem sounds similar to the impetus for Russian futurist zaum poetic language recovery, however it is not formulated on depletion through political or bureaucratic language, is less rigorously linguistic, and seems motivated more towards a primitive nostalgia driven by ethnographic recuperation. The reason for this addition is in the polemic conclusion, a strange philosophical alignment which constitutes the major reason for a "new series" of Alcheringa:

Philosophically, ALCHERINGA finds itself close to the hermeneutic phenomenology. In the words of Paul Ricoeur:

We wish to recharge language, start again from the fullness of language. . . . The same age develops the possibility of emptying language and the possibility of filling it anew. It is therefore no yearning for a sunken Atlantis that urges us on, but the hope of a re-creation of language. Beyond the wasteland of critical thought, we seek to be challenged anew.

The poets of ALCHERINGA start with the voice. The essayists will look, ultimately, to the very origins of poetry. ALCHERINGA will be radical—that is, going to the center—in approaching the Word."

Thus the 'careless depletion' Alcheringa fears has sapped the English language, it seems, is something like Derridean skepticism, the outcome of the structuralist adventure. However, one also might think of Empty Words, the lettristic play of Cage's text slowly degenerating into mumbled letter fragments, a methodological performance of a language depleting itself. Cage's empty words, however, come a bit late in 1977—and besides, Cage is not a player in the "wasteland of critical thought" that Alcheringa is here positioning itself against. The voice of Alcheringa, as opposed to that of Cage—increasingly drowned out by an impatient European audience—returns, through Ricoeur, to a meaningful recuperation of spoken (capital) Words in a symbolic optimism of the creative semantics of the speech act.⁸

Indeed, looking back to Vernon V. Gras's influential collection From Existential Phenomenology to Structuralism (1973) can serve to contextualize this "hermeneutic phenomenological" positioning of the editors of Alcheringa. In Gras's otherwise linear historic-philosophical presentation, there are four sections: Existential Phenomenology in 'Theory' and 'Practice' followed by Structuralism in 'Theory' and 'Practice.' Ricoeur's essay "Freud and Philosophy" from 1970—a response to the structuralist project—is provided before the structuralist texts themselves. Thus the structuralist metaphysical destabalization is introduced already recuperated by a phenomenological "post-critical naiveté" thereby preemptively dispelling structuralist methodological practice in favor time-tested mode of pragmatic hermeneutics on metaphysical grounds. This preemptive attack of structuralism through a linear system of French philosophical development seems at the heart of Alcheringa's position.

However, it would be a mistake to reduce all of Alcheringa to this philosophical statement. In fact, many experimental translations, visual transcriptions, and concrete poetry published in the magazine are in no way connected to this credo. Jerome Rothenberg's larger polylinguistic project stands as a good example of how inappropriate this philosophy would be to ethnopoetics at large. Indeed, practically no mention is made of Ricoeur, structuralism, or hermeneutic phenomenology in Rothenberg's multiple books and anthologies from the time. Tedlock's interest in Ricoeur, on the contrary, is voiced multiple times. In Alcheringa issue no. 2, Tedlock continues the philosophical polemic begun in issue no. 1—an essay for the important 1975 Ethnopoetics Symposium at the University of Wisconsin, "The Way of the Word of the Breath" begins with an epitaph by Paul Ricouer:

The same age develops the possibility of emptying language

and the possibility of filling it anew.9

The mystical article that follows seeks the "WORD at the root of words [which] is cognitive and emotional at the same time, abstract and concrete at the same," this all-caps 'WORD' is the "simultaneous act of mind and body, thought carried on the breath that is the movement of life, the movement of the spirit from the heart-and-lungs to the outside…the essence of what it is to be human…the WORD is holy."¹⁰ Both stylistically and semantically, these lines echo Olson's famous pronouncement from "Projective Verse":

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE…¹¹

But Tedlock's argument is much more mystical/radical than Olson's—the WORD, for Tedlock's Alcheringa, lives on in certain American Indian pre-alphabetic cultures, as a 'living' and 'holy' language. ¹² From this vantage, Tedlock trashes out violently against formalism's decapitation of the "head of language from its heart-and-lungs" and particularly the "last ten years [of the structural mythologist's] formal vivisection of language"—dissecting "what was already, the moment he began his work, a corpse."¹³ Tedlock's Zuni transcriptions, by contrast, seek to regenerate the vitality of tribal language, shamanistically "bringing to life" the vital humanist 'WORD'—it is fitting that Tedlock tunes into Ricoeur's faith-based hermeneutics experience: "the post-critical equivalent of the pre-critical hierophany."¹⁴

Tedlock expands on his statement for the 1977 special issue of New Literary History devoted to "Oral Cultures and Oral Performance," writing: "[structuralist] dissection does not recapitulate generation. Having spent four volumes paring all the meaning away from hundreds of stories and laying bare their structure, Levi-Strauss writes this final sentence: 'It is nothing.' But Paul Ricoeur says, as if to answer, 'The same age develops the possibility of emptying language and the possibility of filling it anew.'"¹⁵ These outbursts against the projected structural enemy of notions like 'vitality' and 'humanism' are symptomatic of wide-scale American philosophical polemics over structuralism in the 70s. Recapitulating the arguments in their banter is does little to further the aims of this project—briefly sketching them as I have done, however, should serve to at least invoke a gist of the inflammatory rhetoric and the geist of a general current active in the philosophical battlegrounds in which poets like Tedlock engaged themselves.

Indeed Tedlock's extreme rhetoric is just one example of the feeling of 'deep image' poetics—the group consisting of Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, Paul Blackburn, David Antin, et al.: younger than the poets collected in the Allen anthology, and older than the second-generation New York School or Language poets—whose investigations "existed alongside and resonated with work in translation, performance, and an awareness of earlier avant-gardes and poetry from 'those anonymous tribal & subterranean predecessors.'"¹⁶ Along with ethnographic research, deep image anthologists like Rothenberg, Quasha, and Eshleman were interested in important forgotten documents from Dada and Surrealism, which they melded into a rich infusion of the projective fields of Olson, the vitality of the Beat poets, and an intense interest in the potential of tribal and 'primitive' oral traditions. Continuing a certain strand of lyric voice in these works, Rothenberg first declared the aims of deep image in "Why Deep Image?" for Robert Kelly's magazine Trobar (no. 3, 1962): "…we have to try to see the world in all its natural and contemporary detail as if no differences existed between the seer and the things he sees. To see this way—through the self (emotively)—results in certain necessary changes on the material emerging in the poem: a heightened sense of the emotional contours of objects…their free re-association in a manner that would be impossible to descriptive or logical thought…informed with a heightened relevance, a quickened sense of life…the recognition of the poem as a natural structure arising at once from the act of emotive vision."¹⁷

This vatic aspiration for an "emotive vision" through the self is exactly oppositional to the sort of poetry Ron Silliman would collect in Alcheringa. Indeed, Language writing would come to most cohesively define itself in direct opposition to the various "emotional" poetries, (as Dworkin has it in The Greenwood Encyclopedia, 2005) from the "raw poetry of the counterculture to the cooked verse of the establishment… Language poetry valued artifice over nature, writing over speech, metonymy over metaphor, and intellect over sentiment." Deep image, in a sense, was the latest incarnation of an emotionally incantatory lyric poetics. Thus, while informed by many of the same poetic sources, (and indeed, through Rothenberg's collections, many important avant-garde writers were recollected to the benefit of the development of Language poetry) the radical break for Language writing followed the structuralist denunciation of the traditional lyric voice of the subjective ego in American poetry.

It is with this backdrop that one must turn the page to Silliman's foundational collection "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets," strangely sandwiched between Tedlock's mystical-primitivist alignment with the 'post-critical' philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, one of David Antin's famous spoken-word performance-poem speech transcriptions, and Jerome Rothenberg's mini-anthology of Jewish oral and process poetry.

Notes : : The Way of Alcheringa

1999-05-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

[1] Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg, "The ways of Alcheringa," Alcheringa, new series, no. 1 (1975): 2. If the reader is interested, I have digitized this magazine—previously quite difficult to acquire—online at my site here: http://jhenrychunko.blogspotcom/2007/04/dwelling-place-9-poets-alcheringa-1975.html.

[2] Tedlock and Rothenberg, 2.

[3] Jerome Rothenberg. "Pre-Face" to Revolution of the Word: A New gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), xv.

[4] From a 1978 letter to Richard Kostelantetz. Reprinted in Richard Kostelanetz, The Old Poetries and the New (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1981),.

[5] See Henry M. Sayre, "David Antin and the Oral Poetics Movement," Contemporary Literature 23, no. 4. (1982): 428-450.

[6] Jerome Rothenberg. "Pre-Face" to Revolution of the Word: A New gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945 (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), xi.

[7] Tedlock and Rothenberg, 3.

[8] Gras, 13.

[9] Tedlock, "The Way of the Word of the Breath," 4.

[10] Ibid, 4.

[11] Charles Olson. "Projective Verse," The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 151.

[12] Tedlock, 4-5.

[13] Ibid, 4.

[14] Ibid, 5.

[15] Dennis Tedlock. "Toward an Oral Poetics," New Literary History 8, no. 3: Oral Cultures and Oral Performances. (1977): 507-519. Accessed via JSTOR. Tedlock continues: The structuralist, if he is not a cynic, is like a mad vivisectionist, thinking he will at last discover the secret of life if the animal on the table will endure just one more little incision before it goes limp. ... The texts subjected to Levi-Straussian exposition resembled the pelts and skeletons in zoological archives more than they resembled live animals, right from the moment the analyst laid eyes on them. On top of that, he has preferred to show us only sketches of the carcasses, chalking in only such details as he has already been able to analyze....

[16] Steven Clay and Rodney Philips. "A Little History of the Mimeograph Revolution" A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing 1960-1980 (New York: New York Public Library, 1998), 33-34.

[17] Cited from Trobar, a magazine of the New American Poetry 3 (1962) in Clay (1998), 131.

The Dwelling Place / Surprised by Sign

1999-04-16T02:04:00.000-07:00

Up front: the title of this collection is an enormous misreading of Roland Barthes. In his essay "Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)" concluding the collection, Ron Silliman quotes at greatest length from Writing Degree Zero:

"it is the Word which is 'the dwelling place'… it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections. Fixed connections being abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and recollections…"¹

Silliman reads this passage—dissected and arranged—as a confrontation of "diminished referentiality as achieved by effacing connections."² What he misses is the implicit tradition of canonical modern poetry Barthes is writing against, from Baudelaire to Valéry in their claim to the transcendental signified: what Silliman cuts out is the "terrible and inhuman" character of the 'Word' in its overdetermination of the sign—which is, in fact, the opposite of diminished referentiality. For example, the first ellipsis of his citation removes Barthes' characterization of the truth-value of the "the dwelling place" 'Word' as a fons et origo that "fulfills like the sudden revelation of a truth" and "can never be untrue."³ Silliman instead emphasizes a dwelling of "innumerable uncertain and possible connections." Further distortion continues as he misaligns Clark Coolidge's rhythmic planar 'voice-less' work ("there is on time / to there is to time / as of district / to be is at there")⁴ with the "Hunger of the Word" that Barthes applies with "a kind of sacred relish" to the consumption of the overnourishing Word of modern poetry. Finally, Silliman chokes off Barthes passage at its peak: the words which would follow Silliman's final ellipsis: "it is a sign that stands."⁵ Coolidge's signs, to the contrary, establish a "spacetime place…building off vectoring-geometries," a "huge lingual continua grinding/humming"—a movement that never stands.⁶ Doubtlessly these moving words form a strange, unintentional dwelling place for Silliman's collection!⁷

But there is much more that can be read from Silliman's confused dwelling place for Barthes' 'Word' of modern poetry. In its periodical afterlife, this passage from Writing Degree Zero has had more than one love affair with Language writing. In April of 1978, a careful excerpting of this section concerning the 'Word' of "Is There Any Poetic Writing?" from Barthes' essay opens the second issue of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal. Printed on the occasion of the re-release of Barthes' text in 1978, the editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (Bernstein and Andrews) include nearly the entire section on modern poetry beginning just after Barthes declares Hugo's distortion of the alexandrine "contains the whole future of modern poetry."⁸ The essential excision, in this version, removes of two interior sentences:

– the first: "To say that this truth is of a poetic order is merely to say that the Word in poetry can never be untrue, because it is whole; it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections."⁹

– and the second: "This Hunger of the Word, common to the whole of modern poetry, makes poetic speech terrible and inhuman."¹⁰

The absence of these lines (replaced by ellipsis) dramatically transforms Barthes' message—first, by removing the "truth" and "wholeness" of the transcendentally shining Word of "infinite freedom," which reconfigures the section as Silliman does, only in a more clearly politically motivated way. This can be read from a small article toward the end of this issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in the aptly titled "Repossessing the Word" by Steve McCaffery.

A key text of Language politics, McCaffery's article (reprinted from an "Infraview" for Canadian magazine Centerfold) applies Marx's notion of commodity fetishism to a politicized textual economy of audience/performer relations: "reference in language is a strategy of promise and postponement; it's the thing that language never is, never can be, but to which language is always moving. This linguistic promise that the signified gives of something beyond language i've come to feel as being central to capitalism (the fetish of the commodity)."¹¹ McCaffery's argument is parallel to the argument L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in which there is no place for a "sign that stands" in "Words that can never be untrue." For McCaffery the diminishment of "reference" is the method of demystifying this fetish, calling for "a structural reappraisal of the functional roles of author and reader" to "reveal the human relationships involved within the labour of process."¹² In a critique of the Capitalism of language, the "Hunger for the Word" is as welcome as a hunger for commodity. Or rather, as Barthes would say at Baltimore, the facts of language, (of the real itself) are not perceivable "as long as literature maintained a totalitarian ideology of the referent, or more commonly speaking, as long as literature was realistic."¹³

Thus, unlike Silliman's misunderstanding this presentation of Barthes' "dwelling place," the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E excerpts are actively violent to the text, employing a strange political strategy of detournement through ellipsis that subverts the original message through selective erasure—presenting a contrary message through a significantly altered version of the original text.¹⁴ But the important question is, what is the difference between a tactical misreading in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and Silliman's unintentional misreading in Alcheringa? It would appear that these two instances point to the one performance Language poetry continually staged: the diversity of possibilities of meaning-making experience through a text. The Word, in both cases is thoroughly alterable: regardless of intention, ripped from the European context, Barthes' cryptic allusive style and open vocabulary leave his text open to these conflicting citations. In a sense, these citational games imply in each message always already its own reversal.

Charles Olson's epitaph to Silliman's collection is another place to begin. It takes practically no leap of the imagination to picture the massive Olson as the Oedipal figure necessary to overcome for multiple strands of post-war American poetry. His "Projective Verse" stands as one of the most important poetic manifestos of the century, powering through anthologies and references despite the devastating critique Perloff extends to the "pseudo-profundities" of its derivation of the poetics of Pound and Williams in the 1973 issue of John Hopkins University's ELH journal—a rite of passage of its own sort for the young Marjorie Perloff—written exactly as Silliman collects poetry for "The Dwelling Place."¹⁵

Here, Silliman's citation is violent homage. As Olson says in 1965, "I am a perfect father, until I am not."¹⁶ The lines—"that which exists / through itself / is what is called meaning"—are from his Causal Mythologies, (1969) and is used as part of a reinterpretation of the eighth century Chinese alchemical text The Secret of the Golden Flower—however it was first uttered by Olson—sans line breaks—at his infamous drunken reading at the Berkeley Conference of Poetry in 1965. Thus while the message of Olson's lines are essential to the tendency Silliman is trying to group (the irrelevance of reference) its origins stem from the greatest dramatic demonstration of the individual voice of countercultural poetry in the latter half of the century.¹⁷ "You're the boss poet here, daddy!" Robert Duncan calls out just before walking out of the conference hall.¹⁸ Silliman's structuralist tendency can be traced even to a clever play with the history of these lines (their origin in the voice) in a paradox of reference (which is itself against reference) establishing a critique of the lack of practical follow-through he sees even in Olson's maxim, the message of which is ideal for his collection as it was famously cited by Robert Creeley as the boldest challenge to lyric poetry.¹⁹

This critique is made all the more powerful in conjunction (the verse lines' disjunction) with the first of Bruce Andrew's extreme page-altering field poems. "3 Poems" it says, in what a perverse reader might hear as an echo of Ashbery's anomalous "Three Poems" that would profoundly effect Bruce Andrews and other Language poets: in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 12 (1980) Andrews writes that Ashbery's work uniquely demands "Behavioral readings, rather than hermeneutic ones."²⁰ And further: "we could say that only here [in Tennis Court Oaths] and in Three Poems does the disjunct formal structure fully double, or reiterate the implicit lessons embodied in the discourse."²¹ The formal structure of this opening poem to "The Dwelling Place" is linguistic. It takes the Olsonian field to the extreme, the words seemed dropped in random dispersal—ale, rate, an, lint, late, lain, etc… However, these words are anything but random—the poem instead explores a series of phonic permutations of minimal combinations of the sounds for 'l,' 'r,' 'n,' and 't' with vowels 'a,' 'i,' and 'e'—forming words of two to four letters in length. In this field, conventional reading habit quickly proves pointless—the writing demands the reader begins with this observation and proceeds to form pairings, triangulations, combinations attempting to discover the laws governing the system of the poem—in effect, it demands a structuralist activity.

Openly adventuring into this field makes a structuralist out of anyone: differential pairings (or pseudo-differential-pairings) emerge—rate/late, nit/net, lain/lane—a course of playful anarchic rearrangements; this delicately composed poem is open to each. Recalling Xisto's concrete reversals, Andrew's poem multiplies the activity and removes a subject reading, an intentional message—all the while demanding the same reading practice. The 'reading' of the poem is just this play, from which a pleasurable movement, a coordination of differential arrangements and sounds are produced, what Barthes, in his lecture of the year before, "The Semiological Adventure" (1974) called "less the project of instituting semiology as a science than the pleasure of exercising a Systematics: there is, in the activity of classification, a kind of creative intoxication…the pleasure of System."²² Silliman, in his article following the collection, calls this "creation of non-referring structure" the essential tactic of 'diminished referentiality' common to all nine poets.²³ As Prefaced by Andrew's handwritten comments at the head of the chapter—cited in Silliman's essay—this non-referential structure forces the reader into a structural arrangement of "sound, texture, weight, discreteness, silence, targets, rhythms, presence, physicality" that is doomed from the start.²⁴ The important effect, however, is that these fundamentally illogical structures ultimately force the reader to take each of these elements for what they are—that which exists / through itself / is what is called meaning.

"Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)" begins with an uncited quotation of William Carlos Williams: "the perfection of new forms as additions to nature."²⁵ In addition to WCW, Silliman's projected 'community' lineage, includes Others modernists like Arensberg, the Russian Futurists, and unexplored 'concerns' for American poetry "(e.g., for the work of such as Lacan or Barthes)."²⁶ From Silliman's impression, these remarks actively construct the community that will be called Language poets. "What this is, then, is a fix-in-time of writing which bears a family resemblance"—which is to say, a synchronic sample of writing from a specific paradigm: Silliman begins by equating his activity as editor with an equivalent activity as a structuralist.²⁷

End

Notes : : The Dwelling Place / Surprised by Sign

1998-05-05T14:00:00.000-07:00

[1] Silliman (1975), 118.

[2] Ibid, 118.

[3] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lanvers and Colin Smith (The Noonday Press: New York, 1967), 47.

[4] Clark Coolidge. A B 7 from "The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets," ed. Ron Silliman, Alcheringa, no. 2 (1975): 106.

[5] Barthes (1967), 47.

[6] Silliman (1975), 119.

[7] Barthes (1967), 48.

[8] Ibid, 46.

[9] Ibid. 47.

[10] Ibid. 48.

[11] Steve McCaffery, "Repossessing the Word," L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E no 2. (1978): unpaginated. "Reference" here and in other places (in Siliman's writing, for example) is often used mistakenly for "signified," "content," or "signification" as is often noted.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Barthes, The Structuralist Controversy (1970), 138.

[14] This is particularly strange because the arguments often line up with Barthes' general project, though not with the specific texts used.

[15] Marjorie Perloff. "Charles Olson and the "Inferior Predecessors": "Projective Verse" Revisited," ELH 40, no 2 (1973): 285-306. Accessed via JSTOR. This strange and incredible article functions in exactly the same manner as Brecht's read-through of the Nazi speeches, placing nearly the entirely of "Projective Verse" up against its "source" in Pound and/or Williams.

[16] Charles Olson. Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley, transcribed by Zoe Brown (Coyote: San Francisco, 1966)

[17] Interestingly, in an autobiographical note, Silliman writes to the UB POETICS listserv, Wed, 21 Aug 1996 03:06:51: But the scandal of the Olson reading or the way in which Spicer was obviously ill at his reading… were lost on me. I sorta knew who Olson was, but had never heard of Spicer. I didn't discover Zukofsky until PBS did the TV show on him in 1966… Had that event occurred one year later, it would have been a completely different one for me. Such is the narrative of actual events...

[18] Robert Duncan. Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley (1966), 19.

[19] From this: "poems are not referential, or at least not importantly so." Silliman himself quotes this line in "Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)" (1975, 118) to describe Clark Coolidge's radical application of the Black mountain declaration. See Robert Creeley, The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 490.

[20] Bruce Andrews. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 12, (1980) unpaginated.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Roland Barthes. "Introduction: The Semiological Adventure," The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang: New York, 1988), 6.

[23] Ronald Silliman. "Surprised by Sign (Notes on Nine)," Alcheringa (1975): 118.

[24] Silliman (1975), 119.

[25] Ibid. 118.

[26] Ibid. 118.

[27] Ibid.118.

Endnotes : : Adventures / Acknowledgements

1997-05-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

These adventures into Form and Alcheringa are, like all explorations, preliminary. As an exercise in writing, they have served as a mode of wrestling with the problems of historical analysis and an introduction into attempts at differential reading. As a pedagogical project, this work has taken me into expanded (and agitated!) fields of inquiry in a wide breath of canonical theoretic literature, troves of forgotten magazines, and new depths of hyperspatial crawling. As a method of communication-questioning activity, historic interpretation or dialogic provocation, the thesis is unavoidably incomplete.

Adventures are by definition always on the verge of 'about to happen' (adventurus). In this thesis, I have attempted to bring a performance around the structuralist activities at two points in space-time to the verge of happening. This performance, necessarily, is limited on these pages—is bound to form a certain planar arc of argumentation, or worse, a cohesive critical point. Perhaps as a sort of indifference to the authority of this model, the writing refuses these necessities. Still, the attempt at even a simulated performance of periodical argumentation requires the elimination of certain figures, the erasure of points of interest, the waning of space.

What I hope to have done is set a frame of inquiry from which investigations can emanate from. This thesis, then, delineates a space, sets a screen or a linear point of entry from which an exploration simultaneously agitated in all directions can begin projecting.

From the onset of this project, I have imagined this work as a hypertext. As a record of my progress and a more open field for expression and interpretation, I have been shaping this expanding space in conjunction with the printed form of my thesis. While not strictly included in the guidelines, requirements or specifications for the senior thesis—this is a realm of adventure I consider inseparable from this printed version and hope to continue to investigate. I thank the reader for venturing...

At Baltimore in 1966, Macksey concludes a conference:

Some of the vitality in the "structuralist adventure" as well as much of the confusion undoubtedly stems from the plurality of analytical languages and the internal divisions about the status of the subject in the various disciplines. Yet we hope that the Symposium has demonstrated that this pluralism and these divisions were themselves susceptible to fruitful analysis. While dispelling any lingering dreams of a formalized and "pure" interpretive language which may have survived the philosophic onslaughts of the preceding generation, these sessions have, I think, renewed the urgency of Charles Peirce's isolated plea for the systematic study of methods and for the semiotic analysis of adjacent sign systems, in all their individuality, as keys to the understanding of the way in which communication and its paradoxes constitute the human community….we might turn again to that tenet with Merleau-Ponty, in a late essay, derives from the familiar structural view of ordinary language's self-transcending power in the movement from the intention of the signifiant to the achieves expression of the signifié: "We who speak do not necessarily know what we express better than those who hear us."

Acknowledgments

This thesis could not have been written without the love, support, and encouragement from friends and family. These words indebted to more names than I ought to conjure up here, I am particularly grateful for the academic mentorship of Craig Dworkin, Cornel West and Rubén Gallo, without whom my passion for words would not be what it is today. In addition, the friendship and tutelage of Keith Sanborn, Eduardo Cadava, Keith and Mendi Obadike, Kenneth Goldsmith, Chris Bush and Joan La Barbara has made my time at Princeton exciting, challenging and rewarding. A small sample from a field of loved names:

Zach Nicol Rachel Alec Steven Ruby Dan Mike Chrissy Tianna Claire Phoebe Colemen Graham Taylor Amy Teel Arthur Zac Anna Carroll Claire James Kendall

Over and above all else, I am eternally grateful for my family in Utah, without whom nothing would be.

This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations,

Danny Snelson

The Waning of Space

Quasi-Infinities and the Waning of Space (1966)

1988-04-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Robert Smithson
Arts magazine, v. 41, no. 1 (November 1966), 28-31

Heap of Language (1966)

1984-04-14T22:23:00.000-08:00

A HEAP OF LANGUAGE

1966
pencil drawing
6 1/2 x 22 inches
Collection: Museum Overholland , Niewersluis

The Dwelling Place

1984-04-11T23:28:00.000-08:00

"The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets" ed. Ron Silliman
Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics.
new series, no 2
8" x 8 1/2"
(1975)

The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets (pdf)

1983-04-16T01:31:00.000-08:00

Bruce Andrews : : Divestiture--A

1973-05-02T17:15:00.000-07:00

One chapter of Andrew's important 1994 title Divestiture--A includes a reorganized collection of the words printed in the first collection of Language writing in Alcheringa.

In the spring of 2007 (alongside the production of this thesis), I edited the 3rd /ubu editions series of online e-books. The argument of the /ubu project--presented in my editor's introduction and continuing through the introduction to each work--is aligned with and complimentary to the words I've written here.

Dear.....

I encourage you to explore this parallel side-track.

Otherwise: