Mann’s death of the avant-garde, placing it within a horizon of theory that has little need for any specific history, might equally announce the birth of a new historical account of the avant-garde, one that goes substantially beyond two significant prior moments. In the first, a conventional Hegelian historicism sees the avant-garde as a moment of negativity or refusal that is recuperated either in a diachronic series (the teleology of modernism for Matei Calinescu or Renato Poggioli, leading toward the formal autonomy of literature or art) or in a synchronic totality (the reinforcement of art as institution for Peter Bürger, where critique is exhausted in redefining the nature of art itself).6 As Mann summarizes these positions, the avant-garde “illuminat[es] in retrospect the fact that the historical project of abolishing the bourgeois institution of art was itself nothing more than a phase of that institution’s development” (TD, 63). In the second, the recuperation of the avant-garde as an example of aesthetic practice is undermined by either a myth of originality that gives evidence of its parasitism on history rather than its autonomy (Rosalind Krauss) or by a cult of the artist whose agency is, in fact, prefigured by institutions (Donald Kuspit).7 Here, the negativity of the avant-garde is always co-opted by the affirmative culture of institutions, such that, in the end, it can only be defined by them:8 “What we witness here is less the truth or falseness of autonomous art than the autonomic functioning of the economy in which it must operate” (TD, 77). In proposing a matrix of theory as consequence of the death of the avant-garde, however, Mann actually works to preserve the agency of the avant-garde, whose negativity (either radical form or political agency) may now be distributed throughout the social totality as a critical force. Such a relocation of avant-garde agency within the totality of culture, even as discourse, is visible in concrete historical developments such as the influence of the Russian Formalists’ foregrounding of the material signifier on modern advertising (from El Lissitzky to the Bauhaus) and film (Sergei Eisenstein), as well as on modernist literary theory, or the example provided by surrealism of an antirepresentational politics of desire that influenced both the fashion industry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis.9 While Mann’s discursive horizon of theory does not account, as it should, for constructions of cultural discourse, it still provides a way of understanding the agency of the avant-garde within a totality that may only begin with the death of its purported recuperation. The death of the avant-garde in this sense turns out to be an anticipatory figure for what I will call the constructivist moment.
Moving toward a consideration of the specific historical forms of the avant-garde, it is not surprising that Mann’s account of the Language School of poetry is as unapologetically prospective and historical as it is, even as he claims the avant-garde itself as over:
Even as these obituaries were peaking — around 1975, when the most was being said about how little there was to say — a network of so-called language-centered writers was emerging, largely in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York. Experimental, deeply critical of current poetic practice and the ideological character of ordinary and literary language, often theoretically militant about their nonreferential and writer-oriented poetics, with their own presses, distribution systems, reviewing apparatus, and public forums, they seem in every respect exactly the sort of group that would once have been considered avant-garde without question. And yet it is indeed difficult to apply this label to the language poets, for the cultural model it denotes seems awkward, outmoded, and exhausted. (TD, 32)
In the necessity to locate its work in a historical succession of avant-gardes, the Language School may be thus characterized as encountering its failure at the outset. As I wrote in 1985, “I, too, have been called a Surrealist” — and have been equally embarrassed by the ascription.10 A notion of the avant-garde carrying with it the dead weight of Calinescu and Poggioli’s rigid and prefigured historicism, as well as the live bruises of Krauss and Kuspit’s pronouncements on the avant-garde’s unoriginality, has indeed been an embarrassment. It has led to a renewed form of originary authorship, for one thing, whose politics are under revision if not unrecuperable, but which even in its negativity depends on conservative cultural institutions to give it publicity, legitimacy, and, finally, reward.11 The question of definition, in any case, is central: the politics of the name avant-garde (as well as many names for the avant-garde) — as the moment of a recuperated and thus contradictory critique of representation — invokes a form of self-canceling negativity that undermines avant-garde agency at the same time that it is identified as its proper technique. Language writing, thus, is “so-called” by its advocates and detractors, indicating an ambivalence toward identity that has often been mistaken as a refusal of recognition.12 As Bob Perelman has written, “Why didn’t we simply name this body of writing? While we were clearly dealing with the subject of language writing, we avoided that name.”13
Rejecting the nominal instability of “so-called language writing” as merely another instance of avant-garde paradox, we may look instead for a historical account of the evolution of its name. The term language-centered was first used in print, in the history of the Language School, in a head-note to “The Dwelling Place: 9 Poets,” Ron Silliman’s 1973 selection of recent work published in the ethnopoetic journal Alcheringa: “9 poets out of the present, average age 28 . . . called variously ‘language centered,’ ‘minimal,’ ‘non-referential formalism,’ ‘diminished referentiality,’ ‘structuralist.’ Not a group but a tendency in the work of many.”14 In the context of Alcheringa, “language-centered” connoted a culturally holistic notion of “total poetics,” in editor Jerome Rothenberg’s terms, as much as a linguistic turn to structuralist theory.15 By the mid 1970s, both “language poet” and “language writing” were in common use, descriptively and pejoratively, by virtue of the tendency’s emerging visibility first in San Francisco and then in New York; individual writers began to be described (or baited) as language poets in the late 1970s.16” In 1978, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, after some discussion with other writers, named their journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, spacing the letters with equal signs.17 The secret history of the equal signs begins here, with the question of the original intention of the name of the journal of a school that was seen as undermining authorial originality.
If the author is suspended in the naming of the journal, we may consider an alternate scenario to connect a view of language to the construction of the school. Of crucial importance is that the graphically modified noun language was used to name a journal that published articles about language-centered writing, so-called, rather than examples of it — a controversial claim on my part that depends on a distinction of genre between articles about poetics and examples of poetry (or between description and enactment as discursive modes). L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E stood as a name for a body of work that can be represented but only indirectly presented, in three senses: (1) examples of language-centered writing itself were not the primary content of the journal; (2) articles about language-centered writing were not identical to their referents, even if a horizon was imagined where sign and referent would meet; (3) as a result, the name of the aesthetic tendency that produced this referential schism would partake of the nonreferentiality of the work itself, which it represented, as it were, in absentia. Nonreferentiality, thus, was central to the discourse of the journal, not just