Douglas, on the issue of "collaboration," I'm going to keep poaching from
myself as long as I have handy things at hand! This is from an interview
with me that will be appearing in September (sorry, the interview is my
favorite critical form-- I do it on both sides). The interviewer is Bill
Freind. The rest of the interview, I should say, is not as provocational in
tone, and, to qualify my critique of Watten et.al. below, I do say elsewhere
in the interview that collaborative modes would no doubt explode within an
active counter-economy of heteronymy:


Q. Your reference to capitalist law raises some interesting questions. The
poet William Wordsworth was one of the first writers to push for copyright
protection, yet it's well known that much of his early work was co-written
with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Are you suggesting a similar kind
of hypocrisy is at work today?

KJ. His betrayal of Coleridge and of his earlier radical principles aside,
Wordsworth’s aesthetic was based on the individual’s visionary voice.
Copyright lends itself quite naturally to Romantic ontology and,
consequently, to the great majority of poetry written today. But the
aesthetic of the Language and so-called Post-Language poets is largely based
on the idea that such I-centered, scenic claiming is part and parcel of
ideology’s fictionalizing function. They've written about this quite
eloquently. But here these postmodern radicals are, stamping their texts
with their mostly academic identities and copyrighting them as fast as they
can churn them out. One might say that their betrayal is of a more candid
type.

Speaking very figuratively, I had mentioned that any “collaborationist”
sucking-up to the hegemony of the Author Function would necessarily fail to
meet the demands of a true revolution in poetic language. Ironically,
Barrett Watten, to whose work and person Aerial magazine devoted a fat,
special issue, with BARRET WATTEN printed in huge letters on the spine, has
just written an essay arguing, with allusions to Kristeva, and with a strain
that makes one wince, that half a dozen examples of collaboratively produced
texts between Language poets stand as evidence of an avant-garde dismantling
of conventional notions of authorship. Not quite, I'm afraid... Watten’s
main example is Legend, a five-person collaboration that he claims
“dissolves the individual,” is “supra-subjective,” and “is located precisely
in the place of the utopian elsewhere/nowhere invoked by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’s
articulation of authorial subject positions.” But one must ask the
embarrassingly obvious question: How can an authorial subject position be
“elsewhere/nowhere” when its legal denomination so emphatically marks a
textual/territorial site of ownership? The store has an address and number
in the Yellow Pages, as they say… Watten’s claim that “collaboration”
between avant-garde Authors represents the threshold for a shedding of the
Author Law, as he puts it, would be almost touching in its naivete if the
arch-academic rhetorical lingerie of his essay weren’t so plainly the
disingenuous costume of an “experimental” strip-tease for the Modern
Language Association Convention.

Let me qualify that last wordy sentence: There are exotic dancers who are
compelled by objective circumstances to perform what they do, and many of
them are very good people, hard-working and intellectually gifted. My point
is that Barrett Watten’s apparent gifts would find their true, unbounded,
and nomadic range were his identity not so theatrically on the Authorial
stage, dramatically pretending it is not what it is. But alas, in the
revisionist spirit of the bureaucratized Third International, the erstwhile
vanguard Party of Language now stages “collaboration” with a corset-like
mode of literary production as a poetics of “revolution”. And it’s hardly
surprising that this is so, now that the leftist opposition has its
ministries and diplomatic posts in the Academic Popular Front of Poetry.

Fanciful and badly punned as the above analogy undoubtedly is, one must go
by observation, and by its light, who can’t but feel that what the [Robert]
Pinsky’s and the [Susan] Howe’s, the [Bob] Perelman’s and the [Adrienne]
Rich’s alike desire most truly is to be enshrined in the canon’s diurnal
course, right alongside old Wordsworth?




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