The Secret History of the Equal Sign: L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E between Discourse and Text

Avant-gardes, in breaking down the boundaries of the autonomous author in favor of both the work and its immediate reception within its community, frequently employ strategies of “multiple authorship,” in which the work is positioned between two or more authors, toward a horizon of collective practice or politics. Any theory of the avant-garde must take into account not only the poetics of its devices of defamiliarization and their relation to the construction of new meaning but also its stakes in the discursive community defined by means of its literary practices. This essay discusses several examples of avant-garde multiauthorship developed by writers of the Language School: the collective authorship represented by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and other literary journals; Legend, a multiauthored experimental poem by five authors; two poems written under the title “Non-Events” by Steve Benson and myself; and Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s collaborative novel The Wide Road. Michel Foucault’s concept of “discursive formation” and Julia Kristeva’s dialectic of “symbolic” and “semiotic” provide critical terms for an approach to the politics of community enacted in works of the avant-garde. These cultural politics, and their implications for the genres of poetry and poetics, continue in the contemporary form of the poetics Listserve, itself seen as a form of multiauthorship.