Robert Duncan's ‘Kopóltuš ’

The importance of the poetry of the San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan to what became known as ‘Language writing’ has been widely noted. He also anticipates it in his interest in Roland Barthes, although he published on it only once. In 1970, he wrote a short essay entitled ‘Kopóltuš: Notes on Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology’, which was published in February 1975 in the journal Credences. The essay is short, structured around two quotations from Barthes's Elements of Semiology, each followed by a passage of commentary. However, there is no detailed microanalysis of Barthes, the quotations serve only to spur new reflections. There is no movement, for instance, towards a structuralism of poetics, and the name of Barthes is not invoked beyond the title.

The essay revolves around an explication of the word kopóltuš in its title, which is a neologism, although Duncan implies otherwise. He defines it as the arrangement of a group of objects which ‘reveals that other elements we do not admit to seeing are present in what we see’. The first quotation from Elements of Semiology refers to the ‘complex associations’ of phenomena in the human world as ‘systems of signification’, and the formation of the kopóltuš seems to be a kind of by-product of such systems. Duncan then draws on Clive Bell's notion of ‘significant form’, which he brings alongside Barthes, defining it as ‘the feeling of parts belonging to the whole as a sign’. In this sense, producing emotion is what makes such forms ‘significant’, but Duncan retools Bell's phrase; the kopóltuš is the site at which a combination of elements into forms begins to have a signifying property that is independent of those elements, bringing about the ‘other elements we do not admit to seeing’.

However, Duncan's definition is slightly inconsistent with respect to the concept of the sign. He writes at one point that ‘this particular sign is a kopóltuš’, but then, in the next paragraph, that a ‘kopóltuš is not a sign, it is a feel of an arrangement’. What Duncan seems to latch onto in Barthes is that notion of signification at work in cultural experiences: ‘images, gestures, musical sounds, objects’.