william watkin's blog

"Though we keep company with Cats and Dogs": Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the Work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben.

2010-05-07T09:48:00.004+01:00

I recently published an article on the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben in Jacket Magazine.

Take a look at it here: "Though we keep company with Cats and Dogs": Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the Work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben.

It fuses together some central elements of Agamben's work on the poetic word, and Hejinian's provocative theory of happiness.

Effectively Agamben's conceptualisation of poetry as a potential modality for an alternate form of life as thinking breaks down into the study of four elements.

1. the poetic word (onomatopoeia, glossolalia, xenoglossia, the semiotic and naming)

2. Enjambement

3. Caesura

4. Structure/Rhythm, what I call projective recursion

Placed together these form the basis for what I call logopoiesis in my most recent work, that is what has been called elsewhere by Heidegger and Badiou, poetic thinking.

I think now there is material on all four elements posted on the blog in relation to various contemporary poets.

Article: "Draft 33 Deixis" / Notes on "Deixis"

2010-05-07T09:42:00.004+01:00

I recently published this collaboration with Rachel Blau duPlessis in relation to her work Draft 33: Deixis. Take a look at it here: "Draft 33: Deixis" / Notes on "Deixis": A Midrashic Chain.

Deixis remains a fascination of mine and turns up in the most unexpected places. I return to again in my recent book The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis.

Projective Recursion: The Structure of Ron Silliman's Tjanting

2010-05-07T09:31:00.003+01:00

A new article commissioned for Jacket Magazine on Ron Silliman is now available here: Projective Recursion: The Structure of Ron Silliman's Tjanting.

It is part of an excellent special edition on Silliman's work.

The piece is especially important as it is the first time I have tried to formalise my ideas about Agamben's theory of poetic structure in terms of analysis of a specific work of poetry since my work on this area in my recent book The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis.

Under Glass: Agamben and the Museum

2010-05-06T11:34:00.006+01:00

There are two contesting theories of poiesis in the period of aesthetic modernity. The first concentrates on the role of the artist as god-like being of creation. The second on the art object itself as thing unto itself. Naturally the two positions are connected, only gods make stones and flowers and only gods make works that compete in terms of self-sufficient thing-ness as stones and flowers. Although we touched on the art object in the previous chapter when we spoke of the reproducibility of the art object, our primary focus was subjectivity and poiesis. Agamben, however, is as interested in things as he is beings and so now we turn our critical gaze to the art object itself, especially its simultaneous creation and negation during aesthetic modernity.

Within the logopoietic project, place is of central importance. It has been the exteriority of art that has marked it out for philosophy as first despised object, then servant to thought, and finally thought’s salvation, the positions of Plato, Hegel and Heidegger respectively. Thought is in the mind, contained within a concept of subject that it founds and destabilises. Art, we know, has been place in an outside zone but forcibly and artificially. If art is not outside, where should art in fact be? By the time of the advent of modernism the place of art is a contested and compacted room. Within the aesthetic modern age in which we still tarry with joy and a heavy burden, each definition of art brings with it its own environment. Art for us is increasingly seen as an object in the world, result of subjective poiesis and criticism. It is also seen retrospectively and with increasing nostalgia as transmissibility within a tradition of experience. Here the space of art is stretched and pegged to the four corners of the total cultural environment, past present and future. This is a place-less and object-less concept of art as medium for the transmission of common experience. In terms of art as poiesis, Agamben and our own favoured term for the designation of an art that thinks, the work of art is the coming to presence of something and so is a zone of truth, a-letheia, the un-veiling of a truth previously withheld from view. This is the famous Heideggerian lichtung or lightening clearing. The room of such an art is becoming arboreal, like Max’s bedroom in the great novel by Sendac. Art can also be within the modern epoch the negation of a number of these positions. A place of irresolvable and often tragic contentiousness. Thus art is taken by we moderns as a conception of what can and cannot be art, the ontological decisionist stance of the modern critic/spectator. In this manner art is the space of the coming to presence of art as such, a path through the woods to a clearing that turns out to be nothing other than a path through the woods to a clearing and so on. Just as much as art was conceived by the moderns as once-transmissible, it is naturally now described as the non-transmissibility of the pure creative act, ex nihilo, out of nothing into pure shock. Such an eventful art almost immediately comes to also be seen as inter nihilo, into nothing, resulting in the nihilised isolation of an art object without content, a pure conception or of the aestheticised object whose sole content and meaning resides it is self-consciousness of having no content at all. This is the art without content emerging from the hands and mouths of the women and men without content all of whom are modelled on Musil’s marvellous Ulrich, the great man without qualities. No one single definition of art pertains in aesthetic modernity, no sole landscape is settled. Art is all of these things contained in a stanza which is capacious enough to allow all these contesting claims to art to enter and be in relation, and injudicious enough to avoid trying to choose between them. Art, by which we must always mean modern art, is the place of the displacement of the concept of art, a negative yet potentially constructive space. Or at least this is the theory of the art object that can be construed from the later pages of Agamben’s early, great treatise on art and modernity, The Man without Content.

Museum
Agamben’s discourse on the object is highly charged with Marxism and ideas of commodity fetishism. It is these early considerations of the art object as fetish that allows Agamben to declare that in our age all art is reduced to ‘the exhibition of an impossibility of using, of dwelling, of experiencing’ (Prof. 84). All art objects, in other words, are eventually to be found in a museum of our regard. The place of art, in other words, is under glass, and the role of the logopoietic thinker is to crack the pane.

It was during the 18th century that the first publically accessible museums came into being and it is probably not insignificant that there seems to be disagreement over which was the first museum. As is well known the name museum comes from the Greek meaning seat of the muses and was originally a term for a scholarly learning. The first musea were akin to modern universities comprising of libraries and so on. By the 18th century the term was more widely used as a location to house artefacts, things to be looked at but not necessarily read. This shift in meaning leads to a debate as to whether the British Museum or the Louvre was the first publically accessible museum, all depending on a very Anglo-French debate over what constitutes ‘the people’. Is the public everyone or those who represent the people of the state? Either way, it is the origin of the shift in meaning of museum from the word to the thing, writing to the image, that most interests Agamben in his essay on the European tradition of the Wunderkammer or cabinet of wonder commencing around the beginning of the middle ages. These promiscuous collections, as he calls them, were made up of such diverse elements as alligators, canoes, antlers, sawfish teeth, minerals and statuettes, to sample some of the elements of the famed collection of Hans Wurms. That said, through such confounding diversity ‘only seemingly does chaos reign in the Wunderkammer, however: to the mind of the medieval scholar, is was a sort of microcosm that reproduced, in its harmonious confusion, the animal, vegetable and mineral macrocosm’ (MWC 30). Thus a central element of the Wunderkammer was metonymy: the diverse, seemingly random, parts of an apparently capricious collection, in fact emulated in part the whole that was nature. In Britain, a significant example of the modern cabinet is the Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford which, across town from the Ashmolean, proposes a permanently alternative pre-modern view of the collection. The second quality of the Wunderkammer that Agamben highlights is its discursive nature. Having explained the synecdochal nature of the collection he adds: ‘This is why the individual objects seem to find their meaning only side by side with others, between the walls of a room in which the scholar could measure at every moment the boundaries of the universe’ (MWC 30). In this sense, therefore, the museum presents a double syntax of the object. Its synecdochal qualities resemble nothing so much as generative grammar where the whole of the universe of language is reduced to a number of representative items, NP VP and so on. On the other, it also emulates structural linguistics with meaning dependant not on a deep structure but on a surface proximity. While it is ideologically essential that modern institutions such as Tate Modern present their collections based on entirely different, scholarly principles, the rehanging of the Tate’s collections based not on historical periodisations but thematic relations allowed for just such powerful juxtapositions and in effect transformed the foremost museum in the country into a medieval cabinet of wonder. Albeit housed in a vast, groaning eviscerated factory.

The beginning of the end of the Wunderkammer is traced by Agamben to the year 1660 with the publication, in Antwerp, of the first illustrated catalogue of an art museum, a work entitled Theatrum pittoricum by one David Teniers. In Teniers’ rhetoric Agamben already finds that of the modern museum and senses the death knell of the cabinet of wonder soon to be replaced by the museum. This is further confirmed with the publication in the same year of Boschini’s Carta dal navegar pittoresco which contains a detailed guide to seventeenth century Venetian painting. It also includes a description of an imaginary, perfect galley. This is a location within which the diversity of art works can find some kind of architecturally assured order or as Agamben says, appropriating the saline, nautical tang of the text: ‘It seems that for Boschini, his imaginary gallery is in some way the most concrete space of painting, a sort of ideal connecting fabric that is able to ensure a unitary foundation to the disparate creations of the artists’ genius, as though, once abandoned to the stormy sea of painting, they could reach dry land only on the perfectly set up scene of this virtual theatre’ (MWC 32) One can sense here the pre-cursor of the modern style of galleries reified most recently in the naming of the White Cube gallery in Hoxton. This provision of a fabric contravenes the law of proximity to be found in the Wunderkammer in that it replaces a syntax of display, each work coming to meaning in relation to its proximate works, and invokes instead a diction of display, each work displayed as a single word surrounded by space. Proximity, the very basis of the synecdochic power of the Wunderkammer, is replaced by separation, the basis of the modern, metaphoric space of the museum. The museum, it transpires, is yet another material manifestation of the prevalence of scission within metaphysics.

Two other qualities of Boschini’s imaginary gallery become important to Agamben. The first is the fact that Boschini is so convinced of the importance of gallery space to the monstration of art that ‘he even compares the paintings sleeping in the halls of the gallery to balms, which, in order to acquire their full power, have to rest in glass containers’ (MWC 32). Agamben speculates that similar assumptions, that art is edifying only when matured under glass, is behind the modern practice of sending art directly from the hand of the artist to the hall of the museum. {insert quote from art magazine here]. This aside, the rise of the museum, better to term it the transformation of the museum from seat of learning, through cabinet of wonder, to hall of preservation, is indicative of the essential Heideggerian assumption behind Agamben’s, and indeed contemporary philosophy’s, central theory of modern art:

What is certain, at any rate, is that the work of art is no longer, at this point, the essential measure of man’s dwelling on earth, which, precisely because it builds and makes possible the act of dwelling, has neither an autonomous sphere nor a particular identity, but is a compendium and reflection of the entire human world. On the contrary, art has now built its own world for itself (MWC 33)

Or to put it on Hegelian terms, art is no longer the sensible presentation of the idea, but is the sensible presentation of the idea of sensible presentation. The museum breaks open the syntax of the cabinet, smashes its glass frontage, and displays the objects therein alone, in a hall, surrounded by space, to be ogled and appreciated merely because, in effect, they are in the museum.
This almost cruel ostracism of art leads Agamben to the second quality of modern art to be found in the inception of the art gallery, that of distanciation. ‘Consigned to the atemporal aesthetic dimension of the Museum Theatrum’, while the work will retain indeed increase its double aura (metaphysical and financial) the actual space of the work will, Agamben predicts, dissolve so that it will come to resemble the convex mirror Boschini wished to hang in his gallery, ‘where,’ he says with satisfaction, ‘the object, instead of coming closer, steps backward, it its advantage’ (MWC 33). These Works Are Fragile! Do Not Touch! No Flash Photography Please! Do Not Feed The Exhibits! The result of this is a paradox that Agamben simultaneously delights in and bewails, namely the logic of apotropaicism: ‘We believe, then, that we have finally secured for art its most authentic reality, but when we try to grasp it, it draws back and leaves us empty-handed’ (MWC 33). Unless, of course, we buy an imprinted postcard, mug, tea-towel, T-Shirt, set of underwear in the gift shop, in which case we can own the work, as many copies as we like.

One cannot help thinking that the long journey to the first and last art, art as art, is to be located in these three metaphoric spaces. In its first existence as the seat of the muses, the museum is nothing other than the zone of poetic dictation, and one has no interest in the manifestation of art as in object, but only as a means of knowing the truth. Here the museum is really the seat of the muses, if one takes the muse in Agamben’s sense as dictation. The museum is the space where poiesis facilitates the coming to presence of truth. This is symbolised precisely, I believe, in the difference between the library and the museum. The library requires thought whereas the gallery merely requires your spectating presence. The second space is that of the cabinet. For the first time the museum is a place of objects not ideas, and they are located under glass because they are rare, auratic, precious and singular. Yet they are held within a single, metonymic, syntax: the cabinet. They are not so much objects of curiosity as curious objects demonstrating a compendium of the wonders of God’s creation: nature. In an odd way, much like the monster in literature and art, their uncanniness does not undermine transmissibility, but further confirms it. Like Agamben’s Homo Sacer, these cabinets are held in a necessary zone of indistinction the better to secure nature’s sovereign, unified diversity. Two facts Agamben neglects to mention in relation to the collapse of the cabinet in favour of our third symbolic space, the theatre, are traceable directly to the Enlightenment: the rise of science and of universal rights. The objective classificatory systems of science replace fairly rapidly the compendia of earlier traditions, so that by the time the surrealists begin to revive the tradition with their own Wunderkammer of objets trouvees, it is precisely not to provide compendia but wild juxtapositions of items which is the main concern. Taxonomy has replaced the compendium and the Wunderkammer become ideological tools to preserve in perpetuity objects which are torn from their taxonomic syntaxes and forced into new a-syntactical, tabular and thus effectively poetic metaphoric juxtapositions. While at the same time the decision to make the Louvre free to all several days a decade, converted the rights of private ownership into that or the public good. Museum’s ceased to be closed collections and the doors of the gabinetto were thrown wide open for all to peer inside. This strikes one as the aporia at the heart of any Heideggerian theory of aesthetic transmissibility, for the modern museum, source of the collapse of arts dwelling amongst us, seems to result from precisely the accessibility of art to all.

I have already hinted at a continuing, mutating life for the Wunderkammer in modern art through the work of the surrealists. For them, however, what is placed in a box behind glass is not a compendium or some form of digest or epitome. The origin of the word epitome resides in the Greek to cut but, like compendium, it also retains the meaning of miniaturisation. In contrast, the effect of the modern, surreal cabinet is, of course, anamorphic gigantism rather than perfectly proportional miniaturisation. The juxtaposition of two objects produces a metaphor charge between the two greater than the sum of the parts. Artistic versions of this can be seen, for example, in the famous Lobster phone where the two objects placed together have a profound, aesthetic anamorphism or gestalt. This was never the intention of the cabinet of wonder and, in fact, this is not the feature of the cabinet that is retained by the greatest exponent of the work behind glass we have ever known, supposed surrealist Joseph Cornell.

Under Glass
Cornell’s assemblages do not benefit, on the whole, from the gestalt of alienating juxtaposition, the greatest development of the modernist arts, but rather sustain a greater uncanniness due to their medieval origins. They create microcosmic unities that are unsettling, rather than macrocosmic isolations and subsequent recombinations. The influence of Cornell on the contemporary art scene can be felt strongly in the preponderance of vitrines and taxonomic art works of which the most significant practitioner is Damian Hirst. That the most ‘influential’ artist of the present moment should be an adept of the glass cabinet and its more sculptural outcropping the vitrine should first to be traced back to Koons before noting how in Hirst the majority of his attention is given to the content of the box rather than boxing itself. While this content can be controversial, divided calves and sharks, it can also be staid and taxonomic, shells, giving a clue as to the true genius of works that are not destined to appear behind glass in a museum, but which incorporate glass and the very staging of the Theatrum pittoricum.

Three works by Cornell, who was far from prolific, present us with the vital link between the Wunderkammer and the theatre space of the contemporary vitrine. The first of these, ‘Pharmacy’, provides a clear line of influence from Boschini to Hirst. It displays behind a glass fronted cabinet door a modernist grid in the form of four glass shelves each then bisected by glass partitions resulting in twenty cells or [cabins within the cabinet.] In each cabin is a glass specimen jar containing a single object or class of objects: shells, minerals, butterfly wings, what looks like gold. Here, almost as if Cornell knew of Boschini, which seems almost impossible to think, precious balms have been placed under glass so as to attain power over time. In some senses a form of ready-made, in that it reproduces the industrial fittings of an actual Pharmacy, the difference here between Duchamp and Cornell is the emphasis on the craftsmanship, the techne, which Cornell has applied to the work. In some senses this is the archetypal Cornell work and, perhaps, one of the forgotten masterpieces of modernism encapsulating, indeed subdividing and displaying, the very condition of an art in a world where art no longer has its dwelling amongst us on earth. Art is, instead, on a wall, subdivided and, most importantly, behind glass.

In a slightly later work, ‘Cockatoo and Corks’, Cornell comes closer to the surrealist side of his surrealist-constructivist affinities with a clear juxtaposition of objects placed under glass. The cut-out image of the Cockatoo occupies the majority of the top cabin in the work which occupies around two thirds of the total cabinet. Even so it feels cramped in there. In its beak the bird holds a string attached to the door of an embedded cabin attached to the top right of the cabinet, pent inside of which are several corks. The door of this sub-cabinet is divided into four sections. Corks litter the floor of the Cockatoo’s cage/cabin, and the architecture of its restricted life, perch, feeding station and so on, are primarily fashioned from cork. In the lower cabin of the cabinet, we find a complex of subdivisions totalling seven cabins of varying shape and size. The central cabin, that largest, holds the machinery of a musical box. The cabin to the right communicates with the home of the bird by means of a cork which passes through the dividing ‘floor’ to the habitat above. In the remaining cells are what resemble pill boxes and a few more corks. While the relationship between the bird and the corks remains mysterious to me in that I have never been drawn to the caging of flying or for that matter scampering beings—perhaps corks once used for the bird to chew much like cuttlefish bones—the dominant effect is the complex syntax of the work. The various divisions of cabins into sub-cabins, of miniature cabinets within cabinets, as well as the stratification of the work into foreground, subground and inserted ground not only add to the effect of claustrophobia, but make one engage with a reading of the interior world of the cabinet. It is, in effect, a sophisticated architectural vision of a form of museum.

These two rather different works come together for me in the sparse and thus, for the desubjectivised critical spectator, provocative ‘Window Façade’. Here the cabinet of ‘Pharmacy’ appears to have been raided and the content of six shelves subdivided into four making thirty cabins have been looted. While in this box the shelves and walls are not glass as was the case in ‘Pharmacy’, each cabin is fronted by its own piece of glass a small number of which have suffered shivering or impact fractures. It feels as if junkies had raided the pharmacy, or the people had finally looted the Louvre. I find it a somewhat terrifying work. Away from the sentimentality of the found objects that occupy much of Cornell’s work, Benjaminian objects of lingering aura such as old photographs and excerpts from provincial publications, this piece has a much sharper vision. The cabinets of our imagination and of our institutions have been attacked, and the things held inside have been imbibed, stolen, broken, or maybe just flew away. It is Cornell’s masterpiece, impossibly moving and enigmatic.

Taken together these three works provide a fascinating illustration and development of Agamben’s theory of the museum. The first literalises the adoption of a industrial and scientific paradigm, that of the medicine cabinet, to represent the new status of the art object when placed under glass by modern means of isolation, classification and democracy. The second presents the possibility of a complex, constructivist visual rhythm of the procedure, suggesting that the very act of vetrification could be the source of aesthetic power. A dream most fully realised in a work such as Hirst’s astonishing ‘Mother and Child’ and then left to drain away in his recent works. Finally, the third has an almost Messianic edge to it. We arrive at the cabinet of wonder when all the exhibits have been lost to carelessness, greed, events, lack of vision, or simply time. This is a haunting work in which the very hall of the museum has, lacking exhibits, becomes itself the exhibit, much in the way the turbine hall has become the most powerful visual experience of any visit to Tate Modern, or the exterior of the Guggenheims regularly outstrip the collections held within as we rapidly run out of masterpieces to show in them.

Poetry, as yet, is not kept in a museum. Not that there are not literary museums, but as yet poetry remains free from glass. This may not be for long. Of all the literary arts poetry is most under threat by modern publishing, reading and even academic habits. Even I, co-keeper of the Archive of the Now, have an office full of thin volumes that I will never have the time or inclination to read. They are each, for me, a kind of terrible and admonishing cabinet, for the only thing worse for art than being kept under glass is being held between covers, unseen by any but the most professional and obsessive eye. Poetry is, like the majority of the visual art works in the world today, already in the archive. If the modern art work suffers the contracted transaction from production to display and preservation, passing from the studio directly to the gallery, literature runs the risk of an even more deadly transaction, from the study to the archive.

If poetry is the archetypal western art, and the act of museumification or vetrification is the archetypal modernist aesthetic gesture, there must be some link between poetry and the gallery. As we will see, Agamben traces this link through Baudelaire and the fetish, but poets are in general figures of catholic tastes with time on their hands and perhaps drawn by the fiduciary promise of a modern ut pictora poiesis, they often wander into galleries and studios. Auden of course famously wrote 'Musee Des Beaux Arts', while in Williams’ Paterson a flood bursts into the library and washes all away. These two represent two modes by which poets enter the gallery, either in reverence, witness Bishop’s wonderful ‘descriptions’ of art works, or with nihilistic intentions. During the hey day of the New York School, many works were written about the complex relationship between the visual and written arts. Of these, Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ remains one of the most sustained considerations of ut pictora poiesis ever written and, due to Ashbery’s admiration for Cornell, leads us towards some closing words on art behind glass.

Ut Pictora Poiesis
‘Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ is Ashbery’s masterpiece work of 1975 for which he was awarded the three major literary prizes in America. Widely read as a consideration of postmodern issues pertaining to identity, self-reflexivity and representation, it consists of Ashbery’s reflections, literally, on the painting of the same name by the mannerist painter Parmigianino, now housed in Vienna. The use of a convex mirror, away from considerations of subjectivity, simulacra, and the like, also allows Ashbery to consider the inter-relation between creation, display and, of course, glass. Later we will come to consider the centrality of apotropaicism in Ashbery’s ‘Down by the Station Early in the Morning,’ a work that ends, as does this poem and also Ashbery’s Three Poems with an assault on, or at least exit from, the halls of display. Indeed across these three remarkable works Ashbery touches on the three zones of the history of art display as I have detailed them. In ‘Down by the Station’ it is a library, original seat of the muses, that the wrecking ball ventilates brutally. In Three Poems it is a theatre. While ‘Self-Portrait’ comes to an close with the exiting of an art gallery. In contrast to ‘Down by the station Early in the Morning’, which concludes on the aforementioned apotropaic gesture, ‘Self-Portrait’ commences precisely in the modern paradox that Agamben has noted of the way in which the work of art on display invites merely to push one away:

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And Swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. (SP)

At the end of this long piece, as Ashbery seeks to quit the poem/museum/analogy (‘As Parmigianino did it’ being a classic statement of ut pictora poiesis), he returns again to this image of welcome/warning: ‘Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand, / Offer it no longer as shield or greeting, / The shield of greeting…’. What is fascinating here is the means by which Ashbery conflates the apotropaic with the anamorphism of the modern museum. The hand is literally looming out of the work, although not yet as the beginning of a progression from the Renaissance to modern art that one can detect in the mannerists for, as Ashbery points out, the anamorphic hand is actually the result of acute observation or a realistic depiction of optics. That said, it is a harbinger of what is to come on the surfaces of Picasso or the narrative of Molly Bloom. The hand here, master metonym for the creative process, is both pushed out of the compendia of this small painted masterpiece, and also provides the complex distanciation of a post-assimilable art, that which invites one into the gallery precisely to display the unassailable alienation of the modern art work.

Ashbery is a creator-spectator throughout the poem in his complex reworking of ut pictora poiesis which is, in effect, the absolutely correct interpretation of the phrase through a full understanding of what poiesis actually means. Like the poem which could be a useful companion to this work, O’Hara’s “Why I am not a painter”, Ashbery and his friend both understand that any similarity between poetry and painting comes not from a comparison of the finished work, which is not to say that paintings and poems do not share aesthetic commonalities, but through the act of working or making. For poiesis means not the making of an object but the act of coming to truth through making and it is this which Ashbery the postmodernist shares with Parmigianino the post-Renaissance mannerist. Ashbery, therefore, as observer-creator, exists in the same space as the figures of Frenhofer and the nephew in being both the artist alienated from poiesis by the Ut or spectatorship, and the spectator able to present the perfect critique of the work of art which, however, as a poet not a painter, he could never hope to emulate. This is the most full investigation, therefore, of the much abused syntagm ut pictora poiesis combining, as it does, creation, observation and alienating separation. Parmigianino is not the first painter to use or even to depict a mirror, but he is the first to use a distorting mirror and as such he too becomes a self-alienating, desubjectivised creator-spectator. Ashbery hints at this in a contradictory interpretation of the painting as both modernist museum and medieval cabinet of wonder. At first he exhorts,

But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there
And nothing can exist except what’s there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves
And the window doesn’t matter much…

This distinction is a troubling one for in fact an alcove is defined as being a type of recess. That said to recess means to go deep while an alcove is itself a shallow, vaulted space. Recess is the result of perspective, while an alcove is an anamorphic space or vaulting as the result of distortion perhaps. Remarkably, Boschini’s work (and of all modern writers Ashbery is perhaps the most likely to know of this obscure work) describes almost word for word the effect of distorting flat space into a false recess to which Ashbery refers here: ‘The work on the ceilings, which are flat, molds them into arches, and transforms them into vaults. Thus he gives to concave spaces the look of flat ones…’ (MWC 32). What Ashbery is clearly alluding to in his comment on the recess-less alcoves of painted space is that the painting is a realistic portrayal of the effects of light on surface, the mirror, so that literally there is no perspective here as the painter is copying a surface not actual space. Here he seems to dismiss the metaphoric potentials of the cabinet with its recesses and glass frontages for a form of display that is entirely reflective, negating poem as capacious stanza in favour of the surface aesthetic of the visual arts. Yet he goes on to conclude ‘I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything / Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty’. The picture, therefore, is a cabinet of wonder still, a compendium of potential chaos organised not on the side by side proximity of what is displayed, but in the modern nothingness of the artist’s gaze. For how can a self-portrait be contained in a Wunderkammer, whose precise purpose is desubjectivization in the face of God’s world. Here, rather, we witness desubjectivization in the face of man’s own ingenious self-reflective creation.

About midway through the poem, Ashbery becomes less concerned with the solipsism of subjectivity and surface, and moves rather through the contested hallways of several institutions and city locations that mark the complex history of production and reception for this particular work. The first of these is Rome, ‘where Francesco / Was at work during the Sack: his inventions / Amazed the soldiers who burst in on him; / They decided to spare his life’. Having been saved by the wondrous power of his invention the artist’s life is spared. The poet then speaks of Vienna, where he first saw the work in 1959, and then ‘New York / Where I am now’, producing a complex of temporal and spatial shifts to further add to the rich soup of the poem’s reflection on the act of invention through epochs and layers of reflection and display. As he says of this complex syntax, itself a kind of cabinet of wonders, ‘Our landscape / Is alive with filiations, shuttlings’. This being the case when he finally comes to occupy the gallery space, it is hard to state at which point in time he is and, increasingly, whether the spatial co-ordinates are real, imagined, remembered, or a comment on a space contained within the image in question:

Yet the ‘poetic,’ straw-colored space
Of the long corridor that leads back to the painting,
Its darkening opposite—is this
Some figment of ‘art’, not to be imagined
As real, let alone special? Hasn’t it too its lair…?

This darkening corridor mirrors in negative the looming anamorphism of the painter’s hand suggesting an alternative depth to the poetic in contrast to that of painting. The space of the museum becomes, here, overlaid with precisely the dark qualities of poetry—linearity, depth, darkness, memory, imagination, figuration and realism—resulting in the museum itself becoming, not so much the dwelling place of art displaced as we saw from its dwelling on earth amongst us, as art itself. This corridor becomes transformed in the dark arts of poetic, associative thinking into the temporal flow of the present, the tension between the now of reception and the then of his first encounter with the work and before that its invention being felt across the whole of the poem’s cabinet form. This multiform space, first corridor, then lair, then water way, ‘as the waterwheel of days / Pursues its uneventful, even serene course?’, is eventually made to speak:

I think it is trying to say it is today
And we must get out of it even as the public
Is pushing through the museum now so as to
Be out by closing time. You can’t live there.

We are left with the same profound, modern anamorphic apatropaicism we began with when Francesco’s hand loomed out of reality/the painting/memory/time, both inviting us and warning us to stay away. The corridor leading into the gallery where the work is held behind the glass of the Viennese Theatrum pittoresco, at first leads us back to the painting for one last glance, yet at the same time it is an institutional space. The museum will close and we must be out of there before it does. Just as the soldiers of the Sack were allowed brief entrance into the cabinet of Francesco’s inventive wonders, so we too, the hoards of modern spectators, are allowed a glimpse of the truth of art, before we are expelled and the glass case closed on the cabinet against the gathering dust and degradation of time. Such a sad confession the artist makes at this point: marvellous though the corridors of art are, we are only welcome as visitors. Never forget, he seems to warn, that while we can sit on the seat of the muses for an epoch or more, we are in effect only keeping it warm for their return. So settle down in the gabinetto of the wonders of modern art, but don’t become too comfortable. One day poiesis will return to its dwelling, and all we interlopers in the corridors of creation, will be flushed out onto the streets.

Ontological Whisperings: Agamben and the Name

2010-05-06T11:27:00.002+01:00

Ontological Whisperings Only, of the Literature of Exception

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe. (Henry V, Act 4 Prologue)

Can one found a literary theory based on the topographical specificities of the political that Agamben describes in the Homo Sacer project?

Thus far there have been few attempts, aside from Lee Spinks essay ‘Except for Law’ which looks at Crime Fiction in relation to the politics of exception. It is perhaps surprising that this has not yet occurred in any concerted fashion. In the first instance, the narrative of Homo Sacer ought to be provocative of fictive narratives: a despised central character who, although the lowest member of society, contains within him the cipher of absolute power and the very continuation of the state as we know it. It has almost the scent of melodrama about it and certainly echoes numerous famous narratives of doubling such as Frankenstein, Caleb Williams, Confessions of a Justified Sinner and ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’. In addition, the establishment of the politics of exception is, as I have mentioned partly based on literary texts. Finally, while Agamben has recently been accused of using his literary sources as mere allegorical support for his wider philosophical schema, any detailed reading of Agamben would prove this to be far from correct. Agamben is a respectful and assiduous reader of literary texts, more so than any other contemporary philosopher in my opinion. That said, he is no more interested in them as literature alone, if there is such a position of solitary literary self-coincidence, as he is interested in over-coma patients or, for that matter, ancient Roman law. Just as these examples lead him to the political as such, or the being of politics, so his use of literature is part of a wider project to determine first, language as such, and subsequently to a total overhaul of the philosophical as such where it currently resides in a, as he sees it, post-metaphysical doldrums.

If one considers recent literary successes within the U.K., issues of sovereignty, bare life and exception seem very much to the fore. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the neurological disease eating away at the life of the pantomime villain in McEwan’s Saturday, the reduction of the students to the status of Homo Sacer within a UK that is effectively and open camp in Kashiguro's Never Let Me Go even Sebald’s masterpiece Austerlitz, all revolve around considerations of basic biological existence and its mediation within and through social, domestic, sexual or historical relativities. They are, therefore, novels of bare life as mediated by and, excluded from, social life. In the U.S., the potential omnipresence of an Agambenian theory of literature is perhaps even more marked where various post-9/11 novels investigate the non-relation between the dispersal of power over life and death and the mere fact of existence. Thus in Roth’s The Plot Against America, the US is revealed as having been potentially only one democratic choice away from becoming a national camp (a not very strenuously veiled attack on Guantanamo Bay and American racism). While in DeLillo’s Falling Man, the fact of biological survival of the September 11th attacks turns the main characters into empty, physiological vessels, continuing to function as social human beings within the terms of the state, wandering the teeming streets of the world’s polis without recourse to any actual sociality. Perhaps a more pronounced example of Homo Sacer in American literature is DeLillo’s Cosmopolis where the main character acts with a sovereign power of wealth beyond that even of states, while a former employee lives in an indistinct relation to him, plotting his downfall and thus the removal of Sovereignty. Here, DeLillo exposes an element biopolitical power Agamben has not yet considered, namely regicide or the act of murder that does not kill Sovereignty as such. The death of one capitalist does not kill capitalism.

Often, it is the directness of contemporary film that astonishes with its ability to manifest and fulfil complex philosophical concepts. There is no better example of this than Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later (2007). England has been decimated and depopulated by a virus that reduces human beings to manifestations of pure rage or a primal aggressivity. These are wasteful, consuming and solipsistic zombies—very much the zombies of our age—who do not eat the flesh of their victims but merely pummel them with their anger. The sole intention of these attacks is cathartic reproducibility, exchange of body fluids turns each victim into another rage-consumed monster, and they find their satiation only when all human life has been expunged. American troops are attempting to repopulate London through a secure zone they have set up in the environs of Canary Wharf, home of postmodern capitalism. District 1, as it is referred to, is soon compromised by the discovery of a rage victim outside the confines of the district who is asymptomatically infected. She is brought into District 1 for scientific tests related to a possible antidote. This victim, Alice, fulfils several multiple functions of the Homo Sacer in that she is a despised yet sacred figure, exceptional to the camp yet included within it under strict security, a human laboratory for the discovery of a cure and so on. The presence of the exception within the state must always have viral implications, an element of the revolutionary potential of Homo Sacer Agamben does not touch upon, and in the midst of a fresh outbreak within the confines of District 1 the director delights in the depiction of what is termed, by the armed forces, Code Red. This is a classic state of exception wherein District 1, the polis, is transformed first into a holding camp with all the inhabitants herded into secured areas, and then, with cinematic velocity, a zone of genocide as the decision is made to destroy all occupants to halt the spread of the contagion. As the film ends, victims of the virus are shown on the rampage in Paris and the futility of containing and negating exception is brought home. In a land where everyone is infected, who exactly are the exceptions, and as exception exists in the zone of indistinction inside/outside, how is it possible to exclude the Homo Sacer? The political message of the film is both bleak and inspirational: the limits of the polis leak.

Fresnadillo’s film is an uncanny and brilliant allegory of Homo Sacer, which is not surprising as it is clearly a comment on our contemporary political situation wherein sovereign biopolitical power is able to make a decision over the very existence of its subjects in moments of extreme exception: the outbreak of diseases, responses to terrible acts of terrorism and so on. It is also significant that this is a European film for, of course, Region 1 resembles closely the various holding camps for illegal immigrants dotted around the borders of the Eurozone, and the permeability of its borders is surely a political comment on the part of Fresnadillo and his team. Of course, Agamben’s work recommends itself to contemporary cultural critique in that it is hard to think of another contemporary thinker whose work so perfectly fits the cultural mood of the age to such a degree that one can almost hear Zizek’s rapid apostasy as he moves from Lacan and Hitchcock to Agamben and Fresnadillo. Homo Sacer is, in other words, a very powerful tool for the analysis of contemporary cultural texts. A potential literary theory composed around the four elements of sovereignty, bare life, Homo Sacer and exception resides asymptomatically in the Homo Sacer project, waiting on some future outbreak within the academy.

I will not be attempting any advocacy of such a theory of Literature and Sovereignty or The Literature of Exception. There are several reasons for this. In the first instance, such readings work well when one deals with localised examples of literature, film and so on. Crime Fiction naturally considers the law and those outside of it. Contemporary prose fiction occupies the same political moment as Agamben so of course their concerns overlap, interestingly, but in a non-revelatory manner. Any reading of literature based on Homo Sacer is a limited reading of certain forms of literature that fulfil the terms of that text. It is hard to imagine such a theory opening up new vistas in the recent poetry of Lyn Hejinian or Charles Bernstein. I am not sure how Mallarmé might respond. There is, perhaps, also a contemporary wariness and weariness that dissuades one from the enthusiastic rummaging in the canon for Homines Sacri. Classic texts rise up before one’s eyes like once great actors now a little worse for wear, encouraged out of retirement for one last ill-advised starring role: the aforementioned Frankenstein’s monster, Magwitch, Piggy. If there is to be a future literary theory composed of an intimate relationship with philosophy, either a Derridean or Agambenian theory to come, one suspects it needs to move beyond allegorical applications of philosophical systems to apparently less self-conscious, less thoughtful texts such as philosophy often seems to regard novels and films. Finally, however, and most significantly by far, one does not need to concoct a theory of literature from Agamben’s philosophy, for a very substantial part of Agamben’s work is concerned with literature, in particular poetry. One need not, therefore, fabricate an Agambenian literary theory, for the third Agamben, not Agamben the political nor Agamben the philosopher but Agamben the literary critic, has been generous enough to provide for us one of the most challenging, systematic and powerful conceptions of literature to be found amongst the annals of any philosopher, certainly since Heidegger.

To be Wilsoned
How would one go about reading literature after Agamben? Certainly, one ought not ignore exceptionalism, and one cannot close one’s ears to the beguilements of the other Agamben either, the thinker of being. One would need to undertake a journey of redemption and appeasement as regards the Agamben we all know, before presenting a concerted and systematic reading of the third Agamben, whom may we well know about, but is rarely spoken of. Before we begin with the study Agamben and the Ends of Literature then I propose that we undertake such a journey through a reading of s short piece of poiesis that itself straddles the various identities of the great Italian philosopher and philologer. I hope my choice is apt, although for a truly effective literary theory it need not be, in that it is a story of doubles, naming and sovereignty touching on all three elements of Agamben’s work, literature, metaphysics and power.

In Poe’s classic tale of dopplegangerism, ‘William Wilson’, the protagonist whose name is not but is almost William Wilson (coincidently my own initials), is tormented through his school and later University years by his nemesis who goes by the same pseudonymical appellation: William Wilson, by which one presumes one is labelling the narrator, who both is the protagonist of the tale and not the protagonist as he is its narrator. Thus the narrator goes not by the title’s alliterative, dualistic and trochaic moniker, ‘a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real’, but by another epithet of, we presume, phonetic similarity. William Wilson, not that William Wilson, not the narrating William Wilson, who is also not quite that William Wilson either, for the sake of clarity let us call William Wilson the second William Wilson—one strike through for the negation of identity, this is not the same William Wilson as that which speaks, and the second for the communal possession of the two men of a name which, while sonically kindred to William Wilson, is not William Wilson, (what then could their pseudonym be, we presume the William stands, there is no almost-homonym for William, thus is must be the surname that has been altered slightly, from what, Watson, Weston, Watkin?)—competes with, copies, mimes, emulates, counterfeits, bootlegs, pirates, transcribes, duplicates, Xeroxes, forges, echoes, mirrors, plagiarizes, monkeys and parrots the narrator William Wilson (properly William Wilson).
As the years progress the narrator becomes increasingly unhinged by the mimetic attentions of his (dead) ringer (very) spit (and image), usually performed by a nefarious whispering in the ear. This whisper, the result of a laryngeal defect Poe, apologies, the narrator, describes as ‘a weakness in the faucal or guttural organs’, both protects his nemesis from ridicule by awarding his speech with an immockable gravitas, and provides the only aspect of the narrator that his would-be substitute cannot reproduce: vocal volume. This ‘singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own’, as a sonorously mitigated vehicle, increasingly bears one single syntagmatic tenor: ‘William Wilson!’

The story comes to an inevitable end in Italy. Wilson is attending the ball of the Duke di Broglio; the duke of intrigue would be the English translation. It is carnival and everyone is in disguise. The narrator, however, has a tip-off regarding the object of his licentious regard, the very wife of his host: ‘With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited’. Feverishly pursuant of this deciphered, erotic, esoterica, the masked lover is retarded from his intention to make himself come into presence before the Duchess di Broglio by a light hand on the shoulder and a whispering in the ear. It is, naturally, William Wilson, mockered-up in the self-same costume as that sported by our hero. In an accelerated narrative frenzy that seems possessed, all these years later, with the same passion that gripped the writer at the very moment in 18-- when these events unfolded like pleats of a parted curtain or a carnival cloak, William Wilson drags William Wilson into an ante-chamber of the main ball-room where he stabs William Wilson several times. At this point the narrator is porlocked by someone attempting to enter the ante-chamber of pure violence, and when he returns to consider, or perhaps finish off his namesake, everything is the same and yet also slightly different:

The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, --so at first it seemed to me in my confusion --now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.
Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist --it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment --not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!
It was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:
‘You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead --dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist --and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself’.

It is a powerful and famous revelation, much copied in the years that have proceeded from that terrible, final malediction. Interestingly, when the story was first published in 1839 it was itself already a copy of an earlier tale by Washington Irvine, and thus it would seem that the machine of doubling is itself always already productive. One might at this juncture coin a verb in English, Wilsoning, as Coleridge’s Chinese Box poem lead to porlocking, to describe not the fact of doubling but the effect of its always-already being in play and yet also never being in play. For, of course, as in the recent filmic adaptations of the story, Fight Club and Momento, the story’s protagonist becomes also its antagonist and in the last turn of the narrative, which is always the end of the story, doublarity becomes once again singularity.

To be Wilsoned is the inevitable consequence of these two categories of fiction, proto- and anta-gonist. Interestingly, while they originate from the same Greek construction, they refer to rather different subjective states within story-telling. The protagonist is a person of first order, while an antagonist is an opponent, so presumably in some sense despised. Thus protagonism refers to a subjective hierarchy based on some exercise of power. It carries with it something of the sovereign that indeed William Wilson executes in the final act of killing which is not murder. It is a sovereignty which throughout the narrative he is unable to fully possess as he concedes dominance in each instance to his other through self-inflicted blows of insecurity and folly. As he declares with a hidden intent in the final paragraph before the tale’s verso in Rome when speaking of the dyadic hierarchy Wilson-Wilson, ‘Thus far I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination’. In a sense, then, the story is not about the uncanny at all, but rather depicts the desubjectivization that the protagonist suffers within the corridors of the English class system: prep-school, Eton, Oxford and so on. In fact, this oscillation between a universal subjective state, ontological doubling, and socio-historic facts, the English class system, presents us with the undecidable within the story’s thematics to match the structural-ontological undecidability between the two homonymic school chums.

In contrast, as ever, antagonism converts the topographical reliance on verticality inherent in sovereign protagonism, and instead relocates the two nominations on a flat surface. The antagonist is not definable in terms of power but rather in terms of relation or rather they are not solely definable in terms of power because they are not located in a position of easy relation, but one of struggle. It is difficult, in the melee, to determine at any point a clear dominion. An earlier usage of the word ‘antagonize’ refers to the neutralizing force of counteraction and this indeed is relevant at the end of the archaic story where William Wilson kills himself, if that is indeed a viably finite reading of the closing paragraph.

The Most Uncanny Thing, Literature and Doubling
As yet, Agamben has not written on Poe and certainly has not glossed ‘William Wilson’, although much of what I have just said is spoke as if through the mouth of Agamben, as if he were whispering in your ear. That said, the philosopher is well read in the 19th century American literary tradition having co-authored a book with Deleuze on Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. Melville is in some senses pally with Poe. Born a mere ten years later he outlived his predecessor only to suffer the same ignominy at the hands of the American publishing industry so that, like Poe, his life ended in poverty and obscurity. As we shall see later when I read Agamben’s non-reading Bruno Schultz, there is a potential reading here by Agamben on Poe of the very order of Bartleby’s passive negation of self exercised in the phrase ‘I would rather not’. This phrase Agamben identifies as the impotency at the heart of all potentiality or that which is not expended of potential when potential comes to actuality in act. A similar economy is, one could argue, operating fatally in ‘William Wilson’, where the protagonist acts to destroy his other but, in doing so, retains rather than expends alterity. As the final words of the story advocate, while the protagonist is in ascendancy here, ‘you have conquered and I yield’, antagonism has been eradicated by protagonism, duality erased by singularity. The cost of protagonistic sovereignty is total self-negation, ‘yet henceforth art thou dead’.

Agamben could have potentially been a literary critic attendant on the ontological intricacies of the uncanny. His first book is subtitled Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. That said, by the time he turns his attention to the uncanny and doubling in The Man Without Content, any psychological element of the uncanny has been excised in favour of clearly onto-aesthetic considerations. The book begins with the essay ‘The Most Uncanny Thing’, but here Agamben refers not to a generic element of literature, The Uncanny, but, following a reading of Nietzsche, an essential characteristic of all modern art: ‘For the one who creates it, art becomes an increasingly uncanny experience…because what is at stake seems to be not in any way the production of a beautiful work but instead the life and death of the author…’ (MWC 5). In these inaugural comments, Agamben is laying the foundation stones for his theory of poietic Modernity, a theory which shadows and echoes his more widely feted and dissected definition of our political Modernity. Specifically, following a complex logic which I will try to unpick towards the end of this book, Agamben is highlighting a split that occurs in art between the positions of critic/spectator and that of artist creator.

Assuming a time when art dwelt amongst us and we had no need to differentiate the experience of making and observing art, Agamben goes on to describe modern art in terms of a radical disassociation between artist and audience. The artist is no longer one of us as he or she does not hold in common a conception of what the art object is, rather their art appears simply as an object in the world, about which an audience must decide critically: is this art? This question which is ontological in essence, replaces the more established critical question of the west which is epistemic: is this good art? As he often does, Agamben uses a literary work to better demonstrate a metaphysical truth, for while he is speaking of a localised effect of our Modernity, his observation as regards poiesis and desubjectivization is a wider, metaphysical proposal. Reading Balzac’s tale of a proto-abstract artist, The Unknown Masterpiece, Agamben recounts the experience where the artist Frenhofer makes the self-conscious subjective transition from artist to spectator when, he realises, through the eyes of another, that his masterpiece is nothing but lines and colours. At this moment, we are told, ‘Frenhofer becomes double. He moves from the point of view of the artist to that of the spectator, from the interested promesse de Bonheur to disinterested aesthetics’ (MWC 11). That this central text for Agamben should begin with essays on the uncanny and then ‘Frenhofer and His Double’, allows us to realise that his critique of Modernity is bifurcated, in the first instance, between a political and an aesthetic consideration of the limitations of our age. Further, just as Homo Sacer spans universal metaphysical propositions and localised historiographic observations, so his work on literature consists of markedly materialistic considerations of literary texts and works of art often at a very technical level, his interest is not particularly limited to enjambment or the ready-made, but to ontological observations revealed by the localised reading of artistic texts.

Naturally, such observations on the uncanny and subjective doubling allow us greater access to the potential meaning of the enigma William Wilson. Wilson is, after all, a spokesperson for Poe himself. His experiences of growing up in England were also Poe’s experiences. The uncanny guest that haunts this feast of literary tall-tale-telling surely speaks with a whisper all writers of narratives have heard. It is the voice of a character you have made, and yet someone who is able to take on a life beyond your own. W.W. is experiencing then, nothing other than the subjective split inherent to poiesis, in particular as a result of his antagonist revealing himself at the end of the story as the tain of our mirrored self; a figment of Master Wilson’s imagination. To make something assumes a decision or literal division, but each act of making splits and divides in a different fashion. Simple making is the division of absolute divisibility or a particularity without singularity that reaches its apotheosis in modern production methods. Inventive making imposes, as Derrida argues, a split in the fabric of the very institution of art, art’s modernity. Invention is not pure creation but the activity of producing something new within the law-limited confines of convention. This oscillating dyad, convention—invention, is our modern sense of literature as something original, inventive, singular. It is a productive, impossible to heal, rent in the fabric of the conception of art amongst the Kantian sensus communis and, in theory, should be in accord with Agamben’s definition of aesthetic modernity, which also partially emanates from a reading of Kant. Yet the most uncanny thing about art for Agamben is not reproducibility, or judgement disruption, but making as such, ex nihilo, a new thing in the world. Such an act of making constitutes an event and Derrida is quite clear that this is not what he means by literary invention. Frenhofer’s subjective collapse is not the result of his inventiveness, for that assumes a work assimilable into commonly held values rather his canvas disrupts such a continuity. The experience of the artist as maker has absolutely nothing in common with our experience as spectator. This being the case, as Frenhofer becomes spectator to his own creation and finds his very subjectivity as maker radically undermined when he starts to criticise what ought to simply be produced, so we too, Agamben asserts, suffer a similar uncanny doubling or split. That which we are expert in, art, is the very thing we cannot create. Making and thinking is therefore a classic non-relational relation to rival those of Homo Sacer, and The Man Without Content becomes an uncanny double of the Homo Sacer, wandering not the liminal spaces of society, but the hall-ways and antechambers of our modern aesthetic institutions.

Homonym, Synonym, Pseudonym: The Whispering Names of Being
Even at the localised level of literary generic concerns, Agamben always considers ontological issues and this structure can again be identified in the issue of naming. ’William Wilson’ extends into the same ground of homonym, synonym and pseudonym that concerns our Italian master in his great work on being, The Coming Community. In a central text from this collection for Agamben’s work on language as such, ‘Homonym’, he reenergises a debate that raged at the beginning of last century between Frege and Russell on the logical and ontological status of the name in relation to the thing it is appended to. Frege’s contention that the concept ‘horse’ is not a concept, refers to the paradox of distinction one is forced to consider in relation to the word as transmission of the idea of the thing, and the word as thing in itself. As Agamben explains in relation to the sign ‘shoe’: ‘Even if we can completely distinguish a shoe from the term “shoe,” it is still much more difficult to distinguish a shoe from its being-called-(shoe), from its being in language’ (CC 73). This problem, how to shoe an horse, inspires Agamben to return, as he often does, to Aristotle, in particular his discourse on synonyms versus homonyms in the Metaphysics. Aristotle defines synonyms as entities that have the same name and the same definition, while homonyms are objects that have the same names but different definitions. ‘Thus the single horses are synonyms with respect to the concept horse, but homonyms with respect to the idea of the horse’ (CC 75).

Not content with this differentiation, how the sign horse can be synonymical (all horses) and homonymical (the concept ‘horse’ or horse as such), Agamben muses:
But what is the idea that constitutes the homonymic of multiple synonyms that, persisting in every class, withdraws its members from their predicative belonging to make them simple homonyms, to show their pure dwelling in language? That with respect to which the synonym is homonymous is neither an object nor a concept, but is instead its own having-name, its own belonging, or rather its being-in-language. This can neither be named in turn nor shown, but only grasped through an anaphoric movement (CC 75-6).

Here we see mounted three levels of naming. The name of the thing (synonym), the name of the concept of the thing (homonym), and the having name (homonymic synonym). The first order of naming is reproducible and proliferant. It gallops along in vast, ever extending herds. The second imposes a philosophical incision differentiating the bad infinity of endless naming from the enforced finitude of a universal concept: all horses. A classic artistic representation of this might be bridled in Stubb’s 1762 canvas ‘Whistlejacket’ where the particularity of a horse, placed on a neutral background wherein it seems to float in air, becomes an archetypal image that seems to whinny ‘I am horse’. The final order of hipponomia contains no content as such either in terms of reproduction or philosophical, conceptual monstration. It is, in other words, liberated from predicative logic without it, apparently, renouncing its predicative structuration. If it is anaphoric, then being-named is merely an indicative function or abbreviation for that which has already been named and must, by definition, be predicative although in an empty fashion. Agamben solves this problem by suggesting that being-named is auto-anaphoric ‘the idea of a thing is the thing itself’ (CC 76), by which he means that being-named contracts the galloping, telescoping, endlessly deferring logic of names and concepts into a single moment where the idea and the thing come together in perfect coincidence. Such and instant where presence is allowed rear-up is not due to the referential veracity of the specific name used, but in the neutral and content-less locale of the event of being-named. Just as, say, the anaphora ‘it’, ‘he’, ‘the Italian philosopher’ or ‘Stubbs’ horse’ add no new meaning to the idea of the thing referred to, so the event of being-named does nothing other than situate or support the saddle of being as such. This is Agamben’s famous whatever-being, ‘Whatever is singularity insofar as it relates not (only) to the concept, but (also) to the idea’ (ibid.) or ‘that which, holding itself in simple homonymy, in pure being-called, is precisely and only for this reason unnameable: the being-in-language of the non-linguistic’ (ibid.).

Acute readers may already be able to see the relevance of homonym and synonym for any reading of ‘William Wilson’, but no such reading would be complete without Agamben’s short essay ‘Pseudonym’ in which he discusses the prose of one of his favourite writers, Robert Walser. Agamben is fascinated by the combination of neutrality and irony or suggested irony that typifies Walser’s prose anti-style. Anti-style certainly in comparison with his German language peers Mann and Broch. Perhaps the archetypal Walserian voice therefore is Ulrich, the narrator of Institute Benjamenta who comes over endlessly as a wide-eyed ingénue and self-aggrandising cynic. Agamben begins his essay on Walser with a consideration of the linguistic and literary extremes of lament and praise, which he sees as the ‘extremes that define the domain and the scope of human language, its way of referring to things’ (ibid.59). Naming, therefore, has two extreme limits and as always it is an issue of duality and non-relation. Lament occurs when meaning exceeds, or perhaps less contentiously simply does not capture, the thing in itself. Praise is the result when ‘the name perfectly says the thing’ (ibid.). Irrespective of whether this is an accurate linguistic observation, Agamben is not a linguist as such but an onto-linguist who uses linguistic categorisations as means of accessing being, it certainly speaks to the double-Agamben that Negri has acquainted us with.

Agamben’s own work is simultaneously that of lament and praise. Walser interests Agamben because his language seems to renounce any intercourse with either side of language’s ‘ontotheological pathos—both in the form of unsayability and in the (equivalent) form of absolute sayability’ (ibid.). Defining the West as a project destined to make language bring the name of God into being and then found in God’s name the power of reference, he finds Walser’s prose wonderfully guilty of outliving ‘its theological task’ (ibid). How does Walser achieve this neutered and neutral God-less prose? Primarily through a highly developed use of pseudonym: ‘The semantic status of his prose coincides with that of the pseudonym or the nickname. It is as if every word were preceded by an invisible “so-called”, “pseudo-”, and “would-be”…almost as if every term raised an objection against its own denominative power’ (CC 59-60). Agamben goes on to describe this prose style as ‘a modesty of language with respect to its referent. This referent is no longer nature betrayed by meaning, nor its transfiguration in the name, but it is what is held—unuttered—in the pseudonym or in the ease between the name and the nickname’ (ibid. 60).

I will leave to one side the odd use of the word ease here, retaining the privilege of returning to this many pages hence, but for now it suffices to say that ease is the merest hint of a differential spacing, adequate enough for division but modest enough, why not, not to insist on a radical difference of identity, heterogeneity or singularity. Walser’s language solves, for Agamben, the great problem of Western metaphysics in a manner that will take the rest of this study to unpick. For now it is enough to clarify that the pseudonym, like the homonymic synonym, moves language into a zone of indistinction and thus passive neutrality between ancient and contesting metaphysical values. In the case of the homonym it is word and concept, here it is the sign as reference or ontological plenitude. The pseudonym is, after all, a peculiar form of naming in that it does operate a clear denominative function in the world, one can pass and be identified as existing under that faux moniker, but the name in question is no one’s real name. Operating a logic that is Agamben at his most brilliant, a term which exceeds the dyadic operations of metaphysics, here language and truth, operates a simultaneous double-deconstruction. This works not only on the terms’ asymmetrical relationality, this is Derrida’s domain, nor does it necessarily instigates a Heideggerian destruktion of all terms, but rather allows for a type of neutralising completion. The pseudonym dismantles the machinery of linguistic reference and coincidence, in that it refers but non-veridically, and it names presence, but insincerely. Of course, under such pressures, the pseudonym is no longer semantically a nick-name, but a false name that resides between and is also overlaid on top of the actual name and its operational but untruthful alternative.

At this stage one should also be able to ascertain the relation of the pseudonym to the homonym. The homonym exists in a neutrality of indication between the thing as such and its named presence. It points to a thing but does not name it, does not need to name it, because its contractile powers have removed the space and oxygen required for referential velonomia. It contracts the distanciation between synonym and homonym, thing and concept, presenting an uneasy reigning in of metaphysical energies expended, apparently fruitlessly, since the Greeks. So too does the pseudonym foreshorten the gap between reference and coincidence which is precisely the same debate utilising different terms and operating in a slightly modified context. For reference is nothing other than synonym, and coincidence pure homonym. Although Agamben infuriatingly never states this to be the case, homonymical synonym is just another nick-name for the psuedonymical powers of Walser’s not especially astonishing prose.
These debates present in miniature two issues. The first is that Agamben’s whole project is based on an ontological consideration of the presence of language as such and the basis of western metaphysics on a failure to bring this problem to its full monstration within its now exhausted ontological stable of names. The second is the logopoietic methodology of Agamben that is thus far commented on by only a couple of his critics, and that itself rather negatively. Across these two essays, and a number of others, Agamben comes at the problem of naming being from the perspective of literature (poiesis) and philosophical discourse (logos). At no stage does he favour one form over the other, indeed the problem resides in their false division since Plato, nor does he precisely dismiss either form. If anything he seems more favourable always to literature but, in the final analysis, his interest is ineluctably drawn back to his true calling and his true naming: philosophy.

If Agamben is drawn to philosophy, I am always drawn back with fresh incredulity to the logopoietic manner in which great works of literature address and perform fundamental metaphysical truths often well in advance of philosophy itself. ‘William Wilson’ is not only no exception, as we habitually say, it is exemplary and in that sense truly exceptional. It is unclear to me if Agamben’s work provides a framework for a clearer understanding of this fiction, Walser is for example stylistically the very opposite of Poe, or whether the story simply confirms the lasting presence of the issues that Agamben has but recently clarified in discursive prose. This indistinction, the most significant and productive of our age I would wager, is the very quintessence of the logopoietic. Concentrating first on the story’s devastating and explosive ending, we see performed first here in the form of a concluding revelation a cataphoric reversal of the auto-anaphoric ontology of self-naming homonymic being. The dying words of Wilson’s other unveil the ontological duality that is present in all beings, but which is dramatised as a rhetorical device in fiction and thus becomes, one presumes, a heightened ontological problem for the writer who occupies the extreme points of ontology. At one end he is in total coincidence with his activity of poiesis, taken here to mean not the act of making something but of bringing to presence being in the activity of creation. In a remarkable irony, a truly modern and Romantic irony, the nihilistic energies of the modern maker are realised in a productive destruction of one’s self as living being and creator. In killing alterity in the self, and potentially killing one’s own life—it remains unsaid whether Wilson murders another Wilson or the self-same yet alterior Wilson his alter ego—the narrator brings to presence the truth of being’s reliance on alterity: ‘in me didst thou exist’. He also removes the potential for poiesis at precisely the same moment, for poiesis is nothing other than a bringing to presence the other of being, its unsayability, not through the naming of being, William Wilson, but through the activity of naming as the basis for whatever being in the being named. The name William Wilson doesn’t matter at all. The name William Wilson matters most of all.

In murdering alterity, Wilson not only disallows poiesis at the moment of his greatest creative-destructive act, but he also negates his status as artist-creator by becoming, instead, spectator to his own actions. This is further emphasised by the complicated presence of the mirror in the ante-chamber, and the instigation of the Porlock who, in interrupting Wilson’s total self-plenitude in the profoundly nihilo-narcissism of self-murder, thus stated so as to differentiate self-murder from simple suicide, also brings in perceptive distanciation so that when Wilson returns to his antagonist, he is aware of what he has done, rather than consumed in the act of doing itself. I do not believe that, directly, Poe intended ‘William Wilson’ to be an allegory for the creative act. I am sure he had in mind a consideration of ontological duplication, counterfeit, masking and psuedonymising as the critics, no doubt, confirm. That said the story is a profound investigation of the reliance of being on profound alterity, creation, destruction, and spectatorship, all key themes for the development of aesthetic modernity. No one except the modern artist is surely as fully aware of the issues of alterity. What is poiesis after all but the bringing to presence of the most other of all things, our own self-presence? And who but the story teller in her profound engagement with deixis, anaphora and cataphora, can testify in full as to the ontological problematics of naming being, which brings us to our second level of reading.
As I have tried to creatively demonstrate in my own slightly over-wrought reading of the fable, the whole narrative revolves around the issue of naming. Who is William Wilson would, I imagine, be a legitimate literary theoretical question. Agamben’s work is important in that it allows us to move away from a predicable psychoanalytical reading, to a more profound investigation of ontology and nomination that makes the story not merely great literature but a working of lasting logopoiesis. Perhaps it suffices here to map out the means by which Poe performs Agamben’s observations on synonym, homonym and pseudonym, 150 years before the philosopher himself comes upon them. We will take as read the multi-stratificatory issues pertaining to author, narrator and protagonist, a favourite technique of the ‘gothic’ after all, although there is little if anything gothic about ‘William Wilson’. Of course, in the 1830s with fiction still in its nascent state, Poe's prescience in such matters is a simple sign of his greatness. Laid out on top of this layered bed-rock is the problem of the narrator’s non-name. He goes by a pseudonym, arguably we all do of course, which is itself a partial homonym, his pseudonym resembles phonetically his real name, which is itself a full homonym, in that William Wilson names two beings. This homonym is destabilised by the coincidence of the phonetic quality being a false coincidence, William Wilson is not their name, and an almost veridical coincidence, William Wilson sounds like and almost is their name. Wilson’s mimetic ontology, his being seems entirely based on aping that of the narrator’s, is perhaps inaccurately presented in such a form of words for his ontology remains radically singular in the moment of its being-named, singular by being non-particular or whatever, irrespective of whether its presentation to the world or its actual being-in-the-world is mimetic. That it is so is again another central element in our case for reading this as an allegory or modern nihilistic poiesis, for Wilson is, in this way, a representation of the narrator in all elements except phonetically. As if Poe has relied mainly on the advice of Agamben but, at a central juncture, had also consulted with Derrida, Wilson is phonetically marked out as different from and identical to the ‘real’ Wilson through the use of the whisper.
The biological restrictions of Wilson’s larynx undermine his charade in one crucial element, which means that when he speaks the name ‘William Wilson’ he is able to make it exist as pseudonym, homonym and synonym. If a synonym proper defines phonetic difference and semantic coincidence, not Aristotle’s definition but the rhetorical usage of the term, then this whisper presents us with a third layer of synonymising. Whispered in this fashion, William Wilson does indeed sound different while naming the same thing, although the phonetic divergence is in terms of volume, a phonetico-hyletic element of language that linguistics is yet to take into consideration, while the thing named is not, in fact, the same concept at all for it names two very separate beings: ‘this singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own’.

Agamben has not yet written on whispering. He has considered the voice, silence, and issues of subtle divergence in general however which, when taken together form the basis of an ontology of mumurous susurration. In Poe being does not speak, nor does it stay silent. It whispers and in so doing it brings together in one motif all the complexities of this many-banded formation. It also depicts in wonderful and apt miniature, for Agamben is a prose mannerist, two central issues for his theory of literature as a form of logopoiesis or activity of bringing the being of philosophy to presence. This whispered name ‘William Wilson!’ is, as far as I am concerned, one of the greatest creations of aesthetic modernity that we have, as ascetic as abstraction, as thrilling as film, as disturbing as atonality, and as shattering as poetic desubjectivization. In naming the issues surrounding pseudonym, homonym, synonym, naming, concept, being-named, duplication, coincidence, alterity, difference, the phonetic, the reproducible, mimesis, singularity, volume and violence, there is no greater undertonal expression of modern, poetic being until, perhaps, Kurtz lies back and mutters ‘The Horror the Horror’. While a great deal has been made about the silence of artists, most importantly Rimbaud and Duchamp, for me the greatest artists of our age are those who are falling silent. I urge you to listen to the whispering voice in your ear, for it is poetry calling you to being.

The Literature of Exception and its Many Exclusions
Having dealt with genre and naming being, there is of course a simpler reading of the tale courtesy of Agamben, and that is a consideration of the presentation of sovereignty and exception tragically staged as an Italian commedia dell’arte. The narrator tells us early on that he has inherited his family’s characteristics making him ‘self-willed’ to such a degree that his parents failed to hold his caprices in check. ‘Thenceforward my voice was a household law…I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, master of my own actions’. At prep-school, ‘the ardour, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and…gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself;--over all with a single exception’. As the language in the early section of the narrative shows, the main character is born to a sovereignty that he exercises with relish at his exclusive school, but in this instance the exception is not a Homo Sacer substitute but rather a rival to his sovereign claims. The story does not delineate the standard zone of indistinction brought about between sovereignty and exception, but considers the fervid bifurcation to be found within sovereignty itself as the two men vie for supremacy of the ‘throne’ of their limited, but powerful, little world. The energy expended in this struggle is described in the middle part of the story where the narrator explains the facility with which his protagonist keeps step with him, and the hidden struggle he has to undertake just to maintain the rivalry on an equal footing. The tension here between the two men, therefore, can almost be described as the coming to being of exception. Structurally the positions are all laid out like so many cards in a game of écarte, the closed world of privileged education, the available positions of sovereign and exception, but it is as if we are located in pre-history or the pre-political, waiting for the écarte that will explode this uneasy equilibrium of kings and raise one up to true sovereignty by the striking down and expulsion of the other.

This transpires at Oxford where the narrator conspires to relieve Lord Glendinning of his fortune by the caddish cheating at cards. When Wilson exposes this ruse, the narrator’s wild profligacy in the halls of power is finally brought to an end and he is ‘sent down’ from Oxford. The following paragraphs describe the errancy of this newly minted Homo Sacer: ‘Abased, humbled to the dust as I then was…’; ‘commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and shame’; ‘I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion has as yet only begun’; ‘From his [Wilson’s] inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee…and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain’. This is an admirable delineation of all the specific qualities of the Homo Sacer to be found across Agamben’s work: abasement, shame, subject to mysterious dominion, the impossibility of escape from the structural dominance of the sovereign. What is also presented here is an issue barely hinted at in Agamben relating to the very choice of whom is to occupy the role of Homo Sacer. This issue is brilliantly considered in relation to the selection of the Jew in the extermination camps by Andrew Benjamin, who criticises Agamben’s conception of ‘bare life’ as being total indistinction, stressing that it was of great importance that a specific identity be considered by the Nazis before they stripped it of all human characteristics. Does not the Homo Sacer first bear traces of their former existence, and does not the choice of the sovereign’s power of debasement pertain naturally to the inherent characteristic of power, the removal on one’s potential superiors? Agamben certainly traces the obscure figure of Homo Sacer back to a section of Roman law giving the father absolute dominion over his household to such a degree that he can kill his son with impunity. Why his son? Because the son naturally competes for dominion with the father, and indeed Homo Sacer may be a frightening, paranoid and despicable prophylactic measure: to exclude one’s rivals before you believe they will exclude you. Certainly in ‘William Wilson’ this is the case and explains the strange clinamen between the sovereign and their non-relational and despised other. The Homo Sacer was once a candidate for total power and the secret that they bear with them is that the first candidate for exclusion is not the poor nor the helpless, but the sovereign himself.

Yet, I would argue, the narrator is not fully Homo Sacer but is in the process of becoming excluded. One assumes that exclusion is a single act of scission but here at least this is not the case. The narrator is slowly, with many snips and refutations, carved from his position of assumed dominion and slowly brought to a state of absolute shame. Exclusion, it would seem, like narrative and the Freudian subject, needs to unfold leisurely in its own time and find its own end. It is almost as if the sovereign is in a God-like position, allowing the narrator free-will within certain structural confines to come to the debasement of total bare-life by his own devices. Is this not the very nature of the operation of the law on societal norms? It is passive, seemingly, an inactive network of checks and balances to protect the polis from the chaos of nature out there. Whatever abuse is performed due to the provisions, loop-holes and relations established by this law, the law is never guilty. Guilt is the privilege of absolute power and total powerlessness.

The end of the story is the beginning, or ought to be, of a true exclusion. We are cast from the world of poiesis woven about us inn golden gossamer thread, courtesy of the narrator-maker. This is the case both in terms of the semantic but also the semiotic function of the last words of ‘William Wilson’ which dispel the sovereign rule of absolute narration and the dominion of the literary word. Taking Agamben at his word we must pay careful scrutiny to the auto-anaphoric here in the form of the deictic pronominal indicators, it is often the case that anaphora and deixis coincide or overlap: you, I, thou, me, this image, thyself. Due to the complexities of naming that I have outlined each instance of anaphoric deixis here is simultaneously an act of auto-anaphora, for as the phrase ‘this image’ suggests, along with numerous other clues in the narrative such as the shared birth date and the fur coat, Wilson may be simply a figment of the narrator’s overwrought imagination. The status of being-named in the story is especially consequential in that the word murder, in the realm of sovereignty and law, is particularly sharp. If the narrator kills Wilson then within the law it is murder. If my reading of the story is correct, however, as the narrator has become outside the law, his actions are not determined as murder as he is literally anomic. Thus if Wilson is acting sovereign, and indeed everything is a performance here, then he could kill the narrator without it being murder and so, by rights or by the law of anomie or the norms of abnormality, if given the chance the Homo Sacer could kill the sovereign with impunity because they already live in punition. If the narrator kills himself then how can this be murder and why is it not counted as suicide? It could just be a figure of speech or perhaps it is testimony to the radical desubjectivization that the narrator has experienced such that his self is not his any more. Thus the auto-anaphoric would carry with it a fracture, a rift in the imperious surface of the mirror of self-naming, which is the very moment of the being-named wherein being comes to itself by its impersonality as whatever being. William Wilson ceases to name all such men, or the concept of actual singular Wilson-being, but is reduced to the anaphoric-deictics he, thou, thyself, even this.

In this way the narrator has been fully Frenhoffered, so irrevocably split that if he were to take up arms against his own life, it would be as if murdering another human being. That Wilson is able to call this murder means, in a remarkable fashion, that in dying he has reconferred on Wilson full legal status; anomie becomes, at the last gasp, bonhomie for these old school friends. Thus sovereign and Homo Sacer finally do exist, here at least in one of the greatest works on sovereignty we have in the literature, in total nonrelationality. If the sovereign kills the Homo Sacer, it is not murder and is anomic. If, however, the Homo Sacer kills the sovereign then their status as the absolute excluded is negated, their bare life which was their denuded social being if you recall, is simply redressed in all the regalia of statehood. They do not, it would seem, take the place of the sovereign, they are instead pardoned and become simply a citizen again. Negri and Zizek are both correct in identifying Agamben as the last surviving revolutionary philosopher for precisely here at the end of the story, we discover a means by which anomic regicide is the perfect generator of social happiness.

Literature and Life in Agamben

2010-05-06T11:23:00.003+01:00

The prominence of the literary in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben is extensive, sustained and fundamental. His first book, The Man Without Content (1972?), is a dramatic critique of modern literature and the visual arts. Since then he has published a number of works solely or mainly about poetry and literature: Stanzas (1977), Infancy and History (1978), Idea of Prose (1985), The End of the Poem (1996), Profanations (2007) and Ninfe (2007). These works constitute a third of his total published output and by far the most sustained engagement with literature of any contemporary philosopher. More than this, away from these explicit statements on literature, the majority of Agamben’s other philosophical works depend on central readings of literary texts. These facts alone are reason enough to attempt a full-length study of the literary Agamben. They argue, by implication, that Agamben’s work can only be understood if this large body of material is read alongside the more widely disseminated texts. In addition, it raises the question within a discipline such as literary studies that is still so intimately involved with continental philosophy, why it has neglected to engage more actively with the philosopher most amenable to the great task of contemporary philology.

Poetry and Life
Literature, most particularly poetry, clearly matters to Agamben, but even he appears initially agape that it still matters so much to the world at large: ‘Why does poetry matter to us?’ he ponders, before rapidly responding, ‘The ways in which answers to this question are offered testify to its absolute importance’ (EP 93). In the modern age, he argues, there have been two dominant responses to this question. The first is the confusion of art with life exemplified by the Nietzschean will to power as art that Agamben argues typifies Romanticism and aestheticism. The second is the profound separation of art and life to be found in the disinterested regard of Kantian judgement, distinctive of what he calls Classicism and secularism. Neither position, according to Agamben, is the correct answer to the undoubted prolongation of the ancient regard our culture holds for the literary into the aesthetic nihilism of the modern age. The first position assumes too close a proximity between art and life such that they become indiscernible from one another at the expense of life. The second imposes a distance between art and life that, ultimately, robs art of its central role not merely in our lives but in human existence as such. The result is that in the modern era art and life are either conflated or cordoned off from one another, indistinct or too distinctive, in gestures we almost come to expect of Western metaphysical, political and, it would seem, aesthetic practices. Within metaphysics, according to the Agambenian critique of the tradition, it is typically the case that two foundational terms are artificially and with violence forced into a unity (artlife), or they are subjected to an endless division as the basis of the production of varied concepts of human existence (art vs life = the human). Modern art, therefore, is subject to the same aporias that Agamben more familiarly identifies in modern politics and modern philosophy.

Repeatedly, brilliantly and controversially, in book after book, from the very beginning of his career to his most recent publications, Agamben seeks for an alternative to this negative metaphysics of false unity and/or enforced separation. He believes that one figure who is party to such a third modality of thinking is the poet:

Opposed to these two positions is the experience of the poet, who affirms that if poetry and life remain infinitely divergent on the level of the biography and psychology of the individual, they nevertheless become absolutely indistinct at the point of their reciprocal desubjectivization. And—at that point—they are united not immediately but in a medium. This medium is language. The poet is he who, in the word, produces life. Life, which the poet produces in the poem, withdraws from both the lived experience of the psychosomatic individual and the biological unsayability of the species (EP 93).

I would imagine that for most students of literature this is a confounding perhaps even ludicrous statement: the poet produces life! Such an ejaculation does not sit easily with any of the dominant ideologies within contemporary literary studies, which almost exclusively consider the obverse to be true. Literary production is widely analysed in our academies in terms of how life produces and shapes poetry. Contemporary literary analysis has little or no interest in a counter argument that life as such is an act of poiesis. This being the case, the proposition that literature is not merely important to our lives but productive of life, while shocking in its bravura originality and its demand for a universal importance for poetry, means that Agamben’s ‘literary theory’ is almost nonsensical to those who actually study the literary. This divergence is made all the more disturbing by Agamben going on to state that in the moment of ‘reciprocal desubjectivization’ performed by art and life on each other, the unity attained therein between poetry and life due to their holding in common an essential co-existent experience of negation is not to be taken as somehow figurative or rhetorical:

On the contrary, poetry matters because the individual who experiences this unity in the medium of language undergoes an anthropological change that is, in the context of the individual’s natural history, every bit as decisive as was, for the primate, the liberation of the hand in the erect position or, for the reptile, the transformation of limbs that changed it into a bird (EP 94).

Poetry, it would seem, not only produces life it also dictates the vicissitudes of its evolution, in particular a transition of no little importance to the seven billion or so living human beings on the globe at this very moment, and indeed the innumerable animal beings that we have little or no compunction in eradicating through the predominance of technological productivity: the point where the animal becomes what we term the human. Poetry produces life by somehow continually re-enacting the emergence of the ‘human’ from the total indistinction of general and universal biological being, a being which must have no conception of such a term as human, or indeed any sense of differentiation. We have to tread very carefully in this primeval and pregnant swamp however, for Agamben commits the whole of his book The Open to a patient deconstruction of the terms human and animal. Therefore, for poetry to avoid being merely another cog in what he calls the ‘anthropological machine’ of the production of the human out of an imposed division from and articulation with the inhuman or animal, it must both help human being out of the swamp of animalistic indistinction and take the hand of human being while leaping with it back into those dissolute waters. Poetry, therefore, produces something called life by the double negation of biological life (indistinction) and human social life (division). This is a great deal for poetry to take on. More, I would wager, than anyone has ever asked of it before, even Mathew Arnold. Indeed, according to Agamben, in bringing together metaphysics and politics the poetic experience with language constitutes everything. Perhaps, then, the reason why literary studies has been so negligent of Agamben’s ideas of late is ascribable to perfectly understandable stage fright. We are not yet ready to take responsibility for everything. It is possible that we never will be. Yet, according to Agamben, we must, at some imminent future date, we must.

If this poetic claim to everything is to be taken seriously, as indeed it has to be as the totality of Agamben’s philosophy is part dependant on this avowal amongst a handful of others equally unsettling, poetry does not simply retain some arche-trace of the first emergence of the human which the philologist unearths. Although often accused of teleology, Agamben always strongly refutes such a clearly flawed foundational temporality. Rather poetry enacts anthropological change every time we experience it. Agamben is quite clear in stipulating how this endless change occurs. First is the presupposition of an asymmetrical duality within our mode of thinking, here see-sawing between poetry and life. Two positions are taken up, always the same two in fact. The first is the imposition of unity across two terms, the second the enforcement of their actual division into two terms. Perhaps it would be helpful to actually think these two strategies the other way around, first division then unity but, I would argue, Agamben avoids this to dissuade us from falling into teleological habits while thinking these two positions. It is not that division occurs and then unity, rather imagine that unity-division occurs as a single but bifurcated and nonrelational category which we can simply rename metaphysics.
Second is an experience for the poet of double desubjectivization. This double ontological negation as poetic experience is a central concept in Agamben’s work and we will return to it any number of times so here I will simply adumbrate a much more involved set of arguments to come. In terms of everyday historical life, Heideggerian Dasein if you will, poetry and life must be considered as separate either permanently or by being part of a narrative of unity that presupposes their previous separation. However, what brings poetry and life together is the sharing of a mutual experience of alienation from their sense of being that Agamben terms desubjectivization. More than that, it is not enough that they share alienation they also actively alienate each other, reciprocally returning the favour of ontic nihilation. Poetry, for example, gets in the way of life by bringing into the everyday that which cannot be easily assimilated into the everyday without radically altering its essence. Life simultaneously alienates poetry by disallowing the poetic the option to simply fall into hermetic, self-celebrating, melodious noise. The language of poetry undermines the predominance of meaning in the world, but the centrality of meaning insists that poetry exist in the world and not in some other, tuneful place of song.

At this juncture we must pay almost forensic attention to how these two presences come together without succumbing to the structures of metaphysical thought, so familiar to us now from the travails of Heidegger and, subsequently, Derrida. The combination of poetry and life is not immediate, Agamben stipulates, rather they co-exist or are co-suspended within a single medium. This medium, which he consistently calls language although it would be a mistake to think of this ‘language’ as similar to that which I am using now to communicate however inexpertly with yourself, is a zone of mutual, privative yet productive withdrawal. Within language the differential essence of human life and the permanent unity of the inhuman, phusis or nature, come into proximity within a single medium through the means by which this medium negates both difference and identity. For reasons which we will labour over, it is the poet and poetry alone that can undergo this experience, primarily because poetry retains the correct relationship with language as such, a medium that has been lost to human being, historically, due to philosophy and politics. Poetry is able to experience language as a non-mediating medium that denies immediacy without succumbing to its opposite. It is in this way that ‘poetry’ ‘produces’ ‘life’. The unity of poetry and life in the medium of language is the very basis for a continually emergent ‘human’ being allowing for what I would describe as Agamben’s ontology of in-difference.

Limbs
We are being over hasty. Before we make the leap to human being let us tarry a while longer in the animal kingdom. As we know, for monkeys, the thumb allowed for a manipulation of environment via the medium of tools unparalleled in the natural world. This would have counted as a great quantum leap or event for animal history if animals could experience the event within their inherent timelessness or if they possessed any sense of history which they patently do not. Naturally, to speak of this as an event is somewhat disingenuous for another reason. Although Kubrick’s argument in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey is compelling, performing the greatest caesura in the history of film editing as the bone-become-tool rises into the sky creating a world only to become a space-ship transforming world into globe and beyond, in reality the evolution of manipulation took millennia to occur. As did the previous change wherein reptiles ‘learnt’ to fly, or even earlier than that when fish developed an ability to walk and breathe in air. In each instance the development of a new limb resulting in a further stage in the development of the human came about excruciatingly slowly.

Yet, in some senses such development can not be said to have occurred temporally until the completion of the final evolutionary transformation, the development of human speech and with it self-consciousness and history. Development, evolution, change and so on are all historical consequences of the very first event, the self-reflective and temporal capability of recognising and naming such a thing as epoch-making event-hood as such. The new limb, therefore, following on from legs, wings and hands, is the very first limb, limb as limb, the remarkable anthropogenesis of an amputated human being. Legs, wings and hands; poetry has traditionally made metaphoric use of all three. Poetry’s rhythm walks on uncertain feet. Its melodies rise as if on wings to the heavens. These two name, perhaps non-coincidentally, the two realms between which Heidegger places the poet as demi-god whose is precinct opens up within the span between earth and the transcendent realm of the sky. The third limb here, the hand, is not quite a limb at all but the very precondition of Dasein’s being-in-the-world of objects to hand. Handiness or equipmentality is, of course, the very basis of being-in-the-world, so that if feet belong to the earth, Heidegger’s term for the materiality of nature as such, and wings belong to the sky, the realm of the transcendental or that which stands behind existence (Being), then the hand creates the very world from which the thrown-ness of being comes about as the precondition of being’s projection from fallen being into the disclosure of Being as such. The hand is, to put it succinctly, the essence of the so-called ontico-ontological difference, or the division imposed between beings in the world and Being as such. These three limbs, therefore, mark the retrospective historiality or deep-history (geshichte) of human existence: earth—sky—world. As such they are profoundly foundational and seemingly constitute a unity of everything. What other limb, therefore, could the unity of poetry and life conjure and what new environment will this limb open up for man the animal? The name of this new limb is speech—Heidegger in particular is illuminating on the etymo-anatomical origin of our European vocabularies for language in common words for the tongue, itself not an actual limb but a muscle —and the wonderful world it debouches onto we have come to call human language.

Much here remains obscure. We must progress, therefore, with an anatomist’s circumspection, limbing the body of the text, moving carefully in from the particularity of each limb to the gestalt-effect of the torso. Having gone out on a limb with Agambenian rhetoric and Heideggerian ontology, we must retract then feel our way as if lost in darkness or the cordite fog of battle, using the limber as a guide back to the stability of the main carriage. Three terms are under debate here, each in the process of a radical dissection that Heidegger called Destruktion and Derrida deconstruction. These terms are not, therefore, in the midst of redefinition, rather they are squirming beneath the surgical violence of a post-metaphysical lancet of thinking. Three terms, life, language and thinking/Being, that explain the relevancy of Agamben’s work on literature, more than that its urgency, after which and only then, can we approach Agamben and his life-long obsession with poetry.

Lives
At the risk of striking an overly portentous tone too early on in proceedings we can go no further until we ask: what is life? This is the question behind a good deal of the Homo Sacer project and is the basis for one of Agamben’s most ambitious works: The Open: Man and Animal. This text constitutes the second part of, along with Language and Death, nothing less than perhaps the most credible attempt to go beyond Heideggerian thought through the philological capture of Dasein, and eventually Being, within the history of Western ‘anthropogenesis’, or the very creation of human being by the anthropological machine. We can only emerge onto the edges of the full clearing of thought that is The Open by observing that early on Agamben makes clear the almost insurmountable problem within our culture of defining the meaning of life:

For anyone undertaking a genealogical study of the concept of ‘life’ in our culture, one of the first and most instructive observations to be made is that the concept never gets defined as such. And yet, this thing that remains indeterminate gets articulated and divided time and again through a series of caesurae and oppositions…everything happens as if, in our culture, life were what cannot be defined, yet, precisely for this reason, must be ceaselessly articulated and divided.

The rest of the book traces the history of this process right up to the work of Heideggerian ontology, a breathtaking tour of ontico-philology that does not concern us here. Rather, we should pay attention to the structural necessity of defining life for, as we are forewarned here, we will never arrive at a definition of life as such. Life is not some thing but is rather the indefinably indeterminate fuel that drives the anthropological machine of defining the human as not the animal or the inhuman, through an endless activity of the simultaneous division and articulation of the term life. We are already familiar with this economy of thinking for, as Agamben helpfully appraised us, within the modern period life is simultaneously articulated with and divided from the term art. I might go so far as to say that not only does life place us within the contradictory logic of the caesura, that which both divides and joins, but, as Agamben also asserts, life is to be found in the caesura as such, an observation of no little relevancy to the study of poetics.

The Open is primarily concerned with the means by which man appropriates the animal in order to produce or create a conception of humanism as different from and yet intrinsic to the animal. This is one part of a double assault by Agamben on our category of life. The other is to be found scattered throughout the many pages of the Homo Sacer project and its foregrounding of the term ‘bare life’. As the first pages to Means without Ends remind us, summarising the early pages of Homo Sacer: ‘The ancient Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by the word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all beings (animals, humans, or gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group’. Any familiarity at all with Agamben means the reader is probably more than comfortable with this definition, Agamben’s assertion that the differentiation was lost over time, and how the division has come to the fore again during the period of modernism which, borrowing and modifying the term from Foucault, Agamben defines as biopolitical. Biopolitics is little more than the revelation of this ancient caesura through an act of articulation wherein the state, the realm of the polis, nomos (law) and bios, takes an interest in, legislates on and finally takes a sovereign power of removal of, the simple biological fact of our being alive. Biopolitics takes over our life, and in so doing first resurrects this ancient division zoe/bios and then eradicates it: zoe-bios. We can see here that the same dynamic dividing-articulating paradox of the caesura operates in the political entity of biopolitics in exactly the same manner as the metaphysical realm of being.

If, in The Open, life is an energia or a mechane for producing the human as life at the expense of the animal in us all, effectively a foregrounding of bios through the appropriation of zoe, in Homo Sacer we re-encounter this life as ‘bare life’. Bare life is, essentially, the base fact of being ‘alive’. It is living as such, denuded of anything other than first the fact that it is, and second that this life does not belong to the human being as such but the sovereign power of the state. It is tempting but erroneous to define ‘bare life’ is as simply animal life, in any case itself merely the result of the operations of biopolitics within the sphere of ontology, or some return to a Hobbesian state of nature. As Wall explains: ‘Bare life is simply set outside the properly human sphere without being brought under divine law and without re-entering nature. Bare life is otherwise than public life…’.

Bare life is bare, in this case, in the sense of being denuded. Bare life is life that has been laid bare as ‘life’. It is not in a state of grace with its bare-ness. It finds no comfort in its return to an Edenic disrobing, but stands before the polis unveiled, humiliated and embarrassing like some terrible recurrent nightmare or guilty Heideggerian dream. Bare life is not life as a foundational, pre-historical or arche-trace of life before division and articulation, rather it is the result of zoe travelling through bios and then being rejected by bios as improper. At this juncture, bare life is excluded from the polis and not subject to its laws and norms, whose archetypes in Agamben are the infamous figures of the Homo Sacer and Muselmann, yet it does not revert back to animal or natural life. The reason for this being primarily because it did not originate in phusis but was always a product of the bio-political (bios + polis) and its millennia-long project to eradicate phusis from the polis through the power of exception enshrined in the sovereign and supported by the nomos.

Form of Life
Beyond life as a paradoxical dynamic of indefinition, an etymological residue from Greek times, a mechanism for defining the human against the animal, and a means of totalitarian control, there is one final possibility for life in Agamben’s work which I will simply touch upon here as he himself merely raises it as a tantalising possibility in Means without Ends. This final life is what he calls the form-of-life. Form-of-life returns Agamben’s thought full-square to the centre of Heideggerian ontology, which is apt for however devastating his attack on Heideggerian being is in the final pages of The Open, Heidegger remains the central forebear for all of Agamben’s work on poetry. A form of life is almost the opposite to the melodramatic ‘bare life’. Where bare life is indistinct and without qualities, even the quality of lacking quality which as Musil shows can be the most interesting subjectivity of our age, our form of life is the day to day detail of the kind of life we have been destined to lead. This is, of course, Heideggerian ‘thrown-ness’ into stimmung (mood or a predisposition to living in a particular manner) also presented in Being and Time as the predestination of being within the Daseinal predeterminations as to how a particular being will come to live out its days. As is now well documented, while Dasein is thrown-being it is also projective being, meaning that if it is encased in actuality, you are a carpenter so carve wood for little reward, it is also marked by possibility, you could carve wood with passion and inventiveness coming to a sense of authentic being based on wood-carving.

This authentic living out one’s life as a self-consciousness of what one is rather than what one is told or assumed to be, is in part what Agamben means by a form of life, without the dashes, which leads to a more complex formulation of form-of-life. Of form of life he says: ‘A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life—human life—in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life…’ (MWE 4). He defines such a form of life as power, potenza in Italian which also means potential. This he contrasts with (bio)political power: ‘Political power as we know it…always founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of a sphere of naked life from the contexts of the forms of life’ (MWE 4). For bare life, for example, the only possibility that exists is survival (MWE 8). This is profoundly dis-empowering in that there is no power as potential or possibility here, simply continuation. In contrast to this a form of life that a being lives as a possibility rather than a necessity or a contingency, is a life imbued with the power of appropriation and authenticity or really living. For Agamben, the archetypal activity of authentic, form-of-life being is not, thankfully, some Heideggerian artisanal volk-kraft, (one gets the feeling Agamben is less than familiar with the traditional skills of the campagna) but the more grown-up activity of thought. Thought is not just another form of life, the Dasein of the philosopher, but form-of-life as such:

Only if I am not always already and solely enacted, but rather delivered to a possibility and a power, only if living and intending and apprehending are at stake each time in what I live and intend and apprehend—only if, in other words, there is thought—only then can a form of life become, in its own factness and thingness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like naked life (MWE 9).

Form-of-life is, in other words, living as thinking in such a way that one is not reducible to a particular identity because one is actively engaged in the praxis of questioning the foundations of your identity as existence-projection-understanding (life-intention-apprehension). It is potential living or what Agamben would call whatever life. That said, whatever life refrains from being appropriated by the state into ‘bare life’, which shares with form-of-life a profound indistinction, because it is actively engaged in resisting the state through praxis-agency-critique (another way of reading life-intention-apprehension). Such a form-of-life is critically engaged with its everyday being through the activity of the disclosure of being, which is the definition here of thinking, and as such cannot fall foul of any of the metaphysical aporias of the various forms of life I have described.

Poetry as Living as Thinking
My intention here is not a treatise on life in Agamben and we will rarely return to the debates of the Homo Sacer project pertaining to life in the pages to come. Yet, if poetry produces life and our intention is to consider Agamben on literature then we must understand what this could mean. As we have seen, there are several ways in which we can take this term life according to Agamben. There are the two predominant, privative and ultimately catastrophic definitions of life within the west. The first is the metaphysical definition of life as human life. The second is the political appropriation of this human life as bare life. We must avoid making the mistake of saying poetry produces either of these false senses of life. We also saw how both these problematic definitions emanate from a resurrection of a false division of life into zoe and bios by the Greeks. Having said this, this falsity is not necessarily the imposition of a division that is improper on the part of Greek thinking, for indeed it is we moderns who really came to define both zoe and bios as life by the metaphysical-political production of the ultimately genocidal term ‘life’ as a compound of two values initially intended, as Agamben makes clear, as entirely separate from each other. All the same poetry must not fall into the trap of this caesuric logic: the division-articulation of the term life from out of the historical base of all western categories in Greek thought. Poetry must not become co-extensive with bios in its being a form of human culture, nor collapse into some pre-social idyll of pure zoological noise.

These three dangerous definitions of life lead us to a fourth definition of life as a process of division-articulation which is, in essence, western philosophical thought. Thus it was not the Greeks who had two terms for life, but our amnesiac mnemosynical recollection of the two terms as two facets of the one modern term life that established here the paradoxical logic of an onto-political caesura: life as that which divides and joins with violence. Having said that, certainly Platonic thought is culpable in imposing this divisive articulation on all models of thought to follow and Agamben himself moves swiftly after his definition of life as caesura to show how Aristotle enshrines this within his philosophical method. Poetry is not this either but, like all forms of thinking, it is party to it and its participation in the caesuric dynamic of metaphysical thought will be mapped out against the tensions internal to poetry between meaning and form, caesura and enjambment.

If poetry produces life, is does not produce any of the four ways that the term life has come to be defined in our culture. This leaves us with the final meaning of life in Agamben, therefore, the form of life which is, notably, not life as an object for subjective knowledge, truth-agreement and instrumentality, but a form of authentic, self-aware and critical living. In this final formulation the trick is to get beyond the caesuric logic unity-division, a task almost impossible to conceive of in that it is ancient, ubiquitous and ruthless. The power of a form-of-life is that it is a specific life which both lives out ontic determination, I was destined to live this specific life, and perpetually questions the preconditions of this life to be always open to the possibilities of living otherwise. As Agamben says of thinking, the form-of-life par excellence: ‘To think does not mean merely to be affected by this or that thing, by this or that content of enacted thought, but rather at once to be affected by one’s receptiveness and experience in each and every thing that is thought’s pure power of thinking’ (MWE 9). A form-of-life exists precisely in the midst of the famous Heideggerian ontico-ontological difference in that it is neither entirely existing (Dasein) or thinking (Being) but something akin to existing-as-thinking/thinking-as-existing in perfect balance, to such a harmonious degree that one could say the division of terms here is almost cancelled out, without, however, being subjected to a transcendental, unifying Aufhebung. This stilling of the dialectic into thought if in-difference, neither difference nor its resolution but a peaceful copresence of terms, is what I am here calling logopoiesis.

If there is such a thing as life for us today, simply being alive itself being still a scientific mystery, then it must be a narrative compound of all Agamben has to say on the subject. It is the historical result of contemporary thought within a post-Greek mode of thinking the division-articulation of being through the maiming of the anthropological machine and the humiliating denigration of bare life. Such a life cannot be simply a return to life, idealised animal living, for both animal and living are metaphysical constructs that come into their own in terrible fashion during modernity. One cannot, it would seem, go back to life, returning to a state of ferality, instead one must go forward from life into living. In Means without Ends Agamben makes it clear that to do this means to engage in thinking. Yet, as we have seen elsewhere, he has also stated with some lucidity that it is poetry that produces life, so what conclusion are we to draw from this, that poetry is first a form of thinking and second the form of contemporary thinking? Most emphatically yes, on both counts. Poetry produces life as a form of contemporary and future thinking for which Agamben struggles to find a name: Idea of Prose, criticism, potentiality, form-of-life. I propose to call this way of thinking through poetry, logopoiesis.

Zoon Logon Echon
In ‘The Dictation of Poetry’, considering the troubled history of the relation between poetry and life, the philosopher asks: ‘What does it mean for a living being to speak?... Do life and speech constitute an articulated unity, or is there a disjunction between the two that neither individual existence nor the historical development of humanity can overcome?’ (EP 76). It would seem that these two apostrophic interrogations, ‘Why does poetry matter to us?’ And ‘What does it mean for a living being to speak?’ interrogate and perhaps answer each other through the centrality of speech for human life and being. The answer as to why poetry is still important to us is to be found in the question what it means for a being to speak which must also mean how to produce life. The production of life follows a complicated, in some senses a-teleological, timeline incorporating the transformation of the human animal into the only human animal. That this production became destructive due to the Greek bifurcation of life into zoe and bios and our appropriation of this gesture should not dissuade us from realising that the production of life is in some senses the production of human, that is non-animal, life, although not in the manner outlined in the ‘anthropological machine’ of modernity. Before we can answer to how something like poetry can be responsible for the production of life, therefore, we must trace the history of the rise of life in the evolution of the limb of speech into language.

Those well-versed in Greek categories will be more than aware that while that remarkable culture had no single word for life, they did have a single definition of what marked man out from other animals, and that was the phrase zoon logon echon or the living being that has language, made famous by Aristotle. Reflecting on this syntagm Agamben goes on to note: ‘The metaphysical tradition has interrogated this definition with regard to both the living being and to logos. And yet what has remained unthought in it is the echon, the mode of this having. How can a living being have language?’. In Homo Sacer the definition of man is reconfigured around Aristotle’s dictum that man is a living animal with an ‘additional capacity for political existence’, but as the analysis progresses it becomes apparent that the opposition in play in political being is identical to zoon logon echon. As Agamben says,

the link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of man as ‘the living being who has language’ seeks in the relation between phone and logos…The question ‘In what way does the living being have language?’ corresponds exactly to the question ‘In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?’ The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized (HS 7-8).

There are way-stations to linger at here before we move on once and for all from the political Agamben. The first is that clearly the phenomenal fact of having language, which historically has defined the human animal as human is, according to Agamben, the base fact of metaphysics. As such it answers three fundamental questions: what does it mean to live, what does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to exist as a being? That it has been assumed that this definition of human being is dependant on the inter-relation and irrevocable difference between speech and language, phone and logos, has clouded our judgement so that we have been incapable of understanding the very fact that we have been able to transform the tongue from being a muscle to being an additional life-making limb. In Agamben, as soon as the phone/logos opposition is posed, (and certainly there is a clear critique of Derrida here) one must move to the point immediately preceding this opposition, the very fact of having language at all, and immediately after, the political-liberationist implications of a possible recuperation of this remarkable possession. In so doing, Agamben is always trying to establish critical distance from Derrida of course, and perhaps now is the time to reflect on the genius of both these thinkers whose ideas are simultaneously so complex and so simple.

Just as Derrida effectively took the oppositional and hierarchical structures of Western metaphysics and moved them from a vertical and fixed position phone-logos/grammata to an oscillating horizontalisation, so Agamben also performs a similar philosophical/topographical sleight of hand. Finding the territory of post-metaphysics overcrowded by the inspired prolixity and promiscuity of Derrida, he instead begins his analysis one moment before the opposition and the instant after. Thus the living being dwells in the polis by virtue of retaining within bios a space for zoe, just as in the logos a space for the phone or the zoon is retained. It is worthwhile, at this stage, loitering in this confounding topography of excluded inclusion or appropriated expropriation as Agamben calls it elsewhere. The polis allows the zoon into its walls converting the zoon into a human, while allowing the zoon to retain its bare life as a private matter. At least in the first instance. Bare life and speech is included in the human structure of the polis and logos, as that which is held internally as excluded. This is the only difference between man and animals, this structure of an included potential exclusion. Animals too possess a kind of speech and some form of life but what differentiates animals from humans is that they know no differentiation between the internal and external, and thus they are unable to enter into a state of being subject, simply because they never experience the desubjectivization of this most fundamental differentiation: inclusion/exclusion. Animals, therefore, can be said not to have life at all, and certainly we habitually treat them that way, nor do they have what we call speech.
In the same manner, post-emergent humans also must lack life yet not die. It would not be enough, therefore, to attain life either through a return to zoe or a renovation of bios. Life does not reside in either position. Instead life is lost through their historical distinction. One cannot go back to a time before life was lost, for life must be lost to exist. Nor can one go forward and fix life within humanism, the biopolitical sphere cannot allow for that. How can we live again? If poetry produces life, how can we access poetry? To do this we should listen to our poets and become as children once more.

[apologies for this rather enigmatic formulation, the final reference here it to Agamben's theory of infancy which made it into the book while this section on life did not. I am now returning to this material for my next book also on Agamben and so will update this conclusion in due course to make the piece end more satisfactorily]

Poetic Dictation

2010-05-06T11:20:00.002+01:00

Within the discipline of Romantic studies, Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ holds an exemplary place. The story recounted by the poem is an archetypal narrative of what has been called the Romantic Ideology. As is typical of ideology, its nefarious influence is assumed to propagate throughout the whole of English language poetry, giving rise in contemporary poetics to mainstream, free-verse late-Romantic poetry such as we find in Seamus Heaney, and the rejection of this model to be found in the poetics of Charles Bernstein. The poem begins with the event of an encounter, ‘Behold her, single in the field / Yon solitary highland lass! / Reaping and singing by herself / Stop here, or gently pass!’ Opting for the first of the two injunctions, the journeying poet listens to her as she sings ‘a melancholy strain’. The reaper sings in a language that Wordsworth does not know which leads him to speculate as to what she may be singing across the middle two of the poem’s four stanzas. Finally, unable to solve the mystery of her voice, he is moved and moves on, but the true shift in his emotions comes, as ever, at a later date in retrospection: ‘And, as I mounted up the hill / The music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more’. However mysterious the voice of the reaper and the theme of her chant, the rhetoric of this poem remains remarkably familiar. The reaper is no more a reaper than the daffodil a daffodil or the French revolution an actual historical event in Wordsworth’s other works. All three are fables of solitary wandering, sudden encounters with a singular event, immediate emotion, opening up access to recollection at a later date and a mediated emotion through the power of imagination manifested in verse. This is what makes Worsdworth’s poetry so great and also so vulnerable to attack.
Wordsworth, like all great poets, is a liar. As ever Plato was right. We now know by virtue of the labours of philology that he never encountered the solitary reaper in question, shall we say in actuality, but appropriated the event from Gilpin’s XXXX.. From this lesser known text we are able to evince facts germane to the work of the poet, for example that the reaper Gilpin encountered was singing in erse, that he was not alone but travelling with companions, but that none of his companions were Wordsworth. Due to this source text and the arduous work of Wordsworth scholars this poem as been given as an example of the problems of appropriation and authenticity now seen as detrimental to the ideas of Romanticism resulting in their being termed ideologies. Wordsworth invents fake encounters to support his masculine ideology of the male poet, alienated from society, and able to take up a god-like position in relation to the objects of his regard. Here this object is literally a woman, whose alterity, her song in erse, is encapsulated in a voice which, like that of his sister Dorothy, is a potential threat to the male poet’s dominance. Thus he chooses several techniques to protect his aesthetic sovereignty. He sits above and beyond her on his horse, for example, and while his curiosity as to the content of her singing leads him to exclaim ‘Will no one tell me what she sings? —’, the heavily marked caesura here the only graphical indication of mendacity in the text leaving space for the consideration of the possibility of companions and the original poet Gilpin all of whom have been excised from the final poem, he opts not to risk dismounting and approaching her to ask. The danger, we might surmise, of dismounting is that while the colonial occupier does not speak erse, his subject may indeed speak English. This possibility perhaps unconsciously resonating, the poet stays mounted in splendid elevation and opts instead to appropriate the woman’s narrative, bringing to it an Orientalist flavour: ‘Of travellers in some shady haunt, / Among Arabian sands:’ (There is a hint here to the still exotic status of the Hebrides to late 18th century English folk). Subsequently our vaunting poet speculates that the song’s topos may be of ancient battles, recalling the troubled colonial history of these isles, before settling on perhaps an inevitable masculinist comment on female poetics: ‘Or is it some more humble lay / Familiar matter of today?’
Contemporary readings of this poem are all excellent in identifying how inauthentic the Romantic Ideology is in its fake encounters, masculinist postures, colonialist arrogance and pretence of authentic relationship to the world of natural order. At the very end of the work the poet is able to leave the woman toiling in the field, a comment on their differing sexual, cultural and national status. He could dismount and join her in her work, learn her language, get to know her culture and songs, but apart from Wordsworth being too early for modern anthropology, the scholarship suggests there is too much at risk for Romanticism to behave in such a manner. It is too risky to leave the lakes for wilder lands to the north. Better to get someone else to make the actual journey for you, so that you can plagiarise the event of the solitary reaper from the safety of your study.
‘The Solitary Reaper’ therefore is a classic in the lethargically expanding canon of what I am calling apotropaic verse: poetry which protects by pushing things away. The brilliance of the readings of the poem are all based of course on the fact that the poet has altered the facts of real experience to fit the poem. Brilliant though they are they are all disastrously flawed, for while Wordsworth may be a liar, he is lying on behalf of the truth of poetry and its relation to its dictation.
The theme of poetic dictation is sustained across Agamben’s work commencing in his 1977 study of pneumatology in Stanzas. Over several astonishing chapters Agamben attempts to unearth what he calls ‘perhaps the most imposing intellectual cathedral constructed by late medieval thought’ (St 90), namely the conception of the pneuma as breath and spirit and vital substance moving through the circulatory channels of the body. The pneuma as a concept is already familiar in Aristotle but during the medieval period it becomes finessed to represent an intermediate state between ‘corporeal and incorporeal, rational and irrational, human and divine’ (St 93). By the time we get to Dante and what Agamben sees as the Stilnovist origins of all European poetics, the idea of the pneuma as spirit which however has enough substance to circulate in the body and which palpates from the heart as both seat of the emotions and engine for the body’s circulation, is well established within the body of European culture.
This divagation through the quasi-corporeal circulations of the body is necessary to explain the conception of poetry as dictation found in a tercet from Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and in the manner that he dictates within I go signifying’ (cited in St 124). Agamben notes that while on the surface this tercert conforms to the scholastic definition of language as ‘notation and sign of a passion of the soul’ (st 127), in fact it radically calls into question the idea of language as a notation of intellection. ‘Dante instead characterized poetic expression precisely as the dictation of an inspiring love’ (St 127). The legacy of this pneumatic theory of poetry is that poetry was situated ‘at the extreme limit of the corporeal and the incorporeal, sensible signifier and rational signification’ (St 128), allowing it to transcend the tradition of assuming the signifier and signified are first separated by an uncrossable barrier, and second, therefore, that language is dominated by the pursuit of an object of desire it can never attain.
Five years later and instead of considering word and phantasm Agamben finds himself in a complex reading of Heidegger’s famous definition of the human animal as having an experience of death of which it can speak differentiation if from the animal. Itself a seminar on Heidegger, ostensibly, with Hegel playing an imposing supporting act, on the transcription of the seventh day Agamben begins with a consideration of the negative grasping of the very taking place of language through the unspeakable experience of the voice as such, which leads him to speak of the ‘’confrontation’ with and divergence from poetry’ on which first philosophy is founded by Plato in the exclusion of the poets from the republic. This leads him to raise the dual interrogations: ‘Do we find in the poetic tradition, unlike the philosophical tradition, a language that does not rest on the negative foundation of its own place? And where do we encounter something like a reflection on the taking place of language in the Western poetic tradition?’ (LD 66). Naturally the implied answer to the first question through this book and Agamben’s work is yes. And while Badiou would reply ‘The Age of the Poets’ to the second question, Agamben instead turns to the troubadour tradition and the development of the razo de trobar to supersede the ratio (ars) inveniendi.
Approaching a theme he will return to again in The End of the Poem, Agamben considers the term topics in ancient rhetoric as ‘a technique of the originary advents of language; that is, a technique of the “places” (topoi) from which human discourse arises and begins’ (LD 66-7). The conception of topoi allowed the ancient tradition of thought to conceive of ratio (ars) iudicandi or scientific logic, as ‘less originary than that of the ratio (or ars) invendiendi, which sets off the very advent of the discourse and assures the possibility of ‘finding’ language, of reaching its place’. (LD 67). Agamben goes to on to explain that while judgement was based on the already-having-been-given of language, topics took as its duty the building of a place for language termed argument after the Latin root for the word in argu or splendour ?? and clarity. ‘To argue signified originally, “to make shine, to clarify, to open a passage for light”. In this sense, the argument is the illuminating event of language, its taking place’ (LD 67).
Over time this radical view, certainly for we moderns, that invention precedes judgement and does so by making a luminous, translucent or merely transparent space for language to simply shine through in the form of an inventive argument, is smudged then obscured. By the time of the 12th century and the troubadour and Stilnovist traditions, ratio inveniendi had therefore ceased to be a form of invention, and became a set of memory places or mnemonic devices for the orator. The art of invention had been reduced to a tenebrous memorial to the original, shining inventive act of language presenting itself as such. It is at this stage of aesthetic decadent automatism that the transformation of ratio inveniendi into razo di trobar, from which the troubadors took their name, occurred. The term trobar means to find, but it may also stem from tropus meaning rhetorical figure, either way: ‘What they experience as trobar goes definitely beyond invention. The troubadours do not wish to recall arguments already in use by a topos, but rather they wish to experience the topos of all topoi, that is, the very taking place of language as originary argument… Amors is the name the troubadours gave to the experience of the advent of the poetic word and thus, for them, love is the razo de trobar par excellence’ (LD 68).
Now we are aware through our earlier encounter with love in Dante that first, another name for the place of the trobar is the stanza, and second, that love here refers to nothing other than the very place of language as such. And so it is finally to Dante and dictation that we now turn after yet another, and in this context final, digression. Through a reading of the poem L’infinito by Italian poet Leopardi, Agamben then turns his gaze to Dante through the statement of the profoundly Heideggerian basis of all his early theories of poetry:

L’infinito expresses the same experience which we saw as constitutive for philosophy itself; namely, that the taking place of language is unspeakable and ungraspable…The poetic experience of dictation seems, thus, to coincide perfectly with the philosophical experience of language. Poetry contains in fact an element that always already warns whoever listens or repeats a poem that the event of language at stake has already existed and will return an infinite number of times. This element…is the metrical-musical element. (LD 77)
For old time’s sake let’s go back again to Scotland. It should be apparent now that the metrical-musical element is simply another means of discussing the semiotic, as indeed Agamben goes on to do, and it is the music of poetry that ‘The Solitary Reaper’ also celebrates. While the topos of the reaper’s song, for what else is one to term the tried and tested structure of the Romantic lyric, may be the cause for the extension of the encounter of poetry into an actual poem, it is the nature of the poetry as such which actually concerns Wordsworth, as exhibited by that most English of poetic techniques, synonymisation. The reaper’s song is described variously as ‘melancholy strain’, ‘overflowing sound’, ‘chaunt’, ‘voice so thrilling’, ‘plaintive numbers’, ‘humble lay’, ‘song…singing’ and finally, perhaps most telling, ‘music’. One effect of this synonymisation is to sustain the metrical-musical element of her poetry not merely through the balladic prosody of the poem, but also as a continuous background of noise sustained through that another most poetic usage, this time of diction, anaphora. Yet it is the final couplet that brings the poem so very close to an Agambenian reading: ‘The music in my heart I bore / Long after it was heard no more’.
This seemingly simple conclusion is deceptive and, I hope, more clearly understood as a result of my arguments pertaining to argument as such. First, of course, Wordsworth closes what Agamben calls the hermeneutic circle of pneumatic verse. If, as Dante argues, poetry is first and foremost a dictation of breath/spirit from the emotional pumping station of the heart, its circulation can extend beyond that of the poet’s body. Here the poem dictated to Wordsworth is pronounced from the heart of another poet, the reaper, who must also be subject to the dictation of the place of language as such in the form of love. It is notable here that the myth of Syrinx and the origins of poetry in the unrequited lust of the gods is emulated in the reaper’s own melancholic, weary, plaintive and sorrowful song. The poem circulates literally heart to heart, but what allows it to be carried in the heart of Wordsworth if his understanding of the voice remains absented? Precisely this: that the unknowable and unspeakable nature of the voice as such as originary place of the experience of language is to be found within the qualities of the pneuamticisim of her voice. Wordsworth does not understand the theme of what she sings, but he instantly and consistently comprehends its topos.
As the reaper sings, what she sings, language as such, is already in existence. She sings from the heart of its ever-present circulation as it is dictated to her by the pneuma of breath/spirit. Of what she sings remains forever unrecuperable, even if we knew erse, but what she sings, the metrical-musical matter of song as such, will continuously and constantly be re-encountered. Indeed this poetry, the poetry external to versification, a poetry of voice beyond the grammata of the line, will never cease, both because it will live forever in a pneumatic transcirculatory motion between the reaper and Wordsworth, reproduced within the apotropaicism of language as prophylactic to the cessation of the semiotic, and because as Wordsworth says, ‘the Maiden sang / As if her song could have no ending’. Returning to 12th century Italy now from the Cimmerian future, we can propose in English fashion a synonym for the reaper: she is to be called the muse.
Speaking of the metrical-musical element or the semiotic, Agamben says that it ‘demonstrates first of all the verse as a place of memory and repetition. The verse (versus, from verso, the act of turning, to return, as opposed to prorsus, to proceed directly, as in prose) signals for a reader that these words have always already come to be, that they will return again, and that the instance of the word that takes place in a poem is, for this reason, ungraspable’. (??) This phrasing alone not merely opens up ‘The Solitary Reaper’ as exemplary of a poetic thinking, but also reveals that the Romantic Ideology, so-called, is not a localised event but issues from the totality of the western ideology of verse: ‘For oft when on my couch I lie’ [etc]. The now almost infamous phrasing ‘Recollection in tranquillity’ testifies not so much to the Great Universal Teacher or even the spirit that moves through all things, as to the inevitable originary presence and return of the verse. What the archetypal Wordsworthian encounter dramatises is not, I am contending, poetic events, but the means by which the event is unable to disrupt the versus, just as prose can never entirely overwhelm poetry or, for that matter, poetry exist without the return of thought in the caesura. As Agamben has it: ‘Through the musical element, poetic language commemorates its own inaccessible originary place and it says the unspeakability of the event if language (it attains, that is, the unattainable). Muse is the name the Greeks gave to this experience of the ungraspability of the originary place of the poetic word…To utter the poetic word’, according to the Greek tradition supported by Plato, ‘signifies ‘to be possessed by the muse…that is to say, without the mythical image, to experience the alienation of the originary place of the word that is implicit in all human speech’. (LD 78).
All of which prepares for the final two statements on poetic dictation in Agamben’s work thus far. Idea of Prose is subdivided into 33 short, what to call them, chapters, better prose stanzas, each of which is entitled with the syntactic commencement ‘The idea of…’ Of these 33 the first 5 form a remarkable discourse on poetry directly in relation to themes of dictation, memory and the muse. The first essay ‘The idea of Matter’, considers enigmatically the decisive experience, what one might term the subjective event, for which subjects habitually lack words. Agamben says of this experience that is not even an experience but ‘nothing more than the point at which we touch the limits of language’. (IP 37). Such an event is not, he confidently assures us, an event at all ‘not a thing so new and awesome that we lack the words to describe it’ (IP 37). Instead of event he calls this matter: ‘Where language stops is not where the unsayable occurs, but rather where the matter of words begins. Those who have not reached, as in a dream, this woody substance of language, which the ancients called silva (wildwood), are prisoners of representation, even when they keep silent’ (IP 37).
As we have moved through the wonders of Agamben’s prose we have often found ourselves literally cutting through the wood of matter, first through our channelling of the myth of Syrinx and how after her transformation into a reed bed her reeds were then cut from the ground and made into pipes for music and poetry. Then, in the wilds at the edge of my own Cimmerian world, we found this myth reversed as the feminine principle of the Syrinx is reversed as an ineffable, and yes misogynistically conceived, woman, sings as she reaps rather than having to be reaped so as to be allowed to sing. It is significant, I feel, Agamben sees fit to begin amidst the arboreality of woodland before the book commences to the sections which have concerned us thus far, the ideas of prose and the caesura respectively. It is mere coincidence and yet not without some meaning that ‘The Idea of Caesura’ ends with a poet on a horse who ‘awakens and contemplates for an instant the inspiration that carries him—he thinks nothing else but his voice’. As we have already seen, this moment of thought arriving through the pure place of the voice is central to an understanding of Wordsworth’s verse, sorry Penna’s verse.
Why then at this stage does the next stanza consider ‘The Idea of Vocation’, by raising a question odd, I think, to a contemporary audience: ‘To what is the poet faithful?’ He admits that such fidelity could not ‘be fixed in a proposition’ (IP 45) as indeed propositional thinking is what a philosopher is faithful to. Yet, he realises, ‘how can a vow be kept if it is never formulated…? It would have to quit the mind in the very moment it affirms its presence there’ (IP 45). The philosopher then speaks of forgetting in relation to the origins of the Italian word for forgetting—the rather disturbing dimenticare leading to the formation dimenticato, I forgot or made myself de-mented, (in Italian, expelled from the mind)—in the word oblivion with an aphorism culled from a gnomic moment in Hölderlin: ‘The forgotten is not simply cancelled or left aside: it is handed over to oblivion’ (45). As Hölderlin goes on to express, the vocation of the poet is precisely to the oblivion at the very limit of all memory leading to a special form of immemorial infidelity which is, for him, the vocation of the poet: ‘Fidelity to that which cannot be thematized, nor simply passed over in silence, is a betrayal of a sacred kind, in which memory, spinning suddenly like a whirlwind, uncovers the hoary forehead of oblivion’ (IP 45). The vocation of the poet, therefore, is neither to what can be remembered or that which must be lost forever but the ‘reverse embrace of memory and forgetting which holds intact the identity of the unrecalled and the inforgettable’ (IP 45). In moments, in seconds, and for all time, we will come to understand exactly how this vocation of the poet accords with that of the philosopher, but before that it is worth reminding ourselves that we are still woodbound, for the forehead of oblivion is hoary for arboretical reasons. [It is not mere accident that hoary means grey simultaneously from age and frost and must, from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon hoar. Indubitably hoariness is again a Cimmerian quality pertaining to damp nestled in the hollows of gentle rolling hills for many mild wet months, once bore the now abandoned usage ‘of tree or wood: grey from absence of foliage or because covered in lichen’. The limbs and stems of trees, saplings, perhaps beds of reeds some neglectful god or reaper failed to gather in and which have been dead for generations, become hoary from misuse.]
‘The idea of Dictation’ is nestled between two related articles, ‘The Idea of the Unique’ which speaks some more of the poetic vocation in relation to Paul Celan, and ‘The Idea of the Muse’, which on the surface seems little more than a recollection of Agamben’s attendance of Heidegger’s seminars, perhaps just a statement of his credentials. It seems odd that a biographical sketch of Heidegger’s hoary last years where he would give his seminar ‘in a garden shaded by tall trees’ or ‘in front of a small hut hidden away in the midst of an olive grove’, should be the chosen example for the archetypal poetic experience of inspiration manifested in the figure of the muse. The philosopher seems old and frail. Agamben recounts how when students crowded around he retorted to their incessant questioning, ‘Who, what?’ ‘ ‘You can see my limit; I can’t’. Where once he would stride through the Cimmerian wild woods of his arboreal retreat in Todtnautberg, expectant of the encounter with lichtung, now he cowers beneath the olive trees, unable to sustain the attentions of his disciples into whose midst he appears thrown by fame, his beard gone grey, his cheeks flecked with the mortal marks of his death to come. Agamben interprets Heidegger’s frailty in the face of persistent questioning as a confirmation of the philosopher’s earlier comments on philosophical fidelity:
a thinker’s greatness is gauged by his fidelity to his own internal limit, and not to know this limit—not to know it because of its closeness to the unspeakable. That a hiddenness be maintained in order that here be a disclosure, a forgetfulness maintained in order that there be memory, this is inspiration, the rapture of the muses which brings man, word, and thought into accord with one another. Thought is close to the thing only if it gets lost in this latency…’ (IP 59).

As we can see from this the vocation of the poet and that of the philosopher bear an uncanny resemblance. Both are determined by an inspirational experience of the muse, and both engage in a process of forgetfulness. Yet their relation to oblivion is of a different order. For the poet, the presence of the forgotten remains intact after the experience of the poem for the essence of poetry is precisely to retain obliviousness. In contrast, for the philosopher oblivion is retained for the purposes of disclosure, which away from Heidegger might explain the failure of dianoia in the twentieth century. Like the Homo Sacer or scapegoat, it would seem as if philosophy embeds within itself the hidden so as to experience disclosure and the forgotten to facilitate memory. It is true that, for Agamben, there can be no thought without desire for what is lacking, what he elsewhere terms the res amissa of poetry. Yet for Heidegger surely the power of poetry over philosophy is poetry’s relation to the hidden as permanently hidden. While poet and philosopher both set out across the woods in search of a thinking of being and truth, the philosopher sets out to actually find the lichtung, while the poet has no such intention.??
Irrespective of the differences, both poet and philosopher come together over the nature of thought as such: that is something which is hidden, forgotten, which inspires unexpectedly the poet-philosopher and to which they remain faithful. Another name for such thought is, according to Badiou and Nancy, the event, although Agamben does not use such terminology here perhaps to avoid confusion with the Heideggerian eirignis which both is and is not what we now understand as the event. Instead, he talks about the uniqueness of language in the final ‘stanza’ under consideration here, ‘The Idea of the Unique’. Glossing on Celan’s assertion as to the uniqueness of poetic language, Agamben goes on to note that language is always doubled up:

There is, in fact, the experience of language that forever presupposes words…Contrariwise there is another experience in which man remains absolutely without words in the face of language. The language for which we have no words, which doesn’t pretend, like grammatical language, to be there before being…[is] the language of poetry (IP 48).

And so it can be said that there two types of language in accordance with the traditional roles of philosophy and poetry respectively. Dianoic prose does not concern itself with the semiotic and has, therefore, no means of cutting a path through the wild-wood of matter to an encounter of the forest as composed of wood. While I would prefer to avoid the clichés of wood and trees here, it seems in English one is destined to arrive there regardless of one’s best intentions. Philosophy is literally not able to see the wood for the trees, but wood here refers not to the summation of the set of trees, but rather the pure matter as such from which the trees are composed, if one can use such a verb. In contrast, the poet can see only the wood, so that they are unable to see the trees at all. While my rhetoric is under collapse, what is important here, however, is that through Agamben’s reading of the dictation of poetry, or poetic inspiration, both philosopher and poet are able to make a move outside their own sylvan aporias guided as ever by the helpful muse.
Agamben realises immediately the aporia at the heart of any conception of a unique language accorded to poetic dictation. He explains ‘the unique language is not one language’ in that it is always already split between words without language (philosophy) and being wordless in front of language (poetry). If, as Celan argues, uniqueness is the destiny of language, of what order is such a destiny in that, as Agamben responds, it precedes words as vehicles for meaning and to whom can it occur if we are not yet speakers? Agamben, of course, calls this state of speechlessness before a language that precedes words, infancy, and reflects that such a state knows nothing of destiny. ‘Destiny is concerned only with the language that, faced with the infancy of the world, vows to be able to encounter it, to have forever…something to say of it’. (??). Such a destiny is, as we have repeatedly seen, a false eschatology for in speaking of the uniqueness of language, one proves its impossibility, and if one has words to speak of language, one no longer has language before one of which to speak. Faced with the impossibility of seeing both wood and tree, Agamben’s great innovation here is to turn a dead-end into a new clearing for thought:

This vain promise of a meaning in language it is destiny, which is to say, its grammar and its tradition. The poet is the infant who piously receives this promise and who, through avowing its emptiness, decides for truth, and decides to the remember that emptiness and fill it. But at that point, language stands before him, so alone, so abandoned to itself that it can no longer in any way impose: ‘la poésie ne s’impose plus. Elle s’expose’, so Celan writes…’ (IP).

Both poet and philosopher meet at the chilly point of poetic exposure. Neither can, alone, reveal the truth. The philosopher has the great advantage of arriving after language and all the benefits that language brings with it. However, thinking through philosophy means presupposing the existence of the very thing upon which the truth of being resides: language. The fidelity of the philosopher, therefore, consists of thinking up to their known limits, yet retaining in reserve the possible inspiration of a forgotten additional limit. That limit is, naturally, the fact of language’s existence as such. In contrast, the poet always already thinks in direct relation to the existence of language as such, the wild, pithy matter into which they constantly hack and moan. Yet they have nothing more to say on this subject that the very fact that they can say something. They may work endlessly with the raw material of the forest, but they will never even shape a single tree let alone the wonders of natural woodland. For the philosopher the tree trunk is hollow, they see the outline of the form but there is no wood inside. Such trees are light and easy to topple, perhaps explaining the restless energy of philosophy since Plato. For the poet, to my relief, the metaphor is slightly harder to sustain. It is as if one had carved out the centres of each tress, dispensed with the bark, and left the sawdust and chippings strewn all over the place. Yes one can get a pure experience of matter, but it is meaningless waste product. Both poet and philosopher alone are faced with a profound emptiness wherein the truth of being in language ought to reside. The philosopher concerns herself with empty shells, the poet with filling up the void with sawdust and trash. A pretty pass surely and a tragedy if, contrary to Eliot’s premature assertion, it were not for the fact that these woods are enchanted, filled with nymphs, naiads and sprites. They are the territories of the muses and at moments of pure inspiration, poet and philosopher can and will meet over the very things both have lost and forgotten, perhaps go for a walk and barely understand each other or of what they speak and yet exit from the encounter inspired.
The name of the power of the muse is dictation.
In ‘The Idea of Dictation’ Agamben returns again to the razo di trobar, defining razo here as ‘the exposition of the hidden ground of the poem’. (IP 51). He then cites Dante’s warning that poets risked shame if they were unable to ‘set it out in prose’. It should now be much clearer as to what is at stake in this apparently merely charming philological observation. The razo is of course philosophical thinking, and the origins of modern European poetics reside precisely in an irrevocable inter-relation between the trobar or pure creation, and the razo or pure explication. There can be no finding without the attendant narrative of its occurrence, and no such narrative need exist before the occurrence itself. To find an event one must always already commit to naming the event in language, yet to write in language one must always concede to the precedence of the event. Thus poetic dictation has two permanent meanings: to dictate the poem to someone else to transcribe, but also to be dictated to by pure creativity as such.
Both elements come to the fore in a reading of a razo by 20th century writer Delfini which deals directly with the problem of memory, thinking and the semiotic. As Delfini tries to negotiate the complex thickets and byways of dictation as we have whittled on them, he ends up snagged in a familiar thorny bower, ‘between the impossibility of thinking…and a power only of thinking, between the inability to remember in the perfect, amorous attachment to the present, and the memory that arises precisely out of the impossibility of this love…’ (IP 52). This paradox, as we have seen and as is confirmed in this essay, is the permanent division of poetry ‘and this intimate divergence is its dictation’ (IP 52). The analysis of Delfini, and the complex work which surrounds the idea of dictation that I have tried to negotiate on your behalf, and which found me betimes lost, befuddled, exhausted, scratched and literally having lost my mind to forgetting quite why I entered this bosky realm in the first place, leads Agamben finally to make his point that the lyric is ‘necessarily empty…transfixed on the verge of a day that has always already set: it doesn’t have, literally, anything to say or recount’ (IP 53). Yet it is precisely the fact that poetry has nothing to say, that the poet is speechless in the face of the trobar, that the razo comes to the fore: ‘thanks to this sober, exhausted dwelling of the poetic word in the beginning, something like a lived experience (which the narrator will gather as the material for his tale) comes to being for the first time’ (IP 53).
It is a difficult path through the trees to the moment when Agamben finally puts pen to paper and writes the essay that for decades he has been promising to write or better has been perpetually writing in the form of some other razo de trobar. In The End of the Poem we meet with the essay ‘The Dictation of Poetry’. It is worth pausing here to marvel on just quite how difficult and involved any reading of Agamben proves to be. This essay, although of length and lucid, is simply impossible to understand without reading all the work on dictation and language which precedes it. Yet as one does so, one finds oneself taken down various other pathways, raising entirely new conceptions, yet all the time tied to the proximity and yet never merging streams of poetry, language as such, and philosophy, what language has to say. The majority of the essay revealed as if in a clearing in the thickest of Italian pineta consists of a reading of the razo of various troubadour masters, reiterating and developing issues we have already concerned ourselves with. In the midst of this Agamben returns once more to that moment when the ars inveniendi has reached a point of automatism in the 12th century and had been downshifted from the art of inventive creation to a mere mnemonic technique. By now of course we must be aware that the art of invention’s relation to memory will, at this juncture, become unstable. Poetry has no memory, for it is either so proximate to the object of its love that it is totally inspired by it lacking any distanciation necessary for recollection (remembering for our part that this love or trobar of which we speak will also be reconfigured by Dante as the stanza, it is as if in question is right there in the room with you, like the fabled elephant, and thus impossible to ignore). Or poetry makes as its task the immemorial and the permanently hidden. By concentrating on the linguistic infancy of pure matter, poets wander deliberately lost in the woods, refusing to remember from whence they set out that morning, or where they intended to arrive. They have a map, their sense of direction is acute, and Arianne has assiduously unspoiled her thread but the poets simply do not care. In fact this problematics of poetic double forgetting, no need to remember or no intention of remembering, is encased to a degree in the very moment that invention had been reduced to mere mnemonics, for at that very moment invention in Europe had forgotten its roots in the event of the inspiration of the muse, and poetry had lost its place. At this moment, the troubadors’ conception of the razo inevitable gains powerful currency:

The troubadours want not to recall arguments consigned to a topos but instead experience the very event of language as original topos, which takes place in an absolute proximity of love, speech and knowledge. The razo, which lies at the foundation of poetry and which constitutes what the poets call its dictation (dictamen), is therefore neither a biographical nor a linguistic event. It is instead a zone of indifference, so to speak, between lived experience and what is poeticized… (EP 79).

In the 12th century in Europe a great deal of importance to modern literature is born. The abandonment of the ars invendiendi in favour of the razo de trobar radically alters how we go on to conceive of literary singularity in relation to its inventiveness. Perhaps it is the recollection of the collapse of the term invention at this point that spurs Derrida on to force invention as such to always collapse into convention. Is he presenting a logical and metaphysic originality, or merely expressing the hang-over of European disappointment as to how the Latin art of invention lost sight of the muse in the grove and instead turned art into serviceable and lasting roadways to expression? Certainly invention is of a very different order to the trobar or discovery, and this one fact alone leaves a trail of crumbs, barely discernible amongst the rusting bracken, which many centuries later that arboreal thinker Heidegger was able to unearth. Invention speaks of creation ex nihilo, and all the attendant joys and disappointments that ushers in, whereas the trobar speaks of a sudden encounter a finding. And who exactly finds who? Does the walker find the truth, in which case he is a philosopher, or does the truth upend the walker, tangling about their feet and transforming him into a poet? The trobar has inbuilt a narrative carved out of journeying, searching, hiddenness, revelation, memory, forgetting, and inspiration. This narrative then leads to the essential second element of the razo, which is itself nothing other than a fictional narrative of how the room was discovered, or how love was trobato [found].
The razo has at its roots three forms of dianoic thinking. The first is philosophy of course, for the razo is that other form of remembrance, what came after the event as the precondition for the event. A simple example of this will suffice. Agamben’s own Heideggerian insistences on language being the house of being gives us access to the infancy of language as such from which philosophy proceeds. Yet this infancy of language remains inaccessible to the mind until philosophy’s razo makes it present, although intimations of its presence have been felt in poetry for millennia and more. The second is literary prose. And the third is literary criticism. The razo, therefore, allows for the much belated return of philosophy to poetry, a homecoming on which we have had attend, admittedly, seven to eight centuries. It also begins the collapse of poetry into narrative prose which took approximately six to seven centuries. And finally it began the discipline of literary criticism, whose full impact will begin to be felt in about five to six centuries.
The most famous razi de trobar in the English canon reside in Romanticism. Perhaps the most obvious and widely known is Coleridge’s explanation as to how he came to write ‘Kubla Khan’. For those of you unfamiliar with this great narrative of English letters, Coleridge found himself in an opium inflected dream during which the whole of Kubla Khan came to him. When he ‘woke’, by which modern readers would probably say sobered up, he set about transcribing what had been dictated to him. Like many from the more inspired side of writing, we anti-Wordsworthian, Faulkneresque or XXXX, I imagine his pen did not travel fast enough across the page for, as is often the case, he was interrupted in his act of dutiful transcription by the mythical ‘person from Porlock’. The Porlock, a metonym in English literature now for any unwanted interruption, detained the poet long enough for dictation’s strident but intermittent voice to fade. Subsequent critics have attempted to reinterpret Porlock as a fictionalised excuse for the fragmentary state of the work but, as often seems to be the case, a lack of understanding of the European roots of English Romanticism is the cause of this dire misapprehension.
It should be clear now that Coleridge’s so-called excuse is little other than a razo de trobar, and that these narratives first take many forms, second are always concerned with a lost love that cannot be reclaimed, and third are always fictionalised narratives after the fact to explain the event of inspiration. It is interesting that in this famous Razo that Coleridge is called from his room by the Porlock, and that when he returns to his room, the dream has gone forever. The room here of course is the stanza form and what remains are mere fragments, wood without a trunk as it were. Porlocking has since had a rich history in literature, and it is surely significant to remark that it is not so much the moment of dictation that writers have found so inspiring as the subsequent moment of interruption. Porlocking is, in some ways, the writer’s first experience of the end of the poem in that it constitutes the dramatisation of the end of the encounter with language as such on whose basis poetry and philosophy are revealed. The Porlock will and shall always arrive so that the trobar will cease being experienced so that it subsequently can become an experience in its recounting within the razo.
With this interpretation still resonating in our ears we can now return to Scotland and Porlock ‘The Solitary Reaper’ in that all acts of hermeneutical interpretation as unwanted interruptions, ill-timed knocks at the door of the stanzas of poietic dictation. Wordsworth’s adage, ‘recollection in tranquillity’, is a typical example not only of a superlative razo but itself a theorising of the razo as we saw with our first knock on ‘The Solitary Reaper’. The poem purports to telling the razo, the poem, of a trobar, encountering the reaper, yet we now know that no such trobar occurred. The facts that the encounter is fictional, that the meaning of the words remain untranslated, and that the pneumatic promise of poetic immemoriality is a sham for the poet never gave access to the reaper’s music in the first instance, do not undermine the work as has been widely reported. Rather they confirm its status as a superlative example of dictation. Indeed the whole Romantic Ideology, so-called, is a meta-razo de trobar: the poet wanders without aim, he encounters poetry before speech, then later in tranquillity he narrates this encounter with speech. There is nothing new therefore in Romanticism, arguably the world’s first avant-garde movement. Romanticism does not encounter, trobar, this theory of composition, razo, it is the age-old structure of poetry, as well as the archetypal moment wherein all poetry succumbs to prosaic philosophy. Romanticism, therefore, merely unconceals what has always been the essence of western poetics.
Moving forward a couple of hundred years and Modernism, the self-styled enemy of Romanticism begins to give way, in poetry in the 50s, to the more open ambiguities of postmodernism—this is decades before the novel is brave enough to tentatively make this move before collapsing disastrously into it current swamp of ersatz late-Realism. The initially much-vaunted, now often vilified self-consciousness of postmodern poetry is perhaps subsequent to modernity for no other reason than it returns poetry back to the razo de trobar tradition of Romanticism. The perfect exemplar of this motif remains John Ashbery, whose supposed late Romanticism if it exists at all does not depend on the formulations of an orphic subjectivity as American critics have tried to establish, but something quite other to that. Ashbery’s poetry seems rather the perfect hybrid of trobar and razo that is typical of Wordsworth and Coleridge at finest. Poems which relate their own composition, such as the famous opening of Three Poems or works like ‘Late Echo’ and ‘Down by the Station Early in the Morning’, have merely absorbed the razo into the trobar, coming close to fulfilling the dream of Agamben’s work even though he suggests such an event could never happen in modern poetry.
Needless to say postmodern poetry abounds in such examples, and it would be churlish to ignore Ashbery’s friendly rival Koch in a roll-call of postmodern troubadors. In work such as ‘Seasons on Earth’, ‘One train may hide another’ and ‘Time Zone’, Koch consistently relates the razo of the great trobar of postmodern aesthetics from the abstract expressionists through to the New York school themselves. That said, the outstanding work of postmodern troubadorism to be found in post-war New York is Frank O’Hara’s often anthologised ‘Why I am not a painter’. The poet begins by responding to what must have been a common question for the director of foreign collections at MoMa and so clearly steeped in the dictations of inventive creativity: Why is he not a painter?

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
‘Sit down and have a drink’ he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. ‘You have SARDINES in it’.
‘Yes, it needed something there’.
‘Oh’. I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. ‘Where's SARDINES?’
All that's left is just
letters, ‘It was too much’, Mike says.

Initially the poet acts as second fiddle to the culturally more valuable inventiveness of the painter Goldberg who, interestingly, has opted to make the word SARDINES a visual component emphasising its woodiness in ‘baring the device’ as Perloff terms it. Here the poet seems to take on the subject-role of the razo of someone else’s trobar, revealing the enigma of artistic inspiration: it needed something/it was too much. In fact, in miniature, this double syntagm is the essence of every creative act, the need for something and the need to remove something. Already we learn a great deal more about invention than one tends to glean from philosophy, for while Agamben, Derrida and their peers spend a great deal of time in the moment from absence to presence, they tend to neglect the other form of creative absence, that of simple erasure. As the poem progresses, however, it increasingly becomes apparent that O’Hara is making a point about poetic creation perhaps even at the expense of the visual arts:

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

What we find here is that the trobar of invention is much more expertly rendered with the poet’s encounter with the sign/idea/colour orange. The thought ‘orange’ comes unbidden to the poet’s consciousness and while there is a double joke here in that orange is the most famous example of a word that does not rhyme in English as well as being a colour in language in the opposing fashion to SARDINES being a word within colour, pretty soon the poet becomes overwhelmed by the dictation of orange. At the end of the poem and painting we discover that the remnants of the trobar, SARDINES and orange respectively, are retained within the works in the form of titles, but that the works that result from them have little directly to do with either dictation. As with Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, or the first instance of the double encounter in Wordsworth, the initial dream of the work, its first dictation, is Porlocked to the effect that another work takes its place. The poem ‘Oranges’ exists, it even spawned a work of art, but the poem ‘Why I am not a painter’ is the real work of genius here, providing a razo de trobar as trobar. It is this embedding of the trobar within a razo, or the trobaratizione de razo that is the lasting legacy of postmodern art, and is a gesture that as yet remains poorly understood by the professional writers of razo, we literary critics.

Syrinx / Larynx: A Full-Throated Ease

2009-04-28T19:40:00.004+01:00

Apologies, some odd layout issues here which I need to fix, blogging has changed somehow over the last year or so so need to understand what is wrong here.

Syrinx / Larynx: A Full-Throated Ease

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.[i]

Caliban, with these now oft-voiced and melodious phrases, presents his case to be taken as one of the most influential theorists of poetry within our English tradition. Commenting on the noises of the island, the song of the island being the speciality of English literature until the last century, Caliban seems to offer a critique of natural noise-making as a form of poetry. These sounds are typical of the Greek sense of [aisthesis], sensory pleasure, origin of the modern and contested discipline of aesthetics.[ii] Their ability to offer sensory delight is coupled with an assurance that, as poiesis, they can do no harm. They are of no significance because they, like another of Shakespeare’s other famous noisings-off ‘the sound and the fury,’ ‘signify nothing.’ Then again, like all pleasures, they may not be so harmless on sober reflection. As Caliban goes on to declaim, in lines leaden with a tangible pathos:

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.[iii]

As the clouds of aisthesis momentarily part, knowledge rains down upon us and it becomes clearer why Plato wanted to exclude the poets from his ideal and islanded republic.[iv] These noises are not the skittering of unseen feet in the forest that Agamben eloquently speaks of in the “Epilogue” of Language and Death.[v] Rather, they are more akin to the sound pollution emanating from the activities of artificial creation, either those of Prospero the poet-king, or Caliban’s god Setebos. These instruments, and the word here has a pejorative Heideggerian potential in referring to an instrumental creation that is pure praxis devoid of poiesis, have somnambulistic properties that lead to false mimesis in the form of dreams whose reality can never be realised. They cast a spell on Caliban of such power that he would give up the world in favour of an artificial paradise constructed entirely of beautiful twangling and humming. Although one may be afeard of the noises of wild animals on a strange isle, of bears that may endlessly promulgate as the island enters many decades of winter, the worst that can happen is that one will exit pursued by a bear and never return to centre stage.[vi] Surely the fate of the mesmerised monster is far worse than that. Trapped within a republic wherein he is a slave, tormented by the clamorous dejecta of Prospero’s poiesis, he is forced relentlessly to both submit to the noises’ somniferous enervations, and submit to the inevitability that they will always bestir him into wakefulness. A kind of aural myth of Sisyphus unfolds here wherein Caliban, our hero, is continually lulled to and jarred from dormancy by the boisterous power of poetry.

I call this power the syrinx naming both a Greek term for the pipes of pan but also, subsequently, a delightful zoological designation for the vocal organ of birds. It also bears the burden of the meaning of a channel, expressly that cut in the stem to form the pipe which later comes to find morphological figuration in the channel that lies between the trachea and bronchi in the bird’s throat. Finally, is has been used as a term in archaeology for a narrow gallery cut in rock, for example in Egyptian tombs. The value of the terminology syrinx is, therefore, apparent as the articulating power of the voice that leads in our culture to poetry, bird song and death. Syrinx is also one possible sound for the narrow passage between waking and sleeping which the dream is, a waking dream, a day dream, source of the very danger of intoxicating bad mimesis that Plato warns an all too credulous Glaucon against. Perhaps deafened by the clamour of bird song or the smoke and mirrors show from the many theatres that were thriving before the censors’ interdiction, the poets of Prospero’s island have, on the whole, chosen not to listen to the voice of philosophy in this regard.

On December 31^st, 1900, the once feted novelist Thomas Hardy gazed out at a frigid and inhospitable landscape, England, the island which had raised and rejected him, leaving the novelist alone with the dubious consolations of poetry and, it is said, the guilty memories of his neglected wife. The resulting channel that he cuts in language, ‘The Darkling Thrush,’ is now one of the most precious ways within the canon. It, like Caliban’s song, has taken on a greater meaning that the poet could ever have imagined. Inevitably, observations such as ‘tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings of broken lyres,’ and descriptions of the sharp features of the frost fixed land as ‘The century’s corpse outleant,’ seem to presage the devastation that will be wrought to the land of Europe by modernisation, techne and war. While the statements of personal impotency such as, ‘The ancient pulse of germ and birth / Was shrunken hard and dry, / And every spirit upon earth / Seemed fervourless as I,’ make this a prototype surely for Eliot’s classic statements on alienation and anomie in ‘Prufrock’ and ‘The Wasteland.’

When the syrinx sounds its clarion call, ‘At once a voice arose among / The bleak twigs overhead / In a full-hearted evensong / Of joy illimited,’ one assumes poetry once more, as it has been doing since Wordsworth and Coleridge began writing poems such as these well over a hundred years before, will save the day. This is certainly what the poem’s conclusion seems to concede:

However, like most Romantic lyrics or so it has been proposed by critics, the poem’s predictable but no less affecting syllogistic argument is disingenuous and ultimately heartless, qualities it shares with its repentant yet forever culpable maker.  I would contradict the message warbling here that art will provide us with our salvation on three counts, emboldened by what Caliban told me as I was set to sail about art and the unbearable placeless place of the syrinx, the channel art cuts between the waking world and the sleep of the self.  The first is that if the poet was able to predict the effects of modernity on faith and nature, and the existential dread that would ensue with the desubjectivisation of modern life, he was just as capable of realising that the broken strings of poetry would remain permanently limp and mute.  It is not so much the epochal verity that faith was under threat and only poetry could save us that Hardy carves out in the poem, but that prosody was under threat by the experimentations in free verse by the French of which he must have been aware, and only a song emanating from the syrinx of the disciplined prosodic thrush can save the poet.  Imagine a novelist who can no longer be a novelist seeking refuge in a poetry that can no longer be the kind of poetry he would have it be.  This is a truly lamentable fabricator.

               The second is an issue that takes us back to a peninsular Agamben, via our diversion through the narrow channels of English poetic genius, and that is the relation of the voice to the beast.  The thrush does not sing, as Hardy suggests, because he knows something.  The animal voice may by syrinxical in terms of morphology but its power issues from the fact that there is, as we have learned, no channel for the voice of the animal as animals know nothing of the separation of self and voice.  The voice of the bird is not nor can it ever be that of poetry.  Instead it is that of the pure coincidence between sound and sense which is called onomatopoeia.  It performs coincidence not hesitation, crossing the two streams or tonoi of poiesis in a manner that poetry as such cannot allow.  The thrush sings for the very reason Hardy cannot admit to, namely that it knows nothing of hope.  Hope suggests an ontological incompletion and potential resolution that the animal, totally open to its being possessed by its world as Heidegger describes,[i] simply has nothing to say about it being devoid of memory or desire.  Hope is not a thing with feathers.  Yet again, the poets, with great facility, lie and Plato feels the warm seep of vindication flow through whichever ground he was laid, centuries before, in a shallow but hallowed burial syrinx.

               The third is a contradiction in the consideration as to where the syrinx is located confirming a life-long suspicion of mine that Hardy was no ornithologist.  Like all Romantic poets Hardy has no interest in nature from the perspective of objective and scientific apprehension, as indicated by the confusion in the work as regards from whence the voice of the bird emanates.  While the term syrinx was in usage throughout the 19^th century Hardy prefers to suggest that first the bird’s voice issues from its heart, and then later that it resides in the bird’s soul when he metonymically states of the speckled proto-bard that he: ‘Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom.’

               While one might facetiously comment that one should not go to the poets for an accurate epistemology pertaining to the voice one could counter this by saying that we encounter no such problems in the work of that first great English modernist poet, John Keats.  Keats, in his ‘Ode on a Nightingale’ continues the aesthetic tradition of Caliban by associating the sounds of nature with a liminal space, what I am regularly referring to here as a channel, between waking and dreaming states.  Not only does the poem begin with the poet’s consciousness under doubt, ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness / Pains my sense,’ but ends with a now almost folkloresque statement of doubt over the subject’s ability to differentiate actual experience of the world from, inner subjective experience: ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:--do I wake or sleep?’  This statement of uncertainty about experience coupled with Keats’ famous statement on poetic desubjectification would, according to Agamben, justify my claims that Keats is the first English modernist and not a Romantic poet at all.  This presents us with a messianic overlap of poetic precursiveness and belatedness with Keats able to prefigure the coming of the epochal event of the modern and Hardy nostalgically confirming its full presence in an aesthetic wistfulness towards the loss of what was never ours to posses: a state of affective grace within nature.  Unlike Hardy’s thrush, surely chipped from the same eternal rock as Keats’ bird, the nightingale here sings directly from the syrinx as biologically we know it should: ‘Singest of summer in full-throated ease.’  This strikes me as a statement of pure open-ness on the part of the nightingale in that it sings in a state of absolute plenitude wherein its voice coincides entirely with its presence.  At least that is how I would interpret full-throated.  That said, at the same time the bird sings of its absolute alterity, piping out its inhuman state as an animal in full possession of its voice but with no access to human language.  The bird speaks its being in such a way that the very concept of being as somehow representable, namely differential from say lived existence or the world in which the being is to be encountered as already cast, (cast as thrown, fixed and required to play its part) is impossible.  The bird sings in the space of a full-throated ease, meaning the bird’s voice and being coincide absolutely whose indivisibility wings the bird into a space of total unrepresentability.  This space is, as I have been insisting, the space of ease.

               While the poet seeks ease from suffering he wishes famously first to lose himself in narcotics and then the more sinister palliative of the ‘viewless wings of poesy,’ he is also only too aware of the dangers of ease:

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

In such an ecstasy!

Death for the human being provides a sense of ease from life which, as Keats rightly states, is totally alien to the animal: ‘Thou was not born for death, immortal bird!’  The bird will cease to exist or perhaps most accurately will be robbed of animation but he does not possess being-towards-death as we know and he is unaware.  Due to this ontological dispossession the bird therefore remains permanently ‘abroad’ on the other side of midnight, over there, easterly, to the right of the poem, in the space Agamben calls ease.  While Keats considers the consonance of the end of the poem and his own end and tries in vain, as many poets have, not to end the poem but to cease upon the midnight or hang on the very tip (corn) of the right hand syllable, proximate to the space of ease, proximate to proximity as such; the bird need not negotiate finitude.  A nightingale is not thrown into being, nor will she exit being.  She exists, instead, simultaneously within her being and alien to it, withdrawn from its presence in the easeful space of ontological proximity.  Appropriating Agamben’s own philological categories, the bird sings in stanzas, the poet always in lines, and this is Keats,’ and by extension our own, modern self-alienating tragedy.

               If nothing else this differentiation answers the question pertaining to the metonym of soul and song raised by Hardy in the sense that Lazarus was raised, that is, from the easeful if narrow space of death.  The bird’s song is indeed its soul but in contrast to Hardy who must surely have been reworking this ode for a new age, such a soul remains in Keats alien to a Christian eschatology of hope and salvation.  As the soul of the bird cannot be known its primary quality is that of concealedness resulting in our having to concede that bird-soul it is a feature of ontology not epistemology, of being not of knowledge.  As such, bird-soul domiciles permanently in the process of pouring into the space of the abroad both over there across the channel of the end of the line, and also about, totally within the external environment of its absolute being.  Thus this can truly be said to be the soul of animals contained exactly within the qualities of the syrinx as Keats so masterfully portrays them in his poem of praise.  This voice is both fully the bird and yet located exterior to the bird in the space of ease or unrepresentable singularity.  The voice knows no differentiation, therefore the bird cannot be said to be its voice for there is no not-being-the-voice available to it.  The bird and the voice are one but not unified in that they must be accepted as being also totally singular and alien to each other.  The only similar state available for man, of course, as Heidegger explains, is our relationship to death and Keats is right in identifying death as the human space of ease: a permanent yet totally alien access to a proximate space of singularity.  As Hegel states, only in death can the human being find its true voice within the metaphysical tradition of presence that we have inherited.  Only in death can the human be said to be both totally itself in the fulfilment of its being-towards-death, and thus totally unrepresentable.[ii]  In this way one could propose a coincidence here of the material origin of poetry, the representation of death, and the anatomical facts of bird song: the syrinx.  In addition one is able to see directly how the Keatsian negative capability, upon which modernity, modern aesthetics and post-metaphysical philosophy is grounded, ‘that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,’[iii] coincides with the conception of ease.  Ease is that space between the subjective and objective worlds wherein desubjectification is performed precisely at the moment of a radical disobjectification.[iv]  That this space is to be termed, above all else, poetry relies on Agamben’s own radical readings of animal voice in his work on onomatopoeic openness.

[i] For Agamben’s analysis of this see O 52-6.

[ii] For Agamben’s analysis of this see LD 41-53.

[iii] Keats letter Sunday [21 Dec. 1817]

[iv] For Badiou’s definition of poetic disobjectification see MP 76-7.

Recent research reveals that the voice of humans and the song of birds are produced in very similar ways. That said the location of our voice remains permanently at one remove from that of the nightingale due to the morphological bifurcation of the syrinx. For both animals, human and bird, the larynx is placed at the top of the throat and can manipulate the passing of air through its membranes to produce an astonishing array of sounds. However, unlike the human animal, the throat of birds has a second organ of speech located at the base of the throat precisely where the trachea splits in two above the bird’s two lungs. This syrinx as it is called allows the bird, therefore, to produce two effects that remain rather provocative for the study of poetry. The first is that they can produce two differing voices at the same time. They can, in other words, combine strophe and anti-strophe within one single song. The second is that in alternating lungs a bird can breathe through one part of the bifurcated syrinx while still singing through the other, seeming, therefore, to sing endlessly without ever having to take a breath. This is an illusion as is almost everything to do with our cognitive experience of the voice. In fact, the nightingale, the thrush, the crow are each taking many half-breaths, fitting them into the rhythm of the song creating a seamless effect. The bird does not appear to breath because it is always breathing, in a useful anatomical analogue to the way that the bird’s song cannot be separated from its being in that it is permanently separate from the very conception of being.

What would bird poetry resemble; whose verses would it most call to mind?

According to Agamben’s preconditions for poetry the question is a silly one as there can be no such thing as bird poetry regardless of the opinion of poets such as Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Hardy and so on. The first preventative privation appended to bird poetry is that it combines the two streams of language as Agamben conceives of them, in his terminology semantic and semiotic or more generally the occurrence of the sound and that which follows on from sound, for example meaning. There is, although I am not certain there never was nor ever can be, no signification in bird song because it does not allow for the barrier between signifier and signified central to Agamben’s theory of linguistic ontology. This can be reconstituted by saying there is no delay in the voice of the bird meaning one is permanently held within the presence of its continual coming into being without the possibility of advent or finitude to allow one distance enough to be able to allow said being to be revealed. Bird poetry speaks, most certainly according to Agamben, but it does not represent. It contains within its trills and arpeggios no difference between sound and sense and subsequently there can be no tensile presence between the two necessary for poetry to come to its being. A second privation stems from the fact that bird song never ends and therefore, logically, there is no end of the (bird) poem. Bird poetry cannot result in a bird poem nor can it submit to the planar inter-dimensionality of stanzas. Such ‘poetry’ knows nothing of silence nor of commencement. It cannot submit to finitude such as one observes at the end of the work of art, a necessary precondition for the very presence of the work of poiesis as a work, and its most insurmountable aporia.

One final point on the infinitude of bird song is that it is not subject to the law of spacing. The idea of half-breaths, surely only metaphorical for who determines the duration of a breath or even is able to truly explain its articulation into a plurality called breathing, is, however, provocative. The syrinx disallows any need for spacing as a material marking of the semiotic as both present and different. Bird song may be pure noise but it does not submit to the pure semiotic as it lacks the qualities of singularity and difference essential to the definition of the semiotic. The song of a bird simply keeps on going, one single stream, knowing no end point and consisting not of notes, or phrases, but pure noise as such. This may seem a fanciful discourse into the constructed fiction of an ornithopoiesis, a sub-genre of the discipline of logopoiesis, but when one turns to Agamben’s work on the word and the voice one discovers that the problematic of bird poetry or a discourse on the syrinx as the precondition for full-throated ease, is central to Agamben’s conception of the human voice, infancy, dictation, glossolalia and the term which I want to investigate here: onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia

As we have seen there is in language, potentially, two streams, that of the semantic and that of the semiotic. While these two streams can never meet, within each stream there are zones of distinction or spectra of effects. At the furthest limit of the semantic, for example, is pure meaning as such known to all and having no need of expression. Like god, the furthest limits of the semiotic also do not exist, according to Derrida, for this would indicate a mark that is incapable of (re)iteration.[xi] Yet it is to these furthest semiotic limits that Agamben’s essay ‘Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice’ takes us in its investigation of Pascoli’s use of what Contini calls dead language. As we saw with Dante, the arrival of the linguistic concept of the dead language was an essential one for poetry providing a crucial distinction between grammar and the vernacular which, in general, language has since tried to suppress. A dead language has no parole or actual usage yet it is not meaningless for then the terms dead and language would be irrelevant indications. This isle is full of strange noises. As I write a December wind howls down from the hills above my house; somewhere, for weeks, as I have been writing this, something loose has been banging sonorously in the distance against some wall; my fingers click each time I write a thing—yet none of these are, properly speaking, dead language. Dead presupposes a once living thing and language expresses the potential for signification, therefore while to each of us the dead languages of Pascoli’s poetry are mere noise, not all noise ought to be a dead language.

Agamben begins the essay with Pascoli conceding his recourse to a dead language: ‘the language of poets is always a dead language…a curious thing—a dead language used to give greater life to thought.’ (EP 62). Taking up this challenge, ‘thought lives off the death of words’ (EP 63), Agamben then proceeds to trace the conception of a dead language from St. Augustine, through the 11^th century logician Gaunilo, to St. Paul and the Christian tradition of the gloss. Augustine considers how a word no longer in usage when heard by a person may be the subject of a desire to know typical of the love of knowing (philosophy). The person wants to know what the word means but before that she must vouchsafe that it is a word. No love can be aroused due to pure sound alone, he argues, in that one cannot love what one cannot know, and yet one also does not love what one already knows. This is the marvelous economy of loving.

This condition of truth, that it must be knowable but not yet known, returns in Agamben’s work elsewhere when he considers the word ‘explain’ in Idea of Prose. In ‘The Idea of the Enigma,’ truth occurs as the result of the collapse of representation.

This does not mean that the truth is something unrepresentable…rather truth begins only an instant after the point at which we acknowledge the truth or falsity of a representation…This is why it is important that representation stops an instant before the truth: this is why the only true representation is that which also represents the gap that separates it from the truth (IP 107).

The logic here is hard to fault. Truth comes in only after representation for if your representation is correct then there is no need for it anymore as truth as been attained (naming). If it is incorrect then truth can only be approached once that false representation has been silenced in preparation for the truth (discourse). Either way, representation’s failure to be true is not in fact proof that truth can never be attained in full, but necessary for truth as such to be attained. Without the gap between representation and truth there would be no truth. The love of knowledge, philosophy, therefore can only come into being by virtue of the basic semiotic precondition that the sign you perceive is a sign and is singular. To have the desire to pursue one’s innate love of knowing, Augustine argues, one must both know and not know, know that the noise can transport meaning, but not yet know what that meaning in transport is. Agamben confirms this in his gloss: ‘the experience of the dead word appears as the experience of a word uttered (a vox) insofar as it is no longer mere sound…but not yet a signification—insofar as it is the experience, that is, of a sign as pure meaning and intention to signify before and beyond the arrival of every particular signification’ (EP63). Insofar as it is infantile and, ultimately logopoietic.

This ‘intention to signify without signification’ throbs at the heart of the totality of Agamben’s loving philosophical system as he traces it through the ontological re-configuration of the point in Gaunilo’s conception of an experience of thought that does not signify but dwells in the ‘voice alone.’ More significantly for our argument here, however, is Paul’s famous comment in Corinthians to ‘he that speaketh in an unknown tongue’ or lalon glosse, which not merely gave rise to the significance of the gloss but also a full understanding of that key word for poetics, glossolalia. Taken usually to be merely inarticulate sound, Agamben rightly, through Paul, establishes glossolalia rather as the presence within the subject of speech whose meaning is not yet known or the ‘place between the withdrawal of mere sound and the arrival of signification’ (EP 66). What is significant here is that glossolalia is an experience of what has come to be called the dictation of poetry which emanates from the troubadour tradition and often illumines Agamben’s comments on the relationship between poetry, language, philosophy and life as such. Paul says of lalon glosse that it is as if one is hearing the barbarian speaking within one. It is worth pausing here to recall that the term barbarian, so significant for poetry since Adorno, stems from the Greeks’ mild xenophobia as regards the speech of other cultures which sounded to them like a meaningless sound. In other words the lalon glosse of bar-bar is the onomatopoeic origin of all our conceptions of culture. More interesting for us here is the spatial transposition of barbarism intrinsic to Paul’s thinking which explains his profound influence on contemporary thought notably Agamben and Badiou.[xii] Perhaps Agamben puts it best: ‘To-speak-in-gloss is thus to experience in oneself barbarian speech, speech that one does not know; it is to experience an ‘infantile’ speech (‘Brethren, be not children in understanding’) in which understanding is ‘unfruitful’’ (EP 66). While Agamben does not pause here or anywhere in his analysis of language in its infancy to consider the alterity of language as such this passage hints at just such a potentiality. If we were to simply trace the topography of glossolalia one would soon enough come to consider the narrative of alterity, interiority, desubjectification and disobjectification upon which we are building the edifice of a logopoietic thinking. Glossolalia commences from the lalon glosse of the unknown tongue. This tongue comes to the subject from the space over there, a locale we would not be incorrect in terming the space of ease. The tongue however speaks within the mouth of the subject, appropriates the larynx of man, and makes him speak in language but not in any language in particular. The barbarian therefore, the excluded other in the zone of indistinction, is invited into the mouth of the subject to as to speak in an unknowable language which, however, allows the subject to know language, being and thought as such as in the first instance previous to knowing. Through this complex overlaying or stratifying of potential locales, therefore, the concept of otherness comes to be known as being within the subject, alienating the subject from its own mother tongue, allowing it to see language in its infancy as a thing in the world (semiotic) but not yet an object.

Through his readings of Pascoli that proceed from this observation on dead language as pure intention to signify Agamben is able to neatly differentiate through Pascoli’s use of glossolalia, proper names and onomatopoeia two ways in which language can be said to be dead and thus potentially a road to the vision of a language as such. The first of these, glossolalia, and its sister term xenoglossia, is the death of language, while onomatopoeia or the poetry of the birds, (Pascoli is infamous for his bird-voiced ornithopoiesis), is termed the death of the voice. Staying with glossolalia Agamben states: ‘Glossolalia and xenoglossia are the ciphers of the death of language: they represent language’s departure from its semantic dimension and its return to the original sphere of the pure intention to signify (not mere sound, but rather language and thought of the voice alone). Thought and language, we would say today, of pure phonemes…’ (EP 67). Such a sphere, once located he explains ‘beyond or before sound’ (EP 67) is the voice in its original purity, which finds it place ‘neither in mere sound nor in signification but rather, we might say, in pure grammata, in pure letters.’ Through noise, therefore, one is able to sidestep the division between semiotic and semantic if the noise is located within the subject in the form of their intention to have that sound signify; Augustine and Dante’s conception of love. A word which can mean but does not mean is a word that once did mean and potentially will again. In such a word one encounters the base of all signification, what Derrida terms the mark or as Agamben terms it here the grammata. Grammata is the ability to make marks, to put together letters, without their being reducible to any specific meaning, it is yet another version of the gestic or the tabular.

Glossolalia can be said to kill or at least violently negate language by presenting a permanently insurmountable break between the phonetic and the semantic. While meaning is there in potential, the barbarism of someone else’s tongue in one’s mouth means that the semiotic and the semantic will never come together and speak. In onomatopoeia language dies for exactly the opposite reason, for of course in such signs as ‘oink,’ ‘tweet’ and ‘bark,’ there is also a profound meaninglessness this time issuing not from the lack of meaning brought about by an irrevocable differentiation, but due to the fact that difference within the sign has not come about. The language of birds when written in the language of men attempts to reproduce that quality that animals possess and which we humans do not, that of occupying totally in the voice the essence of being as such. If glossolalia is pure signifier then onomatopoeia is pure signified in that it says exactly and exhaustibly what is means: 100% oink, total tweet, absolute bark.

Agamben goes on to explain the almost tragic circumstances that lead up to the capturing of the animal voice in onomatopoeia when it becomes ‘engrammatos and comprehended by letters. In entering into grammata in being written, the animal voice is separated from nature…’ (EP 69). Again, as we saw in glossolalia, onomatopoeia enters grammata as a form of pure intention to signify, only this time from the opposite direction. Unlike the foreign word which moves from meaning into pure noise, onomatopoeia ‘emerges from the infinite sea of mere sound without yet having become signifying discourse’ (EP 69). This results in another kind of dead language not one which no one speaks but ‘only the trace of the animal voice’s absence, of its “death”’ (EP 69). In the grammata, therefore, the two streams of language are able to enter the pure potentiality to signify, which is surely what is implied by pure intention to signify, in a process Pascoli describes as ‘crossing over’ and which Agamben reformulates as death:

The letter is therefore the dimension in which glossolalia and onomatopoeia, the poetics of dead language and the poetics of the dead voice, converge in one site, where Pascoli situates the most proper experience of poetic dictation: the site in which he can capture language in the instant it sinks again, dying, into the voice, and at which the voice, emerging from mere sound, passes (that is, dies) into signification (EP 70).

There is, it would seem, after all I have said to the contrary now revealed as mere meaningless nonsense, a poetry of birds, but it is not written with claws or dictated to scribes by manipulative and articulate beaks. Not at all, the poetry of birds is written by man in the form of onomatopoeia. Like many such zoological projects and observations, crudely put, to transcribe the poetry of birds one must kill them, tear out their bifurcated pipes and encase them in the materiality of the grammata. To reveal the syrinx one must destroy the host of its essence, just as Syrinx herself had to be destroyed to be saved in the form of reeds. And to make the reeds sound one must tear them from their roots and animate them instead with your own breath. Is it any wonder that Syrinx’s first sound, the very first sounds of poetry, were deemed to be so melancholy? To get to the syrinx one must move through the larynx, through the human voice, and yet there is also an act of violence to be performed here. No man nor woman can be full-throated, can give a full throat to their own voice as being, without killing language. Just as the syrinx must be yanked from its place and embalmed in grammata to be spoken in language, so too language must be cut from our throat and placed alongside that of the birds to access what it means to live, as a human, and yet possess language. For man to be in this way he must be ‘for the birds.’

[i]

[ii] After Heidegger’s sustained attack on aesthetics and literary criticism, Badiou all but puts the discipline to death with his designation ‘inaesthetics’ of which he says: ‘By “inaesthetics I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.’ HI frontispiece.

[iii]

[iv] We of course do no know for certain where Plato might have founded his neo-fascist state but the archipelagic nature of Greek geography makes an island more than likely. The island is, after all, a geological affirmation of the girdled isolation of the conception of the Polis. That Plato sojourned long under the auspices of dictator Dionysius on the island of Sicily or Grecia Majore as it was then called, again adds credence that the Republic was essentially an island community.

[v] See LD 107.

[vi] For a fascinating and witty consideration of these issues from the perspective of the non-personification of space see Sean Gaston, ‘Enter Time,’ Starting with Derrida, 60-80.

[vii] For Agamben’s analysis of this see O 52-6.

[viii] For Agamben’s analysis of this see LD 41-53.

[ix] Keats letter Sunday [21 Dec. 1817]

[x] For Badiou’s definition of poetic disobjectification see MP 76-7.

[xi] The precondition of the mark is that it is available for reiteration. See Jacques Derrida, Margins 315.

[xii] Aside from Agamben’s consideration of the Pauline inheritance in The Time that Remains there is also a contesting view of Paul as an archetype militant for the event of Christ in Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

No Blogs for a While

2008-06-10T10:06:00.002+01:00

Hi

Just to say my wife gave birth to twins a couple of months ago after a difficult pregancy which explains why I haven't posted anything and won't for a while yet. Still, enjoy the content already available and will be back sometime in the future.
William

From "Lines out of Space"

2008-03-01T09:19:00.002Z

Is is worth

it now that I said it it
seems so much more realer
somehow is this the apparition
trembling in the moisture
gathered on the yellowing bluff

on trains many things happen but no more than anywhere else
movement-containment-they-are-isolating
put something in a box any old crap it becomes my gift to you
a man is holding his nose in such a way or seen without due care and atten-
that I think his hand is his nose for a moment

I am not a talker a day decoder
will I tell the others about the nose, about elvis here and michael jacksons over
there is it worth it it is an unlikely thing a
precious but unlikely thing a mirage of light dispersing in
the shattered clouds resting on the lee

with each comment on it you add on to it
I watch a tourist chase a map in a small capricious wind
in reaching for the glass I knock it further from my hand
death isn’t in the detail but the accumulation of detail is
the way one talks with death
or

A GHOSTLY MIST OBLITERATES ALL WITH ITS BILLION PARTICULATE SMEAR

Legends

2008-02-28T12:41:00.002Z

Read only masterpieces; write only rubbish. Read only masterpieces; write only. Read only masterpieces; write. Read only masterpieces. Read only. Read!

Agamben's Idea of Prose and Derrida's Writing: Are they the same thing?

2008-02-28T12:38:00.003Z

Met with Sean Gaston in Oxford yesterday and we spoke for a couple of hours about Derrida's Signsponge. Towards the end I raised an issue about Derrida's conception of the event of literary inventiveness leading on from issues discussed in Signsponge.

If, as Derrida says elsewhere, there is very little literature, and yet if, as he says in Signsponge, Psyche and Shibboleth, the moment of invention is intrinsic or potential in all inventive/literary language, how can it be that it happens so rarely. The logic of invention, that singularity immediately is disseminated into generality and yet in doing so generality is destabilised by the presence of non-translatable singularity either as a trace or a potential, means that invention is fleeting certainly, but not as Badiou would have it, rare.

I suggested to Sean that the issue was that while invention is a potential in all writing,it occurs only rarely at which point its effects are inscribed within the text, effectively infecting the text's claims to stability and authorship and thus disseminating the trace of singularity throughout all writing in effect. Thus is happens only on occasion, but the reverberations of the trace of this are present in writing. Otherwise how would one explain the scarcity of literature in contrast to the omnipresence of the logic of the trace inherent in invention and thus all writing?

Sean's reply was that he felt the issue resided in reading, that the event occurred in reading, and that I assume only certain readers can activate the event through its encounter. Part of a wider project he has to suggest that for Derrida all thinking is reading.

We did not resolve this issue but it led on to our considering the difference between literary invention (rare, singular, with finitude) and philosophical prose (common, general and without finitude). Poetry that can be signed versus philosophy that cannot. I suggested that in fact the age old antagonism between poetry and prose as Agamben terms it is not between two genres of writing but two moments in writing, that of the singular, which is occasional, and the general which is common. That writing is dominated by the law, but that said law can only function due to the event of singularity and is permanently deconstructed by the presence of the event which also can only occur through the immediate betrayal of the event by the generalities of the law. Thus all writing is prose, with the potential for poetry within.

We then gave examples where in Derrida it was meaningless to call a text philosophy or poetry, for at certain points the text was both: Glas, Envois, Signsponge, Cinders and so on. Sean said that for Derrida there was no poetry or prose, there was just writing.

This led me to a rather exciting proposition which I will just outline here. In the controversy between Agamben and Derrida, Agamben dismisses the trace on favour of a messianic idea of prose wherein the divisions between poetry and prose, singular and general, would disappear and a language would come into place, a being in language, that existed beyond difference. His criticism of Derrida being that the arche-trace disallows any way out of differentiation.

Yet, in fact, Derrida's conception of writing is just such an idea of prose. For in Derrida's writing while the role of differance is essential, he never ending oscillation between the trait and the re-trait, fist as Gaston explains, erases the difference between time and space as it is both time and space, and, as I hope to have shown, the overall effect is that differentiation between poetry and prose becomes simply a rhythm, mostly prose, sometimes poetry.

This being the case Derrida's writing is Agamben's idea of prose. Which might explain Agamben's odd blindspot in reading the trace in Derrida and his regular attacks on the one thinker who, in fact, is in almost complete agreement with him on all other issues.

Reading Derrida

2008-02-28T12:33:00.002Z

It behoves upon us to read Derrida as he would have read Derrida if he were not Derrida.

If Derrida were alive now, in his thirties, faced with the massive presence of the dead Derrida's ouevre, how else would he read him than in a "deconstructive" fashion?

The only respectful way to read Derrida is to read against the grain of his texts. Anything else is mere hagiography.

Badiou's criticisms of Derrida are, as are all such criticisms, poorly judged based on a representation of his work which is simplistic and misleading. Yet his criticism of the reliance of post-Heideggerian philosophers on a certain rhetoric of late Romantic defeat and melancholy is a point well made.

Not that Derrida cannot also be a funny and affirmative philosopher, but there is an over-reliance on the derelict topographies of melancholia and loss. Spectres, prosopopeia and the like are extremely attractive tropes in Derrida's work but perhaps Badiou is right and they suck him into a Romantic discourse of ending and remnants which disallows a reading of him in an affirmative mode.

For me there must be two simultaneous readings of Derrida.

The first is a meta-philosophical reading. Derrida the philosopher of the trace. A reduction of Derridean singularities to a singular contribution to the theory of the trace as a mobile space-time nexus as Sean Gaston describes it.

The second is quite the opposite, a lapidary, occasional, singular Derrida where one reads the moments of his work as moments, without ever succumbing to summary and generalisation. The Derrida of poetry, the Derrida of lines, numerical Derrida, Derrida and animals.

Thus my reading of Derrida will be a set based on only one multiple, and at the same time a set which includes all multiples.

Derrida must be read as a proper name. As both singular, and as multiple, one and the many.

Negotiating a reading of Derrida against the grain, undermining Romantic rhetoric, that exists in the paradox of the proper name as both singular (Derrida of the trace) and multiple (the encyclopedic Derrida) strikes me as the only post-Derridean way to read Derrida that is neither ridiculously dismissive (Badiou, Agamben, Habermas) or mere hagiographic commentary.

Apologies...

2008-02-23T09:42:00.001Z

There has been a bit of a break since my last post. I am working on a book and my wife is expecting twins so it has been a buy time. I suspect that future posts will be sporadic for a time, but of great quality when they do arrive!

Incommensurable Poetics

2008-02-23T09:34:00.003Z

Introduction

Incommensurable: adjective 1 not able to be judged or measured by the same standards. Commensurable: adjective 1 measurable by the same standard. 2 (commensurable to) proportionate to. 3 Mathematics (of numbers) in a ratio equal to a ratio of integers.

— ORIGIN Latin commensurabilis, from mensurare ‘to measure’.

This has been an age, and ours has been a discipline of incommensurability.

Modernism and the Avant-Garde

Modernism itself was based on a simple, avant-garde gesture, which was a willing of art to become incommensurable. The rejection of aesthetic values, of the very idea of aesthetic evaluation by professionals or class-privileged individuals, a core value to modernism in all its manifestations, is the taking on of an incommensurability: my poem is not to be measured against or judged by your standards of either prosody, or literature. This was the gamble of the avant-garde incommensurable artists: reject the standards of existing art and in doing so reject the very idea of standards. As we know, it didn’t quite work out like that as these days we are now judging postmodern incommensurables against their modernist predecessors/counterparts. From the dream of judging differently, the avant-garde has simply been adjudged different. Yet the dream of the avant-garde was one of incommensurability, not to be judged by the aesthetic category of “art”, or to produce art that could not be judged at all.

Criticism and Incommensurability:

Literary criticism is, after all, a philosophical procedure of establishing categorical thinking about written texts. All philosophy is against incommensurability as categorical, abstract, universal thinking must, by definition, be the result of measurement against clear standards and judgement. Perhaps it goes to far to say philosophy is about establishing consensus, for one does not have to agree with Heidegger over being for being to exist. Philosophy does not look to establish a general agreement. If philosophy cannot be incommensurable, then this means that incommensurability is more of an aesthetic category, hidden by the origin of the word in measurement, but revealed by the more modern addition of the idea of judgement. Judgement involves taste of course and taste, as Kant details it, is the origin of the idea of “art” necessary for the rise of the professional critic (see Agamben here). Criticism therefore is a commensurate discipline.

Yet since the 1970s at least, the discourse of discipline, what is often called literary “theory” has been based on profoundly incommensurable values themselves originating in philosophy. While philosophical discourse cannot itself be incommensurable, it would seem that philosophical thought can be dominated by the desire for the incommensurable typifying one key strand of modernity. Probably the strongest incommensurable concept for criticism has been the unconscious. The unconscious is the most incommensurable of incommensurabilities. It cannot be measured because it exceeds the conscious discipline of measurement. Indeed if it is true that the unconscious knows nothing of negation, then it is an illimitable field of energies that cannot be pegged out and noted down. Nor can it be judged, or to put it another way, it is always already judged as being inadmissible in the super-ego’s court and so it can never enter into the institutions of judgement.

Gender theory and post-colonial theory also both rely in their more radical forms on incommensurability. Remember incommensurability is not the same as conflict nor exacyly equivalent to alterity either. It refers to the inability to judge according to the same standards, suggesting a double standard in play. It is the double standard of patriarchy and imperialism that first allowed us access to their potential deconstruction. More than this both disciplines struggle with the aporia of judgement, to be judged fairly according to the same standard (to become commensurable within the system) or to be judged according to the standards of a whole other tribunal (to remain radically outside the integration into the system). To be or not to be (in)commensurable, that is a question still to be answered.

As to whether Marxism is incommensurable or simply conflictual, this is a harder issue to resolve for in the end we are all commensurable by capitalism, even and especially Marxism itself. Materialism makes everything commensurable, consumerism especially so in that every object is commensurable with its equivalent in a system of exchange. If nothing can be considered external to this, then nothing can be incommensurable. I would say of all the literary “theories” Marxism is the one that struggled most simply because it had no use for incommensurability.

Which leaves deconstruction whose dependence on incommensurability should not blind us to its complex relationship with the commensurability of thought and language. It is true enough to note that deconstruction simply indicates the incommensurability of a concept within the very field where said concept has been measured and adjudged to be commensurable against a set of standards embodied in the text itself. What does the philosophical text do but make a concept commensurable at the same time as it broaches the concept? Text that does not serve this purpose is excessive to the trial, cannot be measured against the standard of other philosophical texts, and thus is incommensurable. With this in mind, all of Derrida’s work is incommensurable. Or is it? For indeed all Derrida does is measure a text against its own standards of quantity and quality (measurement and judgement), and find it wanting. So that while the result of deconstruction is that Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger are all found to be incommensurable philosophically, deconstruction itself is perhaps the most commensurable philosophical system of all, in that it is measurable against the same standards as the text in question because all of its categories come from those standards. Deconstruction is profoundly standardised within the singularity of its moment, yet radically non-standardised and this incommensurable outside of its singularity. This is indeed what singularity marks out, an total incommensurability of the moment of something’s inception.

Some other commensurable elements of what we might call “pop deconstruction” might be its reduction of texts to standards of blindness, presence, truth, speech, centres: the whole chocolate-box of western metaphysics. Logocentrism is a gesture towards commensurability after all. Yet like the avant-gardism which is, I believe, a central part not only of deconstruction but all “French” theory, the aim of deconstruction is not to judge according to different, new, or otherwise better standards, but to question the very idea of standardisation through measurment and judgement. As such, it is in fact much more successful than surrealism or futurism in problematising the very conditions of commensurability. Yet in the end, irrespective of the philosophy, the act of literary criticism always seems to come down to a basic commensurability founded on a classic consensus. To explain the text, to read it for explanation, that’s what we do. We respond to the injunction explain that the always present incommensurability of the poem presents, and we reduce the incommensurability of the poem’s linguistic otherness, to the commensurability of philosophical discourse.

Standards

Incommensurability, not the same as conflictual nor immediately synonymous with other too, it denotes that the object in play, in question, under scrutiny, on trial, being read, is not measurable by the same standard. It denotes so many issues that are central to the study of literature, and more widely the very idea of literature, in this ever so long twentieth century (eleven decades and counting). Of course the neutral sense of the word is that this poem is not measurable by the same standards as that poem, this apple cannot be judged equal in a competition to find the sweetest orange. Only, within the field of the poem, say, this can never be a neutral statement. It is not, after all, that there are simply a number of different agencies or institutions who simply have different ‘standards’ as to what constitutes the poem. Or there are, but the status a regards the power and influence of these institutions is not equal meaning that in the end incommensurability has come to mean not simply measured by a different set of standards, but not measurable against a certain set of values that have come to be the standard. Incommensurability therefore both speaks to the fact that different entities can be judged according to different standards but is that true. Say we take poetry as the thing we want to judge or measure, and of course these are by no means equitable processes, judging and measuring. Surely if they are related then measuring comes before judging, judging existing only by virtue of first measuring. Yes, poetry, can there be different ‘poetries’ as it is sometimes written by members of the postmodern avant-garde, each to be measured against a different, one would preume, their own self-defined standards? Not really, for poetry is a category of thought just as surely as being or knowledge are. It is not a free-floating signifier. If one is judging poetry, irrespective of what kind of poetry (are there indeed different kinds?) one has already pre-judged it according to the aesthetic categorisations that have been in place since Kant. It is poetry that you are measuring, in advance, poetry, and while you may have different ideas about say what poetry is or should do, the very fact that we can speak of it as poetry belies tha fact that as soon as it is named, the thing to be measured, has already been judged. Thus are there or can there ever be incommensuable poetries? Or is it not the case that there is a poetry which is incommensurable and so, by definition, not poetry at all, or not measurable as such. Or is it more radical a problem than that, that it is not poetry and its incommesurablilites that we are adjucidating over, but the very incommensurability of poetry itself. Poetry, not measurable by the same standards of all other categories, not measurable because it does not succumb to delimitation and measurement. Yet this doesn’t sound right does it, because that’s what we do with poetry after all, first we measure it, and then we judge it.

serialkiller 4.3

2007-12-02T08:45:00.000Z

That one went deep down didn’t it? Did you feel it go deep down? Here’s a question for you: considering all that I have been through, a father who hated my guts and pummelled them for all he was worth, that whore of a mother, that slut, after she decided to sling her hook, or he did, the way I tell it sometimes, other times no, the way the world was set against me from the beginning of time, this body, this useless cock attached like a leech to my groin, drinking its fill of my blood and then, having gorged itself, puking back all that goo into me and lying there for days, years even, limp and less than useless, the way they treated me both home and abroad (and don’t think the army was any better, my so-called family, ‘cos it was worse), how I was born to be brilliant only to find I was just like all the rest, worse than the rest, and the time that that woman looked at me on the bus and muttered something under her breath and I didn’t hear what she said but her intentions were clear enough and something finally broke inside of me, the last golden rung before I had to plunge, the vile shape of clouds as they scudded past a tumescent moon on the night before my disastrous wedding and three months later she got an annulment saying we had not con-sum-ma-ted our union and was I too blame if the sight of her, er, white, plucked flesh made my stomach churn, and so on and so forth I don’t want to bore you with all the sad and sorry details I mean I am a sadist but even I have my limits, there’s nothing more boring than the story of a life, yes, considering all of that and lots more besides that you can guess at, I mean we are both intelligent human beings I don’t have to spell it all out for you do I, so considering all that I have told you, do you blame me?

Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?

What, not dead yet? You’re a feisty one aren’t you? Do you think you can hold on until the ambulance comes? No? Hardly matters now does it? Would I be so stupid as to call an ambulance? What do you take me for?

What, can’t you take a joke? What’s wrong with women today? (Oh I know this, the answer’s men isn’t it?) Do you have to make such a big deal out of everything? Do you fear men or envy us? Must you keep making that noise? Do you think I am going to clear that up? You imagine that begging is going to make any difference? Well that was uncalled for don’t you think? Is there ever any call for that kind of language? I think we had both better go our separate ways from now on don’t you? Will we come to forgive each other in time I wonder? What becomes of the broken hearted? Will death become you or will you become death? How many fucking shitty roads does a man have to take?

Does this still count as communicative action?

I mean, I ask you, in being so close to the end of it all, will you ever be so truly alive again or were you ever before? Can’t you just accept that I am doing you a favour? Did I introduce you to my skewers yet? You can’t take any more? Are you sure? You are not telling me porkies are you sweetmeat?

Where were we?

Who? What? How? When? Why?

Eh? Huh? Wha? Eh? Wh?

Can I ask you a question?

Am I supposed to have all the answers? Did you ever reason that the number of answers is limited directly by the quantity, frequency and sequence of questions? Without a question what is an answer after all but a statement, an assertion, a mad ejaculation of the brain the no one can take seriously?

Who can bear the scent of those white roses?

Hey there, sleepy head, are you dead yet? Damned if you do damned if you don’t if you see what I mean? Well?

And a question without an answer what’s that, a puzzle, an enigma, a good place to start a journey of discovery? Is that what they mean by philosophy?

And the musk of wild jasmine in the dusky woods?

May I make an interjection? / Time for one last question?
Aren’t you someone’s long lost daughter?

From "Lines out of Space"

2007-11-17T09:13:00.000Z

how was your day?

now darker I wrote this later
[leave space up top for cataphoric reiteration] such is the gamble
throw what if the saying of it can’t fill this obscure whiteness? inexhaustible streaming whose source whomsoever stakes a claim mist shrouds the brow call it a hill if you will but brow still stands black birds peck roads this was, at the finish, what we all agreed on having seen if it was made up I didn’t make it up but I made you up
one animal’s sharp cry “ ” somehow delimits this shapeless grey occasioning of the passable irrevocable day so they say anyway best thing is to deny having anything to do with it that way your arse is covered either way if anyone asks thrown down the paged reconstruction hollow soled boots on the wooden platform everything is meaningful in that it happened now much lighter I wrote this earlier real writers probably feel the tool-heft asks “do you know the name of these flowers?” furrowed is a word, double letter score the pattern that is made by your current of associations less a way of thinking than mental disappropriation it was an effect I went looking for actively back there first light on honey soft nearly time to put the dinner on somewhere an owl not invisible only held from view by its will if the phone rings tell them I’ll call them back let me pick up where you left off I say “think the
unthinkable, because it’s unthinkable not
“to try”

serialkiller 4.2

2007-11-17T09:07:00.000Z

Weren’t expecting that were you you smug bitch? Oh, did I hurt you? Forgive me? I think it would help me if you could forgive me, I mean psychologically, could you do that for me?
What was that? Did you hear a noise? Can you keep quiet for a second? I asked you did, you hear a noise? Well? Will you stop your fucking mewling for just one second…?

“Can you feel it? Does it hurt? Is this too soft? Do you like it? Do you like this? Is this how you like it?”

Can innocence survive interrogation? Are you to be held to what you admit to under duress? Is violence inherent to our curiosities? Why even ask if you cannot hold credence to the answer? If there is a question of the question, what is the answer to the answer?

Where were we? Did you see my, oh is that it? Where were we?

Why? Why you? Why did I choose you? You chose me wasn’t that how it went? Wasn’t it you chose me with those big eyes of yours and those, those lips?

Do you mind me staring at your body? Some of the others seemed to mind but you hardly batted an eyelid did you? You probably think you are better than me is that it? Do you think that? Why, why not, because these are just words aren’t they? Do you remember what they used to say at school, sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me? Know what thought did? Can you kill with a word? Words never tell the whole story do they? Is that why I prefer, er, numbers?

Does it seem to you that this is the first time I have done something like this? No? Do you reckon you are the first? Think that makes you special?

Why? Why don’t you love me? You are not loving me yet are you? Can you not just admit the truth for once?

Were you bullied at school? Do I look like someone who was bullied? Well, do I? Can you not just answer a simple question for once in your life?

Oh I bet your husband loves it when you do that? Bet you say that to all the guys don’t you you bitch? You think you are something, you really do don’t you?

Where now? Who now? When now?

Is his misogyny the result of the forms we choose or are the forms present because he hates those cunts?

Oops, did you fall asleep there? Did you just drop off? Forty winks was it? Was I gone long? Or was I long gone? Did you miss me? Will the bitterness never cease? Are you to be the last, my crowning glory? Why must I be a teenager in love? Why do fools fall in love? Do they have any choice? Do any of us? Why has it come to this? Why me above all the others? Why did I have to suffer when you had happiness? Why did she say that to me? She was trying to hurt me wasn’t she? Couldn’t she have just said so then if that was the case? What was that? Does it hurt? Is it too tight? Is that better? Oh, playing hard to get is it? Why would she not just let me, y’know, be who I was? Is it possible that she hated me before I was even born? Is that some kind of explanation? Am I grasping at straws? Will I ever rid myself of the yellow stench of urine? Will the hatred never end? Do you think me a bad man? Do you loathe me or merely despise me? Are you lying to me, lying like all the rest? What time is it? Given the choice of this mayonnaise and the name brand, which would you ordinarily purchase? Who will you vote for come next Thursday? Ask yourself this question, do you want…?

Huh?

Do you think if I could help you by answering all your questions that would somehow make things right between us? Surely you must have guessed that something was wrong between us? Have you been happy these past months? Think I could be happy seeing you so unhappy? Don’t you realise that if I could have done something to fix the situation I would have done it, done anything, said anything to fix things? Why are you looking at me like that? You haven’t understood a word I have been saying have you? Would you like my knife in you?
Cup of tea dear?

How’s that? Isn’t that better? It’s a relief in the end isn’t it? Now I couldn’t let you go free could I? How else was it to end but this way? Nothing to say for yourself? Cat got your tongue? Oh she’s just shy, are you one of those shy ones? This is all a bit one-way traffic isn’t it?

This must feel a bit like an interrogation, does it feel like I am interrogating you? I bet you’ve never been questioned by the police have you? Questions can be violent can they not? I ask a lot of questions don’t I? Too many? Who are you to judge right? Again? Perhaps that’s the point? What’s that they say, ask and you will receive? Will you give it all to me now please?

Teaching Experimental Postmodern Poetics

2007-11-17T08:49:00.000Z

While is is fairly easy to the my students to understand that postmodern poetry is a form of critique of normative poetic strategies of the 20th century, often I find that, in an odd way, they don't necessarily see such strategies as normative. They are not normal for them in that way that for most normal people poetry is totally abnormal. I am them left with the need to teach them what normal is so they can see why Ashbery is not normal. Anyway, here is one way I do it. I usually illustrate first with a poem by Heaney, "Digging" "Death of a Naturalist" something horribly late-Romantic. Then get them to read some O'Hara and Ashbery. It always works.

Normative poetry is called variously traditional, realist, late-Romantic, free-verse or voice poetics

Elements of The traditional poem:
Titular Law: the title announces the meaning
Formal regularity and coherence
Thematic coherence
Significant Lineation (rhyme or strong enjambment)
Coherence (narrative, logic, syllogism, end lines)
Move from the particular to universal: e.g. Heaney’s “Digging” from digging to creativity as such
Finitude: poems ends significantly

Within which one finds such things as:
Metaphor
Referential certainty
Transparency
Absorption
Expressiveness
Voice
Depth
Subjective certainty
Humanism

Origins:
Romanticism: recollection in tranquillity, alienated poet, wanders in a landscape, encounters an event, recalls it later, poetry forms bridge between the event as such and wider significance for all (to see into the life of things) [cf. Daffodils]

Free Verse Poetics: spontaneity, open form, apparently artless, reliance on the voice as authentic, tends to ‘lineated prose’, seems to renounce constraint in favour of expression (no ideas but in things vs confessionalism)

Modernism: the eternally transient, poeticisation of the word, new-realism, disjuncture as realism, myth, objective correlative, imagism

Cultural Presuppositions about poetry:
Prosody is dead
Motivation is essential
Organic form is still the ideal
Poetry versus prose, that these are somehow now mutually exclusive
Poetry Makes nothing happen
Poetry performs the truth that philosophy seeks re: singularity of being
Every word counts

serialkiller 4.1

2007-11-11T12:02:00.000Z

Can “you” hear “me”?

Do you know where you are? Can you, er, remember?

Something happened did it not? You remember something happening? Do you recognise me? Know who I am? Can you nod if you do? Can you hear what I am saying? Do you understand what is happening to you? Do you can you do?

We were in the car-park? I asked you for, directions? You were in a hurry, didn’t want to be bothered did you? Couldn’t wait to be shut of me wasn’t it? What, do I stink or something? Or do we all disgust you?

And then what happened? Something you didn’t expect transpired didn’t it? D’you like that, transpired? That’s right it’s all coming back now is it not? Bet you weren’t quite expecting me to do that were you? Wait, am I losing you? You’re not going to pass out on me again are you? Are you? Are you? Bet you weren’t expecting ME were you? I’m a thing of beauty aren’t I, a piece of work? Do you find me, somehow, unexpected?

*****

That brought you round a bit sharpish didn’t it? Smells rank doesn’t it? Now, where were we? Do you know who I am? Know where you are? Do you know how long you have been here? Do you know what is going to happen next? Will you wait for me while I get my things? These ropes are not too tight are they? That better? I am not such a monster after all am I? We’ll see about that won’t we?

Are questions always precursors to answers?

What?

What? You think that after we trundled this far along the track I am going to just let you go? What? What does that look mean? Think I don’t know what it means? You think I am as stupid as I, er, look? That this isn’t a practised face, a composed look? What?

What do you want from me? Why have you brought me here?

How do you think we got to this point? If I were to loosen the gag a little more would you do me a favour and tell me a story, our story? Isn’t every story a love story of sorts? Isn’t that nice? Don’t you think that’s nice? I like nice things don’t you? It feels good to have nice things around you doesn’t it? Is it likely, looking at me, and the way I have behaved so far, that I was raised in a home with nice things around me? Eh?

What’s the matter starer bearer got your eyes full? Did you used to say that, when you were, whassname, kids?

It’s enough these days to end with the voice rising up in intonation to turn a statement into a question?

One thing in the vicinity of another, in its thrall, alive only because of what enslaves it, a vibration of inequality between them, the rousing of the pulse, a switching or spin, an absence in play only because of a presence, a presence impressed on the soft medium only because of the absence, her absence, his absence? Their absence?

*****

Do you smoke? No? Mind if I do? That’s rich isn’t it me asking you for permission? Is it a case of the pot calling the kettle back? Is it right that someone like myself should have to ask someone such as yourself, a weak person, a woman who is noisome, who bleeds and leaks like a stuck pig or, or a rusty old bucket, whose snatch is nothing but a rusty old bucket stuffed with rotting fish and, and gunk, no tell me is it right, I am speaking here of right and wrong and also of my rights, as a human, as a man, is it CORRECT, that I have to ask you for permission to do whatever it is that I have got to do, and believe me sweetheart a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta, in this day and age, considering all I have gone through to get here, journeys you couldn’t comprehend, forests that would turn your pretty hair white and make you wet those lacy knickers I just know you put on for me, or somebody just like me, and gook, only there is no one like me, I’m unique, don’t worry you’ll get a sample of that soon enough, no is it right, I mean do you think so? No? Yeah?

Don’t say much do you?

What’s the capital of Peru? What’s the matter darling, don’t you want to die? What’s two plus two? You pretty ones are as dumb as they come aren’t you? If it takes two men three days to dig four ditches, how many minutes do you have left until I gut you with this rusty scythe? Wanna know the story of this scythe? How my Da took it one day to the pregnant belly of my Ma?

Were you born in a hospital? Do you have kids of your own? You do? How many? Well isn’t that nice? Husband, house, car, job, holidays, friends, clothes for special occasions, a reliable broadband connection, education, parents, hopes and dreams? A cube, in a bag, of fragrant musk?

Pop quiz: will any of the above help you now? You don’t think I am serious do you? Do you think I would go this far with you, give you my valuable time, and not take it to the next level? Can you guess what I am going to do next?

Bernstein, "The Klupzy Girl"

2007-11-10T20:43:00.000Z

This crib is based on my lecture and seminar notes for teaching this poen to students who have little or no experience of experimental poetry

Like in Koch’s “A Time Zone” poem seems to take place on a bus as poet travels to Boston,probably from New York (3 hour journey)

Opening 20 or so lines are a series of statements to do with modes of expression: poetry, parables, deciphering, protest, alibis, telepathy, epistles, phrasemongering, evocation, explanations, glossing

Self-referentiality: regularly calls attention to the experience of reading the poem or poetry itself: poetry is like a swoon, his parables, not gymnastic: pyrotechnic, perfume scented, enacting, thoughtlessly, glossings of reality seemed like stretching it to cover ground

Techniques: lineation at odds with sentences, gaps between sentences result not in narrative or cohesion but confusion, cohesion instead comes from association, repetition, randomness and self-referentiality; good deal of caesura use or interruptions within the lines

Cohesion versus disjuncture, poetry and prose: Next long section juxtaposes a coherent narrative of someone leaving work with 20 or so profoundly fragmented, disjunctive phrases. Here incoherence now exists in the sentence not between them.

Materiality of the Signifier: next section deals with the material conditions of poetry production: to stroll on the beach is to be in the company of a wage-earner, to command a view of it from a vantage point, ruthlessness, when you stop acting in good faith. Here traditional poetic tropes (beaches and mountains) are inscribed in financial or power structures

Back to work: It seems the person leaving work may have been fired due to these mysterious calls!

Civilisation: towards the poem’s end the poet considers the relation between civilazation and barbarism.

Bus crash: Car smashed into; camera stolen; get off in Boston and everything seems to go crazy
Final 7 lines: inconclusive and suggestive, like only half of each line is present: “Fog commends in discourse” takes us back to the swoon or fog of consciousness

serialkiller 3.2

2007-11-10T08:29:00.000Z

That was several months ago. Just checking.

It takes around three hours to drive from Riley Avenue, High Lane, Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent, to Acton Town, London. M6—M5—M42—M40, that’s the way I usually go, what about you? Text me on 610TWAT.

During that time I thought about it, oh you bet that I thought about it. The connections and coincidences and all that jazz. There was much I knew that my brother didn’t and at that point I saw no need to tell him the rest. He was a family man. He had better not get involved in the adventures of the free.

This is what I had got at that time. The first body was found in the middle of a newish housing development in what used to be Middleport. I say used to be, the name remains but the long straps of twouptwodown terraces that slanted down a typical stokehill to the canalside were all demolished twenty or so years ago.

Including that of my Nana Beckett’s, neé Foster, in which I lived for the first few months of my life. A connection therefore.

They couldn’t quite work out why the killer had taken the effort to lug the already dead girl up onto the roof of the garage like that. She was murdered nearby. They found her purse. Putting all at risk. By they I mean the local constabulary and I admit to having felt a slight thrill when I went down there and quickly realised what he was up to, the tinker. You see I lied. I left my brother’s house and drove straight to Middleport with an old map I had acquired from a council factotum showing the original street plan. The garage was located plumb in the centre of my Nan’s back kitchen.

The second fell at Biltons four and a half years later, her foot only grazing our lives. Her shoe. A coincidence: such patience he had. I was not, you see officer, in hunt of a plot, but merely filling the dead hours of mechanised perambulation, the grinding functionality they call Drivetime—font it up.

Spectral presences is all. How the lives of two young women, both prostitutes working out of Cobridge next to the park that had been the endpoint of a city wide treasure hunt organised by the police one summer in which I had gleefully participated but sadly did not win, had come into my line of vision. Only the windscreen was misty and smudged, and the heavy rain obstructing, and they dashed past or lurked on the peripheries, or were lost in a crowd, and the sun was low in the sky before me, and the night as dark as dark is, soap in them, a mote as bigasaplank in my glaucous eye.

No sooner had I sensed their existence than wallop, they were gone. Gone from life in violence, like Father Roger stabbed at ninety. That’s how I’d like to go.

As I shifted lanes to keep awake, it was 830pm, knowing better than to risk the local radio stations of the black country, I tried to quantify the presence of these two poor girls, to recuperate for them something of their lives. Literature redeems lost time, amongst other things, for example a three-hour check-in for a city-break to Tallinn. I attempted to somehow mourn them, but how do you mourn those you never knew? Was it even right to try?

A lorry from beyond the grave flashed me as I cut it up.

I was only asking.

Two butterflies jerk amidst my spotless sheets.

Mill Dale, Dove Dale, Manifold Valley.

From the back bedroom window of my parent’s house, the Roaches rise up against the horizon then are gradually obliterated as the houses go up over the years.

How we drift between channels. That rare encounter. Hard as it was to admit it, from nowhere the killer had brought his victims into my zone. In killing them he had made them live for me. That’s a gift that’s what that is. There was no doubt from the offing that it was the same man both times. Complicity told me so. And why? Because they both happened to be related to the first two places—not counting Port Harcourt, Nigeria, West Africa in between—that I had lived in. Plot it muthafucka, plot it out. And thus encouraged that’s what I did.
I could see what was happening. Today three massive explosions ripped through the holiday resort of Sharm-al-Sheikh, over sixty were killed, two British tourists amongst them. What it is is a basic, understandable, but often lamentable human truth: if it has something to do with you, it is of much greater importance, irrespective of the quantum or magnitude. Connectivity, the word of our age. Getting connected has hastened the disconnected, atomised wander around the park thrice times vicar that is the gleaming simulacra of life these days in the digital gloaming whatever the fuck that is. I let my thoughts, thus untutored, loose.

I was having none of it. They had died where I had lived but I had lived my whole life not just those first sixteen years. Two out of twenty one, in the end it was not bad going. I would really like to see the stats related to that.

Once past Birmingham, of course, I felt a lot better.

Subsequently many units of measured time passed, but I kept a file. Why? How to say, I keep files on lots of things. Let’s say I was making notes, accumulating material for a novel or somesuch. You see, officer, I too was once, like yourself, a young man, with dreams of becoming an artist.

Sorry, young woman. Of course, I can see that now.

serialkiller 3.1

2007-10-30T15:41:00.000Z

In the compromised before, me and me brother were standing, like men do, in the back yard of our family home on Riley Avenue, which he now owns, staring at an oblong of shaggy grass. Around the lawn, where there used to be gnarled privet behind which I would crawl as a kid, pretending they were the complex, intertwining plots from the great works of our fantasy authors, was a fence. In the middle of the oblong was a smaller ob-long of blue and white police tape, gyring in the wind.

DO NOT CROSS.
(hard to resist that)

The area taped off was small, its width the same ratio to the larger segment of lawn as the larger segment (of lawn) had to the smaller segment. The grass, within, unremarkable. What is it with grass? Before you ask, too small for a body or even a severed limb. Even a child’s. Perhaps a toddler’s left leg with the foot pulled-off might, at a push.

“It was a woman’s shoe.” My brother said.
“Just a shoe?”
“Yeah.”
“No foot inside?”
“No, no foot. Just a shoe.”
“That’s a relief.”
“I dunno why, I called I called the coppers just in case. Turns out it was hers.”

He taps the tabloid I am holding, the front page, news printed on that. A prostitute found asphyxiated with the cord of an iron whose shoe was left resting on her check. The iron switched on, it was the smell of burning meat that alerted the neighbours. The body otherwise untouched and fully dressed, except for one shoe. I looked at the date of the paper. Nearly seven years ago.

“Where did you get this from?” I asked handing the paper back because I no longer felt happy holding it.

“Julie collects murder memorabilia. She had it tucked away in a file somewhere. Surprised you don’t remember it. It was pretty big at the time.”

Ah yes, my threadbare memory. Don’t you remember, they all ask. I’ve been busy, I would reply.

“Here for hours they were, forensics and that. Dunno if they found ‘owt.”
“How long before you can take the tape away?”
“Anytime. Left it there ‘cos the kids like it.”

I looked at the box, which had held a shoe, in the middle of the larger green box that had been a child’s arena. Square wheels within wheels. By definition the past must be broached by cliché. Overcast the sky was dead as usual, Stoke-upon-the-stagnating-Trent. A slight rain slanting on the moors to the north, moving south, turning the air milky, heading our way across the landscaped slag heaps and drained marshland. Where I used to wander like a breeze is now a mix of “Nature Reserves” and cash and carries, and cash.

“Best get going.” I said.
“So soon?” The old question, ignored.
“Odd though isn’t it? Why her shoe here, and why now after all this time?”
“It’s a funny thing. He did her in miles away in the car park of Biltons pot bank. Why he came all the way out here to chuck away a shoe is anyone’s guess. The other shoe was on her foot when they found her. No other bits of clothing were missing.”

He was recounting what he had picked up from the article, trying to piece it together, to fit the shoe to that now noisome foot.

“What do you think?” I asked as I loaded up the boot of the car.
“Well, Police said maybe it was a signal of some sort. You know, I’m still here, catch me if you can. They asked me a few questions, actually. Thought I might have something to do with it.”
I looked at my brother. He raised an eyebrow. A gesture I envied.
“I was at Mum and Dad’s.” He said.
“Seven years ago and you remember that?”
“It was Mum’s birthday, we had a party. You were there too.”
“Just checking.” Then, thinking it through. “I was there?”
“Yeah, amazingly you were.”

A little dig to send me on my way.

“Well,” I said, easing in behind the wheel the way one does at such moments. “That lets me off the hook as well.”

Door slams. I pull away at speed. Quite the exit.

Charles Bernstein, Introduction

2007-10-25T17:17:00.000+01:00

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic

His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others.

Bernstein on absorption:
“By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing
completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...:
belief, conviction, silence.
Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom,
exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction,
digression, interruptive, transgressive,
undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured,
fragmented...: skepticism
doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29.

Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible

Through the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Centre he is advocate of electronic poetics

Through his theoretical work he has advocated voice-based, performative work

In the variety of his collections he explores all areas of page-based work

Through his involvement with PennSounds he is also an archivist of performed verse for the future

"Thank you for saying thank you" (Girly Man)

Postmodernism has been typified by an incredulity towards metanarratives which, in Language poetry means the cultural norms of language, art and poetry

In “Thank You...” Bernstein lists these presuppositions about what a poet should do

At the same time the poem is a commentary on the poem which is (permanently) absent from the collection

Through his ironic celebration of free-verse, expressive poetics he of course gives us a primer in all that is limiting about such mainstream poetics and, by negation, what a postmodern experimentalism should be concerned with:

Accessibility through linguistic transparency vs obscurity, difficulty, alienation techniques

Anti-intellectualism in favour of emotional expression

Stability of the subject who speaks (lyrical ego) with the intention to communicate authentically undermined by radical questioning of subjectivity to be found across post-structural and psychoanalytical thought

Shared values of humanism, subsequently questioned and negated say in the debates between Lyotard and Derrida on the one hand, Habermas and Rorty on the other

The importance of craft (as if poetry were indeed a badly drawn bed cf Plato's Republic Bk X)

Direct communication with an implied readership that will forgive racism in great art (no comment needed)

It says what it is, it is real. The desire for reality at the expense of the real being, in some measure, the definition of the age of the modern reformation as Badiou calls it which we live through today. Denial of the real, in forms that pathetically mime it. Maybe Plato was right, certainly most poets ought to be expelled from the city.

serialkiller 2.3

2007-10-25T17:07:00.000+01:00

Car parks, lay bys and loading bays; unloved interim places that too have their poetry.

Looking at the scratch on the back of her hand. Where had she caught it? She was always doing that.

Her bags were getting heavy now but our subject didn’t want to put them on the dampened ground.

Nothing was happening.
Marked out it was becoming always something.

Skittering sound of her hurrying heels on the tarmac as she made her way around the flooded areas she could see. Movement towards her objective across the open expanse. The disc of each light left a black emptiness between it and its neighbour, calculated, using some algorithm the council had got first from the States, then modelled using software that cost more than her annual wage. Optimum gap for energy efficiency versus sense of safety. But didn’t the lights only make the dark more, erm, foreboding? Fear too was factored in as an approximation.

The same process applied to everything here. The size of the car park, width of the bays, direction of the traffic flow. Planning, architects’ drawings, permissions, modifications, solicitors, local residents’ groups, inquiry. Lists, taxonomies, catalogues, roll calls, more lists.

Shit. Her left foot dipped into a hidden round of rain. Stops being rain as soon as it hits the ground. Yes, contact always alters nomenclature, where had she read that, in a Christmas cracker?

She didn’t hear the car at first. It was moving slowly and in darkness. Like we all are. No lights on it came slowly up behind her as she was concentrating on keeping her feet dry. The brain screens things out until they are necessary. Yet another agency she had given up control to, which then tragically let her down. What wasn’t there before now was very much a presence by her side and the sleeping homunculus in her preconscious finally awoke and hit the button.
Dodging to one side away from the thing she hadn’t actually seen and stumbled. One of her bags dropped and the skirt inside slid from the shiny sheath and onto the wet ground. She fell to the side, collapsing like a box under pressure. Her hand went out and she steadied herself against some post or other. It felt clammy, the painted surface not smooth but dimpled to deter graffiti. Her knee set down on the ground, and part of her thigh. The bone of her ankle felt the bite of three specks of gravel.

Now she saw it, another SUV with the lights off or the same one? Couldn’t, in panic, tell. Tinted windows. Y’know, a killing car. It hovered just ahead of her, looking threatening as the rain bounced from its seamless carapace. She took note of its licence, information that would prove useless. Anyway she forgot it.

The steam of the exhaust dissolving in the instant. Those small droplets that issue forth then drip at irregular intervals of seconds 1, 1, 3, 5... The pulse of the engine as it ticks over in rest 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0…

“Yeah, what do you want?” She shouted, getting to her feet, gathering up the skirt with one swift movement of the arm and wrist. Now she was smoothing down her clothes, checking her bare skin for, what do they call them on TV, contusions. That’s right, she checked for serious contusions. “And try putting your lights on you wanker!”

Which they did. Still waiting there, now with the brake lights glowing red. Their reflection on her face most cinematic.

Had forgotten her umbrella in St*rb*cks earlier in the day.

The passenger side door cracked open and she thought she saw a woman’s shoe, the tip of one. Nothing else occurred for an allotted period time. Then into first gear and the machine moved away, shifting rapidly into second and screeching around the corner that took them past the petrol station and out onto the road which ran past the racecourse. They had lives which were not her own. May God forgive them.

She was shaken. Nothing had transpired per se. Her hands trembled and she hurried now, ignoring all puddles, to get to the car, get into the car, get the car running, get out of this place, roll down the hill and make it to her flat before her hair would even begin to dry and do that frizzy thing. Then towels, wine, phone calls and unpacking. Turn on the TV / fall asleep on the couch. This was the ending she was pushing for, the one we were also rooting for now that we had got to know her a little bit and, I hope, come to like her. She is not so bad.

Struggling with the four bags and her oversized handbag, this season’s mistake, she took out the keys. They were easy to find, she’s neat remember?

Then she heard it, shoes on gravel.

She put the key in the lock and with a whir the whole metal box was accessible.

Then she heard it, rustle in box hedging to her right.

Threw in her bags, slid in after them. Got the key in the ignition, flicked the child lock on, turned the key and the car started as if there was a Jesus. She missed Chris but she knew he would never love her.

Then she smelt it, a sour chemical waft inside the car. Not coming in from the outside. Actually in the vehicle. In the fucking car. The actual car. Inside it.

She raised her hand. Hard to say now why.

“But…”

Charles Bernstein and Language Poetics

2007-10-22T12:25:00.000+01:00

Have been teaching Bernstein for some years now and last year included him on my MA in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Brunel University, West London. Thought I would post these notes as a general introduction to Charles' work. This begins in a very rudimentary style desgined for all kinds of students who have not encountered Bernstein of Language poetries before.

1. Context: Introduction to Language poetics

So-called Language poetry emerged in 70s West and East Coast USA around journal This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

I was ostensibly reacting to the predominant free verse, confessional mode of English language poetry to be found across the US and UK poetry scenes

As a group it looked to build on the formally innovative and socially concerned poetry of American modernism

Picking up on the postmodern innovations of New York School poetry, the groups however had a political edge

Founder poet Bon Perelman defines the Language programme as the following:

“breaking the automatism of the poetic “I” and its naturalized voice; foregrounding textuality and formal devices; using or alluding to Marxist or poststructuralist theory in order to be open to the present and to critique change” (Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry 13)

An early central theoretical concern of language poets was: the materiality of the signifier, that language is physical material not just a medium to express ideas or describe the world “out there”

Additionally that language is subject to the material conditions of everyday life like any other object in capitalism, thus assumptions about writing are all ideological in origin.

Their confrontational, often unreadable, poetry tries to demonstrate the materiality of the signifier and undermine the ideologies of naturalised signification.

Bernstein is the leading voice of this project which Watten has encapsulated in his comments on the two founding journals of the movement, This and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

The deictic This refers to things quiddity, there this-ness, namely for Marxist inflected aesthetics their ideological context.

In contrast the awkward articulation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E reveals the materiality of all language, or that it is made up of phonetic and graphematic matter.

Taken together these two positions encapsulate all that is enduring, controversial and aporetic as regards the conception of the materiality of the signifier.

serialkiller 2.2

2007-10-21T09:43:00.000+01:00

Don’t ask what she was doing here at this time. She had no satisfactory answer for that. No more do I. It was never fully understood. In a dream she had it panned out otherwise.

Have you ever noticed that wherever you go in this great nation, at whatever time of the night or night, there are always a few cars left behind in each car park? Why is that? Are they abandoned? Perhaps they’re dogging, whatever that is. Why not ask your MP? It seemed to her that there was a group of nightdrivers going about their dark business while the rest of us were sleeping. These chaps were negatives of ourselves working opposite coloured jobs and chasing other-coloured dreams. Like the cars left behind in every station car park after the train crash, each one become a mausoleum by dawn, glass misted over.

A fireball tore through the first three carriages.

These symbols of the advancement of will over nature come back to haunt each and every one of us when we realise that we are all animals just the same.

Falling first one way, left to right, almost horizontal in the wind, then switching with a spiralling motion, right to left, then almost as soon as it has, switching back again. Some rain. A glitch in the system, if rain is a system. She tried to look at it, get the rain into a frame and break it down into sections that she could then interrelate in such a way as to spot pattern or structure. For a moment she thought she had it, but then a movement in her peripheral vision distracted her and it was gone. Was there someone? You can see the weather but you can never truly look at it, not without its alterations becoming more than any one of us down here can bear.

Who was that, a security guard at the end of their shift? They stand there all day, then they go home, it’s enough to.

Down the hill, close to her Micra, four orange lights blinked twice revealing the corners of a large people carrier or SUV depending on where you crouch when you read this. An incomplete picture, but enough to conjure up the full image of the machine. Visual shorthand to rowdy up perception. She couldn’t see anyone standing by the car and so we cannot see anyone standing by the car. Waited for them to emerge from the dark giving her proof of life and its goodness along with permission to head there into the harsh arena like an antelope breaking across Predation Plains Wisc..

Company remains a comfort irrespective of the circumstance.

These immobilisers are now of such range as to make cars seem autonomous of their owners, coming to life or waking up of their own accord like any hulking animal at rest by the curb suddenly might. Scent of prey, perhaps, stirring the cells.

The owner stayed away. Where could they be anyway? Down there there was nothing only box-hedging and a single serpentine path that led under the railway lines and down, eventually, into the estate.

Maybe it was a fault. Gremlins in the gem module. Happens all the time. Happens every day. Every soddin’ day. All the same she held back a few minutes longer, but why say that, the air becoming chill as sheets of rain blew under the awning’s overhang. Some presentiment dragging on her inevitable advance. Droplets glistened on the chrome trolleys, huddled together like herding animals such as you have probably seen on television more than once. Water on metal, there is nothing more cold. She stepped back a little. A tentative, meaningless shift of weight. She was going to get wet whatever. She just didn’t want to feel that damp cold slap yet.
Putting it off and putting it off until it cannot be put off no longer.

Better to launch right in. Like a hot bath. Like a sticky plaster. Like a conversation with a stranger. That was how she hooked-up with Chris. She just started talking to him. What was he doing there while she was here doing this? Then, with a shudder, chased that thought away.
No one came to claim their car.

To park denotes mere temporary rest. Shape this space with that in mind.

Couldn’t help thinking about the earlier argument and what her co-worker had said to her. Didn’t like to think of herself in those terms. Quiet people always made her nervous. Which was odd when she thought about it, because she liked the silence of her own company. Although the voice inside never ceases to jabber. Even here now, alone and about to make a dash for it, with some phantom out there or a car with its own animating spirit, felt at peace, chasing the day at work from the boxed off leisure centres of her brain.

Rhythm of the rain on the Perspex awning. Sweep of rivulets passing like skeins of silk around the curved concrete curb corners and down the hill towards the drainage grates someone had placed there for that reason. Plunged turbinate down.

A seagull alighted, momentarily, on the curved neck of a lighting fixture. Pecked at something on its claw. Fishing tackle or a sore. They seem so perfectly themselves in rest and flight. Animals know nothing. Startled by a noise it could hear but she could not the bird swooped down the slope towards the sea from whence it had originated all those years before. Millions of years before.

Followed it with her eyes but it was soon lost to the dark. As was the seafront, the whole of the city of Brighton, strung along the strand, as I said, like forgotten tinsel. It was lonely up here on the hill, with the lights below her. Now she knew why the city clung to the coast. The downs were shady and queer. Still, from this point she had a prospect of the place and could almost fit the thing into one glance. Held her whole home in her gaze, or would if the rain would subside a little and let her rule this world.

She began to suspect it was more than a shower.

PJ Harvey, White Chalk

2007-10-19T17:49:00.000+01:00

Grow grow grow

wet toes aligned at the edge of a void
as clams
like limpets
at the rocktide's lapline

jump and make something
project out into what was not the void
until you happened and
like a waveretreat
cleaved that into empty

sfunny
the hallway didn't seem so empty until we inherited this hideous armoire
an impassable thouroughfare become itself a placeless place

my kids are stranded in the lounge
we cringe and scrape the stairway's foot
stamped once in anger

now planted

then blooming

Legends:
MAKING IS NOT ALL IT'S MADE OUT TO BE
ANYONE CAN EXPLODE
THINGS HAPPEN, TRY STOPPING THEM

bravery comes in the lingering copse of the faithful

not to break nor fashion but
hold on there on that upturned hull
skyborne rescue is not for the likes of us

rather we stubborn we clutch

to a boat's expanding shell
while the swell below becomes continuum

no, it isn't in the throw
nor in the wreck as such
but how the swell

begins to build
to gather rise and fill

beneath our rafting doggedness
to rise, to fill and then
to grow,
grow and grow.

serialkiller 2.1

2007-10-19T15:00:00.000+01:00

By the time she had finished shopping. A car park all but empty of cars. Hers across the road and down the slope. Tucked in a corner by the bushes barely visible from the entrance where she paused. She often came to rest in corners. Neatness in all things. A slightly obsessive side to her personality that Chris found infuriating. So, fuck him.

Jeanie Mack, look at the time.

A rain that was fierce and no one to hold her tight.

In her tranquillity she recollected that when she had applied the handbrake, popped the radio’s detachable fascia in the dash, there had still been the blowsy bunting of daylight pinned above the channel by some helpful hand or other. That sky had been clear but for a few vaporous bars empty of music. Brighton below, the racecourse bathed in purple and gold, the channel a broad reflection. Metaphoric admixture of an evening.

Being in the centre changed all that. Strange effect on time and place these warehouses have, pristine and windowless, with their own micro-climates and seasons, followed by sales. Outside the world could come to an end, will do eventually recently, but inside the same ambient temperature and astringent light will stay, there and all around the failing globe in not similar but identical units. Small pockets of controlled environments, both alienating and comforting, where survivors hunker down amongst Le Creuset and Bosch for comfort, tallying the cotton count of sheets, waiting for the lights to fail and the air-conditioning to stop its gentle lullaby, knowing only then that the whole thing is over and they can exit it, blinking, into a whole new possibility.

Like in the films of George Romero, or Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma. See also The Omega Man.

Some quality heavy rain falling on a hillside has. She imagined that, if abducted, that’s what it would be like inside the spacecraft, a large, well-appointed Sainsburys, with odd fruits on display and small stickers alongside explaining how to eat them. Written in a snaking alien font, a bit like Korean in appearance. Perhaps some soft, alien music emitted from the breezeblock walls. People queuing at the probing counter, yellow tickets in their hands. Happy to be worth something to someone. Each truculent probe like an act of love.

It turned the air white around the security lights, coming in slantwise across the pale aurora caused by the dissipation of the light through the moisture. Rain. Or, the rain. Was dissipation the right word? Most likely she meant diffraction. She liked it all the same. It felt rain-like in her mind’s mouthing of it: di-ssi-pa-tion. Every long word broken down sounds first like the tides and then the wind.

She decided to wait under the plastic awning at the shopping centre’s entrance, Downview they had called it, for some minutes more. Hoping someone would venture through the revolving doors so they could go together into the dark-wet-concrete-lonely-silence. Although you never know, probably safer to go it alone these days. Downview. Kind of depressing. Did they focus-group it?

The mind poses more questions than it responds to. Haven’t they noticed that yet and changed their processes accordingly?

Must text Maureen about tomorrow’s meeting.

She looked behind her. The main concourse was empty and still, slanting up, as they do, to the mezzanine level. The escalators ran on noiselessly carrying nothing and costing us money. Some kid’s pink sock caught at the bottom of one was trembling between the fangs where the stairs slipped under a metal apron that lapped onto the marble floor. The Polish cleaners would have that tidied away by morning.

She looked back out to the car park, looks in looks out, and counted the cars, 13 in total. Too few too scattered. A bleak, fragmented outlook. The main franchised outlets along the mezzanine had been closed for hours. Only the supermarket was left open, tucked away in the dogleg at the back. She hadn’t been alone buying milk and pop-socks but almost. Did the staff park out there? Surely they had their own section? Yes, she saw them now pulling off down an anonymous slip road running alongside the petrol station in her short-term memory doo-dah.

From "lines out of space"

2007-10-19T11:58:00.000+01:00

fast (food) thoughts

burgerking has suffered a complete makeover fu-
cking horrible it is but then it must be hard to come second in
late monopoly capitalism as they call it now to us lot or
sometimes yes I call it globalisation but no do not know what that actually
means ends was so simple, supply the demand but in BK at KX what
exactly is the demand for fake lichtensteins on the walls? oh where is the new real? to
add insult to injury or perhaps spicen [sic.] up this hyper-real
salsa, that by the way is when the attractions of reality very
real though they are are outstripped by those re-presented by art or the
media with chilli added , the latest burger is the Mexican big spicy which not only is-
n’t Mexican (burgers aren’t) but you have to specify that you want it regular (a beat)
big regular! or big large that is an option too and it is all about that isn’t it options I

mean? and outside you can buy crack&sex fairly easily which is also
tempting but one must resist because I am tired of thinking about it supply
and demand I mean and how drugs and prostitution are indeed rather old-
fashioned in a quaint way in that they are really giving you something that you
want for which you have to pay and are probably dependant on in some way the
way we all used to be dependant on flour, milk and eggs—so Marxists thought, (happy days) pancake economics they called it but the late eighties flipped that over I
guess what I am getting at is how fucking difficult it is

these days
to stop for a quick bite
during lent
without having to work it all out I
mean the whole rotten system dammit!

but hey bubba, that’s modern life for you and
off he went, or she, or didn’t go, into the sordid city night, or country gloom, actually it was only late afternoon in the suburbs’ time of hopelessness and tedium I quite like it actually not everything is such a big deal you know if you don’t think about it and you can’t always be thinking about it then you can be like the mouse B. and I saw last night on the tube got half way along the platform actually nearly to my Italian shoes before a newspaper rattle startled it and it

scarpered actually

real events are scary like that un-
real imaginings of a desire-sick brain, in con-
trast are now fairly easy to assimilate under the general rubric don’t you find?
what I mean is that no one cares much about being sick in that 20thc European way
stained crack pipes and orgies where are thee now that we have a need for thee?
by the way I forgot to say, part one is over, will you wait for part two or would you like to go get a drink or something?
I know a really good thai/fusion place (a beat) and they do kareoke in the

mouse basement

Legends

2007-10-18T17:00:00.000+01:00

To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer. To be a great writer one must first learn to be a bad writer and never become a good writer.

serialkiller 1.2

2007-10-18T16:47:00.000+01:00

The born-again Christian surveyor who came to give us a quote for tanking the kitchen of 19a Mill Hill Road, among the many interesting things he had to say for example of the great freeze of ’92 which I had missed out on ‘cos I was domiciled then in Poland—he had tried to make a citizen’s arrest outside of a fella who was roughing up a young chap he claimed had just stolen something from him [unproven]—told me our flat was above an aquifer, the water leeching up into the walls until that time that the capital will be inundated and that there was nothing any of us could do about it, but pray of course. To be helpful I also suggested some measures for cutting our emissions, but he just shook his head. He’s probably right. It’s too late. Don’t bother running. Just accept what’s coming to you.

Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography confirms that there are innumerable springs, streams and rivers across the London basin. Well it was called Mill Hill and the hill bit, at least, was accurate. No smoke without fire, no mill without race.

Always buy on a hill, my mad father says, because when the floods come, and come they will…
I like to think this was true, about the aquifer. He told me that, as a Christian, he was unable to lie but the next surveyor assured me the quote he had given us was a load of cobblers. His words, not mine. Mine now though. As a rule I avoid colloquialisms that might age me, place me in a particular social class, or identify me as a memorable character who might be picked out of a crowd. Is this the same as lying? Not quite, but my faith was shaken to its very foundations, just below the level of the ineffective damp course.

What I’m trying to say: who can you trust? There is no God. Beyond good and evil you’ll find Stafford. I think it’s time to hang the DJ.

We were on the verge of amassing this kind local history that doesn’t mean much to other people but makes the place where you live more an actual location rather than just a holding pattern for the city’s fervid atomisation and mobility, when the call came and we had to do a flit. Wanting to belong means encasing oneself in story. Becoming embedded, eventually. We couldn’t could afford ourselves that luxury. Our long lost child would never have forgiven us. Is there ever a day you can say, that’s it, I’ve grown up, you can relax now?

Let’s sum up for the limp of wit: the drug dealer, the ethnic mix, Acton itself, the inscription of time on the building, the aquifer. Less than a hundred telephones in Chiswick. Less than a hundred!

I once called a youth hostel on the Tatra Mountains whose number was 2. Too true story.

Sitting across the table from me in the greasy spoon just by the tube, leans forward, looks me in the eye, which I hate, Ancient Mariner style, cheap tie dragged in red-stained yolk, half a sausage, says, “Now tell me, are these clues?”

What we’ll do is get the ball rolling at this point, link up the details later, if that’s okay with you. I’m anxious to get a move on. We’ve quite a full agenda.

Predictably, there is a door at the knock.

Income dictates so much, but not all. Space is left over for aggression and suchlike.

But we were outta there and no one has, as yet, answered. The sad thing is they will. If you don’t mind waiting a sec., I’ve just popped out. Can you amuse yourself?

My apologies Mr. Baker. It is either you or me. (He bought the flat from us but there are some things too horrible to register in a homebuyer’s survey, however thorough, for example amputation with a cordless hedgetrimmer).

Motive and Probable Cause.

Tooling through Southall at dusk one day, I nearly hit that raggedy thought-fox.

Non-existent gods, forgive me this mounting anger; his blood-red mouth looming large like a bill-board for a Nevada casino I once spotted from a white ford van full of my warbling compadres. Murmuring, intoning: benedictions and maledictions.

He says he wants to kill me but in his own good time, in the meantime he’s going to leave his mark on every aspect of my life so far, every place I have lived ostensibly and then take it from there I guess. Sort of make it his own, my life. Take the two braids and twine them into a tender.

I want everything, who he knows, where he lives, where he’s lived, what he likes to do in his spare time, what he eats for breakfast, how he takes his coffee, where he was born, the consequences of that, the marks and traumas, parallels with my own life, ways to find links between the two of us, a double helix of linked separation I want you to get me. I need some fucking better way of reflecting on my own journey than the usual book of the week bollocks.

Damien O’Leary reads The Child Who Cried Wolf.
“Life in rural Leitrim was strange at the best of times, but with a bearded lady for a mother and a would-be werewolf for a Da, we were never going to be short of conversation at the dinner table.”

Well, what the hell are you waiting for, an invitation to tango? Go catch me a killer.

Add N to X. Carried the one.

Badiou on Deleuze

2007-10-18T16:42:00.001+01:00

These are my notes on Badiou's book Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. They are more detailed than I thought and supplement the very popular notes I already have here on Deleuze.

Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamour of Being. Trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000

there are two paradigms that govern the manner in which the multiple is thought…the “vital” (or “animal”) paradigm of open multiplicities…/ and the mathematical paradigm of sets, which can also be qualified as “stellar” in Mallarmé’s sense of the word (Badiou, Deleuze 3-4).

· his analysis of Deleuze in the opening pages is designed to re-situate his thought in relation to the traditional metaphysic of the one, expressly so as to undermine the belief that Deleuze’s work is “devoted to the inexhaustible variety of the concrete"” (Badiou, Deleuze 14).
· thus the role of multiplicity here is to liberate being from such variety in an ascetic purification which Deleuze calls being chosen by the inorganic as an automaton. This must be in keeping with Badiou’s own position and is where I have to be careful not to see his work as just version of the mathematical sublime, unless I reconsider this sublimity somehow.

Certainly, the starting point required by Deleuze’s method is always a concrete case…/ But one starts to go wrong as soon as one imagines that constraint exercised by concrete cases makes of Deleuze’s thought a huge description or collection of the diversity characterizing the contemporary world. For one presumes then that the operation consists in thinking the case. This is not so: the case is never an object for thought; rather…the case is what forces thought and renders it impersonal. It is therefore perfectly coherent that, in starting from innumerable and seemingly disparate cases…Deleuze arrives at conceptual productions that I would unhesitatingly qualify as monotonous… (Badiou, Deleuze 14-15).

The rights of the heterogeneous are, therefore, simultaneously imperative and limited. Thinking can only begin under the violent impulsion of a case-of-thought…And each beginning, being a singular impulsion, presents also a singular case. But what begins in this way is destined to repetition… (Badiou, Deleuze 15).

· in other words each case is a case of the one concept of being, as he notes in relation to Deleuze’s work on cinema, thus Deleuze’s work is, he argues, organised around the metaphysics of the one, proposes and ethics of thought based on asceticism, and is systematic and abstract (Badiou, Deleuze 17).
· what can there be then within the proliferation of the case and what is the function of singularity here. Again there seems to be agreement with Nancy here that the multiplicity of the case merely establishes the limits of thought. Case proliferation does not open thinking up to an unbearable relativity, but in fact closes it down to an equally unbearable limited set of monolithic principles. As he says “I am convinced that principles do exist” (Badiou, Deleuze 17).

· it is central to Badiou’s project to turn ethics away from alterity, multiplicity away from diversity and philosophy away from language and his reading of Deleuze is based exactly on this. His is instead a return to a sense of being, an existential sense revealing his early debts to Sartre, which comes back to Heidegger as the central force of twentieth century philosophy. The univocity of being which he picks up on in Deleuze relates then directly to this aim, to reduce multiple voices as just examples of a limited number of cases which all testify to a very limited set of principles which all relate to the ontological certainty of being which is not reducible to identity.

· in reading Deleuze’s work as kind of updating of Plato he notes in relation to the simulacra of the real the Plato also notes…

it is necessary to affirm the rights of simulacra as so many equivocal cases of univocity that joyously attest to the univocal power of being…/ One does far more justice to the real One by thinking the egalitarian coexistence of simulacra in a positive way than by opposing simulacra to the real that they lack, in the way Plato opposes the sensible and the intelligible. For, in fact, this real lies nowhere else than in that which founds the nature of the simulacrum as simulacrum: the purely formal or modal character of the difference that constitutes it, from the viewpoint of the univocal real of Being that supports this difference within itself and distributes to it a single sense (Badiou, Deleuze 26-7).

· this is similar in some ways to Nancy’s argument that singularity reveals the edge of being through its interruption of myth only working on the opposite direction. For Badiou the singular case is only a proof of the univocity of being, for Nancy it only allows univocity by a linguistic intervention.

· he then goes on to consider the problems of giving a name to being with being itself being seen for rather dull reasons as insufficient. What is more interesting is Badiou’s reason for Deleuze must give being two names:

What emerges over the course of these experiments is that a single name is never sufficient, but that two are required. Why? The reason is that Being needs to be said in a single sense both form the viewpoint of the unity of its power and from the viewpoint if the multiplicity of the divergent simulacra that this power actualizes in itself…it is as though the univocity of being is thereby accentuated for thought through its being said, at one moment, in its immediate “matter”, and, in the next, in its forms or actualizations. In short: in order to say that there is a single sense, two names are necessary (Badiou, Deleuze 28).

· these two names for being reveal Badiou’s own opinion about the relationship of being and its event in simulacra. He also notes that Deleuze uses a wide ranges of “doublets” or double names for beings, but that this does not mean a relativistic view but an experimentation with a suitable doublet.

· what can also be said is that his concept of the multiple should not be confused with a theory of variety or categorical difference. Difference, as it exists in the multiple, resides only to confirm the singularity of being. One must also consider his sense of singularity in relation to that of Nancy and the others, for there seem to be major differences which are not apparent from the terminologies they share in common. Multiples are not different categories which pertain to the ethical code of being, and heterogeneity is not a sense of “being various” but of being in terms of an unspeakable supplement.
· His list of vital texts for Deleuze are Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, Foucault, Cinema 1 & 2, and The Fold.

· it is true that it would be tempting at this stage to think of the second name as being that of categories of the first, something which one finds from Plato through Hegel to Heidegger. Badiou calls the dysymmetrical view where the names are secondary categories of being which serve to divide up being into a series of essential subdivisions such as matter, form or substance. Instead, he sees Deleuze as undermining this tradition:

The univocity of Being and the equivocity of beings (the latter being nothing other than the immanent production of the former) must be thought “together” without the mediation of genera or species, types or emblems: in short, without categories, without generalities (Badiou, Deleuze 32).

· this is the essence of Deleuze’s anti-dialectic in Difference and Repetition especially through an attack on mediation. Mediation is a passage from one being to another based on a relation that is internal to one of them, for Hegel negation. However “univocal Being is affirmative through and through” (Badiou, Deleuze 33) meaning the negative is impossible. Thus the long error of philosophy which divides ontology into being and nothingness is attacked:

There are not two ‘paths’…but a single ‘voice’ of Being which includes all its modes, including the most diverse, the most varied, the most differentiated (Badiou, Deleuze 33) quoting Difference and Repetition p. 36.

· instead of being/non-being, Deleuze goes for active/passive and all his couplets are based on this how everyone must not lose sight of the fact that while two names are needed to described being, this does not produce an ontological division which could be productive of categories. Within the violence of though one must begin somewhere and it is natural to being with categories but the aim is neutrality of a point beyond active/passive.
· interesting precisely because it is an attack on categories and their false role in dividing up the indivisible and putting a name to the unnameable. Obviously I should refer this to consciousness as well.

· he goes on to consider these doublets in terms of the double movement of thought that is typical of Deleuze from beings to Being and Being to beings for from sense to nonsense and from nonsense to sense. All thought consists of this double moments then between the singularity of beings and the univocity of Being. Badiou’s terms this in the form of descent and ascent, beings to Being and Being to beings and concludes:

when we have grasped the double movement of descent and ascent, from beings to Being, then from Being to beings, we have in fact thought the movement of Being itself, which is only the interval, of the difference, between these two movements…Univocal Being is indeed nothing other than, at one and the same time, the superficial movement of its simulacra and the ontological identity of their intensities… (Badiou, Deleuze 40).

When thought succeeds in constructing, without categories, the looped path that leads, on the surface of what is, from a case to the Ones, then from the One to the case, it intuits the movement of the One itself (Badiou, Deleuze 40).

thought is always an (ascetic, difficult) egalitarian affirmation of what is (Badiou, Deleuze 45).

· he turns his attention to the return to the importance of the ground in Deleuze’s work or the univocal Being behind each of the simulacra of beings, stressing that this is not a pictorial ground where the beings are mimetic copies of an ideal ground but in the sense of the double movement we have just considered. In turning Deleuze towards this grounding (fond) he seeks to state that they both share in common the fact of being classical philosophers:

in this context, classicism is relatively easy to define. Namely: may be qualified as classical any philosophy that does not submit to the critical injunctions of Kant…[it} upholds, against any “return to Kant,” against the critique, / moral law, and so on, that the rethinking of the univocity of ground is a necessary task for the world in which we are living today (Badiou, Deleuze 45-6).

whereas my aim is to found a Platonism of the multiple, Deleuze’s concern was with a Platonism of the virtual. Deleuze retains from Plato the univocal sovereignty of the One, but sacrifices the determination of the Idea as always actual. For him, the Idea is the virtual totality, the One is the infinite reservoir of dissimilar productions. A contrario, I uphold that the forms of the multiple are, just like the Ideas, always actual and that the virtual does not exist; I sacrifice, however, the One (Badiou, Deleuze 46).

· Badiou says then that Deleuze’s work results in transcendence while he argued that Badiou’s work failed to hold thought within immanence, resulting presumably by accidental transcendence? He raised this problem in a letter to Deleuze.

Reaffirming the integral actuality of Being, as pure dimension-multiple, I stated that, in my eyes, immanence excluded the All and that the only possible end point of the multiple, which is always the multiple of multiples (and never the multiple of Ones), was the multiple of nothing: the empty set (Badiou, Deleuze 46).

· thus they ended up in a non-resolvable controversy over what constituted the ground, multiple-actual vs. the One-virtual
· the result was an “impasse” as he says:

for me, multiplicities “were” sets, for him, they “were not” (Badiou, Deleuze 48).

· the way he presents this debate is fascinating in terms of the differend and the ethics of friendship. Here they line up in an arrangement that does not agree to disagree, does not agree, and yet which retains no hostility. Surely this is the aporia at the heart of a classical philosophical debate, the basic inability of ontological certainties of different orders to talk to each other in debate. Their argument consists of Badiou saying yes and Deleuze no.

· after critically appraising Deleuze’s theory of the virtual, he concludes:

I must therefore return…to my own song: the One is not, there are only actual multiplicities, and the ground is void (Badiou, Deleuze 53).

I have always conceived truth as a random course or as a kind of escapade, posterior to the event and free of any external law, such that the resources of narration are required simultaneously with those of mathematization for its comprehension. There is a constant circulation from fiction to argument, from image to formula, from poem to matheme… (Badiou, Deleuze 58).

· quite central for work on the avant-garde and the theory of chance encounters
· then goes on to consider the false and the true in terms of paradoxes of time to show that truth supersedes time. He agrees with this:

truths are actual multiplicities with a much higher “Dionysian” value than that accruing to any sort of phenomenological salvaging of time…I maintain that every truth is the end of memory, the unfolding of a commencement (Badiou, Deleuze 60-4).

· the section on chance, 68-76, is concerned with the throw of the dice in an opposite sense, Badiou believes, to the may it is found in Mallarmé. He ends up by summarising Deleuze's position in terms of three basic axioms: the throw of the dice is always unique, the unique cast is the “affirmation of the totality of chance” (Badiou, Deleuze 74) and what eternally returns in each event is “the original unique throw of the dice with the power of affirming chance” (Badiou, Deleuze 74).
· the importance of these axioms’ for Badiou, is to clarify Deleuze’s relation to the eternal return but there is also a second importance in determining the difference between absolute chance, the event, and the role of chance in probability. Thus the throw if the dice is not part of a series of throws which move towards a probability which is that of the dominance of the same, such as in an infinite series where eventually all six sides of the dice will occur equally. Instead, chance is the affirmation of the absolute uniqueness of the event. Thus what returns in each throw is not a movement towards probability like monkey’s typing the works of Shakespeare, but the uniqueness of the event.

With each throw of the dice (with each event), there is, no doubt, the formal distinction of numerical results. But the innermost power of the cast is the unique and univocal, it is the Event, just as it is what affirms in a unique Throw, which is the Throw of all the throws, the totality of chance. The numerical results are only the superficial stampings or simulacra of the Great Cast (Badiou, Deleuze 74).

· in contrast to this approach, he makes clear his own…

…I said to myself that the indiscernibility of casts (of events, of emissions of the virtual) was, for him, the most important of the points of the passage of the one. For me, on the other hand, the absolute ontological separation of the event, that fact that it occurs in the situation without being in anyway virtualizable, is the basis of the character of truths as irreducibly original, created, and fortuitous. And if truth is indiscernible, it is not at all so with respect to other truths (from which it is, on the contrary, doubly discernible: by the situation in which it is inscribed, and by the event that initiates it), but with respect to the resources of discernment proper to the situation in which it originates (Badiou, Deleuze 75).

Contrary to Deleuze, therefore, I think that the “event dice throws” are all absolutely distinct—not formally (on the contrary, the form of all / events is the same) but ontologically. This ontological multiplicity does not compose any series, it is sporadic (events are rare) and cannot be totalized. No count can group the events, no virtual subjects them to One (Badiou, Deleuze 76).

If, when all is said and done, chance is the affirmation, for Deleuze, of the contingency of the One in all its immanent effects, it is, for me, the predicate of the contingency of each event. For Deleuze, chance is the play of the All, always replayed as such; whereas I believe that there is the multiplicity (and rarity) of chances, such that the chance of an event happens to us already by chance, and not by the expressive univocity of the One (Badiou, Deleuze 76).

…for me, given that the void of Being only occurs at the surface of a situation by way of the event, chance is the very matter of truth. And just as truths are singular and incomparable, so the fortuitous events from which they originate must be multiple and separated by a the void (Badiou, Deleuze 76).

Chance is plural, which excludes the unicity of the dice throw. It is by chance that a particular chance happens (Badiou, Deleuze 76).

· we end up with two versions of chance, the ludic and vital (Nietzsche/Deleuze) and the stellar conception of the Chance of chance (Mallarmé/Badiou)

For me, alas!…death is not, and can never be, an event (Badiou, Deleuze 77).

· in final conclusion he states his defence against Deleuze’s accusation that he is guilty of transcendence:

…I conceptualize absolute beginnings (which requires a theory of the void) and singularities of thought that are incomparable in their constitutive gestures…Deleuze always maintained that in doing this, II fall back into transcendence and into the equivocity of analogy. But, all in all, if the only way to think a political revolution, an amorous encounter, an intervention of / the sciences, or a creation of art as distinct infinities…is by sacrificing immanence…and the univocity of being, that I would sacrifice them (Badiou, Deleuze 91-2).

· on grace…

It does occur, by interruption or by supplement, and however rare or transitory it may be, we are forced to be lastingly faithful to it (Badiou, Deleuze 97).

During this (short) period of our philosophical history, all in all there have been…two serious questions: that of the All (or the One) and that of grace (or the event). (Badiou, Deleuze 98).

serialkiller 1.1

2007-10-11T13:53:00.000+01:00

This just in / So go on in.

I’ll take William in the car and meet you at the other end. Don’t worry, I know the way. He’ll be safe with me.

On the morning of the day that my wife [name withheld] and I left London for the last time, the police raided the flat of the drug-dealer opposite. Let’s say ‘round ten rozzers in stab-proof body-armour—but what of swiping and sawing and hacking—filed one after another down the narrow hallway, did whatever they had space to do inside—sorted, sifted, emptied, overturned, recorded, imagined, invented—found, I presume, nothing, at least nothing incriminating, bag that, ‘cos they then left without arresting the bloke who I was friendly with but never quite caught his name but anyway we all called him the drug-dealer so I guess it was fated and you should hail him likewise if you were ever to clock him. Don’t panic, I’m no cockney.

One day what happened was, in any case, bound to. This was that day, so I chose it over all others. A pebble dropped in water, waves radiating forwards and emanating backwards.

As we saw the last of our things packed up by a William who was not me and his mate, who seemed a little slow, the dealer sat on his front steps complaining with a Rasta geezer about the injustice of it all, hand gestures nodding dreadlocks, while a Sikh gentleman in a turban fixed his front door lock for him. The dealer’s cheeks were pinched, his overall face a slap. Constellations of eczema were casting across one wrist on which he fiddled and raked.

Nothing much, a gestalt of London fabricated on accretions and assumptions. One last incongruity before we left for warmer climes abroad; Oxfordshire. The monster we called it the London. Tentacular motorways and serpentine waterways dragging the rest of the nation towards its elegant, well-monied beak. Restless, chomping beak. By which we’d gotten slightly bit.

Otherwise, sublime and vast. London, the real eternal city. So various and yet so typical. Words can be used to describe it, but words don’t help you live in it chum. Which in part was why we were leaving it. That and the fact that my wife had a new job. That and the fact that we had come to accept, and so realise, that our lives were in mortal danger.
For the sake of all that is to come, keep in mind the number 13.

This was on Mill Hill Road, Acton. Right in Acton, middled there like an egg on toast, linked to Acton High Street—the second greatest of all my Crocodile Streets lined with Cinnamon Shops after a dilapidated thoroughfare populated by North Africans and South American prostitutes I ran aground on in Catania, trundling livelihoods in trolleys along—by the short King Street. The short King Street, home to a small Somalian community and the dirtiest corner of the world where once I saw two Polish lads pissing against the pub, the Seven Keys, at around ten thirty at night, the street full of London people buying fags, rizlas and booze. Complaints that go unheeded in the dark; effluent burbling riverwards.

Our flat was, original features add value, the basement of number 19, end-of-terrace, mid-Victorian, huge sash-windows, walled-garden, used to be a builder’s merchants est. 1900, stencilled letters still visible on the large, east wall. Wait a minute, got a photo of it somewhere. Call Chiswick 34, back when there were less than a hundred phones in Chiswick.

Numbers, counting, one in a series of. You’ll learn.

We had only been there a year but then when had we stayed more than a year any place in London? Or you for that matter? Not him, he’s a home-body. Because of this peripatetic tendency, many more will have to suffer, many more will have to die. What is a natural mystic? You see, as I had grown increasingly desperate, death all around and running through me like the “Blackpool” in a stick of pre-lipped Brighton rock, I had got to the point of looking for reasons and causes in everything, even my own actions, although I was pretty certain by this point, one day one page away from the conclusion of the matter, that it was probably, towards its resolution, not my fault. At least not directly. There is always complicity. I have the rather egotistical quality of accepting blame for all manner of cock-ups and offences to the spirit, but that’s enough about me. I am here to talk about him. Spot the difference.

Write the story of your future. Call it an ought-to-biography. All this jabber and chunter is aspirational after all. Otherwise why words?

Try this at home. Is grandma out of the room? I have counted how many gaffs I have squatted in London over the many years that I have, off and on, lived there, and it comes to 7 in total. Add into that all the other places, Stoke of course, Manchester, Brighton, Poland, Dublin, and Belfast, and the compound in the Delta state of Nigeria, and it comes to a total of 22 including this hovel I am writing from now just east of the book’s end which we will call Home. Make a note of that, 22. It’s widely held amongst my many acquaintances to be a lot and thus indicative, otherwise why would we bother you? I am making it exemplary so that it is noticed but also just an example of how we all started to behave towards the end of the last century. Balance on that and hope for the best of the rest of what is to follow.

Numbers, patterns, every third.

Above the darkened lane two bats careen in gyres.

Serialkiller: I have finished with the lyric

2007-10-11T09:10:00.000+01:00

Yes I have pretty much finished with the lyric. Apart from occasional pieces like the PJ Harvey project I haven't written any lyric poetry for maybe 2 years. The poems collected in Lines in Space have been regularly revised during that time but nothing new written.

Instead I have been working on a kind of holy grail of writing, the poem-novel. The result is Serialkiller which I finished fairly recently and have been tinkering with ever since.

The idea behind Serialkiller is to begin to dispense with, once and for all, the culturally imposed differentiation between poetry and prose in place since Plato. At the same time I am sick of contemporary narratives and contemporary prose, they are both dead on their feet as far as I am concerned. So I set about writing a 'novel' based on some simple, experimental poetic ideas:

write not as a narrator but as a lyrical ego
write chapters as poems, linked yes but also as stand alone pieces
compose the narrative therefore as a collection of poems
in sections of essential narrative, always use poetry ideas to move things along rather than prose; which means association, permutation and syntactical disruption rather than connection, information, syllogism and so on
use already existing models of prose poetry esp. Hejinian, Ashbery and Silliman, but don't write in so called new sentences
in non-narrative sections make the poems cohere in relation to the narrative so that narrative is poeticised and poetry narrativised
use the whole palette of experimental poetry techniques that feature in the lyrics, but in alinear form
retain the possibility of linearity
use the themeatics of the genre, serial killers, as an aesthetic and conceptual cohesive device

The results are not yet what I am terming a writing, neither poetry not prose, but they are I think a move forward in terms of narrative prose and to a lesser degree poetry.

I am trying to get it published by a mainstream prose press, but as that will either take forever or will never happen, the latter most likely, will post a large portion, most of, if not all Serialkiller here in the meantime.

Beckett and Badiou, by Andrew Gibson

2007-10-08T17:41:00.000+01:00

Am writing a review of this great book and as usual well over the word limit so thought I would post the full text here before I have to cut half of it out and inevitably totally change it.

I am posting it because in the months to come Badiou's conception of poetic thinking will make more and more appearances here and Gibson's book is a great introduction to that.

Book Review: Andrew Gibson, Beckett & Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford, 2007).

This is a rare book in modern times, an academic study of unflinching seriousness, resolutely RAE unfriendly at nearly 300 pages, and one of the few examples of literary criticism that one needs to own and return to and over time. In fact it is not one book at all but at the very least two. In the introduction Gibson himself admits that “my book might be thought of as Janus-faced,” adding “it has a revolving structure, turning alternately in one direction and another.” (B&B 5).

Thus, as the title suggests at one moment the revolving eye of Gibson gazes firmly at Beckett, a familiar figure to the academia, at another at Alain Badiou, now perhaps a familiar name but still a thinker many feel the need for an introduction to before then can enter into any form of lively intercourse. These two gentlemen, Becket and Badiou, require therefore two slightly different modes of address as Gibson is aware, producing effectively two different books within one volume.

The first book is quite simply the best introduction to, and proposed development of, Badiou’s work in relation to the study of literature. The second is a sophisticated reappraisal of Beckett’s whole oeuvre. This occurs not merely through the filter of Badiou’s rosy gaze, Badiou’s great innovation being to read Beckett as an optimist of the event, but also through the diffraction of Gibson’s systematic analysis. I am less qualified to say if this is major work in Beckett studies, but I am perfectly in place to say it is an important advance in literary studies and should be made required reading for anyone still interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy that we used to call literary theory.

Or is it three books, the third being more of a parergonal outwork or project for a future monograph in the form of a complex and suggestive conclusion that expands on Gibson’s own theories on the remainder, modernity, and the temporality of intermittency? I don’t have the educational background to know who the three headed beast of yore is that could supplant Gibson’s invocation of Janus, but whomsoever they are, this book is their kin.

This being the case, and my having only a few hundred words to go up against Gibson’s 100,000 plus, it is perhaps best to proceed fairly systematically. Such a progression is in any case apt considering the patient, systematic exposition Gibson provides here of the work of Beckett and Badiou. Then there is the often clinical systematicity of Badiou’s mode of thinking and rhetoric. And finally, Badiou’s project to produce a fairly diachronic, systematic narrative of Beckett’s journey through the problems of humanism, the impasse of language and on into to a thinking of the eventhood of the event. A journey that, in the final analysis, for Badiou and Gibson makes Beckett’s work overall heroic and affirmative.

It took over 15 years before Badiou’s foundational work Being and Event (1988) appeared in English in 2005. In contrast, the follow-up La Logique Des Mondes (2006) will appear in translation in 2008. This is indicative perhaps that Badiou’s star is rising, although his reception amongst Humanities scholars will always be hampered by his reliance on mathematics, in particular set theory. Then there is his unadorned, often vituperative prose that seems cold and angular to an ear attuned to the voluble, metaphoric style of much French philosophy. If Badiou is going to find a world audience not limited to French-speaking philosophers and political theorists, then Gibson’s work in the first 140 pages will play a major role in this.

Gibson begins by defining the bi-polar universe of Badiou’s thought as contained within the concepts of actual infinity and the event. These two ideas are at odds with each other and yet also totally inter-dependant. Actual infinity is not the endless proliferation of numbers beyond human comprehension that one finds in Hegel and Romantic thought, rather it is an axiom of a determinate infinity. In set theory there is an infinity of infinities, but infinity itself can thought of as a limited number or concept, that of the fact that there is infinity.

If infinity turns out to be, in some ways, finite, the presupposed finitude of the event, the thing that happens, reveals in fact the potential for infinity. The event is an “aleatory fragment, the chance occurrence of something that had no existence beforehand”. It is an explosive movement that “destroys any illusion that the limits of the situation are the limits of the world.” (B&B 16). I find the clarity and yet also the complexity of this summary of Badiou’s work of real benefit to the study of literature, but it also explains why Badiou and Beckett form another dyad in this dualistic, yet never dialectic, study. As we go on to find out, the role of infinity is key to Beckett’s work, as is the potentiality or perhaps even threat of the event.

It is at this early stage that we also encounter Gibson’s own central thesis, which remains the most important and original element of this impressive study and, I hope, will come to stand as a key term for the development of our ideas of the relationship between literature and philosophy in the years to come. This conception which Gibson calls “the remainder” is in fact very close to a definition of the literary post-Badiou. I will leave the precise formulation of the remainder to Gibson himself:

In Badiou’s philosophy, the world of events is the sole source of value. From its point of view, the situations to which events are counterposed and into which they break constitute a negligible historical residue. I shall call this residue the remainder. (B&B 18).

The remainder is a vital development of Badiou’s work on literature. As events are so rare, and when they do occur they are often missed or only realised by a coterie of faithful militants, the bare facts state that for the majority of the time we are in the realm of the remainder and most, if not all, literature emanates from that world or temporality. As literature itself cannot constitute an event, but can only testify too or patiently wait for events, by definition literature is the remainder.

This simple logical observation is, in fact, rather devastating. It certainly takes Badiou to task over his neglect of the remainder in his relentless pursuit of intermittent events. It allows Gibson’s book to open up completely the philosophical importance of Beckett, who ceases to be a writer and instead becomes one of the great thinkers of the remainder. It raises uncomfortable questions as to what the status of literature is in relation to the radical potentialities of events. And finally, it makes this book a full-blown theory of contemporary literary value.

Having summarised Badiou’s work and established his own thought in relation to it, based on an implicit critique of Badiou’s work which simultaneously requires that we treat his work with the utmost respect and seriousness, the first two chapters then introduce Badiou’s work to a general audience. Chapter one deals with key Badiou terms: Being, Event, Subject and Truth. While the second moves more towards the issues of state, doxa and politics that fill in some of the detail of the remainder and prepare the way for the consideration of the aesthetics of waiting for the event that define Beckett’s importance to our age.

This allows Gibson, in the third chapter, to tackle specifically Badiou’s take on Beckett in relation to the current scholarship. Taken together with the introduction these first three chapters constitute probably the most accessible and certainly the most relevant introduction to Badiou’s work to a humanities audience. Not that Gibson does not pay his dues to his forbears, most notably the brilliant work of Hallward, it is just that here Gibson is able to concentrate on Badiou’s ideas on literature, apply them to literary works, and unpack their implications from the perspective of a literary critic.

These chapters alone are worth the cover price. In particular we come to understand Gibson’s main criticism of Badiou’s affirmative ethos. Central to Badiou’s metaphysics is a rejection of what he sees as a late-Romantic melancholy to be found in Heidegger’s insistence on the end of metaphysics, and the work which followed on in such an eschatological vein. In contrast, he insists that metaphysics is possible now the gods have fled the earth, placing all his faith in the existence of actual infinity and the power of intermittent events.

What Gibson notes, however, is that because events are so infrequent, so intermittent, there is an inevitable human side or cost to this. One comes to long for past events, or to desire the sudden arrival of new events. Rather than instilling a sense of militant optimism in writers and thinkers, the scarcity of the event has resulted in a pathos or melancholia. And it is precisely such a melancholia, Gibson argues, that one finds in Beckett.

Thus, in keeping with the Janus-face of this revolving study, we have two theses which are then pursued through the remainder of the seven chapters of the book. On the one hand is Badiou’s radical reappraisal of Beckett. In Chapter 2 Gibson addresses what Badiou calls in The Handbook of Inaesthetics “poetic thinking.” There are, it seems, two main types of poetic thought vis-à-vis the event. The first is exemplified by Mallarmé and is described as a patient fidelity to the fact of an event having occurred. These poets name the event and in doing so allow it to exist within the world of the remainder that we all occupy. They are the apostles if you will, acting as servants of the intermittent and demanding that we accept its occurrence.

Then there is a second type of poet, those of restricted action. These writers take as their point of interest not that there was an event, but that there is no event. They are the precursors, John the Baptist preparing the way for the possibility of the event. One can see here then that there are two alternatives for Beckett. He may testify to the event’s passing, or he might clear the ground in preparation for the event’s arrival. That it is the latter case explains for Badiou and Gibson why critics have misread Beckett’s work as pessimistic. Rather, it is a systematic admission and understanding of the fact that there is no event, Such an admission admittedly can seem negative, but it is a necessary negativity and an essential acsesis, a clearing away of the detritus of the remainder. This work must occur before the event can arrive.

This is thesis one and Gibson unpacks how Badiou is able to tell the tale of Beckett’s heroic wait across the whole of his career. In the early work Becket breaks with doxa, across The Trilogy he clears the ground taking language to a point of collapse while demonstrating that there is no event, while in the later prose he is able to establish a landscape in preparation for the possibility of some future event. To explicate and develop this thesis from limited sources, for Badiou’s work on Beckett collected in On Beckett, is both repetitious and intermittent, is a great feat. To bring it about Gibson travels far and wide within Badiou’s whole oeuvre, demonstrating remarkable levels of scholarship.

Where Gibson’s book is exceptional, however, is the way in which he is able to overlay his own critique of Badiou and put forward his own, complementary but ultimately competing theory of intermittent pathos. Taking his lead from attacks on Badiou’s overly technical almost allegorical readings of Beckett, Gibson concedes that Badiou’s reading of the author borders indeed on an allegory of reading that not only misses the detail and nuance of Beckett’s work, but misses the fact that breaking with doxa, clearing the ground and waiting on the event are all dependant on nuance, hesitation and uncertainty:

The final chapter, looking at Beckett’s plays, is effectively Gibson’s extension of Badiou. Criticising explicitly Badiou’s reading of the drama as “more consistent with his [Badiou’s] philosophy than with the plays themselves”, Gibson is free to propose instead the centrality of the remainder to Beckett’s poetic thinking. Perhaps my only criticism of the book is that the centrality of the remainder is not matched by extensive consideration of what the remainder consists of. Gibson is not unaware of this problematic when he notes, reviewing his own book:

It may sometimes have seemed as though I have defined the concept of the remainder chiefly in terms of what it is not. The remainder is what exists outside the domain of the event, truth, subject, fidelity. How can we characterize it, other than negatively?...For Badiou, the remainder is so closely associated with pure negativity that he scarcely thinks it at all as such. (B&B 235)

Gibson goes on to assert that in Beckett one comes close to an “empirical definition of the remainder” (B&B 235) as effectively an approximation or an abstraction. Gibson then sets himself the task of tracing these approximations and abstractions across the plays which he feels Badiou reads rather poorly. As to whether this will satisfy the reader as to the importance and definition of the remainder, I remain myself unconvinced, not by the conception but by the clarity of its appearance here. It is, I would humbly suggest, the topic for a future study.

Two things come from this book as very clear however. The first is that Badiou’s formulation of an atheistic, post-Romantic metaphysics of acsesis and assertion is highly significant for an understanding of poetic thinking. or how literature has taken up the reins of philosophy during the period of modernity. Second, that Badiou’s work on literature has limitations when it comes to analysing literature as such, beyond using is as simply exemplifying his system. At this stage one needs a literary critic to step in as Gibson has done. In doing so Gibson not only expands one of the four terms of contemporary, post-Badiou philosophy, but also provides a complex intervention on Badiou’s work through his criticism of the philosopher’s neglect of the remainder.

In the conclusion Gibson takes up his own theorisation of the pathos of intermittency and provides a complex and wide-ranging reading of various philosophers’ work on modernism. I can’t do justice to it here but if the reader is at all concerned with modern art then I suggest they read it. This leads Gibson to a conclusion that, while pitched locally at the way a contemporary philosopher reads one of the great writers of modernity, is in fact a provocation to all of us whose object of regard is literature:

We might finally put the point like this: for Badiou, the event is difficult insofar as it is rare and has a complex structure. But it is also simple, almost luminously clear…Because Becket thinks the event and its rarity from the vantage point of the remainder, the event appears only in second-order, muted, veiled, distorted, equivocal, or compromised forms” (B&B 290)

It was ever thus. Even when formulating poetic thinking, the philosopher cannot resist the clarity of dianoia, cannot, in fact, in approaching literature, help but obfuscate it by the very act of philosophical illumination. At the same time the writer, however philosophically rigorous, can’t help but smear the clarity of the philosophical optic with their messy insistence on thinking through poiesis, through making. Gibson’s brilliant study takes us right to the heart of this ancient and yet suddenly very relevant problem. In the future library of works on poetic thinking which thinkers like Badiou have founded, Beckett & Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency will be a required text and I urge any colleagues with an interest in the future of our disciplines to read it with care. While the remainder may be obscure, Gibson’s mind is nothing but clarity and light.

Legends

2007-10-06T09:13:00.001+01:00

Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.Every great writer must experience at least one apostasy of sense.

PJ Harvey, White Chalk

2007-10-06T08:53:00.001+01:00

2. Dear Darkness

Dear darkness
we are timorous at your edge
ledged in metaphysically small
walled by our illimitable
perimeters of theme and its counter
bound to a dream of light
frightened by their shadow play

Dear darkness
we are hardly here
fear of the unknown has had us thinned
pinned to an apocalypse of sense
henceforth unable to approach
to stroke you, riotous material
feral and fecund, tattered and unwhole

Dear darkness
why is it they tell us that you fall
stalled by metaphor and the promise of relief
stolen from potential
torrents of sodden word worried leaves
returns from beyond the woods
hooded eyes and opened cheeks

Dear darkness
I am laid out on a thought of boat
floating on your bottomlessness
caressed by lapping's lapping
happy to slide beneath or 'tween your tress

trees that bear your fabric on their crown
bend low then let their old defences down

dear darkness, it is true

PJ Harvey, White Chalk

2007-10-05T18:49:00.001+01:00

For some reason, before even listening to more than a couple of tracks, I knew I could write poems to each of the titles of PJ Harvey's lastest album. So here goes something.

1. The Devil

The devil'
shobbled
sold bad boots
by farrier jones

evil is still got meaning
he spouts as
he limps to town
shitting-stoke-wankshafted-up-twat-on-bastarding-trent
or anywhere really'
show he talks

The devil'
sscuppered
bought bad debts
by broker james

even evil got the blues
he wails as
he punishes a piana
or anyone really'
show he works

The devil'
ssozzled
fed bad booze
by barman jessie

even evil got to die
he chokes as
his vomit'sinhaled
not anything really'
show he joins 'n dis

joins

one shoe shed
a sepia key plucked fingerfree
wettened words that

stink of gutsn

yeah brim

stone if you

like, oh
'nd our happiness

Lines in Space

2007-10-05T17:53:00.000+01:00

How I imagine Michael, liking my poem not quite enough to...

It was perhaps my finest moment. PN Review, in particular Michael Scmidtt, almost published one of my poems. They liked the work but not quite enough to publish it. Like O'Hara I am too hip for the squares to square for the hipsters. Anyway, it was more than Stand could be bothered to say so in honour of meaningless honours here is my most successful work of art. It is untitled or better tri-titled:

"ein augenblick in der lichtung"

silence a fire’s percussive click cuts
the ciccada’s strum
Zum Zirm
one in the dog valley it
is night here last night to be exact all
is unwrapping in real time then
before the storm in cloud above mountain
on an off like a faulty fluorescent light
in a summer abandoned porta-cabinã
(It’s not as if I am trying to kill romanticism)
or not it does not have to be that way for you I
am not so convinced it was really that way for me
impermeable logic, all can and should be otherwise

"wo ist mein kugelschrieber?"

erm, what next oh yes! Freud
stayed here once (idle mind that seeks no particular recollection)
thermo-electric pulses across the brain’s ravines he
later wrote “all I ask is to be alone near a wood” ah, would! he
was firming up chapter one of Totem and Taboo (that great double
act) “The Horror of Incest” which is a bad book in the end
they say we all have one great novel in us we
also all have one bad anthropological generalisation
was writing in skirmish to Jung but Jung wasn’t listening said
he had heard it all before which is typical

"im haus rottensteiner"

all day walking we got nowhere damn this dim happiness smokey valley phased in blue im-
balance
“did I tell you the story of the story that ate itself?
it began like this…”
“did I tell you the story of the story that ate itself?”
it began like this…”

Ashes to Ash (end)

2007-09-28T10:52:00.000+01:00

Redemption, Limits and Swallows

Whilst Ash investigates the redemptive power of the elegiac poetic process, Ashbery’s poem is based on the aporias discovered at the outer edges of this process, or what might be called the limits of poetic thinking. Derrida describes the aporia thus: “Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, as its death and finitude” (Derrida, The Gift of Death 68). What is the limit of poetic thinking? “Fragment” suggests that the edge of the conceptualisation of poetic language is that of the consciousness which, according to Ashbery, controls everything else: “My power over you is absolute. / You exist only in me and on account of me” (Ashbery 79).

And yet this consciousness, as the trope of the fragment suggests, can never be encountered in full, and its paratactic accumulations and distributions of the fragments of this self emanate from a vacated subject centre. The combination should be devastating: “That coming together of masses coincides / With that stable emptiness, detaining” (Ashbery 79) but the detention here is the key, tracing the gesture of distribution and thus holding the poetic consciousness between two absolute edges, that of total presence which is impossible, and total absence, which is unknowable.

The poem suspends a fragmented consciousness between the two forces I have already enumerated, the “closed box” of death and the “advancing signs of air” which tend towards a sublime subjective plenitude. The fragment then forms an inner edge between the radical aporetic scandal of two outer edges, life and death, or in ontological terms presence and absence. Derrida would describe this suspension between detention and distribution as the “non-passage”:

In one case the nonpassage resembles an impermeability; it would stem from the opaque existence of an uncrossable border: a door that does not open...In another case, the nonpassage, the impasse or aporia, stems from the fact that there is no limit. There is not yet or there is no longer a border to cross, no opposition between two sides: the limit is too porous, and indeterminate. (Derrida, Aporias 20)

This is the paradox of the edge of poetic thinking. First that there can be no edge between presence, which exists through the violent imposition of limitations on poetic being, and absence which has no experience of what a limit could be. Thus the end of each line, each dizain, of the poem as whole, is literally impassable, the poem maybe a fragment of the whole but there is no edge between the fragment and the whole which would allow the articulation of one against the other. The fragment of post-subjective and postmodern consciousness is ongoing and so is infinite in scale, whilst the whole-ness of the unified poem, traditional locale of Romantic subjective certainty, is now a vacated hole.

However this non-existent edge itself is permeable, so that absence floods the structures of presence in the poem, and presence leaks out into the realm of absence. One finds the poet permanently not there, not at home, yet the streets of his town are full of ghosts from beyond, suggesting the location of absence is as empty of absence as that of presence is empty of presence.

The limit between life and death is both uncrossable and endlessly crossable as it pertains to the edge of being as presence, and the lack of edging around the infinite being of non-presence. This aporia takes the form of a decision when it is applied to poetics. The first mark of every poetic utterance is a moment where the poem decides whether to repeat the mark into presence or retain its irreducibility through a relation with absence. The basic copula of mark syntax is then either mark/mark, at which point the iteration of the mark makes it into a sign. Or is a detention of the mark within the aporia of the non-passage between the mark and its other, the non-mark.

This logic of the aporetic potentialities of the edge is reproduced between each word of the poem syntax, each stanza, and between each singular poem and its others. That this is of particular importance to poetic language is due to the ontological necessity of the edge, the line break, which is the minimal differentiation between the materiality of poetry and prose, but also because semantically poetry subsists on what is elided, whatever is missing. Ash’s ruins of lost civilisations seem pitched directly at this point of decision, for he records the marks of absence in redeeming the past within the present of the poetic structure.

However, as Steve Clark notes, this past is not the totality of the past, but a particular late-Romantic, eurocentric, decadent, imperial version of it. Further, the historicism in question is a double fiction, a process of making fictional narratives from a fictional past which Ash calls “decadent historicism” (Ash 171). As in Benjamin’s modernist schema, the poet redeems the past by recording the flashes of the then in the now, however, the past redeemed is not cited in full but is elitist, and redeemed to comment on our perceived current cultural crisis. It does not so much redeem the past as the present, a present which without the past is an excessive simulacrum, the artificial scene of “Accompaniment to a Film Scene” being not untypical in Ash’s work as a whole: “this is no deception but a form of imitation / unconnected to ordinary ideas / of accuracy. Buildings and mountains / are reproduced exactly, but all much larger / than life size” (Ash 29).

Ash’s exploitation of absence is not then to redeem history, a project of modernism and dialectics, but to make history from the pathos of the ruin so that in the future our history will be redeemed: “If we are not to become / a dispersed people of smoke, / the monument that is us must be built soon” (Ash 157). Ashbery in contrast aims, with his Romantic trope of the fragment of consciousness, to create a chiasmatic poetic unit whose external edges not only investigate the double non-passage of the aporetic line between life and death, but which also folds these edges back into the gaps between each dizain so as to inscribe a self-conscious presence of absence back into the evacuated semantic heart of the poem.

Thus in “Fragment,” the individual moments of the poem are allowed their specificity whilst remaining fragments of the larger whole, that is they retain their limits of non-passage, being exactly what they are in full presence, but only through a process of passage out of themselves into the radical unknowability of the sublime zone of death. The end of “Fragment” conveys this;

One swallow does not make a summer, but are
What’s called an opposite: a whole of ravelling discontent,
The sum of all that will ever be deciphered
In this side of that vast drop of water...
The words sung in the next room are unavoidable
But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you. (Ashbery 94)

One mark alone means nothing without its opposite, the non-mark or trace of death alongside each mark, which is the basis of elegiac language. Ash utilises this logic, the presence of absence, really to vouchsafe a certain, elitist postmodern poem unit which is really that of meta-absence, or the anti-logos. His false redemption of a fictive history into a simulacra of the present makes a mockery of the messianic time of redemption. Ashbery, however, in the passage given above, allows the parts of his poem to retain first and foremost their current specificity.

One swallow here, one word, is not a part standing in for the whole, just as the fragment of this poem about death does not take the place of death in a monumental fashion. Instead one must add up the words into the poem. However at each point of addition there is an unravelling, each additional mark not only adds in more presence, it also adds in more absence, as each mark is traced by the non-mark, each swallow followed by a ghost swallow. The resultant sum is all we can know on this side of the non-passage, but it allows access to what is beyond, in the other room, because its edge is not between absence and presence, but is the double passage between the logic of presence and that of absence.

This denies the passage and in denying passage allows thinking to pass from the realm of metaphysical presence, into that of metaphysical absence and back again. Like the ruin, the fragment is only part of the absence all around us, but unlike the ruin, the fragment is not the end of the story but the end of ending in favour of a process of inscription wherein equal attention is paid to the voices outside the room/box of the poem, as to that singular but deconstructed voice of the poetic consciousness. This manner of composition, of writing in and on the edge of the aporia, exploiting the natural tendencies within poetic language towards absence rather than enforcing discourses of presence at the expense of absence, is the beginning of a formulation of poetic practice predicated on the semantics of absence, and is typical of postmodern poetry making it the site of a formulation of an elegiac language, the ghostly trace to the modernist, rational model of direct, and semantically full, communication.

WORKS CITED

Ash, John. Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996.
Ashbery, John. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1970.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana Press, 1992.
Bloom, Harold ed. John Ashbery. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985.
Clark, Steve. “‘Uprooting the Rancid Stalk’: Transformations of Romanticism in Ashbery and Ash.” Forthcoming.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1993.
---. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.
Shoptaw, John. On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Ashmania

2007-09-25T08:46:00.001+01:00

Ode (kinda) to John Ash

when will the world look and see John Ash
writing alone on those Anatolian shores his
pen poised as his judgements are
hesitant to drop
to mark a make yes
like a kestrel conscience
hung above
matter's vole

our curiosity too needs to pounce
just as poiesis must first eat, stuff
way before it can ever move to make, oh
when will John Ash see and look
the world and in shining on its
already faded rugs & drapery
he saved the very thing he saw and
caused to fade?

Seems Ash's newest collection has caused a minor surge in interest in this most reclusive of writers. See the comments on Sonnets at 4am for example:
http://sonnetsat4am.blogspot.com/2007/02/poem-by-john-ash.html

This includes a poem from a much earlier collection The Burnt Pages.

He also has his own Wikipedia page which no longer amazes me as everyone seems to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ash_(writer)

John Ash, "To The City"

2007-09-25T08:36:00.000+01:00

Found this online from Ash's newest collection which I haven't yet seen. It is, as all of Ash's work is, deceptively simple, seeming first off to simply present a scene in lineated prose, then the prosody makes its gentle presence felt, and finally matters of metaphysical import take possession of your consciousness.

As Peter Campion says in his lovely littel review of the poem:

"The poem blends absence and presence, dream image and naturalistic reality. Like those shoes at the doorway, Ash dwells (in this poem and in all his work) in a borderland. By living there he maintains a state of desire, an intensified engagement with feelings as fragile and surprising as the ghost of poplars he sees in the city towers. "

To the City

The village has come to the city.
In the narrow street, in the crowd
pressing down it, in the faces of tall buildings
we plainly see the shimmer of poplars
in the emptiness of the plateau, the huddle
of houses from which the voices of families,
and tribes before them, rise, reaching across
the sharp ridges of their displacement
to settle like smoke in the deepest hollows
of the city. They are very near to us, in the store
or the next apartment, in the shadow of the tower
yet are heard as distance, as ignorance,
and, in their echoes, the city seems to shudder
like something imagined from very far away—
glass city for those without windows. Their shoes
sit at the doorways as if begging for admission.

Ashes to Ash (3)

2007-09-25T08:30:00.001+01:00

Ashbery and Ash: The Harp and the Cave

Ash’s poetry works on how he can cite the past in poetic language and thus redeem it, without reducing the rubble of its current state of ruination to a kind of gothic theme-park testifying to the permanent presence of absence in our lives. In “Scenes from Schumann” he again comes up against the artefact and the ruin: “The urns showed well against the blue of the river, / and beyond them, the ruins of the old insane asylum, / covered in leaves...” (Ash 156). Here the urn, traditional tropic centre of the transformation of absence into presence thanks to Keats, is not so much juxtaposed ruins as placed on top of or against them, which is a means of imposing an artistic unity onto actual ruination. This is the aporia of the non-redemptive monument. However he then goes on to undermine this: “the words / took off like birds from our lips, to circle an absence // that couldn’t be named without turning the feast to ashes. / Not that the talk died. No, it grew brighter...” (Ash 156). The ruin as testimony to loss is a trick. The monument openly testifies to a new and full presence created out of a radical totality of absence: death. In this manner its deconstruction is not so surprising, its confidence being so great it is literally heading for a fall. But the ruin is surreptitious in seeming to pay homage to absence by allowing absence equal footing with presence within its form. A ruin consists of what is there and what is not in equal measure. However the ruin is not the same as the flashes of a ruined past, because the ruin is the end of a process whilst these flashes, these bits of lost history, are part of an ongoing process of eventual, total citational redemption. The ruin is archival, but flashes are held in a radical dialogue with the present, thus they are the bird-like words in Ash’s poem which circle around, rather than settle on the absence. Here absence is not elevated to monumental status, or even the mid-way gothic monumentality of the ruin, rather it is an absence that will not relinquish its semantics of absence into the presence of nomination. This would indeed reduce the feast, the joyous process of the redemption of the past, into ashes; the past brought down to the ruins of what once was great. The end of the feast would be the end of words, but it is the end of the elegiac poem also. The greatest tragedy of the elegiac is that it must end and the lost beloved finally given up, but like the peculiar logic of ending into beginning, one notes that the beginning of elegy comes from the end, whilst the end of the ending is the onset of beginning of a real end, the end of absence in favour of monumentally consoling presence. Whilst this can be avoided the talk will not die, but when the process of local redemption is over it can begin again, as the fragments redeemed from the past are not viewed as eloquent testimonies to a once great empire, but as parts of an ongoing current process of redemption. This is a logic Ash addresses in “The Sudden ending of Their Dream”:

The sudden ending of their dream
came when the wall collapsed
and they saw the water-wheel stop turning.
They began again,—
under the chestnuts in flower, on the bridges,
under the marvellous clouds, beside the statues.
If anything could be saved they would save it. (Ash 119)

Ash’s ongoing battle with the redemption of fragments of the past from the status of ruins, back into the ongoing temporal process of being the past in the now, is picked up in Ashbery’s “Fragment.” The title suggests an open relationship of the part standing in for the whole, which is also the synecdochic operation the ruin represents, but in his own admission the title is something of a joke due to the length of the piece.

If the poem is a fragment of a greater unity, it is the fragment of a consciousness, and it is a fragment not because it is all that is left over after the consciousness has departed, it is not for example the fragment of the consciousness of his dead father, but because it is all that has been recorded up to the present time. Immediately the redemptive aspect can be seen, in that like the flashes in Benjamin, the fragment is a working out of the relationship of memory to the current event of writing it down, but this is a process without the modernist presupposition of a final, unified telos of total redemption through citation.

Ash’s use of postmodern redemptive history was all about what goes into the poem, what can be salvaged in there, and for how long, without a discernible telos to structure the redemptive process; Ashbery’s poem however is about the outer limits of elegiac utterance and thus moves on from redemption altogether into the irresolvable and irredeemable realm of the aporia.

As critics such as Bloom and Shoptaw note, “Fragment” is not so much an elegy for the poet’s father as for the poet’s Romantic, questing, solipsistic self. The fragment presented is immediately problematised for within the synecdochic imperative the part, whatever its status, must stand if for an unidentifiable whole, but not only is the part here problematic in scale, and in its self-conscious exploitation of the aporias of parts and wholes, the whole itself is empty. The trope of the self as absent centre is one around which the whole of “Fragment” revolves:

Out of this cold collapse
A warm, near unpolished entity could begin

Although beyond more reacting
To this cut-and-dried symposium way of seeing things...
The hollow thus produced
A kind of cave of the winds; distribution center
Of subordinate notions to which the stag
Returns to die: the suppressed lovers.
Then ghosts of the streets
Crowding, propagating the feeling into furious
Waves from the perfunctory and debilitated sunset. (Ashbery 80)

The collapse of presence, onset of the elegiac but also of fragments and ruination, is the necessary cut for this “near unpolished entity,” the fragment of the poem. This fragment, although possessed with edges, is not “cut-and-dried,” its limits are not formed as a matter of course nor are they necessarily permanent. This is due to the radical presence of absence as I have already discussed in relation to edges in dizain 3. Here the textual marking of absence is thematised through his father’s death and the threat to poetic identity this announces.

The result is a self evacuated of presence, a hollow cave of the winds, with the emptiness then re-constituted in the poem as wholeness, graves, open ports, empty spaces, and the like; and the winds representing a natural creative force, poetry, which blows through this emptiness. The similarities to Coleridge’s Aeolian harp are notable, as they are to Plato’s cave of course, only here the wind blows across an absented instrument of the self, and the cave is not a trope of a real world beyond the shadows, but a distributing centre, disseminating absence into all forms of metaphysical presence that surround and are predicated on the concept of subjectivity.

These subordinated notions, subordinated because they have collapsed from dominance and also because they are the subordinate but excessive supplements to the discourse of subjective presence, announce the death of the poetic questing self symbolised here by the quarry rather than the hunter. The tropes of the presence of absence then pile up from the stag which is, itself, an aporetic heart of a dying Romantic subjectivity. The suppression of love results in the proliferation of ghostly lovers, as if to negate something were to result naturally in its propagation and distribution, whilst the rhythmic waves emanate from a symbol of edging and cutting, the sunset, which is then undermined. The discourse of the end then comes to an end here, and the end is performed in a manner which arrests its power to structure the self into full presence through monumental death.