0.0 Prologue.
0.1 First, this is a long note. I didn’t write it in one sitting, and hope you’ll take your time reading it, if you are moved to do so at all.
0.2 I’m not going to drive myself mad hyperlinking every possible reference, though I think good faith requires that, if I have in mind at some moment a specific passage, I should try to cite it as best I am able.
0.3 But I am going to use this analytical-style organization, mostly as a sort of guide to keep me from getting unclear, over-dense, and muddling my antecedents. Or so Franklin can make fun of me. This is not an attempt to prove anything via some rigorous logic, but rather to draw together some interesting poetics discussions among some bloggers from this summer. It moves from some particular discussions form this summer toward a more general set of claims. I will hope that what I gain clarity I won’t lose in seeming schematic. You can read the whole note (it extends through 10.3) by clicking below.
0.0 Prologue.
0.1 First, this is a long note. I didn’t write it in one sitting, and hope you’ll take your time reading it, if you are moved to do so at all.
0.2 I’m not going to drive myself mad hyperlinking every possible reference, though I think good faith requires that, if I have in mind at some moment a specific passage, I should try to cite it as best I am able.
0.3 But I am going to use this analytical-style organization, mostly as a sort of guide to keep me from getting unclear, over-dense, and muddling my antecedents. Or so Franklin can make fun of me. This is not an attempt to prove anything via some rigorous logic, but rather to draw together some interesting poetics discussions among some bloggers from this summer. It moves from some particular discussions form this summer toward a more general set of claims. I will hope that what I gain clarity I won’t lose in seeming schematic.
0.4 I’m going to need to use some swift method for indicating a constellation of tendencies in contemporary poetry and poetics — a constellation of which a perfectly fine example would be the poems in The Hat, which is where this started anyway. Since I’m writing in words, this indicating method will probably have to be a word or two; really, it will be a label for a complex category of poetics concepts and behaviors. Categories are preparation for thinking, sez Deleuze. Listen, I know labels are bad. I know there will be abreactions to any use of “avant-garde,” “experimental,” “post-language,” “post-avant,” and so on (in fact, there’s a critique of the current use of the concept “avant-garde” below). I know that any label limits unfairly the complex it is trying to index, and that said complex is neither reducible nor univocal. I know also that labels risk becoming brand names. So I hope, given that we all know these things, that we can move forward without haggling over these specifics, agreeing we are doing the best we can given the constraints of this whole word/category/concept problem. I will admit any term I use is insufficient; you will not pretend not to know, more or less, what array of poets and poems I’m talking about. Okay?
0.5 Now I have to choose a label that will succeed in indicating something important about the constellation, but which at the same time doesn’t beg the questions I am trying to ask here. The poetries to which I mean to refer share, in some (non-totalizing, anti-hegemonic blah blah blah) way, an interest in not replicating the poetics currently most successfully and broadly canonized and commoditized (insofar as such things are possible in the field of contemporary poetry). I’m going with “emergent poetics,” per Raymond Williams via Steve Evans. In fact, this set of notes can’t help but be, in the end, a defense of that particular terminology at the very same time that it tries to get at what is indicated by such a term.
1.0 Levinas.
1.1 I agree with Jordan and Josh and Jean-Luc that Levinas is a good first call when considering the intersection of Judeo-Christian terms and transcendental ethics (hey, I’m from Berkeley, and thus mandated to find quasi-infinite explicatory power in — nope, not Marx — Levinas and Heidegger). However...
1.2 ...I’m not sure anything is Levinasian simply by virtue of finding itself at this crossroads of ethics and belief.
1.3 For example, here’s the end of the Tanya Larkin poem “Heaven and Hell Are Real Places” (p.93) that I really like, as I like all her poems:
...I thank God for giving me autumn
and unwrapping it so violently shaking
the knife in the air nicking the light then
hacking it in two and mincing it to bits
and my happiness in this infinitely dying
light what would I do if I couldn’t release
a little liquid now and then I would die
of happiness for sure I would burst.
This is fantastically energetic; it catches me up and carries me along, wildly vivid, and it breaks lines perfectly.
1.4 Still, as with the proliferation of Hat poems that invoke Judeo-Christian (and let’s be direct, in these poems there’s an emphasis on the Christian portion of that convenient yoking) language, I don’t see all that much poetic engagement with the Levinasian conception of the asymmetric relation with the Other on which his ethics is founded, in a way that I clearly do in, for example, Jean-Luc Godard.
2.0 Godard.
2.1 It’s not the fact that he has his lead character in Notre Musique recite phrases from Entre Nous.
2.2 It’s the way he frames things, and the montage, mostly.
2.3 Godard is Levinasian not as a matter of content, of image-text, but as a formal expression of relations between things within a frame; relations between frames; and relations between the camera and things.
3.0 Brand-name Scholarship.
3.1 All that being said, I agree strongly with Jordan (again!) that what’s at stake here isn’t the particular famous scholar whose remarks most resemble some poem or another (though Jordan seems to think that’s what I was up to; not so). I mentioned the names I did, not to suggest this dude is like Agamben, that dude is like Virilio,...
3.2 ...but as highly-visible flags, one might say, revealing a general cultural-historical wind. I was suggesting that the apparitions of Christianity in The Hat might have been raised and swirled about by this same wind that raised and swirled the apparitions of Christianity in recent critical philosophy (a category which does not, as it happens, include Levinas, though he may well be both the most relevant fore-runner and individual cause).
3.3 That is, I wonder if, by considering both all this God etc in The Hat, and a certain turn in recent critical philosophy, as related phenomena, I might be able to think better about what might be going on in history in relation to all this.
4.0 History & Poetry.
4.1 Poetry — and this is equally true for emergent poetics and for its counterparts, dominant and residual poetics (to stick with Williams’ terms from "Structures of Feeling") — happens in history, and articulates the basic social relations present in history, up to and including the present.
4.2 It does this without necessarily intending to, sheerly because poetry (et al) is formed by consciousnesses which in turn are formed by the social relations in which they develop.
5.0 Marxist Criticism.
5.1 To draw together a seemingly different discussion which has occupied some of the same poet/bloggers and some others (see references for example by Ange, Josh, Jasper, Henry, and Jeffrey; some specific links are found below, 5.4-7), the preceding section above is the basis of what gets called Marxist criticism.
5.2 The claim (4.1) is Marx’s own, a corollary to his basic tenet “We know only one science, the science of history.” Relevant to the discussion of religion and poetry, it’s worth recalling that this statement is the kernel of Marx’s departure from Hegel, and from Hegel’s philosophy of “spirit.” As someone or other said, perhaps Jameson, it’s the idea that “set the dialectic on its feet.”
5.3 The second claim (4.2) can be found all over the place but is perhaps best located in Lukacs’ idea of “imputed consciousness” (the title chapter of History and Class Consciousness), an idea which bridged Marx’s interests in politics and economics with later/Frankfurt School investigations of aesthetic production.
5.4 Marxist analysis of poetics, thus, is not primarily interested in the political views expressed in a poem,...
5.5 ...and certainly doesn’t demand that poems articulate a certain politics or ideology, either in content or form,...
5.8 Marxist criticism doesn’t even require you to “believe” in whatever the hell “Marxism” is, in class conflict, workers’ internationals, communism, universal health care, redistribution of wealth, etc.
5.9 (same as 4.1 above!) It just asks how any given poem, while doing the many many things a poem might do, articulates the historical conditions in which it appears — admittedly with the suspicion that economic relations between people constitute a fundamental force shaping those conditions.
6.0 Emergent Poetics & History.
6.1 Though all poetries express historical conditions, emergent poetics has far more at stake in considering recent history and “current events,” and its relation to them, than do its counterparts.
6.2 For residual poetics, the relationship to history must always be one of nostalgia, insofar as it must hearken back to the period when it was still a vital fact. This nostalgia is able to take on the guise of fury, as residual poetry looks back in anger at the bygone era of its eminence which has betrayed it by not enduring.
6.3 Though dominant poetics may first appear as the poetics of the present, insofar as “the present” is the time of its domination, it is in fact not committed to the present but an interminable non-time. It prefers the belief that things have always been as they are — that is, a belief that the conditions in which it dominates are not historical but universal and timeless. Thus, its dominance is both indefinitely assured and, more relevantly, is not to be questioned, as it is an inevitable result of unchanging and unchangeable conditions. See also: transcendental claims, “common sense.”
6.4 Emergent poetics is, by definition, emerging along with emerging historical conditions. It’s the category of poetics that stakes its existence on both the presence and changeability of history. It is uncertain.
6.5 Hence, while emergent poetics is not in any way duty-bound to have the conscious intent to discuss, describe, theorize or thematize (or etc) historical conditions or “current events,” it must accept itself as an expression of these things.
7.0 Emergent Poetics & Politics.
7.1 Insofar as acting on the present to change it is the name of politics, emergent poetics is inevitably understood to believe in politics.
7.2 This is not to say that emergent poetics believes in any certain politics (one could imagine an emergent poetics that took as its politics a belief in fascism. Indeed, there is no need to imagine this).
7.3 Much of the reluctance about politics in emergent poetics (and this reluctance too is part of history) comes from the knowledge that, unlike the cases of dominant and residual poetics, the relation to politics must be negotiated, and cannot be refused.
7.4 Poems are, among many other things, expressions of that negotiation. However, they are not the negotiation itself...
7.5 ... and thus politics resides with the poet in social space, not with the poem. “Political action” or “activism” are proper to the poet, not the poem.
7.6 What emergent poetics might be said to share with political action is not identity (this is both liberating and disheartening). They are joined in the sharing of an understanding and a willingness: that history’s present is changeable, and that one proceeds without any certainty about results.
8.0 Emergent Poetics & the Term “Avant-Garde.”
8.1 The familiar critique from within, as it were, of “avant-gardism” rightly worries about the role of the vanguard, and the potentially or inevitably elitist politics of such conceptions.
8.2 Regarding the present discussion, however, the problem with the term “avant-garde” (and similar, including “post-avant”) is that it proposes the possibility of being ahead of history, while the poetics it means to index is defined by its participation in ongoing history.
8.3 Or, as Raoul Vaneigem put it 40 years ago, "Are we avant-garde? If so, to be avant-garde means to move in step with reality."
9.0 Emergent Poetics & the Term “Experimental.”
9.1 Everything that happens in the present belongs to the present.
9.2 A given poem — which is by definition of the present, not for the present — can’t rightly be called “experimental.”
9.3 However, because emergent poetics doesn’t accept the set of facts currently on offer (about poetry or about social relations) as the complete or stable set of facts, it shares something with the concept of “experiment.”
9.4 This congruence must perforce be found not in the poem but in emergent poetics’ “attitude,” in the sense of the passage “We wish to transform these times (to which everything we love, beginning with our experimental attitude, also belongs), and not to ‘write for it.’”
10.0 A Kind of Summary.
10.1 The ideas of religion, politics, activism, avant-gardes, experimentalism — all these things belong to the history of the present, and to emergent poetics’ stance toward the present. They do not belong to a given poem; they can’t; to say that they must risks not merely injunction but nonsense.
10.2 Given poems might take up any of these matters and an infinity more. While these might be contingent (e.g. politics, “the news”) or transcendental themes (e.g. God, love), these remain expressions of an emerging history.
10.3 Poems are indeed free to do anything but leave the present.
Posted by jane at September 16, 2005 05:22 PM | TrackBack