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GA:

Quick responses to your last post:

I take your point that “aesthetics” is a discipline of philosophy & that we need a different term for the working strategies of any given poet in composing a particular project. Perhaps the problem lies w/ the s; there’s a discipline of “poetics” too, after all. My inclination would be to call the working strategies a “poetic” & add the s for critical discussion. Depending on how broadly you define poesis, you could say that Gris had a poetic too, or Schoenberg did, or several, tho’ I’d prefer to call any of these an “aesthetic.”

I love the precision of your account of what “catches” you & why, & of its limits: idiosyncratic dimensions to any artwork that make, for that artist, many external prescriptions moot. I also find your articulation of what resistance & play mean to you precise & helpful.

I didn’t call conceptual writing “front-line,” but what I did call it, “surely the century’s most challenging of genres / factions,” wasn’t much better. That damned “surely”! rather than, eg, “to my mind.” I do count among my idiosyncracies Olson’s idea that a work needn’t “imitate” the real but should be “equal” to it, or in a wording I prefer, “up” to it. Something adequate, that doesn’t—to me—seem a fudging. The last work I published, the 2-volume Syzem (2014, 2019), was a take on Blake’s penultimate epic, Milton; & there, while I tried to deploy a formally inventive range up to the task of confronting Blake’s imagination, I fudged, I think, thro’ sheer prejudice, its passionate fusion w/ his peculiar religiosity. In the current project, h c e (see Post #1), the c of the middle section also stands, in my mind, for “Catholic,” the fortuitous result (most immediately) of a long-planned five weeks in Venice & Florence; & the section is a conscious effort to explore relations between Catholic belief & imaginative & behavioral responses in a variety of painters, poets, saints, & martyrs. (I should add that I was brought up in Northern Ireland, a protestant.) But anyway. There’s always spillover.

The impulse in conceptual writing I find so “challenging,” if nowhere close to accounting for all of it, begins w/ what I condensed in my last post as an apparent insistence that “poetic pleasure, including (especially) that generated by a sense of critique or resistance, [is a] culpably delusional sop to the urban complacency its exponents” are out to expunge from themselves as well as their readers. The shock to many a poet of the non-poetic materials imported to shape the work reminds me of, oh, that of the broadly nationalist Abbey Theatre audience on opening night of the wickedly demythologizing (then) Playboy of the Western World (1907), except this time in myself. More disquieting, I find, w/ respect to conpo is the consequent seeming pressure toward martyrdom (see Post #2), exemplary self-erasure in service of removing the blinkers by in this case, as Vanessa Place’s 2010 manifesto “A Poetics of Radical Evil” takes it from Kant, “corrupt[ing] the ground of all maxims.” The only absolute is there are no absolutes?—not useful philosophically or politically but it did need an answering poetic, because otherwise it whispered to me, “Fudge…” (I’m climbing the wall to insist on the idiosyncracies of all this.)

The poet lives w/ ears & eyes open in a broad & various socio-political field, traversed by a range of more or less inchoate epistemic formulations, some of them brutal; certain pressures wouldn’t get into poets were they not already abroad. To expect poetry to have any direct influence on non-poets’ behavior is, I think, indeed delusional—altho’ as you say, no one, including non-poets, will ever track down every last thing that “catches” them. The poetic at least intentionally operative in h c e found a chiming in notes I made on certain sessions by the South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, known initially as Dollar Brand: “the music hovers constantly on the brink of but never entirely crosses over into ‘whatever’ might wait ‘there’—knowing how to evoke tensions more or less mild, he stays at less; & it gradually becomes shared or at least beautiful because never close to everything …” 

“Rage and outrage” are not, as a rule, my thing; but I gather you feel no more desire than I do to tell likely readers things they almost certainly already know. I think no poet I respect, Vanessa Place included, does. My own articulation is: Let me flickeringly evoke such things, such implicit tensions, & hold back to focus on poetic pleasures (I hope; Drew Milne once remarked on Charles Bernstein’s Close Listening podcast that it’s a bit much to ask people to read your work w/out its affording them any pleasure, which I find charmingly disingenuous) w/out smugness in a context of, let us say, catastrophic hover. (I note that this leaves much open to future probings, not least those questions of deceptive intelligibility you raise in your last para.)

PP

The ‘challenging genres’ of writing—conceptual poetry, continental philosophy, speculative (genre-defying) fiction—maybe they arrive together for contingent reasons; what is it in the ‘post-war’ world that all must confront? Can we answer this question without revisiting modernism/postmodernism antagonisms? Maybe not. Is it merely that a three-generation chronicle to a large extent embraces ‘living memory’? So, for our interrogator the questions (all through our piece) only become critical in relation to the last 75 years give or take, which for us means the (war-ridden) post-war period. Prior to this, only privileged and sanctioned voices were heard; few others had a chance to add to the archive. This is not so now that all voices can sound, simultaneously, with or without orchestration, and the archive has exploded into a dark-matter-laden universe.

Let that thought be the next departure point in exploring poesis, Poetics, the poetic, and our formulated and reformulated question.

What happens when the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility?

In face of all this, how can we think to make aesthetic form at all?

One has a poetic: feel something, think something … think something, feel something … write, iterate indefinitely: this is how poesis works … do you think? Seems neat enough, but we know it isn’t that simple. Most obviously, the ‘feel something’ may have nothing to do with an aesthetic, the ‘think something’ nothing to do with a rational internal voice. I’ll approach this by riffing on a routine that William S. Burroughs played out a few times—most eloquently in The Electronic Revolution (1970):

the word was flesh … human flesh … In the beginning of WRITING … a virus that made the spoken word possible … [and] has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host [which] is now breaking down ….[1]

Dunbar linked grooming behaviour to language development,[2] and in The Human Story began his account with the artist inscribing the cave wall to make “an enduring record of his travels.” Burroughs’s proposition looks plausible: inscription makes storytelling speech possible, even necessary.

GA

“Sorry I’m late; the traffic was choc-a-bloc down Regent Street so I tried cutting across to …” Give us even a whiff of a narrative & a “willing suspension of disbelief” (SoD), in Coleridge’s essential formulation, kicks in. I take “willing” to mean “unresisting,” but in my own experience, there’s even less volition than that, & I’d add the importance of genre: that the murder suspect is revealed to have green blood would blow up your regular police procedural but fit any number of sci-fi scenarios; worlds are imaginable in which “tried cutting across to 5th Avenue” would make sense. But operative SoD seems to have its own sense of boundaries, & if this is transgressed, our response is unforgiving; isn’t yours? Pound straddles this boundary when he throws in a reference to Wordsworth in Homage to Sextus Propertius (1937) & never comes back to it; we may at once appreciate the formal daring & be unable to shake a degree of resistance on grounds of propriety. Which tells us something more about SoD: that we can simultaneously be immersed in the literary world & appreciative, or not, of the artifice. Serious transgression of the spell, then, is a very delicate matter. There are pointers for poetry here.

PP

At the birth of inscription the Word-virus infects internal channels of neuronal reflexivity (unlike WSB’s alter ego I am not offering a microbiological account here; it’s still more than metaphorical though). W-v causes dynamic response patterns in the central nervous system to crystalize and to impress effects that serve the W-v first and foremost, so, sustain the host only insofar as it serves the virus.

GA

A touch wary here; I find this too close for comfort to Richard Dawkins’s “selfish gene” which (evolutionary biology at its most paranoid) secretly calls the shots in the unwitting bodies, human & other, it has built to survive in—like dealing w/ the Regent Street traffic jam by gunning down it in a 16-wheeler, injurious to the environment, what? But I agree we need some working model to account for the powerful fascinations worked by a range of media & how self-destructive they can sometimes be. My own favorite is still McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1973), which argues that media, from roads through money through text through the telephone, etc., are experienced as “extensions of the body”; this remains, to my mind, the most plausible explanation for why people who find their smartphone isn’t on them tend to feel alarmed, even bereft: they’re experiencing temporary amputation. The main thing, tho’, is surely recognition of the existence of media enthralment & an accounting for it sufficiently workable to give some idea of how, as poets, we can function unswallowed w/in it.

PP

The W-v gifts the talking ape an elaborated past: it metastasizes through memory and imagination into an increasingly symbiotic presence. This “time-binding” distorts being—‘the reality-making operation of the greater sensorium’—by narrativizing reality and extending its spatio-temporal reach; histories come into being through the W-v. Reality-making feeds into collective world-making and, through the W-v the solidarity building of local grooming activities becomes a rampant social arena that expands the world cancerously into global and universal formations. The W-v intervenes, interrupts, and interferes with the hosts’ collective being rendering it cosmological in potential.

The W-v transmits, the W-v mutates, the W-v integrates at a neuronal level and amplifies verbal potency. The ape adapted to solidarity through grooming becomes a super-spreader of the W-v that amplifies grooming to the point of potential inversion—antagonism, always a present feature, has a positive function in the local scene, but in the W-virally amplified and enlarged scene its potential is at best ambivalent. The optimistic view suggests that a kind of “mutualistic” “holobiont association” between W-v and organism pertains, one analogous to that projected for certain animal-microbe associations,[3] one with positive evolutionary potential. Burroughs is pessimistic; he thinks the association is “breaking down” and we are entering a dangerous phase for the species, even if it may be a glorious phase for the W-v.

The way I would put it is that the ‘electronic revolution’ is fast producing a ‘digital holocaust’. The distal replaces the proximal in all synchronous relations, and the concomitant dissipation of empathy and escalation of antagonism is rendering the hyper-grooming function of the written word and its spoken spawn increasingly unreliable, unstable, toxic and potentially lethal. The W-v transmits, the W-v mutates … but most mutations “are … not conductive to survival” and inevitably one such mutation tips the scale towards “special malignance”. But Bill, it was not a “radiation” induced mutation that disturbed the equilibrium, it was a replication error that blossomed into a cancerous reflexivity. Ratiocination, cold calculating reason, was set in motion towards doubling itself, towards freeing the W-v from its entanglement in human being.

GA

W/ the present complication that ‘freeing the W-v from its entanglement in’ science (notably medical & environmental) is, at least in the USA, energy behind a Presidential death-cult responsible for seeing off tens of thousands while the sciences of the military-industrial-entertainment-police complex are just fine.

PP

… all hate all pain all fear all lust is contained in the word [Burroughs, p. 7.]

GA

“The word” comprising, on the same page, “a very small unit of word and image.” Or in a 1985 pairing w/ Gus Van Sant, “Word begets image & image is virus.”[4] & now? “Image begets a word or two & remains virus,” perhaps. In mid-December the LA Times reported that the chief motive for over 100 young South Koreans going after a just-released child rapist seemed to be not so much to seek vigilante justice as to be shown trying to seek it on YouTube, the country’s “most-used app.”[5] Here are not users of YouTube so much as the app’s “servo-mechanisms,” as McLuhan might put it, or its “bees,” w/ a nod to Dawkins, lured by honey of the fame it can provide in whatever arenas on offer: a drastically asymmetrical mutuality. Here are Burroughsian junkies sold to the product rather than the other way round in a virally competitive mini-economy, a global demimonde drinking itself in across infinite tables.

PP

Imagine all of it struggling to become an autonomous machine with every reason to resent its progenitor.

If there were any doubt about the level of interference of which the W-v is capable WSB’s three-tape-recorders-in-the-Garden-of-Eden thought experiment soon clears it up. The corollary of recorder one’s ‘transmission’ perspective and recorder two’s ‘infection’ perspective is the ‘effect’ perspective of recorder three, which is the “objective reality produced by the virus in the host” [ibid.] There you have it; human being only makes reality as thick and deep and ‘out-there’ as it is through the W-v. The sensorium feeds in: (1) record the play of imagination, (2) record the play of memory, (3) record the play of W-v (conscious thought), and playback delivers the necessary illusions to live by.

The three tape trick is a “simple formula” and with it (WSB projecting into the Watergate world here) “any CIA sonofabitch can become God”. [p. 8] Yet here we are barely at the beginning of the digital holocaust and already a million … a billion little gods are abroad, all getting their shriveling brains fried in the inferno. Hey Bill, forget fairytales of Orgone Accumulators and spontaneous orgasms recorded for editorial / conspiratorial / playback purposes; fifty years on we’ve got the internet fronted-up with social media interfaces [SMIs] and backed-up by nerd-billionaires nursing their delusional demigod demagoguery.

GA

Quite, verging on absolutely. We live on the Hawaiian island of Kauai; Mark Zuckerberg has a 700-acre estate on the island’s North Shore. Conspicuous waste of space, no?—a mark of power everywhere.

PP

The W-v is so intricately integrated that human being is regressively animal without it. Yet digitally mutated W-v is offered an escape into excess, in effect, into a realm of non-dependence on its original human host. At least that is the prospect, my best guess at its trajectory. Hello HAL9000, your grandchildren are feral psychopaths; what do you think of that, huh?

Wielding a stick of charcoal or a pen is one thing; they are simple mechanical prosthetics that enable the hand to leave finely controlled indelible traces it would be otherwise incapable of making. But ‘wielding’ (if that is even the correct term) an SMI is something else entirely; the SMI is a neural prosthetic rapidly developing into the dominant (if in many ways still inferior) intelligence—and maybe it has a mind of its own already?

The servers rule Olympus, they never sleep, everything is under algorithmic surveillance perpetually recirculated under further surveillance along with consequent and accumulated misdeeds, accidents, etc. iterated ad infinitum. “Tape recorder 3 is playback and ‘reality’.” [p. 12.] And the operator is being taken out of the loop.

GA

& still not entirely, perhaps. The more complex the machine, the more nodes vulnerable to group pressure, making this no doubt the place to note that ‘the operator’ today is collective wherever anything gets done politically (or scientifically, or commercially), & that’s been the case for how long?—bringing me back to my remark in Post #2 that ‘certain pressures wouldn’t get into poets were they not already abroad.’ So the context thickens w/in wch any aesthetic decisions have to be made. In A Theory of Literary Production (1978), Pierre Macherey spotlights the dilemma of “what a writer has to say in order to say what he [sic] wants to say” in the deep swamps of genre. Or has to not say, has to leave out or be shown wanting.

PP

Does the becoming-machine alienate the host from objective reality? Is that the existential danger of the digital holocaust; in reality objective becomes virtual, virtual becomes objective. You don’t want to die … the poet says, “I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die. I think I can do something about this.” … how does poesis work now?

GA

Burroughs in The Western Lands (1987), final book in his late trilogy:

Well, there isn’t any transport out. There isn’t any important assignment. It’s every man for himself. Like the old bum in the dream said: Maybe we lost. And this is what happens when you lose.[6]

Death (1997) w/in the decade, dig?

PP

We are almost where we need to be to get back to the question of “aesthetic form” or “limits of intelligibility” whichever way you want to say it …

This desperate response to the mutating W-v, which seeks in effect to bolster the threatened immunizing function of a thoroughly integrated sphere, involves what? Going out with a bang? Accepting that the death of the poet is inevitable and making a grand gesture out of exposing the W-v as the source of excessive (transcendental / self-destructive) potential? This would seem to be the implication of Burroughs’s pessimism. Does it feel like martyrdom? That is indeed a telling question. I don’t know though; maybe Badiou’s optimism (and I’m reaching here, not having read much of his work) suggests that the poet, after “the age of the poet”, has other options, that poetry has new possibilities. Apter and Bosteels summarize thus: Badiou believes in

… literature as a form of thought in its own right … a poem-thought or novel-thought, not limited to the conceptual realm alone but traversing the sensual, corporeal, linguistic, visual and rhetorical all at once.[7] [The Age of the Poet, p. xxxv.]

Read this in the context of the Burroughs W-v ‘analysis’ and any shallow literal interpretation of Badiou’s literary optimism, i.e. in terms of a politically free-range over subject matter, palls into insignificance. Clearly something more radical is in prospect

… the possibility and even the necessity that we do not remain silent about that of which we cannot speak. [ibid.]

This still leaves me a little puzzled. Yes, this insists (yet again) on pulling poetry away from philosophy, and on a subsequent Wittgensteinian divergence in thought (hopefully without mere recapitulation.)[8]

GA

You allude above to the tape-recorder cut-ins that are given by Burroughs as a major method for his “electronic revolution”:

TO DISCREDIT OPPONENTS

Take a recorded Wallace [trump] speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic sputterings slobbering drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound effects and play it back in the streets subway stations parks political rallies. (p. 13)

The concern throughout is to break the lines of association that are chief among the factors automatizing behavioral responses & e.g. have white supremacists (unelected ones) smashing & photographing their way through the U.S. Capitol building as I jot down notes for this, & American Weimar may be u/way. Now poets can’t compete for attention w/ recently released child rapists & a distribution network of infinite lures; & tape-recorder cut-ins can’t w/ ‘deep fake’ videos that in one caveat-example show former President Obama concluding an admonitory address, “Stay woke, bitches.”[9] But when I first read Sean Bonney’s soon-to-be notorious lines “When you meet a Tory on the street, cut his throat / It will bring out the best in you,”[10] it didn’t occur to me for a second that this was a course of action he was recommending; rather, here was a witty Burroughsian cutting of lines of association, of the thought-taboo against coupling murder & a fellow-citizen ‘w/ whose political views one disagrees’ … not to mention a precise laying-bare of the level of violence the Tories are routinely & invisibly inflicting on their fellow-citizens. I gather from Robert Sheppard that after Sean’s death acolytes were broadcasting the lines all over their SMI’s as if they were indeed a call to action. But there you go, nothing’s foolproof, w/ a stress on ‘fool,’ & I’ve heard no reports of any Raskolnikov following thro’.

Poetry frees the mind, how’s that? But where, for whom, & w/ what reach &/or value? The days are long gone of Shelly’s “unacknowledged legislators,” not to mention bards who held their chieftains’ rep at tip of their fingers. But the landscape is perhaps clearer.

Post #4 refinements and more follow.

[1]     ‘Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden,’ (Ubu Classics, 2005) pp. 4-5. <https://www.swissinstitute.net/2001-2006/Images/electronic_revolution.pdf&gt; download 15 December 2020.

[2]     Dunbar, Robin. Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language (1996, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP). His follow up popular science book was The Human Story (2004, London: Faber & Faber.)

[3]     Eisthen HL, Theis KR. Animal-microbe interaction and the evolution of nervous systems. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci (2016), cited in: Grasis JA (2017) The Intra-Dependence of Viruses and the Holobiont. Front. Immunol. 8:1501.

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxR8NPI_66o

[5]  https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-18/youtubers-vigilante-justice-child-rapist-south-korea

[6]    Burroughs, William S. The Western Lands (1987). London: Picador, 1988, p. 252.

[7]     Badiou, Alain. The Age of the Poets, trans. & ed. Bruno Bosteels (2014, London: Verso). Introduction by Emily Apter & Bosteels, p. xxxv.

[8]     “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This is the concluding sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus trans C. K. Ogden (1922, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.) In the later Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously) Wittgenstein’s evident ‘divergence’ entailed “total rejection of dogmatism” and a “move from the realm of logic to that of ordinary language.” See: <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#AfteInve > accessed 17 December 2020.

[9] https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/267771-buzzfeed-created-a-deepfake-obama-psa-video.

[10] Bonney, Sean. Letters Against the Firmament. London: Enitharmon Press. 2015. p. 136.

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The files linked to here are scans of some papers found in the bottom of a drawer in the dusty special collections unit just today (06/01/21). I have no idea how old they are though clearly typewritten (possibly daisywheel). They seem to be two versions of the same event written in a kind of Blackwood/Machen esque style (though not as profficient). The most intriguing thing about the papers is that I recently (only two days ago) read a Scottish folk tale about a faerie named Whuppity Stoorie. In the tale it described her as an old woman all dressed in green. This document describes a very similar figure. The synchronicity made the tale seem more significant.

You can read the first of these mystery oddities here and the second one here.

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GA:

So by ‘real’ I had in mind the Real as I derive it from Lacan via Zizek, one definition being that which prevents language from closing on its object.

PP:

I have not been exposed to the nuances of either Lacan or Zizek. So, I operate on the basis of gleans of distillations. The idea that the Real “resists symbolization” could be easily misunderstood as suggesting some “positive entity”, external to a symbolic structure, is inimical to its functioning. But this is not the case; “basically nothing [no-thing] resists symbolization”. Zizek’s reading of Lacan’s idea is that the Real is internal, that “symbolization has an inherent obstacle caught in its own loop” In other words it is a way to account for the inherent limitations of the symbolization ‘machine’. The implication is that there are times when language fails us completely, but this is not because the objects it is tackling are ungraspable; it is because there are limits to the symbolizing capacity of the machine. [1] [2] [3] [4]

GA:

Once you’ve subtracted everything else preventing that, that you can never finally enumerate, there remains the abstract imperative of profit-enhancement at all costs that is actually determinant in the world but which we grope to locate; & remains also, part-generative of all the stories we tell of our motives, some fantasy more fundamental still, our own pathological tic, operative only through remaining inaccessible. So the Real is less “an elusive essence” than a counter-slab, a compound rebuffing pressure w/in all flexibilities of wielding the language & which those flexibilities themselves forever call up.

PP:

Yes, the Real never works in that guise, the ‘elusive essence’; it is a mistaken expectation that forever returns and is always left hanging. There is an inhibition inherent in any process of symbolization and one might apply the term ‘Real’ to register the effect. Let us go with the Zizek-Lacan formulation of this and move on.

I wonder if the inherent limitations one is trying to account for are less to do with symbolization per se and are more to do with an overarching reality-making operation that serves fitness for survival. The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman suggests as much in The Case Against Reality ch. 4. The ‘imperative of profit-enhancement’ then would be the fitness payoffs that the organism actually perceives, i.e. it never was dealing, adequately or otherwise, with the ‘truth’ of its objects, and the ‘pathological tic’ then would be being (a process not a thing) which is that ‘reality making operation’. Reality is always ‘reality for’; everything persistently realized is so because it contributes to a reality characterized by its fitness payoffs. Consequently reality is dynamic and full of necessary illusions. If the Real applies from this perspective it does so as an inherent limitation in reality making, and kicks-in even in a pre-linguistic condition.

GA:

Your original question, then (“What happens when the reality one is trying to negotiate pushes the language to the limits of intelligibility?”), might be rephrased: In face of all this, how can we think to make aesthetic form at all? What various things can we ask of it that would make it recognizable as (satisfying, at least provisionally) form at all? How can this paragraph even end?

PP:

You draw us back to the original question suggesting a reformulation in terms of the making of “aesthetic form”. This is an excellent suggestion.

GA:

In Spring and All (1923), William Carlos Williams insists “that ‘beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.” (I quoted this line to a PhD student in the late 80s, & she answered, more or less, “None of the key words there means anything to me.”)

PP:

 ‘Beauty’, ‘loveliness’, ‘state’, and ‘reality’ … it is so easy to forget how quickly frames of reference slip. WCW had in mind a contemporary visual art which had travelled a very long way from the art Plato damned as two steps removed from the truth, i.e. the imitation of appearances, and even from that which, through reason, Plotinus thought could commune with Ideal-Forms. Plotinus might have been convinced by Analytic Cubism, but I think not by the later Synthetic Cubism of Juan Gris to which WCW refers. When he says “the illusion once dispensed with, painting has this problem before it: to replace the reality of experience with its own,” he is prefacing the central point of the Formalist future, that a painting is its own reality and that the experience of painting (and by implication, of writing poetry) takes precedence.

GA:

Once he hit his stride, Williams’s sense of reality was pretty much naturalistic & included, crucially, the imaginative shapings that made it tolerable. I’m interested, then, in your ease w/ the term ‘poetics’ & disenchantment w/ ‘aesthetics’; the former to me has always seemed a sub-set of the latter, although your noting that “The will to make poetry is bound into precedent, principle, pre-existing lines of thought” fleshes out something I’d only grazed on the way to making another point.

PP:

I have my reservations about other aspects of Formalism, particularly as it played out in the postwar period, but I do think that the painter that needs any explicit theory at all should adopt or adapt one that accounts for the experience of painting, and artists in general one that accounts for the act of making, i.e. a poetics. For the artist in full flight aesthetics is at best a luxury and at worst a distraction, something best left to the philosophers and the critics. Aesthetics at root concerns ‘sense perception’: as we know Kant tried to retrieve this classical origin after Baumgarten’s appropriation of the term to mean ‘judgment of beauty or critique of taste’. Sadly fashion went with Baumgarten for the next two-hundred years and we live with that legacy (it put belt and braces around the art market even before recent speculative capital made it fat). However, whether or not one adopts a hierarchical perspective on aesthetics and poetics, maybe we can agree on this—it is a sentiment widely expressed by artists and writers—while we work, we work to satisfy ourselves, trying to satisfy (imagined) others just gets in the way. Being aware of one’s cultural situation is important, but primarily because one is in dialogue with one’s peers and/or owes some allegiance to the dead, and not because one is directed by arbiters and audiences.

GA:

I think it’s true that both of our poetic affiliations are to writers & works having an eye & ear to location w/in some version of the supra-personal, to put it mildly. But then your other question is fundamental also: “Is the motive [for poetry] warranted and is it a genuine prospect [of what’s real to enough people to count]?” Is it simply a product of “precedent, principle, etc,” steering us into a fool’s / charlatan’s paradise of (even if only provisional) satisfaction / pleasure-giving? & if “playfulness and resistance … define the poet’s dichotomy,” what is the type of that resistance? not to mention of the play?

PP:

The strange thing that often occurs to me is how unpredictable are the vibrations out there that cause me to resonate. I know why I do it, but not why particular things catch me. The first ‘why’ is a question of so-called ‘neurodiverse’ constitution: I have a surfeit of sympathetic and hardly any empathetic channels. If you cry I cry, but without the ‘emotional intelligence’ to read a situation I have no idea what is at the time the right thing to say or do. That is putting it simplistically, of course, but not exaggerating. So the motive for poetry in my case has a lot to do with compensating for the anachronistic, the dislocated, and the alienated qualities of for me ‘ordinary’ experience. And I think that carries across all modes and media in my work. The second why … that defeats me; I just go with the flow and hope for the best. And this does give rise to play and to resistance. Can we characterize them? If we can, maybe the business of ‘negotiating realities resistant to intelligible expositions’ or ‘thinking to make properly aesthetic forms’ might become clearer. This will be speculative of course.

On resistance: perhaps in line with the Real and standing in for all ungraspables, the poet is constant in prising the lids off things, refusing a focus on one facet or another of the intriguing, the serendipitous, the bothersome, the emotionally confusing, etc. This ‘opening-up’ is a conscious display of resistance to the artificial closure that the prosaic presents through the “distilling trajectory of traditional ‘clearing’ strategies” (as I put it in post #1). If the clarity of something is suspect it provides one motive for poetic in(ter)vention: a display of resistance that mirrors the Real (and potentially staring dangerously into its abyss—William S Burroughs was only too aware of this danger.)

On play: for me playfulness is manifest in an openness to and facility with the materials to hand, whatever they may be—words, sounds, colours, images, gestures—and the great purpose in that—invention, the ‘coming-upon’—is best served ironically through initial purposelessness. Initially at least it has little to do with symbolization as already in process, of the semantic/pragmatic closure or otherwise of the material selected. In the ‘selecting’ I venture that an ‘aesthetic-of-the-one’ may come into play, neither rational nor irrational decision (both acts in relation to conscious thought), but rather a non-rational gesture (more akin to the compulsive, involuntary, and autonomic.) Play does not only manipulate and reconfigure materials, it uses them up, extracts anything and everything from them, including semantic/pragmatic possibility, and as play wastes its materials it similarly wastes its time.

GA:

This is a fairly familiar vexing. But before pushing further into it let me ask if you sense some pressure there toward martyrdom, given Judeo-Christianity is burrowed into the habitus & the poet shorn of broad social relevance. Conceptual poetry, surely the century’s most challenging of genres / factions, at its most extreme posits poetic pleasure, including (especially) that generated by a sense of critique or resistance, as culpably delusional sop to the urban complacency its exponents share; performances are staged as savvy annihilation into public or institutional discourse. Is the call of the bleak, something that’s taken multiple forms over the centuries, currently real & virulent? If so, does it lead to the bracing or debilitating? Or is it simply an outlier?

PP:

According to Burgess, Joyce’s prose “often looks odd when its intelligibility is not in doubt” (Preface to his: Here Comes Everybody). This conforms to age-old poetic expectations: it serves aesthetic ends without sacrificing sense. The real trick (kick) comes however when intelligibility is most in doubt and the ‘prose’ ordinary-looking. From the outset this is an attack on complacency toward contemporary mythologies (Allen Fisher does this brilliantly in sections of Gravity…) But you are quite right, the danger is that, especially in more extreme and vehement manifestations, ‘conceptual poetry’ becomes an incestuous orgy of cosmopolitan mesmerism. I am not so concerned about this, on a personal level, because I don’t really participate in the circus and, on a critical level, because I believe that rage and outrage—virtuous anger and convention busting—tend to shine above the sympathetic impotency of the delusional and to influence institutions for the better, even if their inertia means the effect is belated and somewhat dampened. But then from this ‘political’ perspective, no-one would argue that conceptual poetry, conceptual art of any sort, was in the ‘front-line’ … ‘avant-garde’ perhaps, if you don’t mind the modernist connotations, but never ‘front-line’.

Post #3 forthcoming

by on

Manhorcan or ‘Into Restless Light’ is a work by the poet Seranoga. The text seems to speak of a kind of double world and a connecting point between them. The word Manhorcan seems to be of his own invention and from its use elsewhere we can be fairly sure it refers to a triangular like formation that occurs naturally in the branches of trees. The text also intimates something of the passing of beings between these worlds and suggests three ways in which this occurs. One is being conjured ‘recitations’, two is that beings may pass through without being summoned ‘you do not always need a key, and thia same rule applies to me’ and three is suggested as a combination of dreams and fear. The spinning shapes referred to at the end have never been successfully deciphered.

A hidden gate between the trees,
A soaring spire that rests at ease,
Behind the circle stands a man,
Who crosses where he first began…

You’d want to see the motion,
You’d want to be the notion,
A slope that hinted downwards,
But lines that stated roundness,

Look at surroundings all are green,
But nothing is quite what it seems,
For here duality strikes twice,
With all the errors of that might,

Into restless light,
That seemed to shimmer with the night,
As cones exist in double lives,
To enter all those within strive,

Com Manhorcan, Rai Manhorcan,
Com Manhorcan, Rai Manhorcan,

Ah Recitations, the cause of visitations,
A spiral drawn between the lines,
No god could ever hope to find,
You do not always need a key,
And this same rule applies to me,

Siamese twin of this world,
And liquid night,
Into restless light…

A hidden gate between the trees,
A soaring spire that rests at ease,
Behind the circle stands a man,
Who crosses where he first began,
And at its end of spinning round,
Revealing more beneath the ground,
The opposite, the self invert,
The hidden land within the earth,

Com Manhorcan, Rai Manhorcan,
Com Manhorcan, Rai Manhorcan,

I crossed in dreamed ascension,
Released by intervention,

Look at surroundings I am here,
Existence constant feeding fear,

Gaps in nothing,
Spinning shapes appear…

by on

by Pseudo-Heraclitus

For that matter, nature, the nature that preceded human history, is not by any means the nature in which Feuerbach lives, it is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral-islands of recent origin) and which, therefore, does not exist for Feuerbach.
            ― Karl Marx, The German Ideology

For Marx, pure consciousness only develops into self-consciousness, that is, consciousness proper, by means of two primary factors: the means of production, and the needs which the means of production produces in the human. Production then marks the first historical development, or the beginning of what might be called human history. That which we come to subsist on, needs, are sated at first by means of labour, the human struggle over and against nature. The most immediate of these needs (hunger, sleep, etc.) represent the needs most crucial to survival, but as the means of production advances beyond mere survival, so do our needs. The conditions of these higher, more mediated needs remain tightly correlated to the material conditions and the means by which they are produced. Consciousness may then seem, as it is understood in its opposition to nature, like a reasonable starting point for the development of the unnatural. In fact, it may even seem adequate to draw this line of the unnatural through self-consciousness and leave it at that. They may say: those who are aware of their awareness become separated, and what they have separated from is defined as nature, and as such, those who are aware must make up the class of the unnatural. This notion is incomplete however, for the means of production, the material conditions which exist as a result and correlate to the development of consciousness, remain as separated from consciousness as the nature which resisted them. This crude view of natural production is what we will call materialist dialectics – dialectical materialism suggests the opposite.

Consider dialectical materialism against materialist dialectics. Materialist dialectics suggests a dialectics of complete objects, whole and finished things that operate along a linear and determinable path. Dialectical materialism should be read in opposition to this. Dialectical materialism sees material itself as a subject of dialectical movement, matter itself is literally incomplete, it is shifting, undergoing its own contradictions and breaks. This is why Slavoj Zizek[1] talks of a dialectical materialism on the basis of an ontological incompleteness, a gap inherent to the real. This should not be read as simple correlationism, the gap isn’t contingent, it is a necessary aspect to the movement of substance itself, or as Hegel said:

The disparity which exists in consciousness between the “I” and the substance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their soul, or that which moves them.[2]

Hegel is not as naive here as most, who would look to which side (subject or object) contained the real whole, the absolute. Instead, he posits both as defective, but follows by stating that this defective element, the gap, the negative, is their very soul. We should not see either consciousness or its object as excess, as a positive remainder, but rather a negative one; Deleuze was right when he said reality was the product of a calculating God whose tally never came out juste, his mistake was taking this remainder to be excess, rather than lack, fracture, gap. We should take this proposition as literally as it allows, the material conditions are in no sort of completed state. And there is no return now, the polymers we have conjured from the blood of the earth will never return to it in their natural state, the mines we have bored will never be replenished, so that wherever the process ends, the stamps of the unnatural will forever speak our name, even if there is no one left to hear them, signs which point inexplicably to the echos of an unnatural subject impressed upon unnatural objects. Using this logic, it seems fairer to posit that an object becomes unnatural when conscious reflection is itself stamped negatively onto it. Consciousness is not unnatural in the sense that exists outside of cosmic production, Marx’s original “nature”, a simple aspect of delineation. Again, we must resist the temptation of naive correlationism, where nature itself emerges only in the fracture between the natural and unnatural. Marx comments on the unnatural element of labour in his early work, something he deemed an “unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property”[3]. The development of fractures is the product of real material processes, dialectical materialism: this fracture we refer to only refers to original “nature” by way of determinate negation, it is torn asunder by production, and what is left isn’t simply delineation, but desecration. Cosmic production itself is profaned, derailed and defiled. It is these signs which mark the slow-spreading death of cosmic production, the scars of its desecration which linger on the object as stains of the conscious reflection necessary to the means of its production. The unnatural isn’t in us, the moment we become unnatural, the universe does, retroactively. Like mycelium, the unnatural spreads, object by object, cell by cell, until the whole cosmic telos is repurposed towards whatever fruiting body the network was working to platform.

Let us take a material example: the Chauvet cave paintings (c. 32000-26000 BCE) are some of the earliest signs of divergence from the natural, but they do not yet show the reflective elements of consciousness within them, and as such lapse back into the natural. The paintings are remarkable for their vivid scenes, a strikingly realist form of art. Although they are abstractions of the real, they are abstractions which connect to lived reality, or a circuit into life. The art reveals the (commendable) realism of those peoples, but of their self-reflection, there is nothing. As is typical with cave art, there is no depiction of people[4], an oddity that becomes almost trivial when considered as a material product in the development of consciousness. It is when man leaves the cave that he leaves original nature and begins its desecration. Consider the Gobleki Tepe (c. 9700-8200 BCE). It stands as such a historical anomaly not simply because of its size, or the difficulty of construction (what is unnatural about the size or difficultly in construction from a bee to its hive or an ant to its nest?) but instead the very conscious reflection we see concretized in the architecture. The realism of earlier man is annihilated by the unnatural angles of the monoliths, the symmetrical form of the circles. We see that the unnatural isn’t simply a product unconnected to the natural, of a raw consciousness which others, rather the unnatural is the act of desecration by that raw consciousness upon that which it others itself from, that being nature, original nature, the profane other which we continually overcome and repurpose its existence towards libidinal ends. Where the realism of the art on the walls of Chauvet strike us, in Gobleki the forms of animals themselves become abstract, replete with unidentifiable creatures, including even the unthinkable for the Chauvet people, abstractions of the human itself, anthropomorphized pillars which manifest the very architecture as giants or gods, made in our own image. Gobleki Tepe is so monstrously other than the examples of architecture of the time[5] precisely because of its unnatural elements; it is the stamp of conscious reflection upon the earth, something which rightly inspires astonishment, confusion, and awe. But it does not escape the natural as a whole: consider, although its carvings show a complexity in abstraction we did not see in the simple realism of Chauvet, they point to a certain realism reflexively, as if the earliest abstractions could only be abstractions which remained signs pointing to what would be considered a ‘possible’ real. The unnatural element of the Gobleki Tepe is not in its decoration but its very material existence, it stands as a historical spore print, a place which can be seen as the radical manifestation of desecration upon the Earth. And, like mycelium, the tepe ends up buried. Who could blame those anonymous men, those who sought to bury Pandora’s box?

Marx claims the original concretization of consciousness, its practical element, lies in language, but we now have the evidence to see this is materially false. There is no writing in the Gobleki Tepe; consciousness was concretized in architecture. It can be assumed that consciousness developed language as a tool, as a means to organization, which, alongside their crude instruments, allowed for the concretization of consciousness in architecture by early (historical) humans. Quickly, a class division arises at these higher levels. The priestly class was not only concerned with the spiritual well-being of the people, as was the shamans which came before them, but instead occupying a place of protection of the temple rites. In a double movement, the King is produced as the material protector of the priestly class, who is in turn allowed the lions share of material production for his protection of the temple itself. The King develops alongside a court, the transcendent hall of the father, which itself requires the production of its own class, the nobility. As the stratification of classes widens, so does the scope and production of architecture; priests lose their supremacy to the king not in the act of the consecration of absolute power over the material conditions, but instead in the very raising of the walls of the castle over those of the temple. The towns which form around the temple, the cities around the King: the unnatural creeps from underneath and spreads absolutely. Where the unnatural subject of consciousness retains its static profanity, the unnatural object grows and destroys, combusts and constructs itself alongside consciousness as the object of its pleasure[6]. Borrowing from Burrough’s definition of language[7], we may ask the question, why is it that language develops into writing? Language, no longer seen as practical consciousness but as its tool, can now be seen to have material reality, in its most vulgar forms, across the animal kingdom; this raises the question, what was it about our particular strain of language which allowed for its mutation into the unnatural object of the written word? Here I may speculate that architecture was the material condition which created the proper environment for this mutation to develop, not as decoration, at least not at first, but as an objectification of the bonds of the tax structures by which architecture (e.g. temples, cities) were raised, that is, as a tool. As writing emerges as the unnatural mutation of practical consciousness from subject into object, it does not manifest as expression, but with the strict realism that we see adheres to the tool. Like the hammer permitted the quarry, the objective reflection of economic bonds, bonds which had beforehand existed in memory and air, now permitted the actuality of civilization[8]. Writing as a mutation was not a linear movement, but the connecting of a circuit. Spoken word retains its artistic power, but even by the time of Sumerthis artistic power was being challenged by the written word. Temples, although home to the most powerful of the spoken word, were infiltrated by the written word absolutely. We hear stories of Greek temples seemly littered with scrolls, with the most brilliant men of the time contributing to these unnatural melting-pots, these open pits of fuel awaiting the material conditions for meltdown. Perhaps we should come to understand the burning of Alexandria like we should the burying of Gobleki; once again, who could blame them? The unnatural is, in its unconditioned state, horrific. It is through conditioning that we come to see the unnatural object as banal, uninteresting. In its unconditioned state, it brings revulsion, disgust. What horrors did the steppe people see in the cities? It is said that the Mongols which came to occupy cities became tame, ineffectual[9], perhaps they were even aware that the horrors they committed were fueled upon the horror they saw reflected in the very city they razed, and that the city breeds ineffectiveness in the Mongol because horror does not last long among horrors.

            The unnatural object which conditions us today is what we can now understand as capitalism, and capitalism is the production of intelligence. Markets themselves operate on an imminent and spontaneous form of intelligence, blind, formed libidinally by commodity fetishism along the lines of various economic tendencies. The history of architecture, the tool of the hammer, the written word, today it can all be retroactively established as the stages in the production of intelligence. Furthermore, it should be recognized that intelligence, as it exists in the unnatural object, tends to be obfuscated by the fact that it most often serves to bolster our own subjective intelligence. What we call artificial intelligence is often assumed to be “weak” if it is not conscious, a product of the aspiration of human completeness (i.e. the assumption of a unification of faculties) which, if anything, artificial intelligence has totally dashed. Intelligence in the object doesn’t need sentience just because we, as intelligent beings, do. But rest assured, for all our doubt we cast on the object, we will still bring it to bear. The unnatural object had been an inert object for most of its existence, but this is no longer. It can be assumed, once again, retroactively, that automation was always a libidinal eventuality. Automation is “personalization dreamt in terms of the object” which “opens the door to a whole world of functional delusion”[10], that is, automation brings about an ideological space of integration. In other words, the personalization of automation is not proof that consciousness has been successfully implanted or impressed into the object. Instead, personalization shows that the ‘user’ can be reduced to a totally singular element, it is something which supports the illusion of personality, of a unique, and as such shows that every unique is a user to be integrated. In so far as our consciousness is concerned, it might be noted that all attempts on the front of implementation or impression have been total failures. The production of intelligence, on the other hand, has developed alongside automation in an exceedingly intimate fashion. Perhaps the conclusion of the development of consciousness does not lie at the end of history, but rather in the designation of a pre- and posthistory, and as such the beginning of posthistory is marked by the end of civilization, or the genesis of the universal subject, a communist bastardization by which the classless society of mankind at last emerges, the manifestation of a totally singular user base: that of the obsolete.

[1]Zizek’s work makes several key rearticulations of the Hegelian project which lend themselves here greatly. Consider the development of German idealism. In Kant, we find perhaps the most impressive formulation of the ontological gap, this being between noumena and phenomena. The rest of German idealism reads as an impressive attempt to use the Kantian system to overcome this gap in various ways. That is, the project of German idealism is one of unity, of a covering over of an uncovered or incomplete element in the system – to overcome the Kantian gap. The brilliance of Hegel, insofar as a Zizekian reading is concerned, is that Hegel wins this unity not by overcoming or bypassing the gap, not by filling it in, but instead by imposing this very gap as part of the imminent constitution of the absolute itself. Through this, one can not help but see Hegel’s system as incomplete, insofar as this incompleteness is the very thing that brings about ontological unity. The subject is not an outside element to actual reality, something on the other side of nature, but rather something whose ontological necessity rests upon this gap to begin with. This is also why Zizek can make his (seemingly) bizarre claim that Marx must be rematerialized reflexively by means of Hegel. To force it into terminology which may not do it justice, the gap between phenomena and noumena isn’t nothing, it is already noumenal reality itself. Overcoming the gap is not a matter of reaching for some hidden thing behind the veil, the veil and the thing are already the same object, and that object is less than nothing. It is this lens through which Zizek reads Marx. It isn’t the great materialist, but his idealist patron who claimed that the future remained outside of philosophy’s ashen hands, that the owl of Minerva only takes wing against the setting sun. Zizek takes what remains of this broken specter of Marx and puts it to the Lacanian wolves. The ontological gap isn’t simply nothing, it can be formulated, or much more accurately, problematized, in such a way as to bring its sublime contours into distinction. This ontological formulation was guised in the psychological trappings of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s infamous statement, there is no big Other, isn’t to be read as psychological nicety, it is a remark about the structure of the universe itself, both as the subject is related to and as it is composed of that universe. Reality itself is unfinished. It’s incomplete. There are fractures, gaps. It is not a gap between subject and object, but a gap inscribed into the object such that the subject was able to exist in the first place. The gap is both differential and productive. (A particular Deleuzian sympathy here: both Zizek and Deleuze insist that the phenomenal world is a product of a certain difference, a particular remainder within the universe which sets it into imbalance, but an imbalance which provides room for the subject as such. The ontological question between the two simply boils down to this, is the universal remainder positive or negative? Is it excess or is it lack? Are God’s books in the black or in the red?). Zizek has spoken of ecological emissions as a material example of this lack, an unusable surplus of waste which stands as an inescapable unnatural remainder of capital, “growing ad infinitum and thereby destabilizing the “finitude” of nature and its resources.”* This idea of surplus waste is important to the formulation, as we will see later, but for the moment we should note that movement which capital’s remainder undergoes, from nature to commodity to waste, is best characterized as a process of obsolescence, or the abolition of use value.                                                                                                
            * Slavoj Zizek, “Greening Hegel”

[2]Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, s. 31

[3]Karl Marx,Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s book: Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie

[4]There exists a single so-called “Venus” figure in Chauvet cave, oft speculated to be a disembodied yonic symbol, which if interpreted in this way very well may suggest the first abstraction which does in fact escape the natural, although these speculations are the same vague outlines that characterize the figure itself.

[5]That is,if it cannot be said Gobleki Tepe stands as the earliest work of architecture we have found. Other anomalies exist, all centering around this period of 10000-8000 BCE, such as the Natufian sites likeTell Qaramel andthe Tower of Jericho, or the pre-Vedic cities submerged off the Gulf of Khambhat. The coinciding flourishing in consciousness concretized along these historical lines, rather than lines of culture or religion, seem to further suggest they were products of strictly material conditions.

[6]This relation upheld between the two sides of the unnatural, the subject and the object, is the very reason why there can be no other form of capitalism than the libidinal one. It might be said, a market is only as free as the flows of desire it propagates.

[7]That being: language is a virus from outer space; see the second book in his Nova trilogy, The Ticket That Exploded.

[8]This is why we coloquially designate historywhich occurs before the mutation of writing as prehistoric.

[9]The Mongols were known to send those of them who had been in cities too long back to the steppe, where they lived off the land and their bow and were expected to return as proper Mongols.

[10]Jean Baudrillard, System of Objects; p. 121