McCaffery, Steve Prior to Meaning, The Protosemantic and Poetics
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to
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ning avant-garde modernism studies
& General Editors Marjorie Perloff Rainer Rumold
Consulting Editors Peter Fenves
Stephen Foster Chritine Froula Françoise Lionnet Robert von Hallberg Prior to Meaning The Protosemantic and Poetics c Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois
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Contents
List of Illustrations, ix Acknowledgments, xi Introduction, xv
Insufficiency of Theory to Poetical Economy, Zarathustran ’Pataphysics,
Blaser’s Deleuzean Folds, Charles Olson’s Art of Language:
The Mayan Substratum of Projective Verse, Richard Bentley: The First Poststructuralist?
The Recension of
Paradise Lost,
Johnson and Wittgenstein: Some Correlations and Bifurcations in the Dictionary and the Philosophical Investigations, Between Verbi Voco and Visual, Some Precursors of Grammatology:
Scriptio Continua, Mercurius van Helmont, Joshua Steele, Peter Walkden Fogg, and That Precarious Binary of Speech/Writing,
Sade: Writing and Modernity, Temporality and the New Sentence:
Phrase Propulsion in the Writing of Karen Mac Cormack, Voice in Extremis,
Jackson Mac Low: Samsara in Lagado, The Scandal of Sincerity: Toward a Levinasian Poetics,
Notes, Works Cited, Index,
Illustrations
. Ezra Pound, page from ‘‘Canto ,’’ showing western system of numerical superscripts, . Mercurius van Helmont, Alphabete vere naturalis hebraici brevissima delineato, pronunciation plates of Hebrew characters,
. Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, prosodic notation of part of Hamlet’s soliloquy,
. Joshua Steele, Prosodia Rationalis, notation of silence in final bar,
. Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, table of non-Romanic characters with corresponding spoken sounds,
. Peter Walkden Fogg, Elementa Anglicana: or, The Principles of English
Grammar, wordless music and its verbal source, . Tom Phillips,
A Humument, monochrome reproduction of original polychrome,
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, my sincere gratitude goes to Erica Federman for con- vincing me this project could be undertaken and to the State University of New York at Buffalo for bestowing on me the John Logan Fellowship, under which auspices much of this work was written and finalized.
To Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Ray Federman, and Susan Howe, sincere thanks for their general input on the project and for making my tenure as John Logan Fellow as cordial and sybaritic as it was demand- ing. And thank you Scott Pound for the many affable and stimulating con- versations in transit between Toronto and Buffalo. Further thanks go to Robert Bertholf and Mike Basinski for their generosity in showing me some special items in a very special Special Collections and giving me an office and library away from home; to Johanna Drucker, Deirdre Lynch, Jerome McGann, Brian McHale, Marjorie Perloff, and Jill Robbins for keen com- ments on specific chapters. My gratitude also goes to Susan Harris, Susan Betz, and the rest of the editorial staff at Northwestern for their diligence and skill in generally improving the prose style and format. Chapter would not have materialized in its present form without my several years of valued collaboration with Jed Rasula in ‘‘accidental research’’ that culminated in our anthology Imagining Language. Final thanks are sent beyond words to Cuisle Mo Chroí, whose patience, emotional support, challenge, reality checks, proofing, and editorial and stylistic suggestions have made this a far better book than it would have been otherwise.
An early draft of chapter was presented at ‘‘The Ends of Theory’’ con- ference at Wayne State University in . A revised version appeared in The Ends of Theory, ed. J. Herron, D. Huson, R. Pudaloff, and R. Strozier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ).
A version of chapter was presented on the panel ‘‘Virtual Philoso- phy: Nietzsche and Postmodern Poiesis’’ at the eighteenth conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, in . It was subsequently presented in a revised form on the panel ‘‘What Is a Minor Science? Applied ’Pataphysics and the Stakes of Discourse’’ at the American Comparative Literature Association convention at the University of Georgia, Athens, in . A revised version appeared in Open Letter , no. (winter ), pp. –.
A draft of chapter was presented at ‘‘The Recovery of the Public World: A Conference in Honour of the Poetry and Poetics of Robin Blaser’’ at
Simon Fraser University in . It was subsequently published in a revised form in the Gilles Deleuze special issue of Discourse , no. (ed. Réda
Bensmaïa and Jalal Toufic) (), pp. –, and later in The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honour of Robin Blaser, ed. Charles
Watts and Edward Byrne (Vancouver: Talonbooks, ), pp. –.
Earlier versions of chapter appeared in Ellipsis , no. (spring ), pp. –, and in expanded form in the Fragmente , pp. –, ‘‘After Modernism’’ issue (Oxford, ).
Chapter was presented in an early draft at Assembling Alternatives: An International Poetry Conference, University of New Hampshire, . Chapter was presented in an earlier form on the ‘‘New Poetries in
Canada’’ panel at the th Modern Language Association convention in Toronto, .
An earlier version of chapter appeared in Close Listening: Poetry and the
Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –. Incorporated sections formed part of a different essay, ‘‘From Phonic to Sonic: The Emergence of the Audio-Poem’’ published in Sound Effects: Acoustical Technologies in Modern and Postmodern Writing, ed.
Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), pp. –.
Chapter first appeared in my North of Intention: Critical Writings – (New York: Roof Books, ) and in a revised, expanded form in North Dakota Quarterly , no. (), pp. –.
A version of Chapter appeared in PreTexts , no. , University of Cape Town, , pp. –. My thanks and grateful acknowledgments extend to all of the above magazines, journals, and books that initially published the pieces. I also wish to extend sincere thanks to the following people for permission to use their material: Carla Harryman for permission to quote from
Under the Bridge; copyright © by Carla Harryman. Karen Mac Cormack for permission to quote from
Quirks & Quillets; copyright © by Karen Mac Cormack. Jackson Mac Low for permission to quote from
Stanzas for Iris Lezak; copyright © by Jackson Mac Low. Tom Phillips for permission to reproduce material from
A Humument; copyright © , , by Tom Phillips, London. Page of Canto by Ezra Pound, from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright © by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp.
Introduction
Prior to Meaning studies the ways in which language behaves rather than how it’s designed to function. It traces a limited autonomy of the writ-
ten mark at a level both beneath and around the semantic. Collectively the twelve essays index a general shift in my thinking away from a Saus- surean model of language ( langue/parole, signifier/signified) to a different set of provocations found in Prigogine and Stengers, Deuleuze and Guat- tari, Alfred Jarry, Sade, Leibniz, Lucretius, and in the ‘‘other’’ Saussure, the Saussure of the paragrammic notebooks—provocations that led me to con- sider writing as a material scene of forces. Gathering together a decade of work, the collection is deliberately nonsystematic. Discrete studies in them- selves, the chapters link together by tracing several interlacements along a broad conceptual plane I’ve termed the protosemantic.
Three other conceptual threads are presidential on this plane: the clina- men, the monad-fold, and the dissipative structure. Like Kristeva’s geno- text, the protosemantic is more a process than a material thing; a multi- plicity of forces which, when brought to bear on texts (or released in them), unleash a combinatory fecundity that includes those semantic jumps that manifest within letter shifts and verbal recombinations, and the presyn- tactic violations determining a word’s position: rupture, reiteration, dis- placement, reterritorialization. It is also the invisible in writing, that which looks at us without actually appearing itself. Like the paragram, it remains invisible but is already there, establishing an uncanny position from which we are scrutinized by language. The protosemantic is also a severe and per- sistent alterity because of its minuscule, elusive, yet omnipresent nature and is accessed through nonsystematic uses and noncommunicative functions of reading, speech, and writing. Mostly though, the protosemantic informs and structures the domain of ‘‘betweens,’’ and the perplications produced in transits, flights, and deracinations.
If a tangible contemporary poetics emerges from these threads, it would probably comprise a synthesis of force, kinesis, and perturbation; a poetics of preestablished alterities but also of the retinal grounded more in reading than writing. What I gesture toward is a material poetics of unstable lin- guistic systems, like the poetics of turbulence hinted at in Charles Olson’s claim that ‘‘[t]he real life in regular verse is an irregular / movement under- neath’’ (Olson and Pound , ). In this respect, the book extends re- flections in
North of Intention. There, I considered the paragram as a trans- phenomenal and ineluctable aspect of all combinatory phonetic writing
systems. Here, I reenvison it as a key factor in formulating protosemantic subsystems within the written. The paragram authenticates a wild postu- late: that the virtual is not the inverse image of the actual but the enjoyment of the latter’s own self-resonances. Moreover, if ‘‘[f ]ixity is a function of power,’’ as Houston Baker claims (Baker , ), then the paragram has its own sophisticated sociopolitical ramifications. (I consider some of these in my analysis of Johnson’s Dictionary in chapter .) Pertaining as paragrams do to hidden, nonlinear relations within texts, their disposition commits all writing to the status of a partly self-organizing system; they are thus unquestionably not only major agents of linguistic instability and change but also advance a protosemantic challenge to the smooth instrumentality of linguistic parlance. A modern-day Addison might label paragrammic disruption as the negative dialectics of the false sublime, but of interest to me is how such turbulence and nonlinearity can be exploited through nonconventional reading habits. Ronald Johnson and Lucette Finas (chap- ter ), Charles Olson (chapter ), Jackson Mac Low (chapter ), and William Burroughs, John Cage, and Tom Phillips (chapter ) all appear here as contemporary writers-of-their-unconventional-readings of others’ writings. These I connect in chapters and to a richer genealogy. Two cen- turies earlier, Richard Bentley devised his own delirious method of textual recension based on the principle of approximate homonomy, installing a homophonic saturnalia and a dizzying array of bifurcations into the seman- tic univocity of
Paradise Lost. For his part, Dr. Johnson, in that florilegial multiple theme park known as his Dictionary, ends up constructing the con- ceptual, if not ideological, opposite of Saint Paul’s Cathedral—a chiasmic, decentered, lexical edifice of preexistent part-objects. In an exemplary dis- play of sovereign negativity, their near contemporary, Peter Walkden Fogg (see chapter ), offers his own transcribed erasure of a poem by Hayley as a form of ‘‘wordless music’’ that appears precessionally as the limit text of this practice of written-reading. All of these writers share a predilection for secondary discourses arrived at via annexation, violence, and alteration. I don’t offer this fact to initiate speculation on a tantalizing ‘‘parasitic sub- lime’’ but rather to underscore the highly complex dissipative structures that language and literature truly are.
To return to my three conceptual tools: The clinamen, or atomic swerve, derives from classical particle physics as outlined by Lucretius and earlier by Democritus and Epicurus. The concept of the monad I take from the eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz and its Deleuzean modification as the fold. The dissipative structure is a concept developed in contemporary nonequilibrium thermodynamics. As the latter term is more recent and less familiar than the others, let me give a brief outline of its form and conse- quence.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers are the founders of the science of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and were a formative influence on De- leuze’s and Guattari’s work in the late s. Philosophically speaking, they escort ontology out of its traditional discursive framework and place it in the turbulence of systemic complexities. In their radical identification of being with becoming, they pose a profound irritation to philosophy’s inter- pretive control over Dasein. In effect, Prigogine and Stengers offer a meta- physics of process rather than of presence, challenging philosophy to open up to radically alterior forces that disturb the conceptual stability of being. Avoiding the centrality of human being in this way might encourage re- flection on the protosemantics within language. It might be said that Pri- gogine locates ‘‘identity’’ in verbs, not nouns, in uncompromising action, temporality, disequilibrium, and change. Physics meets metaphysics not in the latter’s beyondness but at the former’s point of bifurcation where being emerges as becoming. Prigogine and Stengers, incidentally, call the scien- tific period from Newton to quantum physics the science of being. Their work discloses the vexatious problem of where to place chaos in the passage of becoming. Is it the birth of order or its breakdown? Their famous dictum that the path of self-organizing systems is one from chaos to order might be taken as an overly deterministic and ultimately conservative claim, but my own interest lies less in the accuracy (or otherwise) of their theory than in testing its usefulness as a conceptual instrument in poetics and the general domain of writing. Most stimulating to me is their contention that com- plex stable systems carry within them unstable subsystems that pressure the dominant system into disequilibrium and expenditure. (Their term for such complex systems is ‘‘dissipative structures.’’) At a maximal point the system bifurcates into either a higher complex organization or into chaos. Such bifurcation points (transported and renamed by Deleuze and Guattari ‘‘schizzes’’ and ‘‘lines of flight’’) function in a manner similar to Lucretius’s clinamen as a force toward difference and morphological modification. As the letter-clinamen can produce a novel word or a nonsensical syntagm (see chapter for a tangible enactment), so a bifurcation can precipitate a dissi- pative structure into either a higher order of complexity or complete dis- array. I embrace for poetics the dissipative structure as a new episteme of becoming whose nature and behavior can be tersely stated by way of the following postulate: identity is what complex systems escape from. (I in- vestigate the protosemantic notion of a ‘‘becoming meaning’’ in chapter .)
I choose in two chapters to develop the antisocial ramifications in Pri- gogine’s and Stenger’s concepts: in the singular ontology of Leibniz’s mo- nad (chapter ) and in the concept-type of Sade’s libertine (chapter ). The clinamen, as stated, is a differentiating effect brought on by a singular agency. However, the monad, and its contemporaneous link to plication, radically challenges socially based notions of the outside. Monadic singu- larity is exemplary of a noninteractive system—what Prigogine and Stengers call a ‘‘hypnon.’’ The monad, the clinamen, and the libertine are similarly the invocations of singularities, staking their claim against the faulty col- lectivity of encoded community.
Describing the emergence of ‘‘automatic poetry’’ at the Café de la Ter- rasse, Hans Arp makes the consequential claim that in poetry, as in nature, ‘‘a tiny particle is as beautiful and important as a star’’ (quoted in Richter , –). Automatic poetry aside, the clinamen helps formulate a Poet- ics of the Particle. If the whole is no longer atomized and if atoms are traced or tracked along their transits, the result is a micropoetics of delirium. Par- ticle poetics is unquestionably latent in the atomistic linguistics of Lucre- tius. The clinamen as a protosemantic force is a singular interaction between virtual force and actual form that creates by modifying its place in a pre- existent structure. Marx thought it emblematic of free will; Deleuze and Guattari of desire; and, in speaking of man as ‘‘a particle inserted in un- stable and tangled groups’’ (Bataille b, ), Bataille ekphrastically cap- tures the socio-ontic aspect of the clinamen. But in its mythogemic guise it appears as the subaltern deity that errs, inducing shifts along fault lines, ensuring that there is no semantic passage without detour, and introduc- ing noise into systems. Speaking of a ‘‘Jesuitical’’ seizure of the signifier Lyotard approaches the crucial relation of clinamen-deviance to writing’s protosemantic, uncertain motility: ‘‘to love inscription not because it com- municates and contains, but through what its production necessitates, not because it channels, but because it drifts’’ (b, ). Jean-Jacques Lecercle describes language as a ‘‘Labovian ‘system,’ [which] far from being defined by its constants and homogeneity, is characterized by immanent, continu- ous variability—variable units and optional rules’’ (, ), but in the clinamen’s world volatility must supplement—even displace—variability. Its protosemantic disturbances ensure that ‘‘language,’’ ‘‘meaning,’’ and ‘‘in- formation’’ are bound enduringly together in an asymmetric and volatile relation. The clinamen is the being-of-movement of an atom, apparent to itself only in the disappearance of stabilities. It is not a move within or toward transcendence but an event inside the atomic quotidian, and in its confluence of unpredictability with inevitability it enjoys the status of a law. The poetic significance of this lex atomica derives from the innovative analogy Lucretius draws (in
De rerum natura) between atoms and letters in which cosmic speculation is articulated onto both a theory of language
and a protogrammatology (see chapter ).
If letters are to words what atoms are to bodies—heterogenous, de- viant, collisional, and transmorphic—then we need earnestly to rethink what guarantees stability to verbal signs. (Lucretius’s analogy provides, of course, the essential link between nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the incalculable errancy of the written.) In our age of incipient miniaturiza- tion, it might be apt to return to the rumble beneath the word. There’s a stubborn, even tautological, literalness about that protosemantic element we call the letter. And against Agamben’s insistence that Language is always ‘‘a dead letter’’ (, ), I wish to argue that Language is frequently the struggle to contain the errant vivacity of ‘‘a living letter.’’ Barthes renders the precarious entente between letter and word in a characteristically ele- gant passage. ‘‘Such is the alphabet’s power: to rediscover a kind of natural state of the letter. For the letter, if it is alone, is innocent: the Fall begins when we align letters to make them into words’’ (b, ). Innocent, per- haps, but letters also have a puzzling amorous dimension; they are, as Anne Carson informs us, ‘‘the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet’’ (, )—and we should bear in mind that Lucretius dedicates his poem to Venus. Conceived as atoms, letters intrude themselves as protosemantic events strictly defined by their dynam- ics. Being perpetually and unpredictably volatile, they introduce deviance as the basic rule of all grammata. A condition obtains not of collective sig- nification but of particulate, insular driftings that lead to those Möbian complexities Lyotard insists are ‘‘[n]ot a matter of separation, but on the contrary, of movement, of displaceability on the spot’’ (b, ). From their traditional conception as the minimal thinkable unit, words give way under the pressure of Lucretian linguistics to a different characterization as the provisional container of protosemantic animations, holding in tempo- rary check a fecund, unstable lettristic micropedia. Seen this way, texts are not deficient but paragrammically abundant. (Unlike Iser, I see poems not as presenting gaps for a reader to remedy, but as informational excesses that in part impale and in part escape their readers.)
Today our immanent hegemony of informatics—electronic, disjunctive, digital—finds itself enveloped in a telling aquatic metaphor of its own making. We say we ‘‘surf the net,’’ poised on a mouse pad like a modern- day cybernetic version of Basho’s frog, primed to jump-click into a pool of endless, concentric data waves. Prior to Lucretius, Epicurus declared this datatopia to be a void whose wave motility comprises a downfall of atoms with stochastic inclinations. The swerve from the line in Greek par- ticle theory presages the disjunctive potency of the mouse click. An incli- nation out of line equals birth, birth itself being a particle becoming wave. So how does this relate to semiogenesis? Can language be envisaged post-
Saussure as a particle-wave economy in which the aleatory interactions of parole enfold in langue and resuscitate the turbolinguistics of Lucretius? The
clinamen certainly lends itself to poetic consideration. In Ronald Johnson, John Cage, Tom Phillips, and Jackson Mac Low, it manifests as a devia- tion from a grammatical and linear reader-consumption to a paragrammic reader-writing. The common practice of these writers is to follow lines of flight and release a surprising other in sameness. Central to their meth- ods are protosemantic ways of exposing virtualities; the application of an optical clinamen; a parenklitic reading that deviates from a consecutive, linear engagement with a syntagmatic chain to open up the virtual inside the actual. Even the conservative Dr. Johnson reveals lexicography to be a tempestuous, self-defeating engagement with the errant clinama that in- evitably occur in the practice of citation. (Bakhtinians might treat all these works as fundamentally dialogic, and disciples of Serres as fundamentally parasitic, but what I emphasize is their common condition as organized sys- tems containing turbulent subsystems.) In Sade’s figure of the libertine we
find a socioethical clinamen represented so forcefully that it questions the very ground of our ethics and morality.
Though my third tool, the monad-fold, is only addressed locally in chap- ter , the conceptual presence of plication is omnipresent (perhaps most intensely in the grammatological schemes of Helmont and Fogg [chapter ] and in Johnson’s folding of citations into his lexical series in the Dictionary). Folds and the clinamen together make available to poetics an alternative terrain of forces and readily available differentiators in the kinetics of voli- tion and singular sublexical activities. Both the fold and the clinamen are agents, present everywhere, introducing instability into any steady concept but never vulnerable to the status of universal epistemes. Moreover, like the paragram, atoms and monads have an obvious articulation onto the social sphere, sharing a common relation of variant force fields between bodies. In this they stand in sharp contrast to Barthes’s and Althusser’s Sausurrean- derived, linguistically controlled explanations of the subject.
Differance is a nonconcept historically positioned by Derrida at the ter- minus of the metaphysics of presence, but like Lucretius’s theory of atomic
deviation, Derridean grammatology perforce reduces to a foundational re- liance on the granular. Contemporary science, however, offers revisionary ratios to this concept. René Thom, for instance, reveals how morphogenesis is not the birth of grain from grain but the practice of infinitesimal foldings called catastrophes (Thom ). There are contradictory propositions and questions in this forced alliance between the fold and the clinamen that I leave, perhaps provocatively, unanswered. How, for instance, can the plica- tory monad be reconciled to the movement of the atom in its vertical fall through a nonsite? And how can we reconcile the digital atom in a void and its production of a veritable ars combinatoria with the analog nature of the fold and its plenum? Jarry engages such momentary conjunctions of discrepants by appealing to an astronomical term syzygy: it’s the syzygy of atom and monad, space and plenum that I offer as neither an aporia, a diffi- culty, nor a transgression of the law of noncontradiction, but as a wedding of the incompossible.
Deploying this seemingly bizarre conceptual apparatus allows me to con- sider poems and texts as dynamic structures containing within them sub- systemic turbulences, such as the paragram and homophone (exemplars of the clinamen and fold respectively), and the disruptive logics of citation, collage, and dictation. As such,
Prior to Meaning is less a contribution to contemporary poetics per se than a staging of concepts, issues, and im- plications that both inform and contaminate the discursive propositions (and repressions) ineluctably present in all poetics. And it warns that any discourse of poetics is doomed to encounter the nature and virtualities of certain systems of writing.
Perhaps this latter fact encourages a marriage of grammatology and poet- ics. I initially toyed with the idea of calling this collection Grammatology and Poetics, and several chapters thread a broad frontier where poetics and writing systems conjoin, especially in the imagination’s intermittent en- counters with scripts and the protosemantic elements residing in notation. Olson’s early fascination with Mayan hieroglyphs, his seduction by their impenetratable, uninterpretable alterity (examined in chapter ) is cannily reminiscent of two earlier nonoccidental fascinations: Athanasius Kircher’s and William Warburton’s fastidious conjectures on the xenographic impact of Egyptian hieroglyphs as a silent protoscript. (I might add to this Ezra Pound’s attraction, via Fenollosa’s theories, to the Chinese ideogram.) Cer- tainly, a major concern of this book is to reveal some of the factual limi- tations in Derrida’s version of logocentrism, and chapter offers several examples that contest the now dominant opinion on the speech-writing binary as a dyadic opposition in which full speech is valorized over writing.
This collection is also in a way about material bodies: sonic bodies, liber- tine bodies, proprioceptive bodies, bodies both within and without writing, and most especially microbodies. Contrary to David Porush’s conviction that literature has typically had little use for the microscopic except as it offers up some interesting metaphors (in Hayles , ), I stress a need to shift attention to those lesser bodies and hope that Prior to Meaning pro- vides material and evidence to warrant a serious consideration of both a residual and a possible micropoeisis.
It’s now well known through Niels Bohr and quantum physics that in the infinitely minute world of the atomic the very act of observation pro- duces photonic impacts that profoundly unsettle the phenomenon being observed. This microphysical fact of non-neutral observation underlies as much Ronald Johnson’s micropoetic written-reading of
Paradise Lost, as Richard Bentley’s delirious recension of the same poem (in chapters and , respectively), and Tom Phillips’s selective deletions of Mallock’s
A Human Document (chapter ). All offer readings that similarly unsettle a text at hand.
In many ways Prior to Meaning ramifies and celebrates a single yet reso- nant declaration in
Finnegans Wake: ‘‘The proteiform graph itself is a poly- hedron of scripture’’ ( Joyce , ). Joyce captures in this single phrase the nature of grammatological dissipative structures. The protosemantic is in part the modality of the proteiform graph, that sublexical, alphabetic, and phonic domain of recombinant infinity that is the Western alphabet in operation and whose quintessential disequilibrium can be specified as the excess of information over meaning. In a real sense, then, this book should be read as an earnest cartographical contribution toward mapping out the grammatological context of Finnegans Wake. It’s clear from the works I study that my sense of what constitutes poetry is categorically nongeneric. I consider the novels of Sade genuinely poetic—Bentley’s editorial practice and Johnson’s lexicography equally so. Indeed, I hope that the strange affini- ties that emerge and the dissipative structures I assemble will contribute to an ongoing unsettling of any stable notion as to what both ‘‘contemporary’’ and ‘‘poetics’’ denote.
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I don’t want to enter this risky world of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truths emerging, one by one. All I want is to allow myself
to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck.
—Foucault 1
Foucault’s words offer a seductive, utopian topography in which to situate pluralistic, theoretical endeavors. With its hedonistic stress and desire for an amniotic provisionality to discourse, the passage suggests that theory’s motivation to mastery and epistemic finality is the prime obstacle to a fluid motion through a smooth space of praxis. Certainly, the ‘‘happy wreck’’ that Foucault embraces stands in sharp contrast to the self-investment and motivation underlying the procedures of literary theory, whose willful drive is toward the annexation of cultural works via interpretational and explana- tory strategies, and the consequent curation of their meanings.
2 Salutary, if only for its shock value, is Julia Kristeva’s description of this theoretical subject.
The product of an ambiguous social attitude, the ‘‘theoretical’’ subject sets himself up with even more power in this situation inasmuch as he will mime the dissolution of all positions. The empty, hollow space he represents by the very fact of its representation, acts as a magnetic pole and experiences itself as such. This subject of enunciation either says nothing or else dissects his speech for the sole purpose of becoming the focal point where all other signifying systems converge. One could say that his discourse becomes hysteric only to position himself better within the place of impregnable transference—dominating, capturing, and monopolizing everything within the discourse’s obsessive retreat, which is haunted by power/impotence. (, )
This coupling of power to its negative dependence recalls Hegel’s famous analysis of empowerment in the master-slave relationship in which the self- consciousness of the master (in the case at hand, the field of theory) is nec- essarily defined by the slave’s own relational status. The essence of the slave is to exist for another, while the self-consciousness of the master depends upon the slave’s own dependence on him. Conceived as the object of a master-theory, the poem-slave guarantees a stubborn Hegelian sediment to the most un-Hegelian theoretical endeavors. Appropriation is philosophi- cally structured by a transcendental partition separating theory from its object field, thereby allowing its activation across the difference and simul- taneously binding theory to its object in the very affirmation of their sepa- rateness. This is hardly a novel insight—in fact, this entailment via Hegel’s dialectic pertains to all dyadic oppositions and to any transitive practice. Yet passed unnoticed, or bracketed as unproblematic, it inscribes a serious blind spot in theory’s self-questioning, and Lyotard for one has pointed to the dangerous presupposition of the rules of its own discourse that permits theory to elude self-scrutiny (Lyotard a, xiv).
Theories, of course, are constructed upon a second-order system of con- cepts, making use of ancillary discourses that frequently elude analysis. It’s common knowledge that structuralism employs a second-order system of organization derived from certain concepts and categories of Saussurean linguistics. A fact less known is that structuralism co-opts a precursory sys- tem from Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire de l’architecture francaise. This is no innocent deployment but a subtle derivation of its conceptual base via a dense genealogy of architectural models and metaphors that include both
3 Marc Angenet exposes the institu- Augustinian and Thomistic theologies. tional distortions of Saussure by the structuralists and the historical com- plexities of their ascendancy in France, citing structuralism’s failure to attain the status of an episteme and enumerating its ad hoc deployments of Saus- sure’s terminology and concepts as a syncretic formulation to bind together numerous competitive (and often incompatible) intellectual investments. Through the s, Angenet argues, Saussure’s terminology functioned as a ‘‘phraseological cement’’ binding together basically heterogeneous and even conflicting interests. Saussure’s comparatively late entry into French intellectual circles is also remarked.
Saussure’s paradigm took forty years to travel from Geneva to Paris. French linguistics at the time, under the hegemonic influence of Antoine Meillet, opposed [ P R I O R TO M E A N I N G sic] insuperable obstacles to Saussure’s acceptance and discussion. That is why Saussure migrated eastward, as it were, and found a first institutional landing point in Russia during the first world war . . . Saussure came to be polemically criticized and rejected in the late twen- ties (but at least understood in a pertinent light) by the major literary scholar of our century, Mikhail M. Bakhtin. . . . By the time it becomes de rigeur to read and draw inspiration from Saussure in France, it is clear that this Saussure is bound to be read through his cosmopolitan tribu- lations and through layers of superimposed mediations. (Angenet , –) 4 Theory’s mandate to critical annexation has an inaugural Platonic en- dorsement. In the
Apology, Socrates argues that poets are the worst inter- preters of their own work: Well, gentlemen, I hesitate to tell you the truth, but it must be told. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained these poems better than their actual authors. So I soon made up my mind about the poets too. I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspira- tion, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. (
Apology c, in
Plato ) If Socrates’ assessment is correct, then the price of creative primacy is the installation of that transcendental rule of the subject-object partitions that Hegel remarks upon. With the Apology, the control of meaning enters wholly the readerly-critical sphere, the binding status of the poem now being that of its material inertia and the concomitant depreciation of the poet to irrationality and silence. In this Socratic exclusion the poet cannot theorize, and since the matrix of the poetic is placed in an inspirational, automatic emission, the poem itself is rendered static in the nondiscursive domain of an object-field.
The Apology anticipates many of the claims of cultural modernity: the fallacy of intention, the death of the author, the privilege of readership; while in assigning initial creativity to ‘‘a kind of instinct or inspiration,’’ it premonishes uncannily Kristeva’s concept of the prelinguistic process that articulates ephemeral and unstable structures—a process considered by Kristeva to be the underlying foundation of language—and which she terms genotext (, ).5 In addition, the Apology carries the far more im- portant of Plato’s two poetic banishments. Called for in the
Republic is a literal expulsion of subjects, functions, and bodies as a practical deportation from the great republic. But in the Apology, it is the axiomatic separation of creator from semantic determination and from all rational procedures that is called for. Poetry (in a manner Foucault later demonstrates of mad- ness) is defined, enclosed, and then silenced. After the Apology, the poet is committed to the domain of semantic heterology.
6 The persistence of this ostracization is worth remarking. For instance, Levinas comparably ban- ishes poetry and art to the realm of the irresponsible, claiming that they elevate ‘‘in a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of evasion’’ (, ). The critical stance before such work is the responsible act of inte- grating ‘‘the inhuman work of the artist into the human world’’ (Levinas , ). In Benjamin’s early thinking the critical task occupies a similarly exalted position at the convergence of artistic, religious, and philosophic domains, enjoying the panoptic perspective where ‘‘the essential indivisible unity of all three vantage points can be grasped’’ (Wolin , ).
To address theory’s insufficiency to some poetical economies involves approaching theoretical practice from the vantage of its thresholds and fully exploiting the negativity of its Hegelian sediment. The potential of poetical economies here is to address theory itself from their own material resis- tances; consequently not to argue against Plato but beyond him. The con- comitant challenge to theoretical disciplines is to redirect their reflexivity into a self-examination staged immanently within their own procedures, addressing those areas of the nondiscursive that theory must leave free, as 7 well as those aspects that escape of necessity through theory’s apertures. Citing the works of Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Artaud as ex- emplary, Kristeva revisions writing as ‘‘textual practice’’ involving a subject- in-process for its production and maintaining resistance to all binding theoretical annexation. Textual practice threatens all signification and rep- resentation through its partly a-symbolic constitution. Issuing from a ‘‘split’’ subject divided between conscious and unconscious drives, such texts in- volve an oscillating tension between two discrete signifying processes that Kristeva famously terms the ‘‘symbolic’’ and the ‘‘semiotic.’’ The latter carries the burden of instinctual drives and forces that affect, but do not support, a social transmission. Despite the strictures of a sociolect, the semiotic is disposed in specific detectable aspects of language, especially its rhythmic and sonic intricacies. The symbolic process, by contrast, involves a disposition toward the normative modes of signification: grammar, syntax, sentence integration, and the covering rules that guarantee unproblematic, P R I O R TO M E A N I N G intersubjective communication. (Needless to say, textual practice valorizes the former, semiotic disposition.) Theory (demanding a construction by way of categorical abstractions articulated onto the symbolic) requires a molar stability that renders a last- ing relationship with processual textual practices incompatible. Kristeva’s revisioned writing involves ‘‘giving up the lexical, syntactic, and semantic operation of deciphering, and instead tracing the path of their produc- tion’’ (, ). If theory is to be accommodated, it must be as a pro- visional operation passed through and finally jettisoned. To solve theory’s own metalinguistic dilemma, all theoretical agendas must be replaced by heuristic ones. All attempts to stabilize discursively (by hypothesis, expli- cation, or description) a radically unstable practice are abandoned, and the negativity previously ‘‘swallowed’’ into theory is released into instinctual play ().