I have now launched a new blog on
European identity and culture, Another Europe. I expect to post about every six weeks
and, as always, comments are welcome.
Rethinking Weimar
notes on German philosophy of the Weimar era (1918-33) and visionary writing
Tuesday 10 December 2019
Monday 16 December 2013
The Existentialist Poetic of Thoreau's Journal
Henry
David Thoreau conceived of his writing of nature in his Journal as an
experiential form of writing. As he commented in his entry of 2 July 1852,
‘Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but
in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report.’ The
grounding of nature writing within one’s own personal experience is emphasized
again by Thoreau on 19 April 1854: ‘I am not interested in mere phenomena,
though it were the explosion of a planet, only as it may have lain in the
experience of a human being.’ Such sensual experience generates the reader’s
sense of the writer’s physical presence, so that we no longer feel imprisoned
in our mechanized contemporary environments but instead actively there, out
there, with Thoreau. ‘The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with
his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.’ (3 February 1852)
Thoreau
drew a direct link between the plenitude and degree of illumination of a
reader’s or student’s cognition, and that student’s ability to immerse himself
in studies which enable him to become charged by sensual experience.
‘It
is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits – a scholar, for instance,
to studies – which lie next to and conduce to his life, which do not go against
the grain, either of his will or his imagination. The scholar finds in his
experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others dry,
barren, and dark. If he is wise, he will not persevere in the last, as a plant
in a cellar will strive toward the light. He will confine the observations of
his mind as closely as possible to the experience or life of his senses. His
thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body. […] Dwell as
near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ (12 March 1853)
Here
we find an affinity between the impulses underlying Thoreau’s journalizing and
a central aspect of Weimar
era German thought to which I have referred often on this blog. For we are
reminded here of Jaspers’ early existentialism which, as Chris Thornhill writes
in his study Karl Jaspers, sought to
‘deploy Kant as the basis for an existential
metaphysic of possible lived unity’. Jaspers’ early
existentialism, Thornhill notes elsewhere,
sought precisely to overcome Kantian antinomies such as that of reason and experience,
by ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life
in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. This existentialist
project was anticipated by Thoreau’s requirement of the subjectivist researcher,
‘whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science’, that ‘His thought
must live with and be inspired with the life of the body’:
‘There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer
of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be
poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most
alive, whose life is the greatest event.’ (6 May 1854)
In his journal entry for 14 July 1852, Thoreau had already related his concern with the ‘most alive’ to the question of a living language. Here he pointed to the emergence of the sort of artificial, manufactured-to-death language which characterizes today’s bureaucratic, public sector discourse and capitalist, private sector discourse alike. ‘A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as “humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails.’ The deathliness of ‘humanitary’ results from its excess: from its self-aggrandizing add-on, the suffix ‘-itary’. Just as here he notes the excessive moment of particularity in ‘humanitary’, on 30 March 1853 Thoreau went on to comment on how a particularizing, analytic perspective on life diminishes our full experience, or our existential sense of ‘possible lived unity’. His references to ‘view’ and ‘the unbounded universe’ make it clear that he thinks of such full experience in terms of our visionary capacity:
Crucially,
for Thoreau the writing of full experience is genuine poetry, because such a
writing conveys the ‘affinity’ or sympathy
between the writer and whatever he has experienced – ‘the phenomena that show
themselves in him’. In that way it also conveys the sympathy between the
particular elements of nature which scientific observation simply separates.
‘What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower – both yellow – to
pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me
record, and it will be poetry.’ (2 September 1851) Or again, three years later
on 24 September 1854: ‘What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which
he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it, who has
known it longest and best.’ Thoreau’s preoccupation with a unified life’s
possibilities of sympathy and relationality, enabled him to describe the action
of existential poetic naming which derives from imbibing a natural object’s
spirito-existential ‘nutriment’: on 19 September 1854 he had written, ‘I have
given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns
and winters as if I had nothing else to do but live them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me’.
On 2 January 1859, Thoreau’s exposition of ‘vital and natural’ poetic language brought him to counterpose ‘artificial’, patriarchal, academic regulations of language to the free speech of mothers, brutes and animals:
In his journal entry for 14 July 1852, Thoreau had already related his concern with the ‘most alive’ to the question of a living language. Here he pointed to the emergence of the sort of artificial, manufactured-to-death language which characterizes today’s bureaucratic, public sector discourse and capitalist, private sector discourse alike. ‘A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as “humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails.’ The deathliness of ‘humanitary’ results from its excess: from its self-aggrandizing add-on, the suffix ‘-itary’. Just as here he notes the excessive moment of particularity in ‘humanitary’, on 30 March 1853 Thoreau went on to comment on how a particularizing, analytic perspective on life diminishes our full experience, or our existential sense of ‘possible lived unity’. His references to ‘view’ and ‘the unbounded universe’ make it clear that he thinks of such full experience in terms of our visionary capacity:
‘Ah,
those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker does not too
curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only
himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his
intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view,
but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.’
On 2 January 1859, Thoreau’s exposition of ‘vital and natural’ poetic language brought him to counterpose ‘artificial’, patriarchal, academic regulations of language to the free speech of mothers, brutes and animals:
‘When
I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of
the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain
rules of theirs, - Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr.
Kirkham’s rule, - I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is
that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or
an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or
father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless
as a lamb’s bleat.’
Thoreau’s
suspicion of academic language use – of ‘literacy’ – rests on his sense that,
just as natural life itself symbolizes human experience, so too, conversely,
human symbolic expression is grounded in natural phenomena: ‘Talk about
learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or
types which express our thoughts and feelings’ (16 October 1859). It is because
their language conveys the sourcing of letters in natural things that ‘We
cannot spare the very lively and lifelike descriptions of some of the old
naturalists’, as he writes on 17 February 1860 (for example). ‘They sympathize
with the creatures which they describe.’ But for Thoreau, importantly, a vital
and natural – poetic – language conveys not just nature’s facticity, but its
spirit too. On the following day, his journal entry expounded his animist
phenomenology and noted the inadequacy of traditional scientific description to
that phenomenology:
‘Surely
the most important part of an animal is its anima,
its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by
which it most concerns us. […]
Science in many departments of natural
history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; i.e., it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of
animated nature must itself be animated.’
On
15 February, Thoreau wrote of ‘the physical fact which in all language is the
symbol of the spiritual’; his sense of natural phenomena as being symbols of natural
anima, explains his intention –
stated nine years earlier on 9 November 1851 – that lively and lifelike, poetic
expression is to convey ‘animated’ phenomena on their own terms, without
reducing them to mere brute facticity, as would the ‘common sense’ view of
nature. For only such a form of expression can convey the sympathy between the
writer’s anima and nature, or the way
in which the writer has experienced and imbibed natural anima. ‘My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would
so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts
which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought.’
Thoreau
opposes vital poetic language and the experience of nature which it conveys, or
what he calls ‘the true growth and experience, the living speech’ (16 October
1859), to the paralyzed vitality and ‘dry technical terms’ which he associates
with academic science’s specialist accounts of nature:
‘I
look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised
that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry
technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular
language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors
has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering
magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of
blood-heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.’ (6 May 1854)
On
5 September 1851 we find Thoreau praising James John Garth Wilkinson’s The Human Body and Its Connection with Man,
Illustrated by the Principal Organs for its analogical method. By drawing
quotidian physical analogies (such as when he describes the papillary cutis as ‘“an
encampment of small conical tents coextensive with the surface of the body”’),
Wilkinson, Thoreau feels, finds in popular, nonspecialist language a means of
communicating unified, existential reason’s sympathetic experience of the body:
this is true cognition or ‘perception of truth’.
‘The
faith he puts in old and current expressions as having sprung from an instinct
wiser than science, and safely to be trusted if they can be interpreted. The
man of science discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to
inhabit. Wilkinson finds a home for
the imagination, and it is no longer outcast and homeless. All perception of
truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.’
Nine years later, on 13 October 1860, Thoreau’s existentialism leads him to argue that, because of their success in conveying ‘the highest quality of the plant, - its relation to man’, ‘it is commonly the old naturalists who first received American plants that describe them best’. Here Thoreau again advocates (the ‘free and lawless’ writing which can relay) singular, existential cognition over professional scientific knowledge:
We
are reminded of the earlier remark that ‘the first requisite and rule is that
expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an
interjection’. It is as if, for Thoreau, an academic aesthetic architecture of
‘grammar and rhetoric’ is to be supplanted by a demotic aesthetic physics of verbal
force and compaction. Already on 12 November 1851, he was thinking in terms of
‘interjection’ and discharge: ‘Those sentences are good and well discharged
which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, -
a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma.’ The ‘continent
concentrated thoughts’ of which Thoreau wrote on 30 August 1856 recall these
well-defined resiliencies. In order to adequately reflect the complexity of
nature, Thoreau maintains on 27 October 1858, language really should be
compounded – ‘ground together’ – rather like in German:
Nine years later, on 13 October 1860, Thoreau’s existentialism leads him to argue that, because of their success in conveying ‘the highest quality of the plant, - its relation to man’, ‘it is commonly the old naturalists who first received American plants that describe them best’. Here Thoreau again advocates (the ‘free and lawless’ writing which can relay) singular, existential cognition over professional scientific knowledge:
‘After
all, the truest description, and that by which another living man can most
readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight
of it inspires. No scientific description will supply the want of this, though
you should count and measure and analyze every atom that seems to compose it.’
Thoreau’s
rejection of the language of academic science and advocacy of an existential
poetic, relates to his rejection of professional, scholarly literacy in favour
of popular, democratic literacy. ‘Anything living is easily and naturally
expressed in popular language.’ On 6 December 1859:
‘Literary
gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write because they have
studied grammar and rhetoric; but the art of composition is as simple as the
discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely
greater force behind it. This unlettered man’s [Irving’s] speaking and writing
is standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms
before, he has made standard American.’
Walden Pond in 1908 |
‘Who
will undertake to describe in words the difference in tint between two
neighbouring leaves on the same tree? or of two thousand? – for by so many the
eye is addressed in a glance, In describing the richly spotted leaves, for
instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely
indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal
twist toward our mark, - such as reddish,
yellowish, purplish, etc. We cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be
compounded like colours, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual
expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together.’
A principle of compounding or compaction can also be found underlying Thoreau’s broader conception of writing as the creation of ‘a theme’, and subsequent identification of ‘one pertinent and just’ thematic ‘observation’. Thoreau’s idea of writing here would reverse today’s academic writing practice, which typically starts from a pre-set, often predatorily pre-identified theme, before exploitatively selecting the material (and only that material) which will enable one to sustain one’s forced argument. The dominative logic of subsumption, against which Theodor Adorno directed much of his thinking, continues to determine so much of what passes for intellectual life now. A commodity is to be delivered, or you will be made unemployed, your selfhood erased and then accused of mental illness, etc. On 3 February 1859 Thoreau noted:
A principle of compounding or compaction can also be found underlying Thoreau’s broader conception of writing as the creation of ‘a theme’, and subsequent identification of ‘one pertinent and just’ thematic ‘observation’. Thoreau’s idea of writing here would reverse today’s academic writing practice, which typically starts from a pre-set, often predatorily pre-identified theme, before exploitatively selecting the material (and only that material) which will enable one to sustain one’s forced argument. The dominative logic of subsumption, against which Theodor Adorno directed much of his thinking, continues to determine so much of what passes for intellectual life now. A commodity is to be delivered, or you will be made unemployed, your selfhood erased and then accused of mental illness, etc. On 3 February 1859 Thoreau noted:
‘The
writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first
written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and
foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been
brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent
and just observation.’
In
his entry for 13 October 1860, Thoreau suggested that visionary affirmation of
natural phenomena, by contrast with professional scientific description of
nature, involves an existential, sensually delighting form of language which
has its own inevitable momentum: like the interjections and discharges of which
he writes elsewhere, these ‘unconsidered’ or ‘unconscious’ statements – acts of
definition – are not impeded by the sort of career-sustaining guards and
scruples which complicate academic language.
‘[…]
unconsidered expressions of our delight which any natural object draws from us
are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be
regarded as it concerns man; and who knows how near to absolute truth such
unconscious affirmations may come? Which are the truest, the sublime
conceptions of Hebrew poets and seers,
or the guarded statements of modern geologists, which we must modify or unlearn
so fast?’
On
1 April 1860, Thoreau’s understanding of how the action of inevitably releasing
verbal statements of visionary definition accords with a principle of natural
law – a ‘sympathy with the universal mind’ – is so transcendentally shocking as
to negate for him the import of communication itself.
‘The
fruit a thinker bears is sentences, -
statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised
that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not forethought, -
so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement
which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel
and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the
universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity
to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our
consciousness, just as we carry our food to our mouths. This occurred to me
last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavoured to
report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.’
(All
Thoreau quotations here are taken from: Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861, ed. by Damion
Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2009))
Thursday 31 October 2013
Heidegger, Prynne and 'Parataxis'
'in Cambridge, let's split'
-Iain Sinclair, Red Eye
Disregarding the possibility of Heideggerian Marxism, in Parataxis 9 Milne responded to
‘If
any attempt is made to relate what “phenomenology” might mean for poetry, the
phenomenology of experience suggested by Hegel and Marx is in sharp conflict
with that developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The “experience” of
capitalism may be incommensurate with a phenomenological account of
experience.’
In
my experience, the letter from your university informing you that you have
earned £4500 this year as an hourly paid lecturer, is an equally gritty and
vicious phenomenon whether you view it with your Marx or your Heidegger specs
on. (As is the lack of a letter when you are then sacked without warning, after
having been assured repeatedly that your contract would be renewed). But in the
next number of Parataxis, in his
article ‘Speculative Assertions: Reading J. H. Prynne’s Poems’, Milne’s reading of the reference in Prynne’s ‘Foot and
Mouth’ to the ‘Pressure Sensitive/ Tape (also known as RUBAN ADHESIF and NASTRO
ADHESIVO)’, persists in separating Heideggerian from Marxist perspectives on our experience of this world. In
this reference of Prynne’s to what Milne calls ‘the trans-national language inside rolls of
Scotch tape’, Milne writes, ‘The world-at hand is figured not as the
transcendence of tools in the revelatory unveiling of Being, but as an
implicated concern for the techniques and habits which sustain this world.’
This sort of sardonic pillorying of Heideggerian terminology is
particularly depressing given Milne’s inability to stand by the Marxism to
which he opposes that terminology. The response to Marshall
in issue 9 comments that ‘there remains the task of showing how dialectical
thinking which is critical of what is usually thought of as phenomenology could
be developed, or how an account of the affinities between Adorno and Prynne
could be sustained’. This comment is hardly an investment of faith in original Parataxis co-editor Simon Jarvis’
landmark Adornian reading of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, which had appeared in Parataxis 1 (and which has been republished here).
Jarvis’ article argued that Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical. Prynne’s poem ‘The Numbers’, Jarvis maintains, does not supply us with ‘a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to external determination’:
Jarvis’ article argued that Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical. Prynne’s poem ‘The Numbers’, Jarvis maintains, does not supply us with ‘a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to external determination’:
‘Attempts
(such as that of Michael Grant in the Dictionary
of Literary Biography) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start from individual
experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his acknowledgement that to
understand individual experience is also to go beyond it. Prynne invokes
demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but
dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily
reveals its own mediatedness.’
Before
I get to Marshall ’s
reaction to these remarks, I want to note two further attempts, other than Marshall's, to
reclaim the possibility of recognizing phenomenological immediacy in Prynne.
The first relates to the particular immediacy of a certain strand of Prynne’s
poetic discourse which we could call his Londoner’s language. Prynne’s origins as a Londoner are rarely attended to by critics, though there are
occasional references to his registering of wartime experience in his poems.
But it seems to me that in his essay for Parataxis
9, ‘Counterfactual Prynne: An Approach to Not-You’, John Wilkinson unwittingly touched on precisely the arch London quality of Prynne’s language, when he wrote of the Not-You line ‘our confidence is end-up
like a roller towel’, that it is ‘a characteristically Prynnian witticism which
tends to make exposition sound laboured’. Academic exposition is attracted,
because ‘end-up like a roller towel’ is a hermetic, difficult phrase. Why a roller towel ? But this phrase also
carries a sort of difficulty which renders exposition unnecessary: because it
is as if hermeneutic mediation is resisted by precisely the incisive immediacy
– the sheer phenomenological baldness – of the language’s quality of underworld
hermeticism. This line of Prynne’s is a
slap round the face with a rolling pin, never mind a roller towel. A new
semantic content has been displaced, from elsewhere, somewhere covert, and is
suddenly here. This London
tenor of phrasing has maintained its speakers outside the law for centuries, and
it will continue to shock academic interpreters whilst holding its secrets
close.
This first attempted reclamation of phenomenological immediacy, like the second one which I want to note now, enlists an attention to Prynne’s involvement with what we could call visionary phenomenology.
This first attempted reclamation of phenomenological immediacy, like the second one which I want to note now, enlists an attention to Prynne’s involvement with what we could call visionary phenomenology.
[...] This is the place
where, deaf to meaning, the life stands
out in extra blue. [...] [The Oval Window ]
N.
H. Reeve’s extended discussion of these lines in his ‘further note’ on The Oval Window for Parataxis
6, begins by relaying his ‘suspicions’ of their communication of visionary experience. ‘Any celebration of an enhanced, heroic moment, unashamed to assert its
claim to superiority, almost automatically gives rise to suspicions as to the
interests it could be serving.’ However, Reeve continues, ‘in this case […]
those suspicions stay secondary’. For ‘here the momentary thrill can remind us
that this cynicism reflects a loss to which we are not reconciled, that there
is still the ghost of something dear to us which we expect poetry to awaken’. It
is precisely the phenomenological experience of visionary shock, that is – or what Reeve
goes on to term ‘an apparently immediate sensation’ – which brings us to
awareness of both the desacralization and disenchantment of this life, which
typically is not definite enough to be ‘the’ life, and the continuing existence
(however spectral it may be) of ‘a degree of intensity and radiance unavailable
to our normal categories’.
Reeve’s reference to ‘the Romantic tradition of the privileged lyric moment’, suggests the relation of Prynne’s involvement with such visionary phenomenology to the Romanticist poetic tradition from which his poetry is distanced elsewhere in Parataxis. In his ‘Speculative Assertions’ essay of 2001, for instance, Milne maintains that ‘Foot and Mouth’ ‘could be read as a satirical revision of the conflicts of ethos and pathos enjoyed in the late romanticist and quasi-philosophical readings associated with [Harold] Bloom’s Wallace Stevens or Heidegger’s Holderlin [sic]’. (In his footnote to this Milne notes that the ethos/pathos opposition was in fact later ‘deployed by Prynne’s de Kooning/ O’Hara essay’). In a significant comment in a letter to Allen Fisher of 16 September 1993, published in Parataxis 6, Milne aligned his long-standing suspicion of the poetic lineage of ‘faded romanticism’ – a romanticism far from Prynne’s own romanticism of ‘extra blue’! – to his scruple regarding phenomenological readings. One suspects here too a suspicion of the concept of poetic tradition itself; the postmodernist suspicion that anything connected, integrated or whole is universalist, coupled with a Marxist charge that poetic linguistic beauty is that which is consumed by the bourgeoisie and produced by the naïvely artisanal (those who believe themselves to be ‘originally’ related to language).
Reeve’s reference to ‘the Romantic tradition of the privileged lyric moment’, suggests the relation of Prynne’s involvement with such visionary phenomenology to the Romanticist poetic tradition from which his poetry is distanced elsewhere in Parataxis. In his ‘Speculative Assertions’ essay of 2001, for instance, Milne maintains that ‘Foot and Mouth’ ‘could be read as a satirical revision of the conflicts of ethos and pathos enjoyed in the late romanticist and quasi-philosophical readings associated with [Harold] Bloom’s Wallace Stevens or Heidegger’s Holderlin [sic]’. (In his footnote to this Milne notes that the ethos/pathos opposition was in fact later ‘deployed by Prynne’s de Kooning/ O’Hara essay’). In a significant comment in a letter to Allen Fisher of 16 September 1993, published in Parataxis 6, Milne aligned his long-standing suspicion of the poetic lineage of ‘faded romanticism’ – a romanticism far from Prynne’s own romanticism of ‘extra blue’! – to his scruple regarding phenomenological readings. One suspects here too a suspicion of the concept of poetic tradition itself; the postmodernist suspicion that anything connected, integrated or whole is universalist, coupled with a Marxist charge that poetic linguistic beauty is that which is consumed by the bourgeoisie and produced by the naïvely artisanal (those who believe themselves to be ‘originally’ related to language).
‘In
the restricted notion of poetry, a phenomenology of experience and faded
romanticism gesture at the tradition of poetry while implying utopian ideas
about the civic possibilities of language. What makes it restricted is the
assumption of a poetic relation to language, and an overdetermined sense of
what constitutes formal beauty and coherence.’
Milne
offers Fisher no explanatory background for these assertions, beyond the rather
inane remark that ‘I take it that one of the faultlines in contemporary poetry
and poetics is the relation between a restricted notion of “poetry” and a more
dispersed sense of a poetic relation to linguistic manifolds’. However, in his important
article for Parataxis 9, ‘The Two
Poetries and the Concept of Risk’, Marshall
usefully explained how Milne’s statements invoke ‘the idea of the two
traditions of modern poetry’. In relation to this schema, Milne’s ‘restricted
notion’ of poetry refers to the notions of the Stevens, or ‘symbolist’,
tradition. Marshall
summarizes:
‘A
typical formulation of the two traditions of modern poetry thesis can be found
in the criticism of Marjorie Perloff, particularly in the essay “Pound/
Stevens: whose era?’, where Perloff uses these two authors and the apparently
incommensurable positions of what become in effect their respective critical
camp-followers to entrench a dichotomized formalism, already known perhaps from
the writings of Charles Altieri as that of the objectivist versus the
symbolist, but variously referred to here as: the constructionist versus the
expressionist, the encyclopaedic (or epic) versus the lyric, the fragmentary
versus the meditative, and so on.’
Milne’s
determined opposition to aligning Prynne’s writing with the Stevens, or
symbolist/Romanticist poetic tradition is clear in ‘Speculative Assertions’,
when he distances Prynne from ‘humanism’ and ‘civic personhood’. Milne
acknowledges (the early) Prynne’s ‘lyric sequences’, but recasts Prynnean lyric
as anti-lyric, a lyric mangled by the ‘destructions of subjectivity akin to
anti-humanist phenomenology’ which drive it. Such a lyric is intrinsically only
a diminished Olsonian ‘epic’ anyway. (Phenomenology is seemingly now
admissible, as a prop for Milne’s anti-humanist inclination).
‘Prynne’s
poems eschew the vocalizations of humanism, providing neither a congealed
“voice” nor an identifiable persona or civic personhood. The bardic temptations
of post-humanist epic – that poetry could include everything and history
– are brought into the briefer focus of lyric sequences. Song is acknowledged
as an expressive parameter, but the agencies prompting lyricism are not those
of a singer, and are more easily read as destructions of subjectivity akin to
anti-humanist phenomenology.’
It is the Parataxis article on Prynne most willing to engage with Heidegger's thinking which is also most sympathetic to associating Prynne’s poetry with Romanticist poetic humanism. In their essay ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J. H. Prynne’s The Oval Window ’, which appeared in Parataxis 3 (and is republished here), N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge read the following lines from The Oval Window :
It is the Parataxis article on Prynne most willing to engage with Heidegger's thinking which is also most sympathetic to associating Prynne’s poetry with Romanticist poetic humanism. In their essay ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J. H. Prynne’s The Oval Window ’, which appeared in Parataxis 3 (and is republished here), N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge read the following lines from The Oval Window :
It is not
quite a cabin, but (in local speech)
a shield, in the elbow of upland water,
the sod roof almost gone
but just under
its scar a rough opening:
it is, in first
sight, the oval window.
[…]
Reeve
and Kerridge argue that this description of what they call (reflecting on the
picture on the volume’s cover, and anticipating Prynne’s 2008 ‘Huts’ essay) a
‘rough shepherd’s hut’, ‘seems to touch’ on ‘various Romantic traditions of
negotiating a place for the self, a place of at least provisional stability,
amidst the boundless organicism of the world’. Where Milne admits lyric into
Prynnean poetics only if its very constitution is warped by ‘destructions of
subjectivity’, Reeve and Kerridge attend to the way in which The Oval Window rearticulates the
remnants of a Romantic poetic of self-stabilization. ‘The poem’s emphasis is
always on the temporary, threatened, fragmentarily glimpsed moments of “staying
put”, and the barely habitable condition of such buildings as would make
Heideggerean “dwelling” possible.’ In this connection, Reeve and Kerridge also
quote the lines referring to the arctic tern which ‘stays put wakefully, each
following suit/ by check according to rote’. They comment that the tern’s
condition – of ‘patience which is not passive lethargy, repose which is alert
and vigilant rather than timidly self-protective’ – represents ‘something close
to what Heidegger meant by “dwelling”, a kind of reverential letting-be and
letting-come of the world in which man was properly rooted’.
Such references to a form of ‘dwelling’ that stabilizes the subject are echoed in D. S. Marriott’s article in Parataxis 9, ‘Contemporary British Poetry and Resistance: Reading J. H. Prynne’, which, in its discussion of the relevance of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, relates the idea of ‘dwelling on the earth in the light of day’ to Prynne’s preoccupation with return. Marriott states that the poem ‘elliptically refers’ to Orpheus’ ‘need to return to the land of the dead to reclaim (and ultimately lose) the lost love’. Prynne’s poem’s metaphor of ‘the sun making things “worse”’, argues Marriott, ‘draws on the local-existential sense of being on earth in the Orphic myth and its explicit connection between human life and dwelling on the earth in the light of day’; the latter ‘two processes’ are ‘etymologically linked in the Latin derivation of humanus from humus’.
Such references to a form of ‘dwelling’ that stabilizes the subject are echoed in D. S. Marriott’s article in Parataxis 9, ‘Contemporary British Poetry and Resistance: Reading J. H. Prynne’, which, in its discussion of the relevance of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, relates the idea of ‘dwelling on the earth in the light of day’ to Prynne’s preoccupation with return. Marriott states that the poem ‘elliptically refers’ to Orpheus’ ‘need to return to the land of the dead to reclaim (and ultimately lose) the lost love’. Prynne’s poem’s metaphor of ‘the sun making things “worse”’, argues Marriott, ‘draws on the local-existential sense of being on earth in the Orphic myth and its explicit connection between human life and dwelling on the earth in the light of day’; the latter ‘two processes’ are ‘etymologically linked in the Latin derivation of humanus from humus’.
In
his essay in the same number of Parataxis,
‘The Spirit of Poetry: Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne’, Anthony Mellors
writes of ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’ that it represents Prynne’s
‘most protracted meditation on the subject of return’. Marriott’s article quotes the following lines:
[…] To our unspeakable loss; we
make
sacred what we cannot see without coming
back to where we were.
Again
is the sacred
word,
the profane sequence suddenly graced, by
coming back. […]
The
Parataxis critics suggest two
distinct ways of reading such meditations on return. Marriott’s reference to
the ‘semantically incomplete and referentially opaque’ nature of Prynne’s
poetry, straightforwardly explains Prynne’s own references to unspeakability
and ‘what we cannot see’, as well as the uncertainty (in the second cluster of
lines just quoted) as to exactly what
the profane has been ‘suddenly graced’ into. Marriott, moreover, encourages us
to be wary of the idea that such opaque reflections on return were formulated
as a conscious critique of secular, liberal-progressivist rationality: Prynne’s
poetic opacity, Marriott writes, ‘cannot be construed as an oppositional
hermeticism as Mellors argues [in his PhD thesis]’. But Mellors’ charge, in the
pages of Parataxis, that the idea of
return in Prynne is a ‘mystical’ one, is indeed instinct with his criticism of
the opacity of Prynne’s poetic language, which Mellors casts in Heideggerian
terms. ‘Prynne wants to get rid of “meaning” altogether, and replace it with a formal
significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic Saying,
moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical return.’
Milne had already evinced a similar dislike for the idea of ‘mystical return’ when, in a letter to Prynne of 7 March 1993, which was published in Parataxis 5, he noted his poetic ‘determination’ when writing his own Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, ‘to evade a Heideggerian fetish of the etymological and pre-Socratic grounds of language and being’. A specifically Heideggerian mysticism is clearly Milne’s particular target, since here he also writes of ‘a Benjaminian dependence on a theological mystification of history which is often my own gnostic temptation in the face of defeated reason’. So late-Benjaminian mystification of history is endorsed, whilst Heideggerian mystical restoration of origins, or what Mellors calls ‘the Heideggerean project of “destruction” that attempts to clear away metaphysical abstractions from supposedly original properties’, is impugned. Quoting from Derrida’s Of Spirit, Mellors extended to Prynne his suspicion of Heideggerian return to an ‘original temporality’:
Milne had already evinced a similar dislike for the idea of ‘mystical return’ when, in a letter to Prynne of 7 March 1993, which was published in Parataxis 5, he noted his poetic ‘determination’ when writing his own Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, ‘to evade a Heideggerian fetish of the etymological and pre-Socratic grounds of language and being’. A specifically Heideggerian mysticism is clearly Milne’s particular target, since here he also writes of ‘a Benjaminian dependence on a theological mystification of history which is often my own gnostic temptation in the face of defeated reason’. So late-Benjaminian mystification of history is endorsed, whilst Heideggerian mystical restoration of origins, or what Mellors calls ‘the Heideggerean project of “destruction” that attempts to clear away metaphysical abstractions from supposedly original properties’, is impugned. Quoting from Derrida’s Of Spirit, Mellors extended to Prynne his suspicion of Heideggerian return to an ‘original temporality’:
‘Heidegger
constantly invokes the spiritual (especially in the essays on Hölderlin, Rilke,
and Trakl) and, like Prynne, claims to undercut Christian (and Platonic)
appropriations of the term by returning to a prior or original temporality: “In
its most proper essence, as the poet and thinker allow it to be approached, Geist is neither Christian Geistlichkeit nor Platonic-metaphysical Geistigkeit.”’
Mellors
goes on to practically accuse Prynne’s poetic of the late 1960s of Aryanism
when, having noted that ‘the arcane pursuit of etymological value arises as a
justification for and sublimation of crude beliefs in national, racial, and
sexual superiority’, he specifically compares Heidegger’s essay on Trakl to
Prynne’s ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’. ‘As in Prynne’s essay, we are dealing
[in Heidegger’s Trakl essay] with the cultural programme of defining and
returning to our “proper home” in a neat dovetailing of Indo-European
linguistic origins with the philosophy and poetics of temporality.’ This sort
of alignment of Prynne with Heidegger’s Nazi Aryanism strikes me as being little
more than sensationalism: when Prynne observes that the runic wynn 'was the name for "bliss"; it was a proper name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples', he is not advocating racial exclusivity or hegemony.
It seems to me that the critique put forward in Parataxis of Prynne’s concern with return to a prior or original temporality, needs to be tempered by an awareness of the resistance to circularity which Prynne expressed elsewhere in Parataxis. I am thinking of the attack on totalized recursion made by Prynne in a letter to Milne of 21 March 1993, published in the journal’s issue 5. ‘If swinish contentment or stoic damage control are both off the map, then the work of any manifold (poetry included) must be directed so as to minimize inclusion in the main structure of unrecognized recursive loops.’ In their Parataxis article Reeve and Kerridge had already wondered, in connection with The Oval Window, about the nature of the ‘quest’ in that poem for ‘alternative responses to the world, Heideggerean or otherwise, which are not artificially stabilized by controlling circuits and mechanisms’. But such a controlling circuit – a ‘main structure of unrecognized recursive loops’ – could itself be linguistic, recalling the ‘Infantile,/ recursive pandect’ already posited by Prynne as early as the Wound Response poem ‘An Evening Walk’. The ‘main structure’ of his letter to Milne indeed seems to refer to totalized significatory or semantic circularity: later in the letter Prynne writes of ‘the cycle of pure irony’, and it is in relation to the possibility that both Milne’s and his own poetries now are trapped within and stabilized by their hyper-vigilance, that Prynne desires a poetic irony ‘directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates’:
Marshall ’s article for Parataxis
9 offers close readings of two poets, Prynne and George Oppen, ‘who are
ordinarily associated with the Objectivist tradition as defined or redefined by
Olson and others’. But this positioning of these poets does not lead Marshall
to cordon them off within the field of ‘open’ poetry – Marshall underlines ‘the
inadequacy of the idea of the two poetries, one that is open [Pound/Olson etc.]
and one that is closed [Stevens etc.]’. Therefore, and whereas Milne disdains
attention to ‘phenomenology of experience’ as a feature of the ‘restricted’
(closed) poetry he critiques as a Marxist, Marshall’s approach frees the potential
for a phenomenological reading of Prynne whilst showing Parataxis cultural Marxism to be paralyzed within a ‘fixed
opposition’:
Marshall ’s intervention against Parataxis cultural Marxism also locates that Marxism’s paralysis in
the negative dialectical approach to Prynne advanced by Jarvis’s work on
‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. In this way, Marshall
echoes Prynne’s own resistance to circularity with a critique of paralytic
negative dialectical criticism of Prynne, which again restores the potential
for phenomenological readings of Prynne’s poetry. Marshall identifies a ‘danger for
“dialectical” criticism […] in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a
category”’, of encouraging a lack of ‘daring the “moment”’.
It seems to me that the critique put forward in Parataxis of Prynne’s concern with return to a prior or original temporality, needs to be tempered by an awareness of the resistance to circularity which Prynne expressed elsewhere in Parataxis. I am thinking of the attack on totalized recursion made by Prynne in a letter to Milne of 21 March 1993, published in the journal’s issue 5. ‘If swinish contentment or stoic damage control are both off the map, then the work of any manifold (poetry included) must be directed so as to minimize inclusion in the main structure of unrecognized recursive loops.’ In their Parataxis article Reeve and Kerridge had already wondered, in connection with The Oval Window, about the nature of the ‘quest’ in that poem for ‘alternative responses to the world, Heideggerean or otherwise, which are not artificially stabilized by controlling circuits and mechanisms’. But such a controlling circuit – a ‘main structure of unrecognized recursive loops’ – could itself be linguistic, recalling the ‘Infantile,/ recursive pandect’ already posited by Prynne as early as the Wound Response poem ‘An Evening Walk’. The ‘main structure’ of his letter to Milne indeed seems to refer to totalized significatory or semantic circularity: later in the letter Prynne writes of ‘the cycle of pure irony’, and it is in relation to the possibility that both Milne’s and his own poetries now are trapped within and stabilized by their hyper-vigilance, that Prynne desires a poetic irony ‘directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates’:
‘Perhaps
this is my own current look-out, indeed, and I reserved a bolt-hole at the
outset here [in this letter] by referring to non-conductive irony, coyly
leaving room for a version not armed against itself (I think that’s a recursive
illusion anyway) so much as directed to forward the passage of non-circular
predicates.’
Prynne’s
observation of the Cambridge
late modernist tendency towards hyper-vigilant poetic irony echoes Out to Lunch’s
insightful witness, in his review of Wilkinson’s ‘Harmolodics’ for Parataxis 4, of the ‘frozen gaze of
Parataxis [sic] scruple’. Coyly concealed behind his post-punk nom de plume, Ben Watson pointed here to
the recursive circuit of total scruple which characterizes the late modernist
poetics propounded within Parataxis (and
which was precisely what was so intimidating to a graduate student like myself,
newly arrived in Cambridge and trying to find the confidence to position myself
in relation to late modernist poetries – in particular to the work of Iain Sinclair,
the Olsonian element of which is a special victim of Cambridge scruple). It
seems to me (now) that the Parataxis
scruple is frozen by nothing other than the academic prejudice of which it ultimately
consists. When Milne, writing in Parataxis
4, simply asserts that ‘Adorno’s
critique of Heidgger’s [sic] poetics of Hölderlin in his essay ‘Parataxis’
(recently translated in Notes to
Literature vol. 2) remains pertinent’ to Martin Harrison’s use of
Heidegger, but does not explain how or why it remains pertinent, the student
senses a cultural Marxism whose argumentation has become paralyzed by its own
arrogance.
‘I
shall argue that the kinds of risk both writers [Oppen, Prynne] take cannot be
properly understood with reference simply to the fixed opposition between 1.
lyric ego meditating on the phenomenology of experience and, 2. unbeautiful
dance [cf. Milne’s ‘improvised dance’ in P
6, 28] over the manifolds of language. I shall argue that neither writer
abandons the phenomenology of experience altogether.’
‘In
an early essay for Parataxis, Simon
Jarvis wrote: “Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically,
as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent
immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediateness.” A truly dialectical
criticism would have nothing to fear from “apparent immediacy”. On the
contrary, the danger for “dialectical” criticism is that in its haste to
disavow phenomenology, “as a category”, it will turn mediation into an empty
truism, without ever daring the “moment”.’
To
get frozen, recursive-dialectical reading of Prynne moving by ‘daring the
“moment”’ would first involve recognizing, with Marshall, that poetry is itself
a contingent process of
phenomenological (visionary) definition: ‘each poem is a trial, a process, an
attempt to come “face to face to a fact” (as Thoreau aptly puts it) rather than
a complete facing up’. Recovery of the ‘mediated immediate’ that is the
phenomenology of experience within a poem, is, Marshall argues, therefore only
possible through a recovery of the ‘element of process’ – both within our
practice of reading and then, when our reading is un-frozen, within the poem
itself:
‘[…]
any language can be regarded as reified: that is, only by recovering a moment
of the process (or to put it in the statutory pigeon-Hegelian, of the mediated
immediate in the instance of its mediation) can language and experience reflect
upon each other (in the way that Hegel says the concept of the object reflects
upon the subject): this element of process is riskily evoked in the reified
analogue of the reading process itself.’
Wednesday 4 September 2013
Bathos Monotone
J. H. Prynne’s
poem, from his 1971 volume Brass, is
titled ‘Thinking of You’, but at first sight it appears to address kitchen
waste, rather than the traditional romantic object of the lyric poem. This form
of bathos has its own dark comedy, a bitter comedy that is reinforced by the
sheer monotone relentlessness of the repetition of the references to the 'can' or its ‘fat’ within the poem’s
series of functional, prosaic statements. These functional-yet-gnomic
statements are layered, or laid down, almost like a sequence of disregarding
slaps. I say almost like, because in their diminished functionality the slaps are sloppy, miscast ones. In fact Prynne's use of unexpected punctuation, such as the comma inserted in line 4, can be seen to effect the breakdown of the violence of philosophical logic - that sterile argumentative fury which is so helpful for efficiently constructing a dissertation, or maintaining (and raising) one's place in the hierarchical academic 'rank' - into a species of philosophical verse which is cognition of academic violence and not its unwitting perpetuation.
Not going forward let alone re-
turning upon itself, the old fat in the
can.
The old fat rises to a reason and
seems because of its can, not going
forward but in its rank securely,
so as to be ready. Divinity rises to
no higher reason since going up alone
is returning itself to the can. You
choose
if you like whether we stay in the rank
or go forward as alone we can, divinely
secured about the midriff. Older than
forward is the way we might go and
grow because we do, fat. In the can it
is the rancid power of the continuum.
Human
sublimity – such as the sublimity of romantic love, or of the visionary
capacity of our imagination – is referred to here, in terms of access to the divine.
Perhaps the solitary transcendental imagination – when we each, ‘alone’, are
‘divinely/ secured about the midriff’ – is privileged over sublime I-thou
relations, or being as the Siamese twin of a You. But any human sublimity,
solitary or otherwise, is bathetically reduced to old fat, animate spirit
converted into inanimate matter. You could call this Prynne’s Marxist
materialism: a critique of alienation, of the reifying commodification of
the subject, which in fact holds out little hope for humanism.
But
the use of the comma in the penultimate line, for example, seems to complicate this reading.
‘we do, fat.’ These words could be taken as suggesting our conversion to fat in
the can, dead matter (‘we…fat’), but perhaps they simply refer to the way that,
when we ‘grow’, we become fat. Hence Prynne stills holds out the possibility that, even after all
the abuse under capitalism, we remain (perhaps overweight) humans with spirit. In addition, the
proposal that we might ‘go forward as alone we can’ claws back the fact of
human agency, our status as can-do mammals, from the very word for the
inanimate lump of metal itself: ‘can’. Humans ‘can’ create works of spirit,
such as this poem, and such a human cultural construction can appear unusually
bloated, or ‘fat’, as a consequence of the poet’s intention to double-space its lines (the double-spacing of ‘Thinking of
You’ is unusual in Brass, though
there are areas in ‘Of Sanguine Fire’ which are double-spaced
too). So you could say that if ‘Thinking of You’ itself, as a poem, ‘is’ fat it
is only because Prynne decided that it should be so; indeed the air between the
lines which fills out the poem on the page or screen could be said to emblematize the human spirit which
chose to put it there, just as Prynne chose to put spaces between the constituent
words of his later title ‘Air Gap Song’.
But
of course the poem sees us old (modern) humans, emblematized as ‘old fat’, to
be in dire straits now – spirit contained within a reified can-world. ‘Not
going forward let alone re-/ turning upon itself, the old fat in the can.’ As
Keston Sutherland rightly suggests in his article on Brass, 'Hilarious Absolute Daybreak' (online here), the poetic
performance of bathos effected in Brass
entails not ‘lamentation’ of hopelessness so much as a direct statement of
hopelessness. Hence the refusal of the idea of spirit’s self-critique: ‘let
alone re-/ turning upon itself’. Quoting Prynne's poem ‘Crown’ from his The White Stones, Sutherland writes:
‘Brass does what The White Stones, Olson and Heidegger programmed themselves not to
do: it recasts the Heimkehr of
fortune as the paralytic transit from destiny to modern politics, and it does
that by evacuating lamentation rather
than by universalising it. Brass is
the reversal of a reversal, “the question/ returned upon itself”.’
Floating
contained as the fat in the can, the modern spirit of ‘Thinking of You’ reprises the ‘crust’ from the earlier Brass poem ‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’: the ‘slight
meniscus’ which ‘floats on the moral/ pigment of these times’. In each
poem the meniscus, the spirit-level – that is, the attenuated form of our
spiritual life – can be seen to be an epiphenomenon of a moralizing, mass media-entwined contemporary politics. The second stanza of ‘The Ideal
Star-Fighter’ begins by commenting on this particular version of an infantilizing politics
of the ‘ought'.
And so we hear daily of the backward
glance
at the planet, the reaction of
sentiment. Exhaust washes tidal flux
at the
crust, the fierce acceleration
of mawkish
regard. To be perceived with
such
bounty! […]
True to Sutherland's imputed explosion of 'destiny' within ‘modern politics’, this poem adds that a politics which dominates the environment whilst cosseting the
population in an enforced state of eco-friendly ‘moral/ stand-by’, remains vulnerable to the inevitable, predestined revenge of nature that it is bringing upon itself:
[…] We should
shrink from that lethal cupidity; moral
stand-by
is no substitute for 24-inch
reinforced
concrete, for the blind certain
backlash. Yet
how can we dream of
the hope to continue, […]
The
bad idealism represented by ‘moral/ stand-by’ has a contrary, the last lines here imply. It is just that the
hopeless micro-climate of Brass
stifles such a good morality at inception. ‘how can we dream of/ the hope to
continue’. Likewise in ‘Thinking of You’, the old fat attains ‘a reason’ –
perhaps that of Kantian moral normativism – and remains canned. Lacking the
hope to continue, it is ‘not going/ forward but in its rank securely’. This is
precisely ‘so as to be ready’: as if it too has been convened by the
TV/Twitter news to ‘moral/ stand-by’.
But then some lines later ‘Thinking of You’ proposes that we can still choose to ‘go forward as alone we can, divinely/ secured about the midriff’. It seems to me, however, that these lines contain a critique of reason à la moralizing progressivism: Prynne is noticing here a false, privatized progressivism, supported by religion or transcendence. Earlier in Brass, the poem ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ had already warned against the self-insulation of an over-articulate poetic avant-garde from mass society: here carnal collision was already advocated over being ‘divinely/ secured’.
This last particular 'fat', referring as it does to the traveller on a ‘way’ of collective reason which is ‘Older than/ forward’, or more mythic and irrational than progressivist enlightenment reason, yet also – precisely as such a life-force or exercise of crazy vitalism – a transcendental potential which can itself ‘grow’ and rise to a ‘higher reason’, arguably looks back specifically to the ‘fanatic resin’ mentioned in the preceding poem in Brass, ‘Es Lebe der König’.
[…] the plum exudes its
But then some lines later ‘Thinking of You’ proposes that we can still choose to ‘go forward as alone we can, divinely/ secured about the midriff’. It seems to me, however, that these lines contain a critique of reason à la moralizing progressivism: Prynne is noticing here a false, privatized progressivism, supported by religion or transcendence. Earlier in Brass, the poem ‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ had already warned against the self-insulation of an over-articulate poetic avant-garde from mass society: here carnal collision was already advocated over being ‘divinely/ secured’.
[…] No
poetic gabble will survive which fails
to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:
no history
running
with the french horn into
the alley-way, no
manifest emergence
of valued
instinct, no growth
of
meaning & stated order:
Earlier
lines in ‘Thinking of You’ suggest moreover that a movement of private reason –
‘going up alone’ – itself hobbles divinity’s own civilizing action:
[…] Divinity rises
to
no higher reason since going up alone
is returning itself to the can. […]
What
might it mean for transcendental potential to rise to a ‘higher reason’? And
what might it mean for a collective
exercise of reason to escape return
to ‘the can’? With the latter concern we are returned to Prynne’s early
visionary politics of socialized language, which (as I note in my book on Iain Sinclair) he propounded in an important
letter to The English Intelligencer of 14 March 1968, but also, in The White Stones,
in the memorable third and fourth points of the ‘up-/ shot’ concluding
‘Questions for the Time Being’:
[…] 3. What goes on in a
language is the corporate
& prolonged action
of worked
self-transcendence – other minor verbal
delays have their uses but
the scheme of such
motives is at best
ambiguous; 4. Luminous
take-off shows through in
language forced into any
compact with the historic
shift, but in a given con-
dition such as now not even elegance
will come
of the temporary nothing in
which life goes on.
By
the time of Brass the life-world has darkened from our ‘temporary
nothing’ to ‘the hate system’ and ‘the entire dark dream outside’ of ‘The Ideal
Star-Fighter’: ‘the rancid power’ of the progressivist-capitalist ‘continuum’. True
to Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment has reverted to mythic
barbarism in the can-world. But still
in ‘Thinking of You’, arguably, self-transcending, ‘corporate’ and ‘historic’
linguistic activity is identified by Prynne with the emergence of visionary
potentials. The final lines of ‘Thinking of You’ show that such ‘Luminous/
take-off’ is never abjured as a possibility
for our collective exercise of reason, even in Brass.
[…] Older
than
forward is the way we might go and
grow because
we do, fat. In the can it
is the rancid
power of the continuum.
This last particular 'fat', referring as it does to the traveller on a ‘way’ of collective reason which is ‘Older than/ forward’, or more mythic and irrational than progressivist enlightenment reason, yet also – precisely as such a life-force or exercise of crazy vitalism – a transcendental potential which can itself ‘grow’ and rise to a ‘higher reason’, arguably looks back specifically to the ‘fanatic resin’ mentioned in the preceding poem in Brass, ‘Es Lebe der König’.
fanatic resin and is at once forced in, pressed
down and by
exotic motive this means the rest,
the
respite, we have this long.
In
both poems Prynne suggests that this is now our time of decision: in ‘Thinking
of You’, ‘we might go’, and in ‘Es Lebe der König’, ‘we have this long’. Given
that ‘Es Lebe der König’ is dedicated to Paul Celan and that the ‘You’ of which
the succeeding poem’s title is thinking could well again be Celan, it seems
that ‘the rest,/ the respite’ within which reason might decide to grow is
indeed our own historical moment following the reversion of enlightenment to
myth in the Holocaust. ‘Es Lebe der König’ indeed has its analogue to the bad
alternative, the canning of reason with ‘the rancid power of the continuum’: the
moment of restriction within instrumentality when ‘the beloved enters the small
house’. ‘The house becomes technical, the pool has/ copper sides, evaporating
by the grassy slopes.’ Yet the very evaporation of this version of the can
hints that we still have respite within which to decide whether to let our potential
path of reason atrophy into academic sophistication, and ‘re-enter the small
house with/ animals too delicate and cruel’. Structured by bathos, hopelessness
and the recognition of technology’s restriction of spiritual horizons, Brass can still imagine its own copper
sides breaking open, growing into a wider path on ‘grassy slopes’. In ‘The Five
Hindrances’, Prynne writes of the way of collective reason to which Brass thus points in terms of glowing
‘air’, spirit. ‘The future history of the/ air is glowing, with amity beyond
the path itself’. The present-day time of decision, when the narrow old way
might vanish for good, is also the moment of ‘manifest emergence/ of valued
instinct’, of ‘growth/ of meaning & stated order’. For this contemporary
moment of decision, ‘The Five Hindrances’ adds, is as dazzling and bemusing as
the visionary element which it holds in fruition:
[…]
Now we come through
the air
we breathe bemused by the week: the fire
of heaven, gentle, very light. […]
Labels:
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Adorno,
Celan,
fate,
Heidegger,
Horkheimer,
language,
myth,
nature,
Olson,
Prynne,
technology,
transcendence
Wednesday 31 July 2013
Conditioned
‘Whoever has lived through these times and paid attention feels in the inmost way that an hour of reckoning has now come for the German spirit. In sleepless nights of listening and waiting one senses, very close by, the hot breath of this spirit. Now that false dreams of power have been dreamed out, now that need and suffering have burst the hard shells that threatened to suffocate it, this spirit, with a monstrous display of power, struggles toward its realization. […] Nearly all of the innumerable movements that now tremble throughout Germany and shake it to its foundations testify, despite their apparently contradictory directions, to the desire and nature of this spirit. Youth groups that carry forward generalized human ideals or the ideas of the Germanic fraternities; communards whose values are linked to the communism of primitive Christianity; associations of the like-minded that have as their goal a renewal from within; interfaith religious groups; democratic-pacifist unions; and several efforts at popular education: all these seek the same thing, to emerge from abstract ideas anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms.’
-Siegfried Kracauer, ‘German Spirit and German Reality’ (1922)
Kracauer’s insightful definition of the stirring of collective, existential spirit-life during the early years of the Weimar Republic, is quoted by Michael Jennings in the course of his essay on Walter Benjamin for the 2012 collection edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar, The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law. This summary of the early existentialist Zeitgeist, as involving a struggling forth of Geist out of the conceptualizing ‘ego’ and into ‘concrete communal forms’, can be read as a programme statement of The Weimar Moment itself. In his ‘Introduction’ to the volume, Koshar stresses its ambition to attend to the theological dimension of the intellectual life of the Weimar era:
‘Although scholars such as Mark Lilla have celebrated liberalism’s separation of the political and theological spheres, the cumulative effect of these essays is to show that even in its most secular and “humanist” variations, the debate for or against liberalism constantly allowed “theological” themes and gestures entry.’
On this blog [here] I have referred to Chris Thornhill’s emphasis on the way in which Jaspers’ early existentialism evolved out of his critical reaction to neo-Kantianism, in particular the variety propounded by Heinrich Rickert. The Weimar Moment shows what Jennings calls the ‘the religious revival that swept Germany in the early 1920s’, to be instinct with the emergence of meta-Kantian – for instance existentialist – thinking at this time. In his contribution, John P. McCormick notes how Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss also were both ‘deeply affected by the early-20th-century crisis of neo-Kantian thought in Germany ’. In statements that bring to mind the debilitating crisis of contemporary academic rationality too, McCormick writes:
‘This crisis is perhaps best characterized as a widespread perception that Enlightenment rationality could not ground itself: that the most sophisticated system of reason required either a leap of faith to get itself off the ground or some external motivation outside the system itself.’
In the early 1920s Benjamin as well was becoming aware of the limitations of Kantian rationality, as Jennings stresses when he discusses Benjamin’s positive reception of Erich Unger, whose Politik und Metaphysik of 1921 Benjamin classed as the ‘most significant writing on politics of our time’. (Interestingly, Unger’s title foreshadows the sub-title of Thornhill’s 2002 book Karl Jaspers). As Jennings underlines, ‘each man’ – Unger and Benjamin – believed that philosophical thought ‘must move beyond a Kantian model that for them was based upon an inadequate understanding of human experience and knowledge’. Quoting Unger’s book, Jennings continues by noting that Politics and Metaphysics ‘thus conceives politics as an activity whose primary goal is the provision of an arena for psychophysical experience that may “correspond to a disclosure of divine reality”’.
‘As Margarete Kohlenbach has put it, Benjamin and Unger shared the conviction that “philosophical thought is to seek to identify the conditions in which man could objectively experience, and thus know, that which in modern religiosity is at best believed, or somehow sensed, to be true.”’
Rodrigo Chacón, in his contribution to The Weimar Moment titled ‘Hannah Arendt inWeimar : Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?’, notes the shift in Arendt’s terminology in the course of her life, so that later ‘she would attempt to provide existential concepts for the religious notions that she had used in her dissertation’. For example, ‘human “createdness” would become human “conditionedness” (Bedingtheit)’. Yet Chacón thus suggests that Arendt’s existentialism was inseparable from the initial accent on religious experience in her thinking. In the 1920s, he writes, Arendt was ‘deeply marked by the attempts of Heidegger and [Rudolf] Bultmann to provide a philosophical account of certain Christian possibilities of existence’. Opposing Arendt’s later emphasis on existential Bedingtheit to Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian ‘hyper-normativism’, Chacón points to the way in which Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s attention to existential experience of the spiritual quality of our life – of Christian possibilities – modulated in Arendt’s mature thought into her existentialist attention to ‘existential sources in Christian religious experience’:
‘Time is only pure intuition to the extent that it prepares the look of succession from out of itself. […] This pure intuition activates itself with the intuited which was formed in it, i.e., which was formed without the aid of experience. According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself. [….] As pure self-affection, time […] forms the essence of something like self-activating.’
McCormick’s account of Schmitt’s and Strauss’ response to the crisis of neo-Kantianism is suggestive in relation to contemporary intellectual crises such as postmodern, nihilist relativism and the conversion of mass socialist politics (in the UK) into the debt-building profligacy of consumerist New Labour. But perhaps the progressivism of Blair’s ‘Things can only get better’ is morphing now into a wary stoicism, of ‘Things had better stay the same’. Recent academic phenomena such as the online journal Thinking Verse or Simon Jarvis’ ultra-formalist epic poem Night Office – which holds to an abababcc rhyme scheme throughout all its 218 pages – can be read as rebellions against today’s version of the modern rejection of limits, or as restatements of the Weimar era theorists’ insistence on the need to evolve conceptions of conditioning form:
Rodrigo Chacón, in his contribution to The Weimar Moment titled ‘Hannah Arendt in
‘Like Bultmann, Barth and others, Arendt was not a moral – let alone a “normative” – thinker, […] because (human) morality – especially in the form of an ethics of the “pure will” – is essentially a rebellion against what conditions us or what is given to us. Thus [for example], again like Bultmann, Arendt problematized a fundamental ethical and religious precept – neighbourly love – from the standpoint of a more authentic understanding of its existential sources in Christian religious experience.’
The essay from Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin-Israel, ‘The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger’s Theological Critique of Immanuel Kant’, focusses on Heidegger’s 1928 work Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Here again Bedingtheit and an awareness of human limitations seems to offer the key. Moyn and Yadin-Israel argue that ‘unlike Kant’s, Heidegger’s philosophical argument is intended to win assent for an anthropology of human abasement, neediness, and dependence’. It is in temporality, Moyn and Yadin-Israel assert, that Heidegger finds ‘the damning proof of man’s dependence and indigence – an insuperable limit to his autonomy and perfectibility’. Or alternatively they maintain that, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger transfers autonomy to time. They cite the following extract, commenting that it ‘touches on precisely those capacities that for Kant mark the human subject as a citizen of the noumenal world but transposes them so that they are now attributes of time: self-activation, independence of experience, and a kind of autonomy’.
(Marketa Luskacova) |
Indeed for Heidegger, as Moyn and Yadin-Israel continue, ‘Time must be self-affecting for human being to remain consigned to a state of receptivity’, of dependence and finitude. This reference to receptivity leads into Moyn and Yadin-Israel’s discussion of Heidegger’s ideas of attunement, summoning and service. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics : ‘In order to allow the being to be what and as it is, however, the existing being [Dasein] must already have projected that it is a being on the strength of what has been encountered. Existence means dependency upon the being’. As Moyn and Yadin-Israel put it, ‘Knowledge, Heidegger concludes, lies not in the individual’s ability to gain mastery over nature but in an ability to properly orient oneself toward receiving the revelation of the world.’ As Chacón notes too, for Heidegger ‘revelation was to be understood in terms of Dasein’s openness for meaning or sense (Sinnoffenheit)’. Moyn and Yadin-Israel see Heidegger’s location ‘squarely in the aftermath of Barth’s insistence that man’s indigent need for external revelation be recovered as the lost core of Christianity (with Heidegger obviously displacing the source of this necessary revelation)’, as determining his emphasis on ‘Readiness to be summoned to receive the external gift of revelation, presented as an offering and made available through the agency of the “wholly other”’. The Weimar Moment repeatedly returns to the link made by Weimar dialectical theology between conditionedness and revelation. Chacón quotes from Bultmann’s ‘The Eschatology of the Gospel of John’ of 1928: ‘To know him [sic; God] is to see him as really made manifest, and that means to recognize him as Creator, to submit one’s self to be determined by him.’ Ulrich Rosenhagen, in his article treating the Weimar era Jewish-Protestant encounter, summarizes Friedrich Gogarten’s Die religiöse Entscheidung (1921; The Religious Decision) as both an attempt ‘to define a new language of God and revelation beyond history’, and a rejection of religion qua ‘an arrogant human enterprise to overcome the absolute contradiction between creator and creature’.
McCormick’s account of Schmitt’s and Strauss’ response to the crisis of neo-Kantianism is suggestive in relation to contemporary intellectual crises such as postmodern, nihilist relativism and the conversion of mass socialist politics (in the UK) into the debt-building profligacy of consumerist New Labour. But perhaps the progressivism of Blair’s ‘Things can only get better’ is morphing now into a wary stoicism, of ‘Things had better stay the same’. Recent academic phenomena such as the online journal Thinking Verse or Simon Jarvis’ ultra-formalist epic poem Night Office – which holds to an abababcc rhyme scheme throughout all its 218 pages – can be read as rebellions against today’s version of the modern rejection of limits, or as restatements of the Weimar era theorists’ insistence on the need to evolve conceptions of conditioning form:
‘Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that Enlightenment rationality was unravelling into a way of thinking that violently rejected “form” of any kind, fixated myopically on human capabilities rather than natural limits, and lacked any conception of the structural constraints that condition the possibility of philosophy, morality, and politics. Consequently, for both authors, Enlightenment reason obfuscates “genuine” expressions of rationality and obscures the necessity of political order as such.’
McCormick analyzes Strauss’ schema of varying atheisms, in order to underline his conception of the religious ‘fear that is necessary for stable human interactions’ (McCormick’s words) and founds political order:
Jaspers is positioned on the same axis of civility as Gay's mentor, Ernst Cassirer. Jaspers’
early existentialism was not anti-Kantian, but meta-Kantian. If it sought to
supersede Kantian formalism, it remained structured by the antinomies (such as
reason/experience) which it sought to overcome by, in Thornhill’s words [here], ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in
an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. To submit to (the
project of) such an encompassing account, or to seek to absorb oneself within
psycho-physical wholeness, was the early existentialist variant of the more
populist 1920s trend defined by Kracauer: ‘to emerge from abstract ideas
anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms’. But of course the
existentialists, like the new urban constructors, were either ‘outnumbered’ or (in Heidegger's case) seduced by Nazism:
Germany drifted on into submission to authoritarian leadership, and remained
fatally trapped within the old forms of power.
McCormick analyzes Strauss’ schema of varying atheisms, in order to underline his conception of the religious ‘fear that is necessary for stable human interactions’ (McCormick’s words) and founds political order:
‘Strauss
observed that traditional atheisms associated with Epicureanism and Averoism [sic] were fundamentally soft; they rejected the harsh rigours of religious
observance and diminished the necessity of fear of the divine. On the contrary,
Strauss suggests that modern atheism, as expressed by a Hobbes or a Heidegger,
confronts and embraces the harshness of human existence, accentuates the
necessarily and fundamentally fearful state within which human beings exist,
and accentuates the inescapable fact that human beings are in need, as such, of
dominion, of being ruled.’
Whether
manifesting now as submission to the principle of capital accumulation à la Weber, or else to an infantilizing
consumer culture à la the Wyndham Lewis of The Art of Being Ruled (1926), such religious awe remains the human
norm. Surely religious fear and the need to submit underpinned what Kracauer called
the imperialistic-militaristic ‘false dreams of power’ which afflicted Germany in the years preceding the First World War. When we need to be ruled we too in turn begin to dream those
dreams; but arguably in ‘German Spirit and German Reality’, Kracauer, with his
association of the growing thinking of existential spirit-life with its own
‘monstrous display of power’, begins to suggest a new form of power and an
alternative way of being ruled. For what was the 1920s push towards the
emergence of existential spirit-life but a more progressive manifestation of
‘The Hunger for Wholeness’ which Peter Gay, in his Weimar Culture, saw to characterize the Weimar era ‘fear of
modernity’?
‘Not
all who, in the twenties, hungered for connection and unity were victims of
regression; a few, outnumbered and not destined to succeed, sought to satisfy
their needs not through escape from but mastery of the world, not through
denunciation but employment of the machine, not through irrationalism but
reason, not through nihilism but construction – and this quite literally, for
this modern and democratic philosophy was formulated in their writings and
carried out in their buildings by architects.’
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