Principles of Interpretation: Reading Beyond The Human

Reading beyond the Human: Laying out principles for a course on Revolutionary Narrative: The Poetics of Power.

In a narrative, things, social units, locations, ideas & beliefs, (both explicit and implied), can all be actants. Let’s call them Object-Actants (O-A). A “character” in a narrative is both an O-A, and a receptacle and carrier of multiple O-A’s. An O-A may be in itself, autonomous, but still a part in a larger whole, as the cells and organs of an organism exist both as parts, and objects in themselves. Dependency in the relationship, then, indicates limits of freedom, but does NOT determine independence of identity.

The centrality of human Object-Actants (or their representations) in a literary work is as limiting to the range of possible interpretations or readings as it is in thinking about the natural world. That is—a human-centric understanding is in no way necessary to the ways we might understand a story.

                                                          *****

Object-Actants are dynamic, reacting to and eliciting reactions on other O-As. They both endure and change in text-time, maintaining their identity as they change. Relationships may be dominant-subordinate, or co-equal, in which case they may form an alliance that may in itself constitute  an O-A.

Ellen Joy: A Speculative Realist Criticism

"We choose to seek, then, a non-projective, non-hermeneutic criticism that would multiply and thicken a text’s sentient, bottomless reality. This criticism would be better described as a commentary that seeks to open and not close a text’s possible “signatures.” Aesthetics may constitute a domain of illusions, but these illusions posses their own material reality and are co-sentient with us"  Ellen Joy: Notes Toward a Speculative Realist Criticism

Levi Bryant responds on Larval Subjects [...]
Books do not mean something, they do something.

Here then we get the first sense of what it might mean to say that criticism comes after the text. This thesis is not the bland truism that the text must first exist for us to “criticize” it, but rather is the thesis that criticism is a production based on the affectivity of the text. In other words, the question is no longer the question of what the text means with the aim of closing the text, but rather is the question of what the text builds. Criticism here would be aimed at what texts build and allow to be built. And since the building power of any entity is infinite, texts would be radically open."

Creative Illness ?

I found this in my journal... don't recall whether it was posted--maybe in reply to a comment, but thought I put it up again. From February when I was dealing with asthma, and the had just begun working on Poem to the End of My Days. I've recently completed work on the third volume.

I keep thinking about the psychosomatic components. So very complicated--as I don't have to tell you, not a matter of 'mind' &/or versus 'body'  Nothing of mind that isn't physical, nothing of body that isn't mind. This would be the year of my father's death... didn't live to his 71st birthday. Simply the fact that this occurred to me several times as early as this summer  (beginning 69th B-day, beginning of my 70th year)..  and came to mind very forcefully with those 'faux death'
syncope episodes... which  happened, when? In October. Month of my father's birthday. I think this tells me that there's something to be listened to here. Not a matter of simple cause... anything but simple

I love this quote from Lacan... in answering the question of where the ego is situated.. that one must ask "through whom and for whom the subject asks his question. (ital mine)... 'subject' in Lacan's use,  being the 'I' who speaks: whose 'language' the analyst is keen to hear in the swerve and ellipses of what is spoken.   

through whom -- for whom
the subject asks

... & what is the question?  ... how can one hear or understand the question, until you grasp that?

I needn't add how relevant this is to any form of creative work... the very mark of difference between success and failure of any piece.  It may not be conscious... almost certainly isn't, but that 'from whom... and to whom' is there inhabiting, animating, engendering every novel poem painting musical composition song dance... if it is to live. To be alive. This is the psychic reality of the Muse, of 'inspiration.'  ... some word, eh? ..."in-spiration?" The breath of life. Poem to the End of My Days

Coincidences are incidental, are they not? ...  to our powers of selection from the glittering stream... perhaps, even more, conjured from our powers to ignore what doesn't correspond? ... not out there, but private. Symbolic language within. Thinking them out there, of the world, I'd think would be but another veer from our own Truth. Through whom am I speaking now... and to whom? And what is the question... yours or mine?

Not so much my father as his death, his day of birth, the timing and this cough and how I number my days... coincidence of subject... how my body has responded. The pulmonary specialist told me to ditch the Lisinopril even though the cough preceded it. Gasoline on the fire, he said, not cause of inflammation or its spark, but fuel enough (& deadly, so i heard) & so I stopped. Ace inhibitor--inhibitions incomplete...  insufficient for the task. It's always the context, material and otherwise, that matters.

Observe Ulysses bound to his mast...

oh no! Scrap that!

Wrong symbols there for sure! 

Who then the sirens, where the foundering rocks?

Kafka's Father

On Tales from the Reading Room: Poor Old Kafka: Franz K’s tortured relationship with his father, an affliction Franz was never able to resolve. Only half tongue-in-cheek, I raised a question in comments. A brief exchange followed:

 Were you granted the [powers to go back in time and] to transform Kafka’s father into the compassionate parent he craved… knowing Franz would have a pleasurable self-fulfilled life–as an accountant who never wrote a word anyone would want to read… would you offer him your compassionate magical rescue…. or let him suffer so we would all have those delicious enigmatic stories to enjoy at his expense?

<Comment by jacob Russell — August 17, 2011 @ 5:44 pm | Reply ·  Jacob – ach my friend, what a question you ask! You see, you go right to the heart of it with that. And if Kafka had lived longer… and finished The Trial and The Castle? Would an ending have been as oddly satisfying as the endless prospect of uncertainty that we are left with?

Comment by litlove — August 17, 2011 @ 6:06 pm | Reply ·  Kay Redfield Jamison raises similar questions in her book on artists & Manic-Depression, Touched with Fire.
The Joker in that question, of course, is the unstated assumption that the more visible vicissitudes of being socialized animals are and should be fixable… cured…that there’s a measurable ratio … or some such. I like Lacan here… that there is no cure to the neuroses that dog us all without exception… but psychoanalysis might be one way to live more meaningfully and creatively with our afflictions–by better understanding what they are.
… and questions like that can never be answered by anyone but the one who suffers. To assume otherwise is the source of a great deal of entirely avoidable misery.

(Keep in mind that “Understanding” is not the same as an ‘explanation,’ nor does it erase the symptom that is the source of the suffering.)

This, and a radical revision and rewriting of a novel I’ve been working on for more than ten years, set me thinking from a new angle about ‘realist fiction.’

I’ve been stripping the text of this novel of much of its connective tissue: transitions, developmental passages, much (not all) ‘scene setting’ descriptive detail—those very conventions, which if removed from any contemporary realist novel, would make it something else--the mechanics that define the genre, the I-beams and pylons, lifts, stairwells and hallways which make possible: plot, character development, the flowing narrative voice-over—the stuff that  holds up (though doesn’t constitute) the illusionary schtick of verisimilitude.

Litlove’s thoughts on psychoanalysis, Lacan’s rejection of the conventional idea of a ‘cure,’ what all that textual paraphernalia was really doing for the reader—all came together… something clicked for me..
This is, I thought, precisely what sets Kafka’s work apart from conventional realist fiction. He never found a ‘cure,’ and neither did his stories, exactly what ELF novels do… pretend to ‘cure’ the disease! The whole business of verisimilitude is tied up in this. No matter how unsettled the world-picture may be at the end of the novel, how disturbed or disturbing—it amounts to a kind of explanation: the parts are meaningfully fit together, even if the whole remains an enigma—which shoves the enigma safely outside the contingent & generative action—alien to the parts that make up that whole. Even if we don’t and can never understand the Big Picture, there’s the reassuring meaning of personal love, assertion of individuality in the face of… etc. The basic stuff of almost any ELF novel.  Entertaining and artful as they may be—they are anything but ‘realistic’ – in the sense of what Woolfe, Joyce, Svevo, Musil… and Kafka…were searching for—something that goes a long way toward  defining the Modernist project of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

The novelist takes his characters and their world and explains for them, and to us, how things work. A kind of fictive explanation that doesn’t actually explain anything, but gives us a sense of a world grounded in 18^th and 19^th C. ideaa of efficient and effective cause. Actions have consequences! And here they are! (I would add, that this pseudo-pschologizing of reality becomes infused with the aesthetic structure—inseparable; and explains the importance of foregrounding purely aesthetic structures in ‘experimental’ fiction.)

Where Lacan comes in for me, is in what I see as his relentless opposition to the intrusion of conventional ideas of causation into psychoanalytic practice… as though there could ever be points fixed-in-the-past, affecting reactions across time through memory, when memory itself is continuously generative and part of an on-going multiple set of dynamic relationships involving sensual perception imagination desire… never fixed, ever resistant to conceptualization, whether abstract or conventionally dramatic… exactly what representations of ‘psychological realism’ set out to do, and in doing so, reinforce assumptions of causation that externalize human meaning, leaving us as a substitute, an illusion of coherence that only works on the level of the individual—lending an invisible political force reifying the status quo, and delegitimizing whatever threatens to significantly challenge it.

----
Perhaps this is closer to what I was working toward above...
that there's a correspondence between the causal chains of association that constitute narrative plot, and the spurious significations which are symptomatically imposed on the tohu v'vohu of present experience. Over against the Romantic quest for meaning, the Modernist project set about unmasking--not so much 'meaning' itself--as the encrustations of its semblance which serve to preserve the current structures of power and propriety. This stripping away differs from the ironic deconstruction of artifice-as-reality we associate with post-modernism--which leave the mechanisms in place, doing their work like machinery we no longer believe in, but are nonetheless helpless to alter.

What is left when reality (the preserve of realist fiction) is stripped away (not deconstructed) -- is the ineffable 0 of the REAL... the endings Kafka could not have written had he lived in any condition of health or malaise. But this 0 may also be a space where we can--if we dare--step into and begin again, and again, and again.

To put it another way--a mathematical analogy--realist fiction produces its effects by overdetermination; the constraining equations favoring existing narrative power structures by virtue of overwhelming the possible degrees of freedom.   



The perfect literature for a society of masters & slaves.

Fantasy and Dream: The Supreme Tyrant and the Dreamers on the Street.

A re-post from June 22, 2009 I thought relevant to the piece below on Dorothea Lasky's Poetry is Not a Project.
 
Fadi Abou-Rihan  has been posting a running commentary on Winnicott's ideas on 'Found Things," on the trasitional quality of play,  dreaming and fantasy.  Go to his post, Structure and Process, to follow his ideas.
While I can't pretend to offer useful interpretation--I was struck by Winnicott's distinctions between fantasy and dreaming, on the comparative fixity of fantasy--which is tyrannically (I don't think that that overstates it) re-guided back to whatever has been identified as the desired object, as opposed to the poetic quality of the dream, whose "agility is the mark of a mucking about and a taking liberty with whatever it may encounter."
 How often I've experienced in my writing--particularly when the going gets rough, the words hard to come by--that I've become 'fixed' in just this way, to a goal, preconceived--even if one I'm as yet unable to articulate, that I'm trying to keep everything within bounds...coloring within the lines, not at all unlike fantasy daydreams in states of infatuation: securing the hand of the lover, of winning the prize, getting the book published. This is not, I think, a matter of releasing a bundle of unacknowledged desires pent up in some prison cell of the unconscious. It is not a turning inward, however much it involves unconscious and perhaps repressed forces; rather, it is a losening outward--a movement toward the world, a relaxation of the border police. Play brings new aspects of reality into view... into play, involves us in the world in ways we had missed, or avoided, or feared.
It is certainly possible to push ahead in that goal oriented mode, "purpose driven" writing; one can even learn to be quite good at it, which may be the worst thing that can happen--that one can get good at it; good at making it happen... which is really a way of not letting it happen. The mental Besiji may indeed succeed in striking fear in the hearts of the dreamers, chasing  them 'safely' indoors, shooting the Voice through the heart, letting it bleed to death on the street. We need to learn to say to the Voice, like the primal cry that it is... don't be afraid! Don't be afraid!

Here are exerts from the post.

By the early 1970’s, Winnicott elaborated further on the quality of this interaction when, with the help of one of his patients, he introduced a distinction between “fantasying” and “dreaming.” Fantasying is an isolated and isolating activity as with, for instance, the daydreaming of the perfect partner, perfect job, perfect home, or perfect finances, the daydreaming of, in sum, the perfect and perfectly satisfying life (the aeternitas) in the face of an intolerably disorganised, unmanageable, and fleeting reality (the tempus). Fantasying instigates no action; it at best runs parallel to and at worst substitutes for life and action; it is a fixity that distracts from and drains objects and relations; it inhibits and at times altogether paralyses them . Dreaming, on the other hand, corresponds to the agility typical of an excursion into an “imaginative planning of the future” (”Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living”, 35), an excursion that precipitates and looks forward to action as much as it is shaped by it (DFL, 26-33). Doctor and patient had come to see that fantasying about an action and dreaming about it belong to two separate orders; indeed, “fantasying was about a certain subject and it was a dead end. It had no poetic value. The corresponding dream, however, had poetry in it, that is to say, layer upon layer of meaning relating to past, present, and future, and to inner and outer, and always fundamentally about [the dreamer]” (DFL, 35; emphasis in the original).
[...]
Yet, and however distinct they may be, fantasying and dreaming remain inextricably implicated in one another. The fixity that is the trademark of fantasying speaks a strong attachment and a wish to revise and preserve as is, in other words, a fidelity to a particular object or situation, while dreaming’s agility is the mark of a mucking about and a taking liberty with whatever it may encounter

CA Conrad interviews David Wolach

CA Conrad's interview with David Wolach on PhillySound is not to be missed--it is so rich on so many levels. I've been writing and thinking and writing and posting snippets on 'ownership' --obsessively for the last few days. I nearly jumped out of my skin reading this--so many points of intersection, commonality and difference... the shaman theme... body intelligence, staging actions in public spaces... . wonderful stuff

The Body Politic, The Body Poetic, The Body Real

The deep formative connection between Dread Scott v Sanford (1857) and Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific (1886) is increasing more evident. Dread Scott, who sued for his freedom after accompanying his master to the free state of Illinois, was declared by the Supreme Court to be 'property,' and not a person. Santa Clara County v SP declared corporations to be persons. The latter decision has, over time, reconfigured everyone as "property." It's no mere linguistic quirk that Personnel Departments are now called Human Resources for the only legal persons that matter. Battlestar Galactica as a modern parable... but the robotic inventions that rule us are not technological devices, but institutions--and the matrix of laws that make us all wage slaves--if we're 'lucky' enough to hold a job.

This is the inexorable logic of the idea of property, of ownership. As the claim of ownership--whether of persons,things, land or the forces of nature, depersonalizes the owner into a complimentary thing, possessor and possessed being different manifestations of the same--a difference of custom and law but not of being, the very assertion of personhood, in as much as it is successful, deprives the person of the power of possession. Who--or what then is left to claim ownership, but the pseudo-person of the corporation, which in claiming ownership of labor, refashions as possessed things all in its employ--and, unlike human laborers, at no loss to its claim of personhood--as that claim is only a legal fiction. To insist on one's personhood, it is necessary to surrender the power to own to this fictive Person--which eventually to own everything. To be a person becomes increasingly difficult, and ultimately impossible, as survival demands surrender, acceptance of translation into a 'resource' -- the property of the Corporation.

From David Wolach Preliminary Reflections on "Commoning and the Body"
"Commoning and the Body".

David Wolach has sent the following notes, questions, and links to orient an approach to the Nonsite discussion he will facilitate on Sunday Juy 25, 2010:

This is the beginning of how, as poets, we need to think through our received ideas of property and the language of ownership--even to the level of possessive pronouns relating to the body. What do we really mean when we say something like, 'my arm,' 'my body' ... or rather, what else is meant that we overlook in our unmindful usage?

In a capitalist “service economy,” the body is ever more occulted, relegated, or in the way. An aesthetic rediscovery of the body as having proprioceptive, sensory, and kinesthetic potential to inform us uniquely and importantly, and to provide care by opening covered possibles, seems to be a kind of positive articulation of an overall renewed interest in and fear of the "occult body." Market magic, as many have noted in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling, has been the raison d’etre and the excuse for the stripping away of public land rights and the erosion of habeas corpus, all while corporations have gained increasingly robust legal protections as bodies, as “persons,” a definition which not only runs counter to the rights of individuals in a “free” society, but does so by means of defining “person”—hence “corporation”—as pseudo-unified enclosure, workers becoming operational cells of an organ, barely in need of consciousness. I am interested in what the effective (cunning) manager is interested in suppressing: the fact and the knowledge of the value of the working body’s (growing) surpluses, the body's hidden marks and tracks, its sensory and affective capacities and contiguities with other bodies, hence relational (necessarily social) potentials. There is something passive in our current fragmentary realization that our affective capacities are considered by our managers as every bit as “defective” as our various and variable “disabilities.” That the two are on a spectrum, of a category, for the “competent” manager.

Art and Philosophy

Following up on my previous post

Levi Briant has generously responded to my comment with a post on On Art and Philosophy.

Exerts from his post, keeping in mind that he is "still working through these issues, so [...] not committed to these positions in a hard and fast fashion. This is amusing... as--being no philosopher, I am never committed to what I write in a 'hard and fast fashion!"

...philosophy and art engage with being, just in different ways. Good art, I believe, operates in the split between qualitative manifestations and withdrawn being. Indeed, good art, I think, suspends or defamiliarizes the domain of the actual or qualitative beings.

...

[comparing 1984 and The Trial] Great art, I believe, instead operates at the split between the actual and the virtual, suspending the reign of the actual and alluding to that which is withdrawn at the level of the virtual. Great art alludes to another world rumbling beneath the familiar actualities and thereby defamiliarizes the domain of the qualitative or of sensuous manifestations. Where Orwell gives us determinate answers as to why the distopia is organized as it is, for Kafka the principle of this organization is always withdrawn and in doubt.

Of particular relevance to the fetish of 'realism' as understood by certain critics (think James Wood)...

This calls for both a new concept of mimesis and realism in the domain of the arts. Mimesis here can no longer mean the representation of the world as it actually appears. Rather, mimesis, if we are to insist that it is imitation, is an imitation of being. Ordinarily we think of the mimetic on the model of the photograph, treating it as a likeness of that which it depicts. Yet true mimesis is not likeness, but is instead an imitation of withdrawal. It is precisely that artistic practice that produces effects of withdrawal in the work, thereby enacting the split between real objects and their qualitative manifestations. Such is the difference between art and kitsch. Kitsch is pornographic. It wants to deploy everything before the gaze, restricting beings to the level of qualitative actuality, eradicating any dimension of excess or withdrawal in being. [...] for nowhere have they adequately addressed the status of objects as split between the sensuous and the real, but rather they perpetually treat objects as bundles of fixed and static sensuous qualities.
...
Likewise, realism here has to be understood in entirely different terms. Just as mimesis is not likeness, realism is not representation or adequation between a sensuous qualitative state-of-affairs out there in the world and a representation. Realism is not mirroring. In this respect

Read all of Bryant's post on LARVAL SUBJECTS

Aife Murry: Maid as Muse

 Emily Dickinson: Myth of the Solitary Poet
A review of Aife Murry's Maid as Muse on X Poetics.

Emily's language was affected by Mrs. Mack's and certainly by that of other servants with whom she regularly spoke or listened to intently. The queen of mimicry took an improvisational page from her servants' books. Even her genius for ambiguity could have found influence among servants for whom the art of evasion and ambiguity were part survival strategy and, at least in the case of the Irish, part of their legal tradition. Genius is believed to be solitary. What would it mean to rethink a body of work--in this case reread poems for class and race--in light of the way Emily's daily life was shared with the working poor of the town?

I've never quite believed in the myth of the poet as solitary recluse. Emily may have come to shun those of the outside world and all the most intimate acquaintances from her own station in life, but as Murry writes:

What is to be made of the fact that Margaret Maher [ the Dickinson's maid ] preserved the work in her trunk or saved the poems destined for destruction? As people investigating artistic motivation and process look around the writer's room, they are not just communing with the author and the view from the windowpane over the writing table. There was a woman leaning over the grate and some chance remarks that seeded an idea for a poem. All those quotations in the poems suggest engagement, ongoing conversations, and inspiration from the social world around her as much as the written world she inhabited. That 'social text,' that fleshy real world was inhabited by maids, laundry workers, seamstresses, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, basket weavers, laborers, stablemen--all of whom Emily knew by name. 

Suggests a rich social life indeed--of just the sort that class bound memory erases, and when it doesn't erase, discounts as of no importance. A woman of her time could not easily have ventured into a world beneath her class, but might well have found more in common with those who entered and left her domain--tearing the fabric of domesticity and piety and letting in a light too harsh, too unforgiving for the upstairs folk, but fertile for a mind insistent on engaging with a larger universe.
What does it tell us, that this daughter of New England Protestant rectitude selected for her pall bearers, six immigrant Irish Catholics?
 Thanks to Ron Silliman and his archival elves for listing this review!

What Matter ?

What matters in a poem is beyond reach. What remains (language, cultural associations, representational content etc etc... ) is interesting to talk and think about--more than just interesting: may or may not lead (by exhausting the compulsion to classify argue establish hierarchies and judge to ... to what? where?

A transformational encounter. That might leave us for a few seconds free of the need to talk about it, the need to kill what has happened by turning it into a traceable abstraction... trade-able... an aesthetic commodity. A tool of politics and culture. A mirror we pretend has power to reflect our invisible face.

What lives in a poem is not fixed in place. It is generative. It is of nature. A return to nature (as though it were possible to leave -- as though there is anything 'outside' of nature, that is not at most, nature, by looking back at itself, imagining that it is other than what it beholds).

What matters is what happens, all of it. Mind. Affect. Idea. The generative event. The encounter. The trace that remains.

Must we then remain silent? The irrepressible urge to think, speak, write--impossible to resist. And there's no need to do so. But let what is living in the poem speak--a continuation of the generative voice--using and breaking through, as the poem itself both uses and shatters the cumulative shells of culture and convention. We can't pass judgment on a poem any more than we can pass judgment on the wind or a mountain. The poem is nature's judgment of its own artifice--which is the artifice of our multiple identities... political, sexual, personal, national, species. The sound of laughter--of what we are laughing at what we think we have become.

On Sontag's Against Interpretation

Text "Against Interpretation"
Interpretation, for Sontag, is grounded in the distinction between form and content, which she traces back to the Greek idea of art as an imitation of reality, and to Plato’s theory of ideas, which explained even material things as an imitation of a transcendent reality, reducing art to an imitation of an imitation. This places art in need of a defense.
Its truth value fatally compromised (imitation of an imitation), Aristotle looks for justification in use—as therapy: the purgation of unhealthy emotions. One doesn’t have to search far for upticks on this old chestnut.

The problem begins with the idea of mimesis—art as representation, which persists (for Sontag) even with non-representational art in the form of the distinction between form and content. Abstract expressionist painting posed a direct challenge to this; denying ‘content’ to its critics, limiting them to describing form—and thus acknowledging the work of art as it “is,” without reduction or translation to a meaning external to itself. Nonetheless, while a work of art

“… may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it’s usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. (“What X is saying is . . . ,” “What X is trying to say is . . .,” “What X said is . . .”

thus, locating the ‘meaning’ outside the work. Leaving us, as she says, “stuck with the task of defending art,” such that “We can only quarrel with one or another means of defense.” From there—a conclusion I applaud, but attained by a logical elipsis that leaves me near breathless:

Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice. This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism

For me, that’s the heart of this essay—it’s whole point, but left on a foundation in serious need of additional support.
The problem, as I understand it, lies in her accepting—or at least, not challenging Plato’s idea of representation. She ignores it, while accepting the grounds for the troubling distinction between form and content—not Plato’s ideal forms, but the notion that there is a ‘reality’ that constitutes the world outside the work of art, in which interpretation wrongly wants to ground the ‘meaning’ of the work. In this case, a more naïve take on ‘reality’ by far than Plato’s.
What she would hope for, is a less impoverished take on this world, that “… we [may] again experience more immediately what we have.”
Now I have to interject—interrupt with my own thoughts. No one experiences a ‘world,’ that is, a semi-coherent, cohering pattern made up of the kaleidoscopic fragments of particular perceptual encounters. The coherence is already mediated, already an interpretation. The ‘meaning’ relocated by interpretive translation from the work of art… from the text… is then some sort of reification, using the text (art work) to establish the authority of conventionally accepted (narrative) patterns. The fault of Sontag’s analysis is in locating the “content” of the response ‘in’ the texts (granted, as a misreading or projection)… but then failing to identify what generated that ‘content’ and the purpose it served.
Here the analysis become seriously muddled. She wants to claim that

Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists. They are writing the literary equivalent of program music. And so rudimentary, uninspired, and stagnant has been the sense of what might be done with form in fiction and drama that even when the content isn’t simply information, news, it is still peculiarly visible, handier, more exposed. To the extent that novels and plays (in America), unlike poetry and painting and music, don’t reflect any interesting concern with changes in their form, these arts remain prone to assault by interpretation.

Why? Let me quote an earlier passage.

The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning - the latent content - beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art) - all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

Do you begin to see the problem? What were the texts Marx and Freud claimed to be interpreting? And here, I would say Marx was more independent of actual previous texts than Freud—having rendered their contents more rigorously to discrete elements of data which he then re-ordered, than Freud—who was far more an interpreter of acual texts than of direct observations than he would ever acknowledge.
Sontag charges the artist with the task of disarming the interpreter—by implication, blaming the victim for his/her exploitation. The work should aim to a pure formality that vitiates the possibility of interpretation—that is, reductive translation to a ‘meaning’ outside itself.

cannot be described or paraphrased. They can be. The question is how. What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place?


What is needed, first, is more attention to form in art. If excessive stress on content provokes the arrogance of interpretation, more extended and more thorough descriptions of form would silence. What is needed is a vocabulary - a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms.

So far so good… but then

Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.
Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

… hence, the artist is responsible for denying the possibility of assimilating work into thought
Marx and Freud treated (or claimed to) perceived/received reality as manifest content in need of explanation, exposure. Sontag (in this essay, conflates what they were attempting with interpretations of art—looking for latent ‘meaning’ in the manifest content. She ignores the extraordinary irony of treating the ‘reality’ (assumed subject for Freud and Marx) with the subject texts of her interpreters… how did this ‘reality’ become a text? On this, she has nothing to say.
The problem as I see it (after Marx and Freud), is that what needs interpreting is the hologram of ‘reality’… all the ways we put the parts together to construct alternative views/narratives of the ‘real.’
Let me cut to the chase… apply the ‘problem’ of interpretation in reverse—what needs interpreting, what needs exposure—manifest to latent content—is received reality. The hermeneutics of interpretation apply, not to literary texts, but to the ‘cultural texts’ we use to make sense of the world. “Reality” is the artifice that needs to be interpreted, the artifice that pretends to be the world. Yes, learn to read the text as form… that we may learn, not lessons about content about the real world, but about how to dismantle the hologram and anchor every particle of the constructed world in actual experience.
As suggested in my previous post, what I need to add is the idea of the 'encounter,' and the grounding of authoritative texts  in myths of origin. That's another post ...

Critical Reading and Interpretation

To grant the biblical texts authority, they had to be interpreted. The 1500 year enterprise from an assemblage of oral traditions and literary fragments through midrash, mishnah, gamara-- to Joseph Caro’s codification in the Shulkhan Arukh (which itself, must be continually interpreted) while claiming the text as authority, does so by first silencing it, fixing it as a mute idea whose voice can only be heard as resurrected through its interpretations, where it regains multiplicity in the new texts that have been generated. Christian history follows a parallel course.

Texts are inherently unstable, and hence, without authority. Power, whether exercised by religious institutions or secular, faced with the need to legitimize their authority, have to resort to interpretation. Interpretation, whether literary, legal or religious, is about one thing, and one thing only: locating authority for power.

Interpretation identifies ‘meaning,’ by relocating it outside the text, granting it independence as something that can be comprehended in itself, by itself. Free standing--with the ghost of the text as 'idea' hovering over it. This ‘meaning’ is only a mask for the operative relocation of authority, making it available for use--to legitimize power.

A critical response, to remain open to the text, rejects interpretation. A critical response is just that: a response--a multifaceted encounter with text and at the same time, with the imaginative, productive subject involved in the encounter. A critical response has no authority and claims none.

A critical response doesn’t say, this is what I found, offering up bones and tools like an archeologist with artifacts from an excavation; a critical response reports what happened in the encounter, and what is happening in the act of reporting it, a map of a journey and a process that echoes, but does not reiterate or claim to reproduce the journey and the process that generated the text. It is a continuation of that which generated the text, not an end point.

I haven’t read Sontag’s, “Against Interpretation.” I don’t know if I’m thinking along the same lines, or have something entirely different in mind, but I see I will have to read her 1964 essay now and compare.

"Art and the Remodeling of the Commons"

Exerts from "Art and the Modeling of a Commons,” Thom Donovan, in Critiphoria 2

In this talk I am going to address art and poetry because art and poetry provide us with tools, I believe, for talking about commoning. Personally, for me, they mediate what a commons is. Art and poetry are not removed from our experience (though there are countless ways that art in particular is alienated from us through its becoming commodity), but what gives shape to our lives. How can art and poetry provide us with
tools for addressing, rethinking, and transforming commons?

[…]
I have noticed two emergent forms for art: reenactment and the parade. Seeing Arto Lindsay’s art parade in Times Square during this past Performa, the parade reminded me of the importance of bodies coming
together in actual space. Does the art parade not express a desideratum for collective action, demonstration, and protest? Following the parade as it danced/marched down 7th avenue, one could not help but witness and interact with countless side events and attractions. While the parade itself was rather bland—consisting of a line of about fifty marchers in tan trench coats—witnessing random passersby interact with the marchers
was not. If art expresses a desideratum for being together eventally, how to reappropriate art’s appropriation of the parade for communing? Occupying space, and witnessing the fruits of being with numerous others in space, one observes what develops, what becomes, from bodies being in space in semi-organized ways. Art is good at organizing things in this way. It is a means of organization—so why not use it more to this end?
[…]
If I take anything away from Peter Linebaugh’s brilliant book on the history of The Magna Carta and accompanying Charter of the Forest, The Magna Carta Manifesto, it is that commons must be struggled for both within the realm of culture and within the realm of the law. While the Magna Carta is currently eroded by violations of Habeas Corpus, the Charter of the Forest’s demand for usufuct—the lawful enjoyment and use of the land by all—is threatened by land expropriation practices which began in the 15th century and continue ubiquitously to this day. These practices, which created an urban proletarian for the first time in history, happened through the deliberate efforts of proto-capitalists to erode feudal law and grant new powers to landlords over feudal lords. At the beginnings of our modernism are the seeds of two global crises which have nearly played out their course: ecological unsustainability and the expropriation of labor                     Read the rest HERE

Not unrelated... the kids at the end of this video, the ones applauding while everyone else pretends this isn't happening... they are the fucking
Hope of this World !

Poetry, Myth, Philosophy: The Haunted House of Our Childhood

Levi Bryant on Larval Subjects takes up narrative and narrativity: in the de-privileging of narrative characteristic of the disjunctive strategies that run through the best and most interesting contemporary poetry and fiction, another intersection of Object Oriented Ontology and literature, . (For posts touching on this, see HERE and HERE. Even a work like CA Conrad’s Book of Frank, which uses or suggests a conventional biographical framework (if only as parody), goes well beyond attacking one suffocating (straight/male/family) narrative, only to replacing it with another (equally restrictive) Queer narrative. This is the “Book,”not the “Life” of Frank—the text is no transparent window to a ‘content’ somehow untouched by the mediation of language. This foregrounding of language in the poems, with its many disjunctive strategies, leaving no possibility for the exclusive (and excluding) force of narrative closure--doesn’t eliminate narrative so much as radically equalizes it. In the language of the post linked here: refuses to reduce the ontological significance to a single element (the narrative as God, in which all else derives its Being), the difference alone which makes a difference.

All narratives, including the meta-narratives of philosophy: and narrative itself, has its genesis in myth, with its totalizing cosmic/human maps, locating the human in shifting intersections of nature and culture, implicitly and explicitly privileging the human, if not denying ontological status to the non-human, declaring it unknowable, or reducing it to a construct of mind.

We cannot free ourselves from the gods without leaving the house we have built for them. May philosophy and poetry lead us, hand in hand, out of the haunted house of our childhood to take our place beside, not above, the things of the universe.

Disjunctive Stratagies: Journal Notes Morning After a Reading

Last night’s reading at Brickbat Books: Stan Mir. Voice over.. or voice-under—poetics as a running associative commentary on objects-ideas-events passing through the mind-field, tripping off little explosions on the page: syntax only partly disjunctive. Sentences: declarative, interrogative, occasional fragments, sometimes clusters of fragments.

Disjunctions located between phrasal units.

Beginning to note and classify disjunctive strategies as I listen to poets read—simply because it’s often so much more difficult to follow at a reading than on the page. Certain features begin to stand out—how is this poet different than that one?

Poetic taxonomy.

Sarah Dowling's  syntactical amputations ( ). Resist internal closures, holding structures open at a grammatical level, inviting reader/audience to complete the interrupted sentence, phrase, ‘idea.’

For CA Conrad, there are parallel disjunctions: associational (the surrealist heritage, with free association primarily on the macro-level, creating structural coherence (his Somatic Exercises)on a second level with breaks in explicit and implied narrative/thought lines—maintained through transformative variations—lines spliced sutured resectioned around suggested ellipses.

Ryan Eckes and Brandon Holquest both draw on conversational disjunction—structures developed as internally evolving generative dialog.

So many forms of this—so many kinds of fault-lines: the disjuncture of qualification (“we don’t misunderstand hours but don’t misunderstand them” (Keven Varrone : Passyunk Lost) , or reversal, or figurative re-assignment: metaphor and simile as layered dissimulation—comparative incommensurates.

I consider the possibility of developing this as a thesis with supporting examples, then quickly dismiss the idea. It’s about fine tuning my ear. Becoming a more attentive and discriminating listener. Theory and thesis seriously stated demand defense, revision, reconfiguration—all of which cling to the same idea. Prefer to trash an idea before it fossilizes. An imprint is wax tossed into the fire to make room for another. Let both poetry and criticism remain uncommital… or rather, committed only to the next poem, the next idea. Prefer to leave the academics to arrange the bones of the dead.

Philly Poetry

David Alpaugh ( New Math of Poetry The Chronicle Review of Higher Education) goes over what’s become all too familiar in both print and the blogosphere —another end-of-the-world-of-poetry-as-we’ve-known-it article. To his credit, Alpaugh goes into considerably more detail than is the norm, and while he avoids lamentations for the fallen hierarchy, doesn't cry for a new order of gatekeepers, he still locates contemporary poets as dislocated exiles from a world that no longer exists, which—even though he doesn't particularly hanker for its return, leaves him without a sense of what has happened or what it means. Not surprising, absent a secure idea to guide him (or maybe more important--without the kind of vibrant community we have in Philly), so he turns to statistics… and is dismayed. By the sheer numbers. An inundation of Biblical Proportions… Billions and Billions of poets, god help us!

I’m not going to summarize. If you're interested, I recommend you read the article. What Alpaugh shares with the more pessimistic and deprecating commentators is an implied assumption that poets are helpless ninnies quite unable to sort matters out and define our proper literary role without the aid of our Betters, who can be almost anyone as long as they are not themselves afflicted with the lamentable condition of being poets.

The broadest category of fixers are all those people who don’t read poetry… or read at all (you see, I wasn't exaggerating... any and everyone). If only, the argument goes, if only you poets would write stuff that anybody could understand and enjoy—you would be saved! Poetry would be saved!  As though people who don't like to read aren't swamped with opportunities for entertainment. How raising a few poets to Rock Star celebrity status is going to save anyone, I have no idea. Celebrity sure hasn't helped Britney Spears be a better singer—or Lindsey Lohan an actor, or saved either drama or the musical arts by opening a pipeline from artists to the masses.

The other, only marginally more sophisticated complaint (though favored by the relatively well educated) is the Lost Gatekeeper Lament. What you poets need are Cotton Mather critics—to sort out the wheat from the chaff (god knows, poets can’t tell trash from treasure!), to chastise the wastrels, drive the sinners from the fold—till only the Pure and Righteous Laborers in the Hallowed Fields of Litrashur are left to lay the Golden Eggs of Everlasting Poetic Merit. As religion masks for class, so too the Gatekeepers, who,  claiming their sole concern is aesthetics, ignore how closely their tastes define class fault lines.

Then there’s those damn MFA programs churning out poets like … I don't know, metaphors fail me.I can work up my share of indignation on this one, for different reasons--but I won't. Cause that's not where I see the real action. Alpaugh has quite a bit to say on this in his essay, The Professionalization of Poetry.
Here in Philly I view this from a different perspective. There are a lot of poets in Philly—but ya know what? Most aren't MFA grads. Many weren't even English majors, and those who were—the best of them—the ones who are serious—not about being poets—but writing poetry, hang out at the same readings with poets who found their way to poetry from anyplace but academia—and it doesn’t matter. Where you came from, I mean. Where or whether you have a degree or a teaching position. There are overlapping circles of poets in Philly—it would take a multi-ringed Venn diagram to map them all out. In the last year alone I’ve heard more than 40 poets at readings (not counting the 56 who read at the MLA Offsite event)—I can name dozens off the top of my head, and not one has ever mentioned how worried they are about this really scary lack of gatekeepers, or how lost they are without Cotton Mather Critics to show them who counts and who don’t.
What do we do? We listen to one another. In public readings and private gatherings. We read poetry, search out our contemporaries, search for voices and critical ideas that excite us to write, that challenge us to emulate the best, to go beyond what we were doing last year and the year before. There is a process here of self-winnowing that the Woeful Lamentors don’t see, don’t get. Isn't this what poets have always done—judged themselves, sometimes alone, often together, where the one goal that matters most everyone holds in common, no matter how diverse our voices and styles: where is the next poem coming from? What have we done lately and where are we going, and how can we help each other to get there? Yes, there’s competition—but there’s no point system, no measure but the needle of that internal compass that each poet must read alone.


Maybe years from now people will talk about a Philadelphia School, or movement—a Philly Renaissance—who knows. If so, it will likely be defined by a select few of the many poets who are part of this moment, and the Gatekeepers of the dead will hold them up and ask—why oh why aren’t there real poets like that now! What we need, they’ll cry, are ideals, standards, rules to cut the bad poets from the heard! But the living poets will know better. They will listen. They will read. They will challenge and inspire one another—and if there are more poets than can ever be published or rise to fame—so be it!

You say, (counting and counting), what are we to do? There are too many poets!

I say, with William Blake: Bring out number, weight and measure in a year of dearth.

In the year 2010, in the City of William Penn and Ben Franklin and Louis Kahn and Thomas Eakins and Philly Jo Jones and CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock and Rachel Blau DuPlessis and… and…and… and… and… and …

Ain’t no fucking dearth in sight!

René Girard: "the Inverted Transcendence of Mimetic Desire

"The gods haven't withdrawn: they have gone online and their name is Legion. "

Andrew Galli via A Piece of Monologue in the Guardian (sounding rather like Žižek on Lacan's Big Other): on René Girard's Deceit Desire and the Novel.

Girard's premise is the Romantic myth of "divine autonomy", according to which our desires are freely chosen expressions of our individuality. Don Quixote, for instance, aspires to a chivalric lifestyle. Nothing seems more straightforward but, besides the subject (Don Quixote) and object (chivalry), Girard highlights the vital presence of a model he calls the mediator (Amadis de Gaule in this instance). Don Quixote wants to lead the life of a knight errant because he has read the romances of Amadis de Gaule: far from being spontaneous, his desire stems from, and is mediated through, a third party. Metaphysical desire – as opposed to simple needs or appetites – is triangular, not linear. You can always trust a Frenchman to view the world as a ménage à trois.

Mediation is said to be external when the distance between subject and mediator is so great that never the twain shall meet. [...]  When mediation is internal, however, the distance between subject and mediator is small enough to give rise to rivalry between the two. The mediator, who aroused desire for the object in the first place, comes to be seen as an obstacle to the fulfilment of this very desire: "the model shows his disciple the gate of paradise and forbids him to enter with one and the same gesture". Although now ostensibly a figure of hatred, the mediator continues to be idolised subterraneously or even subconsciously [...] Girard's contention is that the need for transcendence has survived the decline of Christianity, resulting in the ersatz "inverted transcendence" of mimetic desire. 

Narrative in Service to the State: Brian Turner, A Well-Written War

It would be hard to find a better example of the inseparability of narrative, whether poetry or fiction, from politics, than Elizabeth Bumiller's NYT review of Brian Turner's A Well-Written War. The last paragraph quoted here is a perfect demonstration of how a documentary mindset--the conscious pursuit of 'objectivity,' is most ideologically in debt to conventions that rationalize the status quo and erase alternative ways of imagining the world: hence, the most restrictive and limited representations of reality. To show the world the way it seems to be is propaganda, not art.

Soldier-writers have long produced American literature, from Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs about the Civil War to Norman Mailer’s World War II novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” to Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” about Vietnam.

The current group is different. As part of a modern all-volunteer force, they explore the timeless theme of the futility of war — but wars that they for the most part support. The books, many written as rites of passage by members of a highly educated young officer corps, are filled with gore, inept commanders and anguish over men lost in combat, but not questions about the conflicts themselves. “They look at war as an aspect of glory, of finding honor,” said Mr. O’Brien, who was drafted for Vietnam in 1968 out of Macalester College in St. Paul. “It’s almost an old-fashioned, Victorian way of looking at war.”

The writers say one goal is to explain the complexities of the wars — Afghan and Iraqi politics, technology, the counterinsurgency doctrine of protecting local populations rather than just killing bad guys — to a wider audience. Their efforts, embraced by top commanders, have even bled into military reports that stand out for their accessible prose.

“The importance of good official writing is so critical in reaching a broader audience to get people to understand what we’re trying to do,” said Capt. Matt Pottinger, a Marine and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who is a co-author of the report “Fixing Intel,” an indictment of American intelligence-gathering efforts in Afghanistan released last month. “Even formal military doctrine is well served by a colloquial style of writing.”

Emphasis mine

Trace, Absence, Remnant: The Critical Task

One can only hope for readers who notice the cracks you've left, and the light that shines through from the other side.

I've been thinking about the Trace. As through a cloud chamber an energized particle passes, ionizing the cloud medium, marking the path of the particle--a trace that is not itself the moving particle that made it, but its sign. So a poem, a work of art. What is left on the page, the canvas, resonating in our hearing: the Trace of the encounter that is its meaning. An absence marked, or mark of what is absent.
The critical task, both necessary and impossible, is to evoke through a second level encounter with the Trace (the Thing left to mark the Absence... the Lacanian Real ?) -- the shape of the relationship between the remnant and that which is no longer there and cannot be reclaimed, renamed, recounted. A second Trace, a second Absence.

Just because this deserves quoting and passing on: Steven Augustine in a post otherwise dedicated to a rant on Norte Americano myths of Niggratude.

We need a non-mercantile equivalent for the word “career”. We need a word denoting a long-term pursuit of creative projects, or project, in which the quality of the ongoing results evolve with experience, but in which the effort is not motivated by the promise of money, or likewise judged by its monetary potential. We need a term like that and there is none; just the vaguely-insulting “avocation” (which imputes, somehow, a touching childishness or eccentricity) or the explicitly insulting “hobby” (for which “skill” plays no necessary role).

At one time... drop the prefix.. vocation had such a meaning.