Mad Man's Blog

Mad Man July 22nd 2010

Poetry and Philosophy have not always had the most amicable of relationships. Ever since, what is considered by many to be a great schism thanks to Plato, who wished for the Poets to be banished from the Republic, the two disciplines have danced around each other, occasionally joining, and not always with the best of results. Philosophers have long valued the poem though, long ago they turned their backs on Plato’s dreams. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Derrida, a long line of continental philosophers that have understood the importance of poetry. The latest in this line, is Alain Badiou, who sets up the poem in opposition to knowledge. Badiou celebrates this distinction, this antagonism that Plato first uncovered, or engendered, that philosophy and poetry aim at two different things, with regards to reality and Being. But where do Philosophy and poetry differ? What can they teach each other? Do they share a common ground?

Poetry: The Art of the Surface.

Poetry is at its best when it is an art of the surface. The poem is of language, but it differs from dialogue, from prose, in that, it is essentially, always a failed attempt. What is the goal of language? To communicate, but to communicate efficiently, to maximise semantic content, or depth, to utter an objective content. Yet poetry is the failure with regards to these aspects of language, to communicate depth of meaning, or depth of being, by ‘saying as few words as possible.’ The ‘unsaid’ of language, is linked to its status as a series of commands, prompts, acts. Commands function best when they are simple, yet they always have a hidden, unuttered content, that is implicit in its usage. Poetry is inefficient in this sense, in that it releases amounts of this unuttered content randomly, the force behind the authority of the command is undermined, it is no coincidence that poetry resists strict strata or authority, unlike say, painting or literature, poetry resists attempts to make it into a patrician, or royal art form. No wonder poetry makes poor propaganda, it risks allowing the reader to see through the shallowness of the command of language, liberating that which is ‘hidden’ in the standard form of the speech, or the text. Poetry mocks the repression of language, and threatens to unleash it at any point. In order to function properly, a language must enforce rules that are not just syntactic, or semantic, but beyond this, authoritative, to allow for only ‘what needs to be said’ and not ‘all that can be said’ to in fact be what is said. In this respect, a language user aims for clarity, but to position his language as such that he can maximise its depth, its ‘unsaid’ so that his language only points to it, without having to say it. Poetry has little respect for this ‘only what needs to be said’ rule. It flaunts it, dipping into the vast reserve of ‘all that can be said’ to the point of breakdown at times:

‘’For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the….’’

There is always more that can be said of course, but saying all is verging on the horizon of nonsense. This is a limit that the poem can not breach, it is akin to the speed of light, one only dramatically increases the linguistic mass of the poem, to the point of absurdity, but never actually breaks the limits of language.

The poem is said to be among the deepest methods of communication. How can this be, if it fails the rules of language as a system of commands, as a drive for efficiency and clarity in all things? Because it understands this, that the surface is the deepest, that all depth is but unencountered surface, ready to be skimmed by the word. The poem can of course, deploy ambiguity, the attempt to hide it’s meaning, and this is not at issue with what has been discussed, because its ambiguity is loose, perverse, it is really the case that the poem can be interpreted in a number of ways, the true meaning of which, if it is not obvious in the wording of the poem, can never be pinned down, it is only an absence that can be interpreted n number of times, this is an extension of the poem’s ability to ‘say more’ than other forms of language would require.

But the poems depth does not come from it’s ambiguity. It’s depth comes from it’s focus on the surface, it’s resistance to the object, to the effort of language to distil reality into objects, substances, presence. ‘The poem has no object’ to quote Badiou, it is the effort to move away from the object, towards a state of becoming or multiplicity. If we understand by becoming, what Heraclitus did (a poet as much as a philosopher as Blanchot tells us) namely, that reality is flux, change, reality is processes and multiplicities that are never ‘yet’. We can see how the movement of the poem, the grammar of the poem, is informative here, a grammar not found simply in its words, but in its movements, the only objects of the poem are its themes, it’s movements, the regularity of rhythm or rhyme or meter, are the fidelity with ‘process’ that give definition to being, a fidelity emulated in the poem. The object for the poem is unnecessary, because process alone suffices, staying at the surface, never falling into the ‘thing’ of the object, the supposed depth of the object, which is superficial, if not artificial, a false reserve of being created by the conflation of presence. ‘Poetry is communicated before it is understood’ as Eliot knew, and his poems are exemplary in this respect:

‘’The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.’’

Everything here takes place at the surface. The depth of the world is communicated here, at the surface, for there is only surface in this world, with so much ready to be uncovered. Philosophy is not an art of the surface however. It seeks depth, but depth to be uncovered and put into its concepts. It is not enough for philosophy to only say that which needs to be said. The starting point of all philosophy is the abandonment of this position, the position of common sense. Philosophy however, sets up too much against the surface, seeing it as superficial, illusory, the world of appearance. Philosophy greatest wish is to excavate not only the hidden aspects of ‘what can be said’ but of Being itself. Though while it believes this can only be expressed in language, philosophy remains therefore enslaved to it. Badiou’s insistence that ontology is mathematics, is an interesting effort to free it from language. But philosophy is trapped by the need to maintain depth, to force being into it’s concepts, to seek knowledge or ‘representation’ the Philosopher seeks to shackle being, to bend it to his will. The effort is valuable, because as Heidegger knew, this effort to capture being is never fulfilled, but the meaning of being is continually enriched. The Poet abandons this urge to represent Being however, rather, the Poet seeks fidelity with its hidden power, that which language abandons. This is why Nietzsche admired the Poet, who is at first sight, in an apparent move of ignorance and superficiality, a move to destroy the will to ‘knowledge’ to grind being in the wheels of philosophy and science. Rather, the Poet embraces being for what it is, affirms it, by using it, deploying it in the poem and understanding it only at the surface, because the surface is the site of real depth.

The Poem and the World.

Wittgenstein remarked famously, that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’. But he was partly incorrect, the limits of our world, are the limit of our poetry. Of course the poem is ‘of’ language, but as we have seen, it is failed in regards to some of the main rules of language. If we want to understand the limits of the world, we could understand it as being able to cleave the world into its atomic components, as Wittgenstein (at least in the Tractatus) wanted us to do, which is limited by our ability to match up words with their referent ‘part’ in the world. But the poem does not ‘cleave the world to atoms’ it does not match the way the world is, as some collection of objects or facts, but tells us only that the world is process and becoming. The poem does not seek fidelity with the object. It does not seek to recreate the world element by element. In fact, the poem births its own world. Why is it a world at all? Because it’s only fidelity is with processes, with becoming, it is this that it stays true to, not replicating these processes exactly, but mimicking them, or to put it better, and avoiding the shallow charge of mimesis, it emulates them. The Poem expresses that which is of the world, abandoned, or shunned by ordinary language, which does so in an effort to force the world to become something other than it is not. It should not surprise us that efforts to reconstruct the world in language exactly always fail, if we endeavour to exactly reconstruct that which is under consideration, something is always missing, the way of Being itself, made more and more apparent as the effort is increased. The poem abandons the effort to reconstruct, in exchange for an effort to create, to allow for processes to unfurl, to become, as is the way of Being of the world, at least to the limits that language allows:

''I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves;

And mid-May's eldest child,

The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.''

Keats knew this, the melancholy of his poetry is a testament to this, his poetry has lost its object, it is not that Keats here desires what he can not possess, but that it he realizes he has no object to possess. What is wondrous for Keats in this world, is its unfurling, its poetry is found in the becoming of nature in its multiplicity, its relations amongst itself, its excess, all this in comparison to the world of Man, with his language, his dry stale objects of knowledge, the world Keats births here, is the world of the Nightingale. The poem is too some extent, a parasite. It takes from the world, not it’s objects, but its themes, it’s excesses, the points of transition of being in its processes and becoming: weather, death/life, intensity, destruction, creation. It is once more in opposition to ordinary language here, which seeks to give back to the world, not out of a sense of generosity, but an act of imposition, to force the world to become fixed and stable, to take from the flux only that which it needs, and give it back as substance, object. This is the endeavour of science, and of history, and ultimately, philosophy.

But philosophy lies in a unique place here, it has too much of poetry already within it, that is, an anti authoritarian impulse, that is never satisfied with the rules and laws it throws up and creates for itself. Philosophy is like a sun, an entity born of two forces, the crush of its own mass, the tendency to condense itself, to achieve final structure, its own end in infinity, and its own destructive force of disintegration, which is constantly seeking to destroy itself. We may say that in part, this is due to its own critical capacities, but we should say more than this, it is dogged by an ever present, niggling doubt, over whether has ever been successful. Why? As it is always failed, the poem cares not for the success that philosophy yearns for. Philosophy is eternally optimistic a process though, all great philosophy is the destruction of some old system, and then it’s replacement, which is offered up in full awareness that it will suffer the same fate. Philosophy is like the star, always unsettled.

The poetic impulse is accepted in poetry without the need to further conceptualize it, it matters only to be utilized, to, following Eliot, communicate before it is understood (which is a secondary effect of other language operations, even the parasite can be fed off). However, this impulse haunts philosophy, philosophy in its opposition to common sense, or its need to transcend or supplement it, flaunts the authority of language, which is the reification of common sense, because it sees it as insufficient in its grasp of reality. But it still maintains in its desire to conceptualize everything, this is its ultimate goal, its will to power. Nietzsche knew that the philosopher is the worst form of tyrant in this respect, Princes, Earthly tyrants and Dictators, seek only common power to dominate men, or materials, but the Philosopher, is the one who seeks to know the ultimate nature of reality, the mind of God, and there is no higher power. But what use has the Poet for power? For him power is not the negative, reactive force that it is for most Philosophers, who seek it to dominate and use it to dominate others, instead, for the Poet, power is affirmation set amongst the words, the Poet is only happy if he takes this power to its limits. Perhaps this is why the Poet is never truly satisfied? But for him, the power of poetry, lies in its ability to create.

Poetry is unalike other arts, such as painting, which has either given itself over to the task of mimesis, or the rendering of force and difference. Poetry is a capacity of language after all, albeit a redundant capacity. But the poem can not escape language, though it can it taunt at its limits. Lacan thought language, or entry into language, as the fundamental psychic event, the birthing of the subject and the symbolic, founded on an act of castration. A giving up of something, that forever haunts our existence. Language is a tyrant, it forces itself upon us, it structures us, forms our very subjectivity. Language takes a lot out of us, in its efforts to render us a subject, in the way it removes or castrates something of us, as material, worldly beings, who then enter into this symbolic universe, but all its potential, always comes at a price. Without this dimension of our subjective existence however, we could not have poetry, or language in general, because poetry is dependent upon this process if it is ever able to say anything at all. And yet, it offers us the greatest extent of freedom within the great capacity of language, a chance to kick back at language even, poetry is the revenge of the lost, the repressed. What was lost is never returned. Art, philosophy, science, non quite match poetry in this respect, it is the best possible, of two worlds, the real, and the linguistic, it attempts to access reality as it really is, but maintains itself within language and its limits, circling around its void. Much can be said of the world. But the job of poetry is to try and say, or point to that which is orphaned by language, and in this expression, it affirms reality, and keeps steadfast with it.