The Poethical Wager
Oui, mais il faut parier. Cela n'est pas volontaire, vous êtes embarqué.
Yes, but you must wager. This is not voluntary, you are embarked.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
INSERTING AN H IN POETICS: A SLEF INTERVIEW
This interview between old friends (only sometimes at odds), Joan Retallack and Quinta Slef, took place in a short-circuited corner of cyber-space on a rainy Domingo/Domenica/Sunday/Sonntag/Dimanche.…
QUINTA SLEF:How shall we begin? Just before we turned on the tape recorder, you said, "Art that's of consequence has always been a poethical wager." You've been talking and writing about "poethics" for quite a while, but, before we get into that, why "wager"? What's that about?
JOAN RETALLACK:
When you make a wager you stake something that matters on an uncertain outcome. It's a conscious, strategic risk. Of course we're taking risks every moment of our lives, but most of the time we can't think of it that way. We'd become paralyzed with fear. It may sound dramatic, but it's actually a truism that every time I choose to do something or persist in some sort of behavior, I'm risking my life for whatever needs, desires, impulses, habits, values … lurk in that behavior, whether or not I have a grip on the implications. There's no avoiding it. Life—motion, change—is inherently risky. Why not take risks for what we care about most?
QS:Why not indeed? But, to be faux-Socratic, you've just said that's what we're doing anyway. Don't we always try for what we think is best?
Not necessarily. It's seldom that clear. Apart from the obvious question, best for whom?—the individual? the community?—a good deal of what's done in the world comes out of the sense that what's best is really impossible. Might as well do the next or third best or— out of overwhelming frustration, anger, despair—the worst possible thing—just get it over with, destroy the field of possibilities that never seems to yield justice or solace or satisfaction! In art—particularly avant-garde art—this is what critics label "nihilism." I personally think it's rare in the arts. Artists want to make things. Their energy tends to be constructive. Of course I'm postponing the question of effect. Even if I want to act positively, what I think is best may be off the mark from even my own subsequent point of view. The future, that is, the present, is complex and uncertain.
QS:Then what hope is there? We're all shooting in the dark.
JR:
Yes, if we're Platonists or Kantians or religious fundamentalists we're shooting for transcendence into a realm unknowable by the senses; if we're dadaists or Buddhists we're letting things happen; if we're pragmatists we're betting on an outcome by means of logics and intuitions that come from experience in the world as we find it. Radical unknowability is the only constant.
QS:That's a daunting view if part of your program is ethical or political.
JR:
It's daunting if your primary concern is control. What we need is a robustly nuanced reasonableness, one that can operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty, that gives us the courage to forge on, to launch our hopes into the unknown—the future—by engaging positively with otherness and unintelligibility.
QS:
I don't see the logic in that. I would think it would be precisely the other way around—to engage now with the little certainty we can muster. At least we'd have the best chance of charting some kind of predictable trajectory.
JR:
Well, that's the probabilistic approach of the sciences. I think it's just what we have to relinquish in the arts—that illusion of predictable trajectories. Think of how narrow a trajectory must be in order for it to remain predictable. An obsession with the predictable is what leads people to confuse ethics with censorship in relation to the arts. What we need is dubious prototypes of difficult processes. Long-range inquiries and exercises of imagination that are an entirely contingent praxis of constructively reasoned agency.
Dubious?! (laughter) Reasoned agency?! I thought implicit in your use of wager would be the foregrounding of chance—that the language of intentionality can never provide an adequate description of any act. Mustn't the artist, as artist, act out of intuition and imagination more than reason?
JR:
Yes, yes, of course. The major role of chance, and change, in our world is precisely why intuition and imagination are so important to a reasoned agency. This is a synergy, not a dichotomy. To act at all we need to pick up on so many cues that are not part of what we're explicitly taught to notice. The kind of agency that has a chance of mattering in today's world can thrive only in a culture of acknowledged complexity, only in contexts of long-range collaborative projects that bring together multiple modes of engagement—intuition, imagination, cognition.… The more complex things are, the less certain the outcome but also the more room for the play of the mind, for inventing ourselves out of the mess.
QS:So one could say that making something of complexity is our only chance. Does it work the other way around? Making something of chance is the only complexity?
JR:
Hmm. I like surprising symmetries, but … hmm. You know it's amazing how constrained and victimized people feel in affluent cultures brimming with advanced technologies and electronics designed, as McLuhan pointed out, to give greater scope to our nervous system. Electronics links us in a global neocortex, yet the model for agency remains one of rugged individual willpower. I think we get into those typically postmodern conundrums of the "prison house of language" or the "prison house of power relations" when we puzzle about how the individual speech act fits into social-construction theories of language. Analyzing the individual act to discern signs of free will, given the degree of our interconnectedness, is bound to be discouraging. The apotheosis of this may have been the analytic philosopher A.I. Melden's book Free Action, in which he interrogates, for over two hundred pages, the meaning of the act of raising one's arm.[1]
QS:That appeals to the Occam in me.
JR:
Oh yes I loved it. British analytic philosophy is the next best thing after Lewis Carroll. The peculiarly context-free thought experiment is wonderfully, uselessly tonic. Wittgenstein suggests a remedy by positing the vague, ubiquitous "form of life," context of all contexts that
QS:But to return to one-armed elegance for a moment, what does Melden conclude?
JR:
As I remember it, he concludes with what could be the starting point of a much shorter book—the question whether so and so raised his arm voluntarily is ultimately too complex to understand since there are so many difficult matters of social context that the author cannot treat in such a study. Ethical analysis that foregrounds isolated acts of individual will always fail when real life floods in and muddies the logic. So the possibility of effective human agency can't depend on such arguments.
QS:
So, ethical agency is embedded in values that inform long-range projects that engage with a complex world as well as indirect and unpredictable ways in which this work might affect the cultural climate.
JR:Precisely. Beautifully put!
QS:
Hmm, interesting, but—to play devil's advocate—aren't things complicated enough already? Isn't that why artists and humanists and scientists alike have for millennia sought means of simplifying in the service of clarification, one might even say, of sanity? For example, why further complicate an already complex term like poetics—which ten out of ten people are fuzzy about anyway—by adding an accursed Aitch?
JR:
Quinta, my dear friend, life complicates us. Whether we like it or not. There's no turning away from that if one is to live in relationship with the circumstances of real life.
QS:
Wait a minute! I must stop you there. I've noticed that you use the word real with abandon. I must say I find this highly suspect. What isn't real? Or, to put it another way, what does the adjective real add when you speak of "real life"? Remember how Kant discounted St. Anselm's proof of the existence of God? He showed that "real" is not an attribute. You can logically prove that a being "than which nothing greater can be conceived" can be conceived, but you can't prove that it's real. Real adds no content to a description.
JR:
I've wondered about this myself. Isn't real simply adding emphasis, like underscoring or italics, or an irritating redundancy? But aren't terms like naturalism, realism, everyday life always historical in import? They come up at times when people are trying to revise old
QS:Interestingly, minimalist work—which is pared down in conceptually strategic ways—has a very complex aesthetic relation to everyday life.
JR:
Yes! But the whole methodological landscape has been changing since the beginning of the twentieth century with the introduction of the constituting observer. Sciences of complexity have altered our sense of the "essential" simplicity and rationality of all things. There is still pattern, but it's in dynamic interaction with an enormous field of unpredictable elements. Chaos theory has brought turbulence and chance into the foreground of how we understand the conditions in which we actually live. I suppose that's what it comes down to for me, real means connected with everyday life as we experience it. This is why I've always thought John Dewey's Art as Experience is the heart of his entire philosophy—of his ethics, politics, and pedagogy.
QS:But what does all that necessarily have to do with art?
JR:
Certain kinds of art help us to live with nourishment and pleasure in the real world, connect us with it in ways nothing else can, by shifting our attention to formally framed material conditions in ingenious ways. I'm thinking now not only of minimalism but of what Duchamp and Cage taught us about the link between art and the nature of attention. This relates to Dewey's argument about the urgency of connecting with our sensory environment if we—the species so prone to abstraction and estrangement—are to avoid a kind of living death. Just as importantly, the word real took on further meaning for my working poethics when I discovered D.W. Winnicott's useful distinction between fantasy and imagination. Winnicott played a major role in psychoanalysis with his contributions to object relations theory, but his most important contribution from the point of view of aesthetics is his theory of play.[2] He argues, and shows in case studies
QS:Let's return to poetics.
JR:When did we leave?
QS:
Well, I'm not as sure of all this as you are. Life may necessarily complicate us, but it doesn't follow that the inverse proposition is the case—that we should complicate life. Again, I ask you, why the accursed "Aitch"?
JR:
A poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you're to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of art's significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world. That as is not a simile; it's an ethos. Hence the h. What I'm working on is quite explicitly a poethics of a complex realism.[3] I suppose also that I want to suggest a "po"-ethos to replace the enervating "post"-ethos we're stalled in at the moment. With the situation we find ourselves in—unprecedented, accelerating complexity, more and more porous borders—neither art nor theory can afford to remove itself from the new configurations of the contemporary.
QS:You mean you think we're not at the end of history and art and the history of art and the art of history after all?
JR:
Not only are we not at the end of history or art, except as perversely defined to end rather than undergo paradigmatic changes, but we're at a threshold of untold possibilities. What thinkers like
QS:
You've pointed out elsewhere that it was said of Galileo that he wasn't doing science, of Mandelbrot that he wasn't a mathematician, of Wittgenstein that he wasn't a philosopher, of Joyce that he wasn't a novelist, of Gertrude Stein that she wasn't a poet, of Duchamp that he wasn't an artist, of John Cage that he wasn't composing music.
JR:
Yes, what they have in common is that they redefined the boundaries of their disciplines in relation to experiences that lay outside generic definitions. What we have instead of ends is exciting new ways of continuing, new ways of conceiving the relation between the discipline and the extradisciplinary experience, new recognitions of the degree to which these projects are complicated by their positions in multiply intersecting and overlapping sociopolitical and cultural constellations. We know (or perhaps just temporarily think) that there are no universally and absolutely legitimate uberviews. Without that illusion, without the authority of what we've called metanarratives, we can only compose our projects as I think we actually always have: in relation to the contingencies of cultural climates and microclimates. This doesn't mean our projects are no longer informed by history. They're not vacant of meaning because we've admitted their historical contingency. If anything they're more meaningful in navigating a sense of the contemporary under principles of uncertainty, incompleteness, turbulent complexity. I want to say to artists, and particularly poets, Resist pressures to regress, deny, escape, transcend. Pop culture and religion do that well enough on their own. If we're going to continue to make
QS:Do I detect a soapbox somewhere in the room? "Mess" … as in Beckett's "The form must let the mess in"?
JR:
Yes, or in John Cage's version, Let the mess shine in! I'm glad that you recognize mess as a key technical term! There's also Gertrude Stein's sense of the writer making her way through the mess of the contemporary. Of necessity never entirely knowing what she's doing because to write out of her own time she must work with material that is not yet formed into recognizable patterns. Unlike the classics, the contemporary has not yet been classified. She, like Picasso, uses the word ugliness as well as mess. Picasso said, Anything new is ugly. This is always a by-product of a truly experimental aesthetic, to move into unaestheticized territory. Definitions of the beautiful are tied to previous forms. The end of beauty has been lamented, too, of late. Have you seen all those articles in the New York Times about composers who are finally restoring beauty to music after the Shönbergian-Cagean debacle? What this means is they are mastering mechanics of stimulus-response similar to those of pop and mass cultures, rolling out tried-and-true methods of eliciting "Ah, how beautiful!" from the audience. In music this means things like sensitive adagios ripening toward thundering crescendos, etc. I and some others think of the music of John Cage as beautiful, think of much of the poetry associated with the label "Language" as beautiful. But this sense of beauty draws on a very different value context—a different poethics, if you will—from the music of Brahms or the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson. Not to deny the beauty in all that. Of course it's beautiful.
QS:
Most people think Cage and so-called (or not) Language poets have really made a mess of things, in the negative sense of mess.
JR:
And why is that? It's because the work is jarringly, disarmingly, disorientingly unfamiliar. Like most of the art and science characteristic of the twentieth century—that could only be a product of the twentieth century—it has defamiliarized certain ways of seeing reality while offering others. Theories of "defamiliarization" are very familiar at this point. What is not so well understood is how the positive material of avantgarde or innovative or new (choose the term that offends you least) art remains invisible to the person whose primary experience is persistently that of the absence of the familiar rather than the presence of the new.
JR:
It is absolutely necessary to be certain of certain things—that 1+1 = 2, that a black hole won't emerge out of the dusty corner of this room. To import certainty to other areas of life requires varying degrees of denial and/or oversimplification. Some of that is necessary too. But if your question is, how can we notice and make new patterns that meaningfully, pleasurably connect us to the exigencies of life in this complicated, often frightening, and not so brave new world?, the project requires all kinds of things: tolerance for ambiguity; willingness to move forward with uncertainty; willing suspension of both belief and disbelief; willingness to wade purposefully, playfully out into the mess.
QS:Sounds unsettling, sounds downright icky.
JR:
Well yes. It is that, particularly if by "icky" you mean anxiety laden. Working in the noise of the mess, the cacophony of intersecting cultures, polylingualisms, competing sociopolitical valences and vectors, the omnipresent electronic intimacy with global intentions, needs, desires we don't understand—the relentlessly unintelligible. All this brings on—to ennoble it a bit—something like Kierkegaardian dread. But to some degree or another this is the work of living in our world that we are all doing anyway whether we like it or not. It's the raison d'être for that whole category of endeavors we call "work," isn't it? Without the action of time, without change, without thermodynamics and entropy and chaos, work wouldn't be necessary. We'd be smiling serenely in homeostasis.
QS:
I'm not sure this generic endorsement of work gets us very far. Work, after all, takes place in many ways—repairs to existing forms, restoration, conservation, replication, as well as analysis, critical evaluation, modification, invention. It's not all based on noticing obsolescence and creating new forms.
JR:
You're right. Yes, there are many examples of this range in poetry. One could—to identify only the extremes—think of "New Formalists" as conservators, "Language Poets" as inventors. The former risk being called irrelevant fuddy-duddies; the latter, destroyers of all that is true poetry. I'll make no secret of it—it's the inventors who interest me most, those in the past as well as the present. Not only in the arts, but in every discipline. They give us the energy to be present despite the frightening aspects of the mess. They give us the chance to experience the grace of memory in motion.
Sounds brave, but is it really "new"? This is a perennially contested idea and for good reason. Can there really be invention or are we always just tweaking what already exists?
JR:
Of course new never means ex nihilo. It means ex perturbatio, ex confusio rerum—or, in the vernacular of this room, medias mess. Out of the teeming multiplicity comes a new sense of pattern. And that pattern, if it's to be useful, hasn't bypassed uncertainty and unintelligibility.
QS:
This brings to mind Italo Calvino. He loved Carlo Emilio Gadda's novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana[4]I think for reasons similar to what you're talking about. Do you remember his Norton lectures—published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium? He admired Gadda for writing that uses "multiplicity" as a way of knowing the world.
JR:What I like so much about Calvino is that he makes it clear that giving pleasure, entertainment, is as high a priority as any other.
QS:Yes, the lectures are entirely about the characteristics of novels he takes pleasure in.
JR:
Pleasure, yes, but I want also to think for a moment about entertainment. In our world, where we are suddenly discovering that we all have "Attention Deficit Disorder," ADDition is supposed to replace the "higher" mathematics of multiplication. The expression "entertainment value" is pervasively used to justify simplistic fare in all the media. The assumption is that a homogeneous mass audience wants first and foremost to be entertained. Well of course we do. But what does that really mean? The word entertain means to hold the attention. There's no question that this must be the first principle of any work that's to have impact. The question is how attention is held, how our assumptions about "attention spans" change and why, how attention is trained by the culture. Our informal and institutionalized cultural pedagogies shape—quantitatively and qualitatively—our geometries of attention.
QS:Well to some extent, but we also know at this point that people really do have different intelligences.
JR:
Differences in learning styles and preferences need to be respected. But I think I'm asking another question: are we systematically discouraged from engaging in sustained projects that can give us the cumulative pleasures of a meaningful challenge as well as the capacity for effective
QS:
So you want to posit imagination as a function of the active intelligence that to a significant extent shapes its own world rather than absorbing prefabrications.
JR:
Exactly. If we're transfixed by gimmicks that prey on our tendency to sink to the occasion of fantasy's innocuous pleasures, this is not so much attention as capitulation. But this passivity has been naturalized by our consumer ethos. It's thought to be natural to want to sleep one's way through life. I don't think it's "natural" at all to scratch only the media-induced itch, to become flaccid and twitchily reactive.
QS:
You seem to be condemning the entertainment value of mass culture entirely. I'm not sure I disagree, but is fantasy life always so sleazy? You make it sound like a virtually vegetative, masturbatory state!
JR:I couldn't have put it better!
QS:
Can't fantasy play a role in conceiving new patterns? The child psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim placed enormous value on daydreaming—another name for fantasy—in transitional spaces like hallways and secret hideouts so that children would have imaginative space to call their own. He felt this is where artistic ability was nourished.
JR:
I'll refrain from an ad hominem attack on Bettelheim, whom I once read with great interest, but I do think his conflation of fantasy and imagination comes straight out of the worst elisions of the German romantic tradition. His Uses of Enchantment makes important points about stories as previews of life's brutalities without critiquing the way in which the Grimm fairy tale can render that brutality oddly acceptable. Fantasy turns its gaze inward, backward, toward the autoerogenous zones. It's consolation or titillation cordoned off from "real" implications. This has been its chief defense in relation to pornography for instance—that it has no implications for "real life" and is therefore harmless. But that it lacks "real" implications doesn't prevent real consequences. The real fills the vacuum in grotesque
QS:That's an alarmingly strong statement!
JR:Yes it is. It alarms me too.
QS:You sound too certain about the cultural context of the Nazi holocaust, of causal connections in what was, if nothing else, a vastly overdetermined event.
JR:
No, you're right, of course. It was overdetermined. It was a horrendous collision of elements—some with a contemporary contingency that had very little to do with long-standing cultural traditions, some that had a lot to do with them, for example, with pedagogical traditions of compliance as well as the things I mentioned earlier. No, I'm not as certain as I sound. It's something I, like many others, continually puzzle over because it's a paradigmatic conundrum of relations between culture and terror.
QS:
But how do you use thoughts like these in relation to contemporary thought and art without beginning to think of moralistic opprobrium—thou shall not write fairy tales!
JR:
No, you can't do that. That kind of authoritarian certainty comes from thinking in terms of easily identifiable, isolatable, cause-effect sequences: the mechanics of billiard ball a hits billiard ball b causing situation c. I would rather think in terms of more complex environmental models, of atmospheres or climates teeming with variables of circumstance, habit, opinion, value.… This is actually a meteorological model that brings one to consider the broad cultural ethos rather than moral isolates. So what does one do in the turbulent weather of contemporary societies, global cultures? What does one do if one hopes to help in some way?
JR:
Yes. The sky darkens. What can you do but take cover? Not even the pathetic fallacy to call on. There's no direct link between the unfolding of the storm and what you want to happen next in the story of your life. Things are out of control.
QS:OK, cut to the cultural storm.
JR:
There's been a continuum from the popular culture of the early part of the twentieth century to the mass culture of today that has become increasingly fantasy bound, increasingly dependent on the fantasy logics of a consumer-centered me-ethos. You know as well as I do that to make something that disturbs fantasy logic is to ensure that it won't sell. Whether or not something sells is the sole criterion of value throughout most of our society. In a sales-driven faux high culture, novels are more and more written by committee. Agents and editors advise the author on how to shape the book to please the affluent zip codes where the bookstore chains thrive. What little poetry gets reviewed is relentlessly self-obsessed narrative snippets placed between wide margins. A recent review praised a poet's "powerful," "bitter" memories of her father as "perfectly accessible." No challenge here to the fantasy that it's a small world after all.
QS:Do I detect a strain of bitterness in your feelings about this?
JR:I hope not. Actually, I really think not, as Descartes said just before he disappeared. Willful simplemindedness is no fun. Ah, yes/no, no bitterness there.
QS:
Let's get back to the "prison house of culture." The power differential right now between economic "bottom-line" motivations and the few voices articulating alternative values seems overwhelming. I don't mean to be crass, but with the picture you're presenting of the state of our culture—and of course it's all globally interconnected, this consumer-driven ethos—how can it possibly help in any way at all to make the subtle lettristic gesture of thickening poetics with an h?
JR:
Ah, glad you asked! This revives my spirits. I like the way you put it—"thickening poetics with an h." Precisely! As you know, I love and often cite John Cage's essay "History of Experimental Music in the United States." I love it because it directly links aesthetic questions with an ethos of a historical need for experiment. Cage talks about choosing to do not just any experiment but what one thinks needs to
QS:
"Espoused." Peculiar word, espoused. But, yes, I see the relevance to what you've been saying about possibilities inherent in complexity. However, doesn't this beg the question of what is needed? How can one even think in such terms in the midst of a tidal wave?
JR:
And not just one tidal wave: tidal waves of market-driven goods, tidal waves of information, tidal waves of intercultural noise. What we are talking about is utter chaos. And that's what can give us an inkling of orientation. Every chaotic system is a dynamic, rather fragile equilibrium of order and disorder, pattern and unpredictable detail, all extremely sensitive to initial conditions, to any change of any variable. To enter an h into this turbulent system is to change an initial condition in albeit a cultural microclimate. But the fragile contingency of the larger pattern means that even such a small change could have an increasing effect.
QS:The butterfly effect seems too gossamer to pin one's hopes on.
JR:
Yes it does, doesn't it. And yet, the effect can be quite real. We know this from history. The example that's always trotted out is the assassination of the archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo—the event whose effects were magnified by other coincidental events into the first great European war. One could say, Well if old Ferdi hadn't gotten his, something else would have done it; and of course that's probably true. It's precisely the point that anything might have done it and that there was no way to predict the outcome.
QS:
Your example also implies that one can't know whether the effect, if it does indeed lead to major changes, will be positive or negative. Whoever shot Ferdinand may well have thought he was doing something for the greater good.
JR:
True, your overall logic is sound, but there's something about the ethos of the act itself, in that case the act of murder, that might lead one to feel it would be unlikely to have a positive effect. An equally passionate act that embodied respect for life, a connectedness to the larger social fabric, might have fared differently. In fact, to return to
QS:
Hmm. They also come out of the thick plots of terrorist groups. But then there's the question of ethos. Let's get back to literature, the proper domain of thickened plots. In fact let's get back to Calvino. I'm thinking about his vision of what he calls the possibility of a "hypernovel." He's advocating a literature that's not an idealization but a method of knowing the complex, messy world imaginatively. And what's interesting is how commodius that literature can be. His exemplar, Gadda, like James Joyce, can use anything and everything, so to speak, given what Calvino refers to as his "complicated epistemology."
JR:
Yes, let's look at the text: "Gadda developed a style to match his complicated epistemology, in that it superimposes various levels of language, high and low, and uses the most varied vocabulary.… Gadda throws the whole of himself onto the page he is writing, with all his anxieties and obsessions, so that often the outline is lost while the details proliferate and fill up the whole picture. What is supposed to be a detective novel is left without a solution."[6] This, by the way, also happens to Gertrude Stein in her only attempt at a detective novel. Her obsession with language wins out over the trajectory of the detective genre in Blood on the Dining Room Floor.[7] To this reader's delight!
QS:Of course!
JR:
Of course. In fact, the generic detective fiction or sci-fi novel or thriller is a closed system, a fantasy world, designed to be incommunicado with the immense world we move through in everyday life. Listen to this—detective fiction could never do this: "In one of Gadda's novels, the least thing is seen as the center of a network of relationships … multiplying the details so that the descriptions and digressions become infinite." Ah, the scalar detail of a fractal poetics! "Whatever the starting point, the matter in hand spreads out and out encompassing ever vaster horizons, and if it were permitted to go on further and further in every direction it would end by embracing the entire universe."[8]
QS:And the magnification—your butterfly effect.
JR:
Thickened with an ethos of valuing the random confluences in everyday life. Notice how Calvino sees Gadda effecting this complexity, this outward trajectory. The novel is, after all, like poetry, made of language. The making of language (poesis) into a complex form that has
QS:This reminds me of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's notion of "thick description."
JR:
Yes, very thick description. So thick it moves beyond description as an attempt to bring forms of extratextual reality (odd juxtapositions, cross purposes, etc.) into textual reality. Which is what Geertz is fascinated by as an ethnographer, how to "be there" in a text, how to create a "world in a text." In the extreme, which in art is always better than the mean, it becomes a question of language that is itself a form of life in the Wittgensteinian sense, a textual form of life informed by the extratextual contexts in which it lives, and which it changes. Calvino quotes Gadda as saying—in line with quantum physics—"To know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality."[10]
QS:Distort has negative overtones. It feels more violent than the effect of the observer in quantum physics.
JR:
Oh I don't know. Think of Schrödinger's poor cat, equally dead and alive in the box of his thought-experiment. With all the violence around us one could become too frightened to embark at all. It's necessary to find ways to navigate the turbulence, to practice the art of staying in motion in a world that is always threatening to stun us into stasis. Imagination can rise to an occasion. It can use the surface tension of the tidal wave rather than being pulled into the undertow. This is what makes life exhilarating.
QS:Sounds wet and romantic to me!
JR:
Ow, that stings! No! Not romantic! Well, all right, I admit to it, just a bit, because what I'm talking about involves passion. But there's
QS:So the idea is to rise to the occasion, not above it.
JR:
Connect with it and create textual realities with their own "structural integrities"—to use a Bucky Fuller term—as viable forms of life with more resonance than reference. This is what the best poetry can make happen on the page. To rise above the occasion is to miss it. The occasion in today's world is an enormous, intricate entanglement of people and events. Calvino was excited by the possibilities of a "hypernovel" because it doesn't say "things are complex" but is itself a complex system that embodies a method of knowing how to operate in that "impossible" situation, how to take oneself beyond one self's single-point perspective.
QS:
Calvino ends his essay—con brio—on just that note: "Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic" (124).
JR:Ah, I love "to plastic." This is not—with its gutters and cement— to be mistaken for a pastoral vision.
QS:
Then he invokes Ovid, whom I know has been important to you. "Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified himself with that nature common to each and every thing?" (124). Lovely, isn't it?
JR:
Yes, it speaks to the arts that restore lost continuities between us and the rest of the world. And one can argue that the reason art has always been so critical to our species is that we are in constant need of reconnecting our senses to the sensible world. But art is also full of disjunctions, deliberate disharmonies. To speak of poethics is to fore-ground this whole range of reassurances and dissonances, as values
QS:O.K., I have to say this. I'm afraid I'm still not convinced that"poetics" without the h won't do the very same job.
JR:
Thank you for your candor. Let me come at this from a different direction. Poetics without an h has primarily to do with questions of style. Style is the manner in which your experience has understood, assimilated, imprinted you. How it has transformed you in its Transyl-vanian cultural laboratories, focusing, even magnifying, the currents that have fed your intellectual energy, passing them on "stepped up,"reenergized, but not swerving them into unforeseen collisions that produce new possibilities, that might even blow out a few old fuses. At this point, preswerve, but feeling a distinct surge of power, you exclaim, Ah, I've found myself as a writer! Actually your poetics has you in its grip.
QS:This brings to mind something that Sartre said—that without our intervention, the language just goes on speaking itself. I think Sartre said that.
JR:
Something like that. But, yes, that's it. You are being led; you cannot breathe fully. You are in its grip. The grip of what you know you should do. Your style is identified; it has become your obligation to the culture. You are doomed to execute it and then to reenact the fatalism of that execution over and over again. The reward is that no one will dispute that you are a poet. Your poethical work begins when you no longer wish to shape materials (words, visual elements, sounds) into legitimate progeny of your own poetics. When you are released from filling in the delimiting forms. This swerve, of course, comes about only as the result of a wrenching crisis. I don't mean to be dramatic, but you might not survive it. At least, not as a poet. You may at this point pick up some other line of work. If you persist, the patterns in your work may become more flexible, permeable, conversational, exploratory. This is a radical shift. It will change your sense of the relation of your language to "the mess"—the world beyond the page, everyday life and death. And this will in turn affect the world of the page—the formal intersections of historical and momentary fragments, formal intersections of space-time with linguistic forms of life, recovery and loss, silence and art. I think Francis Ponge was getting at something like this when he wrote in Pour un Malherbe, "In order for a text to expect in any way to render an account of reality of the concrete world (or the spiritual one), it must first attain reality in its own
QS:There's a widespread feeling that unintelligibility has no place in poetry, that it makes the work inaccessible in flagrant avant-disregard for its audience.
JR:
I like that, "avant-disregard." It's a good joke because it accurately reflects a common opinion. But it's not true. The language of one's contemporary moment is a complex barometer of all sorts of crosscurrents that are affecting us, that we are sensing, that fill us with energy and breath, anxiety and terror, but that we cannot yet bring into discernible form. I once heard a scientist who loves poetry say that the language of science and the language of poetry have in common that they are both natural languages under stress. The complexity of the world, in which language lives and develops and evolves, forms every word into a chord conveying many many things at once—some of them contradictory. Those chords strike us on many levels—sensual, intuitive, intellectual. And there's so much that we experience in the silence before, during, after, even within words. The poet must work with all of that. It's as unknown and challenging as exploring any wilderness or frontier.
QS:We are getting farther and farther from Aristotle's Poetics.
JR:
Oh, you noticed! Yes, Aristotle, who has cast the most enduring shadow over the course of academic poetics, quite artificially divided everything up into what he took to be thoroughly comprehensible dis-ciplines—theory, practice, ethics, politics, poetry. Poethical poets, whether or not they have themselves used the h, enact the complex dynamics that crisscross through these boundaries. The model is no longer one of city- or nation-states of knowledge, each with separate allegiances and consequences, testy about property rights and ownership, but instead the more global patterns of ecology, environmentalism, biorealism, the complex modelings of the nonlinear sciences, chaos theory. You can see this now with more and more poets using multiple languages in their work—not as quotation but as lively intersection, conversation.
QS:
OK, I confess I'm confused. One's poetics must inevitably be formed by one's personal experience—by the strange and problematic
JR:
Yes, "understandards," one might awkwardly say. The form that is visible as form at any given cultural moment is what has already been assimilated into the academy. So the teaching in graduate programs of those "great innovators" of the past goes on almost entirely in an atmosphere of invisible contemporaries. And the implicit fallacy that is transmitted, say to the MFA student in "creative writing," is that if you are going to succeed in the cautious world of poetry prizes and establishment publication and professional advancement, your work must closely resemble a legitimated model. In the poetry of aboutness the only thing that need change is what it's about: the marvels of my sensitive, free associative response to seeing the first flower of spring. The models in most writing practice courses, in interesting contrast to those in scientific practice, rarely include the innovators. But even when they are included, the modeling paradigm is off base. Innovative poetry is most instructive to the writer, not as product but in its manner of operation. Every "great" innovator was acutely aware of changing circumstances and forms of her or his own times and had to devise a distinctive writing procedure to accommodate them. It's in this sense that authentically innovative work is consciously poethical. It vitally engages with the forms of life that create its contemporary context—the sciences, the arts, the politics, the sounds and textures of everyday life, the urgent questions and disruptions of the times. It's these factors that make it different from earlier work and for a time unrecognizable—to all but a few—as significant extension or transgression of existing genres. For the work to become poethical it seems it must risk a period of invisibility, unintelligibility. This happened with Stein, Joyce, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Cage. It's happening as we speak to some of our most brilliant contemporary poets. For a poethical development to occur, I think the language—the aural and visual forms, the grammar, the vocabulary—must precisely escape, in a radical way, the control of the poet. It must fly from the poet, like Zeno's arrow, in an imperiled, imperiling trajectory subject to cultural weather, chance, vagaries of all kinds beyond the poet's intentionality, out of zones of current intelligibility.
QS:Like Zeno's arrow! This might sound rather daring except that Zeno's arrow didn't move. It remained motionless in the air.
Quite right! Until new language—a new philosophy, a new mathematics—came along to release it from false arrest. Chaos theory, fractal geometry, helps now to release Stein's or Cage's work into the culture. In fact at any given historical moment all of Zeno's laws against motion may be relevant to the reactions of academies and critical establishments. It takes a major conceptual shift—the very one that the art itself may be previewing. It seems to happen more easily in the visual arts. The figure-ground shift that we see in impressionist studies of the refraction of light into color, the figure-ground shift in the study of light in quantum physics—these become received by cultural eye and brain in ways less problematic than Joyce's foregrounding of linguistic refractions in Finnegans Wake. I wonder why.
QS:
I don't know, but I think that's true. For instance, the shift that occurred in the art critical world for Duchamp's "readymades" to become art prepares the way for Duchamp's and Cage's belief that the work of art is completed by the viewer. For the viewer to make this contribution to the meaning of the work, the culture must have already gone partway.
JR:
Yes, back to Zeno. The problem in one of the paradoxes is how that poor stalled athlete is trying to get from one side of the stadium to the other, but must first go halfway, and half of that, and half of that … and so on in infinite regress. In the contemporary aesthetic environment that problem need never arise. The poet never has to go the whole way, doesn't have to complete the transit of meaning all alone—
QS:Is met partway by the reader.
JR:
In fact the artist shouldn't attempt to go the whole distance. As many have said, one way or another, the work should not explain but show itself. There's nothing more stimulating than a formally evident invitation to the reader to realize the work for her- or himself. There's always at least a dual perspective, that of poet and reader, two very different starting points of equal importance, mediated by worlds of experience in between—the vast diffusion and noise of the whole culture.
QS:
Gregory Bateson said in Steps to an Ecology of Mind,"All that is not information, not redundancy, not form and not restraints—is noise, the only possible source of new patterns."[12]
JR:
It's the infinite messiness of that noise that gives each of us the chance to invent our own life patterns. New poetries are filled with noise, with surface indeterminacy. The moving principle of reading poetry
QS:Not an argument? Of course not. Who's saying it is!?
JR:
Well there's a long-standing, very entrenched aesthetic of persuasion, isn't there? In which the reader must be made to feel what the author felt, must be convinced of the author's omniscient perspective, must come to believe in the characters and the point (singular) of view—at least within the microcosm of the work—and be edified and inspired (filled with the author's breath) by it. The reader's activity is not one of participatory invention but of figuring out. Figuring out what the author as master creator means. One of my students recently said, Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. This applies to the lyric fictions of the I-poem as much as the Ichroman. It all has to make internally consistent, persuasive sense.
QS:Oh yes, I recall that you wrote somewhere that the ubiquitous three- or four- or five-stanza lyric poem mimics those exemplar arguments in modal logic. Final epiphany equals logical conclusion.
JR:
Both are guiding the mind toward an outburst of certitude—cognitive and/or emotional. And, of course, I'm speaking of an aesthetic whose guiding principle remains verisimilitude, what I think of as the "unnatural realisms." They have nothing at all to do with the complexities, the multiple logics of nature, of everyday experience; they are instead highly stylized, simple, and elegant conventions of "realism" or lyric "truth." Everything depends on the audience's suspension of disbelief—believe me, there's a lot to suspend!—coupled with a rhetoric of persuasion. Nature, the natural, is caricatured and called lifelike. There's no attempt to imitate nature in her manner of operation. The actual model is the rhetorician in his manner of conviction. Aristotle wasn't in a position to know this, so he separated the Rhetoric and the Poetics into two books, even though the position of the tragic spectator is clearly the same in both instances.
QS:Surely you jest!
JR:
Surely not! Not at all. The terms of the Rhetoric—ethos, logos, pathos—are engaged in the same asymmetrical relation between writer and reader, targeting the same imaginative coefficient in the audience as verisimilitude, the major term of the Poetics. Both want to cognitively convince the audience while manipulating their emotions.
JR:Yes.
QS:"Yes"? Is that it?
JR:
Well, I think about the forms of life the artist brings into the work and then the completion of the artist's part of the work as resulting in a kind of "score" for the reader or viewer. I wonder about the poethics of the kind of realization it invites. These kinds of thoughts, it seems to me, lead to the possibility of a contextual criticism based on poethical analysis, rather than judgment.
QS:What would that look like?
JR:
Glad you asked. I just happen to have with me a document that can be read into the record. It came about in the course of an epistolary conversation with a young poet who was, in a series of quasi manifestos, defending the continuing relevance of older forms like the sonnet and villanelle against what he took to be a devaluing of them by certain Language poets. This was to my mind a poethical matter. I wrote this:
The term "Poethics," as I see it, has two working uses:
- Analytic: Every form, old or new, has its poethical matrices and consequences. We can ask—after or while locating our questions within a value context—What are they? Are they useful to us? (Whichever "us" is inquiring: "world us" or I and my friends who are charting a working poethics.) Do they seem to be constructive or destructive given the articulation of our value context?
- Normative: as a descriptive term denoting what one takes to be the best uses of a positively constructive imagination in relation to contemporary conditions as they intersect with history.
- All of the above is most importantly not about manifestos but about investigating the construction of specific texts. The ways in which language works can be compared among texts. The extent to which the analysis is comparative will, I think, determine the scope of its relevance. Manifestos are energizing because they're not fair. They're a call to action, not mindful exploration. In the rush to battle, the soldier doesn't question the ethical basis of the war. The manifesto is a call to arms whose form of life is to end conversation, not continue it. It festers in all of us who are passionate about what we are doing and it's difficult to redirect that passion into a useful form of exploration cum conversation, but I think we need to try.
Here endeth reply to young poet.
JR:
I'm not sure I can do that. Although I sometimes know what I think I'm trying to do, I also know my perspective has a lot to do with what helps me continue on. Whether in, say, using language in new ways we change the grammar of the way we are together, I suppose Ifeel, as Cage put it, I don't know, but I can try. That's the force of the poethical wager.
QS:That's how this conversation came about in the first place. We were going to talk about your so-called poethical wager. How did that notion come to you? Was it from Cage?
JR:
The word poethics is related to Cage, to how I've been understanding his aesthetic framework for sometime. I invented this term in the late 1980s to characterize his aesthetic of making art that models how we want to live. It was used as the topic for a panel at a 1992 symposium on Cage at Stanford. But the idea of the poethical "wager" is something that came to me during an "experimental vegetarian barbecue" at my house with the poets Tina Darragh and Peter Inman. The conversation was, in part, about how we could choose to go on working in the culturally isolated field of experimental poetry when the whole world seemed to be going to hell all around us. All three of us have had activist backgrounds—civil rights, antiwar. Peter is currently a labor negotiator for his union at the Library of Congress. So the question arises, given the troubles of our society in the world right now, shouldn't we be devoting ourselves entirely to direct social action rather than the "luxury" of poetry? I think this is an intermittent question for many of us, and it's—I find it—a bracing one.
QS:Well, how did you answer it?
JR:
I can't speak for Peter and Tina, of course, but my answer is poethical and certainly a form of "we don't know, but we can try." My idea, which may be a patent rationalization, is that the world situation is so complexly interrelational from weather to neural networks to all forms of culture, there are so many variables, that large-scale or even modestly scaled predictive accuracy is impossible. Certainly when you get down to the level of individual agency, the effects of any one person's actions or work, particularly from the partial and myopic perspective of that individual herself, are quite mysterious. This means, I think, that each person has to make decisions based on prescription rather than prediction. This is a common distinction in the field of
QS:Such considerations lead to accusations of the exclusivity and self-indulgence of the avant-garde.
JR:
Exactly. So, even given that one doesn't choose to have such a small audience, how does one reply to that possibility with regard to one's own work? It strikes me that since the work of any generation is adding to the initial conditions of generations to come, one obviously tries to add positive, even constructive, initial conditions. And, of course, one isn't in it alone. I feel the work I do is part of a cluster of aesthetic projects that involves many other artists as well.
QS:So there are many butterflies!
JR:
Yes, we're all in effect choosing to be part of one family or genus of Lepidopteron or another—a highly decorative, lightweight species that might seem almost like a biological whim, but of course, we know it has a very active place in nature. And that any individual, for reasons entirely unknown qua qua qua, could shift some ecological pattern—in a way noticeable or not to us, the "observant species." In other words, all one can do is take what is actually, in these terms, a very realistic, if improbable, chance that one's contribution might be useful. So that's it, the long and the short of it—my view of progressive action within a paradigm of chaos. I was explaining this to Peter and Tina, and Peter said, that sounds sort of like Pascal's wager. I hadn't thought of it that way, but of course he's right. I find it an interesting comparison. Pascal was himself trying to figure out how to proceed in the midst of potentially crippling uncertainty. And his thinking was naturally couched in terms of his involvement with probability theory—tossing the binary God coin for a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails. Now we can envision many more variables and possibilities. Although I admit I always thought Pascal's wager some-what cynical, I've loved the spirit of, You must wager. This is not voluntary; you are embarked. I think that precisely describes our condition. Each era works with its own scientific and mathematical models, its own understanding of the nature of things. We now have
QS:What a good idea!
JR:Yes, enough of this. Let's go for a walk.