Poetry, Strangeness and Ideology

The living core of poetry is the intense strangeness of canonical experience (Bloom) in which a slit is made in the umbrella of civilization (Lawrence). It is this strangeness, this rending of the veil of ideology that makes poetry intrinsically political.

An ideology of canonical strangeness is a contradiction in terms. Individual poetic movements, poetic techniques, poetic forms can be ideological, but poetry as such is intrinsically opposed to ideology.

Communion with nature, experiential profundity, sublime intensity, romantic passion - these elements of romanticism become ideological at the point at which they cease to be strange. Likewise with extreme 'formal' innovation - which always also means, or ought to mean, innovation of experience - e.g. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, objectivism, etc.

The definition of ideology assumed here, like all definitions of ideology, is a partisan one.

Modernism: a Historical Schema

1. German Romanticism = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical anti-modernism

2. Rimbaud, Baudelaire = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical modernism.

3. Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens... = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical ???

Terrence Malick The Tree of Life

High-tech Hollywood meets high art: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is historically significant for being the first film to combine the most recent high-budget special effects with formal innovation and the most serious artistic ambition. In terms of formal innovation, it is not the high-quality special effects in themselves that are most interesting (the fusion of astronomical imagery with abstract representations of the divine is almost a sci-fi staple) but the fact that they form part of a disjunctive structure that departs from Hollywood's narrative conventions. Not that the film eschews narrative entirely - indeed I would suggest that it's most important formal innovation is precisely the way it combines standard narrative techniques (enabling us to enter the protagonist's Texas childhood with genuine emotion) with genuinely poetic, 'avant-garde' juxtapositions.

One juxtaposition in particular dominates the film: images of deep space and deep geological time side by side with a narrative of human loss. The epigram from Job with which the film begins (together with certain whispered voiceovers, and the sermon that occurs within the narrative) clearly suggests that we interpret this juxtaposition as an attempt to evoke the strangeness and at times cruel incomprehensibility of God through the strangeness and incomprehensibility of His creation. Understood in this way, the attempt may be judged successful; on the other hand, a more radical film might have refrained from overdetermining this interpretation and instead allowed the images and narrative to speak for themselves, thereby secularizing the strong Christian metaphysics.

However, the film's biggest failure is its lack of irony. It is not so much that great works of art must be ironic (though many are), but that a film so self-consciously sincere in pressing high-tech Hollywood techniques into the service of high art ought to have been more conscious of the meaning of such a strategy. Like the gleaming monuments to corporate America in which the protagonist moves (and of which he, and Malick himself, is clearly critical), The Tree of Life cannot help but appear as a slick, high-definition monument to Hollywood's big-budget culture industry (which it implicitly affirms by its mode of production, its use of special effects and its star Hollywood actors). Had this theme been raised and explored within the film, it might have been a great work of art (following on from my previous suggestion about secularizing the Christian metaphysics, one might imagine a similar film in which Hollywood special effects were themselves presented as a successor to religious art in a non-religious age). As it is, however, the film appears ignorant of its own preconditions and thus to some extent both pretentious and naive.

Benjamin, Baudelaire and a Dilemma of Contemporary Aesthetics.

Contemporary artistic practice can seem to face the dilemma of a choice between an antiquated aesthetic of meditative contemplation (postmodernism as neo-romanticism) and a fruitless skeptical fragmentation (postmodernism as intensification of modernism). In Walter Benjamin's terms, a purely contemplative aesthetic is antiquated because it aims at an experience of aura that no longer has a place in post-industrial capitalism, while a skeptical aesthetic is fruitless because it merely reflects this loss of aura.

One way to escape this dilemma is suggested by Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire. For while, for Benjamin, "the disintegration of the aura makes itself felt in [Baudelaire's] lyric poetry", it does so in such a way that the lived experience (Erlebnis) of this loss, is "given the weight" of auratic experience (Erfahrung). Unlike, say, Eliot's 'the Wasteland', in which the loss of aura is experienced only in the mode of skeptical fragmentation, Baudelaire's experience of loss (both as nostalgia - 'ideal' - and pessimistic clarity - 'spleen') attains metrical, thematic and thereby contemplative coherence.

Heidegger on Poetry and Thinking

Poetry and thinking meet each other in one and the same only when, and as long as, they remain distinctly in the distinctness of their nature. (Heidegger, '...poetically man dwells...')

The profundity of Heidegger's thinking about poetry (or 'poetic thinking' as Heidegger's 'Dichten' can also be translated) lies in his sensitivity to the possibility that the essence of poetry might simply be inaccessible to thinking - even postmetaphysical or meditative thinking, i.e. 'Denken'. Heidegger recognizes that 'Dichten', as the spiritual activity or thoughtful journey of the poet might be such that it can only be fully understood 'from the inside', in the same sort of way that swimming can only be fully understood by someone who has actually learned to swim. If this is true, and the spiritual journey involved in 'Denken' is radically distinct from 'Dichten', it would follow that 'Denken' could only ever approach an understanding of poetry indirectly and externally. Not only would a philosophical definition of the nature and purpose of poetry be unattainable - even a philosophical account of the relation between philosophy and poetry, between Dichten and Denken, would face significant limits. Indeed it is not clear why Heidegger's claim that poetry and thinking can 'meet....in one and the same' does not overstep these limits, in that it brings the kinds of spiritual activity together under the roof of 'the same' as this is understood by 'Denken.

Richard Rorty and Conversational Philosophy

According to Richard Rorty's definition, doing 'conversational philosophy' requires us "to give up the goal of getting things right, and substitute that of enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions". This fits in with his pragmatist view that the point of philosophy "is not to find out what anything is 'really' like, but to help us grow up - to make us happier, freer, and more flexible".

Rorty does not seem to want us to read too much into his use of the term 'conversational', but it strikes me that there is indeed a close connection term between the goal of enlarging a repertoire of descriptions and the art of conversation. Among other things, a good conversationalist ought to be able to engage and impress a wide range of potential interlocutors, which could be said to require a sympathetic grasp of the wide range of life-stances these interlocutors might hold.

Following this train of thought, we might say the conversational thinker ought to be interdisciplinary, as it would be a poor conversationalist who only felt comfortable talking to those working in her own discipline. In particular she ought to have a grasp of literary as well as scientific culture, in order to be able to converse skillfully with members of each.

An implication for literature and the arts - which Rorty sees as important voices in the 'conversation of mankind' - might be that the best art is that which attracts the interest and admiration of people with a wide range of different intellectual positions; and that the best artists will have the breadth of intellectual sympathy required to do this (even if this remains at a relatively intuitive level - Shakespeare?).

Reading Rorty, one sometimes has the feeling that his ideal 'liberal ironist' is a little too happy, too untroubled by doubts and fears in her intellectual life, to be a flesh and blood human being. After all, when one has given up trying to get anything right, what is there left to worry about, intellectually? But, again, the term 'conversational' suggests a way of putting flesh on the bones. The would-be conversational thinker will naturally worry whether she is really as good a conversationalist as she takes herself to be - there is always the possibility that the next person she meets (or the next book she reads) will say something that blows her mind or shakes her foundations, converting her to a radically new outlook. Indeed the next person she talks to might even convince her to give up conversational philosophy and return to classical epistemology.

Not that what fundamentally worries the conversational thinker is the shame of meeting a superior conversationalist. For the underlying worry is that one's current outlook is not sufficiently flexible and open-minded, that it has not been informed by a wide enough range of perspectives, and that consequently, one is not as happy or as free as one would like to be. Despite avoiding the anxieties associated with the traditional ideals of truth, it is quite possible for a conversational thinker to be driven, in his quest for an ever wider range of intellectual sympathies, by the kind of anxious, unsatisfied desire for fulfilment most of us recognize.

Heidegger and Wallace Stevens on Poetic Thinking

Is there a specifically poetic way of thinking? Heidegger thought there was. In his later writings he  distinguishes poetic thinking from meditative philosophical thinking. For Heidegger these two styles  of thinking are in some ways alike - both require the thinker to abstain from logical-scientific (or what Heidegger would call 'technological') thinking in order to be able to approach the 'holy  mystery' of being. But Heidegger also emphasizes that they are distinct. Just what the distinction is  Heidegger found difficult to say. As he put it, the dialogue between poetry and thinking is a long  one, and is only just beginning.

Julian Young (in his book 'Heidegger's later Philosophy') suggests the following interpretation of  Heidegger's distinction. Meditative thinking is discursive, while poetic thinking is intuitive and  direct. Meditative thinking is thus limited to pointing to being in a negative way, while poetic  thinking enables the thinker to actually set foot within the realm of being.

A problem with this way of drawing the distinction is that while experientially direct access to the  realm of being may be the successful outcome of poetic thinking, only the most optimistic and  mystical of poets would think of such access as characterizing their everyday way of thinking.  Perhaps Holderlin, in his final days of madness, was granted a more or less continuous vision of  being; most poets' everyday way of thinking is a more meandering, less ecstatic affair, only occasionally punctuated by moments of poetic vision.

Wallace Stevens' account of the poet's way of thinking (in the lecture 'A Collect of Philosophy') is  more realistic in this respect:

"The probing of the philosopher is deliberate, as the history of the part that logic has played in  philosophy demonstrates...On the other hand, the probing of the poet is fortuitous..Up to the point  at which he has found his subject, the state of vague receptivity in which he goes about resembles  one part of something that is dependent on another part, which he is not quite able to specify...It  may be said that the philosopher probes the sphere or spheres of perception and that he moves about  therein like someone intent on making sure of every foot of the way. If the poet moves about in the  same sphere or spheres, and occasionally he may, he is light-footed. He is intent on what he sees and  hears and the sense of the certainty of the presences about him is as nothing to the presences  themselves. "

Here Stevens is describing, not the moment of poetic vision itself, nor the process of poetic  composition, but the everyday way of thinking of a poet in search of a poem. Moreover, the  description not only differentiates the poet's way of thinking from logical-scientific thinking, but  also suggests a difference betweent the poet's way of thinking and Heidegger's meditative thinking.  Despite the fact that, according to Heidegger, it involves a turn away from willed deliberation, there is after all  something deliberate, slow and cautious about meditative thinking that contrasts with the easy, 'light-footed' and 'fortuitous' approach of Stevens' poet. Although both may involve a  state of 'vague receptivity' ultimately directed at what Heidegger calls Being, or what Stevens calls the 'supreme fiction' (in 'A Collect of Philosophy' he suggests that 'the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea'), Heidegger's 'Gelassenheit' differs from the relaxed, playful way of  thinking Stevens seems to be after.