. . . poetics

a hole is just there. 
it is its own justification. 
a poem is a hole also. 
nobody necessarily digs it. 

Performance & Poetry

I'm a bit thin on the content just now…

I've been meaning to settle down with Laclau for a few days, and I have a serious academic need to do so. But my time is taken up writing for, reading within and collaborating on a series of poetics essays which will be included in the APG anthology that is currently in the works. 

Today my task is to think the role of performance within the group's history. I am aided by having text written about this topic by various poets in the group, but assembling these into an essay still imposes many challenges - interpretive, aesthetic, etc…

I will share this one small portion of my draft (it will be vetted by the group and may change significantly) concerning the established history of performance in relation to poetry.

• Always Historicize!   It isn’t that we didn’t know some history about this, some of us did. We knew that poetry was once very verbal (Greeks, Troubadours, pre-columbian Americans, many African cultures, etc); but within the euro-culture that we still to some extent live & work within (and within many other urban cultures across the world) poetry had been reduced to a "page" phenomenon centuries or millennia ago. Perhaps bardolotry goes too far;  but it’s true that Shakespeare and his contemporaries did remarkable poetry, intending it for stage performance. But theater, like narrative, turns away from (not just verse) but poetry itself, during the 18th century—at least in European culture and its outposts. Maybe it is due to Parry & Lord’s influence that the history of performed poetry lays such heavy stress on memorization. Whatever the case, that isn’t something we wanted to explore. Memorization is not the whole story of course and there are both exceptions to that conception (more of oral poetries than performed poetry) as well as occasional revivals of orality and performance in relation to poetry as with slam and rap and what gets called ‘performance poetry’ more generally in our time. But again the frequent memorization (though there is freestyle rap and much else) as well as the preponderance of heavily cadenced rhyme and relatively traditional verse structures underlying most of those contemporary manifestations didn’t offer much to suit our poetic desires. The Beat approach with a poet reading with sax or bongos, while not unappealing as an idea, faltered often on the poetry itself which, paradoxically, unlike that of Stein or Pound somehow, seemed very remote from our moment (a beat poet circa the year 2000 reminds us of that moment in the Woodstock movie when Sha-Na-Na take the stage). And while there were those doing performance in interesting ways among the Language folks (and still are), Grenier’s famous “I HATE SPEECH” and other poetic operating principles in that loose collection of poets effectively bracketed speech-based performance as a central generative focus (as much as we like a lot of LangPo very much, it is nearly as page-bound on whole as the more traditional verse it posed an alternative to). The history that meant the most to us performatively speaking was scattered and somewhat singular, DADA, Mac Low, Antin, Cage and a few others being the most pertinent but still providing only suggestive examples, and significantly, ones that often we could only read about (The Four Horsemen providing a notable counter-example much closer to some of our impulses). 
• Our sense of poetry history demands a retelling, one that sees the centrality of performance as sometimes more and other times less prominent, but never absent. Performance is crucial to poetry -- we know and feel this every Wednesday. Orality and performance are not simply something poets did back before they could shuck off that burden by writing their poems down. Performance has to be seen as one key dimension of poetry’s growth and reconfiguration of itself, its audience and its world. The reduction of poetry to “the page” diminishes it and stifles that growth. Poetry can be great on the page, this is indisputable. It’s just that that’s not all it is, or all it should be. And as we’ve discovered, that which cannot be done on the page can sometimes be done on the stage. 

Eros and Thanatos? not so fast…

Recently I came across a review by Slavoj Žižek of Catherine Malabou's latest book, and other than my growing interest in Malabou and the many things that Žižek has to say about this text (as yet available only in French) one thing jumped out at me. Why? Simply that Žižek manages to really nail an issue that I've always felt a bit uncomfortable about. Now firstly, for those who don't know, Freud never published anything wherein he called the death drive "Thanatos" - that term comes instead from Ernst Jones and purportedly Freud repeated it back to him in their correspondence, using it as Jones did as a synonym for the death drive. Be that as it may (I would like to see this correspondence myself), Freud does pose Eros against the death drive at one point & this is the problem. Malabou does not use the word "Thanatos" but I've been running into talk of Eros/Thanatos a good bit lately so it's on my mind. Here is Žižek:

So, ironically, when Malabou opposes Freud and Jung, emphasizing Freud's dualism of the drives against Jung's monism of (desexualized) libido, she misses the crucial paradox: it is at this point, when he resorts to the dualism of drives, that Freud is at his most Jungian, regressing to a premodern mythic agonism of opposite primordial cosmic forces. How then are we to grasp properly what eludes Freud and pushed him to take recourse in this dualism? When Malabou varies the motif that, for Freud, Eros always relates to and encompasses its opposite Other, the destructive death drive, she--following Freud's misleading formulations--conceives this opposition as the conflict of two opposed forces, not, in a more proper sense, as the inherent self-blockade of the drive: "death drive" is not an opposite force with regard to libido, but a constitutive gap that makes drive distinct from instinct (…), always derailed, caught in a loop of repetition, marked by an impossible excess. (…) Eros and Thanatos are not two opposite drives that compete and combine (as in eroticized masochism); there is only one drive, libido, striving for enjoyment, and "death drive" is the curved space of its formal structure.

Žižek, following Lacan's practice - or maybe it is Hegel's practice in his History of Philosophy - is taking the thinker in question (Freud) "more seriously than he took himself" that is, being more rigorous in uncovering and extending the most radical of his insights and not allowing him to slip back into weaker stop-gap positions like this cosmic yin-yang of opposed forces.

My unease about Language's preeminence

Something that has been troubling me under new names or new instances for some time now has to do with how language is used in lacanian theory.  The way the story goes is that the squalling little infans, the biologically human and pre-linguistic child is nearly another being entirely from what it will be once it accedes to language, to the No that grounds signification, after which it will always mean rather than be. Now, I am persuaded by so much of this argument and so comfortable in its basic parameters that I sometimes have difficulty formulating my unease with it.

But, due in part to last semester's intellectual escapades (Ernesto Laclau, William E. Connolly, also The Affect Studies Reader) I find myself feeling that something significant is lost in the psychoanalytic accounting of these matters... and that something either is or has something very much to do with affects.

My thoughts run as follows...

It seems that there is a lot of research and documentation about the infans' relation to others and in that research much indication that before using language at all, that those squishy little ones are more than able to signal with affect and receive affective signals. Then given the broad continuity of affect signals, whether one is a speaker of any language or not, it seems that while language may very well retroactively overcode those things, those affective signals or expressions... but that they retain their form in large part. As such it seems that to make the moment of learning to speak a language such a divisive cut is to ignore those factors and how they impact how we live, relate, love and hate, and most pertinently how we mean and interpret. On a particularly moody and glum day, a joke may not make me laugh, an idea may strike me as inert, a poem I have loved before may seem lifeless and dull.  On a particularly ebullient day, I may find large significance in small, everyday things, hear the poetry in the kids massing for the bus, etc. But if affective relations show this continuity from before we spoke to now, isn't it somewhat non-dialectical to assume that once language is uploaded that those factors are simply taken in, absorbed by language? Would it not seem more apt to assume that their continuity across that boundary of speech (the laugh of the infans and the laugh of the octogenarian being mutually recognized & recognizable) is an indication of their persistence either 1. alongside each other without significant mutual impact, or (as I think is the case) 2. in an evolving dialectic, perhaps (and only perhaps) in which learning how to manage their overlap involves finding each already at work in the other? Isn't the clinical process of the 'talking cure' in part about finding the words for the affects - and isn't that finding also a way of feeling the affect in question for what it actually is in its connections with one's life? If I am plagued by some floating and unshakable guilt whose justification I cannot name, and by whatever means I do manage to find its name, to comprehend what it is that I feel guilt about, do I not then have the chance to feel the guilt for what it really is, meaningfully connected to it object?

That this - what Freud means (or so I understand him) by the idea of 'working through' - linking of the affect with the words that name it adequately is not simply a furthering of my alienation in the realm of the signifier?

Anyway, such run my thoughts. & saying so, repeatedly (as this is not the first time I have tried this line of thought) as a process of working through has lessened the unease in some ways, in that at least I am inching toward a clearer notion of precisely where and with what I am uneasy. Not a very big step perhaps, but progress (or so I console myself).

The forces contending...

There is always something I haven't done, that needs doing - more often somethings - some marked guiltily (papers owed for classes, files I'd promised to search for) other's with desire (the books I'd always meant to sit down and really read with all the attention I can muster) and still other's marked as obligations of the future (deadlines, expectations, etc). All told, I guess this is better - a mild bewilderment of projects there for wherever interest next goes.

I'm a poet. I am not a philosopher. I am not a psychoanalyst. But being a poet often drives me to one of the other of the latter objects, philosophy, psychoanalysis... not to mention art of all sorts (film, performance, painting, fiction, music).

Of late my head is filled with things, and many of them are thick with interest (that key index of drive). Most crucially at present in my head each day is the book, that book that is assembling of which I am a contributor and maker and so my poems (how to render a poem I only said to a page where it loses all but the static words?), my poetics (knowing that no matter how well I get them into words, that they're always at some minimal distance from the poem, a distance that always will have been found to have been distorting - and yet I try!), and much else about being the poet I am in the group I am a part of (The Atlanta Poets Group). & so much Hegel. Yes, Hegel is really filling my head lately as I'm in a course on Hegel's influence on contemporary theory and have elected as my labor for this course a patient annotation, chapter by chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. & there is much Lacan and thus psychoanalysis lurking nearby as I will read seminars XX-XXIII this semester.

But for all of that, this space will be for the releasing of whatever pent up interest is not absorbed by the needful outputs of those things. & thus, the anything goes-i-ness of my interest when energy remains to say something more.