Self-Discipline for [improv] Sound Poetry

We're them void guys

We're them pose guys

Lean each with each

With weed full head.  Alas!

At the close of my last post I mentioned wanting to concoct a similar plan for re-engaging my monophonic improv sound poetry. If the emitter plans I discussed are an attempt to get some discipline back into my improv practice for "proper" lexical words. What might I do in parallel to that for my improv sound poetry?

First a few limits which might be arbitrary from some POVs but that are important to me, or perhaps to my sense of what sort of sound poetry I have made and desire to make.

1. Echoing something Mark wrote in the SOUND node for the anthology, I do not want it to move over into "song" however loosely construed that might be. In that interview with Christian Bök mentioned in the last post, he has a lot of things to say about sound poetry and I'd like to post about some of that in time, but he references "vocal percussionists" and "beatboxers" such as Dokata and Rahzel… & both have impressive skills or so my web-hunting quickly revealed. Rahzel is clearly pursuing music and Dokata is as well, if in a rather different vein (unlike Rahzel he does not sing, but mimics the music itself). Yet both are also very beat-dependent in a way that I have no immediate interest in. Sound poetry for me is not music and it is not song either.
2. While I will often enough abandon the tenor of "everyday speech" I do not want that abandonment to be the sole focus or what ensures that I am in fact doing "sound poetry." My everyday voice and careful pronunciation will remain a default whenever possible (that is, at any time some other impulse does not directly negate these things). This is not to defend against a charge of doing the police in different voices, nor is it a valorization of my everyday ("natural") voice, just a starting point: the voice I have.
3. I'm not against electronic manipulation of the voice, but in terms of a disciplined practice I prefer to see how far I can go with voice alone before I use effects of any sort. As the local Atlanta scene already has ample evidence, simply using delay and so forth on one's voice while doing poetry is too easily a crutch for doing really bad poems. (If you do not get that reference, count yourself lucky.)

Next, I suppose that I need a distinction between the Hypothetically Lexical and the Generally Unlexical… even if the boundary will be blurred much of the time. What then will these two terms mean for me? Well, whatever they describe, that is all they will be - descriptions - they're not meant to carry conceptual weight (the range of noises that might come out of our mouths could be described in many other ways I'm sure).

Hypothetically Lexical [HL] - here I have in mind things like Joyce's "thunder words" and all that I mean by the 'lexical' here is that they are renderable as words no matter how aberrant. Thus I might say something like "frusstoiklej" - one can look at this and say something with a reasonable degree of phonetic loyalty to this rendering with basis English expectations regarding pronunciation. These sorts of words can be, like "frusstoiklej," completely neologistic and having no clear meaning-bearing particles, or they might have parts which are meaningful but break that in their unified form. As an example of that latter situation, consider "omnithrummage" - 'omni' and 'thrum' and the suffix '-age' all have meaning effects or are meaningful in and of themselves, but as a conjoined word they are not especially meaningful without a bit of wildly ungrounded interpretive work. This then is what I mean by Hypothetically Lexical.

Generally Nonlexical [GN] - here I am thinking of vocal sounds of all sorts, even if some might be potentially rendered as "words" the vast majority cannot be. Things which we would describe as growls or hums or squawks or… however one describes such things. Mimicry, of non-human sounds of whatever sort would be included here.

What might I then do with HL or GN that could be pursued in a disciplined fashion that might result in greater variety and impact in my monophonic improvised sound poetry? Much of what follows I have already been doing, but in a more haphazard, now & then, fashion which I'm trying here to make more deliberate (with the proviso that improv can only take so much deliberation and must always depend on the haphazard - upon chance and spontaneous impulse).

impressively complicated looking, isn't it?

Hypothetically Lexical

Morpheme or word stem study is one option & need not be limited to English & if it isn't obvious there is no need to know the meanings associated (it might even be counter productive in some respects). Much of what follow are 'practice modalities' for improv but not improv themselves.

Computer-based language processing using things like Travesty can produce some very un-English "words" and sometimes these have no unambiguous translation to utterance. But, not every such new word is un-utterable, and if one steps out of English-derived pronunciation rules, opting rather for Sanskrit/Nepali or German for example some will have a less ambiguous pronunciation.

Non-English pronunciation protocols can also be applied productively across language barriers, consider the German or Sanskrit way that one would attempt to utter words like "lynchpin", "motor", "eucalyptus" or "siphon."

Accent study would be another way to think about some of the above. There are a number of books like Paul Meier's Accents and Dialects for Stage and Screen (includes 12 CDs) which covers "Afrikaans (South Africa), American Deep South (Mississippi/Georgia/Alabama), American Southern (Kentucky/Tennessee), Australian, Cockney, Downeast New England, French, General American, German, Hampshire, Indian, Irish, Italian, Liverpool, New York, Northern Ireland, Russian, Scottish, South Boston, Spanish (Castilian & Colonial), Standard British English (Received Pronunciation), Welsh, Yiddish, and Yorkshire." & thinking about what such a book offers one can then imagine working through different accents while dealing with the stems or morphemes mentioned above: Castilian to Russian to Deep Southern.

Mimicry of others, though risky and potentially prone to complaint on PC grounds is another option for HL, thus gay voice, gendered voice, possibly "racial" voice (to the extent that such things can be distinguished from accent). & certainly I have met many people whose distinctive way of speaking I can to some extent imitate.

probably for the best that you can't read this...  

call it a token of my systematic imaginary

Generally Nonlexical

One might start with a sort of "whole earth phonological survey" (another lovely impossibility). My study in German and Sanskrit/Nepali both had repeated drills on phonology, but were one able to practice such things for other additional languages, this might help provide a base of sounds to then work over more intensely (this notion is perhaps relevant to HL as well, but I'm trying to pull it into the GN territory).

Whatever might be adaptable from vocal percussionists or beatboxers which does not move toward song or music is certainly open for the taking (assuming I have the skills).

No nifty name for this but let's just call it vocal-storming for now (on the model of brain-storming),.. basically just trying to make unique and repeatable vocal sounds (fun if you're in the mood) and then to name them or record them or something for further use.

Cataloging and practice of non-lexicals that are common in everyday speech ("shhh" for 'be quiet' etc) is something I have done before to a small and not terribly systematic extent. Presumably this could be extended.

result of an image search with "non lexical" I think

Other Possibilities (applicable to either, depending and paralinguistic in each case)

Pitch; deep voice to high (trying perhaps to make this sound as 'natural' as possible).

Timber is surely imitable to a degree - rough, raspy, creaky, whispery, smooth, hard, whimpering, etc.

Pace or tempo is surely a possibility, though much constrained by my ability to control it. If I had all the words ready in my head (or in Tzara's hat) I could surely include pacing as a variable, but when they come from the fleshy aether of my head…

Tone leads toward acting perhaps, but cataloging the various emotional tones that can be applied provides more options (& some overlap with timber).

Breath manipulations (like speaking during an inhale, coughing words, panting words, etc).

Body manipulations (altering the 'normal' positioning and movement or flexibility of the tongue, face, lips, etc as a way of generating new vocal sounds)

to Emit, again

I. Squandering my gifts (such as they were)

Here is a snippet from a Q&A session with Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein and others at U Penn, available here if you want to read the whole thing (which is pretty interesting)

Bök is asked by a student whether poetry is elitist, which isn't a question that concerns me, but here is some of what he says in response;

Christian Bök: If you’re asking me if poetry is elitist because it’s the expression of our best sentiments, requiring skill and ingenuity to be good at it, then yes, it’s probably an elite activity. It’s only the chosen few who are willing to dedicate their lives to this activity. (…) Very few people are actually willing to make the kind of commitment that’s often required to be immersed within this kind of literature, especially since there are very few material rewards for such dedication.

…this got me thinking some - not so much about "our best sentiments" - but just about the dedication. I remember years when I read poetry daily, thought about poetry incessantly, wrote a great deal or post-2001 improvised intensely on a weekly basis (often still writing a lot even then). But since I started grad school in 2006 all of that has diminished, it was a steady decline and now it's more sporadic. I still improvise and I still write but my time for thinking and reading poetry or about poetics has dwindled to nearly nothing. Something important has been lost, or so it feels to me - hence the tone of somewhat over the top section heading here. I'm not sure I had any "gifts" to "squander" really. Improvised poetry is not like riding a bike in my experience. 

At the last APG meet [25.5.2011], because my new year's poetry resolution for 2011 was made under the sign of theft, rehash, regurgitation, etc - I did the first new emitter poem since I'd been doing them back in 2004-5 sometime (no recordings exist from that period). 

Emitter Poem. [also “denial poetry”] A mode of improvisation originated by Lowther whose intent is impossible, involving uttering words in a sequence in which the following word does not associate with the previous word in any immediate way (sonically, conceptually, in register, etc.) and conceived as as a means of discovering and modifying “slurs.” Allison Rentz, once dubbed this method as “denial poetry.”

The new emitter I did last night, as I was aware and as Zac too had a sense of when we discussed it a bit after the fact, was rather weak or "slack". Mostly I think (hope) that this slackness was simply being out of practice. That is, while I tried to avoid sonic and semantic/conceptual linkages as much as I could, what emerged failed to be as rigorous as what I'd done in 2004. My time in psychoanalysis had something to do with the emitter poem and I notice that though I had not done an emitter since then and have not been in analysis since 2006 or so, that both experiences are often with me, on my mind for one reason or another.

II. Free Association vs The Emitter

The analytic session depends upon the analysand's adoption of free association. Of course free association is just as impossible as the method of the emitter, and part of what helps analysis to work is the failure of free association. Perhaps one could say that   is that because association can never be "free" or undetermined by one's habits, past history and unconscious, that free association fails is what allows new associations to be forged and thereby links old wounds or passions to contemporary fantasies and sufferings. I worked very hard in analysis, though often without knowing where anything was leading or what goal there might be. Much of the sense of labor involved was produced by aspiring to the truly free association and assuming that what such a spoken practice would reveal had to be significant or linkable whether I could make that linkage or not.

At a very superficial level the emitter's method might be thought of as a reversal of analytic free association, as it refuses to immediately allow just whatever comes to mind, subjecting what that is to delimitation. But the apparent opposition is merely apparent in many ways. Firstly because free association is just as impossible as no association. Analysis doesn't rest with an association as "free" and tends rather to push the analysand toward chaining that apparent freedom down once more. Why did that come to mind? being the request to make the links which would unmask the "freedom" of the free association revealing its determinations. Secondly, though the emitter's method is likely not as productive analytically - certainly I cannot imagine an analyst suggesting that it be adopted in preference to free association - the labor of attempting to follow it evoked similar feelings of struggle, of being somehow stuck, of trying to get to something/open a channel/break through some resistance. Thirdly, I wonder if perhaps Allison's term "denial poetry" for these improvisations does get at something? Maybe I needed a counter-balance to my analysis back then, a similarly repeating period of time where, addressing a different other, I could deny that X is linked to Q. Surely I cannot discount this possibility, but at the same time it feels insufficient. Plus, now and then I "cheated" in analysis and applied the emitter method here or there and what I said in those moments seemed to integrate as easily as anything produced freely. Finally, what also mitigates any reading of the emitter as simple denial (psychoanalytic or otherwise) is that in doing those poems I often had a sense that I was working very clearly with associations, even narratives, but that the output protocols of the emitter made this something only I could really see. Reading a draft of some of these thoughts Jeff wrote;

With regard to making it a poem (not being attached to Bök's words but referencing them anyway) and that making poems is about "expressing our best sentiments" to others... I suddenly come to a halt. There is something to the fact that something happens when it's involved with another's experience. They too are on guard for associations. What does the practice do to your own brain's way of perceiving? the muscle you're building? what other situations would it prep one for with regard to poetry? and to go bigger, poetry as art and art as something thats about reacting to what the heck is going on in the world today outside of our selves…?

In a fashion typical of Jeff's interests and preoccupations, he is concerned as much with the response as the production. Back in 2004 I found it quite difficult to concern myself with this explicitly, certainly not in the process of doing an emitter - it was hard enough just to find the next word & that I often did these with my eyes closed is perhaps an index of my need to block the immediacy of the other in some way. But I also knew that the other was crucial and have known since soon after I began improvising that without an other that the work is nearly impossible, that the tension of improv-time (as I have called it elsewhere) is lost. & the big Other is always there as the silent third even when I am thinking to myself and not simply when I address an actual or hypothetical other. 

Without leaning too hard on Bök's words either, perhaps there is more to say about "expressing our best sentiments" even if I've grave doubts about "expression" "sentiments" and most scales by which we would judge this or that one as "best." If the other is crucial for improv, and it is (for me at least), then it would seem to be transference that sustains an improvisation. The group often mentioned their sense of my struggling in those poems, and of moments where I said a word that they had thought of as well. Might these things have to do with the unparticularized something that Jeff mentions taking place between improviser and auditors? Bök's terms are, somewhat surprisingly, very traditional at this moment. I'll not redeploy my criticism of expression here, but note only that it seems to me that the something that Jeff evokes is less an "expression" in the everyday/banal sense of that word than a byproduct, as an endorphin rush is a byproduct of exercise (Lacan's notion of surplus jouissance has a similar dynamic, and I could probably use his discourse theory to think about the method emitter poem upon myself when doing such a poem). The transference between poet and auditors is not quite "expressed" and not unrelated to "sentiment." Jeff is quite right about the others; "They too are on guard for associations" - though perhaps they are only really "on guard" if they know of the method - would emitters work for an audience that didn't know anything of the method?

I was very much targeting "other situations" in my poetic life with this practice. Much of the point of them was to try to break habits, some "literary" in a rude sense and others more general and pertaining to the patterns that speech encodes in me. There is probably something very modernist in this, at least in Antin's sense of modernism, where it demands reduction to the bare minimums of one's medium. So, I imagined this practice, or the facility that it was intended to develop in me, as a discipline - not that far from a rational derangement of the senses (or however that goes exactly), perhaps a rational derangement of normative linguistic usage… But the emitter itself was never really a goal to begin with, I thought of it initially as analogous to playing scales (where the scales are unknown), doing finger exercises, limbering up - and all of this was meant to have an impact on my other modes of improv (and perhaps lead to new ones emerging). & when I was doing the emitters most often it very clearly did have effects on my Minotaur stuff, my improv sonnets and every other improv I was doing. What I was a bit surprised by was that the emitter turned out to be an end in itself as well. 

III. The Method & extension monadic, dyadic and triadic

"To learn is to eliminate." I forget who wrote that and I may've misquoted, but it gets at something, if we accept that what is learned is found slightly to the side of anything aimed at (by following the method). Let me state categorically; the times when I succeeded (measure that!) at any instant will be grossly outnumbered by the times I failed ("deliberately intended, haphazardly executed" is perhaps the unspoken motto of the emitter poem). All of the focus on the limits the method prescribes can have the unintended effect of suggesting that the poems produced are true to the method, or that I am at every moment consciously aware of all that I am doing when perhaps all that an emitter does is resituate the places where determination lurks outside of a certain, ever fuzzy, zone of immediacy. By trying to deny immediacy of association...

1. sonically [thus through all varieties of rhyme, assonance, consonance, etc]

2. conceptually [thus "grape" and "mustard" cannot appear next to each other because in spite of lack of sonic link they are both, loosely 'food words,' but this also implies semantic or grammatical linkages to be avoided that are in some sense normative]

2.a. as regards register, I listed it as I used to attend very intently to this and strove to leap across registers as much as I could, thus; "ibuprofen - orgasm - forewarning - torque - poop - hissy - cuneiform - neighborly - periodizing - tincture"]

… I'd like to get back in the swing of the emitter and thus get "comfortable" again (to the extent possible) with these sorts of limits and some potential extensions (primarily because of the sense of loss I mentioned in section one of this text, but also simply as a discipline, something I find is often useful). Then, to complicate the sonic - couldn't it also imply rhythm and preclude repeating words of the same syllabic count or similar rhythmic articulation (this may be beyond me, as I have tried to do improvisation using only words with an odd number of syllables, but that was a bust - but perhaps I just didn't try hard enough?) or it might at least force more attention to such things if not ruling upon them. 

Regarding the conceptual level there have to be more things to watch out for… I am thinking specifically of crypt-words, as when, if I should say "incest" and follow it with "malediction" that the latter word, by virtue of rhyming with "prohibition" which collocates highly with "incest" should also be avoided. I often allowed these in the past, but they do lead me back to habit rather than away from it. There are other conceptual linkages that deserve more thought, but that one occurred to me in the night as I lay in bed last Wednesday thinking about the slackness of the poem I'd made hours before. Maybe there is some work to be done here with parts of speech, or stems -vs- compounds, whether affixes are involved or not and so forth.

The plan then, such as it is, is to start doing emitters at weekly meetings for the remainder of this year and to work out a way to do them when alone (here I am thinking that perhaps if I was making a video while doing so that this might make that (silent, third, big) Other feel a bit more present and thus invoke improv time effectively.

Back in the day (I think this was all in 2004-5) when I had been doing these for awhile, I began to allow the occasional phrase to break the monotony of each new term being like a bead on a string. But this is fraught with conflicts given the method sketched above and even if I consciously decide (as if) in the moment to allow a phrase "some restrictions apply" to appear in a chain of words that are otherwise treated as discrete objects, it risks being an escape hatch, an outlet for my laziness.

Would it then be possible, if we consider the definition above as pertaining to (monadic) emitter poems, to think about dyadic or traidic emitters as well? What about emitters whose smallest unit was a phrase or sentence. Perhaps "emitter" is no longer the best term for these latter suggestions and that the longer units would preclude applying too many of the limits that the emitter can impose in a monadic context, but with the dyad and triad it seems that many new options are possible (new limits can be imposed even as some monadic limits are precluded).

DYADS;

last & first chaining: "brushfire - firestation - stationmaster - masterkey - keystone - stonehinge - hingepoint" etc… (I'd probably bottom out now and then with such a method, reaching a word whose end I could not think of any word to follow it with, if for example I'd just said "mailman" and then I said "mandrake" where would I go next? Maybe there is a word beginning with drake that is completed as compound [at least hypothetically] by another stand-alone word, but if there is, I do not know it. As such I'd need a procedure when I bottomed out like that that would then allow me to restart the poem). & this might be more effective (using the example above) if it were spoken as "brush-fire-station-master-key-stone-hinge-point," though pauses in speech might cause some of the pairs not to be heard. 

common dyads: "T intersection - corporate downsizing - please forward - upscale establishment - silver lining - turkey shoot - carpal tunnel - X factor - rim job - test subject - free lunch - drive safely - gender neutral - stroke victim - peanut butter" etc… But these are also sort of banal at times or unimpressive & may, as an end in themselves, not lead anywhere productive.

uncommon dyads: "manifold excessively - hump longitude - fractal cease - lasting up - shower albeit - wormhole butter - strategic malodorous"… Here the question might be what (if anything) distinguishes a series of uncommon dyads from an even numbered sequence of monads? Perhaps it could be a performative issue, that they must be said as a dyad. 

alternating dyads: perchance, once I am producing decent monadic strings I might allow an alternation between pairs which follow the monadic emitter rules with ones which negate those rules? "cob meaningful - dean dare - usurp sequestered - stay weigh - marker quell - bread water" etc... every other pair exhibiting one of the associations ruled out in the monadic emitter.

…it is hard to see all the consequences of dyads for the method per monadic emitter, but just keeping track of the base-level sonic connections would be significantly more challenging and so those rules may have to soften somewhat. Testing required.

TRIADS;

common triads: "thesis antithesis synthesis - with malice aforethought - by all rights - some restrictions apply - control alt delete - please be seated" etc. I'm doubtful that I could carry on as improv with such for very long given the minute or two that it took to generate the few examples here, but experimentation seems worthwhile. Some study of idioms and so forth might also reveal patterns that could be deployed in this way. 

Should I manage to get acceptably (which is to say, marginally) proficient at these, a larger frame for emitters might be possible where every 30 seconds or through some other sequencing or triggering procedure I might switch between monadic, dyadic and triadic methods (with all the varieties as potential variables).

A plan, an intention, an improv poetry fitness regime - call it whatever best fits. Whatever the case this is what I am thinking about. I am also curious as to whether - given that I am now doing these at a moment in APG history when we are pretty responsible with our recording and archiving - whether transcribing these I might use my very failures, the unavoidable sonic or conceptual echoes and associations as a means to map the poems in transcription. That last idea is pretty fuzzy but I can sort of visualize how that might be rendered on a page & perhaps it would be both revealing (of slurs among other things) as well as interesting to look at.

A final point about emitters. They did not generally allow for a great many neologisms or non-lexical sound poetry stuff. I would like to keep that boundary and strive to allow only known words to be used. [But I also hope to post about sound poetry soon and develop a plan of sorts for a soundpo fitness regime.]

Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

B. Freedom of self-consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness (§§197-230)

Hegel begins by telling us that the dialectical progress that we readers saw in the slave is not something that the slave recognizes within himself (§197) but that this modality of slave-self-consciousness has an historical instantiation in Stoicism (§198). Stoic consciousness entails that only conscious thought abstracted from all aspects of our natural being (desires, animal functions, etc) is essential, all the rest is chaff (§§198-9). The stoic-consciousness treats this as freedom, but it is not, it is only the idea of freedom and one that is unable to pronounce authoritatively on truth or goodness because nothing external to consciousness can matter to it. The best it can do is to judge something as reasonable, a substitute which may be “uplifting” but is ultimately facile and “tedious” (§200). Stoicism “is thus only the incomplete negation of otherness” (§201).

“Scepticism is the realization of that of which Stoicism was only the Notion, and is the actual experience of what the freedom of thought is” (§202). That sounds pretty good, but as always, will be found to not be enough. Sceptical-consciousness is a thorough-going “negative attitude toward otherness, to desire and work” (§202), this is a change from the Stoic’s mere disregard of it all as inessential. The skeptic experiences the freedom of thought as pure negativity but is still mired in the world and perforce must have beliefs about it. Hegel sees these beliefs as diverse and confused (§205). The sceptical-consciousness knows itself as dual (master and slave within itself) “which is essential in the Notion of Spirit” but is not yet unified (§206).

The unity of these aspects emerges in the Unhappy Consciousness which is “a single consciousness” that is not, to begin with “explicitly aware that this is its essential nature” (§207). The Unhappy Consciousness regards these two aspects as “Unchangeable (...) essential Being” and “Changeable” as “unessential” (§208). The Unhappy Consciousness is caught in a loop, it takes itself to be merely changeable being and sees the unchangeable as “an Alien Being” and “yet it is itself a simple, hence unchangeable, consciousness. This loop this is then when “one opposite does not come to rest in its opposite, but in it only produces itself afresh as an opposite”(§208). The dialectic which allows an escape from this vicious circle works like this; 1st the Unhappy Consciousness is opposed to the Unchangeable which simply sustains the conflict unless we move to the 2nd moment in which it learns that “individuality belongs to the Unchangeable itself” and thirdly it recognizes itself, in all it unique particularity as individual in the Unchangeable and thus in the mode of Spirit (§210). The unhappy consciousness is at this moment very close to what will have been its goal (when the book is done) but it fails to see it as such, these determinations are essential in Hegel’s view but this form of consciousness sees them as wholly contingent and the resultant form as “an opaque sensuous unit” (§212) dependent upon some impossibly remote past when an unchangeable individual was a concrete reality, that is it cannot face “the pure formless Unchangeable” and can only come into any relation with the “Unchangeable in its embodied or incarnate form” - i.e., Christ (§213). The Unhappy Consciousness has attained to both “pure thinking and particular individuality” but cannot reconcile the two and is instead stuck between these two positions unable to see that they are united and that this unity “is its own self” (§216). Its thinking is only “a movement towards thinking” which is “no more than the chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense, a musical thinking that does not get as far as the Notion” (§217). It is the devotional attitude that seems the only possible embodiment the Unchangeable as other than itself and never anywhere present which makes it explicitly unhappy. It more everyday terms, it holds itself to a standard that it can only comprehend as impossible of attainment.

Master & Slave, from "Self-Consciousness" The Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY

A. Independence and dependence of self-consciousness: Lordship and Bondage (§§178-96)
I am unsure what I have to add to what is already known about this very famous dialectical moment. Hegel opens with “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (§178). This is a crux of the issue, and is also the problem for those two beings who will emerge from this as master and slave. Each sees in the other a free subjectivity and thus what is needed to recognize their self as also being a free subjectivity. But the freedom of this other must be tested. At §186 Hegel reminds us that self-consciousness is “simple being-for-self” which must therefore exclude what is not itself. When two such (proto?)self-consciousnesses encounter one another each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other, and therefore its own self-certainty still has no truth” (§186). But this meeting is due to be conflictual because self-consciousness’s own “presentation of itself” (self-concept?) requires that it show “itself as the pure negation of its objective mode” (§187) that is, that it is not attached to life (recall that self-consciousness sees all that is external as irrelevant to its constitution when this chapter opened). Each then must prove to the other that life is not more valuable than their own free subjectivity. But when it gets down to it, one relents and submits to the mastery of the other. But, this “trial by death, however, does away with the truth that was supposed to have issued from it” (§188). The slave’s recognition is not enough, because the slave is not a free subject independent of the world of mere appearances. The master does not recognize the slave and recognition must be mutual. They “exist as two opposed shapes of consciousness; one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another” (§189). That these two are nonetheless two that are one is something that is foreclosed by both of them (§189) The master never has his self-consciousness recognized as he wished to have it be (§192) but the slave, by virtue of his labors for the master and his belief in the master as master embodies in the slave the “truth of pure negativity and being-for-self” that comes from the fear of death (§194). In time the slave overcomes the otherness of things upon which he labors and is able to create and learn from this process such that his self-consciousness is no longer opposed to this otherness (as it was to the otherness of the master) and as such the slave’s self-consciousness is more fully self-consciousness as a consequence of his servitude (§195-6).

more thoughts about Affect / Language

Back in February I was trying to work out some thoughts about the connections between language and affect and what I found troubling about the preeminence of Language in so many discussions of Affect. Well, now I have more thoughts to try and get out of myself in some quasi-coherent way and so, here we go…

Let's assume, for now at least, that so far as the account of Language derived from structuralism; langue/parole, signifying chain, the X/Y of the metaphorical and metonymical axes is adequate to its object of study. [I am not sure about that, but just for the moment, let us take it as given.] This model when plotting utterances of whatever sort does so in a way that we might reasonably think of as two-dimensional. Speech unfolds in one direction, forward in time. The other dimension is provided by the axis of substitution.

Many thinkers who are trying to cope with the question of how affect relates to signification are incorporating it directly into the signifying chain in some fashion. To give but two; Laclau ties it directly to signification arguing that "affect requires signification"; Johnston does this differently, arguing that "affects are signifiers." I will not replay here my critique of Laclau's position, but I do not think that affect can be shown to require signification and that the laugh of the infans is proof enough of that for this moment. Johnston's position is much better argued and I am not yet ready to try to engage it fully just yet. I will say that I agree with a great deal of what he says but still feel as if something is missing. What is missing I turn to now…

Let's say that three friends attend a dinner party making a total of 10 people. The three friends are dispersed around the table and talking to various others as the meal progresses. Many things are said, now and then everyone is listening to a single person but often enough things break into smaller side-conversations. There are any number of moments when the three friends are all aware of things that are said which are a bit problematic but none of them is in a great position to make a critique of these things without breaking the code of the dinner party. When it is over and the three are riding home together they begin to collectively process the evening and those moments when each was uncomfortable with the implications underpinning some other person's speech.

Now, let's assume the three are at home, continuing to recount things they heard or thought and one of the three reveals that they were very angry about something, and in telling this they release a great deal of negative affect. Here I want to tread lightly as I am unsure of the best choice of vocabulary. Does 'release' imply too much conscious intention? Would it be better to say that one 'gives off' affect? [We'll return to this below, just flow with me for now]. So one of the three is quite worked up and they state their criticism very strongly and then tired from the dinner and the discussion they go to bed. We are left with two now who remain in place. But now, things are very different. They are both left talking about their night still, but grappling as much with the content of the absent 3rd's criticisms, but also with the "affect bomb" that was set off at the same time.

It seems to me that while, yes, the 3rd did give an affect-laden chain of significations, that affect does not inhere only in those significations, rather that it colors the signifying chain. [Again, terminology alert - to be resumed below]. I, as one of the three friends (one of the two who remained behind when the 3rd left) was very conscious of change in 'mood' which was quite pervasive. I and the other spoke about the criticisms, about the night overall and about things unrelated to the night entirely, but it seemed very much to me that the tone (mood, vibe, coloration, etc) of the discharge of so much affect had colored all that came after, even the purely humorous discussion that was no longer about the evening at all.

This example, though it is what prompted my thoughts about this, is perhaps not the best one to make the point that I am making. But the thing I am pointing at is the way that someone's mood, their "affective charge" can and does impact others' affects. Now the thinker who favors language as model here will attribute this to signifiers. The person in the bad mood we must recognize as being in a bad mood and so there must be signs of this which we read to make this attribution. If it is countered that we may not always be aware of these signs, then perhaps the signifying chain where these details are registered is unconscious. Maybe. But I wonder still.

If the pre-linguistic child, the infans is productive of what seem very much like affects, smiles, laughter, fright, worry, etc. Then it would seem that affects precede language. I am sure that once the child becomes a speaking being that all of that is over-coded with signifiers. But I have a hard time believing that because of this an affect simply becomes just another signifier.

It seems that affects are at times much more nebulous, that we can not know what this 'weird mood' we are in means or what caused it. We may manage to satisfy ourselves about that by means of a statement at some point ("I guess I feel ______") but other times the mood simply changes and we never are able to really articulate what was happening affectively.

If we consider a sentence like "my father just died" we have pretty clear access to the basic signification, the meaning of this sentence. But as a written text without other detail or context we have no bearings on the affect involved, all that we can do is project an affect upon the statement. Affect can surely enter the signifying chain if someone says this to us and we reply by saying "you say that like you are happy about it," that is, if we explicitly enter the term "happy" into the signifying chain to name the affect which we felt in some way by virtue of the way that the sentence was uttered. In that case a signifier of an affect is present in the chain, but does this give any grounds for assuming that the affect is a signifier? In the famous 'the word is the murder of the thing' quote, is affect not the thing? Would "happy" not have to be utterly distinct from that to which it refers in order to be able to refer at all?

I know that there is much else to be done to shore up this general line of thinking about affects, but this at least gives my reasons for being dissatisfied with it being incorporated fully into the signifying chain. What remains is to ask what can be said about affect as distinct from signification and that will be difficult. My word choices for this are all tentative, but the one term which keeps reemerging as I try to think this all through is "colors." I think there is something valid in claiming that affects color the signifying chain. But this doesn't help all that much with trying to conceptualize this. I find I am also attracted to metaphors of charge and discharge, and certainly this has vernacular support, as when we say that an question is, for someone or other, very "affectively charged." In saying something like this we seem to be saying that the question is not one that people can seem to deal with in a non-affect-laden way, that emotions get in the way of reasons, etc. I do not know that I would be willing to accept any absolute distinction between reason and emotion, but neither would I assume that they are coextensive.

If the characterization of the structuralist view of language as two dimension has any merit, might we propose that affect is something like a third dimension? One that intersects in many ways with the two but that remains nonetheless of an other order. This is at least my intuition about this, though it is one that is sorely in need to a better conceptual grounding.

The Truth of Self-Certainty, from Self-Consciousness, Phenomenology of Spirit

B. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
IV. THE TRUTH OF SELF-CERTAINTY (§§166-77)

This opening summation of where we have come to and overview of where this chapter will take us is very dense in content. What I take to the be most salient points are that throughout the stages of consciousness, the truth was always located outside the subject in the object. But with the appearance of infinity at the close of the last section, everything changes. Self-consciousness now is both subject as knower and its own object as what is known. It is only with self-consciousness that, for the first time, “the object corresponds to the concept” (§166). Self-consciousness depends upon an internal division (not unlike psyche & soma) which will be canceled later. That is, to take myself as the object of my knowledge, I insist upon this division, but when self-consciousness does this “what it distinguishes from itself is only itself as itself, the difference, as otherness, is immediately superseded for it” with the result that self-consciousness is initially only “the motionless tautology of: ‘I am I’” (§167). In the first moment of this internal division “self-consciousness is in the form of consciousness” and thus grasps this via sense-certain, perception and understanding, but in the second moment self-consciousness unifies itself as subject and object and relegates the external world to mere appearance (§167). Truth then, is internal to self-consciousness at this stage. In §168 Hegel tells us that taking the subject as object is the same as taking life as object, an object of “immediate desire” a “living thing” (§168). Life is a perpetual flux of becoming for which consciousness’ various concepts of the object were inadequate. Life is the object now and at the same time it is “a negative element” that is “desire” (§168). Life is thus the negative of self-consciousness itself, or consciousness and self-conscious opposed. With desire now as motive force, self-consciousness cannot find truth in an external object of dead matter, instead it requires another self-consciousness to mirror it back to itself. Here the effect of desire upon self-consciousness means that selfhood will be “an absolutely restless infinity” (§169) which we can see in Lacan’s notion of desire very clearly (though “desire” is not strictly equivalent for the two). As desirous beings we eat, drink, etc satisfying our desires directly and assert our individuality and agency in this process and doing so we also deny or disavow our absolute dependance upon the world as “the universal substance” of life (§171). That was simple desire or animal desire perhaps, but we also desire recognition and thus we require other self-consciousnesses (as we will see below).

The I of self-consciousness takes itself to be the absolute end of all activities and it is the measure of its world; the objects in the world are only what they are for desire, for this I, beyond that they are nothing (here I mean mere objects, not other subjects). Desire then is self as negativity relating to its world. But a “self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness” (§177) and it is not a self-consciousness without this other, so the recognition component of desire is crucial to show why it is only at this point in the book that we enter history per se.