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.

Force and Understanding, section 3 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS (cont.)
III. FORCE AND THE UNDERSTANDING: APPEARANCE AND THE SUPERSENSIBLE W0RLD

In §§’s 132-42 the notion of force appears, which is initially a substantial being of sorts, but is reduced by the end to an insubstantial aspect of appearance. As with the last two sections, consciousness is here trying to locate truth in its most recent conceptualization of the object. So, if in sense-certainty “Seeing and Hearing have been lost to consciousness” and in perception “consciousness has arrived at thoughts” such that consciousness now has a concept of the object as an “unconditioned universal” (§132). So this newly conceived object “has returned into itself from its relation to an other and has thus become Notion in principle” but only “in principle” because the subject does not recognize itself in the object (§132). So consciousness has recognized instability in the object, an oscillation between it as a One and Many (§134). So if perception could only think the internal otherness and negation in the object as inessential until the moment when its perspective collapsed, understanding sees its internal otherness as essential and given to begin with. Force then is the very movement between One and Many, between recognizing the diverse properties as shared universals and then uniting them in a discrete object (§§’s 136-8). Thought is then force as well, the subject is the one who recognizes differences within a unity and the unity that is hidden behind differences (though it seems that understanding is not clear on this yet). At the same time, force is a physical notion, it is both the muscle power that allows me to leap into the air and the gravitational pull that brings me back to the ground. But this reciprocal canceling of force doesn’t seem to embrace cause or purpose. And the idea itself breaks up into two parts, force as what we see in actions like jumping and falling back to earth and force as something which seems to lie behind all such examples and which makes sense of them (§§’s 141-2).

The second movement of this section is found in §§’s 143-53 where consciousness posits a supersensible world, a beyond which Hegel calls an “incomplete idealism.” This beyond is really the interior of things, but it has been objectified or reified as lying beyond the world of appearances while somehow also being their essence, the core reality which sustains them as lawful (§143). The understanding posits the law-like supersensible world as the positive truth behind the world of appearances (§144). This beyond which is actually the inner truth of appearances is not a positive but a negative (§146-7). But understanding-consciousness sees this beyond as the realm of law, a stable fixed realm which governs all the change and merely apparent flux (§§148-50). Beyond the specific laws Hegel sees the principle of law as a necessity (§151). Specific laws are always for Hegel an expression of a deeper law he gives some physical “laws” as examples and shows the more encompassing law that sustains them (§§152-3).

Understanding having posited force, was driven to posit laws, and then in a third movement here §§’s 154-65 explanation enters the account as scientific understanding (dependent upon law) and tries to mediate between essence and appearance or between law and force. It appears that law might be something that we posit rather than something in the things considered (§154) but this cannot be solely the work of the subject the object is itself caught up in the laws and the supersensible world we posited (§155). But this assertion of a realm of law is tainted by the shiftiness or flux of the world of forces that it was trying to explain. This leads to the idea of the “inverted world” (§§157-9) which runs something like this: we have the sense-world, and then the supersensible world of laws that explains it, but then we posit a 2nd supersensible world which inverts the 1st one (as the 1st was already an inversion of the sense world which contains it as well. So this inverted world likewise contains the preceding two and unites the oppositions of all into “Infinity” (§§160-1). All of this then would be “explanation” (?)... it seems so.* In the final paragraphs (§§163-6) Hegel tells us (we post-Kantian philosophers and observers of the progression of Spirit) that Understanding still has not recognized how it, as subject, is entwined within all of this and that the world is not external to it, though this realization is coming...

* The “inverted world” stuff is some of the least comprehensible to me. At one level I feel like positing the inverted world is simply there to allow Hegel to pull off the final aufhebung so that we can move to the next form of consciousness. But then the conclusion of it, by ditching the dualism and reinstating the supersensible into the interior of things seems somehow ‘right’ to me - or at least more tenable than the dualist view (with its echoes of Platonic forms and Kantian noumena and so forth). What I lack is a clear sense of why Understanding is compelled to posit the inverted world at all.

Perception, section 2 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS (cont.)
II. PERCEPTION: OR THE THING AND DECEPTION

The object, which had been radically particular for sense-certainty has become a thing which unites some set of universal properties. The donut is now a torus, it is golden brown on the outside, it has a specific size and weight, and many other properties as well. Once consciousness transcends sense-certainty it takes universality as a given and perceives the universality of every thing it considers. These properties are, for perception, properties of the thing and they remain properties of it regardless of and unrelated to the subject who discerns them (§113).

But this concept of the object will also collapse (§§115-7). The reason why is that all that perception can get hold of is these properties, and not the thing in which they inhere. The properties cannot be the thing itself (being a torus is true of both the donut and an inner tube) and yet for perception what else is the thing but the unity of these properties?

Perception then has to tun to the subject and see if the object can be maintained somehow by finding where it is that the subject, the perceptual knower, has been in error. Here perception has recourse to the idea of primary and secondary properties in hopes that while some are shared that one might be revealed that is inarguably only of this unique particular thing (§119). But this endeavor also fails as every property, by virtue of its universality, cannot be the one true and absolute property of this particular thing. To assume that there are primary properties that cannot be perceived is a self-refuting claim as it situates these properties outside of perception and there is then nothing for these properties to be attributed to. A second attempt is made to ground this concept of the object; now perception attempts to claim that the object is a One that unites all these properties in just this singular fashion and coherent fashion in the perception of the subject (§119). Here though we are very close to where we were with sense-certainty trying to delimit truth to only this relation of this I looking at this object. The problem here is that we must cut this One (donut) off totally from all others such that it is what it is utterly in being what it is (making it a thing with properties that somehow does not have properties) and yet we cannot but perceive that there are properties shared. The properties of a thing allow us both to recognize it as distinct and to differentiate it from others and we cannot close off either side of these determinations. So the subject of perception must maintain that the object is a One that unites the Many (properties) coherently, that is without dissolving into a mere collection of properties without any one-ness to be found. The third attempt to solve this problem claims that the internal differences in the object have been misrecognized, they are not essential to the object but appear only when it is compared to others and thus are relational issues (§124). This is what Hegel has in mind in §123 where he says that the unity of the object is for perception “disturbed by other things.”

But this attempt to make otherness inessential fails. Hegel summarizes the failure of this last attempt in §128 where he writes “the object is in one and the same respect the opposite of itself: it is for itself, insofar as it is for another, and, it is for another, insofar as it is for itself.” Which is to say that the thing cannot be what it is unless it is distinguished from other things, its otherness from them is part of what constitutes it. This might be stated negatively as well by saying that strict being-for-self is self-refuting as it denies otherness, and if the thing’s others are negated as other then it loses all distinction and independence as a thing unto itself (§126). As for perception the object and the knowing subject are mutual others, the results reached here invalidate both the concept of the object and that of the subject once again driving the progress of spirit onward yet again...

Sense-Certainty, section 1 of "Consciousness" from the Phenomenology of Spirit

A. CONSCIOUSNESS
I. SENSE-CERTAINTY: OR THE 'THIS' AND 'MEANING'

Sense-certainty first situates truth in the object to be known. This donut right here, right now. Hegel focuses not so much on the object known as the designation of it as this object found here and right now, showing that the idea of a “this” always requires that it be here & now, but that all three terms betray the absolutely particular immediacy that they are thought to mean when uttered. Hegel gives examples (night & day, tree & house) but reminds us in §97 that “language is more truthful” as we cannot operate in language without universals. We are compelled to recognize that this, like now, and here are all universals, terms used to point at a particular, but which cannot themselves be reduced to any particular and which thus embody something of the “negative in general” (§96) in that by transcending the particular they also negate it. What I claimed as an is has become a was, and my claim, though spoken with the conviction of its particular truth has lost any grasp of particularity by being shown to depend upon universal considerations.

When the object fails to anchor the truth for sense-certainty, it turns back upon itself as subject, assured that this I that knows is at least certain of itself. But I, like this, is a shifter - it points to a particular concrete subject when spoken by such a subject. Here self-referential certainty my sense of myself as knower is found to depend on universals whose full scope is denied by sense-certainty trying to maintain its faith only in the here and now of near infinite particularity as immediate truth.

Once the subject’s certainty has collapsed, truth is looked for in the relation of subject to object. Truth was “expelled from the object” and “driven back to the ‘I’” (§100) but there was no certainty assured there either. Truth then must be right here in the now in which I as subject know the donut as object if I “stick firmly to one immediate relation” (§104). Surely this relation is unique, immediate and particular whether object and subject are dependent upon universals or not. But this simply restages the same problem for sense-certainty as this relation can only be one of pointing and thus a reiteration of this in a new guise. Also notable is that while refuting the object and the subject in nonetheless maintains them within its new claim about relation which also fails.

Sense-certainty can only maintain itself by denying time, process,  and mediation (language for instance). But in this third moment it becomes clear that the supposed truths of sense-certainty presupposed a universality without realizing it, that the various heres, nows and thises were each denoting only “a mediated simplicity, or a universality” (§98). As such a new concept of subject and knower are required...

The "Introduction" to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

§§73-7 are concerned with knowledge, specifically as “apparent knowledge.” Hegel replays many philosophical perspectives here without naming them as such. What he finds faulty with the ways that knowledge has been conceived are these:... Whether knowledge is an instrument for relating to the world, or a medium through which we understand the world, then the world in either case must have a different character than knowledge. There is then always a gap of sorts between knower and world, or better said, between knowing and the object to be known. This would be a sort of basic “realism” that he is criticizing. The real problem here (which is a consequence of the dualism implied) is that if we cannot really know the object but only what our medium or instrument can reveal of it, then we must also ask whether we have any direct access to the medium or instrument as well. Thus there is an infinite regress involved in thinking about knowledge in this way. This epistemological problem “goes all the way down.” This is most clearly given in §74. If we assume subject/object dualism this epistemological swamp is unavoidable. Modern philosophy (think Descartes) falls into this trap by assuming that it knows the mind better than it knows the world, that is, that we can know our thoughts directly (rather than inferring them) but that outside of the mind there is great uncertainty. Such a way of starting out that reaches this impasse every time (thus Kant’s phenomena/noumena divide for instance). The consequence of Hegel’s thought here is that epistemology alone can never allow us to reach the absolute. Epistemology is stuck in a neurotic quandry, it wants to know before it can know.

In §76 Hegel begins to give his solution to this problem which is science or better ‘systematic science’ (to use the German, there can be no real Wissen that is not Wissenschaft). Where philosophy had hitherto tended to divide sharply ideas from appearances, Hegel recognizes that philosophy and science must begin from appearances and that the distinction between knowledge and appearance is internal to the world of appearances itself. Science though, gets better, it corrects itself and does arrive at ways of distinguishing appearance from reality - and, as will be thematic throughout this book - this discovering of error is crucial to moving forward and moving forward will allow us to discover truths which will themselves be temporal (not timeless).

§78 (and after) give us “natural consciousness” which we must understand not as ‘common sense’ but as a form of knowing which is presumed to be ahistorical and asocial and which anchors our basic sense of our self as situated, it is our stance toward the world in its immediacy and seeming sufficiency. We try to sustain this, to prove it to ourselves as an adequate knowledge of the objects it knows. There is an erotics here too as our attachment (cathexis) to these ideas sustains us as such. That we find that our concept of knowing does not prove adequate to our concept of the object of our knowing is what leads to the “despair” Hegel mentions repeatedly (akin to when a quilting point ceases to quilt and our fantasy collapses).

While Hegel throughout requires skepticism, he faults Descartes and the Empiricists (it seems) for assuming that they can know their own minds. This too must be doubted. So the progress of the Phenomenology is both bildung and via negativa. It is positively accumulative and insistently negativizing.

Hegel is also parting ways with logic as it has been thought since Aristotle (and still is generally). That is, if a theory is found to be contradictory, for the average logician, this means it is fundamentally wrong. But Hegel in this instance is working more like how a natural scientist works in assuming that every theory will face exceptions and find internal contradictions, but the scientist does not discard everything, rather he tries to correct the theory so that it still explains what it had explained, but now accounts for the variance and provides an explanation of why the preceding version of the account failed to do so. The new account that is produced to solve the issues in the previous account is seen (though only in retrospect) as necessary. It is easy to overdetermine this ‘necessity’ if one doesn’t abandon the logic that Hegel is distancing himself from. That is, if in version 1 of the theory contradictions are discovered, and version 2 resolves them, there is nothing which requires that there might not be other versions which might do so as well, as such version 2 is not necessary in a logical sense, only sufficient. What Hegel seems to be saying is that version 2, while merely sufficient at the time as a solution to the problem, is then built upon until at last the end is reached, and from that vantage it will have become necessary. In Bernstein’s audio lectures he quotes Gillian Rose as having said that “Going forward the Phenomenology is a gamble and retrospectively it is a necessity.” (This is not unlike beginning a sentence, where the punctuation will retroactively constitute what it will have meant.)

§80, here we get some idea, at least formally speaking, of what the “end” toward which knowledge progresses must mean. “...where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion.” Until such a point is reached, there will be no “satisfaction.”

§81-9 are concerned then with the problem of the criterion of truth and how Hegel overcomes it. This was foreshadowed in the “knowing before you can know” above. Hegel solves this problem not by providing an answer but by reframing the question. The dialectical method will be the solution to this false problem. Hegel suggests that all consciousness is minimally self-consciousness, and all self-consciousness requires that I can distinguish myself from the objects I know, so, every form of consciousness has inbuilt within it a concept of knowing and a concept of the object that such knowing requires and an idea about how these two are related. The way the Phenomenology progresses then is by each form of consciousness being driven to despair by realizing that its concept of the object and knowing are inadequate and providing a better concept of each. The dialectical method is thus both how it is that we reach this despair and how we emerge from it.

To conclude with the Introduction we should note that what is unique in Hegel’s thought relative to virtually all philosophy before him, is that rather than seeing appearances as the obstacle to knowledge of essence or Idea or whatever, he makes it the only access we can ever have that could get us there.

Is there a DISSERTATION in here somewhere?

The time is fast approaching when I will need to have a topic for a dissertation and I can at this moment only admit to my uncertainty about what that topic will be. I had entertained the idea, prior to returning from Germany, that it would concern itself with 'discourse' in some sense - this on account of my thesis having been on Lacan's theory of discourse, the prospect at that time of working more with discourse ala Laclau, and because I had tentatively explored having Angermüller as the Mainz-member for my dissertation committee. But, while I retain interest in Lacan's thought about this matter, I have too many disputes with Laclau's (to my mind totalizing) tendencies in that regard and while what Angermüller does with discourse is intriguing, I cannot see myself developing or adapting his approach to my areas of interest.

The thought then emerges that I should foreground those areas of attention and interest in my ruminations on this problem. Here, I can at least say something about my hopes. I want to develop some sort of theoretical model or collection of concepts that will be applicable with whatever situational modifications to; poetry (of the sort that I care about); fiction (and here a canonical, if modern or contemporary author seems a smart choice); film (not Lynch or Hitchcock but something cool still), and; art (possibly performance art in some sense, though object art is also a viable option).

& I then wonder if my interest in the body might be of help in that. My interests here are all over the map (from sound poetry to fashion, the body "overwritten with signifiers" to the voice as object), and that is both energizing and somewhat discouraging. There is a body of scholarship on the "body" that is of a size already that it would take years to begin to feel I had a good grasp on the debates, issues and theories already out there. Some narrowing and pruning would have to be done to even consider this as a reasonable possibility in the time remaining to me to complete a PhD, and the question must be asked as well; do I want to use the entire time I have to do that or might it not be better to just get the damned dissertation done? 

So, in a very lame attempt to narrow the field, while retaining the body and adding other areas of extant interest and curiosity, I have the following possible knot of things out of which to derive a central question (or questions) around which to structure a book (which is how I prefer to think of the diss for a variety of reasons). 

Language Embodied / Embodied Language 

• What psychoanalysis, Freud and Lacan preeminently, have to contribute to understanding the body's imbrication in language. 
• Voice, a unique site of interface between the two, particularly at its more extreme points or edges - sound poetry, glossolalia, aphasias, psychosis as well as in modes which diminish the sense of subjective engagement as with routinized and depersonalized speech or parapraxes as discussed by Freud and others.
• Voice as object.
• Speech (parole) vs Langue, as well as Speech as semiosis (ala Peirce).

It seems to me that this offers at least the potential to allow for some discussion of art (if I limit to performance art or sound art that uses voice), film (obviously, though the devil will be in the details), fiction (this is less obvious, perhaps there are pioneering studies to be made of author's reading their work? the text-heavy and disembodied nature of most fiction is harder to envision in this daydream I am having), and, without any difficulty poetry (the biggest challenge here perhaps being that I've tended to avoid writing about the stuff I love the most, not wanting to link it to the dynamics of the academic economy).

. . . 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.