“I FEEL FOR YOU”: MOVING THROUGH POETRY’S AESTHETIC DILEMMA
By T.C. Marshall
“I feel for you.” We say it all the time, and know what we
mean. When poetry says it, as it does in some way in nearly every poem whether
avant-garde or old hat, it means “sympathy” and something much more complex. Poetry’s
aesthetic power presumes to be able to feel for us, guiding us into more
feelings and perceptions. It works on the basis of the poet’s own perceptions,
whether they be about capitalism or flowers or the workings of language itself.
This is the basis of aisthesis that
we have given to the arts in our society. That old Greek term for
“feeling-perception” has ruled our arts for so long we’ve “got to callin’ it
home.” It may be time now to call it “burnt out.”
A recent blurb for a book recommended by SPD shows that the
language of feelings is still predominant in our field: this book is said to “put 27,000 rays of light into
your body and then take you through the ‘sads’,” while it takes you on “an
exploration of love—in its many incarnations—in a world of violence,
distraction and inevitable disappointment.” This kind of aesthetic praise is
applied even to works said to be advancing our art beyond old ways. So far, though,
we are advancing without advancing our critical vocabulary much beyond the
aesthetic. We need to get a grip on what we’re doing, so we are looking for
concepts that might help.
There are a few key writers who are opening pathways to a
fresh approach. French philosopher Jacques Rancière has put a historical
framework on the progression of the focusing modes employed by the arts through
the ages, from poiesis to mimesis to the current aisthesis. Poetry exemplifies this quite
well, but any of the arts can show how we have moved through and accumulated
techniques from those three basic modes: the iconic, the dramatic, and the
aesthetic. These core three include naming and image-making power, the force of
dramatic action imitated from the world or from imagination, and personal
feeling-perceptions being given form. Whether we are reading a Rothenberg
anthology and admiring Native American naming songs collected by Frances
Densmore or following Keats “Lamia” or Rukeyser’s report of the library fire,
we participate in one or more of these approaches and absorb the insights in
the words. As we participate in reading, we sense what the Ojibwa poet saw in
the white-tailed deer, we sympathize with the lamia in imagination, and we get
the great effect of the burning building on anyone who knows and loves the city
and its art. Each of these poetic stances works with the others to shape
further feeling perceptions. We have grown in our art as we have developed
writing and reading techniques to allow perceptions to do their job in
different ways.
The challenge today, though, is to move beyond these modes
in the direction of something new that poetry and other arts have been
developing. It appears throughout collections of recent performance and
installation art like that anthologized by Anthony Downey. The roots of that work
go back to dada and cinema and what Downey calls “changes to both subject
matter and forms of engagement” in our increasingly politicized times (10). For
at least a century, thinkers and writers have been questioning the
possibilities of the aesthetic approach and framework. Terry Eagleton has
written a study focused on the way that the aesthetic is linked to bourgeois
ideology. For those who wish to move beyond the bourgeois form of society or to
describe how society is already doing so, a new concept of art is needed. There
are those, like Bifo Berardi and Rancière himself, who wish to use the concept and
terms of the aesthetic to indicate and energize the way forward. This is partly
because we have let the term “aesthetic” come to represent all of art’s
efforts. The historicization provided by Eagleton and Rancière, however,
indicates how aisthesis was moved
into position by the rising bourgeoisie to meet certain ideological needs. Just
as aesthetics arose “naturally” from poiesis
and mimesis with the addition of a
new focus, something new is now arising from the self-limitations of the
aesthetic as we increasingly feel the need to critique bourgeois ideology. That
personal focus on feeling-perceptions once affirmed the social power of individual
insights; these were to be gained from properly aligning one’s energies and
attention with the hegemony or with “the truth.” Even in later periods (like
Romanticism, etc.) of critiquing the “powers that be,” the individual artist
became the new star recognized by the bourgeoisie. We still mostly have it that
way, but a few such stars have begun critiquing the whole shebang and opening a
new framework.
That framework hasn’t got a name yet, but there is one
parallel to the other modes that describes this new work well. Work that does
or inspires critical thinking and goes beyond aesthetic expression of
feeling-perceptions could be called “noetic.”
Noesis
is the old Greek term for the complement of bodily feeling-perception that
comes from engaging instead the critical faculties of the mind (noos). This does not deny or exclude or
defeat the aesthetic, but it helps open the direction that much performance art
and some poetry has begun to take in the last couple of decades. This work is
greatly about under-cutting personal insight with social and historical
perspective, and exposing the cultural contradictions in our usual perceptions
and the expressions of them in everything from conversation to art and
politics.
It is the “politics” side of things that has moved art in
this direction. Serious as that may be, there is often quite a bit of humor in
this shift--though not just spoof or sarcasm. To push beyond the
self-seriousness of the aesthetic takes the kind of outside perspective that
humor uses. Freud has shown us that humor is, like poetry, an art of
condensation and an energy-saving way of “working through” contradictions. The
need to work out the tensions of social contradiction has affected both “high”
and “low” art in our time. Popular artists from Frank Zappa to Whoopi Goldberg
make us laugh even as they make us see what we’ve accepted too blithely. The
premiere artist along these lines is one a little less popular than those two
but just as grounded in both pop idioms and avant-garde ideas and practices.
His name was Herman Blount till it morphed into Le Sony’r Ra and then Sun Ra.
His practice was exemplary because it boldly shows how an artist can have fun,
present effective critique, and politicize at the same time. The musician and
composer Sun Ra did it with costumes, performance styles, improv, and
supplementary writings and drawings. He was always already one more thing than
you thought he was. He played the early Bob Dylan’s game more thoroughly and
necessarily than Robert Zimmerman ever did. If Ra thought you might think him
one thing, he added another thing to that in an inseparable combo that was designed
to bend your mind. This fellow was a “Negro” American, but he might be also a
spaceman from Saturn in a costume reminiscent of ancient Egypt where Blacks
ruled as America can’t seem to let them. Ra spread facts and hypotheses about
the deep and powerful history of Black peoples, but he also put them in
contexts where they bent the standard thinking and even liberal generosities
meant to help them. Breaking open our perception is the game here, not
emphasizing the insights of feeling perception; “Art is not a mirror held up to
reality but a hammer with which to shape it” –(attributed often to Bertolt
Brecht, but probably from Trotsky). This shaping may be as serious as the
highest achievement of aesthetics, but it may also be as funny as Ra or Whoopi
as it reaches beyond the aesthetic. It works by emphasis upon the conflicted
contexts combined in our readings of our world.
This art of noesis
appears in the work of many of our poets today, as their aesthetic means reach
beyond themselves and capture those contradictions. We may have to begin to use
our tools to determine, though, which are the sincerely noetic works and which fall
back upon the merely aesthetic. We are always free to enjoy any art we like,
but we can be ready to see which works serve us most effectively. When Claudia
Rankine or Mark Nowak pitch their poetry with a visual-art complement, we can
look at it to see what this doubling of contexts allows us to focus upon that
was not there for us before. When Karen Weiser puts poems on the page in a
fresh and almost un-voice-able way, we can ask what it does for our critical
thinking--and not just for our feelings--about the ambiguities in her
perceptions. When Scott McFarland picks up the call-and-response of the human
microphone from Occupy, we can look at how much the poems problematize that
form in taking it from its original context onto the page. When Rae Armantrout
turns a common phrase inside out, we can ask if the new angle troubles the old
stance of simply snarky wisdom. When Jeff Derksen tries new applications of
older forms for social stance and expression, we can ask if the contexts and
vocabularies from Fordist times (for example) actually produce different
readings of “our own stake in the present” post-Fordist era (125). Noetics is a
new tool, but its future has been forming in the last few decades of our poetic
past.
So far, aesthetic liberalism rests content with the contents
of the world we have known for awhile. If Rankine’s pictures are just more
aesthetically selected illustrations (as her readings recently have suggested),
if McFarland isn’t knocking down the individual voice the way Occupy did, etc.,
then we can say what they have failed to do. However, if we can see a doubled
context at work in these works to shift the ground of thinking and feeling,
then we can use them to move forward. What a poem cancels is as important as
what it asserts. As one poet once said, it all must happen “slant.” This is not
because direct truths are too bright for our eyes, but it is because direct statements
cover their own contradictions too easily. These can be expressed only slantwise.
And that keeps us from standing too firmly for them. Noesis can re-introduce the dialectic tensions in any thought; it
may do so through performance, expression, extra imagery, or what Ra called
“myth-science” as he brought “the future” to bear on the present. Marx wrote in
The Eighteenth Brumaire, “The social
revolution of the 19th century cannot draw its poetry from the past,
but only from the future.” Noesis is
the future that’s already happening. It rises naturally from the aesthetic
regime (as Rancière calls it) and its contradictions.
The grounds for such an approach to the future appear in
many places, with a particular focus in the theoretical concepts of homi
bhabha. In a book explicating his idea of a “third space” where cultural
opposition arises “beyond” cultural belonging, bhabha quotes Frantz Fanon who
says: “… the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” and
“it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will
initiate my cycle of freedom” (qtd. pp. 8 & 9). Professor bhabha sees this
as using the future to approach the present, and he suggests an “unhomely”
thinking to reach beyond the “fetishism of identities” and the concept of
“roots” (9). He aims at “the study of the way in which cultures recognize
themselves through their projections of ‘otherness’” (12). Through such
thinking, we can show both “how historical agency is transformed through the
signifying process” and “how the historical event is represented in a discourse
that is somehow beyond control” (12).
This risky “beyond” is an unlocated space where binary contradictions are
exposed in an “interstitial intimacy” that “questions binary divisions through
which … spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed” and displays the
“double edge” of “hybridity” necessary to “bridging the home and the world”
(13). Underneath his fancy professor-talk, bhabha is exposing the actual
“hybridity” of thinking and speaking or writing. His “third space” is neither
here nor there. He calls it “unrepresentable” (37), meaning that it cannot be
directly or simply represented. This is the major challenge of our poetic task,
presenting both the “is” and the “isn’t” of things—including our very own
stances or positions. For bhabha, the “third space” is called that because it
is not the position of the speaker or that of the hearer. He shows how the very
structure of language creates such a space that presents their contexts
“beyond” each of them. The professor also shows how that can emphasize the lack
of fixed cultural meaning and the possibilities of re-reading and re-historicization
focused upon by “third world” writers like Wilson Harris of Guyana in his
concept of the “assimilation of contraries” (qtd. in bhabha 38).
A.J. Greimas revived Aristotle’s four-square logic as the
Semiotic Square to show how contraries and contradictions blend in such critical
thinking. His project was focused on how we develop meaning and express it
through such doubled sets of contraries and their contradictions. He meant to
help scholars of linguistics and semiotics to express a dynamic view of meaning
and its slippages, enjoyable enough for poets too, but the Greimasian Square
also opens a way to embrace contraries and contradictions together in an
unresolvable sort of sense. The most famous example outside Greimas’ own
writings is in Molière of all places. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, dit Molière,
wrote a spoof of The Bourgeois Gentleman
of his time who was using his newly minted wealth to buy lessons in culture. In
it, the student asks his tutor to teach him the difference between poetry and
prose. They are defined in a way that foreshadows the doubled logic of the
Square; each is what it is by being the opposite of the other, and the
bourgeois gentleman is content to know that poetry is all that is not prose and
prose is all that is not poetry. Ron Silliman made some use of this humor and
intelligence in “Towards Prose,” but missed the simplicity of its blunt tom-foolery.
Where the basic contrariety is the standard cultural one of poetry/prose and
the extrapolation of its meaning goes into the matching pair of
not-prose/not-poetry, the real difference is in how you apply the terms to any
specific instance and how you deal with the contexts for each assertion. It may
seem like another professors’ game, but it helps with thinking about contraries
or their contradictions that are culturally constructed and have no absolute
fixed basis—like poetry/prose, or black/white in the racial sense. Greimas
simplifies the questions by emphasizing the arbitrary logic and the slippage between
contexts that is involved. This opens the way for a description of work like Ra’s
or Whoopi’s or the similar moves in poets’ works, the “assimilation of
contraries” and critique of their contradictions.
As we watch Whoopi Goldberg flip back her hair with a blonde-surfer-girl
shake of the head as she utters a phrase in surfer-ese, she is for us both
“black” and at least “not-black” if not “white,” though she is clearly
“not-white” in her person and that’s part of what makes us laugh and admire her
talent for “willing suspension of disbelief.” It is not simply “irony” at work
here. It is a matter of doubling the truths of what one tells or at least how
one tells it. If there is “identification” going on, it is not with either the
character or the actress except as she has chosen this doubling out of her own
life’s dilemmas. Where poetry attempts to raise sympathy, through
identification or other means, it falls back into the “feel for you” mode and
succumbs to the weaknesses of the aesthetic. Where poetry merely mocks the
hegemonic language and thinking that empower aesthetic distances and
sympathies, it also falls short of critical ability. The Aesthetic has become
an institution, like The Bank or The Stock Exchange, and it has obscured other
modes for art so thoroughly that we now use this term for art itself. If we
want to deconstruct that ignorance and assumed hegemony, we need a fresh
articulation of what art can do. The concept of the noetic is designed to
create this ground-clearing, not by erasing but by adding possibilities and
recognitions that expand the space for thinking. Opening the noetic space can
un-do the self-limitations of aesthetic practice by making them tools in our
critical thinking.
What we can look for as we expand into the noetic space, taking
the aesthetic with us, is greater depth of meaning because of greater
questioning of contexts. Rancière has stopped short of this questioning while
bhabha opens it but hands it back to aesthetics, but our poets have followed
their noses beyond them both. We have many practitioners of delimited doubling,
finding or creating ways to multiply critical angles in a kind of cubism of
intellectual perspective. It is, at least, “bifocal” and gets its depth like
the eyes and mind do. We all can benefit from shaping a way to talk in noetic
terms, either as readers and critics or as writers. We can benefit from
examples of how noetic work is already being done and from alignment of the
concept with what we have had and gotten too used to during the aesthetic
regime. My
review of Or, The Ambiguities by Karen Weiser and Still Dirty by David Lau in this
issue of
GR attempts to unfold their noetic questioning. They make use
of
poiesis,
mimesis, and
aisthesis
as part a basis for a practice of
noesis.
In
poiesis, with its emphasis on
shaping, we get imagery for all the senses along with sound patterning and the
commemorations of naming. This is the basic set of functions for poetry claimed
by everyone from Plato to Gertrude Stein. Here, poets ask readers to envision
and celebrate the images we create.
In
mimesis, with its imitations of worldly
action, the image is broadened to include an unfolding “moving” picture. We get
likenesses and characterizations as the basis for story and its conflicts. Readers
are asked to follow and “identify,” sometimes simply by awakening stories
stored in us culturally, as we observe the struggle for values. In
aisthesis, feelings become the basis for
our perception of values and truths that we “get.” Readers give themselves to
experiencing thought through the form that a poet has given it, and they have
an adventure-in-meaning parallel to that of the writer. Where the critical
thinking of
noesis enters, we ask
readers to undergo their own process of thinking-through our social
contradictions. Together, we put values and assumptions into question by
doubling their contexts. This practice leads us into “unendliche analyse” and
often to humor with its almost inexpressible insights. Weiser and Lau’s latest
books serve to show each of these elements at work as they open the depths of
thinking, with dead seriousness or with sharp laughs, this way.
Such depths are also found in a variety of other
contemporary writers who have been led to question the aesthetic approach.
Eileen R. Tabios’ work with materials from her adopted son Michael’s school
studies makes brilliant use of re-framings that keep the context shifting and
meanings slipping. The integration of her work “Orphaned Algebra” with pieces
spinning off from it by j/j hastain goes even further. My early review of this
work attempts to detail some of that. Tabios’ subsequent 147 Million Orphans (MMXI-MML) also invites other writers to engage
with this material and the haybun form. The variety of angles achieved this way
serves to open contexts and readings even as each haybun unfolds a haiku of
words taken from Michael’s studies. It is simply elegant. In a more abrupt and
occasionally abrasive way, Heriberto Yepez creates an opening by attacking the
conventions of art in his “Notes on art’s crap” as part of his work Against the Police Concept of Art. Statements
6 & 7 in his list of 11 align perfectly with Rancière’s concept of social “policing.”
It was this insight into how an aesthetic mode might move its audience to
police its own attitudes that actually led Rancière to frame the historical
progression of modes up through a questioning of the aesthetic. Yepez’
sentences are much more blunt in their accusations about art’s function in
hegemony. “Police is the ruling concept of art” and “Works of art are part of
the pacification apparatus” join other bits like “Every element of art polices
the others” and “Aesthetic contemplation is counter-insurgency in the form of
delight.” These bold statements recontextualize art as a reactionary force and
lead to claims like “Art will not change the world.”
That is the point. To change the world, the ways of reading
the world must change. Our minds must change, not just in what they think but
in how they think. Eagleton has explained the place of the bourgeois aesthetic
as “a contradictory, double-edged concept” that “figures as a genuinely
emancipatory force” while also involving “a kind of ‘internalised repression,’
inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies of those” who practice
it (28). As it clings to aesthetical ways that can’t help but fulfill those two
sides of their bourgeois function, art plays a part in slowing or suppressing
social change. Yepez is looking at this when he pushes the idea that the “transformation
of the world will involve the destruction of every form of art,” and comments
that “Art’s self-destruction is not enough.” I’m going to take impetus from
that ferocious angle to suggest that art’s function as aesthetics has trapped
it in a cycle of its own inevitable self-destruction. Our way is now clear for moving
our art forward, past what has been “itself” in its aesthetic conception. We
can now ask our readers to add the space in their thought for enacting the dialectics
of contradiction and its resolutions in an unending analysis. There is every
chance that this will play out as a kind of humor complementary to the
seriousness of the thinking involved; Zizek has reminded us about how Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, insisted that
historical tragedy often repeats itself as farce “so that mankind may part happily with its past” (1-2). As we
raise the tragic absurdities of our times not just before our senses but in our
overall sense of things, we can also start to have a lot more fun than just
absorbing sentiments and nodding at their correctness—personal or political.
Reading List
Armantrout, Rae. Money Shot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP,
2011.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. LA:
Semiotexte, 2012.
bhabha, homi k. the location of culture. London: Routledge,
1994.
Brecht, Bertolt. Wikiquote
online at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht.
Derksen, Jeff. The Vestiges. Vancouver: Talon, 2013.
Downey, Anthony. Art and Politics Now. London: Thames
& Hudson, 2014.
Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990
Freud, Sigmund. The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious.
NY: Penguin, 2002.
Greimas, A.J. On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic
Theory. Minneapolis:
Minnesota,
1987.
Harris, Wilson. Tradition, the Writer and Society.
London: New Beacon, 1973.
Lau, David. Still Dirty. Oakland: Commune, 2016.
Marshall, T.C. “Cats in Their
Hats: a review of six books” (incl. the
relational elations
of “Orphaned Algebra”) in Galatea Resurrects #20 @blogspot (May
2013).
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
NY: International, 1963.
McFarland, Scott. O Human Microphone. 1913 Press, 2014.
Nowak, Mark. Coal Mountain Elementary. Minneapolis:
Coffee House, 2009. With
photographs
by Ian Teh.
Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Trans. Debra
Keates & James
Swenson.
Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Rpt. 2010. Original 2001.
---. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose.
Minneapolis: U Minn,
1999.
Original 1995.
---. The Politics of Aesthetics. Ed. & Trans. Gabriel Rockhill.
London:
Bloomsbury,
2004. Rpt. 2013. Original 2000.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis:
Graywolf, 2016.
Silliman, Ron. “Towards
Prose” in The New Sentence. NY: Roof,
1987, 94-108.
SPD recommendation for The Idiot on Fire by Brad Casey from
Megatron (in e-mail
22
September, 2016).
Stein, Gertrude. “Poetry and
Grammar” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am:
Writings
and Lectures 1909-45. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967.
125-147.
Tabios, Eileen R. 147 Million Orphans (MMXI-MML). Finland:
Gradient, 2014.
---, and j/j hastain. the relational elations of “Orphaned
Algebra.” NY: Marsh Hawk,
2012.
Weiser, Karen. Or, The Ambiguities. Brooklyn: Ugly
Duckling, 2015.
Yepez, Heriberto. “Notes on
art’s crap.” In Hache blog, as part 2 under “Against the
Police-Concept
of Art.” 23 June 2015. http://hyepez.blogspot.com/index.html#291136051933501245
Zizek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London:
Verso, 2009.
*****
The Rev. Dr. T.
C. Marshall studies French and Slovenian Philosophy in the redwood forest with
salamanders and mushrooms all around. He also teaches in town at a college that
struggles to serve the community of yuppies, farmworkers, surfers, and
aesthetes in Santa Cruz County. There is a safety pin on each of his jean
jackets now.
