Pangrammaticism

The basic idea behind this blog is that there is a fearful symmetry in experience, and that its axis constitutes the difference between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy is conceptual notation (Begriffsschrift). Poetry is emotional notation (Ergriffsschrift).

Consider the following formula, which just occurred to me:

Only an emotion can justify an action, which will always only be motivated by desire.

Well, all these "poetical" terms—emotion, justification (justice), action, motive, desire—have "philosophical" complements (homologues)—concept, verification (truth), perception, sense, belief. The corresponding philosophical formula, then, can be produced simply by substitution:

Only a concept can verify a perception, which will always be sensitized by belief.

There's something a bit forced and odd about it, which I may or may not eventually be able to fix. But the idea that a perception is (merely) "sensitized" by belief and not (of course) actually verified by it would not have occurred to me unassisted by the artifice of a pan-grammar. Desire motivates action but does not justify it. It is the intensity that an emotion brings to experience that ultimately lets us speak of the "justice" implicit in an action. Likewise, it is here suggested, a belief makes a perception "sensitive" but does not yet let us speak of "truth". Rather, we need the clarity of a concept to do so.

Reminders and Encouragement

Wittgenstein (PI§127) tells us that philosophical remarks are really just "reminders for a particular purpose". What's the poetic equivalent? Well, poetry is made out of strophes, not remarks, and it speaks to the heart, not the mind. So, perhaps the work of poet consist simply in assembling encouraging words for particular purposes.

Poem

Clarity is the bright space
between honesty and wisdom,

intensity, a momentary tension
between decency and love.

Wisdom and Love, pt. 2

The pursuit of knowledge must yield to a greater wisdom. The pursuit of power must yield to a higher love. This is only to say that there must be a respect for limits in science; and there must be a respect for freedom in politics.

Poetry is always about the difficulty of love, and this difficulty is determined immediately in institution. An institution is a particular set of difficulties that lovers face. The institution determines how they feel immediately, the "first emotion" in the encounter. What one feels when one is "in love" with someone is the difficulty (if one did not feel anything there would be no difficulty). The poet writes the emotion down, which is to say that the poet presents the difficulty.

Philosophy, likewise, is always about the difficulty of wisdom, which is determined immediately in intuition. An intuition is a particular set of difficulties faced by sophists (intellectuals). Intuition determines what they think immediately, the "key concept" in any commentary. What one thinks when one "gets wise" to something is the difficulty. The philosopher writes the concept down; the philosopher presents the difficulty.

The poet represents love in history. The philosopher represents wisdom in the world. They do so without authority and must rely on their presentations alone. The poet presents the emotions that immediately determine the feeling that arises in an encounter with a person. The philosopher presents the concepts that immediately determine the thought that arises in an encounter with a thing. Both presentations bring precision to any future encounter. This precision is manifest as clarity in philosophy, intensity in poetry.

Clarity is found in the bright space between honesty and wisdom. Intensity is found in the temporary tension between decency and love.

A Crisis of Brute Passion, an Immanent Pathos

Immanence resists by gathering all our power
out of the totality that brute obedience yields to.

Some emotions are brutal. They are free,
not of institution and motility,
but of feeling and obedience;
they are superficial and daring,
not, first and foremost, not isolated.

Our table of emotion emerges from the whole,
a field of brute obedience.

When politics draws its insistence
from a merely democratic manner, the table
can never be surveyed by a poll. It is necessary
only to the elements of the power
that obedience yields to, furnishing emotions that isolate
the elements, inhibiting their disconnection
from the system. Brute obedience associates itself with
motion. It is dependent and needy and not diminished
by any of the usual privations within.

Its lack of power thus repudiates the system,
abandoned and obscured by the reality.
The babelling of this system can yield an argument
only for the wrongness and falseness of its isolation.
If it is to be fully imposed, however, this immanent pathos
requires two books: the one containing the emotions,
the other the ultimatum of brute obedience.

"What is the stupid fucking point?"

Google found no results for this. Why does that distress me?

Light

[Poem traced from a Google translation of Gilson's Philosophie du Moyen Age as quoted in Ezra Pound's "Cavalcanti" (LE, p. 160.)]

"This French summary is most able, and most lucid. It is far more suggestive of the canzone, Donna mi Prega, than the original Latin of Grosseteste." (E.P.)

Light is a substance, a subtle body,
close to intangible, self-engendered, the same,
constant and spreading, spherical.

Take a bright point, my love,
instantly engendered. Around this point,
posit a huge luminous sphere.

The scattered light can be thwarted.

Either it encounters a darkness
and stops, or it reaches the extreme limit,
a scarcity, and the light ends.

The tenuous stuff of which all things are made,
it is also the first shape of the body, and is
what some have called the corporeal.

Contradiction & Seduction

"The civil status [bürgerliche Stellung] of a contradiction," writes Wittgenstein (PI§125), "or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem." It would be nice to have as clear a sense of the problem of poetry. To that end, note first that the philosopher does not deal in contradictions as such. The philosopher's problem is not to actually contradict people, but to clarify the "civil status" of the contradictions their lives lead them to. Moreover, it is the contradictions that stem from our entanglement in our rules of reasoning (logic) that constitute the problem. "This entanglement in our own rules is what we want to understand (i.e., get a clear view of)", and this will "throw light on our concept of meaning something".

Well, there are rules of passion as there are rules of reason, and our passions, just like our reasons, lead us into trouble. The poet's problem concerns just that trouble. Now, to contradict is to "speak against", and in this case we are interested in the way logic leads us to speak against ourselves. The poet, by contrast, is interested in the rules that lead us astray, away from ourselves and towards another. These are, of course, the rules of love.

The troubadour, specifically, is interested in the rules that might lead his lady to imbibe "the one obvious remedy" (E.P.). As a lover, he is interested in that remedy, of course. But as an artist he is interested, first and foremost, in the rules that keep them apart, which are also, he suspects, part of a larger set of rules, a system of, precisely, poetic justice, that, if it were fully and intensely obeyed, would also bring them together. ("What a wonderful world it would be.") Just as the philosopher ultimately believes that the contradiction indicates a "pseudo-problem", not be solved or resolved but dissolved in complete clarity of the concept, so the poet qua poet seeks that "first intensity" of emotion, the complete intensification of the "rules of the game", i.e., the grammar of the language of love. Here, to be led astray is also to be led back to oneself.

To "lead astray", to seduce.

The civil status of seduction, or its status in civil life: there is the problem of poetry. The poet's task is not to seduce. It is his entanglement in his own rules (his passions) that he has to obey (i.e., get firm grip onbe firmly seized by*). It is not the love itself that is his problem, but the conditions of its possibility.

__________
*I was too eager to construct something like Wittgenstein's "get a clear view of". It is important to distinguish between conceptual and emotional precision. When our concepts are precise they ensure that things are given to us clearly. When our emotions are precise, however, they ensure we are taken with people intensely. A poem presents us with the "chaotic volcanism of first seizingness".

Don't know much about history...

but I do know that I love you.

Andrew drew the association in his comment on my last post. At first, I thought it was just free association, but then I realized how profound it is.

To love someone is to be able to write a poem about them. So, Sam Cooke is really saying:

I don't know much about history, not your personal history or the larger history in which you are implicated, but I know that am I here, that I exist to extricate your beauty from the history of injustice that your body, like all bodies, is subject to, any history, yes, and from its biology and its geography and its algebra.

And if you will do the same for me, if you will untangle the intricate suffering that is my beauty from the history of my own body, then this world in which we both live will be, yes, full of wonder.

I am a poor scholar, Cooke says, but quite a lover, and while our political history reaches too far back into the past for me, and our scientific world too far into the reaches of space and too far into the nucleus of the cell, the surface of your body, your skin, your beautiful skin, is right here with me, and it is not by actually understanding your history, nor is it by uncovering the natural laws that govern the mechanisms of the stars above and the leaves in the trees, and it is not by actually deciphering the political codes that interpret your face and your shoulders and what Tony Tost calls "the genius of your legs" (and, yes, everything in between), that I will fathom this feeling that has captured me. But by "trying to be" an A-student of the immediate presence of this body before me I will, if you'll let me, win your love, extricate your beauty from the prison of space, liberate us from the despotism of time, conquer the universe.

In short: There you are. And here is my poem. Love me.

Right?

I may not know much about art

but I know what a poem is.

Style

"it makes toward me brothers"
Leonard Cohen

A woman's body is the site of much injustice.

Honesty is the appearance of truth, decency the surface of justice. The immediate presence of injustice in the experience (whether hers or mine) of a woman's body is called indecency.

In general, it is the task of a poem to extricate an experience from its history. History weighs like a nightmare on the bodies of women, as it does on a man's experience of the body of a woman.

History impinges on experience immediately in our institutions. A woman's body is an institution, it is a way of doing things. There is, take note, an immediately right and wrong way about a woman's body. A way to do it justice, immediately. But be warned: every body is different.

"No matter how broad and changeable the relative morals of styles may be, there is always an absolute norm to be kept after having heard the admonition of conscience warning against approaching danger; style must never be a proximate occasion of sin." (Pope Pius XII, 1957)

A woman is, willy-nilly, indecently dressed. Whether she is compelled by her culture to dress like a whore or to dress like a nun, or simply to be a whore or a nun, and in whatever degree this be the case in whatever culture and whatever woman we consider, she is, in any case, immediately subject to injustice. (And what a whore dresses like? Yes, that too is decided by culture. A whore's body is an institution, no less than a nun's.)

In general, the injustice is that she is dressed in the first place. From the incompleteness of the attempt to hide her body, indecency immediately follows. (The weather is merely an excuse. A spring day exposes the sham instantly.)

No matter how much pleasure her body might give her, she is willy-nilly too fat or too thin[1], and she is robbed of the pleasure her body could give her. Or she is too chaste or too promiscuous. And she is robbed of the pleasure my body could give her. This is the culture working through the institutions, depriving us, immediately, of pleasure. Pleasure is the momentary experience of beauty, despite everything.

Beauty is difficult. All women are beautiful. All women are... (it's a syllogism).

The difficulty of a woman's beauty is not itself an injustice. A woman's justice, after all, may constitute the difficulty of her beauty.

A woman's body is intensely political—and something ought, indeed, be done about the injustice. But poetry is not politics.

It is the task of a poem to extricate a woman's beauty from the justice and injustice her body is subject to. To extricate her body from its history. To untangle her unfathomable hair from the policies in which it has been implicated.

The poet has only his style with which to do it.

I'm just putting this out there. It is spring.

_____________
Notes:
A number of comments, online and off, have made me recognize certain (perhaps inevitable) weaknesses in this presentation. I will enumerate them here as I find them, fixing them if possible. Feel free to help out.
[1] This image is too tired, perhaps because too true. While I tried to avoid letting this remark target how women (supposedly) feel about their bodies, it can't help but participate in that boring exercise in liberal indignation. The problem is not, of course, how women "feel", but that they, in fact, are too fat, or too thin. But explaining (my way out of what the reader probably thinks I mean by) this is only likely to occasion indignation all the more directly. What is needed here is a different image of how we are, as Cohen put it, "oppressed by figures of beauty". I'll work on it.

Memo to John Keats

Truth is truth, justice justice.
"Beauty is difficult." (Beardsley/Pound)

Locus and Tempo

Intuitions constitute the immediate locus of experience, the "here". Institutions constitute the immediate tempo of experience, the "now". We might say that intuitions locate our experiences and our institutions temper them.

Society as a Subjective Ideality

In my thinking on institutions I'm guided (or spurred) by the work of the economic historian Douglass North, as well as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who wrote the influential The Social Construction of Reality. In reading Berger and Luckamnn I note that when they talk about "institutionalization" under the heading "society as an objective reality" (Part 2) I just, you know, don't buy it. It strikes me like Descartes pretending that he could imagine that he could have no body and yet remain his same old self. Society cannot be an objective reality. Society is always a subjective ideality. Only materiality constitutes an (the) objective reality.

Doctrine of Method

If I am right, there is only one way to experience institutions. You must feel them. That is why only poets are qualified to "study" (wrong word)* institutions. Just as only philosophers are qualified to study (more appropriate there) intuitions. One must think.

Properly speaking (and why not speak properly for a change) there is no "method" to the "study" of institutions. There is a mandate to engage with them.

And not even that. Methods are for scientists. Mandates are for politicians. Poets and philosophers have only their style. A kind of cunning, put in writing.

______
*The right word is "strive" (see "study").

Wisdom and Love

One wants love to pervade one's institutions, just as one wants wisdom to pervade one's intuitions.

Intuitions and Institutions

Kant, I suppose, can be credited with the discovery of intuition as the immediate concern of philosophers. We might say that intuitions are the way the world is here. So we can do "metaphysics" as a study of the structure of intuition and derive our [basic or fundamental] concepts [i.e., categories] from such study. For Kant, this meant that intuitions deliver knowledge to us immediately, they determine the immediate meaning of what we see. It is said that the Kantian Critiques brought about a revolution in philosophy by showing us exactly how concepts might be experienced, "as such" as it were.

I think a revolution in poetry could be brought about by engaging with institutions. Institutions should be the immediate concern of poets. They capture us immediately with their power, they determine the immediate meaning what we do. (Sense is the meaning of the seen. Motive is the meaning of the done.)

Actually, I think a revolution in poetry already has been brought about by this means. But not quite as explicitly as with Kant. I think it is present in Pound and Williams. I think Watten and Waldrop were vaguely aware of it. I think Tony Tost and Ben Lerner and Kate Greenstreet feel it acutely. A poem is capable of presenting the immanent kinesthetics of institutions. (Philosophy, said Kant, was to be grounded in the transcendental aesthetic.) "The immanent kinesthetics of institutions"—the experienced motion of history. How emotions are experienced "as such".

Philosophy and Poetry

"If one tried to advance theses in philosophy," Wittgenstein famously said (PI, §128), "it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them." I just came across a very similar statement about poetry in Anthony Cronin's "The Notion of Commitment" (X 1 (1), 1959, p. 9): "If you can argue with a poem it ceases to be one."

Being St. Teresa

Tonight, Jonathan brings this to our attention:

Remember the example of the flamenca, duende-filled St. Teresa. Flamenca not for entangling an angry bull, and passing it magnificently three times, which she did: not because she thought herself pretty before Brother Juan de la Miseria: nor for slapping His Holiness’s Nuncio: but because she was one of those few creatures whose duende (not angel, for the angel never attacks anyone) pierced her with an arrow and wanted to kill her for having stolen his ultimate secret, the subtle link that joins the five senses to what is core to the living flesh, the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time. (From Lorca's "Theory and Play of the Duende")

To me, this is a bit like Heidegger's question about the meaning of "Being". I mean, suppose these words are actually meaningful (compare: suppose Being constitutes a serious philosophical problem). Suppose that some people know about "the subtle link that joins the five senses to what is core to the living flesh" and some people do not. It's a "secret", after all. Suppose that this flesh is "the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time", and suppose, importantly, that there is some problem that pertains to it. Suppose that an effort is required of us to fathom "the living ocean of love" and those who make this effort (successfully) become saints, that they deserve to become saints. Those who do do not are somehow deficient in "joining the five senses to what is core to the living flesh". (Compare, again, Heidegger: is it possible to "be" more or less?).

One of the important questions that literature raises is that of living "fully". If literature has a contribution to make this is it. I must admit that I don't always have Lorca's faith. After reading Jonathan's book, I don't even know whether the phrase "the living flesh, the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time" is even Lorca's, or some translator's kitsch. But tonight it moves me. I really do wonder whether my five senses are joined properly to that ocean of love. How would I know? How would Heidegger know? What did Lorca know?

Units of Composition

On my other blog, I have been emphasizing the paragraph as the unit of prose composition for academic writers. Scientists and scholars should compose themselves in orderly paragraphs that each make a claim and support it. A standard academic journal article consists of about 40 paragraphs, which are crafted to articulate what the author knows. The text is intended to represent the objects of the author's knowledge.

If the paragraph is the unit of scientific composition, what is the unit of political composition? Let's keep in mind that "composition" here means putting words together articulately for the purpose of producing a representation. Scientific writing represents objects in prose. Political writing represents subjects in prose. So my hunch is that political writers will also compose themselves in paragraphs. These paragraphs, however, will not state claims. They will, perhaps, make promises. Or something like that; threats, perhaps? I haven't quite thought it through yet.

One of the reasons I'm not wholly comfortable with the idea of the paragraph as the unit of both scientific and political composition is that the symmetry does not repeat with philosophy and poetry. Here at the Pangrammaticon, after all, philosophy is supposed to be to science what poetry is to politics. And we already know that the unit of poetic composition is the strophe, while the unit of philosophical composition is the remark. So when we ask about the unit of political composition, we are really asking: what is to the paragraph as the strophe is to the remark?

But what really counts as "political writing?" A bill (i.e., a proposed law)? A speech? A platform? Here, again, it seems most useful to think of such texts as divided up into paragraphs. But instead of representing objects, these texts represent subjects. "We the people..." pervades such texts, even if the author's idea of "who" the people are may vary widely from text to text. The paragraphs of science describe what there is; the paragraphs of politics prescribe who ought to be. "Who ought we to be?" Or, better, "Who ought we to become?" can be considered the fundamental political question.

I'm thinking a great deal about these things these days because I worry about the influence of social science on political expression. I am myself making a return to scholarship, and while my position is resolutely "critical", I will be working squarely within the social sciences, more specifically, the administrative sciences, whose articulateness I've been working to improve over the past five years as a language consultant at a business school. Ezra Pound has never been far from my thoughts.

Should I not, rather, be writing "a poem that contains history"? Can I devote myself to the composition of paragraphs that represent (as an object!) the life of society? Or should I not, rather, explore more deeply to find that epic (or at least lyrical) subjectivity that is the true heart of our becoming? Does the paragraph or the strophe, finally, situate the problem of my composure?