Pronouns

"It" is to science as "we" is to politics. "Mine" is to philosophy as "I" is to poetry.

When philosophy asks the fundamental question "What is it?" it is really asking "How is it mine?" (We owe this insight to Heidegger: the entity to be analyzed is "in each case mine", je meines.) The "objects" of our scientific theories do not belong to us, but the things we experience are ours before we discover a single scientific fact.

Poetry, likewise, traces the fundamental question of who we are becoming back to the question of how I got here. We do not become the "subjects" of our political practices, but the people of our experience are themselves before we decide upon a single political act.

The Insubordination of the Flesh

"Pleasure is preceded by a certain appetite which is felt in the flesh like a craving, as hunger and thirst and that generative appetite which is most commonly identified with the name lust, though this is the generic word for all desires." (Augustine)

I've always had great respect for Catholic moral psychology, though not much love for Catholic ethics. So, for example, I agree about the mechanics of "proximate occasions" of sin, but not that we should avoid such occasions. This does not mean I think we should sin, but that we should be open to the situations where sin, and therefore virtue, is possible.

I have a feeling that Augustine's views on lust and pleasure have to be part of my own canon on this subject (they are of course just part of the the canon on the subject.) I've said that pleasure is the immediate satisfaction of desire in the act, unmediated by an emotion (intellectual pleasure is the immediate satisfaction of belief in the fact, unmediated by a concept). But I have also argued, following Kierkegaard, that this still requires an "image", which just is the immediate presence of the act (or fact) in experience.

Augustine does not (at least here) mention the important work of the imagination in shaping and indeed civilizing (or humanizing) lust. Pleasure is not just the satisfaction of a "craving". It requires the formation of an image (the passage from craving to imagining) and it is here that our "spiritual" lives begin. What Pound described as "a form of stupidity not limited to Europe, that is, idiotic asceticism and a belief that the body is evil", is this substitution of the idea that images arise in the human body with the notion that man is created in the image of God. After the fall, the body is construed as merely "insubordinate". Spinoza was very right to suggest that "we don't yet know what the body can do." And to make this the basis of sane ethical inquiry.

Image, Structure, Texture

In his "Diapsalmata", Kierkegaard tells us that real pleasure is owed to the image. It is not the feeling of pleasure that is truly pleasurable but the correspondence between the act and the image. (He doesn't develop the idea, but it seems to me that this is the right approach to "feeling". Pleasure isn't really a feeling because it is the feeling of a successful action. Feelings, as normally understood, are the result of failed or deferred actions.) Real pleasure, Kierkegaard tells us, does not come from merely drinking the finest wines, but from "getting what I want", even if it is, at the moment, a glass of water. That is, one has to have an image of the source of pleasure before the feeling (of pleasure, which, like I say, is "more than a feeling", as a song goes) is possible.

But I hear the fair lady sigh that real pleasure cannot be anticipated, must come (at least sometimes) unexpectedly, must be "without structure", or some such bohemian idea. An image, she might say, is always a structure, and structures are always to be avoided. Well, I would argue that the image is not quite a structure. We can lift an image from an appearance and impress it on a surface, in both cases without any effort. The appearance has structure and the surface has texture. (The appearance of, the surface of.) But the image is suspended between the structure of the appearance and the texture of the surface. It presents what is is represented in them, indifferently.

Pleasure is felt when what is done and what is seen is exactly as it had been imagined, or perhaps as it will be imagined afterwards (which is a useful notion to meet our fair lady's objection halfway, since now pleasure is possible even in the absence of a prior act of imagination). Either way, pleasure is not "felt", because it is the direct realization of the image in action, without any intervening emotion. It is the perfect ecstasy of being liberated from feeling. It is the moment when the structure of experience is in complete harmony with its texture. When the surface is the appearance. When the act is the fact.

See also: "Figure, Image, Phantasm"

A Specious Coincidence?

In 1972, the same year that the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, Leonard Cohen published The Energy of Slaves. Just noting. (Cf. "The Heart's Content".)

Four Imperatives

Know the object.
Understand the concept.
Master the subject.
Obey the emotion.

The Energy of Slaves

I found Leonard Cohen's The Energy of Slaves in a used bookstore the other day, and I've been enjoying it a lot. In many ways, it is a perfect illustration of my poetics. "It is the task of the poem to detach an experience from its politics," I have said. "To extricate it from history. By this means, the poet locates the emotion." And my example was very Cohenesque: A woman's beauty is intensely political. If the poet is to write a poem "to her beauty", his task is to free, e.g., her lips from the policy that governs her face. The Energy of Slaves offers a number of poems that, though often less politely, accomplish this task. And often more politically, I suppose. Sometimes it does not even involve a woman.

Consider poem #92 (here with simplified lineation):

The killers that run
the other countries
are trying to get us
to overthrow the killers
that run our own
I for one
prefer the rule
of our native killers
I am convinced
the foreign killer
will kill more of us
than the old familiar killer does
Frankly I don't believe
anyone out there
really wants us to solve
our social problems
I base this all on how I feel
about the man next door
I just hope he doesn't
get any uglier
Therefore I am a patriot
I don't like to see
a burning flag
because it excites
the killers on either side
to unfortunate excess
which goes on gaily
quite unchecked
until everyone is dead

Elsewhere (poem #107), he says that "Layton was wrong/ about the war," but "right/ about beauty and death". Irving Layton published a collection of prose five years later called Taking Sides, in which he really is outrageously wrong about number of things. Cohen here (in poem #92) resolutely refuses to take sides. Today, of course, it would be more accurate to invert the force of the poem's neutrality: Today, the killers that run our countries are more eagerly trying to overthrow the killers that run the other countries than they are trying to overthrow ours. I suppose that was actually true also in 1972, but perhaps it was too novel an idea to be useful in a poem.

In any case, what I'm really interested in is that line about his neighbor. The renunciation of all political allegiance and all faith in the proponents of social progress on the basis of "how I feel about the man next door" is exactly what a poem is supposed to do. This one is working from the (foreign) policy inwards. Others work from the (domestic) situation outwards. I'll write something about that later.

The Immanent Doctrine of Totality (3)

The effect of a subject on the faculty of representation, so far as stuff is affected by it, is motivation. That institution which is in position before the subject through motivation, is called normative. The undetermined subject of a normative institution is called surface.

That on a surface which corresponds to motivation I call its society; but that which so determines the manifold of surfaces that it allows of being ordered in certain positions I call the temper of the surface. That in which alone motivations can be related and ordered in a certain temper, cannot itself be motivation; and therefore, while the matter of all surface is taken from us a priori, only its temper must lie ready for the motivations a posteriori in the heart, and so must allow of being considered apart from all motivation.

The Immanent Doctrine of Totality (2)

But institution holds sway only in so far as the subject is taken with stuff. This again is only necessary in so far as the heart is effective in a certain way. The capacity to transmit representations through the way stuff affects subjects is called motility. Subjects are taken with stuff for the sake of motility, and it alone yields institutions; they are felt through obedience and from obedience arise emotions. But all feeling must directly or indirectly, by way of certain marks, pose originally in institutions, and therefore in motility, because in no other way can subjects be taken with stuff.

The Immanent Doctrine of Totality (1)

By whatever art and through whatever media mastery may pose subjects, institution is that through which it poses them immediately, and from which all feeling as medium flows.

Notes:

Part I of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, "The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements" begins (in Norman Kemp Smith's translation) with the sentence, "In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed." In transposing it here for pangrammatical purposes, I have tried to preserve the association of the German "Mittel" (Smith's "means") and "unmittelbar" (Smith's "immediate"), while also availing myself of a pun on the German "Art", which Smith correctly renders as "manner". By talking about "art and media" instead of "manner and means" some useful associations in the context of "institutions" are hopefully evoked. Immanence is to power as transcendence is to knowledge but I will not coin something as barbarous as "immanental" in an attempt to preserve the analogy.

Elements are to knowledge as the totality is to power. This will be important later on, as you might imagine.

It is entirely correct, as the reader suspects, that I'm going to be building, sentence by sentence, a Critique of Raw Passion, which is a poetics, just as Kant's Critique is an account of what philosophy is. For perhaps obvious reasons, where Kant discovered a limit to philosophical speculation, I will decide in favor of the freedom of poetic manipulation.

Assertion and Injunction

"It is the essential business of language to assert and deny facts," said Bertrand Russell in his introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. He should have said "the essential business of scientific language," of course, because it is the no less essential business of political language to enjoin and denounce acts.

Philosophy elucidates the logic of assertion. Poetry aggravates the pathos of injunction.

Mayhewianism #4

"...I began to feel brutishly stupid. It was true that I was studying Keats and Wordsworth and watching bad Italian mafia movies from the 70s, but I was not writing, not producing my own ideas."

_________
Note: This one is an example of "Mayhewian disjunction": Mayhew's "but", if you will.

Poetry and Politics

In my last post I said that the body's capacity for pleasure sets the limit to our industry. Exploitation always involves the use of a body beyond (or indifferent to) its own pleasure. It seems to me tonight that this is a fundamentally "poetic" style of political thinking. As opposed to a "scientific" style of thinking of about politics, or even a plainly "political" one.

Ezra Pound said that "the arts provide the data of ethics". And ethics is all about the pursuit of happiness (as Aristotle understood). We must commit our politics wholly to this pursuit. And that means that we must produce a poetry (not just a poetics) that insists on the body's capacity for pleasure. Notice I did not say its "right" to pleasure, which is a self-referentially political notion. Nor did I worry too much about the neuronal equipmentality of the thing. We need to present (make present) the givenness (datum) of life in order that our policies are unable to ignore them.

We don't yet know what the body can do, said Spinoza. But, truthfully, we know that it can do much more than the law allows. Which shows not that our bodies are decadent but that our laws are petty. And that is a straightforwardly political problematic.

The Heart's Content

In a particular mood you can get me to believe that environmentalism is just an expression of late-capitalist ideology, an elite conspiracy, the apotheosis of scarcity. I know there are real issues, but efficiency, scale, etc. are, properly speaking, real issues too. They don't justify the amorality of the factory.

To construct an environmental limit on human industry strikes me as a decidedly third-rate solution. The limit on industry should always have been the human body's capacity for pleasure. When the worker is no longer enjoying his labour, the limit has been reached. When the body is not made healthier by the work it does, it should step away from the machine. The excesses of capitalism, including the destruction of the environment, is owed to forced labour and forced consumption beyond the natural desires of the bodies that work and consume.

Everyone should be allowed to work and to consume to their heart's content, and no one should be forced to work or to consume any more than that. Industry violates the heart's desire for work. Advertising violates the heart's desire to consume. It is not the planet that cries out against this violence; it is our own tortured flesh. Listen to your heart, man.

Flesh, Image, and Representation

"It is more than the simple athleticism of the mens sana in corpore sano. The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades." (Ezra Pound)

Our spiritual lives begin in the body. Anyone who has ever learned how to do anything with their hands (to draw, or play the piano, for example) or even someone who has simply spent some time "getting into shape" (swimming, for example, or running) knows that it is not merely a bodily change. The body changes, but so does the way we think and feel. I want to say that physical exercise (or training in any art) transforms the musculature and the imagination. We experience a change in both our volition and our intelligence, which is experienced as a transformation of experience itself.

Mastery of any set of stylized movements, whether those required to play a fugue on a piano or those required to run 10 kilometers at a steady pace over hilly terrain, requires the formation of the appropriate muscles and their coordination in activity (what scientists probably talk about as the formation of "neuronal pathways"). It is a shaping of the flesh. This reshaping of the fleshy basis of experience (what Kant called "the conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects") is what transforms our imagination. The new flesh yields up new images in the confrontation of sensory stimulus and motor impulse.

The images occasion thoughts and feelings and, from these, belief and desire. These latter, "propositional", states have content, which is "represented" in science and politics. The presence that is here re-presented, however, is the body.

The Five Motives?

In my last post I made a remark that appears enigmatic even to me. "I suppose there may be exactly five motives (just as there are exactly five senses) but we have not, I think, enumerated them yet." Is there really anything in the realm of motive that resembles the division of the senses into sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell?

If a "sense" is a channel or mode of perception the we can think of "motive" as a channel or mode of action. Now, just as we have hearing we have voice. Voice might be a "motor modality" just as hearing is a "sense modality". So far so good. We also have modalities like moving (i.e., changing our position in space), as well as pushing and holding. We might add pulling, but that seems to be a combination of holding and pulling—back. That seems to do it. But that's only four motives.

Is it silly to look for a fifth? Well most sense experience involves a combination of senses. You can't "perceive" a dance, for example, except by seeing and hearing it. And taste, as everyone knows, is actually a combination of tasting (actually using your taste buds) and smelling. So let's think about this motive of "voice". Let's divide it into the intention to speak and the intention to sing. We now have five: speech, song, impulse (pushing/pulling), grasp (holding), and locomotion (moving around).

Telekinesis, of course, is simply extra-motory action. A sixth motive.

The Image (3)

The image is the secret that Lorca says St. Teresa stole from her duende. It is "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."

What, then, is "core to the living flesh"? What does the image join the five senses to? The image inhabits the fleshy region between our senses and our motives. I suppose there may be exactly five motives (just as there are exactly five senses) but we have not, I think, enumerated them yet. Lorca speaks simply of a "core", and it is possible that some unity of motive is implied. Kant also supposed that the five senses are brought together in a "manifold" of experience, saving experience from becoming a rhapsody of mere impressions.

There is the "living ocean of love liberated from time" and there is a living ocean of wisdom restricted by space.

The Image (2)

The image is of neither mind nor matter. Nor is flesh a merely physical substance. The flesh suffers and, in suffering, imagines. Consciousness pervades the flesh. And in the flesh the image is both thought and felt. Flesh is not merely nerves and tissues, not merely meat attached to bone. It is the stuff of experience. The flesh moves and senses. The flesh lives and its life is imagination.

I think the image is the secret that Lorca tells us St. Teresa stole: "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."

The Image (1)

The image occurs in the body where sensory stimulus meets motor impulse. The image is simply what the body experiences. The body is simply the experiencer of the image. The image may be developed in the direction of sensation or in the direction of motivation. It may indicate a world to be known or a history to be mastered. The image may suggest an object or subject. It may suggest both. An arrangement of images will usually tend in one or another direction.

Images arranged to emphasize the motoric aspects of experience supply the content of poems and, further developed, political representations. Images arranged to emphasize the sensory aspects of experience occasion philosophical reflection and, further, scientific representation.

A Key to the Tractations

My ongoing series of "tractations" follow a very simple model. They articulate a poetical and philosophical moment, centered, implicitly or explicitly on "the image" or "the body", which are ultimately the same thing since an image is a sensor-motor complex [installed in the very fibers of experience]. A "tractation", then, attempts to trace this body-image towards the world (through belief, intuition, and science) at one end and history (through desire, institution, and politics) at the other, with a terseness that is supposed to evoke Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (it is supposed to be the content of a Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus or Logico-Patheticus).

But I suppose all that is obvious. I just wanted to note that in some tractations (those with an odd number of lines) there's a line in the middle that marks the body, and in others (those with an even number of lines) the role of the body is left implicit.

Tractations VII

Poetry begins in lust,

when the flesh moves

in the freedom of desire

to bring love

to a longing heart in

a body

bound to a mind

that seeks wisdom

in the limit to belief

that the flesh senses.

Philosophy begins in wonder.