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.