The Art of Metaphysical Composition

Metaphysical composure is an experience that is available among the variety of experiences. It is the experience of 'knowing one's way about', of knowing how to proceed (cf. Wittgenstein, PI§123, 323).

A metaphysical composition is any arrangement of materials, in any medium, any work of art, which occasions metaphysical composure, or which is best appreciated in a moment of such composure.

"...the outer gaze alters the inner thing [and] by looking at an object we destroy it with our desire [so] for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself..." (Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String).

Such training is the perfection of the art of metaphysical composition. Metaphysical composure is the experience of a thing during a moment of apperception that includes it.

Faced with any given object, metaphysical composure occurs when the subject (I, you) becomes simultaneously and immediately aware of its (the object's) concept, and therefore, necessarily, of itself (the subject).

When the composition employs writing it may be called conceptual notation. It is then the art of writing concepts down, or philosophy.

Composure Begins

Tomorrow morning I will begin work on a short book to be called Composure. I've talked about this project before, but I have now decided to give myself three hours a week (one hour every other morning) to actually make some progress. The basic idea is that composure is the resolution of crisis, and that crisis is a discord of belief and desire, a schism of knowledge and power.

Composure is found in the homologies of grammar, both philosophical and poetic. Remarks and strophes are arranged to tune our intuitions to our institutions, the immediacies of our seeing and our doing. That's a pretty obscure way of putting it. In the book I hope to be able to make this clearer.

As you are distressed
by my reasons,
I am confused
by your passions.

_____
Notes:

Distress is a decomposition of passion. Confusion is a decomposition of reason.

Reason finds its composure by distinguishing things clearly from each other. Passion finds its composure in our intense identification with each other as people.

To distress is to "draw apart" to the point of suffering. To confuse is to "pour together" insufferably.

Composure, then, is a very precise kind of suffering. It is where things are kept apart despite our passions, and where people are kept together despite our reasons. It finds a balance of clarity and intensity.

Poetic Composition

Thomas Presskorn reminds me that I've been promising to write Composure for some time. If it were a straight prose work, I would chide myself for not just getting down to it. But I did actually once try to just "get the thing done" and it simply didn't work. I write scholarly prose quite easily (surprisingly easily) these days. What I'm having trouble with is the sort of writing that I want Composure to be.

"Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten," said Wittgenstein. Peter Winch renders it, "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition." I sometimes think it would suffice (though it doesn't, of course, really) to say "One ought really only compose philosophy," adding, perhaps, a parenthetical "in the manner of poetry", to capture the everyday sense of "dichten".

But what kind of poetry? My answer is that philosophy ought to be written on the model of Rosmarie Waldrop, Lisa Robertson, Ben Lerner, and Tony Tost. Their work is resolutely "emotional", however, in a way that I do not intend Composure to be, and for this reason they work much more freely within their form than I hope to. But the words are composed on the page in a, to me, exemplary way.

Wittgenstein said that his demand that we compose philosophy as we compose poems only showed that he wasn't very good at what he wanted to do. I feel the same way. I simply don't know how to "work" at it. I know that "This is my body" is the central claim of the book. The book is to be a "complete" elaboration of that sentence. I also know that this elaboration will consist of about 50 "moments" (roughly speaking, discrete poems) with titles like "Knowledge" and "Power", "Intuition" and "Institution", "Seeing" and "Doing" ... perhaps even "Eye", "Hand" and "Lens", "Lever". The "poems" will be paired like that, with no moment lasting more than a page (probably about 300 words). But that's what I know. I don't really know how to compose a poem. I can't do it the way I write prose.

Motion and grasp

It seems to me that the potter at her wheel is an ideogram of composure. The plate emerges from our grasp of the material in motion.

An analogue of this motion is experienced immediately in our institutions, just as an analogue our grasp is experienced in our intuitions. We see immediately that the plate is round, we get it. And we throw the clay onto the motion of the wheel.

From this motion and this grasp we derive our emotions and our concepts.

While the immediacies (intuitions, institutions) are of course available in separate moments (seeing, doing), their integration in the potter at her wheel shows that there can ultimately be no intuition without institution, no institution without intuition. In fact, there can be neither institution nor intuition, no experience, without their integration—composure.

And this is the theme of all "crisis".

Apathy and Alogia

The continuing crisis is likely to excacerbate our suffering, or rather, that peculiarly modern kind of suffering, which is the opposite of suffering, an inability to suffer, if you will. It stems from the conflagrations of perception and action, reality and ideality, knowledge and power, belief and desire, in short, pangrammatical imprecision.

The result is increasing apathy and, its pangrammatical complement, alogia, a lack of passion and a lack of reason, the dissolution of pathos and the collapse of logos. One is left with no discernable feeling, no clear thought. While one is kept alive, in a kind of suspended animation, one is barely able to experience one's life.

I take Beckett's How It Is to be among the most precise artistic statements of this fundamental imprecision in living.

If I am right, however, a way out of this crisis is available to us. I call it "composure", and it amounts to a recomposition of belief and desire in our lives. How does one achive composure? That's what I believe I have just discovered: carefully and daringly. "Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still," said T.S. Eliot. He also famously dared us to eat peaches.

It is with these minimal acts of caring and daring, occasioned by barely perceptible twinges of curiosity and sparks of courage, that we constitute the meaning of our experiences.

The Cramp

"Belief is a cramp, a paralysis, an atrophy of the mind in certain positions." (E.P.)

Something of a fundamental insight this morning.

Composure is the conquest of distraction. But what is distraction, really? It is what pulls us away from experience, the presence of things and people in our lives. How does this pulling-away work? Well, it draws us out of doubt and pain (which is part of life) and into moments of certainty and pleasure. That's why we let it happen.

But here's what occurred to me. Why do we come back to experience? Why do we compose ourselves? And why is this so difficult?

It is because we are drawn out of experience and into fixations on "truth" and "justice". We make a discovery and believe its truth. Or we make a decision and desire its justice. And these beliefs and desires can be so strong that we don't want to expose them to corrections by experience.

Truth and justice should always be thought of as temporary situations. But we let them hold on to us for too long. The meaning of a fact, its relative "truth", should always be determined in a corresponding act. And the passage from fact to act must always be experienced. But the meaning of an act, its relative "justice", is always determined in a corresponding act. Again, the passage is experienced.

We see that something is the case and we think, "Okay, what are we going to do about it?" Or we do something and must "see what happens".

But sometimes we experience a fact, a truth, and think there is nothing to do about it. Or we do "the only thing we could do" regardless of the consequences. We don't feed the fact or the act back through experience. We let it stand, as such.

This is how science and politics were born. They are distractions from the experience of truth and justice. They are fixations on one side or the other of the pangrammatical divide. Composure teaches us to return to experience.

Descartes' Feint

I am still working on a book called Composure. It is an attempt to overcome, both poetically and philosophically, what Damasio calls "Descartes' error", which, I believe, was not so much a mistake as a deft piece of misdirection. Here is the key passage in part IV of the Discourse on Method.

I attentively examined what I was, and as I observed that I could suppose [feindre] that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that “I,” that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known that the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.

I do not believe this is an error based on an (understandable) lack of neurological knowledge. Rather, I simply do not believe Descartes when he says he could "suppose" or, as some translations put it, "pretend" (arguably a more literal translation of feindre) that he "had no body".

I cannot myself suppose, imagine or pretend any such thing. If I had no body, I would not be. If there were no world around me, there would be no place for me, no "there" (Da) for my being (Sein). Composure is coming to terms with the experience of being wholly indistinguishable from my body, my world, my history.

I am not "a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing". On the contrary. This experience is my body.

Frühjahr und Alles was der Fall ist

We don't yet know what the body can do, Spinoza taught us. That's why we need ethics. Why do we need epistemology? Because we don't yet master what the body can see.

That's a rather neat pangrammatical analogy. (The body has no analogue or supplement. The body is the mind/heart, the eye/hand.)

We are dominated by totalities. To resist, Williams and Wittgenstein teach us to begin with our own experience, with what we find lying around in plain view. Pound said the poet must "build us his world". He said we should approach the world "in periplum".

Stil there is, clearly, an "everything" out there. There is an "everyone". But, as Pound said, the "total man" has found out for himself all he knows about metaphysics. That is, even our knowledge of totalities is situated in elemental experiences.

"In the composition, the artist does exactly what every eye must do with life, fix the particular with the universality of his own personality" (S&A, p. 27).

I would add "what every hand must see".

Yesterday a question came to me. Does composition teach composure? Does the artist who composes daily in writing find composure in life? The balance of historical and biographical evidence would not suggest so. But, then again, we don't know what life the artist would have led without art.

What is it that is to be composed? Always an arrangement of fact (a reality) coordinated with a subject (the body). Or an arrangement of acts (an ideality) coordinated with an object (the body).

What every hand sees in life as it fixes the universal with the particularity of its own thinghood.

There is a visual field, a field of perception, which is of interest to epistemologists. There is a manual field, a field of action. Here we need an ethics.

The inexorable subjectivity of practical life. And the objectivity of theory.

The poem notes down the emotions that inform the practice.

The totalities are represented (but how?). Poetry and philosophy begin with what is present. Out of this we can build our ethics and our epistemologies. (Pound: "the arts provide the data for ethics".)

The artist ... and both the philosopher and the poet is an artist ... notices facts and acts and brings them into an arrangement in his notes. This is all there is to composition.

Problematic

It is my conviction that the problem of composure can be fully articulated even where the solution is wholly out of reach.

One does not have to have found composure in order to write about it.

(My book would attempt only to articulate the problem.)

A Preface to Composure

This is my body.
These are my hands, writing.
These are my eyes, reading.

The difficulty is keeping it together
amid distraction.
Overcoming the difficulty is composure.

This is my body.
I mean that literally.
This is literature.

Roundness

"When I began my earlier book to talk about the 'world' (and not about this tree or table)..."

Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Redacted from the Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough)

A reader of this blog emailed me about a quote I had posted from Borges's "An Investigation of the Word", one of his "disowned" early works. While I can see why he might have thought it was unsuccessful, I like the approach he takes. "What is the psychological process whereby we understand a sentence?" asks Borges. And his approach to answering it is to analyse a single sentence from the Quixote ("In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall ...") word for word in order to locate "the content its words yield to the reader". It is a naive approach, but one I have great respect for. There is too much philosophy of language that produces apparently sophisticated theories without providing a single detailed application, a single complete analysis.

I called my PhD dissertation Likeness and wanted to call the follow up Composure, but I think both words subscribe to a vain philosophical profundity. (That probably won't stop me in the end, of course.) I'm now thinking of calling it Roundness. In it, I want to provide a full answer to the question, "What is the experience of the roundness of a plate?" We are all capable of having this experience; but in what does it consist?

Composure and likeness are, I think, part of what Wittgenstein called the illusory "super-order of super-concepts". That is, one imagines that the task of philosophy is not to analyse specific compositions or specific likenesses but to provide a theory of composition and likeness "as such". But if these theories are to mean anything to us they must usefully guide our practical investigations (note that Borges and Wittgenstein used the same word). "If the words, 'language', 'experience', 'world', have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words 'table', 'lamp', 'door'." (PI§97) It is in the spirit of that humility that I want to write my first real book.

Composure

The empirical concept of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle. The roundness which is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter. (KRV A137/B176)

That's how it looks from the point of view of "pure reason". Passion would demand the introduction of a craftsman of some sort, an artist.

The normative (e)motion of the potter's wheel is homogeneous with the pure[raw] sculptural emotion of the cylinder. The spinning that can be felt in the former can be instituted in the latter.

The book I want to write, called Composure, would begin with this image of a plate on a wheel, this homology (a homology of two homogeneities), and then develop about twenty-five of its moments of reason and their twenty-five homologous moments of passion. E.g.,

concept/emotion
intuition/institution
seeing/doing
thought/feeling
perception/action
fact/act
given/taken
appearance/surface
sensation/motivation
thing/person
space/time
relation/position
object/subject
picture/diagram
world/history

.../...

I will confine each moment to the space of a single page, and arrange the homologous expressions on facing pages (a "parallel edition" of reason/passion). I know that such symmetry does not appeal to everyone, but I need to see how it works out on the page.

[Update: Either I or Norman Kemp Smith seem to have mixed up "former" and "latter" in the above quote. I've fixed it now and it makes much better sense. Also, I think it might help to rewrite Kant's formula as follows: Our empirical grasp of a plate is homogeneous with the pure geometrical concept of a circle, for the roundness that is thought in the former can be intuited in the latter. This allows us the following variation: The normative motion of the potter's wheel is homogeneous with the pure sculptural emotion of a cylinder, for the turning that can be felt in the former can be instituted in the latter.]

[Update 2: Norman Kemp Smith's 'misreading' follows Vaihinger. It appears in the footnotes to both the current German (Felix Meiner Verlag) edition and the Guyer & Wood (Cambridge University Press) edition. Presskorn has a plausible explanation for Vaihinger's reading in the comments below.]

Epiphany

The philosophical text is the epiphany
of philosophy itself.
Günther Patzig

Here's a possibility that emerges from my last post.

First, recall that philosophy is to theory what poetry is to practice. Now, one definition* says that theories are "programmes of perception", which allows us to construct a homologous definition of practice, namely, "programmes of action".

Confining ourselves to "the system of literature", in which Katue Kitasono proposed we do well to find our place, which is to say, confining ourselves to the theory and practice of textuality, the following homologies further suggest themselves.

Philosophy reflects upon our programmes for perceiving literature (literary theory), deriving clear and distinct concepts from texts. That is, philosophy is a pure form of reading.

Poetry, meanwhile, leverages our programmes for acting upon literature (literary practice), imposing intense and discrete emotions on texts. That is, poetry is a pure form of writing.

(Anticipating an objection, though not in order to baulk at it, let me suggest that it is a category mistake to wonder how concepts then are ever imposed on texts and, conversely, how emotions are ever derived from them. I will probably have to say more about this, yes?)

We are halfway to an epiphany of sorts.

I often cite Wittgenstein's remark in Culture and Value (p. 24) about philosophical writing as a kind of poetry. "Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten," he said, which means, somewhat less elegantly than the German, that "one ought really to do philosophy as poetry." The German word "dichten" is the verb form of "Dichtung", which means "poetry". To my knowledge there is no such thing as poeting in English, as Wittgenstein's translator also discovered here. A literal translation would need the verb "to poet", i.e., "One ought really only to poet (v.) philosophy." Many poets will find this issue familiar. Like Wittgenstein, they see their field not as a corpus of extant work but as an activity. In any case, modifying Peter Winch's translation a bit, we can render this more naturally as, "One ought really only to compose philosophy (as one composes poetry)."

Its true pangrammatical meaning can be recovered by noting the Bunting-Pound thesis about poetic composure, namely, "dichten = condensare" (ABC, pp. 36, 92). That is, poetic expression is characterized essentially by compression or concentration**. Indeed, my German-English dictionary associates "dichte" with "thickness", "heaviness" and even "specific gravity". So we have the poem as a sort of specific linguistic thickness. ("Gedicht" of course means "poem".)

Leaving out a few leaps of logopoeia, let me propose, first in German, that "Dichtung dürfte man eigentlich nur redigieren," an idea that resonates well with Flarf, namely, "One ought really only to edit poetry."

This is actually the state of the art of pangrammatical composure right now. In the difficult interstice between philosophy and poetry there is the composition of a pure text, one that is produced by thickening (writing, compressing) and trimming (reading, editing). What I want to call poetry is the capable end of the racket--leveraging a programme of textual action, i.e., textual practice, i.e., writing. What I want, homologically, to call philosophy is the receptive end--reflecting a programme of textual perception, i.e., textual theory, i.e., reading.

*Pierre Bourdieu uses that definition.
**Ron Silliman deals with this in Jacket 27, April 2005

Note: There's a very close reading of this post in the comments here.

In your composure you find
you are as articulate
about your power as you are
about your knowledge.

Begin with the silence
of your ignorance,
of your impotence.

Now find in your mind
an honest belief, in your
heart, a decent desire.
Hold them forth together.

Crisis

A life combines
reasons and passions,
concepts and emotions,
in the image, where
it brings composure,
in clarity or tension,
by wisdom or by love,
to each moment.

His Penelope was not Flaubert,
his sentence was the paragraph—
sought composure in his prose, and
found distraction in his poems.

Metaphysical Composure

Start with a large sheet of polished glass and a naked body. The pane of glass should be monumental in size and thickness, but perfectly transparent, perfectly clean. Set it upright on the ground and pose the body next to it. Let the body stand with its back to the glass. The head should be tilted downwards and stare to the left, into the middle distance. It should comport itself toward the glass monument like the guy at the end of the scene who hears the telephone ringing.

(reposted from 22.11.2004)

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?

Major and Minor Forms

A distinguished novelist complained that no directions for major form were given in How to Read.
In apology: It is a waste of time to listen to people talking of things they have not understood sufficiently to perform. (Ezra Pound, ABC, p. 76)

Pound ultimately didn't even exhibit "major form" in the Cantos. As Kearns points out,

He never got around to theorizing about major form, nor did he impose one on the Cantos. As he added to the poem or he came across new materials that interested him, he allowed them to find a place in the expanding code, trusting principally that a dynamic magnetism would hold everything together by the quality of the poet's affections. (29)

This is exactly the opposite of what I want to allow, and what I can trust, in Composure. My notes will cohere, I want to say, even if It/I don't (cf. Canto CXVI). That's what the project is about.

I want a major form to emerge from the pieces (the pjecer that have been translated as Kierkegaard's "fragments"). 51 pieces, say, one of which is my body ("This is my body"). Where it at all coheres. The form will not be imposed; it will be built. Hand crafted.