Of Another Tostian Item

When you face this apparition in the clouds.
Zettel for a wet, black crowd.

(Anonymous)


With that the Pangrammaticon takes a Christmas break. Thanks to all those who have been following along and contributing along the way. Special thanks to Laura, Jay and Tony for their insightful comments, to Aaron for his tip, and to Gary and Marcus, and those I have forgotten, for spreading the word. Thanks also to anonymous. I know who you are, but I haven't allowed you to post a comment. Maybe next year.

Please (continue to) have a look around, leave your thoughts wherever you wish. See you in the new year.

Here are some posts I think are especially clever:

You should, of course, have a look at my series of pieces, entitled "The Annotated Pilot" on Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot", which is a poem you should read in any case. I think Part IV of this series is probably the most coherent.

For some general observations and exercises of a vaguely philosophical kind, try "Remark and Strophe", "Metaphysical Composure", "Do your own thing, man" (about Heidegger's "The Turning"), "The History of the World" and "Likeness, Transparency, Delinity".

For light entertainment (or superior amusement, if you will) I recommend "Cécité à l’aspect", "Untested Poem", "Intermission" (which is also recommended by my sister) and (before bed) "Anodyne Pillow".

The Articles of Articulation

jkhk

Laura: "I suspect that the best writers are always in some capacity working within a tradition while working against all traditions and find their peace in the singularity of that experience."

Gary: "I think it is up to us to make the discourse about poetry be solid and useful and illuminating. And it is up to us to illuminate the variety of poets.... With poetry: the poet, everything is the poet."

Laura: "I like this: the. Which makes it difficult to generalize. If it is the poet, then, what is the variety?"

This dialogue only almost happened, so it has the strengths and weaknesses of any reconstruction. I hope Laura and Gary don't mind. In any case, the idea I want to introduce with it emerges from my initial reaction to the first remark.

Shouldn't it read, I thought, "the best writers are always . . . working within THE tradition while working against SOME traditions and find their peace in the singularity of that experience." The argument for putting it is this way is that once you have the substantive, but indefinite, article "a" you really already have a singularity. Whatever it is that gives the writer in question a tradition, one that is not necessarily shared by other writers, imbues that writer with a constitutive difference. So there is no need for any conflict or contrast with anything, let alone everything.

Articles (a, an, some, the), as their name suggests, are crucial bits of grammar in regard to the articulation of experience. (I wonder if "all" is an article of this kind in Laura's sentence.) Conjunctions (and, but, if) of course also "join" parts of the sentence, but in a hamfisted, rough and ready sort of way, since the words or clauses to be conjoined remain intact after the operation. The article reaches into the word it joins, defining not just the structure of the sentence, but the texture of the experience sentenced.

But I don't think I'm just being a stickler for logical grammar here. THE poet, who is, according to Gary, everything, cannot be just any old poet, but is an indication toward the full variety of poets (the multitude contained, however imperfectly, by Walt Whitman). It is within THE tradition, when contrasted with the available, off-the-shelf fashions ("some" traditions) that the poet finds her haeceity, or this-ness, i.e., completes the work.

I'd like to defend the idea that "the best writers" of neo-classicism, romanticism, modernism and post-modernism were all doing the same thing and that the best writers of our generation will be doing that as well. Not against all tradition, but toward the one tradition.

What Kitasono, again, called "pure and orthodox poetry".

Apparatus and Machination: an approach to form

Like you, I'm suspicious of etymological analysis. But here's something I picked out of my Concise Oxford Dictionary tonight. In "The History of the World" I said, in effect, that (laboratory) apparatus is to science what (parliamentary) machination is to politics. I very much like that way of putting it. Now, here's what I discovered.

Apparatus comes from the Latin for "to make ready for", while machination comes from the Greek "contrivance". An apparatus, of course, is just scientific or technical equipment, while machination involves the laying of plots and intrigue.

(Readers of Foucault, by the way, will note that "apparatus" translates "dispositif" and that a disposition is a kind of readiness. Readers of Shakespeare, meanwhile, will note that Claudius' machinations are underscored with the slogan "Be in readiness.")

Now, a "scheme" (when it is not also just a plot) is "a systematic plan or arrangement for work or action". And it comes from the Greek for "form, figure". It is also the source of Kant's schematism by which the transcendental categories were to be somehow imposed on empirical experience. Lastly, we have the German "Bild", as in "Bildung", also meaning "form", and which gives us both "picture" and "image".

None of this proves anything, of course. But it indicates a direction. Between our scientific apparati and our political machinations, we have our imagery, the imagination at work (according to the plans, arrangements, plots, intrigues, etc. of our culture and our nature), and this is precisely the site of form. One should imagine (!) two enormous rigs, one material (the apparatus) and the other social (the machination). We connect the one to the other and call this thinking.

The task now is to make all of this experimentally plausible, that is, to devise (to contrive) clever ways of peeling images off appearances and applying them to surfaces. To think.

The History of the World

[Compare Ben Lerner's "Didactic Elegy"]

‘. . .a successful scientific theory of cognition must account for phenomenality, that is, . . . for the fact . . . that things have appearance.’

From the introduction to
Naturalizing Phenomenology

The world is everything that is on my case.
The solution to the problems
of phenomenology, which are problems
of action
as much as of perception,
is that
things appear as people surface.
Appearances are things arranged
on the surfaces of people
And surfaces are people arranged
among the appearances of things.
Note that the tenses are preserved.
Note the surface tension; the apparent ease
Of the presentation is an illusion.
We push against surfaces
and stand before appearances.
The appearance is the locus of our seeing.
It is the ambivalent object of sensation,
Determined in perception.
The surface is the locus of our doing.
It is the ambivalent subject of motion,
Determined in action.
We may push and push
and remain immobile.
We may stand and stand
insensate.
The immediate determination
of what is seen
is intuition.
The immediate determination
of what is done
is institution.
The image is detached
from appearances,
and applied to surfaces
with equal ease.
The image is what can be done
without effort,
and seen,
without strain.
The image is easy*.
It is no substitute
for thought
for feeling.
Beauty remains the difficulty.
To negotiate the passage
between the intuition
and the institution.
To grasp the concept
is Begrifflichkeit
and to hold emotion,
Ergriffenheit.
We play them
off against each other
like third rate diplomats.
Style is negotiation.
The image is a concept
backed like an emotion.
The facility of style
lies in the arrangement of imagery.
May the republic retain
its style.
Imagination is not for children
alone.
Politics is to action
What science is to perception.
A doing that transforms the
immediacy of doing, the institution.
A seeing that transforms the
immediacy of seeing, the intuition.
Note where we stand to see.
Note what we see to stand.
History is all that has been done,
the total subject, everyone.
The world is all that will be seen,
the total object, everything.
Knowledge is the rightness of perception,
power the rightness of action.
Science cannot plumb the mind because
the mind itself is stretched
Between the surface and appearance.
Science works alone
on the appearance.
Science wants to see all that it can
Forgetting all that it has done.
Science assembles its apparatus,
and forgets.
By this means it locates objects
in space.
Just as politics positions subjects
in time and
forgets
its machinations.
Phenomenology recovers the time lost
In the spaces between things,
The space lost in the time
that is left to the people.
The history of the world:
Everything and everyone
that is on my case.

Post Script

Ezra Pound’s vision of elysium stipulates that ‘First came the seen, then thus the palpable.’ (LXXXI/535). This eidology is here corrected. Motion is as fundamental an experience as sensation. Spirit or mind is not sensation sensing itself (Novalis). Spirit is to be moved by sensation, to be sensitive to motion. To move against sensation. To sense against motion. To stand before and push against. To understand. To stand firm in this middle distance and write.

*We lift images from appearances and apply them to surfaces never the other way round. A surface is that to which an image may be effortlessly applied. An appearance is that from which it is lifted without strain. To imagine is sometimes to see and sometimes to do. The image may equally well be seen or done. The same image is equally compatible with surfaces and appearances. There are not some images that go better with surfaces than with appearances. But we must keep in mind that we cannot impose an image on an appearance; we must lift it from there. Nor can we lift an appearance from a surface, we must put it there. Thus, we lift an image off the appearance of the closed door and apply this same image in opening its surface. This whether in imagination or in experience. That is, the door appears closed as we run into it, and it surfaces in its openness as we pass through it. Note here that the door's openness is nothing to the door but belongs to you and me (the subject), i.e., that which is in motion. Its closedness, on the other hand, is the door’s imposition on our motion (and is objective).

Surface/Appearance

One question that is worth asking, if only to show that it can't be answered, is what images are made of; another is where images may be found. The non-answers are: nothing and nowhere.

Images are often attached to things when one thing serves as an image of another thing and therefore represents it (though there are other ways of representing). And images are also, perhaps necessarily, instantiated in or as things (paintings, drawings, photographs, to take standard examples).

But I want to situate the image itself. I want to know how it materializes.

Consider the fact that experience includes something we call "appearances". These are often distinguished for philosophical purposes from "reality" and are sometimes qualified as "mere" appearances. Science compares a great many appearances in order to discern what we are told is an "underlying" reality, unfooled by deceptive appearances.

But experience also includes surfaces. I would like to distinguish these, with a similar aim in mind, from "ideality" again in order to give a sense to the "mereness" of a surface, or its superficiality. Reality and its mere appearance. Ideality and its mere surface. Politics, they say, brings together a great many surfaces in order to approach an "overarching" ideality, undaunted by disconcerting surfaces.

Now, the image, I want to say, is what can be immediately peeled off an appearance and applied to a surface. It is what can be seen without strain and done without effort. When expressed in a well crafted remark or strophe, it is also what can be said without question. Notice, then, that in working with images (at least on my definitions here) we are cut off from representations of the real and the ideal (which we will leave to science and politics).

Pure imagery is the perfect immanence of the presentation. It is what the poet and the philosopher are after.