Marks and Stuff

All feeling must, either directly, or indirectly by way of certain marks, relate ultimately to institutions, and therefore, as far as stuff is concerned, to motility, because in no other way can a subject be taken with stuff.
-- The Critique of Pure Passion

(For those who are confused, I will post a longer explanation of what the Critique of Pure Passion is, and how it works, next weekend. I hadn't expected it to interest me as much as it does.)

I want to draw our attention first to those "marks" [Merkmale], by which I mean (though I'm not sure if this is what Kant meant) first and foremost written signs, words, the stuff of poems.

Second, note that a subject is taken with stuff just as objects are given to us: "subject" replaces "object", "taken" replaces "given", and "stuff" replaces "us". Generally, "people" replaces "things", but in this case there's this sort of general "we" entity in Kant that needs a just as vague "you know what I'm talking about" sort of designator. So I chose "stuff".

Intuition, for Kant, denotes the sense in which things are given to us to be known. For me, institution denotes the motive by which people are taken with stuff in their power.

Institutions are specific ways of being "caught up in" in historical activity, just as intuitions are specific ways of being "set before" the world's facticity.

Kant does not do much with the role of the "us" in his Critique, even though (as Heidegger showed?) it is probably in this very "us" that the "categories" are born.

But we must not forget the order implicit in the stuff we are so taken with. It moves us, constituting our motives. We are always moving--the roll of the us in the motion of stuff.

Contrary to various esoteric doctrines, stuff does not just respond to our desires, and I think emotion is structured by the tension between our capacity for motion (motility) and the difficulty of moving stuff around (immobility). This tension is the proper theme of poetry.

The Media of Immediacy

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.
--Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, A19/B33.

In whatever manner and to whatever ends a mode of power may position subjects, institution is that through which it positions them immediately, and to which all feeling as an end is directed.
--The Critique of Pure Passion.

There's something very peculiar about Kant's sentence, contained in the phrase, "that through which it is in immediate relation". My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines "medium", in one sense, as "the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses". That gives either (a) "that through which something is devoid of an intervening substance through which to be related" or (b) "the medium of its immediate relation".

More later.

Civil Status

The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem.
--Wittgenstein (PI§125)

Gary Norris at Dagzine makes a useful contribution. Is it more poetic? he asks, "or is it less bourgeois?"

I want to argue that this is more or less the same question. A poem's "poesie" (a word I'm using to denote degree or quality of poeticality) is determined by its specific departure from the bourgeois.

Thus, "courtly love", I suppose.

To Proceed. . .

Emily and Laura are right about the damn fruit and I am wrong. Kasey, too, more or less retracts the example, but sticks to the main point, which I think is the line I want to take. And which allows me to bring the whole discussion to bear on Flarf.

The whole question has to do with the relative ease and difficulty of arranging certain available materials so as to activate our institutions in the text.

Phanopoeia 1-2

Laura went at the superiority of the image itself. "I've eaten an apple, but I've never eaten a fruit," invoking, I suppose, Williams' "contact with experience". Moreover, she is right to point out that apples "come in nice colors: red, yellow, green, bruised, etc." Fruit, I take, is variously nutritious but not especially apt to throw anything onto the visual imagination.