1.
A relation is a real thing, i.e. has a physio-neuronal
instantiation between minds and in brains, traceable
through Positron Emission Tomography.
The res poetica is a relation realized through poetry.
It’s a space akin to what George Oppen had in mind when
he, following Shelley, called poets “the legislators of
the unacknowledged world.”
It’s also a little like “the city upon a hill.”
2.
Poets are real: poets make poetry, or its algorithms, and think
of themselves, and represent themselves, as poets.
In defining the limits of the res poetica, take Wallace
Stevens’s claim that “We live in the mind” in equal
measure with Elaine Scarry’s demonstrations of the
ways mind can be reduced, with violence, to body.
3.
Poets face different sets of what Bishnupriya Ghosh calls
“local struggles” within shifting sets of conditions,
and have different responses to them.
The production, dissemination, and reception of poetry are
part of a projection from the space of such struggles
into another space, the res poetica, a model state.
FORM IS ONLY AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT, and
can thereby be open to various forms of evaluation,
which can result in reason, violence, or other
responses.
4.
Poets cannot help producing poetry.
Anne-Lise François, following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
calls an open secret a “gesture of self-canceling
revelation [that] permits a release from the ethical
imperative to act upon knowledge” in environments
of threat.
An open secret is “an essentially preventative or conservative
mode of communication that reveals to insiders what
it simultaneously hides from outsiders, or, more
specifically, protects them from what it is in their
power to ignore.”
Poetry, in that sense, can be an open secret, “a way of
imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed
and acted on.”
The res poetica can be a compact to transmit and maintain
knowledge in the face of tacit or explicit threat,
through an articulation, or a non-articulation.
5.
Shrikant Verma’s Magadh — which Vivek Narayanan
characterizes as “one of the most highly regarded
books of Hindi poetry from the 1980s” and “among
the best books of poetry I have ever read”—can be
read as an open secret.
Narayanan says Verma’s “ambiguous invocations of half-
mythical South Asian cities bring Borges and Cavafy
automatically to mind, but there is also a canny and
even bitter political outrage… that sets him apart,” and
that makes me think of Mandelstam, and of Robert
Duncan’s Passages.
“Bizarrely,” Narayanan writes, “Verma was a senior
Congress Party functionary under Indira Gandhi
in the late 70s and early 80s — it’s hard, for me at least,
to resist reading Magadh as his way of speaking
about some aspects of that close-up experience in the
only way he could.”
6.
Shrikant Verma’s “Corpses in Kashi,” translated by Rahul
Soni:
Corpses in Kashi
Have you seen Kashi?
Where corpses come and go
by the same road
And what of corpses?
Corpses will come
Corpses will go
Ask then, whose corpse is this?
Is it Rohitashva? No, no
all corpses cannot be Rohitashva
His corpse, you will recognize
from a distance
and if not from a distance
then from up close
and if not from up close
then it cannot be Rohitashva
And even if it is,
what difference
does it make?
Friends, you have seen Kashi
where corpses come and go
by the same road
and this is all you did –
made way and asked,
Whose corpse is this?
Whoever it was
whoever it was not
what difference did it make?
7.
Poetic invocations of particular cities, localities, and
inheritances elaborate a space as much of them,
seeking representationality, as beyond them, seeking
a space with idealized or perfectible conditions.
When realized as a particular instantiation of the res poetica,
the relation that is formed transposes localized
histories and sets of perceptions and inheritances into
a model state, a space that is momentary, fragile,
temporally continuous or discontinuous, but
materially real.
It is the res poetica, rather than a poem or poetry, that brings
together:
- the conditions under which the poem
was written; - the poem itself in its medium of
dissemination (paper, pdf, jpeg, aiff,
phonemes, etc.); - the poem among its predecessors;
- the conditions in which the poem is
received; - the poem’s author function and author
When people argue about the meanings of poems, what is at
stake is not poetry, but a particular realization or set
of instantiations of the res poetica, i.e. a negotiation
of meanings, and an acceptance or a rejection of
meanings, within a relation or set of relations.
7.
Qualitatively, the res poetica is not different in kind from the
nationalisms Benedict Anderson describes in
Imagined Communities, from the “new Tipi way”
Warren L. D’Azevedo describes in Straight With the
Medicine, or from constructs such as “The United
States” or “India.”
It’s just differently realized, and enforced.
8.
David Kyuman Kim, following Judith Butler and Emmanuel
Levinas, constructs the problematic of “melancholic
freedom”:
“Human freedom — which is to say, freedom of movement,
speech, and thought — emerges through the
application of critical thinking and reasoning that
continues to render distinctions from the past,
authority, and tradition.
“The drive for agency — to enact it, claim it, and to live it — is
evident across cultures, races, sexualities, genders,
and classes.
“In acknowledging agency as a central feature of human
freedom, emancipation, and liberation, the work of
agency becomes apparent in distinctive forms of self-
determination, such as political action, cultural
expressions and symbolism, and moral reasoning.
“At the core of contemporary quests for agency lie
dimensions of the religious and spiritual life, the
heart of which is to transcend circumstances and
conditions of constraint and limitation of varying
kinds.
“[T]he work of fulfilling individual and collective projects of
freedom,” Kim says, “requires the ability to see
possibility where there is foreclosure, to discern
opportunities for care and regard for the self when
choices appear to be diminishing, and to sustain hope
in the face of despair.
“Modernity finds its pitch and strength in the clasping hands
of discontent and freedom.”
9.
Despite Auden’s epithet and Spicer’s uncharacterizable
lament (“Poetry makes nothing happen” and “No /
one listens to poetry”), the res poetica is
phenomenologically discernable as what Mina Loy
called “the level of cool plains,” a kind of
transcendence that David Kyuman Kim identifies as
religious, but that can also be (like Loy’s) sexual,
political, or otherwise determinate in trajectory, if not
in instantiation.
Melancholic freedom shares characteristics with the res
poetica, but is not a problematic specific to poetry.
Like sex, political action and religion, poetry, and the self-
determination it affords, is not the province of the
individual.
The res poetica is the result of a discontinuous yet collective
effort to realize human agency though poetry.
8.
Sianne Ngai writes that “[o]ne ordinarily thinks of the ‘face-
to-face encounter’ as achieved through a process of
drawing closer.
“But in disgust the opposite trajectory makes this ethically
important moment happen.
“Pulling away from the object in revulsion, you’re suddenly
in front of the other, who, unlike the others, is
attuned to you, who stands in the space you’ve
prepared for him through that act of withdrawal.
“Paradoxically, in the economy of disgust, it is by means of
an originary exclusion that the textual encounter is
made intersubjective.”
Disgust can be a form of melancholic freedom.
8.
Poetry is capable of sustaining any form of ironic
communication.
Poetry can act as a medium for re-representions of
commonplace derogatory stereotypes as an ironic
comment on networked populism without activating
the stereotypes themselves — i.e. poetry can attempt to
recapitulate and reiterate stereotypes without the
poem’s author function seeming to be a node for
drawing pleasure or discharge from the stereotypes
themselves, in an effort to drain the stereotypes of
charge, even if the node draws pleasure in disgust,
as in sculpting vomit.
A mode of communication is like S&M: without permission,
without mutuality, it becomes violence.
Pleasure in disgust, and pleasure generally, can freak people
out.
The res poetica requires constant renegotiation of forms of
permission.
Deriving pleasure from disgust and deriving pleasure from
re-iterating stereotypes can, during discontinuous
communicative acts, look like the same thing.
I once published a poem that contained the lines “The Asian
woman sat eating Tam crackers / I laughed / This
stuff is endless.”
When I first read the poem at Halcyon in Brooklyn in 2000,
a member of the audience had a visible visceral
reaction to those lines, and the res poetica, running
like a current through that moment, was damaged and
reduced.
8.
According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
“[t]he nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan
views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of
their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to
a single community, and that this community should
be cultivated.”
Seyla Benhabib contends that “since the UN Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948, we have entered a new phase
in the evolution of global civil society, which is
characterized by a transition from international to
cosmopolitan forms of justice.
“[W]hatever the conditions of their legal origination,”
Benhabib continues, cosmopolitan forms of justice
“accrue to individuals as moral and legal persons in a
worldwide civil society… their peculiarity is that they
endow individuals rather than states and their agents
with certain rights and claims.”
That form of cosmopolitanism, which seeks to transcend the
state via natural rights, is a branch of “rights-based”
ethics.
10.
Addressing a conference on “The Charter of Cities of
Refuge” and “The International Agency for Cities of
Refuge,” Jacques Derrida, elaborating an idea of
cosmopolitanism, finds that they have defined for
themselves the task of “bring[ing] about the
proclamation and institution of numerous, and, above
all, autonomous, ‘cities of refuge’, each as
independent from the other and from the state as
possible, but, nevertheless, allied to each other
according to forms of solidarity yet to be invented.”
Bishnupriya Ghosh critiques Arjun Appadurai’s opposition
of “ethnic collectivists who lack the global
imagination of the cosmopolitan, who, by contrast,
relishes non-national nomadism and celebrates
migrancy, hybridity, and mobility.”
Ghosh cites the critiques of Revathi Krishnaswamy and
Aihwa Ong, who find such formulations of
cosmopolitanism reflect the experience of
“transnational elites” who “fetishize their marginality
as migrants, while synchronizing the global flows
that underpin the new world order.”
Ghosh uses cosmopolitanism and “cosmopolitics” to depict
the situation of the “contemporary (post Midnight’s
Children) South Asian novel,” which finds itself,
and its authors, “irrevocably enmeshed in a larger
public culture, imbricated in the uneven battles over
producing a localized modernity.”
The cosmopolitical novel limns “the capacities of the literary
to translate local struggles” and attempts, or can be
read as attempting, “a cosmopolitan literary activism
within… political limits” that are represented in the
works themselves.
12.
Sheldon Pollock writes against “what often seems to be the
single desperate choice we are offered: between, on
the one hand, a national vernacularity dressed in the
frayed period costume of violent revanchism and
bent on preserving difference at all costs and, on the
other, a clear-cutting, strip-mining multinational
cosmopolitanism that is bent, at all costs, on
eliminating it.”
Pollock wants to “conceive of the practice of
cosmopolitanism as literary communication that
travels far, indeed, without obstruction from any
boundaries at all, and, more important, that thinks of
itself as unbounded, unobstructed, unlocated —
writing of the great Way, rather than the small Place.”
At the same time, Pollock wants to “think about
cosmopolitanism and vernacularism as action rather
than idea, as something people do rather than
something they declare, as practice rather than
proposition (least of all, philosophical proposition),”
and also as a choice, one which in turn “enables us to
see that some people in the past have been able to be
cosmopolitan or vernacular without directly
professing either, perhaps while finding it impossible
rationally to justify either.”
At the time of its dominance, Latin was a cosmopolitanist
idiom, and English, Spanish, German and Italian
were vernaculars.
At the time of its dominance, Sanskrit was a cosmopolitanist
idiom, and Tamil, Kannada, Javanese, and Marathi
were vernaculars.
13.
For some, a global cosmopolitanist dominant, American
Standard English, is the only language available.
One way in which speakers of a closed perceived
cosmopolitanist dominant can respond to vernaculars
to which they do not have meaningful access — i.e.
access only to vernacular FORMS, ALWAYS AN
EXTENSION OF CONTENT, but not to the
conventional meaning structures associated with
them — is an ironic infantile appropriationism.
De Man says that irony is “permanement parabasis [or
interruption] of the allegory of tropes.”
An ironic infantile appropriationism ignores or professes
ignorance of the conventional meaning structures
attached to specific FORMS, ALWAYS AN
EXTENSION OF CONTENT, and layers on lowest
common denominator meanings, often of a sexual
nature.
A response to lack of access to all of the conventional
meanings of, for example, Tamil film musicals, is to
use the tools at hand to appropriate the forms of the
vernacular into a kind of super-ordinate neo-
cosmopolitanist idiom, via, for example, heightened
cuts, homophonics, or pasted voice-overs, which are
forms of, among other things, simulating
accessibility and discursive mastery.
The failure of a vernacular to fully signify across different
kinds of divides — i.e., that language, and its attendant
assumptions, expectations, forms and conventional
meaning structures don’t “translate” without effort —
can be exaggerated and read as part of the failure of
the tools of global capital to fulfill its implicit promise
of total access to any and all cultural contexts.
The author function of a work can be made to absorb or
incorporate the ironies of that reading, which also
produce (and this is what makes it lyric) a kind of
pathos, which can be beautiful.
10.
Maharashtra, the state in India where Mumbai is located,
was created in 1956, four years after Nissim
Ezekiel’s first book, A Time to Change was
published in 1952.
Arun Kolatkar, born in 1932, published his first book in
English in 1976, but was by then a well-known poet
writing in Marathi.
His first collection written in English, Jejuri, is a serial
panorama of a sacred Hindu site in Maharashtra,
incorporating numerous ironies that play the site’s
actual physical state off its accepted spiritual
significance.
Kolatkar’s second book written in English, Kala Ghoda
Poems, was published in 2004, a year after his death.
Sarpa Satra, a retelling, in English and in very
modern terms, of a tiny piece of the Mahabharata
was published that same year.
Kolatkar’s work in Marathi amounts to more than fifteen
volumes.
Kolatkar’s “Pi-dog,” from Kala Ghoda Poems, which is set
in the Kala Ghoda section of Mumbai, ends when it
becomes time to “surrender the city / to its so-called
masters” and resists any attempts to reduce its
specificities to perspectives that accrue, like rights, to
any one individual.
Kolatkar’s writing in English may have been an open secret,
with regard to forms of Maharashtrian and Hindu
nationalism.
10.
Poetry has its own particular modes of reception, rather than
a fixed and identifiable set formal characteristics.
Reception, in Auerbach’s sense, is a “subjectivistic-
perspectivalistic procedure,” one that, under certain
conditions, “creat[es] a foreground and a
background, resulting in the present lying open to the
depths of the past.”
The reception of the poem includes all the poems that have
been realized before it, and the histories to which it
otherwise “lies open” in Auerbach’s sense.
The production, dissemination, and reception of poetry, is,
even in negation, an act of affirmation, one that
creates a relation, the res poetica.
7.
In reviewing K. Silem Mohammad’s Deer Head Nation,
Aaron Kunin details “[h]ow to create a community
through poetry:
“1) A poem can describe an existing social organization….
“2) It can describe a society from an earlier historical….
period
“3) It can invent one — for example, Martian teenagers, etc….
“4) It can even invent the symbolic rituals through which
societies define themselves….
“5) a poem creates a community by incorporating multiple
voices through quotation, allusion, and influence —
intertextual rather than international relations….
“6) a poem is an expression of a community of poets….
“7) a poem is also part of a community — a collection of
poems, or a sequence….
“8) a poem establishes an artificial community among its
readers….
“Because the context of reading is a social one,” Kunin says
at the end of his review, “poetry acquires its real
significance in use.”
I think that poems are the media through which the res
poetica is realized, that that is the significance Kunin is
talking about, and the actual neural transport of the
communities to which he refers.
8.
From KSWnet.org, via Lemon Hound:
“Saturday, January 16, 2010
NEGOTIATING THE SOCIAL BOND OF POETICS
“Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: A series that
returns to and departs from Jacques Lacan’s theory of the
Four Discourses in order to discuss the social bond of
poetics.
“Negotiating the Social Bond of Poetics: Thematic Abstract
“The theme of this series returns to and departs from Jacques
Lacan’s theory of the Four Discourses in order to discuss
the social bond of poetics. Lacan develops this theoretical
frame in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX: On Feminine
Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, and some
of the selected fragments from Television. He proposes
that there are four fundamental discourses, or structures
of discourse, that produce different social bonds for the
subject. These discourses consist of the master’s
discourse, the hysteric’s discourse, the university
discourse, and the analyst’s discourse. While Lacan is
concerned with the limitation of the master’s discourse
and the university discourse, he sees the potential of
transformation in the analyst’s discourse. Although he
asserts that it is necessary to make an hysterization of
discourse in the process of analysis — because this is the
first step towards questioning the master’s discourse —
he asserts that this discourse must then be shifted to the
analyst’s discourse for Real change to occur. Seminar
XVII, which took place in 1969, follows the student and
social revolt of May 68, a historical moment in which
Lacan was immersed. He is critical of revolutions that
appear to simply question the master and the university,
and as a consequence only reproduce a new master,
without shifting social bonds, as he cynically suggests
that the Parisian students of 68 were in danger of doing.
However, we do find moments in Lacan’s seminars in
which he suggests that a writer can hold a similar
position as an analyst, and thus one would assume, also
be able to shift these other discourses to enact some
social change. Therefore, I am using this frame to ask
questions, develop a dialogue, about poetics and social
change. Can poetics operate like the analyst’s discourse
to create a different social bond through language? Do
poets intervene in these other discourses or intersect with
them in subversive ways that shift discourse and social
bonds? Is Lacan’s concept of the structure of the four
discourses useful for us today, particularly as we head
into financial cuts in the arts and academia that may limit
interventions in hegemonic discourses? Or do we need to
rethink what poetics and discourse are and reconsider
how we engage with and disseminate them? -Nancy
Gillespie”
11.
Pheng Cheah says that “cosmopolitanism and human rights
are the two primary ways of figuring the global as
the human” — and that as such, they partake of a
faulty discourse of the human.
Cheah argues that the discourses that surround, protect, and
legitimize current forms of globalization — the
discourses of cosmopolitanism and human rights —
fail to take into account the facts on the ground, the
actual ways in which people are not actually the
bearers of dignity, freedom, sociability, culture, and
political life.
That failure “indelibly compromises, circumscribes, and
mars the face of global human solidarities and
belongings staged by new cosmopolitanist and
human rights discourses.
“[I]f social-scientific solutions
to the problems of globalization have
always already pre-comprehended an idea of
humanity as the bearer of dignity, freedom,
sociability, culture, or political life, and therefore as
an ideal project that needs to be actualized, the task
and challenge… in relation to globalization may be to
question this pre-comprehension of the human and,
somewhat perversely, even to give it up.”
***
The Res Poetica a work in progress.
Meena Alexander suggested Sheldon Pollock’s work after reading a draft of a thesis prospectus that contained pieces of this work.
If the Pollock quotations could be dropped or substituted for, this work would be composed using only internet resources, and without utilizing any pay-window enabled sites.
O. Mandel (1961) and Wendy Steiner (1981) have used the term res poetica, which may need to be replaced.
“Metaphysical blippety-blips / while sucking candor lozenge?” -from “The Cosmopolitans” by Sianne Ngai and Brian Kim Stefans
***