Imaginary Essays

by Rick Snyder

Translating Zukofsky's formula for poetry
(lower limit, speech; upper limit, music)
I would suggest that
poetry has as its outer limit, impermeability
& as its inner limit, absorption.

               —Charles Bernstein
               from "Artifice of Absorption" in A Poetics

This is why, at the limit of its own possibility, "at the edge of itself," wrenching itself from its "now-no-longer" toward its "as-always," the poem must clear a way between silence and discourse, between mutism's saying nothing and the saying too much of eloquence. It is the poem's narrow path, the straitening: the path that is "most narrowly" that of the I.

               —Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
               from Poetry As Experience
               trans. Andrea Tarnowski

Poetry lies in the incessant failure of language. We can't ever say what we mean or mean what we say—but even that means something.

Intention is as natural as failure in language. (Not that language itself is natural. It's about as unnatural as wrench, which is why animals don't speak or plumb, but just look at you and run away.) Intention is just another word for desire—though of course it's not, and herein lies the beauty: that all language lies—but without desire, I don't see the point of even being lied to. Of course, the reader must desire too—but with the full realization that no true response can be given, or even made up—and once the reader gives up this illusion, meaning can be made—contingently and socially.

Perhaps deep-seated structures in language unite us in the same way that certain genetic patterns make us homo sapiens—with the actual genetic codes being akin to ideolects—though I use that term with reservations, as it segues easily to the idea of a private, inner language, and all language is public and social, as are we, like it or not. The trap door out, of course, is the internalized other as discussed by Voloshinov/Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, before he declares, "I give myself verbal shape from another's point of view, ultimately from the point of view of the community to which I belong. A word is territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor."

To express anything is to attempt to define it—to another person.

The In the Beginning Was the Word myth, where the power of naming serves as the generative impulse itself—but with the qualification that if there weren't someone there evolved enough to hear it …. Herein also lies the illusion—that at some point, we were of one tongue, and somehow the word was more than a slippery pointer, because it was Adam's word spoken with agency of God as he named things in the Garden, thus warding off the chaos of undifferentiated matter—and setting up Eve by defining the apple.

(I didn't mean anything by "slippery pointer.")

Paradoxically, it is desire, the vital ingredient to all communication, that makes it so difficult. Desire can be overwhelming—often because it cannot be articulated—it remains too deeply subconscious, or it simply doesn't map with any words (like the world)—and it seems betrayed by the very language that helps to create it.

In acts that perpetuate the objectification of the world through the posited existence of stable subjectivity, language is reduced by the assumption that its meaning can be fixed. Language then becomes not referential but representational—attempting to re-present the world, which it really can't do, but will dutifully try if we force it—losing elasticity and excluding the reader until it becomes no more meaningful than a snapshot of a sunset. As Barthes wrote, the photograph is a language without a code. (Williams knew it too, in his injunction that art NOT COPY "reality.")

Debord asserts that the image is the consummate language of the spectacle, in which participation necessitates passivity and isolation, imprisoning us in the cells of our own I's and the mediated, mandated desires that allow the spectacle of commodities to continue to thrive far beyond the range of our presence, our action.

Poetry becomes much more interesting when the frame, when the contextual "world" itself, is manipulated through the writing, and subjectivity and objectivity enter into a more osmotic or symbiotic relationship.

The writer can sublimate too much desire into the material sign itself, working very hard not to betray desire by re-presentational language—which leaves the reader little to work with but material codes that are all but detached (just as language can never be truly re-presentational, it can never be wholly nonreferential) from the dynamic, social code of language as a system of differential meaning.

All writing is ideological, but does that mean that all writing is obligated to acknowledge ideology, implicitly or explicitly?

In the most problematic instances, politicized deconstructive writing becomes sanctimonious, as the writer seems to stand outside of the desire for power to kindly (or aggressively) unmask it for the otherwise helpless reader, who is finally rendered powerless to participate in this one-dimensional sublimation.

Of course our material world—including the language that's a constitutive part of it—affects our sense of self, our desires and our actions—but does that reality mean that it should be the sole prism through which reality itself is seen? The beauty of language is that it's only part material—the sign, the material signifier, is only the starting point—the rest exists somewhere in the minds of both reader and writer.

(Of course, mind is merely a convenient term for actions of the material brain—affected by all our chemical (im)balances and memories we don't even know we have—but that doesn't reduce these actions—our consciousness—to the physical brain, in the same way that the material environment for all social interaction doesn't reduce that interaction to the merely material).

((Of course, to even invoke the terms mind and brain, self and world is to perpetuate a gross dualism in which aspects of the larger environment—aspects of perceptual and cognitive "reality"—are presented as free-standing entities, as if any of them could exist without relation to the others, as if they are not the things whose interrelations, transcending the false distinctions of their very thingness, constitute the larger environment of our shared "reality."))

But how else could we speak of the world—of the thing that we create and are created by?

To adopt and adapt Williams' concern as presented in the fourth book of Paterson and create a new language, one not geared to his now quaintly nationalistic concerns, but relevant to a world whose reality includes the technology of mass murder and convenient degradation, corporate-constructed fetishes, tinted glass and endless parking, crumbling schools, satellite supervision, third-world sweatshops and Timothy McVeigh. Amadou Diallo.

The media that brings "reality" to us, provided we can pay for it with continued consumption.

Today, the poet's activity in Western society has been entirely bracketed and presented as meaningless, as worthy of no money, the sole standard of contemporary meaning.

Thus liberated, the poet is free to network, to compete for publishing, reading, and teaching slots, free to conform, to make connections, to write positive reviews, to acquire social capital and acquire more by distributing it to the young poets who enter his/her program, to win the fame of others doing the same.

Two years ago I watched a show on UPN about bodybuilders. It was behind-the-scenes, gossipy, heavy-metal-accompanied production in which the competitors for Mr. Unreal Or Something discussed one another's strengths and weaknesses and outlined their programs and the implicit reasons for the superiority of their methods. All of the bodybuilders seemed to know each other well, and they spoke seriously about the others, even if they occasionally made some dismissive comments.

Are poets the metastasized idealism to that materialism of bodybuilders, both so wholly out of line with contemporary reality as to seem a freakish curiosity, at once frightening and funny?

Thus liberated, the poet is free to construct a meaningful reality to the extent that he or she is willing to question the comforts of the known, of cell phones, keyboards, interstates, tenure, mortgages, exegesis and other elements of an inhuman reality that we create and are created by.

How would you imagine a world without these things, without you? Or how would you imagine a world in which these things were merely things, and not the end of nature? How would you write such a fiction, or how would you work to create a reality in which life was more than a biological condition bound by the strictures of production and consumption, in which life was possible? How would you write a poem?

"Reality is not simply there," Paul Celan wrote in 1958, "it must be searched and won."

The power of any desire can create fear—manifested as a reactionary desire to control language—which knocks it out of its relational state with the reader and itself, and maps it into a more direct and static relationship with one aspect of itself or the world.

Who doesn't want a pilot to have "transparent" instructions, and who can't see the importance of writing that ironically highlights the tropes of re-presentational writing, and who can't believe that politically deconstructive or re-presentational writing may help heighten political awareness of issues that deserve to be noticed—because peoples' lives depend on it.

At this stage in Late Capitalism, consumption breeds nihilism and fundamentalism—two sides of the same koine. Can nihilism and fundamentalism be countered through the social creation of meaning in the world—of contingent, relational meaning that is unique to the atmosphere of the present time (as translations must be made for each generation, so must poetry)—or is this merely another form of fundamentalism?

To understand that all meaning is mediated and that no external, eternal meaning can be conferred on any human act or thought, to understand the death of God and all grand narratives does not necessitate the evacuation of meaning from all human activities, and does not transform writing into the mere play of surfaces, into the appropriation of discourses, into jokes, facility, and aggression, into the deft unmasking of encoded ideologies and constructed identities and value systems.

Play, appropriation, and unmasking are no more inherently meaningful than meaning itself.

In every situation, meaning is conferred by those who participate in its construction. This activity should be the actual basis for any community working to undermine and transcend existing social structures that would deny the validity of any meaning not marketed for the benefit of those in power.
With the ends wholly bracketed, with a potential meaning so far outside the bounds of contemporary structures of inhuman reality as to seem vital, emancipatory, poetry is still absorbed by the system into a network of artificial success—awards, appointments, blurbs—turning community into Kommunity, meaning into material.

The writing I'm most interested in uses desire to work within—to create—the strait between the traps of fetishizing representation and fetishizing the material word (or world). In between lies the diminished garden—a lie if ever there was one, but one founded on desire—a desire that's not controlled but addressed and manipulated through the language that helps to create it.

One way to do this is through subtle and aggressive manipulations of the horizontal and vertical vectors of language, distorting the associative effects of individual words in syntactical movements of phrase, line, sentence, and stanza to simultaneously generate layers of signification and degrees of indeterminacy that allow a construct in which both reader and writer can exist—not as discrete individuals (which we only are in the passive consumption of images, or mediated "reality") but as acts of cognition and desire that allow meaning to inhere—out there in the world we create and are created by.

In this sense, it is dialectical interaction of language and desire that creates meaning through writing—in the reader and writer—in the imaginative space they create between them.

So much depends upon the participles.

As Deleuze writes in Nietzsche and Philosophy, "There is no event, no phenomenon, word or thought which does not have a multiple sense." As Lyn Hejinian writes in "The Rejection of Closure," "The desire that is stirred by language seems to be located more interestingly within language, and hence it is androgynous. It is a desire to say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and even a feeling of doubt very like jealousy that springs from the impossibility of satisfying this desire."

Yet this ever-unsatisfied desire in the multiplicity of language is all we have, and need—for it is what allows reader and writer to interact and engage writing to realize potential ….

The first step in this process is stepping away from the reactionary desire to control desire—clearing the mental room in Spicer's sense, or starting at zero in Ashbery's—to not write "about" but "around" and "into"—working with the hope that vital, social meaning can inhere in language—but far from perfectly. Ultimately, both writer and reader must work to create meaning-to manipulate the elasticity, the failures of language-wherein its strength lies.

For all language is a lie—an approximation, a differential and slippery code, a metaphor. Nietzsche knew this. He knew that there was no truth or nature, for us, but only the words that point to those things—or only those things, and no way to ever truly say them.

Though Nietzsche posits that reality is ultimately fluid, an environment in which our language imposes illusory but practical constructs of subjectivity and objectivity, and in which we would have the power to reconstruct the very means by which life is perceived, distinguished, and implicitly valued—and though he clearly acknowledges the seamless interaction of language and world in the creation of one another—through all this, I don't know if he thought that language's inability to bridge the gap (that it incessantly re-creates) between itself and the world was its greatest strength.

The day before he was institutionalized, Nietzsche hugged a horse that had been beaten by its driver.

© Rick Snyder. All rights reserved.