A stone fallen from heaven

I'd just like to sketch out some quick unrehearsed responses to Joshua Clover's recent piece over at the Harriet blog ("Unfree Verse").  This is a plain-spoken, straightforward personal essay about some of the dreary aspects of working in academia, and of contemporary work-life in general, and of the effort to be a poet and write poetry in this time & place.  I respect Clover for his honesty, but I have to register my disagreement with his conclusions.

Clover sums up, near the end of the piece, like this : "In the society of ambient discipline, all verse is unfree."  He defines "ambient discipline" as : "I don’t mean Foucault-type discipline like sovereigns and regimes of power. I mean political economy basically. How our shared and fragile lives are structured according to the imperatives of the economy’s self-remaking."

Now this may not be Foucauldian, but it seems to be describing a structural, pervasive economic determinism.  We are not in control of our economy; it is in control of our "shared and fragile lives."  This appears to be an underlying principle of Clover's sense of what he terms "political economy".

There is no argument to be made against the fact that freedom, for each of us as individuals, is limited.  What I question here is the implied global determinism, structuring human social life in its totality.  The history of the 20th century offers numerous examples, from the political left and right, of theories of determinism put to use as means of denying the differences between liberal democracy, on the one hand, and political authoritarianism or tyranny, on the other.

I would argue that a belief in forms of government which provide limited, yet very real, freedoms - those freedoms we associate with basic norms of human rights and liberty - is not naive or delusory.  In the treadmill of economic necessity, so plangently evoked here by Clover, we can lose sight of these fundamental political conditions.  Moreover, cynicism will always rush to the aid of our discontent, if we let it.

I would also argue that there is an analogy (though imperfect) between political freedom and the freedom of art and poetry.  I was struck by Clover's remark : "Poetry can stand for freedom so intensely that people start to worry there is too much freedom."  This gets at something important, but then Clover deflects it into a gibe at Robert Frost (and, by extension, at the neo-formalist school of poetic "discipline").

Let's think for a moment about poetry as free expression.  For poets, this involves the very marrow of our vocation.  We are creatures of the dream of fabulous inspiration : we wait and work for the moment when the poem bursts forth with unaccountable force.  It is on this kind of "charismatic" experience that we have based our whole sense of poetry's cultural importance, its authority.  We believe poetry is the ultimate form of human verbal expression; that poetry is how human beings express living truth.

Even the cherished, exalted fountain of pure, living Truth, however, must subsist and be understood within shared limitations : of mortality, of biology, of history, of politics, of economics, of cognition, of cosmology...  - thus the Chaplinesque, tragicomic biographies of the poets (paralleled by the tragicomic destinies of the cultures which produce them).  Our experiences of poetic free expression, then, are elusive - perhaps never equal to the imagined ideal.

However, once again, this mixed situation does not negate the reality of freedom in poetry, just as economic necessity or political divisions do not of themselves preclude the (limited, embattled) existence of democracy, equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty.  As a poet, I believe in the effort, the labor, of making room for creative freedom and inspiration in one's practical life.  I believe this effort is justified, even if not everyone, yet, has equal access to creative opportunities.  Because it does take work.  It involves actual life-decisions; it requires some devotion, some faith, some self-discipline.  Most of our commitments, of course - along with our whims - may prove eventually to have been mistakes; but this does not disqualify the effort.

No one, as poet, has to take a job in academia.  No one, as poet, has to play the mercenary games of networking and self-promotion (I'm not suggesting that these games, and academia per se, are the same thing : they are not).  Poetry is a distinct labor, which is sometimes rewarded with inspiration, and even more rarely with public recognition.  The freedom to make the original poem - unmediated by necessity of any kind - is the honor, and the ultimate social value, of the trade.  The "autonomy" of art, which Clover derides, is part and parcel of this limited, experiential, laborious, earned freedom.

"The poem is a stone fallen from heaven : no one will judge it." (Osip Mandelstam)  This, it seems to me, is the credo of every real poet.

"Jane" has some current thoughts related to this stuff.

Poetry certainly provides food for thought. What a criticism along the lines I'm mulling over here would do, though, is investigate & evaluate the poem as food-source rather than meal : the poem as many-sided living something. As evocative, resonant art-action-work.

Aristotle, according to RS Crane et al. anyway, offers some neglected tools for doing that. Neglected in part because of the critical assumptions (blinders) he outlines in the chapter I just quoted.

Jane Dark has a very structured & programmatic way of addressing questions (in which one of my comments on the politics of poetics gets described as "absurd"). I can't say I've thought things through as systematically, but off the top of my head, responding:

in the outline she draws here of history & poetry, and Marxist criticism, she is careful not to predetermine any commitments that might be (falsely) assumed to follow from a Marxist-critical starting point. Nevertheless, she is at the same time careful to posit the basic underpinnings of the approach : 1) "history" determines the meaning of particulars (events) : ie. history is the primary & adequate frame of reference for interpretation; 2) consciousness is determined by social forces which also "make" history (consciously or not); and 3) if we identify "emergent poetics", we are bringing to awareness the mode of poetics which is aligned or at least recognizes the forces of changing contemporary history, as opposed to "residual" or backward-looking or traditionalist poetics.

The underlying assumption here is that history itself is determined by economics (ie. class struggle) : what we call the frame of history is colored by the struggle for economic dominion (ie. control of resources & means of production).

The absurd point(s) I was trying to make, and would like to reiterate, is that it seems to me that, first of all, history itself is producing a narrative which contradicts Marx in many respects; for example, the struggle between labor & capital does not seem to shape & define social relations & power structures in the determinist manner which Marx predicted. Social relations, social power, & social development are defined by communities which are not simply determined, in turn, solely by their status as bourgeoisie or working class. What this means is, that even if we choose "history" as the ultimate interpretive frame, history itself is not necessarily defined accurately in Marxist terms.

Secondly, it seems to follow from this that if we are imposing a false (let's say, "materialist") notion of historical causality, we will come up with a skewed image of literature. Rather than assent to a particular theory of history, which then colors our view of literary phenomena, I would argue that "history" is a human work-in-progress - an unresolved, intellectually improvisatory phenomenon, resulting from the interrelation of the workings of time & nature (a reality outside total human control) with human consciousness. We make & write history - and these activities change as new knowledge is gained (& in some cases old knowledge lost). In other words, we have no complete & authoritative version of either history or history-making which we can simply apply to our theory of literature or poetics.

& if this is the case, then it seems irrational to apply a theory of history - since it will be either false or incomplete - as a means toward the "explanation" of literature. It's a case of overburdening criticism with unexplained or unexplainable or inapplicable levels of abstraction.

Criticism & poetics is in the position of devising its own interpretive frameworks. As long as these are laid out clearly, the reader is enabled to recognize the assumptions & assertions undergirding these interpretations. The reader may or may not agree with the provisional outline of history or literature which the critic supplies; but the reader will be in a position to evaluate not only the preliminary assumptions, but their applications as part of the critic's (or the artist's) whole method & approach to specific works of art.

Thirdly, & finally, I would question the simple application of the category of history to the category literature. In a fundamental way, art interprets reality - shows it back to us - by means & methods, and with goals, which rival, & differ from, those used in the narrative/interpretive activity we call history.