Maybe I have time to do a little more mental mountain climbing (or digital finger-slalom) this morning.
Continuing with the Turing biography. "turing" makes me think of a lathe; but apparently the family name stemmed from "Turin", Italy. A.T. was certainly an Olympics-class mental climber.
He's in college, & getting into mathematics, & Russell's Paradox ("the set of all sets, which contains itself", etc.). "'Normally,", wrote Russell, 'a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man.'"
(Aye, there's the rub.)
Georg Cantor's infinity [of infinities] research.
The fractal spiral of self-reflective patterns [the J! the J! the blue J!]. Art's resonant echo-chamber.
But let's get back to poetry. I have a hunch this Russell Paradox can be applied, in some kind of analogy, both to literary style ("what do we do after MODERNISM???"}, and on a more basic level, to the relationship between text (written symbols) and real experience; AND, on a more cryptic level, to certain theological notions.
I won't try to cover all this in one lecture.
On coffee break, I'm reading about Turing, and I'm watching college students go by, umbilically attached to cellphones, I-pods. & I read, "This lack of any simple connection between mathematical symbols and the world of actual objects fascinated Alan." I'm watching the students go by, I'm slurping my coffee, & I'm thinking about the relationship between text and person, and between poetic text and vocal recital, dramatic performance.
I'm thinking about that relationship, because I'm trying to follow up on the previous post, the bit about poetry's serious side opens a space for its aesthetic reception.
This particular intellectual/emotional/spiritual pleasure & value, as we know it anyway, follows specifically from writing & reading, from texts.
But, paradoxically, the benchmarks, the classics, the models which make up the substance of an ongoing tradition in poetry - these originated in periods of revolutionary change : when 1) writing, printing & literacy spread far & wide, and 2) when the vast energies of vernacular languages were absorbed into poetry.
So the classics are packages of newly-grasped forms of energy (reading; new languages).
Our pleasure & learning - through reading & writing - draw on sources which are amalgams of spoken language & new writing tools.
I'm reminded of one of Mandelstam's most striking formulae : "Poetry is a plow which turns up the deep layers of Time, and spreads them on the surface." He's referring to contemporary, Acmeist poetry as he understands it & wants it to be : reaching back into those vital sources, those original amalgams of popular speech and writing technology (Dante, the classic of classic exemplars).
& it's close to Hart Crane's Nietzschean sense of poetry's potential to "reincarnate", to re-capitulate, archaic or eternal times (Marlowe, Pindar...).
"I don't want Ovid in translation; I want the living, breathing Ovid," Mandelstam wrote. (I'm quoting from memory.)
The forms taken suddenly by ancient poetry are springs or sources : fresh, eternal beauty. (This is a sort of classicism, I guess.) Why? Because they embody this symbiosis of text & speech, of symbol & actuality, of poem & person.
Not models or patterns; sources.
Russell's Paradox, which arose in the attempt to conceptualize the basic nature of mathematics, also applies, somehow, every time we read the "imitation of a speech act". It applies, somehow, to our concepts of rationality itself : what is the status of an abstraction, a metaphor, a word? What (if anything) grounds their logical architecture?
& what is "reality", then? Maybe Mankind, for example, is, indeed, a man...
[see, philosophes, the much-debated Aristotelian/Scholastic notion, that there are no universals, only individuals... nominalism loops into Berkeleyan idealism... & back into Peirce's futuristic, "thought-like" realism... & back into poetic quiddity, vivid particularity... ut pictura poiesis... I-am-That-I-Am, I-will-be-what-I-will-be, JHWH...]
and the poem & the person, and the text & the real, and the student & the mp3-player, inhabit this unpredictable borderland, where they flow back & forth...
I'm circling around a holistic conceptualization of art which includes personhood. Getting back to those dilemmas outlined in Carol Christ's book (Victorian & Modernist Poetics).
OK, class dismissed.
Showing posts with label Peirce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peirce. Show all posts
2.24.2006
6.21.2005
Notes Toward & So On (2)
In the previous entry under this heading, I focused on the idea that new directions in American poetry & criticism might involve a new perspective toward symbol and image. On the face of it, this doesn't sound very new. Didn't the modernists just about cover this, from WCW to Pound to just about everyone?
The modernist image was an expression of its era, which was in revolt against the dying embers of post-Romantic Symbolism - its vagueness, otherworldiness, dead rhetoric. TE Hulme and Pound, the founders of Imagism, emphasized the difference between poetic and ordinary (functional) language - the latter, Hulme's "counter" language (words as counters) is abstract and utilitarian; the former (in good British empiricist fashion), using sharpened metaphor, striking juxtapositions, and careful attention to individual things, rather than abstract ideas, allows the reader to see the world anew. The focus is on physical perception. It was the dawn of the Photo Age : even with Pound's ideogram, the desire was for instantaneous perception of relationships.
Needless to say, we inhabit a different era now, a cyber-semiotic age. The computer has given new relevance to the complexity of the sign, ie. in the theories of the founder of semiotics, Charles Peirce. "Signifiers" represent "signifieds"; then, in a sort of chain reaction of semiosis, signifieds become signifiers, on another level. We are close to Dante's sense of the fourfold nature of the image. In the previous post, I wrote about a new version of the poetic symbol, rooted not in an otherwordly allegorical system, but grounded in the complexities of earthly reality. I don't have a name for this new image/symbol : but I'm thinking of qualifiers like "resonant", "harmonic", "parabolic" : signifying-symbolic chain reactions, tending toward an artistic and intelligible unity of meaning and impression - ie. "sense".
Over the weekend here in scandal-prone RI, a story broke on the pages of the Providence Journal. A family accused their lawyer, the son of a former State Supreme Court judge - considered a family friend - of taking advantage of their 16-yr-old daughter; under the auspices of providing her with legal counseling, he had corrupted her with cocaine & sex. The father, an ophthalmologist, related how, in the course of giving the lawyer an eye exam, he had discussed his suspicions that someone was victimizing his daughter; the lawyer said he would do whatever it took to find out who it was.
This is an example of a situation resonating with irony. The eye doctor is blind to the fact that the lawyer and family friend, sitting there under his lens, is the very culprit he seeks. Betrayal lurks beneath the level of mere physical perception. In semiotic terms, the "objects", the signifieds, of this account - the doctor & the lawyer - have become signifiers on another level of intelligibility.
I am suggesting that the evaluation of poetry of our age might have more to do with such parabolic symbolism - with whole poetic systems of intelligible representations - than with Hulme's or Pound's instantaneous cognitive-perceptual flashbulbs. This is why I argued previously that the example of Crane's Bridge - perhaps the most complex elaboration of a "grounded"/intelligible symbol in 20th-cent. American poetry - might be a pivotal reference point for a new kind of symbolic poetics.
In the previous entry under this heading, I focused on the idea that new directions in American poetry & criticism might involve a new perspective toward symbol and image. On the face of it, this doesn't sound very new. Didn't the modernists just about cover this, from WCW to Pound to just about everyone?
The modernist image was an expression of its era, which was in revolt against the dying embers of post-Romantic Symbolism - its vagueness, otherworldiness, dead rhetoric. TE Hulme and Pound, the founders of Imagism, emphasized the difference between poetic and ordinary (functional) language - the latter, Hulme's "counter" language (words as counters) is abstract and utilitarian; the former (in good British empiricist fashion), using sharpened metaphor, striking juxtapositions, and careful attention to individual things, rather than abstract ideas, allows the reader to see the world anew. The focus is on physical perception. It was the dawn of the Photo Age : even with Pound's ideogram, the desire was for instantaneous perception of relationships.
Needless to say, we inhabit a different era now, a cyber-semiotic age. The computer has given new relevance to the complexity of the sign, ie. in the theories of the founder of semiotics, Charles Peirce. "Signifiers" represent "signifieds"; then, in a sort of chain reaction of semiosis, signifieds become signifiers, on another level. We are close to Dante's sense of the fourfold nature of the image. In the previous post, I wrote about a new version of the poetic symbol, rooted not in an otherwordly allegorical system, but grounded in the complexities of earthly reality. I don't have a name for this new image/symbol : but I'm thinking of qualifiers like "resonant", "harmonic", "parabolic" : signifying-symbolic chain reactions, tending toward an artistic and intelligible unity of meaning and impression - ie. "sense".
Over the weekend here in scandal-prone RI, a story broke on the pages of the Providence Journal. A family accused their lawyer, the son of a former State Supreme Court judge - considered a family friend - of taking advantage of their 16-yr-old daughter; under the auspices of providing her with legal counseling, he had corrupted her with cocaine & sex. The father, an ophthalmologist, related how, in the course of giving the lawyer an eye exam, he had discussed his suspicions that someone was victimizing his daughter; the lawyer said he would do whatever it took to find out who it was.
This is an example of a situation resonating with irony. The eye doctor is blind to the fact that the lawyer and family friend, sitting there under his lens, is the very culprit he seeks. Betrayal lurks beneath the level of mere physical perception. In semiotic terms, the "objects", the signifieds, of this account - the doctor & the lawyer - have become signifiers on another level of intelligibility.
I am suggesting that the evaluation of poetry of our age might have more to do with such parabolic symbolism - with whole poetic systems of intelligible representations - than with Hulme's or Pound's instantaneous cognitive-perceptual flashbulbs. This is why I argued previously that the example of Crane's Bridge - perhaps the most complex elaboration of a "grounded"/intelligible symbol in 20th-cent. American poetry - might be a pivotal reference point for a new kind of symbolic poetics.
6.10.2005
...I understand such books probably sound turribly stuffy & old-hat. Nothing new there for poets in those quotes. All ABC stuff (Coleridge's notion of participation, etc.).
What I'm appreciating, though, is the subtlety of analysis, & the way he identifies sources & trends in thought about these problems. You start to see the genealogy of certain familiar ways of defining things. Thus for example, Ron Silliman's focus on Jakobson's 6-sided figure for language (see today's post) : using Prickett's angle of focus, one might start by recognizing a certain techno-positivist character to Ron's application. As if language is this 6-sided "object" which one can manipulate & turn about in various ways : & as if this manipulability is language's main point of interest to us, as poets & readers. Where is this approach to language coming from? Curious that such a functionalist notion of language is used to defend a poet (Coolidge) who is defiantly "non-functional" in Ron's sense of the word (ie. "vulgar representation").
I think Charles Peirce, for one, would look askance at the 6-sided operational model. Why? Because in semiotics, signs overlap & form hierarchies. Which also parallels the notion of an earlier philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt : that the basic meaning-unit of language is not the word, but the sentence. If the basic meaning-unit is the sentence - and if signs form hierarchies, overlaps & algorithms of meaning and effect and affect - what happens to the simple die-cast theory of signifier/signified, etc.? The signifier disappears into the signified, and what is signified becomes, in turn, a signifier, on another, sequential plane of meaning. The notion of "symbol" and symbolic meaning, in this sense, does not fit neatly into a 6-sided dissection ("we murder to dissect", as another poet wrote).
[p.s. on this idea of the symbolic sequences of signifier/ied/iers : as an example of just one among many types of this overlap phenomenon : see Mandelstam's essay "Conversation About Dante", where he describes Dante's chains of metaphors - "imagine an airplane in flight, launching another airplane off its wing, and then the 2nd launches a third..." (rough quote from memory). This whole question - of how multiple layers or branchings of meaning form & dissolve hierarchies of emphasis - an issue for logic & rhetoric - seems worth thinking about. When Mandelstam wrote that future critics would investigate the impulse behind the text, he was adumbrating the difficulty involved in tracking meaning, the author's elusive motivations. The complexity involved seems to explode any simple, atomistic notion of language as a cube with (6) definable applications.]
What I'm appreciating, though, is the subtlety of analysis, & the way he identifies sources & trends in thought about these problems. You start to see the genealogy of certain familiar ways of defining things. Thus for example, Ron Silliman's focus on Jakobson's 6-sided figure for language (see today's post) : using Prickett's angle of focus, one might start by recognizing a certain techno-positivist character to Ron's application. As if language is this 6-sided "object" which one can manipulate & turn about in various ways : & as if this manipulability is language's main point of interest to us, as poets & readers. Where is this approach to language coming from? Curious that such a functionalist notion of language is used to defend a poet (Coolidge) who is defiantly "non-functional" in Ron's sense of the word (ie. "vulgar representation").
I think Charles Peirce, for one, would look askance at the 6-sided operational model. Why? Because in semiotics, signs overlap & form hierarchies. Which also parallels the notion of an earlier philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt : that the basic meaning-unit of language is not the word, but the sentence. If the basic meaning-unit is the sentence - and if signs form hierarchies, overlaps & algorithms of meaning and effect and affect - what happens to the simple die-cast theory of signifier/signified, etc.? The signifier disappears into the signified, and what is signified becomes, in turn, a signifier, on another, sequential plane of meaning. The notion of "symbol" and symbolic meaning, in this sense, does not fit neatly into a 6-sided dissection ("we murder to dissect", as another poet wrote).
[p.s. on this idea of the symbolic sequences of signifier/ied/iers : as an example of just one among many types of this overlap phenomenon : see Mandelstam's essay "Conversation About Dante", where he describes Dante's chains of metaphors - "imagine an airplane in flight, launching another airplane off its wing, and then the 2nd launches a third..." (rough quote from memory). This whole question - of how multiple layers or branchings of meaning form & dissolve hierarchies of emphasis - an issue for logic & rhetoric - seems worth thinking about. When Mandelstam wrote that future critics would investigate the impulse behind the text, he was adumbrating the difficulty involved in tracking meaning, the author's elusive motivations. The complexity involved seems to explode any simple, atomistic notion of language as a cube with (6) definable applications.]
5.19.2005
The "rubrics" posted yesterday probably stem from one underlying principle : Beauty is the substance/structure of poetry. A corollary of this is the notion Jonathan Mayhew was talking about recently : Taste is an impersonal response to an objective reality (beauty).
The strict measures of beauty - not political polemics & allegiances - are what drive the merchants of the "poetry market" from the temple.
One could just as well say that Taste is a personal response to a subjective reality, if one were Kant, I guess (I'm not very well-grounded in philosophy). (Maybe this is what Jordan was getting at in his comment to Jonathan the other day.) But I'm not Kant, and I'm going to assume, with Charles Peirce (I guess), that we apprehend, imperfectly, the real objective existence of certain things, which we name with universal terms (ie. universally applicable).
& now I'm way over my head.
The strict measures of beauty - not political polemics & allegiances - are what drive the merchants of the "poetry market" from the temple.
One could just as well say that Taste is a personal response to a subjective reality, if one were Kant, I guess (I'm not very well-grounded in philosophy). (Maybe this is what Jordan was getting at in his comment to Jonathan the other day.) But I'm not Kant, and I'm going to assume, with Charles Peirce (I guess), that we apprehend, imperfectly, the real objective existence of certain things, which we name with universal terms (ie. universally applicable).
& now I'm way over my head.
8.02.2003
Kasey quotes Mukarovsky's On Poetic Language, an excellent book.
Mukarovsky admits a duality between artifact & communication, but leans toward the self-referential pole (he is also writing this at the height of the modernist era).
I wrote earlier this week that if the poem doesn't work as art, its sociopolitical "communications" are meaningless.
Nevertheless I am leaning & pushing in these blogpolemics toward the communicative pole.
Because, I guess, I believe in "universals", or some ground of truth (thinking of Chas. Peirce here). & for me a corollary of universals is that if they exist, they must exist in some kind of dialectic or duality with partial truths, differentiation of languages, etc. The problem of the many & the one.
How does this relate to poetics? Well, if you accept the notion of universality, then there is a problem with the purely self-referential, the autonomous artifact. Because everything exists in context & relation to general, universal truth. You cannot avoid communication, even if the emphasis may reside in pure aesthetic effects. (Of course, postmodernism already made this critique of modernism, but on behalf of a relativity so complete, so aleatory, it makes communication a moot issue. Postmodernism exploded the self-enclosed artifact & left smaller artifacts bobbling & wandering through "mass culture".)
& frankly I think it's intriguing to consider the hypothesis that there is a motivating situation underlying the supposed divide between "mainstream" & "experimental" (as we know them now, that is in their contemporary versions) : the situation in which the collapse of shared universal narratives pressures art to build these self-referential models, sort of compensatory utopias.
Mukarovsky admits a duality between artifact & communication, but leans toward the self-referential pole (he is also writing this at the height of the modernist era).
I wrote earlier this week that if the poem doesn't work as art, its sociopolitical "communications" are meaningless.
Nevertheless I am leaning & pushing in these blogpolemics toward the communicative pole.
Because, I guess, I believe in "universals", or some ground of truth (thinking of Chas. Peirce here). & for me a corollary of universals is that if they exist, they must exist in some kind of dialectic or duality with partial truths, differentiation of languages, etc. The problem of the many & the one.
How does this relate to poetics? Well, if you accept the notion of universality, then there is a problem with the purely self-referential, the autonomous artifact. Because everything exists in context & relation to general, universal truth. You cannot avoid communication, even if the emphasis may reside in pure aesthetic effects. (Of course, postmodernism already made this critique of modernism, but on behalf of a relativity so complete, so aleatory, it makes communication a moot issue. Postmodernism exploded the self-enclosed artifact & left smaller artifacts bobbling & wandering through "mass culture".)
& frankly I think it's intriguing to consider the hypothesis that there is a motivating situation underlying the supposed divide between "mainstream" & "experimental" (as we know them now, that is in their contemporary versions) : the situation in which the collapse of shared universal narratives pressures art to build these self-referential models, sort of compensatory utopias.
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