Hi Keston,
Still no time really to leap in the pool, but here's a toe in the water
indicating that I think this remark
That is, the desire to enjoy misunderstanding (or to
>prohibit understanding) is a kind of affliction for the possibility of
>consensual adversity. Because it makes the reading process -private-; it
>privatizes the resources and values of exegesis.
is just a little off as a characterization of the readerly protocols
implicit in langpo or requested in langpo prose. I don't think the
prohibition you refer to, for instance, is necessarily stated in the
following passage from Bernstein's "Optimism and Critical Excess":
Here's my theory of surplus explanation:
Multiple incompatible hypotheses are needed to provide an adequate account
of any phenomenon--aesthetic, material, or psychological.
Which of course means no explanation at all.
This seems to me to be arguing for something a little different from
"enjoying misunderstanding" or "prohibiting understanding." Nor do I think
that "the public" is erased here but rather, as it were, reconfigured. It
seems that he assumes that we at least have the object or "phenomenon" "in
common" and share a desire to "account" for it. The "adequate account"
becomes the most complete or "multiple" account, which will take on
contradictory perspectives.
We--by which I mean some public--can collectively value exegesis without
sharing--or especially without requiring-- particular explanations, no?
I'm almost as nervous, Keston, about your hope that
these resources
>and values ought to be public, or even national.
as I am about Bernstein's last sentence, which seems to conflate a
rejection of singular and prematurely narrowed or shared explanations with
a rejection of explanation per se. I'm worried about something I see as
possibly emerging from your line of argument: when does an argument that
exegesis should be understood as a public--or, much more problematically,
"national"--good become an argument that this or that reading of a
particular poem should be SANCTIONED by a public or nation? Assuming that
we could ever really get to the point where we were reading the SAME THING.
But maybe this is framing the problem inadequately. I wonder if we really
don't share more than you seem to think we do--at least within particular
discourse communities, to use some jargon. The problem is probably moving
across and among these communities, not an easy task for ANY poetry these
days.
Today you write
>
>So: I think that people should write the kind of poetry which encourages
>or even stipulates this solidarity of reception. My own future
>poetry, unless I change my view radically, shall be an effort to achieve
>this.
and while I understand your despair before a poetics of defamiliarization
that seems to make little or nothing happen in the world I wonder how you
are going to "stipulate" a reading of your poems. I'll have to see, I
guess, but this goal would strike me as frightening if I weren't pretty
sure that attaining it is impossible. I guess like Eliot in the 4 Quartets
you could float a language thick in received symbol or like Geoffrey Hill
you could work anxiety about interpretation into the most minute details of
the poem. Or you could pursue the path of Creeley, taking a common idiom
as the ground one walks and plays in. But it's hard to know how you can
MAKE something "common." Things--idioms, interpretations--BECOME or ARE
common, no? Oh but you will tell me that you merely mean to push in the
other direction so as not to pursue defamiliarization only for
defamiliarization's sake, difficulty for difficulty's sake, and so on.
Just wondering.
in haste,
Keith
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