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Dear Dom, Enjoyed your post yesterday, and wonder if I could reprint it in a small lit magazine I publish. I could send you a copy on publication (the next issue is in June), would just need a snailmail address and a short bio, say to forty words. If you're comfortable with my using it, the way I'd do it is to give it a title - perhaps 'Poetry as Communication' - and insert at the bottom of the page, 'Text of a post to the Poetryetc mailing list, 13th Jan 2002'). Perhaps you could let me know? Best, Ralph Wessman http://www.tassie.net.au/~ahugo/fr/ >>> domfox <[log in to unmask]> 13/01/2002 10:48:29 pm >>> The argument I often have with people and never win is the one about poetry as communication. Poetry, someone says, is at bottom, primarily, mainly, centrally, inevitably and fundamentally a means of communication. Sometimes they say it's a way of communicating emotions; especially if they think that poems are a good way of expressing inner feelings with maybe some beautiful language and some very apt and clever metaphors and images being used to do it. But that's not what bothers me. It's the "means of communication" bit that bothers me, because it is a normative statement posing as a descriptive one, and you can tell this because whenever you hear someone say that poetry is at its very heart, essentially, without question and above all else a means of communication, they're usually saying it as a way of telling someone off for not communicating *properly*. *Obviously* poetry is a means of communication, so if a poem doesn't communicate it is a *failure*, a degenerate case, The Thing Which Should Not Be. A variant argument asserts that even if a poem *appears* not to be very communicative, it still is communicating really because all poetry is finally and irrevocably and incontestably a means of communication. You can't not communicate. Even if you want not to. Even if you think you've managed not to communicate, you have because you must have because, you see, poetry is a means of communication. I don't especially desire a poetry that communicates nothing whatsoever, but I do resent its communicativity being taken so much for granted. It pre-empts everything the poem might do to disrupt communications, or to bring the performativity of certain figures of rhetoric into question; it means measuring the "success" of the poem in terms of its ability to harness that performativity, like a fresh microprocessor plugged into the motherboard of rhetoric. This one passes; this one's defective. It isn't, looping back to science, that science is purely and wholly exterior to the social matrix. It is that it *infects* society with an otherness that sociology is precisely unable to grasp or recognise because it is concerned only with social inter-actions (which it considers to be the authoritative Final Context of Everything). Some of the actants in science are not social beings; some of them are machines, apparatuses, algorithms - artifacts of human design to be sure, but not everything about them returns to the father. J. G. Ballard wrote somewhere that in the future our computational devices will have refined themselves down to the point where they are invisible to us, capable of entertaining purposes indifferent to our own and of acting in humanly unimaginable contexts. That is not an outcome that can be plotted on any graph of the social: it is, however, an outcome that some human beings are more or less consciously working towards. Dominic