Well Ian, a perception of the materiality of language, particularly written language, is, as we know, one of the most consistent ideas in modern theory, and one way or another such a thing plays a big part in the avant poetry/philosophy zeitgeist. A materialist poetics is shared by a great many across the post-modern spectrum, from the French to the Americans. Pre WW2 such a materialist poetics (though they never talked of it in those terms at the time) was limited to the left wing of modernism, very noticeable in the surrealists for example, but also evident in Russian futurism and American objectivism etc. This is very much the lineage of the avant garde, but I am always wary of attaching too much importance to any particular aspect. Nevertheless, yes, I do think there is a connection between the approach to language in these movements and the 'death of god'. 

I would not, however, link this directly to such things as the shift towards free verse and experimentation because these things happened across the broader modernist scene. I don't think what I am talking about is to be found in the macro forms (though some might strongly disagree with this), it is to be found in the textures and tensions, the micro forms perhaps. 

And yes, the 'in the beginning was the word' thing is, to my mind, one of the lurking presences behind what we call the transparency of language.  Transparency of language implies that words are direct signifiers to actuals, and this fits in with classic Christian and theist metaphysics. The opposite view, that language is opaque, that we bounce back off words instead of going through them to a further level, is, in the simplest terms, what a materialist conception of language does. Something like that. But this is too much for me to deal with here.

Tim A.
 
On 13 Jul 2009, at 10:03, ian davidson wrote:

Hello Tim

Do you mean a different relationship between language and experience? Is it anything to do with 'in the beginning was the word'? 

Would you expand the change to include poetic form, and a shift towards free verse and/or modernist experimentation? 

Fishing here. 

Ian 

> Date: Sun, 12 Jul 2009 11:09:20 +0100
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: spiritual materialism
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> An interesting post Jim. What an immense subject though.
> I've been on this planet for quite a while now and I still don't know 
> what people really mean by 'spiritual'. I tend to think of it as being 
> deep feeling but that never seems to be enough for the religious - 
> they always want to attach such 'deep feeling' to an outside agent. 
> What I do know though is the affect that such a thing as 'spiritual 
> belief' has on our use of language in poetry, or, to put it the right 
> way round historically, the affect on our poetry of losing spiritual 
> belief. I think there is, in most cases where the writer is 
> consciously theist or atheist, a noticeable difference in their 
> relationship to language. I would hazard the notion that that 
> difference first became manifest in Baudelaire.
> 
> Tim A.
> 
> On 5 Jul 2009, at 20:40, Jim Andrews wrote:
> 
> > it is commonly observed that a great deal of contemporary art/ 
> > writing involves a double sense of 'the material'. the term is 
> > understood to refer not only to the subject matter (the 'standard' 
> > understanding in writing) but also the matter of the media in the 
> > piece, the material embodiment of the piece. it's also commonly 
> > observed that the latter awareness of and approach to composition 
> > not solely by ideation, meditation on the subject matter, but also 
> > through operation on the material embodiment, has come to be much 
> > more widely understood as a part of reading than it was a generation 
> > ago. when we encounter work that does not follow the grammars and 
> > approaches traditionally associated with work, we inquire into the 
> > methods of composition, the approach to materiality, and look for 
> > relations between those methods and approaches and the subject 
> > matter, or look for the subject matter in the light of those things. 
> > and so read differently, thereby. and in this way, we now read some 
> > literary work in ways that are closer to how we approach a great 
> > deal of visual art.
> >
> > but what i want to get at is something that isn't so commonly 
> > observed, at the moment, but may be in the next generation. and 
> > that's the relation of awareness of the materiality of writing/art 
> > to our ideas of who and what we are. that's erm awkwardly stated. 
> > what i'm trying to get at is this. the whole emphasis on materiality 
> > is involved in a larger movement to explore how things like 
> > ideation, imagination, the spiritual, beauty, truth, goodness, 
> > justice--all our ideals and things normally associated with the 
> > immaterial--operate in the material world.
> >
> > in this sense, we might say that the whole contemporary awareness of 
> > materiality in art is part of a larger ah spiritual materialism. i 
> > googled that term, after it occurred to me, and i assure you i'm 
> > using it in a different sense than chögyam trungpa, who uses it "to 
> > describe mistakes spiritual seekers commit which turn the pursuit of 
> > spiritualism into an ego building and confusion creating 
> > endeavor" (wikipedia). instead, i'm refering to a relatively common 
> > sort of philosophy in which the material substrate of ideation and 
> > even the spiritual is affirmed and its relations with even the 
> > flightiest of fancies are explored. not to denigrate or dismiss 
> > things like spirituality but to explore how they operate materially.
> >
> > perhaps more evidently, now, this is also related to philosophies of 
> > mind in which the materiality of thought itself is affirmed--as a 
> > chemical and informational process, however emergent--and the brain 
> > and the mind that emerge from its processes are conceived as fully 
> > embodied in the material. so that the idea of being able to create 
> > thinking machines (however unlike us) becomes a real possibility. 
> > and we are conceptualized as nature's (near?) ultimate machines. and 
> > machines are conceptualized not as the simple things we once thought 
> > they must be but as often very complex biological creatures that, 
> > nonetheless, are embodied in the material world and are, therefore, 
> > subject to the constraints and possibilities of machines in the 
> > material world.
> >
> > to wrap it up, we now see the relation between contemporary artistic 
> > emphasis on the materiality of writing/art and the larger moment of 
> > 'spiritual materialism'.
> >
> > ja
> > http://vispo.com

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