 |
 |
>I agree Keith that context goes only so far in determining how a poem is >apprehended, but I imagine I'd say that it goes a good deal further than >you would. Perhaps not, but our tones suggest this. I'm quite willing to >be convinced that I don't really have much compassion for the consumer -as >consumer-, and would welcome your reasons for disbelieving my statement on >that account. > I am happy to have had some small part in initiating this discussion, which I have little time to join. I find much to agree with in many of the posts and want especially to applaud Doug Oliver's remarks. It is not so much that we disagree about the extent to which context is determining, Keston, though I think that we do to a degree; it is rather that I don't believe that it is sufficient to imagine that any one context can be altogether isolated from others. No pure space except in fantasy (if there). One has every right of refusal, as you say, but the grounds of said refusal remain unarticulated except as negativity. This was the point, in the second post, of the parenthetical remark: capitalism as opposed to what? From inside such a total system, I try to make do and make potential, to stumble along, with mobile tactics (the work of de Certeau would perhaps be relevant here). I take it that this is part of what cris might mean by referring to his decision to move from position to position to position as against your decision to opt for a more fixed position. Perhaps I am wrong; it wouldn't be the first time; perhaps he will clarify as you might also unpack what you mean by identifying your position as (partly or possibly) "Heideggerian" (to allude to a more recent post). In adding that you don't have compassion for the consumer "as consumer" you identify part of what I meant by the remark that prompted that gloss, and I would quote the same passage from your first response that Alison quotes: >to let a reader browse from leaf to leaf and come to this conclusion for >herself, is not a liberty I'd be keen to promote (particularly not if it'd >cost her 12.99 or so). Again, of course you do not have to "promote" such an option, have every right to refuse, etc. At the same time I will insist that you cannot pretend to "compassion" as I think that you substitute your own experience for the potential experience of every other possible reader. I think that you imagine that, given social circumstances, the reader's freedom to think or judge for himself or herself is an illusion, and then refuse to do much at all to address that illusion, not anything that I, anyway, would call especially "compassionate." You recognize the ways in which readerly values and understanding are circumscribed--to use Alison's word--and opt not to give them the word you think they might need but instead no word at all, or no word that might be executed within contexts not tightly controlled and perhaps requiring an initiation. My pluralist position cannot pretend to being uncontaminated OR free from manipulation--the freedom of the reader, after all, will not be total--but I prefer its optimistic wager to what might potentially amount to silence. I was altogether moved by and taken with a sentence of John Wilkinson's in an essay on John Wieners published in The Gig some time ago. It is the concluding sentence: "Being well-spoken I'm hardly one to talk." (My apologies to JW for taking this out of the context of a discussion of "absurd wagers" in lyric poetry and of poets who "work interactively in the informational miasma--as programmers say, making choices among local destinies.") When I read that I thought--well I am hardly well-spoken and thus must be altogether prepared to talk--in, of, and maybe even as the miasma. all best, Keith %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%