Part of the problem (the obscurity!) of this
discussion is caused by the tendency to try to
understand (more formally, to define) the concept
'clarity'in an acontextual way. People want to take
this concept out of its surroundings and put it behind
glass in some sort of museum of poetics. So many
conceptual errors are caused by this sort of
instinct...in the Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein discusses two uses of the word 'exactly'.
He describes a couple of scientists in a lab who split
a second into one thousand parts in order properly to
measure something. They wind up with something like
'ah, A's 0.000003 seconds after B, exactly on time.'
Later on these two scientists is visiting another for
dinner - he is well-known for being late for such
occasions. Asked to turn up at 6pm, he makes it by
6.02 pm. Under these circumstances, his host's comment
'How unusual, you're exactly on time ' is not at all
objectionable. What trouble we might get into by
trying to formulate a definiton of 'clarity' designed
to point up sufficient conditions linking these two
uses of 'clarity'... My rather laboured
recapitulation of a brilliant eg is attempting to
suggest that the standards by which we judge many
concepts are context-dependent, and are obscured by a
mania for generalisations that has afflicted Western
thought since Socrates. So-called 'postmodernists -
I'm thinking especially of the Derrideans, here -
share the commitment of the traditionalists, the
classicists, for acontextual definitions. Descartes
and Derrida, Frost and Silliman all agree that it's
acontextual necessary and sufficient conditions or
bust - they just disagree over whether such a
standard, such epistemological suprematism, is
attainable.
People get so hung up on the 'absolute truth' vs
epistemological nihilism' trip that they forget the
alternative - epistemological relativism (sometimes
they even conflate nihilism and relativism!)
This sensible position demands that we pay attention
to the context-dependence of meaning. Of course,
recognising context-dependence implies remembering how
much individual chunks of language, including those
curious chunks of language jnown as poems,
underdetermine their reception and use. Recently I
published a poem by an avowedly 'abstract' poet, a
disciple of Ashbery and Mondrian, in the political
paper which I help to edit. This poem had been
previously published in a self-consciously
'avant-garde' literary zine, where its 'radicalism'
barely caused the batting of an eyelid. How different
was the response when it graced the pages of Third Eye
- A Newsletter for People who Hate the News, in the
place where people were presumably expecting
condemnations of capitalism or reports from the latest
anti-GE food demo! Similarly, I wonder whether a poem
by Keats would not look a little 'disjunctive' and
'subversive' squeezed into The American Tree...
While we are on this topic, can I ask people what they
think about the idea of a Private Language? A belief
in the 'personal' ie non-social nature of private
'thought' and 'sensation' seems a necessary
prerequisite for many of the more reactionary attempts
at poetics built around that vague concept 'clarity'.
In my view, Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument
demolishes such structures.
Sorry this is all so messy, it's 4 in the morning
here and I can't sleep...
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Subject: Chewing the clarity
From: "William Herbert" <[log in to unmask]>
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> GS. Given that obscurity, by definition, interferes
with communication,
it's
> hard to defend.
Dear Gillian,
Just want to expand on this point in your comments on
obscurity.
We all seem to agree that the purpose of a poem is to
communicate, but is
there some difference as to what we believe it to be
communicating? When
people (what a wierd-sounding thing to say! I mean
readers, non-readers,
journalists, workshop attendees, my constituents,
members of the
congregation, petrol pump attendants, Onion Johnnies,
infants two or three
months old) talk to me about poetry (happens all the
time!) they sometimes
mention a message which they believe to be 'in' the
poem, but obscured by
the devices of the poem -- rhyme, alliteration, even
the line, are all seen
as interfering with this message. That suggests that
some readers of poetry
are trying to extract a prose content, some core of
information or opinion
that's different to the 'casing' as they see it. I
tend to think that what
is communicated in a poem is a combination of all
these elements -- that any
message in the poem is shaped by the content rather
than hidden within it;
and that the textures of metre, vocabulary, reference
are not on the surface
of the poem, but intensely involved with its whole
meaning.
If that's at all true then one of the dangers poetry
constantly runs is that
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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