Here's a one-two from the subpo list, a continuation of this discussion
along a slightly different line. Sherry's post (the first post here) was
in response to my initial 'metaphysics' bit.



yes, I like this, what you said. I would add something. to say that
language is already in and of itself a social act and so any language has
social effects or carries social weight (these are not the same things).
so that I think the poet and the reader can each be more or less conscious
of the way the poem works as a social document, or as materially social.
and that is the way in which a poem might be political in the writing, for
me, anyway. but for me, too, language (like shape and color in visual art)
can be more or less abstracted from its social uses (altho not entirely).
and that too has social weight or effects. sometimes abstracting something
for aesthetic effects seems to heighten memory of its social places, too.
Jackson MacLow for me would be the best example of this, esp. his In
Memoriam Kurt Schwitters, which is so very conscious of both of these
things, the aesthetic abstractions and nevertheless the inescapable social
materialities of the poem and its language. or another example, Milton's
sonnet on the dead um I forget the title protestants in some little
mountain town in europe, waldensians?

(Sherry Brennan, in response to 'politicopoeticoco', 16/7/98)


Sherry - thanks for your response - I take the point that a poet or visual
artist for example can attempt to momentarily de-codify words or uses of
colour in order to give the impression that they operate at an abstracted
remove from the social situations from which they originate. But as you
say, this 'heightens memory of its social places' and would seem
principally or at least most gravely to be a kind of heuristic bluff, or,
basically a kind of 'socratics' - What do you make of this, then (I try to
make of it what it came from, as you might have but were unable to have
asked of me directly). Not being able to ask directly is a different
thing, I'll wager, from not asking; this distinction seems to me to have
been made quite smeary and unattractive by much structuralist-influenced
theoretical poetics, which would sometimes have people believe that there
is no-one to ask them anything and so they must invent something to ask
themselves in some secluded and mystical way. I agree that language is
fundamentally social and that its political efficacy consists in improving
or altering the extent to which people are or become conscious of their
surroundings; what I ask is this: is the way in which language (by which I
do -not- mean any ad absurdum universe of unavoidable signs, but words and
grammar) effects this change, radically different from the way in which
other sign-bearing material events effect the same kind of change? If it
is (I suspect it must be), is this because our capacity to formulate social
valuations is one which inheres in language rather than in other human
abilities (despite Nietzsche's preference for the fist or boot)? If this
is so, isn't it really this latter capacity, the capacity to -evaluate-
(even accidentally), that, more than being intrinsically social in the way
that everything in human life is, actually elevates our use of language to
a progressive politics? Which would mean that language, although of course
in its nature a social phenomenon, is not always importantly so; or rather,
it is occasionally of highly inflated political importance and normally of
a necessarily low political importance. Personally I think this idea is
elemental to any individual responsibility with words, and always has been,
but that recent insistence on the pervasive political aspect of language
has contrived to repress the probability of its actual political function
through a rather self-serving trust in a vague resemblance of 'pervasion'
to 'egalitarianism.' And hence, in my rather undeservedly robust opinion,
we get vast tracts of supremely confident and superficially totalizing
verbiage from Ron Silliman. In which the capacity to formulate valuations
based on a distinction between important and relatively unimportant
political language seems to have been programmatically jettisoned in favour
of a fairly toyish liberty. Whippin' and snappin', k


(btb, the Milton piece is 'On the late Massacre in Piedmont', and seems
almost certainly to have been written at Cromwell's suggestion, following
the latter's international protest against the treatment of the Vaudois by
the Duke of Savoy in April 1655. I just read up on this, following your
suggestion Sherry - thanks, it's an interesting piece)
  




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