I've been mooting this response to Douglas Oliver's
two postings for two days. Douglas is a poet I admire
a great deal, "An Island that is All the World" was,
in many ways, the model for my whole Ph.D thesis, its
movement from poetry to prose. I am also a great
admirer of Prynne, find his work emotional and more
than emotional, which I'll discuss below. However, I need to
take on these criticisms of Derrida, to look to a "both/and
Derrida/Prynne".
From Douglas' original posting:
"This is where his [Prynne's] poetry has always been
superior to the most clever linguistic theorists, such as
Derrida, who though attemting to refine Husserl's account of
time has not fully taken in quantum level space-time
coordinates that are probably at work in mental activity --
we get an erasure process instead, which isn't even
sufficiently Schroedingerian enough for me.)"
Douglas expands on this in his later posting, which
I repost at the foot of this message. I'll excerpt from it
and offer responses first.
First of all, I should say I approach Derrida as
a writer, I study him for rhythm and form, I look to his
specific metaphors, how he qualifies and returns to them,
no differently from Douglas and Robin looking at Prynne
as a writer. In fact, their criterion of the poetry's
excellence in these posts seems to me to be its use
of metaphor and imagery. Although I know Douglas has also
written of how much he likes the sound of Prynne, do fill me
in if there's detailed analysis around too.
Douglas, there are a great many canards in your long
posting, often attributed to unnamed "Derrideans", or "early
Derrida". I don't see many who read Derrida tuning into this
list being very impressed with us poets if no-one protests,
anymore than many here would like to hear vague talk of
Prynnites, eg concerning all the poets' poetics in A Various
Art.
"a) In earlyish Derrida, language has two axes of
difference, as in standard semiology stemming from Saussure.
Call them vertical and horizontal."
Where, Douglas? Lacan certainly takes on Saussure
and Jacobson a little like this, but Derrida?
Earlyish-Derrida's first book, *Edmund Husserl's Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction*, questions Husserl's and anyone's
reliance on geometry as a tool for analysing anything. His
book picks up Husserl's challenge, to think the origin of
geometry, whence the first systematising came, a sort of
ideal geometry, and finds no comfort even in that. I would
say the evidence of Derrida's texts, his use of language,
is that he sees language as much more supple and multi-
dimensional than geometric models: even in the way it
describes a model, in language, it both figures it and
bends that figure in space-time, rhythm-time,
context-space. Derrida just doesn't go for models that
are the grounding model of reality, a point from which
to draw a graph, place an origin. Hence his critique of
most philosophy for seeking a meta-language: a model,
mathematical, geometrical language purer than language.
Interesting that of all philosophers, he has most often
used geometrical formalisms: bi-columns, postcards etc.
To use any position, but not as final arbiter.
"Derrida's position [just the one, Douglas? not for
nothing did Derrida call a book *Positions* plural]...
was that in linear time (the 'horizontal') our minds are
always too late to trap the instant of change that creates
difference - the 't' in 'time' has already passed by the
time we see it is different from 'i' and that it is
beginning to create the word 'time'. Along the vertical
axis there is also a spacing out between all the associative
distinctions possible in the language system, from which
also we build the meaning. Our minds are already flooded by
the system of language."
Douglas, this is phenomenology, very useful for
reading Prynne's The Plant-Time Transcripts, where Prynne is
great on Rupert Sheldrake's rather naive "one goes, they all
go" morphic resonance's reliance on linear time, where he is
now to me much more readable because, genuine thanks, you've
linked him to the phenomenology which underwrites P-T T so
much more thoroughly, with so much less resistance, or
complicating of the picture into more dimensions than
Derrida's use of Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzche... But I'm
forgetting Prynne "has always been superior" to Derrida
in all his works over all Derrida's works: no chance that
my opinion might hold, some bits of each are a complication
of the other, and v.v? Not even Derrida's absolutely
consistent avoidance of sexism from 1970's *Spurs* onwards
compared to Prynne's sexist Dr "please call me Myrtle" Gale
character in P-T T?
Let me juxtapose your, in my opinion, Husserlian
Derrida with Derridean Derrida, earlyish Derrida even? (*Of
Grammatology*, 1967): he argues Rousseau's "culture" is not
natural and anti-artificial (always better than "clever
linguistic theorists"?):
"If culture is thus broached within its point of
origin, then it is not possible to recognize any linear
order, whether logical or chronological. In this broaching,
what is initiated is already corrupted, thus returning to a
place before the origin" (o G, p.267).
This is not, in my opinion, about being "flooded by
language" as there was never a dry place empty of language:
nor I suspect, an agreement that language is liquid or dry
only. This isn't about an origin which one can name and not
name, Douglas. This isn't pointless wordplay, but very
serious and actually quite traditional mystic thought, with
a Judaic twist. This doesn't imply Derrida is a believer,
and there is no room in his work for agnosticism; his work
is genuinely agnostic, imagining worlds governed and not by
G-d but gaining no comfort from that (see his recent book,
A Gift of Death, questioning and sympathising with Abraham
nearly killing Isaac).
"The paradoxical deconstruction of both presence and
unified consciousness was expressed by Derrideans in
rhetorical tropes centred on the co-terminous existence of
absence/presence and often written down as an item stated
but also erased. The thing is/is erased. We are supposedly
bound into these apories and oceans of poetry have now been
written about them."
Passing over which Derrideans, which oceans, let me
point out that there is not enough distinction here, between
Derrida and Heidegger, or recognition that he is alluding to
Heidegger. On first reading it looks like you're attributing
to "the Derrideans" the invention of Heidegger's rhetorical
device: naming an origin Origin and x-Origin-x (let this
stand for crossed-through), Presence and x-Presence-x. This
seems especially to follow in your precis because you seem
to show Derrida as imagining this lost phenomenological
reality that an ideal geometry has been flooded by or
"trapped... by linguistic process". No such nostalgia.
Geometry tends to place *things*; Heidegger keeps the
geometry but makes things paradoxes. Derrida makes the
geometry paradoxical, as you're asking him to, chiding
him for not doing, by crossing through "is/x-is-x", in
"The Outside x-is-x The Inside" (o G). He's asking when
is is is, and when is is and; if it is is, then why do
words have to be separated by the word is? A good question
about syntax, a poet's question.
"c) Again in early Derrida, even the unconscious is
ushered towards consciousness by this same essentially
linguistic dynamic -- metaphor and metonymy in Lacan from
Jakobson."
Or perhaps he takes from and critiques Lacan as
he does Husserl, a maneouvre he's getting little credit
for from you, Douglas. Perhaps his renaming "difference"
by one letter, the letter a, to "differance" (apart from
its political echo of "different France", a poet's echo,
a political poet's echo) is an allusion to Lacan's essay
on desire as desire for the letter a. Perhaps he is
critiqueing Lacan's Jakobsonian idea that one can get at
the origin self under the renamed self, the aphasic slippage
along the axes that you describe, that Lacan used, that
Derrida doubts [aphasia: person means to say fork, says
knife etc; "thus", for Lacan, person means to say "go to
bed with me" says "I would like a crack on the head with
a stiletto, please"]. Derrida argues that we lose something
when we remedy the language, ie expel the aphasic mistake.
Hence in his essay "I shall speak of the letter A", Derrida
writes that every innovation always alludes to what it might
have been and "expands the stock of available reality"
(something said by a critic of Ashbery, but applicable) and
makes you think of *every reality*: every noun makes you
think of other nouns, and as a noun, makes you think of non
nouns, verbs, adjectives, then each one of those, then each
combination. How much more multi-dimensional would you like
him?
"For this reason, Derrida claimed that there was no hors
texte - that unconscious and conscious mental experience
was always trapped in linguistic processes."
No. "Il n'y a pas hors-texte". As an Algerian, he's
looking at French the way Louis Zukofsky as a Jew looks at
English and American English, through cross-sections, in
creative alienation. As a cockney might look at proper
English, so he at a proper construction like "il y a", "it
has of it". By putting a ne pas around that he does the
same as the x-is-x. It? What it? Has? How? The sound,
Douglas man of sound, surely is dominately more like "il
y a" than not like it? It doesn't have that big rhythm
stopping shot of the English "not"? Derrida is always
punning on syntax, what "takes place" and how.
"e) Almost persuasively, Derridean assertion/erasure
might be considered a reform of Husserl's version of time
consciousness..." Except it isn't a version of time
consciousness, not a sketch towards a geometry, and Derrida
is critical all through his work, from "early Derrida"
onwards, of linguistics as a system, any science as a
system; his the Nietzchean call a little "the will to a
system is a lack of integrity" but more subtle, "the will
to a system may lead you to the point where you fulfil it
killing Isaac your son, you must will it then be able at
the last minute to complicate it".
Last points:
1) how can you be post Derridean? given that post feminism
means feminism plus what feminism left out, modernism plus
what modernism left out.
2) I think cris cheek's critique of your book, which I get a
lot of pleasure from not least as a gesture towards less
infantilism, feed me feed me don't make me think in poetry,
as pre deconstructionist is right in the above respects;
right because it would improve from Derrida's work on
translation. Why do we only get the Pound of the
Seafarer and not the Pound of Sophocles, or the Bunting
of Horace, or the Stein of Georges Hugnot; why do only
D.Oliver's "good translators have an intuitive sense of such
neglected factors as intonation and voicing in the target
poem" (*Poetry and Narrative in Performance*, xi)? Those
poets D. Oliver thinks good I too think good, and good in
the same ways: such skill at a neglected, ignored art, and
what wonderful revelations that Pound's Seafarer hits a
similar wave form, not just stress pattern, whack-thump.
But any target poem also has linguistic and spatial and
cultural differances (use with inflection of the current
or not idiom, as you show in Prynne, that name and rename)
and there are even some that perhaps are attempting an
identical waveform in the heartbeat of a listener in a
different culture from the target poem's: the measure of
the success of that as of the success of the listener
and reader, at different parts of their life/education,
is also interesting. And where is observation eg from
Bunting, that one doubles one's use of the target poem,
not using the form to convey the target poem's sense
but conveying the target poem's sense eg of Horace. And
then trying to get that pattern, almost exactly, into
poetry of one's own, of one's own observations, either
"sticking to commonplaces" and travel, as Bunting, or using
the pattern to generate material from the unconscious, or
the collective unconscious, as with a lot of Language
Writing. It is, as examiners tend to see of theses they
would like to see re-written in their own image, not even
nodded to as "other aspects for which there is no time".
It's the lack of acknowledgement of these deconstructive
interests that leads cris' critique, I suspect. But
pre-deconstructionist doesn't mean crap. It's a good
book.
3) I was going to say something too about using wave
form as the basis for composition. No time. Derrida
inspires me, I think of him of part as, the New Music,
Total Serialism use of overtones, partials, microtones.
His rhythms are forms for me could teach Prynne
something about how to find forms to compose harmonies
between the partials and microtones of words, the
words intact for all the reasons Douglas you cite in
your book of richness, not going for mere concrete
collage of fragments a la Cage and others. Instead
we get Prynne's
Got a pervasive overtone in decision,
to reach back, maybe harmless in flight
of the amount, be ready, see through what
it says to be done.
(Not-You, p.10)
Which shows overtone as beauty, differance, that doesn't
have to be cleaned out; but it also doesn't distance itself
from the "ooh too squeaky, with no tunes" school of
reactionary attitudes to music (of course, this must not
be reciprocated, not our attitudes to philosophers).
4) I was going to compare some Stein to the Prynne of
Word Order, and argue that Prynne is more emotional,
it's harder to see the different versions, the other
twin, as being also potentially good, or Prynne offers
too much of a sop to worry for some taste. But I think
both Derrida and Prynne are moving as Nietzsche and
Stein sometimes are not in relinquishing needs for
emotional comfort that *do* cost, as they seem less to
for loners like N and S. Thus emotional as a trace
in a process of moving higher, as Husserl does say
of intuitive perception over/through mere emotional and
sensory perception (The Idea of Phenomenology, Lecture
IV). But Derrida's critique transcends even that,
by returning to emotion from the higher and back and back.
5) Douglas, sound and voice, text and voice, together.
6) And a poem from all this, below
Ira Lightman
y
l
d
r r
a e p
w s h
d r m p e
i t o e o y s n
s m sn f n l n d l l o
a d s re t o b ws n e il e m
plde d i em h n o risum vpna g e
poel n lhis v g p r iobaru iatc n n
DERRIDA ACTS OLIVER PENNILESS DERRIDA OF
eardaa caoe olaizo lnglutiu ectisr li
PRYNNE POEMS DERRIDA POLITICS PRYNNE NOT
ee u h rl s oftunub rcyteh p re sia igt
nd h a e a o ssgce ue y w e ap ird oii
d d otn pn n v ct ten
e i cid c d i an asg
n c ev e e t li r
t t re d y l u
a y t
b a
l s
e
dependent disappeared - lorry -
hundred - nailed ahead -
and predictable - localism
each - motiers assessment -
voodoo fell - straightforwardly
virus - recognize nonproductive -
abend problem - purple
innocence - wrongly responsibility -
salute whiterun - music
suspended - depravity perceived -
party intrinsically - intrinsically
dread - angels saturation -
phenomenologies fitting - phenomenologies
saturation - angels dread -
intrinsically intrinsically - party
perceived - depravity suspended -
music whiterun - salute
responsibility - wrongly innocence -
purple problem - abend
nonproductive - recognize virus -
straightforwardly fell - voodoo
assessment - motiers each -
localism predictable - and
ahead - nailed hundred -
lorry disappeared - dependent
NOTES: the starting point of the above was inspired by
taking zip entries (authors surname followed by first
word of their title) in a library catalogue for six books I
was using to respond to Douglas posts. I wrote these six
pairs, twelve words, out in two paired lines and prepared a
pile of seven books (Prynnes *Not-You*, Derridas *Edmund
Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction*, Olivers
*Penniless Politics*, Derridas *Of Grammatology*, Prynnes
*Poems*, Olivers *The Harmless Building*, Prynnes *Word
Order*). I took each book in turn looking for a word that,
like a crossword clue, would thread between the paired
lines, up or down eg D-P (P-D) netted DePendent, which I
wrote vertically down; R-N (N-R) netted huNdRed, which I
wrote vertically up. I choose the first word that fits,
write it, move to the next book in the pile. When I finish
the pile, I either shuffle it, or work back through it, not
using the last book twice but moving straight to the
penultimate book. The process is completely intuitive, I am
not choosing between words, but taking the first seen. I
started to write out a reading of the vertical words, 3
words per line unpunctuated, realizing only at the end I
would finish on a 2 word line: 38 words, 3 x 12 + 2, or 17 x
2. I tried pairing words, but didnt want to lose some of
the three word lines, so punctuated so as to have some of
the enjambements and separate lines of 17 2 word lines,
within. At the same time, I intuited I would go back through
the words, as through the pile of books, using the last word
only once. This brought even lines and counterpoints.
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