Poetics
as Discourse
But the world we
share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again for discourse:
in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics.
Jerome
Rothenberg (Rothenberg, 1981: 3)
In the preceding definitions, I
have adopted an unacknowledged Foucauldian vocabulary in describing poetics as
a ‘discourse’, which requires further exposition. Whereas followers of Michel
Foucault conceive of discourse as ‘a type of language associated with an
institution, and [which] includes the ideas and statements which express an
institution’s values’, I argue that the ordering
and categorising of poetics is
something that has barely begun, and that its elements have been located in
different categories rather than in any single institution. (Danaher 2000: x)
It ranges historically from treatises for gentlemen on the composition of
verses, through literary criticism (even as it developed as an autonomous
discourse); or even in bland bibliographical designations such as ‘authors’
miscellaneous prose’ or the ‘literary interview’. Poetics is not necessarily a
shared form of writing; it has an ambivalent social location. ‘Poetics’ is not
(yet) a unifying principle to structure and arrange a discourse; although an
often-used term, it has seldom been defined. (In the volume entitled The Poetics of the New American Poetry,
for example, the meaning of poetics is taken for granted by the editors.) I use
poetics as a central principle in a method to constellate various writings that only constitute a discourse if
viewed perspectivally, and retrospectively.
The
effect of this indetermination is that there has been little historical
consciousness in both the writing and the reading of the discourse to date,
little evidence of a ‘tradition’ of poetics in the traditional sense, even
though one can trace a loose history of its proto-forms and development, as I
shall show. One has to admit there is also a refreshing lack of a need for
discursive legitimation. Unlike the body of knowledge built up in the social
sciences, for example, where references to the theories of Weber or Kuhn (or
Foucault, of course) are almost obligatory if the discourse is to be legitimate, it is not thought necessary
to refer (back) to the poetics of Alexander Pope or Ezra Pound, S.T. Coleridge
or Clark Coolidge as ‘authorities’ in quite the same way, in order to
demonstrate that the discourse is
legitimate – part of the discourse rather than outside of it, professional rather
than amateur – amongst the fraternity of its users. This is not to say that, in
specific local circumstances, in focussed works of poetics, amongst groups of
poets, these figures do not carry authority as writers of previous poetics;
think of Pound’s position as a provider of poetic strategies and categories
amongst the North American avant-garde. But in other groups, say, among the
Movement Orthodoxy in Great
Britain
Whether
or not poetics can (or would want to) claim founders for its discursivity,
Foucault writes that
To expand a type
of discursivity, such as psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it
a formal generality that it would not have permitted at the outset, but rather
to open it to a certain number of applications …. In addition, one does not
declare certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead
… one sets aside those statements that are not pertinent …. Reexamining Freud’s
texts modifies psychoanalysis itself. (Rabinow 1986: 25)
‘Opening up’ parts of poetics may
be thought of as an exemplary strategy for those wishing to build a new poetics
using elements of older thinking, but such an activity lacks the emphasis in
Foucault’s last clause on whether the discourse and its practices will be
‘modified’ in any definitive sense.
Of course,
apprehension of that ‘modification’ may
become visible if poetics is seen through time, via something like a
Foucauldian framework. It would seem more a discursive practice, at least in
its thinking about poetics –
metapoetics as I define it – if not in
the writing of the discourse itself, which, I suspect, may of necessity remain
too intermittent and wild for such discursive decorum. On the other hand,
Foucault’s rejection of ‘proving’ the falsity of earlier statements of a
discourse is in accord with my thinking here about how poetics develops.
Re-examination of Coleridge or Coolidge can further poetics itself, modifying
without permanently re-modelling, ‘trying on a paradigm’ as Bernstein
experimentally and experientially puts it, rather than providing paradigmatic
sets of organising principles. (Bernstein 1992: 161) Previous poetics can
usefully be ‘set aside’ if they do not provoke writing or thinking that results
in creative writing.
If
we follow Foucault in declaring that ‘such discourses as economics, medicine,
grammar, the science of living beings give rise to certain organizations of
concepts, certain regroupings of objects, certain types of enunciation, which
form, according to their degree of coherence, rigour, and stability, themes or
theories,’ may we effortlessly add ‘poetics’ to his list? (Foucault 2002: 71)
While my task is not Foucault’s – ‘to discover how such [themes and theories]
are distributed in history’ – it is not impossible to discern the presence and
persistence of concepts, objects and so on in poetics. (Foucault 2002: 71)
Certain weak themes can be detected, for example, in the theories of rhythm
during the age of free verse – Pound, Lawrence, Zukofsky and Mayakovsky can be
found testing their theories – but they offer conjecture rather than
definition. Even Pound with his ‘brusque practicality’ cannot claim to
adjudicate the whole field of poetic production, although it is important to
remember the level of factional antagonism inherent in avant-garde formations,
particularly where poetics finds its functions compromised by the more
territorial claims of the ‘manifesto’. Indeed, Foucault’s conception of discourse
is not monolithic: he writes of finding a paradoxical ‘system of dispersion’,
in accord with both my sense of situated constellations and the position-taking
of avant-gardes.
Whenever one can
describe, between a number of statements, such a system of dispersion,
whenever, between objects, types of statement, concepts, or thematic choices,
one can define a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and
functionings, transformations), we will say, for the sake of convenience, that
we are dealing with a discursive
formation…. (Foucault 2002: 41)
He argues that it is ‘a space of
multiple dissensions’ and his analysis must ‘maintain discourse in all its many
irregularities’, a formulation that looks not unlike poetics as I have defined
it with a care I hope is commensurate with its possible forms. (Foucault 2002:
173)
Another
of the components of Foucault’s theory of discourse, touched on but not
commented on above, complicates this dispersion: that is, a discourse’s
reliance upon institutions to mediate and propagate it. ‘In every society the
production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and
redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to
avert its powers and its dangers,’ Foucault says, procedures that rely on
‘institutional support: it is both reinforced and accomplished by whole strata
of practices such as pedagogy – naturally – the book system, publishing,
libraries’. (quoted in Golding 2006: 24) While the discourses Foucault analyses
are more universal in their impact than poetics as I have defined it, it is
true that its procedures are not institutionalised in this way (as a
recognisable discourse), and indeed in the areas of contemporary poetry they
often barely exist, limited to what Charles Bernstein calls the ‘provisional
institutions’ of marginalized poetries, (Bernstein 1999: 145) such as fugitive
publishing of magazines and books, readings and – importantly for poetics – talks series; indeed, non- or
anti-institutionalization might be part of its strategy, as Bernstein suggests
(in a passage quoted in one of the preceding definitions). The antagonistic
landscape of recent poetries (on both sides of the Atlantic) affects poetics,
in that energy is spent (wasted, even) on defining poetic activity against
another group (or individual) but it is also true that the lack of
institutional reinforcement keeps poetics relatively free of forces that might
avert its powers and danger, and precisely institutionalise it. (However,
the poetics of any ‘mainstream’ poetry can be said to have one identifiable
institution, in Britain at least, the school and higher education syllabus, but
that is a subject beyond the scope of this essay.)
Poetics,
as I have defined it, at this stage of its development, is a weak case of a
Foucauldian discursive formation, but one still deserving of the name. The
lesson remains: poetics must be read differentially, not deferentially.
*
*
Return to part one (and an index to all parts of The
Necessity of Poetics) here.
