The Borders of Things

New York Photos

Thanks to my wife's persistence and hard work, she now has a Flickr account and our photos from NYC are up. This is the postcard shot I took. A bit ridiculous. See more here. Probably too many photos of the Statue of Liberty, but there you go.

Ferry & Statue
Originally uploaded by capriajaussen.

"The Pangolin"

Marianne Moore is perhaps the most pleasurable voice among modernist poets. And I mean that in both senses--she is a pleasure to read and her poetic voice sounds as if it, too, is enjoying itself. Which is a feat, of sorts: such lyrical I-ness is a bit against the grain of modernist impersonality. But she achieves this remarkable balance of writing poems that sound as if you are in fact listening to another person, a real person, maybe even Marianne Moore herself, while also feeling as if your are listening to something exact, objective, utterly precise and real. If you have ever read bits from Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory, it has a similar effect. Einstein was intentionally writing to a general audience, and he sounds both conversational and objective, personable and precise. I sometimes imagine talking to him would have been a similar experience. That is how Moore's poetry sounds.

It's no surprise that she commonly picks natural phenomena to write about. Her poem "The Pangolin" is in this case representative. Beginning with the phrase "Another armored animal," the helpful Heath people point out in their footnote that there is a playful tone here, since Moore wrote a number of poems about animals with armor. But there is also an echo of what's to come, since Moore segues half-way through the poem into a natural history of "Man," the animal who creates, among other things, his own armor, "serge-clad, strong-shod." And there is a third overtone in the line: the paratactic, taxonomical "another, and another, and another. . . ." As the poem unfolds, we realize that there is an urge toward precision, like the Pangolin's armor of "spruce-cone regularity." But such precision, in the hand of Moore, isn't simply to describe the world--it is, instead, how poems are made.

The first four stanzas of the poem are absolutely crafted, somewhat difficult in the tradition of modernist opacity, poetic lines in the language of an animal field guide, punctuated with anthropocentric observations. The "scale / lapping scale" until the "uninterrupted central / tail-row!" is also described as a "near-artichoke with head and legs and grit- / equipped gizzard." Near-artichoke with legs is a human description, while "grit-equipped gizzard" is scientific. A third focalization, if you will, comes from the Pangolin itself, via Moore:

Armor seems extra. But for him,
the closing ear-ridge--
or bare ear lacking even this small
emindence and similarly safe

contracting nose and eye apertures
impenetrably closable, are not (Ln. 9-14)

We humans think his qualities superflous (although we never say to what); a scientist can describe them technically; but for the Pangolin, they are necessary, significant--they cannot be done without.

The tendency to reduce and generalize is criticized roundly by the poem:

Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast
each with a splendor
which man in all his vileness cannot
set aside: each with an excellence! (34-37)

Man attempts to "set aside," discount, even destroy, his own "splendor" as well as that of the outside world. Within the context of the poem, the suggestion is that the vileness of man is the setting aside, the insufficient response or account of that excellence in things. Fortunately, human's can't actually diminish the world through this carelessness, but, nevertheless, the loss is clearly ours. Nor can we assume that scientific exactitude is what she means here, even if it is through such exactitude that the splendor can be recognized. In the long, earlier version of her poem "Poetry," Moore speaks of the need for poetry to present "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," and that seems to be what she's after here.

Poetry cannot contain, nor does it create, the excellence of things. But that doesn't make our human tendencies to "set aside" off the hook. Indeed, poetry, by presenting the world in its exact contours but not "recreating," resists our own "vileness." Things don't need our poems, but our poems will attain a quality of the "genuine" (another one of her favorite words) as a result of paying that specific attention to things, and, the material of poetry, words. I keep thinking here of plaster of paris molds one makes of animal tracks. You pour the liquid into the track, and it matches itself to all of the contours, the details, the fine elements that make it up. Then, when the plaster hardens, you have an entirely different object. It's not exactly an imitation of the track: you would never mistake the mold for the track itself, for instance, nor for the foot of the animal that made it. But you couldn't have made the object as precise and specific as it is without the plaster being shaped by the track itself.

Probably confusing things unnecessarily with this metaphor, but lets finish it up: in the case of this poem, the track is the Pangolin, the plaster is a blend of language and the imagination wrapping around the Pangolin's splendor and excellence, and the final product is the poem, which has its own splendor, excellence, and beauty--precise, specific, clear.

Within the larger context of literary theory, Moore is thus not really practicing a version of enstrangement (Shklovsky): you don't see the Pangoliness of the Pangolin in her poem--it isn't a way of experiencing the world. Nor is she imagist, as there is not exactly an emotional and intellectual complex. Nor is she really an Eliotic traditionalist (form is crucial for her, but she uses strict syllable counts, almost Oulipouian). She is practicing, I would say, a type of imaginative realism, a strange reverse-mimesis that both participates in the world and yet maintains a distinct place for poetry.

I could say much more about the poem but, alas, I am out of time.

Brief on H.D. as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

One should be always reticent when it comes to relying too heavily on aesthetic schema, particularly the names of poetic "schools." But they can have value, when used as the rough tools they are--giving an outline, a shape, to something, allowing us to see forces at play in the mass of texts which we call "literary history." EP, like so many of the modernists, wasn't afraid to use them, even generate them via fiat. Michael Levenson reports that one spring day, at a tea-shop in Kensington, 1912, Pound declared Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle "les imagistes," a title H.D would hold onto even by the time of her Trilogy in the mid-1940s (Levenson 69). It is probably as an imagist that H.D. is best known, for those tight, lovely, short free-verse lyrics, even when those lyrics had classically inflected names (such as "Oread"). But, after reading Trilogy, a series of 3 long poems written during WWII (particularly inspired by the London bombings), I'd like to offer a few connections between H.D. and Language poetry, specifically the LangPo I know best, Susan Howe.

In one sense, this is a strange connection, since H.D. is working out of an explicitly esoteric, mystical, trans-religious sense of things. The Trilogy is full of allusions to Greek and Egyptian myths, as well as Christian and pagan rituals, and it is a sense of the historical oneness of things that she's trying to articulate for a fractured world. My understanding of LangPo is that they would be explicitly against such immateriality. Moreover, H.D. is unapologetic when it comes to adopting an overtly strong poetic voice:

but my mind (yours)
has its peculiar ego-centric

in the forest, as every snow-flake
has its particular star, coral or prism shape. (52)

This is, yet again, an articulation of the modernist problem (Stevens wrote a lifetime of poems trying to explicate it): how do you deal with the mind as objectively as possible? How do you even retain "mind" without slipping back into notions of genius or reducing mind to mere positivism? H.D.'s solution in these lines is fascinating. By studying one leaf, tracing its patterns, we learn something about vegetable reproduction in general; in the single snowflake, the physics of crystalization are present. The particular contains all of the elements of the general, and, thus, is a safer route (perhaps) to the general.

But there is also a certain hermeticism running in this, a "the world in a grain of sand" approach to things. And the poetic approaches in Trilogy hinge on the somewhat strange but nevertheless undeniable connection in language between words like "mind" and "mine." The poetic mining of history brings to the surface these mysterious linkages, the things "words conceal" (14)--words as such, not just these words. The making of poetic history, then, is a fraught enterprise, since it is interacting with the power trapped in language as such:

your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
how can you scratch out

indelible ink of the palimpsest
of past misadventure? (6).

The pen itself is poisoned: "corrosive sublimate," according to the OED, is a term for "mercuric chloride (bichloride or perchloride of mercury), a white crystalline powder, which acts as a violent poison"; a more general sense of the word is the product of sublimating ("subliming or converting a solid substance by means of heat into vapour, which resolidifies on cooling"--boiling language until something solid, and different, emerges). But H.D., who was analyzed by Freud, could not have missed the psychoanalytic resonance of both "sublimate" and "palimpsest," and thus the unconscious itself, both collective and individual, is simultaneous a poison, a reactive process, and a writing. An historical poetics is situated between its own potentially destructive energy and that of the past, the pre-sublimated solid that makes an historical moment possible. That which is concealed within the words, indeed.

For H.D., there is something a bit divine (and/or a practice of divination) in all of this. The Holy Ghost is both "the Dream" and "acts as go-between, interpreter" (29). But all of the divine (as well as The Interpretation of Dreams) is grounded in what Derrida famously called the metaphysics of the sign. And yet, as she evokes this metaphysics, H.D. plays on it--she performs something like deconstruction when Derrida is a 14 year old kicking a soccer ball:

[. . .] I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

to hatch butterflies. . . (53)

And then, on the next page, in separately numbered poem (no inside/outside):

For example:
Osiris equates O-sir-is or O-Sire-is

through the ages; (54).

It is as if language itself contains, like a cocoon, a code, a "cryptogram," the suppressed reality of our spiritual and psychic lives; the dictionary as the holy writ. The poet, like the alchemist, makes all of this evident. The opening up of "sir" and "Sire" out of Osiris, a clearly LangPo technique, is used even more directly later on. Playing on the Hebrew words marah ("bitter," when in the feminine form) and mar (masculine version of the same word, and, thanks to a helpful Heath Anthology footnote, also "Hebrew title for Mr.; and Hebrew verb for ruin, mar, break"):

Now polish the crucible
and set the jet of flame

Star of the Sea,
Mother. (71)

Somewhere between associative chains, the talking cure, play, and what Sontag would call the erotics of the text, outside of interpretation, is where H.D.'s metaphysical musings reside.

Since this post has gotten rather longish, and everyone has other things to do, I'll provide simply point out the obvious: that these techniques of word working, explicitly alchemical and hermetical in H.D., are picked up by LangPoets like Susan Howe. (Indeed, for readers of Howe, I imagine that the lines quoted above sound remarkably similar.) A list, pithy, and unfair, by way of conclusion: 1. Isn't it fair to say that, on the surface, there is something almost magical about the practices of LangPo? Someone once told me, somewhere, and this may be wrong, that (borrowing from Wittgenstein, probably the philosopher of contemporary poetics, "if my language is the limits of my world, then changing my language changes the world." The doctrine of correspondences, redux. 2. If we consider that H.D. is writing on the cusp of modernism and what comes after, and if Howe et al are what come after, I will assent to the term "postmodern" in the sense of "after" modernism for their poetics (yet another critical "term"! But after all this talk of the latent powers of words, perhaps my use of them, does, ever so slightly, alter the world). The line between the two might be drawn between the sense of what is actually happening in the manipulation of words--where H.D. sees continuity and oneness, a sign of correspondance, LangPo might see. . . what? 3. If anyone could point me to other texts on H.D.'s position in all of this, I'd like to see them. I found a passing reference in an essay by Rachel Blau DuPlessis on Howe, and I'm sure there's more out there.

From Symbolism to the Vortex--An Experiment in Genealogy

I know of no paths to modern poetry that do not run through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists. There are easy and obvious reasons to do so. The Symbolists were formal innovators, more so than their Brit-late Victorian-Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries (think Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning to some extent, tho NOT Hopkins, who was doing something completely different). The Symbolists brought, more than anyone before them, the urban, the grotesque, and the physical/violent/erotic into their poetry. As a complement to this, they tended toward simpler, less "poetic" language (Baudelaire in particular), even as they produced works of a certain opacity.

All of these things would later be picked up, and perhaps perfected, in the poetics of modernism. But this isn't, I don't think, the most interesting line of connection from Symbolism to modernism. Or, better, these obvious similarities and influences are simply symptoms of a bigger aesthetic and philosophical shift, with numerous consequences, that the Symbolists inaugerated. I'd call that shift the attention to the word and its work, and I'll simplify a sketch of it here.

On a metaphysical level, the Symbolists were trying to get at the heart of things, the really real, which they tended to characterize, in a vaguely spiritual way, as the infinite, the unknowable, the absolute. Since it wasn't knowable or representable in any direct sense, one had to get at it by other means. Language, in its suggestive and affective qualities, was one of those means. The poetic symbol, not an iconic figure (as in Medieval poetry), was an emotionally charged thing that pointed to something bigger, something beyond itself, that could not be named or imitated through a direct mimesis. Thus, poetic lines like the following from Baudelaire's "Evening Harmony: "The sky like a lofty altar is sad and lovely; / The sun has drowned in its blood that is clotting yet." On the one hand, these lines appear to be simple metaphors for a certain quality of the evening sky, as it is emotionally colored "sad and lovely." But, when we look closer, the strange juxtaposition of emotional states and concrete details produces a sky we would never actually see in nature, a fuzzier, more fully imaginative landscape. The sky as a "lofty altar" upon which the sun has "drowned in its blood" possesses overtones perhaps of the sacrificial altar, upon which animals are killed, but, in this case, it is the sun that is drowning in its own blood, a sort of (strange) self-killing. The sun has slain itself in this grotesque, yet "sad and lovely" scene.

It is at once a highly emotional, pathetic poetic phrase, suggestive in its color and narrative, but simultaneously an unnatural one, not realistic. Moreover, the emotions it evokes cannot be simply described; they don't correspond to anything specific in everyday human emotional life. In other words, the poem creates an indefinite, even new, emotional experience out of the specific and imaginative use of language, channeling elements from the natural world but not imitating them. We cannot see the sky drowning in its own blood in nature, nor can we recreate the experience which would lead to this emotional response. It can only be found in the poem itself, and that indirectly, suggestively, symbolically.

If you cut off the metaphysical absolute oneness of Symbolist metaphysics (which isn't really necessary for understanding what they are doing poetically), you see a movement toward "pure art," or art cut off from society, history, ideas. This is not an art that is indifferent to the reader, however, a cold elevated structure of transcendence that leaves one feeling small. It is an art which actually breaks into the reader emotionally and affectively as art. At the same time, this pure art is absolutely constructued. It is the use of language as the material of art which makes symbolist poetry work. Thus, the word and words are cut free from stock associations or tales of Ladies of Shalott--they become material for new aesthetic constructions. The freedom and materiality of the word reaches its Symbolist high point in Mallarme's famous "A Throw of Dice Not Ever Will Abolish Chance" (Here's an html translation), probably, I would argue, the most important poem for what was to come after.

Jump forward a few years to the time of Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Williams. The affirmation of the unknowable has deteriorated, partly for aesthetic reasons (the Vorticist distaste for British soupiness and Impressionist fuzziness would have, it seems, little tolerence for the Symbolist "infinite"). Indeed, Hugh Kenner reports that Pound had little tolerence for the vagueness of post-Symbolist poetry in France and otherwise--it had lost its aesthetic purpose. At the same time, a figure like Pound was interested in the conceptual power of the Image, "the material of poetry," as an emotional and intellectual structure. The lines from Baudelaire above have a certain proto-imagist quality to them, even if they lack the definition and precision of "Petals on a wet, black bough." In other words, the Symbolist interest in language and construction was maintained, albeit with harder lines. Vorticism was symbolism on steroids.

This is perhaps easier to explain in visual art. Wyndham Lewis, for instance, in his absolute commitment to art's self-sufficiency (not quite the same of l'art pour l'art), was dedicated to the force of lines and shapes. Consider this painting, "Timon of Athens:"

While not as representative as others, it is striking how much movement Lewis produces out of mostly straight lines. These are not impressions, they are objects, simple, sharp, abstracted objects put into definite constructions to produce a concrete effect. One can call it an emotional or imaginative effect, but it is far more abstract than "The sun has drowned in its blood that is clotting yet." Nevertheless, in creating something non-imitative from simple units, and, in doing so, unleashing a tremendous "objective" energy in and between those units, Lewis is stepping forward, I would argue, in the pathway the Symbolist first attempted to break. Force is not a Deleuze-Guattarian intensity here: it is a vortex, particles put in relation with one another that create an energy which cannot be found in their parts.
Of course, as a painting, the relation to thinking is vexed, if present at all. Thought has always been a problem for poets and philosophers, and part of Pound's taking leave of his London years in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" is a return to thinking. Nevertheless, the Cantos can be seen as an effort to take the vortex into historical, material thinking. A difficult task; the same attempted by "No ideas but in things."

Ezra Pound and his Kenner

Or, why even the simplest poems can be misread.

I spent the last few days rereading some of Pound's poems (mostly selections from the Cantos) and reading for the first time Hugh Kenner's mammoth The Pound Era. I don't know enough to know about Kenner's status in today's critical discourse (i.e., he might be passe, critiqued, etc.) and there is a good deal of the apologist/disciple in Kenner which often colors his glosses, but the work as a whole I found quite impressive, illuminating, extermely helpful for understanding what was going on in modernism by someone who knew personally most of the people he is writing about. Plus, it is written in enjoyable prose.

Most interesting, in the Kenner, for me, is the fact that he is giving a cultural history (the War is never far from his thinking) and an aesthetic history, showing that the two are never fully distinct but that they aren't identical, either. This is immensely valuable. The question, complicated as it may be, is that of agency: what brings about change, what makes the new (as Pound quoting a Confucian proverb was wont to say) happen. Cultural materialism, in its vaguest and most diverse sense, tends to see the larger social, political, technological, historical milieu as the agent: such and such aesthetic phenomena are really symptomatic of a larger cultural thing--what Althusser would have called "ideology" and Foucault, with an even more all encompasing term, the "episteme." L'art pour l'art types try to place the agency back in the hands of the artist or the artistic history: no, they say, the real agent of change in the world of art is art itself (art as craft arguments) or the artistic genius (romantic theories of art). History has little to do with it: aesthetic problems present themselves and those who can take up the task.

What Kenner does, effectively, I think, is to show that the cultural situation fuels the inquiries and experiments of aesthetic practitioners, guiding them toward the artistic problems they feel compelled to solve. By no means does that make the work mere "epistemic artifacts," but neither does it separate it into some sort of aesthetic autonomy. Thus, a figure like Pound turns to Chinese poetry for several interrelated reasons: a) an interest in human history and his search for what Kenner calls "radient gists," moments of cognitive/ethical/aesthetic value which, while not necessarily universal, "endure," b) a frustration with the superflous post-symbolist English verse as well as the efflusions of late Victorianism, c) an interest in cognitive constructs which directly present the thing (a "natural language," over which Derrida would have a heyday), d) the didactic use of such constructions (an ideograph allows you to see connections you otherwise might not, and thus, enable you to learn something that you could not get from mere narrative about the nature of things.) and e) anxieties over post WWI Western civilization and the transitory fluff of mass culture. To reduce the role of Chinese poetry in Pound (and modernism as a whole) to any one of these factors would be to do, simply, bad history, as well as fail to understand the complex interaction between "aesthetic" practice and "culture."

While we're on Chinese poetry, Kenner makes a passing comment that really fascinated me. It is very common in discussions surrounding modernism to talk about the advent of film as a major shift in aesthetic thinking, the spectacle, the status of the original (Benjamin), and, perhaps most interestingly, the role of the visual and its manipulation via montage and the relationship between montage and literary juxtaposition. Most of the discussions I've read/heard tend to emphasize the fact that the technological innovation (film) resulted in or at the very least made possible, prompted, a new aesthetic innovation (montage/juxtaposition). To a certain extent, this is, of course, true. But it's only part of the story. Kenner reports that during WWI, a young Sergei Eisenstein, years before he went into the theater, learned 300 ideographs from a "former instructor of Japanese": "knife-and-heart, 'sorrow'; water-and-eye, 'weep'" (162). When Eisenstein's intended career as an orientalist was derailed, he eventually became the director credited with the invention of montage, "applying ideographic principles to an art of blended snapshots" (162). Of course, this may be just a coincidence. But so could be the advent of film and the writing of the Waste Land. At the very least, it seems justified to point out that it wasn't technology alone which brought about a literary innovation: indeed, an ancient literary tradition was the source of generating cinematic techniques and not the other way around.

I don't raise this at all to try to privilege literature: I only call attention to this to show that our narratives of what came first and what caused what can be impoverished, indeed.

But back to Ez. There is a lot (too much) to say, and he himself sensed this, even as he realized he had said to much (he descended into an irregular silence toward the end of his life). I think Pound's entire project can be summarized by a concern for the beautiful, a concern for the political, a concern for the future. The music of some of his poems is really breathtaking, as in "A Virginal," and he is always looking for those "intellectual and emotional complexes in an instant of time" (his definition of an "image"). But beauty doesn't come easy, and it is never separate from the city, the management of the state. This is where the Cantos pick up. (Here's one: the Cantos as the inaugeration of cultural studies, albeit a fascist CS). The Cantos are an exploration of historical states and arts, in an effort to show things that only the poetic "intellectual and emotional complex" can reveal. The ideograph is essential to this, creating what Kenner calls conceptual, cognitive, emotional "rhymes" added to the tonal rhymes and rhythms of which Pound was a master. Language does more in Pound's poetry. That might be a good definition of modernist poetry in general: an effort to make language do more.

The future, the consequence of history, is always embedded in Pound the didact. His famous rants on Rome radio were the misplaced desire to teach on hyperdrive. The Cantos are meant to bring you into a knowledge which will spill into history itself, just as they were not to be poems about history but poems which contained history. Fascist, yes, aristocratic, yes. But strangely democratic in its application. No one is more privileged to historical knowledge, but that doesn't mean that everyone has it. Precisely because everyone doesn't have it and yet needs it so badly: this is, perhaps, what drove Pound. I qte from the dedication to his Guide to Kulchur, a statement about as multitonal as anything he wrote:

This book is not written for the over-fed. It is written for men who have not been able to afford an university education or for young men, whether or not threatened with universities, who want to know more at the age of fifty than I know today, and whom I might conceivably aid to that object.
I am fully aware of the dangers inherent in attempting such utility to them.

Dangers for them, dangers for him, dangers for the society subject to such ideas? Perhaps all of the above. But so, for that matter, is democracy without knowledge dangerous. EP and co. faced that problem, and, perhaps, so do we.

Making Desire

Time, always pressing, has kept me from talking about Deleuze and Guattari's book on Kafka. Instead of giving a thorough account, I've reduced my thoughts to a few points, rather pithily.

D&G write toward the end of the book:

A writing machine exists only in an office. The office exists only with its secretaries, its section heads, and its bosses; its social, political, and administrative distribution; and also its erotic distribution without which there would never have been any "technics." this is so because the machine is desire--but not because desire is desire of the machine but because desire never stops making a machine in the machine and creates a new gear alongside the preceding gear, indefinitely, even if the gears seem to be in opposition or seem to be functioning in a discordant fashion. That which makes a machine, to be precise, are connections, all the connections that operate the dissasembly. (82)

"Machine" here stands in for, or characterizes, the idea of an assemblage, which, for them, is always how desire functions. It is, as is Kafka's writing, experimental, generative, not a lack, but only produced within specific constructions that make desire happen. At the same time, and this is crucial for D&G, desire always exceeds the constraints or structures of a given assemblage by creating new assemblages, even taking apart the old.

In this sense, they sound very close to a type of formalism. An assemblage is, after all, a type of form, an arrangement of things (whether they be words, desks, bodies). But where D&G explicitly break from formalism is in claims such as "as long as there is form, there is still reterritorialization, even in music" (6) and that it is stupid to look for structure with formal oppositons if one does not "see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure" (7). Reterritorialization, in this sense, can be an arresting of desire, an attempt to pin it down into a specific form which can then be interpreted. Take their favorite example, Oedipus complex, with its fully territorialized daddy-mommy-me triad. There is no irruptive, generative desire before the territorialized assemblage in the Oedipal logic; desire comes from the assemblage, it does not create it. Thus, without the assemblage there is no desire. This is what D&G want to reject: no, on the contrary, Oedipus comes about precisely because desire created it.

But, and here is where they aren't formalists, it is clear then that desire is THE agent in D&G's philosophy. They sometimes use the term "intensities," which are outside any ability to understand them as structures of meaning, energy, etc.; intensities make up and create new assemblages. But, my naive (and somewhat late-night) question: what would an intensity outside an assemblage look like? Can we think of such a thing? Badiou has accused, if I understand him correctly, D&G of vitalism, and I think his point is solid. On one reading, intensities and desire seem like blind force, an unthinkable and uncontrolable energy which breaks the boundaries it creates for itself. And, at the end of the day, there may be something to that. But, and this is what I think they'd say, it doesn't make sense to claim there are intensities without assemblages, that intensities, while not reducable to form, are always and only present in forms.

Which amounts to saying that intensities only exist in form, and, indeed, one could go so far to say that intensities are produced by form. This is what the formalist would argue. The literary critics of yesteryear wouldn't use the term intensity; instead, they would say "beauty" or "force." I like the word "affect," (even tho it has become a buzz term, which I don't like). Whichever term one uses, it is pointing to that thing which always punches out from a crafted work of art, which seems to exceed its form but, really, is a consequence of it. And Kafka perhaps provides us with the greatest examples of such work. "In the Penal Colony," for instance, is about as carefully constructed a story as one can find. But, I would argue, that doesn't make it a mere "reterritorialization." All of the parts fit together, true, to create something we would call a whole. But that whole itself is affective, unbelievably compelling, irreducible. It is not desire which produces the assemblage, it is the assemblage which causes the desire to erupt.

Which doesn't, I would say, reduce either the force of that desire nor the nature of that structure. But that is an ongoing problem.

There will be time

Two bits of info:

I. As of grades being posted, I have completed all of the graduate seminar requirements for my PhD in English.

II. I am celebrating by going to NYC this weekend. It is my first time. I have one goal: to test, or at least to feel, in the sense of sensibility, whether there is something true in what George Oppen offers here:

The emotions are engaged
Entering the city
As entering any city.

This is a language, therefore, of New York

--From Of Being Numerous

This Is Not Real

Jean Baudrillard, one of the great French thinkers of the last century, is dead.

Read about his work at the EGS.

Franz Kafka, With a Trailer for Some Concluding Methodolgical Remarks on D&G

Kafka's "Metamorphosis," everyone knows, opens with Gregor Samsa's realization that he has become a "gigantic insect." We are tempted to allegorize here, and often feel forced to interpret, since "bug" cannot really mean "bug"--perhaps Gregor merely feels like a bug (i.e., the story takes as objectively real his subjective interior state) because of his family, his job, his impoverished social situation. We begin thinking that perhaps Gregor-as-bug represents capitalism, bureaucracy, the Oedipal conflict, the condition of the artist, disease, all other forms of alienation and social, personal, and familial division. We feel this need to come up with alternatives for "bug" for the simple reason that people do not wake up and find themselves insects. This is not real.
Kafka, indeed, feeds that temptation through his excruciating concern for the minute detail of actions. Most of the "Metamorphosis" is devoted to specific operations and actions, and their difficulties as a gigantic insect: getting out of bed, opening doors, feeding your giant insect brother, making sure he has room to move around (Grette Samsa), leaning over a table sewing lingerie for bourgeois women in order to make ends meet (Mrs. Samsa), falling asleep at the dinner table (Mr. Samsa). The actions occupy Kafka far more than their meanings: it is almost as if motivations are simply excuses for the actions, and their narration, to occur. Consequently, for someone utilizing so self-consciously the techniques of narrative realism (albeit of a certain kind), we are compelled to focus in on the obvious impossible giant insect, piling all of our hermeneutic weight upon him as the sign we must interpret.
But I think this is a mistake. "Metamorphosis" is exactly what it is: a story in which a man literally and totally turns into an insect. Which doesn't make this metamorphosis insignificant. Instead, it forces us to pay close attention to what Kafka is really interested: the absolute surreality of realism, the ruptures and gaps in the everyday world that are themselves as bizzarre, and indeed terrifying, as a giant insect. This interest in the conceptual gaps, the space between what we think we know and what actually occurs in the world, or, more accurately, our actions and the theoretical justification for those actions, leads Kafka into even more profound philosophical and aesthetic territory: what I would call pure form. Kafka's thematic choices (insects, punishments without crimes, artists whose activity is entirely invisible, unnamed creatures burrowing beneath the soil) make it possible for his stories to become form without content--we are reading a story which tells us nothing, a narrative for its own sake, an empty, and yet completely enveloping, fictional structure. Empty and yet enveloping. . .I like that. Kafka contains nothing and yet covers all. And for this he is simultaneously the most resistant of artists to interpret (How can you interpret pure form?) and the artist everyone wants to interpret (this must mean something). At most, then, we might be able to say Kafka is an artist of our desire to interpret. He provokes us into an action, only to show that this action cannot be accomplished, which forces us to consider why we undertook it in the first place.

But these observations are too abstract. Look at the beginning of "Metamorphosis." After Gregor's self-discovery, the very next sentence describes his body, "his dome-like brown belly divided into stiff arched segments," but slips in, almost unnoticed, the cares of the everyday: "on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely." Kafka's virtuosity in this story is really the narrative voice, a hidden third person narration, largely focalized on Gregor, and yet shifting, through a free and direct style, around the thoughts of other characters as well. Yet there is no easy explanation for this description of the quilt. If we read it as the "narrative persona," it makes little sense. When someone is narrating the fact that another person has turned into a bug, who cares about quilts? They can't keep a cold-blooded insect warm anyway. One could argue that it's a useful detail for understanding how Gregor looks, an effect of his new body, and thus a realist technique to allow greater visualization. But it ISN'T a useful detail: the quilt clause really tells us nothing about Gregor's appearance, nor exactly why the quilt is slipping off. We can read it as a reflection of Gregor's consciousness--after all, we often find ourselves fixating on strange details when in crisis situations. But, in the first paragraph, we have few formal markers to warrant attributing this to Gregor, as we do in the following ("What has happened to me? he thought."). It's true that later in the text, the line between Gregor's thoughts and the narrator's thoughts is not always clearly distinguished, but, again, I would argue that claiming this is Gregor's observation is a stretch. So, then, why is this bit on the quilt there?
What I am calling the strange incommensurability of this quilt description with the narrative event fits with the descriptions of Gregor's room in the next paragraph. The cumulative effect is a realism which is decidedly surreal:

Above the table on which a collection of cloth samples was unpacked and spread out--Samsa was a commercial traveler--hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and a fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!
Gregor's eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky--one could hear rain drops beating on the window gutter--made him quite melancholy.

Describing the room, setting the scene: common realist technique. But the exclamation mark at the end of the first paragraph makes all the difference. Whether coming from Gregor or the narrator, the introduction of surprise, wonder, even a certain degree of mass-culture spectacularity, into a magazine picture, is absolutely and totally bizarre, considering the circumstances. Gregor has turned into an insect, and the first exclamation point is granted to an extra-large fur coat. What is going on here? Even Gregor's emotional state is strangely disconnected from his situation, or at least connected in a way we wouldn't expect. The overcast sky makes him sad? He has 6 legs! HE IS AN INSECT!
While it may sound as if I am calling attention to minor details (and, indeed, I am not trying to offer a real "reading" of Kafka here), I think that is exactly the genius of the story, and one we often miss. There is simply no interpretive explanation for these emotions, descriptions, thoughts, just as there is no apparent explanation for the strange and bizarre reactions that come from being sentient beings. The relation between consciousness and the material world is as inexplicable an irruption as the conversion of a door to door salesman into an insect. You might say that Kafka's attention to the incommensurate is an observation of formal emptiness which creates the very thing it is observing: by creating stories that resist interpretation, Kafka is inserting, if you will, aesthetic black matter into the universe. The effect is compelling: we read Kafka's strange tales, and, suddenly, the real world looks even stranger than it did before.
I've only pointed out a few of the sentence-level operations early in the "Metamorphosis," but such subtle, almost unnoticeable insertions, occur throughout the entire story. It is the cumulative effect of these tactics that makes the work a masterpiece, and not, I would argue, the overall thematics that many readers try to emphasize. There are two in particular worth mentioning (I'll skip what might be the most common, "Gregor as artist figure," as this seems to me the least viable reading of the story, the product of far to overzealous allegorization). Both are present in this sentence from Walter Benjamin: "There is much to indicate that the world of the officials and the world of the fathers are the same to Kafka" (Illuminations 113). Benjamin here brings together Kafka as narrator of Oedipus and Kafka as narrator of the bureaucratic, the institutional. Benjamin is right to bring them together, as the structural similarities are compelling. The Law, Benjamin says, whether of the Father or of the State, is written "but in a secret place" (115); its out there, making you guilty, but you never get the chance to read it. Milan Kundera, who knows the world of bureaucracy perfected, echoes Benjamin, calling attention to the "boundless labyrinth" of power in Kafkan texts (The Art of the Novel 101): once you are embedded within the bureaucratic/familial world, you simply cannot get out, nor, and perhaps this is more terrifying, can you understand why you are being punished. Gregor's metamorphosis is inexplicable--he is guilty, but for an offense he could not willfully commit, as was Oedipus. The "officials," in Benjamin's term, are needed to endlessly defer the arrival of the truth, as well as reinforce along every step of the way the power of the paternal.
The two themes are, to be sure, rife throughout the "Metamorphosis." Gregor's immediate concern is with his despotic job situation, a black comic precursor to The Office in its layers of middle-management watching employees, keeping them on track. This job situation, we are told, is a direct result of Gregor's father's failures in business: in other words, the father's rule over Gregor's life conspires with bureaucracy to keep him in check. [Although, and here is where facile analogies become dangerous: to say that the Father and the Office are self-reinforcing power structures doesn't account for the fact that it is Mr. Samsa's failure which dominates Gregor's life. My knowledge of psychoanalysis is inadequate to take up this problem, but too many critics are quick to say "Oedipal drama" where Kafka has created something much more interesting]. More overt Oedipal elements are present. At the end of the story's second section, Gregor's father attacks him with apples (one of which, famously, lodges in the soft flesh of Gregor's back in a nausea-inducing passage). As Gregor passes out from the pain, with

his last conscious look he saw the door of his room being torn open and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her underbodice, for her daughter had loosened her clothing to let her breathe more freely and recover from her swoon, he saw his mother rushing towards his father, leaving one after another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats, stumbling over her petticoats straight to his father and embracing him, in complete union with him--but here Gregor's sight began to fail--with her hands clasped round his father's neck as she begged for her son's life. (69)

I don't think it is pushing this too hard to say it is some recreation of an Oedipal economy. Gregor's mother drops her undergarments as she rushes to her husband, "in complete union with him," an erotic description if there ever was one (albeit Kafkaesque erotics), within which she "begs" for her son. This isn't interpreting symbols, nor is it free association. Psychoanalysis is all over this.
BUT, and here is where I differ from these critical approaches, is not to say that Kafka isn't interested in Father/Officialdom, etc., but that the narrative insertion of that formal gap, that difference which has no explanation, disrupts these larger hermeneutic modes. That is, Kafka's tales cannot be explained simply by Oedipus or by bourgeois capital: instead, they blow these structures apart, so subtly and precisely, that we are left grasping for the specters of interpretive schema that simply cannot exist as such. Which is to say, Kafka, in his generation of these impossible aesthetic forms, actually gives us a way to think Oedipus and capitalism.
[More examples of this tearing apart through emptying. "In the Penal Colony": discipline in its purest form; the prisoner is convicted of insubordination, which is an assault on Law as such, an undermining of Law's fundamental structure (the ruler and the ruled) thru emptying it of any content. "The Hunger Artist": art made invisible (how does one see one fast? What is one looking at?). Perhaps, strangest of all, "The Burrow": the network without content; the object of desire which one wants to be near but does not want to actually occupy.]
Back to Kafka's disruption, which brings me, at long last, to Deleuze and Guattari's study of Kafka. Their book could easily be a chapter in 1000 Plateaus, thus the theoretical interests (Anti-oedipus, productive desire, intensities over emotions, assemblages over structures). D&G are spot on to call attention to Kafka's explosion of these hermeneutic schema, as I would do the same. Moreover, their book is an important analysis of (and challenge to) what would call itself formal analysis. D&G are far closer to formalism than they think, but they are adamantly anti formalist in other ways. But, for the sake of time and whatnot, I think I'll have to take this up in a separate post.