"Kitchen Criticism" - A Guide to Practical Matters in Poetry:Frost's "Mending Wall" and Playful Punctuation.

First, a little theory: Frost's principal contribution to prosody is his somewhat elusive idea of "the sound of sense." I won't go into it in detail--any serious Frost scholar has touched on it in some way, shape, or form already. Basically, it relates to the tension between speech and metre, and the creative possibilities for tone therefrom. Poetic metre is an imposition on speech in order to extract tones of voice for dramatic purposes. I might go into detail elsewhere to tidy up the rough edges of that brief explanation.

Regardless of my imprecision, there is one poetic prescription that follows from Frost's idea: we read a poem to the sentence, to the full stop, to get the full sense of the meaning. Tyler Hoffman, whom I will return to a few times, has a neat phrase for Frost's prosody in practice; he calls it "line-sentence counterpointing." I have always been taken with Frost's theory of the sound of sense--also called the theory of sentence-sounds (Frost couldn't make up his mind), hence Hoffman's useful coinage. 

So, we read the poem not to the line, but to the sentence. There's both a prosodic reason for this prescription, but also a conceptual one, and Frost manages to tease out a little play with both. Despite his claims, Frost most certainly relied, as most poets do, on punctuation to manage the pace of his poems, to manipulate the meaning, just as we see in "Stopping by Woods." He also had tremendous fun with the little dots and squiggles on the page; and it's to one such case I wish to briefly turn before I get too serious. 

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In "Mending Wall," one of Frost's most famous poems, and for a time my favourite, Frost leaves what gamers today might be call an "Easter egg," a little reward for those who know where to find it. There's a lot to say about the poem, but I want to focus on this little Easter egg. The poem is forty-five lines long, unrhymed, written in iambic pentameter, Frost's preferred narrative form. "Mending Wall" is more lyrical, but it does tell a little story. Like "The Road Not Taken" there is a deception, or a trick, at the heart of the tale the speaker tells. More on that poem another time. The Easter egg comes in line 23: 

There where it is we do not need the wall

But you won't see it if I just quote the line. You need the lines surrounding it; in fact, you need a few sentences: 

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

Do you see it yet? There's a tone of gentle mocking in this excerpt, as there is throughout the poem; the speaker finds his neighbour somewhat simple, and makes fun of him, both to his neighbour's face and to us, the reader. 

But there's a little grammatical play being had here, too. Let's look at the middle sentence as a sentence to see: "it comes to little more: there where it is we do not need the wall: he is all pine and I am apple orchard." Surely you see it now: two colons in the one sentence--a very unusual arrangement. Not ungrammatical, but certainly unorthodox. There's no real need to use it in any circumstance. What does it mean? 

The middle most line of the poem, asserting the redundancy of the wall, is bookended by two colons:

: There where it is we do not need the wall: 

Do you get it? The colon makes the line look like a little wall! Specifically, a wall of stones shaped like "loaves and some so nearly balls" that the wall-menders must use "a spell" to keep them in place. 

Unconvinced? There's more. 

The two colons are grammatically unnecessary. They could be replaced by semicolons or full stops. But Frost used two colons instead. The grammar is important here. Colons signify a subordinate relationship. Under normal circumstances, the second half of a sentence with a colon in it is dependent on, or subordinated to, the first half. By contrast, a semicolon is used to divide two independent clauses, or sets of clauses, each with at least one independent clause. 

Two semicolons wouldn't look like loaves and balls of stone stacked on top of each other, but they would indicate parallel clauses. Instead, Frost uses a subordinating grammatical structure to produce an image of a parallel construct: a wall separating two neighbours. But what he is really pointing to is the dependent relationship between the two neighbours, specifically speaker dependent upon his neighbour. 

The speaker mocks his neighbour, about the pine cones and apples, about "elves," and about his (the neighbour's) overreliance on his father's saying, that "good fences make good neighbours." But who called to whom about mending the fence? This from the speaker (my italics):

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line 

And set the wall between us once again.

It is the speaker who lets his neighbour know about the wall. The line is slipped in there and overshadowed by the later joke-making. It's a similar misdirection to the more famous one in "The Road Not Taken." Why does the speaker let his neighbour know about the wall? To make fun of him? Perhaps. That's a question beyond our purposes here; nevertheless, we can say that the speaker is dependent on his neighbour, regardless of how he views his neighbour's dependence on his father's words of wisdom. There are, we might say, parallels of dependency in this poem, and Frost's subtle play with punctuation and grammar is just one layer of the meaning in this poem. 

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That'll do for now. Frost is a meticulous craftsman, right down to the logical implications that follow from carefully selected punctuation marks. This level of grammatical intrigue is common to all poets, but especially formalists I find. Where formal metre is employed, high standards of punctuation tend to be there managing the prosodic tension. In the next blog, I'll look at some more Frost, but I'll bring in some Aussie poets as well. In particular, I'll be looking at silence... 

The Defence of Poetry in the Modern World: A Proposal

It has largely become a cliché in the discussion of poetry, of its moral and social merits, to address the great Platonic rejection of the art from any ideal state of being. Poets were kicked out of the Republic, and for millennia they have held a grudge. Poets “know” intuitively the social and moral importance of their art, the odd outlandish remark punctuating the point: “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” Shelley announces. The emphasis, one suspects, is on unacknowledged with a touch of agitation. As a result of Plato’s rough treatment, there has grown the tradition of the “defence” of poetry, but it seems no acknowledgement of poetry’s importance is yet forthcoming.

But can poetry’s modern obscurity and disfavour really be attributed to an ancient philosopher? The problem that poetry faces today is not philosophical, but perhaps rather economical. Poetry has always suffered from a lack of money and popular appeal; as Robert Frost says, “there is no money in poetry and no poetry in money.” Poetry is forever on the defence because it has a limited audience; it seems it has always had a limited audience, with few exceptions. We try to teach it in school, and perhaps this is where the problem lies. Equally as problematic, in the contemporary context, poetry cannot contend with the hyperstimulation of modern technology and entertainment.

Poetry has remained largely unchanged; the biggest change it has ever endured is the great leap from the oral to written form. The latter, of course, retains a connection with the former. Modern technology, however, has accelerated at such pace that our lives and or experiences are unimaginably different to what to what they were two or three generations ago. Poetry, to be sure, is an ancient art, if not the most ancient, and this is perhaps why we so often return to that first great rejection. We must not overlook the possibility, however, that society may have just past us by. This is the existential threat that poetry faces, and it is up to poets not only to resist this nihilism, but to assert its positive presence in society. More than just poets, it is up to thinkers and theorists and poetry’s small but loyal coterie of sympathisers to defend poetry.

But, does poetry actually need “defending”? Surely, there will always be readers of poetry. The internet has opened up the lines of communication between human beings across great distances more than any other invention; it has taken the inventions of language and the written word into a new dimension. There are numerous online poetry publications, as well as online communities of poets where their art can be shared and discussed. While there is still little money in poetry, it doesn’t seem to be any worse off in Information Age.

Poets still practice their art freely; readers still read, and theorists still theorise. Students still hate poetry, and teachers still don’t help. The question “what is poetry?” however, also remains unanswered. Poetry, for many, still remains a mystery; the mysteries of rhyme, metre, free verse, even the social and moral purpose of poetry, are vexatious for many. Or, perhaps, poetry slows life and the mind down to a pace at which it must consider things at depth, and this is frustrating in the flittering age of the internet. Does anybody really want to think anymore when knowledge is just a Google search away? Importantly, does anybody need to think the way in which poetry compels us anymore?

Poetry must always find and assert its relevance in any given time period; it is no different today. Poets have an obligation to their craft not only to find its contemporary niche, but to expand that niche and seek acknowledgement. This is achieved as much through the practice of poetry as through imparting the practice to others, creatively and pedagogically. Understanding what poetry is requires a sustained engagement by practitioners and theorists alike in order to uncover and convey the mysteries of poetry to those both inside and outside the coterie of poetry.

Understanding poetry is not the same as understanding other arts. Poetry is itself about understanding, about metaphor and meaning-making. Poetry can make us think deeply, and challenge our cognitive capacity; a good poem will always punish a lazy reader, but reward an attentive one. Understanding poetry, answering the question “what is poetry?” is a complex matter that has wracked the minds of poets, theorists, critics, and philosophers since Plato. It may, then, have been a fundamental misunderstanding of poetry that led to Plato’s rash decision. But we can only assume.

How then is poetry to be explained? Perhaps more importantly, how is poetry to be explained so as to attract more readers? Poetry, after all, relates to a fundamental process of thinking; indeed, poetry turns us back towards that process of meaning-making like no other art. To understand poetry, then, is to understand meaning-making at its most fundamental level. The challenge for poets and poetic thinkers alike is to demonstrate this vital dimension of poetry. This is a theoretical problem as much as a practical problem; as much as a pedagogical problem as it is a critical problem.

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The relationship between poetic practice and theory is an important intersection that can shed light on our understanding of poetry, but that relationship is also problematic. There is no comprehensive theory of poetry, but countless parochial ones. Every poet has a few theories that might explain their use of a favourite metaphor or trope; every theorist has a theory by which to explain why their favourite poet is particularly special. There may be a danger, then, that theory is just a side industry or a curiosity, so much self-justificatory or self-congratulatory “padding.” What, then, is the relationship between practice and theory? Does poetic practice even need theory? What purposed does the latter serve to the former?

It is, perhaps, too glib to suggest that the theory of poets is self-serving, equally so with theorists and critics. The attempt to understand poetry is an ongoing effort to which every poet and theorist adds his or her voice and ideas. The question, however, must be asked, what value does theory have in relation to the practice of poetry. Can theory ever explain poetry? Can practice ever be used to prove theory? Do poets write to a theory, or does theory come ex post facto?

Poets, like Wordsworth, Shelley, Eliot, and Brodsky, have contributed just as significantly to poetic theory as much as practice. But we must ask what the relationship between their theory and practice is. In what way, for instance, is Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” at work in The Waste Land? Equally importantly, we must also ask what the relationship between the theoretical insights of poets is. And further, can we apply the insights of one poet to the works of another? Can Philip Larkin’s notion of the “emotional concept” be applied Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man”? Is there any value in such comparative analysis? Will this get us any closer to understanding what poetry is?

We have been trying to understand poetry – to answer the question “what is poetry?” – since at least Aristotle; since Plato, we have been “defending” it against misunderstanding. There is a long tradition of theoretical defences and explications of poetry, which can be mined for convergent insights. “Delight,” for instance, or “wisdom” (or “knowledge,” or “learning”) are recurrent concepts in the defence of poetry. The goal of poetry, as Sidney succinctly puts it, is “to teach and delight.” “A poem” Frost says concurring, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” For Aristotle, the delight, or pleasure, originates in mimesis; for Plato, the sin of poetry consists in the wrong kind of teaching it imparts through mimesis. Is it possible to explain the delight and teaching of poetry in defence against Plato’s accusations?

Our understanding of the human body and brain is of such an advanced nature that we may someday soon map human thought with high fidelity. Soon, we may be able to map the poetic experience inside the brain and see poetic delight; we might be able to see the benefits of poetry. This might be considered a threat, the unravelling of yet another rainbow. What are the implications of our growing cognitive and neurological understanding of human thought and experience for poetic theory and practice? To what extent should poets embrace technology? And how might our understanding of the human body and brain be incorporated into our understanding of poetry?

Perhaps a new “defence of poetry” would be characterised by the re-evaluation of poetry in light of new scientific knowledge. As knowledge and technology evolves, society changes; as society changes, so does its relationship to its artists, including its poets. The poet’s niche must be carved anew. The rise of technology and scientific knowledge can be seen to throw into stark relief the relationship between poetic practice and theory, in part because science and technology have changed how we relate to each other. Poetry, the “most ancient” of arts, connects us to our history and our origins; how we reconcile it with our technology-driven future may be the most important question of all.  

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

Note: this thread has taken on a life of its own. The original intention of this thread was to develop a seminar paper on the Philosophy of Poetry that I would deliver in July; however, it has become apparent that this series of blogs is far more in-depth than a seminar paper. I will continue to explore the notion of a philosophy of poetry here, and hopefully generate further insight into my overall research. As such, this will be an ongoing enterprise. The format will remain the same as a continuous text. Each individual post is not a discrete unity.

 

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 3): Larkin and Brodsky, The Face of the Poem

The conversation, then, in Brodsky’s estimation, is between the reader and the poem; “a poem,” it must be remembered, “addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.” The poem catalyses in the reader’s mind so that the reader can, indeed, “be like” the poem. Where Eliot refers to this process of getting inside the reader’s head as a catalytic process, Brodsky refers to it as “linguistic osmosis.”

Both poets are referring to the way in which the poet conveys the experience of the meaning-making process to the reader. This is process entails emotion. The British poet, Philip Larkin puts the point directly: “poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transference.” Elsewhere he explains the process of transference in three stages:

The first [stage] is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote.

The “transference” of the “emotional concept” through the “verbal device” of the poem from poet to reader – not just a single reader but all readers – resonates with Brodsky’s “linguistic osmosis,” but it also resonates with the catalytic metaphor Eliot uses to explain his “Impersonal theory” of the poetic process.

            Brodsky argues that the poetic experience is intensely private, throwing into stark relief “the privateness of the human condition.” It nevertheless is a conversation with the poet, at least through the medium of the poem; for Eliot, the poet is merely a conduit, and it is the poem that stands in his place, conveying emotion through the “objective correlative,” the objects or series of events that encapsulate what Larkin calls the “emotional concept.” The mechanics of the poetic experience, for Larkin, is best facilitated “in silence”:

the reader’s first encounter with the poem must be a silent, active one, an absorption of spelling and stanza arrangement as much as paraphraseable meaning and corrective historical knowledge.

Larkin is making a comparison between reading poetry and hearing it read; he says elsewhere:

Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go at your own pace, taking it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his personality between you and the poem, for better or worse.

The reader can only be like the poem if the responsibility of re-enacting the meaning-making process is his. We may become curious, Larkin admits, of what the author sounds like:

there comes a moment with any poem that we have really taken to ourselves when we want to hear its author read it. We want to confirm our conviction that he would quicken the pace here, throw away an irony there, or perhaps our curiosity is just for what his voice can add.

This curiosity about the poet’s voice is a natural outcome of what I previously called poetic mimesis; Eliot’s theory of depersonalisation and Brodsky’s linguistic osmosis represent different, but related, facets of poetic mimesis.

            For Brodsky, the curiosity engendered in the reader goes beyond the voice of the poet; it is, for Brodsky, the face of the poet that we become curious about:

In theory, authors’ looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the moment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet’s verse one starts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one’s suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognise the truth, or the degree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, whom we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what truth looks like in reality.

Both Brodsky and Larkin touch upon an essential mimetic component of the poetic experience. However “depersonalised” the poet becomes in the act of poetic meaning-making, the mimetic instinct compels the reader towards this curiosity; the poet is the natural proxy in this experience. It is not the face of the poet, per se, that the reader is curious about, but the face of the poem, the face of meaning-making in general, the human face.

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 2): Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

See Part One here: The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

 

Eliot and Brodsky, the Experience of Poems

 

This kind of "theorising about the nature of poetry" is essential to the understanding of poetry, and it is, indeed, the duty of the poet to engage in the philosophy of poetry. The philosophy of poetry goes beyond criticism, however, and beyond just poets. More on the latter shortly. Many prominent poets have engaged in the philosophy of poetry. The Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky is a prime example; his extensive collection of essays on a wide range of subjects, including other poets, contains important insights into the essence of poetry.

In his lecture to the Library of Congress, entitled "An Immodest Proposal," in his capacity as Poet Laureate in 1991, while lamenting the "plight of the audience" for poetry, he postulates:

A poem, as it were, tells its reader, "Be like me." And at the moment of reading you become what you read, you become the state of the language which is a poem, and its epiphany or its revelation is yours. They are still yours once you shut the book, since you can't revert to not having had them.

This passage has always struck me; I think it captures the poetic experience, "our experience of poems," quite well. Brodsky is referring to a form of poetic mimesis, as he calls it "linguistic osmosis." In his 1987 Nobel Lecture, he writes

If art teaches anything [...] it is the privateness of the human condition. Being the most ancient as well as the most literal form of private enterprise, it fosters in a man, knowingly or unwittingly, a sense of his uniqueness, of individuality, of separateness - thus turning him from a social animal into an autonomous "I." Lots of things can be shared: a bed, a piece of bread, convictions, a mistress, but not a poem [...]. A work of art, literature especially, and a poem in particular, addresses a man tete-a-tete, entering with him into direct [...] relations.

The emphasis on "the privateness of the human condition" is prevalent in Brodsky's essays and lectures. Are we then to draw from these two quotes that a poem that says "be like me" draws the reader into a private experience? Brodsky provides us with an answer:

A novel or a poem is not a monologue but a conversation of a writer with a reader, a conversation, I repeat, that is very private, excluding all others - if you will mutually misanthropic. And in the moment of this conversation a writer is equal to a reader, as well as the other way around [...]. This equality is the equality of consciousness. It remains with a person for the rest of his life in the form of memory, foggy or distinct; and sooner or later, appropriately or not, it conditions a person's conduct.

A theory of poetic experience can be distilled from these quotes. The conversation between reader and writer is mediated through the metaphoric experience of the reader's "being like the poem," his "becoming the state of language that is a poem." The "autonomous 'I'" is, in fact, a metaphoric conglomeration of reader and writer - I would argue this conglomeration includes all potential readers of the poem, but I am getting ahead of myself. A poem cannot be shared, but the experience can be had by any competent reader. It is perhaps a paradox: the experience is private, but it is a private experience anyone can have.

For Eliot, the poet is a "catalyst" in the poetic experience: this is the essence of his Impersonal theory. The poem comes about as a result of the "depersonalisation" of the poet in the creative process; the experience of that poem, then, is not so much a conversation between reader and writer, but it is, nevertheless, a transformational experience. Eliot elaborates this depersonalisation by way of analogy: the poet, he argues, is like a shred of “platinum […] introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.” The platinum is integral in catalysing the two gases into sulphurous acid, yet “the platinum is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.” Eliot says directly: “the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum.”

The poet, is the catalyst in a transformation. In the poetic experience it is the poem that acts as the catalyst; this I believe is the intention of depersonalisation in Eliot’s Impersonal theory. This is supported by another of Eliot’s theories: the objective correlative. He says,

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

At the risk making a bad metaphor worse, the objective correlative can be seen as the sulphurous acid that has been catalysed by the platinum, the mind of the poet. The purpose of the objective correlative is to evoke emotion in the mind of the reader, but according to Eliot’s Impersonal theory, the poet has receded into the background.

The Philosophy of Poetry (Pt. 1): Eliot, Theory and Criticism

In this blog, and in subsequent blogs, I will be posting portions of a forthcoming seminar in which I will discuss the relevance of a philosophy of poetry. In this blog I discuss the critical work of T. S. Eliot, which dominated much of the 20th century thought on poetry. Eliot's criticism helps to set the groundwork for a philosophy of poetry, in spite of the fact that he shows an aversion for explicit philosophising on the subject, particularly by poets.

Eliot, Theory and Criticism

I wish to put a general proposition to you: poetry is a philosophical activity. I wish also to put another, related, proposition to you: there exists a discipline of the philosophy of poetry. The veracity of the latter follows from the inherency of the former. “Poetry is a philosophical activity,” however, is quite vague; do I mean writing poetry? Or do I mean reading poetry? I mean both; and I mean all that poetry entails, including poetic criticism and theory. Poetry is a philosophical activity because it is an investigation into what is meaningful, and why. Poetry is also the creation of meaning. The philosophy of poetry, as I envision it, then, entails an attempt at understanding this dual dynamic of poetic investigation and creation.

In this seminar, I will explore the possibility of a philosophy of poetry through a synthesis of different theoretical perspectives on poetry. In particular, I will discuss and analyse the critical and theoretical work of a number of prominent 20^th century poets, as well as a number of 20^th century philosophers who address the question of poetry. The question of poetry can be understood simply as “what is poetry?” The philosophy of poetry, then, can be understood as an attempt to answer this question.

T. S. Eliot addresses the question “what is poetry?” in the "Introduction" to his The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. Eliot argues that poetry and criticism both seek to address this question; that poetry and criticism are, in effect, different aspects of the same activity. "The question 'what is poetry?'" he says, "issues quite naturally from our experience of poems." "To ask the question 'what is poetry?'" he says shortly after, "is to posit the critical function," by which he means the act of criticism. Eliot is justifying the importance of criticism to the understanding of art, in this case poetry. He says, in fact, that criticism is "inevitable and requires no justification" (emphasis mine).

My interest in Eliot's apology revolves around a seemingly innocuous parenthetical phrase. It occurs amidst the quotes already cited. I will cite the extended quote:

At any rate, the question 'what is poetry?' issues quite naturally from our experience of poems. Even, therefore, although we may admit that few forms of intellectual activity seem to have less to show for themselves, in the course of history, in the way of books worth reading, than does criticism, it would appear that criticism, like any philosophical activity, is inevitable and requires no justification. To ask 'what is poetry?' is to posit the critical function. (emphasis mine)

"Like any philosophical activity" implies that criticism is a philosophical activity. At the very least, Eliot means that criticism is comparable to philosophical activities. This proximate relationship of criticism and philosophical activity is important in light of the causal relationship between poetry and criticism with regard to the question "what is poetry?"

If "the experience of poems" leads "naturally" to the question "what is poetry?" and if "to ask 'what is poetry?' is to posit the critical function," and if criticism, which is "inevitable," is "like any philosophical activity," then there is a philosophical dimension to poetry.  The question "what is poetry?" then, is a question with philosophical implications, a philosophical question. I will address the conceptual importance of this point shortly. There are two further points I need to address first.

Eliot does not deny the connection between philosophy and poetry, but he does obfuscate the relationship. There are two quotes that illustrate this point. In his lecture on "Shelley and Keats," Eliot opines, "I believe that for a poet to be also a philosopher he would have to be virtually two men." He goes on to say that

A poet may borrow a philosophy or he may do without one. It is when he philosophises upon his own poetic insight that he is apt to go all wrong.

He says elsewhere, however, that "the extreme of theorising about the nature of poetry, the essence of poetry if there is any, belongs to the study of aesthetics." We can glean from these two quotes that poetry can, indeed, be understood philosophically, but that poets themselves are "apt to go all wrong" when they try to engage in that philosophising.

The division Eliot erects between philosophers and poets, however, is arbitrary, and it may have more to do with Eliot's dislike of Shelley and the Romanticism more broadly, which he called a "literary disease." There is nothing to say that a poet cannot philosophise or theorise on poetry; Eliot himself does it. Like many poets, Eliot smuggles his own theorising into his criticism of the poetry or literary works of others. For instance, Eliot postulates his theory of the "auditory imagination" in his criticism of Mathew Arnold, while he develops his "Impersonal theory" of poetry in his critique of Hamlet. Criticism is a philosophical activity.

The Female Body: Language, Consent, and Degradation

 

"The female body thirsts for words. The words of a man."
 

I recently came across the above quote (thank you Jess) in relation to a rather debasing television show called "Blachman," named after its "star," in which young women are objectified by two older men as if they were statues, erotic mannequins that only exist to be judged. These women are naked; the two men are clothed, seated, like ageing connoisseurs clucking over a vulnerable muse, no longer able to produce their own aesthetic response to the natural beauty of the world, instead judging it from a privileged position: clothed, seated, and on television. This show resonates with a “casting couch” mentality.

This image is, effectively, the show:

 

 

This show has already come in for some deserved criticism by Elizabeth Plank. (the above image was taken from Plank's post.) What I want to focus on is the above quote, which was deployed as a part of the defence of the show by its “star.” This quote encapsulates the show: two comfortable men commenting on the body of a vulnerable woman. But it also encapsulates the broader issue of the complicated relationship between sexual politics and language. The quote represents a corruption of the meaning-making process that flows from the human body.

 

The female body does not “thirst for […] [t]he words of a man” any more than it thirsts for the words of a woman. The human body “thirsts” for meaning in general. There is more to meaning than just words, but words are perhaps the most obvious representation of meaning. The human body doesn’t simply thirst for meaning, it produces meaning. It produces meaning through its shape, its processes, its location, and, perhaps most importantly in the context, its proximity to other bodies that produce meaning in the same way.

 

Language is a carriage-service by which we share meaning, from body to body; it is not shared, importantly, from body to mind, or vice-versa. The body and the mind are the same organism. We are our own "body-mind," as John Dewey would say (I am fond of the term, however perfunctory it is). What I mean is that the production of meaning is not spectatorial; it does not travel from its origin to its target in one direction. The production of meaning is reciprocal. We need each other’s bodies for the production of meaning, but we use language to lever that production of meaning for our own gain. To argue that women thirst for the words of men is an expression of the leverage of language used to subjugate what should be a reciprocal process of meaning-making.

 

Perhaps the most important reciprocal process or act is the act of consent. Sex is a meaning-making process;  it may seem odd to speak of it like that but it’s entirely true. We “make love,” for instance, wherein sex is an expression of a deep emotional rapport between sexual partners. Or, we might have a “one-night stand”; however “meaningless” a one-night stand might be, it remains an expression of physical desire. It may also be a conquest or the fulfilment of a night out. Consent is, nevertheless, the most important component of any sexual encounter. Without consent the meaning of sex is violence: not meaning, but the destruction of meaning.

 

Consent, however, is not reserved only for the sexual act. A kiss or a caress requires consent, nudity too. The young woman who is the object of the ageing connoisseurs' gaze during their sleazy conversation consents to being seen naked, ostensibly. I say "ostensibly" because the nature of the experience indicates that consent is not reciprocal. The men are seated, clothed, comfortable; the young woman, standing naked in an unwelcoming studio stands before them, responding to directions from the older men. What the young woman gains from being subjugated in this way is not clear, but what the men gain is obvious. Perhaps she earns an appearance fee - after all, who would do it for free?

 

Consent, like any other act of meaning-making, is also leveraged through language. If you believe that your body “thirsts for […] [t]he words of a man” then you are more likely to accept the words of a man; you are more likely to go in search of the words of a man. At the very least, you are less likely to be sceptical of a man’s words; when a man says something inappropriate, the un-sceptical response might be: "that's just men," a variant of the "boys will be boys" tautology. More on this shortly. The place of compliments, pick-up lines, even bad romantic poetry within sexual discourse is predicated on the apparent superiority of “the words of a man.” Women are supposed to swoon at the lovely words of men because this swooning is reinforced in art, particularly popular culture. What is more, it is reinforced through language: you, as a woman, are told the words of men matter, and you know it must be true because I, with my man-words, am telling you so.

 

Of course, there are deep, historical structures of inequality that are the root-cause of the power imbalance between men and women, but it is through language that such an imbalance persists. We live in a liberal, secular, pluralist democracy (in Australia at least, and one or two of these may be debatable), where language matters, even its gross rhetorical form we’ve become used to from our politicians. Those deep, historical inequalities persist through language, even in a democracy. Words matter in a democracy; words are empowered in a democracy. Failure or refusal to be critical of words and to employ them judiciously is unconscionable under the circumstances.

 

Consent, or perhaps “consent,” is garnered through the self-enforcing mechanism of masculine language. What makes this vicious cycle worse is that many women are co-opted into reinforcing this masculine paradigm. It could certainly be argued that the women who appear on the show, for whatever reason, are co-opted in this way. By appearing on the show they are proving that “the words of a man” are important; so important and powerful, in fact, that they can conjure up a naked woman. Conversely, to be naked is to conjure up the words of a man.

 

There is a promise in this transaction, but a promise that is predicated on a false valuation of both the nude female form (under-valued) and the male word (over-valued). “I promise to reveal myself,” the woman says, “if you promise your words.” The words of a man are a revelation, but not of the same sort of revelation as is female nudity. Words should conjure words in response; we usually call this “conversation” or more broadly “discourse.” We might extend this point and argue that nudity, then, should conjure nudity in response. Perhaps if the two older men were also standing naked in front of the younger woman for her to judge their commentary might be different.

 

This can’t be assumed of course. Men are also inculcated with the belief that “a woman’s body thirsts for words. The words of a man.” This is not an apology; men are no more innocent in this than are the women who apologise for their behaviour. Another apologetic cliche springs to mind: "he's just a man." No man is just a man, he is a human being. This kind of language simply reinforces the kind spectatorial engagement, the one-sided transaction, that this show represents. The language we use in the discourse of sexual politics has to change; even the most innocuous use of the "boys will be boys" cliche reinforces the inequality.

 

A less galling example  of such apologetic behaviour (but offensive enough to illustrative of my point), compared to Blachman's quote, occurred in the wake of the Australian Olympic swimming team debacle, and the misbehaviour of some of Australia's high-profile male competitors. Most Australians know the story already, but here is a link. In defence of her colleagues, Cate Campbell exclaimed: "This is what normal boys do for fun, it's how they bond." I am sure the woman at the centre of the Cronulla Sharks sex scandal would beg to differ about the validity of the defence of "boys will be boys" in relation to male bonding routines and behaviour that involve humiliation, violence, or other forms of degradation.

 

But I digress. The point is that language matters; it matters how we use it and how we let others use it. Yes, I said "let," because language is a site of conflict, and in a liberal, secular, pluralistic democracy (or any society that aspires to be one) what we let others get away with, in both word and deed, determines the direction of society. Language is a form of imposition, but it is also a form of resistance, counter-imposition. Sexual autonomy and equality (that is, the equality of autonomous sexual agents) must be expressed through language, because language frames perception and promotes certain behaviours at the expense of others.

Mimesis and Critical Literacy

It's time for a bit of convergence. There are three major ares of interest I have been blogging about recently: Australian politics, critical literacy, and a couple of blogs on neuropolitics, or neurophilosophy. These are not disparate areas of interest; there are common threads that unite them, although it may not seem obvious at present. In this post, I will begin the process of weaving the second and third strands together. Previously, I have blogged about the discourse of imposition, whereby, due to our mimetic nature, we are driven to impose ourselves upon one another. As a supplementary to this blog, I more recently blogged about the misguided metaphysics that assumes that we are hyper-rational agents, quite distinct from our neurophysiology. I asserted in the latter post that such a position is just another kind of imposition in the aforementioned discourse. I have also blogged about the importance of critical literacy to democracy, and provided a demonstration of critical literacy in action. The crux of this post is to argue that, while we are governed in large part by our neurophysiology we can emancipate ourselves from the more negative implications of that fact through critical literacy.

Critical literacy, it must be remembered, helps to guard against manipulation by fallacy, particularly appeals to emotion. Our emotions are the product of neurophysiological processes that qualify our experience of the world around us. Emotions are necessary, but their necessity also makes us vulnerable. Emotional fallacies are the bread-and-butter of populist politicians, fear and envy perhaps the most commonly preyed upon. Language, as our primary tool of communication, is also the primary tool of manipulation. Language, it must also be remembered, presents only an approximation of the world around it; the world language represents is, as such, malleable. The world we live in bombards us with meaning from every angle and over a period of time that extends further than our personal memories; the legacy of ancient events from far off places still affects us, shaping our experiences from remote locations in space and time. In short, life is much more complex than can be captured in a linear language.

Language is an extension of our mimetic capacities into an abstract space. "Metaphoric space" is perhaps a better term. Recently, I have begun blogging on a fourth thread on sexual politics, where I have discussed the role of the imagination and the metaphoric processes of meaning-making that are grounded in the human body. Metaphor is an extension of our embodied experience in and understanding of the world around us, and language is grounded in metaphor; language is metaphor. Merlin Donald perhaps puts it best: "language floats on a sea of metaphor." Language is a projection of our embodied, mimetic experience into an abstract "metaphoric" space that can be translated, reproduced, and shared. Importantly, however, our experience can be shaped in that space; it is a reciprocal process of meaning-making.

Nevertheless, while language can shape our experience it is still our experience, which presupposes that which does the experiencing: the human organism. Language can be viewed as a filter through which human experience is channelled and refined. To extend the metaphor, a lot of the sediment that gets filtered out in the process, however, is still meaningful to our embodied experience. This has considerable implications for our understanding and our communication. There is an argument to be made, for instance, that the experience of women is filtered in just such a way (this was suggested to me recently in a reply to a previous blog, which I have responded to elsewhere). It is important, then, to understand the short-comings of language, as well as the processes whereby it enacts this filtration of experience. This is the role of critical literacy.

Our experience has shape prior to language, but language comes to superimpose itself on the native shapes of human experience. Importantly, language does not supplant our natural mimetic and embodied understanding of the world; we retain "body language" and other pre-linguistic modes of communication and expression, including the native intonations of voice on which, as my favourite poet Robert Frost would say, our "words are strung." There are sounds before words, and those sounds are meaningful, but that's a topic for another day. This is not some special case I'm making for human sounds; all animals have the capacity for some kind of vocal signalling, all mammals at least. Only humans have a complex conceptual language that they exalt above their other modes of communication and expression.

Language goes further than our embodied modes of communication, but is nonetheless grounded in them. Language cannot mean anything without its reference point being the body; more than they, language loses its meaningfulness when it loses it reference to the culture it sustains. A "dead language" is one that has fallen into disuse because it no longer supports the culture, or the collection of social activities, that promulgated it, and upon which it relied for its own perpetuation. We come so much to rely on the conceptual structure that language provides us that the substratum of embodied meaning is overlooked or diminished, except where it supports or augments linguistic meaning; for example, sarcasm is a prosodic augmentation that changes the meaning of the words used through inflection. The sarcastic utterance means the opposite of the conceptual meaning of the words used.

The problem, of course, is that language also empowers us to go beyond our immediate experience. We cannot do away with language; we cannot revert to "body language" and pheromones. We are our bodies, our brains, our chemistry, our instincts; but that is not all we are. We are the stories we tell about ourselves, about our experiences; we are the ideological (political and religious) debates we have about the shape of our community; we are out poetry and our songs. We shape and re-shape the perception of ourselves through our language; this can change the way we interpret our embodied experience, which in turn can change our behaviour. Even though our fundamental experiences have not changed, our understanding of them does.

By fundamental experience I mean the embodied processes, the organs of perception, the mimetic engagement, and the chemical and neurophysiological processes that underpin our experience; these processes, which we do experience, whether in the form of basic percepts, or emotional responses, do not change. Our understanding of them, as represented in art and language, do change. Love, for instance, perhaps to most common aesthetic object in human history, whatever stories, songs, poems, customs, or laws are produce with regard to it, the chemical responses remains the same. It is the language of love that changes. I mention customs and laws quite deliberately; love has been legislated, and in many ways still is. Marriage laws, divorce laws, sodomy laws, interracial marriages laws in the U.S. to name but a few. Language is used to impose control over behaviour; but language is also used to undermine such control, the "marriage equality" movement is a worthy citation here. The term "marriage equality" is an important departure from other prominent terms, such as "gay marriage" and "same-sex marriage." "Marriage equality is a much more inclusive term.

Language matters; that's why critical literacy matters. A thorough understanding of the relationship between language and our embodied mode of understand is also vitally important. We must understand where our meaning comes from, because it comes to us in a highly filtered form; if we simply accept that filtered meaning without critical analysis, or without reference to the origins of meaning-making in human understanding, then we abnegate our control and our contribution to human understanding. What's worse, we risk giving up our own bodies in the meaning-making processes; we risk letting others tell us what our body means, how it means. Language is neither perfect, nor isolated from human embodied experience; but it plays a critical role in how we perceive and represent our experience within society. As such, it is important that we maintain a critical relationship with language so that we are not manipulated by those who seek to impose their experience, their "wisdom," on us.

Difference, Metaphor, and the Collective Imagination

In a response to a previous blog, the responder, Jessica, critiqued my argument regarding apparent homogenous nature of what I referred to as “the collective imagination.” She argues that my formulation of the collective imagination denies or relegates difference, in particular sexual and gender difference. I believe this is the most important quote: “The problem with a unifying 'imagination' is the effacing and denial of difference that does not allow the possibility of other subjectivities.” Her criticism stems from a French Feminist position, most notably an “Irigarayan” perspective. I do not have the background to respond directly to this criticism; my response below will, at best, be tangential. I believe, however, that the differences between myself and the responder are conceptual, and not fundamental. What follows is (hopefully) a clarification of my argument regarding the importance of the collective imagination, and the importance of difference to that metaphoric space.

The collective imagination is not a homogenous space. The term is, perhaps, misleading. The emphasis should be on “imagination”; its “collective” nature is grounded in the common embodiment and environment from which the material of our experience, and by extension our imaginations, is drawn. Our neurophysiology is the same regardless of gender differences, but gender differences are the basis for quite different experiences. The same metaphoric processes of meaning-making underpin our experience, but the physiognomic differences do affect the kinds of material experience, or stimuli, an individual is presented with. However, while physiognomic differences have persisted throughout human history, the material basis of experience, as well as the metaphoric value-systems through which such experience is filtered, have changed. This is a complex point that needs unpacking, but ultimately it can be understood through the evolution of the collective imagination as a heterogeneous space.

Whatever the differences between men and women, the senses of perception are the same. This is not to diminish gender differences or the historical and political disadvantage that has accompanied them, and in many ways still does. Humans are meant to be together, socially, sexually, mimetically. Gender differences combined with our social impulsion makes sexuality a political space. Where there is difference there is a contest for control, because difference implies multiple dimensions; that is, multiple dimensions of a metaphoric space in which human thought and behaviour must operate. Multiple dimensions means complex non-linear movement, which further entails non-predictability or non-uniformity.

While we have a common embodiment in terms of the senses of perception, the kinds of material experience presented to those senses, filtered through physiognomic difference, are not uniform. Being a man is different to being a woman; differences are further exacerbated by culture and religion. Childbirth and the menstrual cycle are material experiences that a male simply cannot understand as an experience. In some cultures, a woman is considered “unclean” during her menstrual cycle. The culturally pervasive obsession with a woman’s virginity – and its corollary of insouciance toward male virginity – is another example of politically filtered gendered experience.

Our metaphoric processes of meaning-making are the basis of our behaviour; the conceptual systems of our morality (and our politics whereby our morality is contested) are the basis of our choices, but they are formulated through our metaphoric processes. Our metaphoric processes, however, are informed by our embodied experience, which is itself predicated on our physiological makeup. The physiological similarities and differences between the genders (among other conventional biological and cultural distinctions) constitute a background of meaning, the contextual field of historical, cultural, and political information that shapes our perception of interactions and events. A homogenous collective imagination would be constituted by wholly the predominant perspective, in almost every case a male perspective.

The metaphoric space of the imagination where our values are ultimately formulated is a diverse space, but it is a contested space. It is the site where difference can be communicated, appreciated, valued. While language is an important extension of the imagination, and the imagination is an important space wherein our material experience can be represented and altered abstractly, which in turn affects our material experience, language is complicit in the homogenisation of the imagination because it cannot satisfactorily capture the nuance in the imaginative reshaping of material experience. Language is linear and struggles to capture the multi-dimensional nature of human experience; language, furthermore, because it is linear, only moves in one direction, whereas meaning comes to us from multiple directions and in multiple forms (through the different senses).

Language, however, remains an extension of us, our most important communicative and expressive tool. Language, so long as it remains spoken and replete with human emotion, remains essential to our experience. Language, while does not capture certain dimensions of experience at all well, is nonetheless an evocative approximation of experience. We are a species of story-tellers and poets, and I will discuss the importance of poetry in the diffusion of language in a later blog. It’s the stories we tell about our experiences that shape our experiences; these same stories serve to reinforce rules of behaviour as well. Because language only moves in one direction, the telling of a story is a forceful event. Language controls emotional response because it moves in one direction; that which is left unsaid, the material experience that is not expressed in words, is suppressed. And that which is not presented in language is not presented to the imagination, or more specifically, is obscured from the imagination by what is presented in language.

It is, therefore, the homogenisation of language that leads to the homogenisation of the collective imagination. To foreshadow a future blog post, language filters all other forms of expression, including pictorial representations of the human form, because language limits the way in which such images can be talked about. Representations of sex, for instance, have historically been limited because the language associated with sex has been considered taboo. “Swear words,” which are almost always derived from sexual acts and bodily functions, are still largely taboo. Conversely, it could be argued that the words are taboo because the acts are taboo; language, however, is the vanguard of the act. Boundaries and limitations – and taboos – are challenged first through language; manifestos are circulated, plans formulated, protests organised, songs, chants, poems, news stories; coherent information must emerge in order for a collective consciousness revolving around a common cause to emerge subsequently.

Language prefigures material change because it operates in the metaphoric space of the imagination where values and beliefs, our shared abstract models of the world and our experience of it, are formed. Our beliefs are actionable metaphors, and language, however imperfect it is, gives us access to that metaphoric space. Language, therefore, is the critical site of conflict in the contest over meaning. Language matters; it may seem a long way to go to get to an obvious point such as this, but this fact needs to be understood in its proper context. Human relations, including race, gender, and sexuality, are filtered by language. Language shapes the “metaphors we live by,” and it is in that metaphorical realm, in the realm of the imagination, that nuance and difference must be expressed and defended. The collective imagination is where the perceptions and values of the material world are changed, and language is the most important point of entry.