Something that may be interesting to folks in 'Listening to Poetry'
As I mentioned once before, I've got a LiveJournal an d lately I've been mulling over matters poetical. I thought I'd copy something that might be of interest to folks in Stephen's course. If you want to view the whole thing, the link is: http://www.livejournal.com/users/truthaboutus/
Yesterday (that is, the meta-yesterday of this journal), we discussed an empiricist account of how reading might be an experience. That account dealt with the case of texts which act upon the memory, and left open to speculation the effectiveness of texts whose subject matter does not touch upon the reader's, though it may come from the author's, memory. This turns out to be a limited field of exploration for the question "is reading an experience", because some poets do not deal in, in fact outright deny, the process of writing from remembered experience. Let's look at one, Leslie Scalapino, on the writing process:
"A characteristic of conservatie thought is iteration of tradition for its own sake, valuable in that it is it... Without the conception of the social as phenomenological, actions that are rebellious in response to whatever imitated as being one- is interpreted as one's being unable to comprehend, couldn't put things together. A syntax that is this dismemberment will be incomprehensible in the framework of conservative thought (one characteristic of which: conception of the past as entity to be preserved as being the present)" (from The Public Word/ Syntactically Impremanence, Leslie Scalapino).
Conservative thought, with its adherence to the belief of a "past as entity to be preserved as being the present", is placed in opposition to "outside" thought, which isn't defined, except in that opposition. The view expressed, however, may appear similar to the phenomenological view that experience itself is reality, and not experience of a reality outside the perceiver containing fixed objects and sets of rules, causation, gravitation, etc, to which those "real" objects adhere. i couldn't really know, as I've never asked Scalapino about her metaphysics, but it would seem to be consistent with further passages: "The idea that writing is invalidated by it being experience has its corollary- in the objection to there being in writing 'thought' which is at one and the same time as 'occurence'. Is that occurence."
In writing the thought and the experience are at least concomitant, if not identical. This is not a case of conjuring a memory so strongly as to have it "seem real", but rather writing in such a way as to make the act, the cognitive act, a genuine experience. For Scalapino, traditional narrative structures, and the language that goes with them, makes of experience a persistent object. And she is right to point out that this creates a paradox: that of an experience being both in the past, as a temporal occurence with a beginning and an end, and in the present, as an extant, persistent object. In a phenomenological framework, even commonplace objects do not persist, as we surely would have to admit that in the field of experience they are always changing (even if the change happens below our immediate level of detection, following Kant we can say that it could possibly be experienced, by a micrscope, for instance, and therefor is still phenomenon). Here's Scalapino again (from Note on My Writing) on the paradox as it appears in writing: "A segment in the poem is the actual act or event itself- occuring long after it occured; or acts put into it which occured more recently. they somehow come up as the same sound pattern." By not adhering to traditional syntax, the writing itself attempts to become a primary reality.
I say "attempts" above for a reason. It is not at all clear that Scalapino succeeds. While she may be right that traditional syntax, which is rather undefined here (but no better defined in Scalapino's writings) forces us into a metaphysics where the past persists to the future, and indeed one might argue this is its strength as a cognitive tool, it does not follow that just any break with that syntax will not carry the same problem. That assumption would commit the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent, to wit:
If 'traditional syntax', then 'metaphysics of persistent experience.'
Not 'traditional syntax', therefor not 'metaphysics of persistent experience.'
The above reasoning is false. If we deny traditional syntax, we have no idea, a priori, what to make of things. This may be a very interesting and provocative state to be in poetically, it may also explain many readers' intial frustration with a writer like Scalapino. To be fair though, Scalapino doesn't think she's using just any syntax, but rather one that is specifically tailored to the task of phenomenological writing, or writing as experience. Tomorrow, I will look at whether or not she succeeds in creating that syntax, insofar as I am able to assess the case.
As I mentioned once before, I've got a LiveJournal an d lately I've been mulling over matters poetical. I thought I'd copy something that might be of interest to folks in Stephen's course. If you want to view the whole thing, the link is: http://www.livejournal.com/users/truthaboutus/
Yesterday (that is, the meta-yesterday of this journal), we discussed an empiricist account of how reading might be an experience. That account dealt with the case of texts which act upon the memory, and left open to speculation the effectiveness of texts whose subject matter does not touch upon the reader's, though it may come from the author's, memory. This turns out to be a limited field of exploration for the question "is reading an experience", because some poets do not deal in, in fact outright deny, the process of writing from remembered experience. Let's look at one, Leslie Scalapino, on the writing process:
"A characteristic of conservatie thought is iteration of tradition for its own sake, valuable in that it is it... Without the conception of the social as phenomenological, actions that are rebellious in response to whatever imitated as being one- is interpreted as one's being unable to comprehend, couldn't put things together. A syntax that is this dismemberment will be incomprehensible in the framework of conservative thought (one characteristic of which: conception of the past as entity to be preserved as being the present)" (from The Public Word/ Syntactically Impremanence, Leslie Scalapino).
Conservative thought, with its adherence to the belief of a "past as entity to be preserved as being the present", is placed in opposition to "outside" thought, which isn't defined, except in that opposition. The view expressed, however, may appear similar to the phenomenological view that experience itself is reality, and not experience of a reality outside the perceiver containing fixed objects and sets of rules, causation, gravitation, etc, to which those "real" objects adhere. i couldn't really know, as I've never asked Scalapino about her metaphysics, but it would seem to be consistent with further passages: "The idea that writing is invalidated by it being experience has its corollary- in the objection to there being in writing 'thought' which is at one and the same time as 'occurence'. Is that occurence."
In writing the thought and the experience are at least concomitant, if not identical. This is not a case of conjuring a memory so strongly as to have it "seem real", but rather writing in such a way as to make the act, the cognitive act, a genuine experience. For Scalapino, traditional narrative structures, and the language that goes with them, makes of experience a persistent object. And she is right to point out that this creates a paradox: that of an experience being both in the past, as a temporal occurence with a beginning and an end, and in the present, as an extant, persistent object. In a phenomenological framework, even commonplace objects do not persist, as we surely would have to admit that in the field of experience they are always changing (even if the change happens below our immediate level of detection, following Kant we can say that it could possibly be experienced, by a micrscope, for instance, and therefor is still phenomenon). Here's Scalapino again (from Note on My Writing) on the paradox as it appears in writing: "A segment in the poem is the actual act or event itself- occuring long after it occured; or acts put into it which occured more recently. they somehow come up as the same sound pattern." By not adhering to traditional syntax, the writing itself attempts to become a primary reality.
I say "attempts" above for a reason. It is not at all clear that Scalapino succeeds. While she may be right that traditional syntax, which is rather undefined here (but no better defined in Scalapino's writings) forces us into a metaphysics where the past persists to the future, and indeed one might argue this is its strength as a cognitive tool, it does not follow that just any break with that syntax will not carry the same problem. That assumption would commit the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent, to wit:
If 'traditional syntax', then 'metaphysics of persistent experience.'
Not 'traditional syntax', therefor not 'metaphysics of persistent experience.'
The above reasoning is false. If we deny traditional syntax, we have no idea, a priori, what to make of things. This may be a very interesting and provocative state to be in poetically, it may also explain many readers' intial frustration with a writer like Scalapino. To be fair though, Scalapino doesn't think she's using just any syntax, but rather one that is specifically tailored to the task of phenomenological writing, or writing as experience. Tomorrow, I will look at whether or not she succeeds in creating that syntax, insofar as I am able to assess the case.
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