Olson's Republic
This piece is excerpted from an essay, less in progress than in
dispersion, addressing the question of writing's socially constitutive
enactments as a way of eventually rethinking "the political" as a
form of process relating powers of saying to powers of doing. In
more ways than one, then, its conclusions necessarily partake of
what the poet calls "the open-ended character of the future."
*
_tesserae / commissure_
having descried the nation
to write a republic
in gloom on Watch-House Point
Volume III of Charles Olson's _Maximus Poems_ begins with this runic
directive dating from June 1963. George Butterick, in his note to these
lines, suggests turning to a letter from Olson to Ralph Maud for further
evidence on what it may mean to "write a republic": "a republic [still so far
as I can 'hear,' the real word for politics--res politius populus puberte
public" (505); and in his note on the first mention of the term "polis" in
_Maximus_, Butterick cites Olson's essay "Definitions by Undoings":
POLIS, then, is a filled up thing (in the passive as city, the
community or body of citizens, . . . not their being as material,
but being as group with will, and that will is from the Sanskrit
stem to fill or fulfill, and includes such words as plenus, plebes,
po-pulus, publicus, thus our public . . . (25)
Butterick also cites an earlier essay, "The Methodology is the Form," where
Olson writes: "The question, now, is: what is our polis (even allowing that
no such thing can be considered as possible to exist when such homogeneity
as any Greek city was has been displaced by such heterogeneity as modern
cities and nations are)?" "Our polis," it turns out here, is "the very whole
world," "the State," "The System," the "totality" that it is incumbent on
writers to "invert" and oppose "by discovering the totality of any--every--
single one of us."
*
It is by means of this discovery of _singular_ totalities that the _Maximus
Poems_, which begins with the epigraph "All my life I've heard/one makes
many," is able to effectively counter the national logo of _e pluribus unum_
with an injunction to write, to constitute, "a new social body" enacted in
dispersed singularities, the "complex of occasions" that characterizes both
American potentiality as Olson sees it and the changing human body itself.
His resources for this undertaking are many: they include Whitman's
poetics of constitutive address, Whitehead's philosophical understanding of
process, Heraclitean readings of language as commonality, Keats's
articulation of negative capability. The force of Olson's proposition,
however, depends on how we construe the political composition of this
body, its relation to the totality that it is intended to invert and
reinscribe, its
modes of speaking, and particularly the dynamic of its responses to
contingency and environment, document and event. The question these
considerations are intended to address is simply put: What does it mean, in
the context of postwar totality, to write a republic?
*
"It was a polis," sd his friend, "no wonder
you wanted to take part in its
creation."
("Obit" CP 426))
"To write a republic" can be understood as a statement of purpose for the
entire last phase of Olson's work, as well as a way of reading what came
before it. Olson uses certain passages in his work in the manner of
soundings or compass readings, enabling a simultaneous drafting and
perusal of the map that the work constitutes as it unfolds. To begin to read
this statement requires asking careful questions of the words and their
possible contexts in order to discern a direction that orients and locates
them. How are we to read terms such as "nation," "republic"? How should
we understand the poet's absent agency, the missing I whose already
achieved act of descrying the nation appears to motivate the writing of the
republic--as, perhaps, "another kind of nation"? What does it mean here to
descry, to write?
*
Having descried the nation: having sighted it, sited it, and, by establishing
distance between it and the poet's own place, having provided a measure of
location for both. Yet the word "descry" deploys an unstable set of
emphases, shifting from "catch sight of" to "discover" to (in an obsolete
usage) "reveal, make known"--a use echoing the word's origin in
_descrien_, to proclaim. Catching sight of the nation, then, as a fin might be
sighted on the sea's horizon (content's slippery glimpse)--or locating it as
land is "discovered" from on board ship? And then, within that word,
another--"decry"--with its senses of both officially engineered depreciation
(as currency is decried) and autonomous public condemnation. Descrying
the nation: crying against it? belittling its importance as entity or
category?
What the poet has seen or done regarding the nation suggests a motive for
the project of writing a republic, even if that motive is aversive, a turning
away; and the sense in which "nation" is distinguished from "republic"
would appear to have affiliation with the sense in which descrying differs
from writing. Yet the kinship among these paired sets of words is equally
there. One relationship cancels itself in clearing a way for the other; but
even
in doing so, the ghost of a descried nation lingers alongside the activity of
writing a republic, as the gloom of dusk or melancholy lingers over the
privileged site of poetic composition, Watch-House Point--a place at once
particular and allegorical, situated precisely in a moment of time, the
darkness of coming to write.
*
Writing a republic, then, can mean inscribing ("from scratch") that body of
persons, creatures, things ("objects" all, in Olson's revisionary materialism)
that go to make up a complex, recognized or unrecognized, of social relations
and aspirations. Equally it may mean correcting (righting) the already
written nature of that body, revisiting the site of its writing in order
to turn its course, alter its outcome. Poetry, outlawed from Plato's republic,
would here return as drafter of its constitution--not in late acknowledgement
of Shelley's unacknowledged legislators of the world, or even of Oppen's
revisionary legislators of the unacknowledged world, but as something
different from either--not lawmaking at all in the regulatory sense (gridding
of the state-form), but instead wayward line-making, surveying: walking
and mapping the eccentric boundaries of possibilities for social assemblage
(elements gathered across time as well as space), marking its contours in the
linguistic field according to a sense of responsibility toward objects as
"units of experience." Knowing objects, recognizing them, means having
"waked to the truth that the act of knowing a real object alters it" (Peirce
255); extending the rejection of Cartesian thinking, it also means
acknowledging the reciprocally constitutive relations incurred by perception
of objects. Objects know us into being as we know them. Like Walter
Benjamin, Olson understood objects as specific instances or local tendencies
of a general temporal turbulenceQa disruptiveness that provides ground for
a reconsideration of the relation between political and aesthetic practice.
*
The republic that Olson invokes, it should be noted, is one fundamentally
removed from any system of organized differences posing as the fulfillment
of a collective will (though the potential for such fulfillment resides, as
Olson's etymologizing on "polis" suggests, in the basis of any republic).
What he is concerned with here turns on a familiar paradox of
constitutionality, embodied in the performative utterance "we the people,"
which simultaneously depends on and enacts recognition of the polity it
invokes. The poet will write this republic into being by means of an address
to it, taking "writing" as a double form of addressing: to the elements or
materials configuring the polis and to the totality that comprises them.
Austin's notion of the illocutionary as a (nondiscursive) force in verbal
signification is relevant here, particularly if it is extended beyond a
restricted class of utterances to encompass the potential of _any_ utterance.
To write a republic is to perform it as a relation, to rescue it from the
status (stasis) of arrested happening; it is a process of doing.
*
The poetics Olson enunciates here radically extends his understanding of
how to locate writing _socially_ in spatio-temporal terms. "People want
delivery" (M II 97), in words attributable to his father the mail-carrier and
union-member, because they lack it; and not simply delivery _of_ letters but
delivery _from_ the conditions of separation and disarticulation that letters
traverse. It is Olson's task to deliver the elements of language back to these
conditions in order to recognize their transformative potential, to see in
them
the forming ground of a potential energy constitutive of meaning. This is a
prefigurative politics of poetic form that is at the same time figurative
(descrying the nation) and configurative (writing the republic). Yet in its
use
of the materials at hand it is, as well, altogether literal. Littoral (coast
haunting). Poetry as constitutionally uncertain enactments of a littoral
address.
*
"As we have gone back beyond the polity to the polis, so we have to go back
beyond the polis to the polites or citizen. A polis or state belongs to the
order of 'compounds', in the same way as all other things which form a
single 'whole', but a 'whole' composed, nonetheless, of a number of
different parts." (Aristotle 94)
"The 'compound' is a genus; the 'whole' is a species of that genus.
'Compounds . . . are of two sorts--aggregates like a heap (mechanical), and
aggregates like a syllable (organic)'. 'Wholes' are aggregates of the second
or organic kind: they have a Form which gives them an organic unity . . . The
polis is such a 'whole'. . . . . Aristotle notes in the _Ethics_, Book IX, c.
viii, sec. 6, that 'a polis, or any other systematic whole, may be identified
particularly with the most sovereign element in it.' (Barker, in Aristotle 96)
Not Sybils but by syllables shall you be free
(Olson, "Antimaximus II")
*
_the Confederacy / for the Doubles to End the World's / Troubles_
State philosophy. Unsteady state. The history of conceptual state-building
from inside what Olson called "the Western box" affords little encouragement
for prospective constitutionalists, especially those who demand that (in
Arakawa and Gins's phrase) "justice be done to the poetic jump." "Do we know
of any greater evil for a state," asks Plato's Socrates, "than the thing
that distracts it and makes it many instead of one, or a greater
good than that which binds it together and makes it one?" (701) Not least
among the ironies associated with the history of the public sphere, so called,
is that its instantiation as a temporary autonomous zone originally hinged on
the project of making itself obsolete--the philosopher-king's dream. This
irony takes its modern form, Brian Massumi reminds us, in Wilhelm von
Humboldt's nineteenth-century blueprint for university education as the
"spiritual and moral training of the nation," whose originary principle
(truth)
drives all learning toward an abstract ideal (justice) by means of an
exclusive Idea (the State)--"the Prussian mind-meld, " as Massumi terms it
(4), that continues to inform present-day notions of educational mission.
Consensus deformation. Plato: "There is from of old a quarrel between
philosophy and poetry. . . . So long as [poetry] is unable to make good
[i.e., Good] her defense we shall chant over to ourselves as we listen the
reasons that we have given as a countercharm to her spell . . . for we have
come to see that we must not take such poetry seriously as a serious thing
that lays hold on truth, but that he who lends an ear to it must be on his
guard fearing for the polity in his soul" (832-833). Don Byrd points out that
in Eric Havelock's _Preface to Plato_, a work from which Olson drew
substantial confirmation for his later thinking, Havelock construes the
contest between poetry and philosophy in _The Republic_ as a struggle
between oral poets and literate philosophers for control over education in the
polis (Byrd 35-6). Yet Plato's ideological recasting of this division between
_muthos_ and _logos_ itself recognizes, despite its absolute claims, the
continuing dependence of each of these modes on the other, and of both on
the power site that is the state-form. Even in _The Republic_ philosophy's
victory over poetry is necessarily incomplete, when Reason itself must be
chanted as charm to ensure psychopolitical tranquillity.
*
Poetry as that form of discourse which distracts the state. Dis-tracts, that
is, not simply by diverting its attention from the good, but by drawing it
apart, dispersing and multiplying its loci of value; not just by constituting
a space alternative to that of the state-form, but by de-gridding the concept
of state-space, revealing it as lumpy, heterogeneous, desquamated; energizing
it into spills and flows. Field as phasal, tendential, in formation. The
alternative to such antihegemonic agitation is a tendency toward brittle
simulacra, pasteboard masks ranged round an absent center of power.
the fake
which covers the emptiness
is the loss
in the 2nd instance of the
distraction. Gloucester too
is out of her mind and
is now indistinguishable from
the USA.
(M III 204)
*
_Still life / public sphere_
Olson's career as a poet begins with his departure from the world of
organized national politics. This move was not the result of an "aesthetic"
decision per se--unless _aisthesis_ be taken in the older sense that Olson
would come to support, a sensory link between interior and exterior worlds
(thus the correspondence between individual and historical tides mentioned
in Olson's "good-bye to all that" poem, "The K"). The political organs of
containment and opposition Olson worked for in Washington prior to 1945
took on a new function in the postwar dawning of "the American century"
(a term whose imperialist overtones echo back to the _pax romana_). "I am
no Greek," ends "The Kingfishers," "And of course, no Roman." From
Greek polis to Roman republic-turned-empire to modern nation,
heterogeneous yet imperializing: what remains of this sequence of state-
forms? What is recuperable beyond traces of their exoskeletal supports,
scattered as stones at the sites of their extensions across the world?
*
In his book on modern and premodern political formations, Claude Lefort
charts the development of symbolic power inherent in the identification of
society with a corporeal body. He notes that "the democratic revolution, for
so long subterranean, burst out when the body of the king was destroyed,
when the body politic was decapitated and when, at the same time, the
corporeality of the social was dissolved"; in modern democracies, "there is
no power linked to a body. Power appears as an empty place" (303). The
virtuality of the modern democratic state-form lies in its character as "a
body
without organs," in Deleuze and Guattari's phrase, a "crowded void"
lacking a center and continually contested by agencies of fulfillment. The
success with which the boundary-agency of entropic capital is able to run
through this dissipative structure is a measure not of the latter's
incorporeal
nature, but of the _dis_incorporation of the individuals ("the unit the
smallest there is," M 623) that constitute it.
the problem is then whether
a Federal organization
or organization at all except as it comes
directly in the form of
the War of the World
is anything
(M II 198)
After world war, the intensities focused in the struggle against fascism do
not simply dissipate; they disperse and refocus, challenging the limits of the
democratic state-form.
*
The public as phantasmic environment, a chamber of echoes. Olson's
insistence on words as actions involves a theory both of signification and of
action. Just as the act of speaking or writing within a given space will tend
to reorganize the hidden givenness of that space, redistributing the points or
nodes of its social composition, so action, as Olson understood it from his
reading of Melville, tends to proceed from a place of repose--a "calm," a
waiting "passivity" that presupposes "the inertial structure of the world."
That the action of writing is predicated on a moment of inertia has
consequences for the ways in which it means, for its entrance into the
world's spaces.
light signals & mass points
normal mappings of
inertia & every possible action
of aether and of
change
(M III 133)
I looked up and saw
its truth
through everything
sewn in & binding
each seam
(M 564)
The virtual reality of matter's emergence from _potentia_ is thus
diagrammed in Olson's poetics of mapping-forth. "Into the Diagram,"--as,
in Peirce's phrase, "an Icon of intelligible relations" (252).
*
The republic as resonant body whose emptiness enables its writing--not as a
filling of that space, not as fulfillment, but as a concretizing of the
invisible within it. If ideology is what disallows the seeing of what lies
before us (ob viam = in the way), then hearing those lies as history's echoes
is what art may permit.
*
_Bona Dea / Athena Polais_
It is clear that if the republic is a written body, it is a sexualized,
naturalized one at that. The "res puberte" of sexual maturity hinted at in
Olson's definition of politics in the letter to Maud is extended in the
"Definitions" essay to include among the roots of "polis" the Latin for
"pelvis"--"which means a basin fr which our meaning of pelvis comes"--as well
as, by way of Sanskrit, the words for "cleanse," "purify," and "fire" (not to
mention _ur-_ itself, the "original place"): "THE FIRE-CLEANSED FULL PLACE
OF THE FIRE, THE PURE PLACE ist POLIS." This ideal intersection of
sexual and sacred, situating the place of politics within the female body, is
alluded to further in the poem (M III 11) equating "Bona Dea" and "Athena
Polais," the Roman goddess of fertility and the Greek goddess in her role as
protector of the city, and later in the extension of nature as culture,
natural
history as the history of polis, in the proposition "the city/is only the
beginning of the earth the earth/is the world." From "republic," then, we
can trace a direct lineage to the "Mother Earth alone"(M III 226)
that is
Olson's compulsive focus in the late poems of _Maximus_, an ecological
extension of the notion of polity that gives full weight to _all_ citizen-
denizens of the earth. In that extension, too, Olson hopes to relocate the
"feminine" principle that has eluded him in previous addresses to an overly
narrow conception of the "political."
*
The political science necessary for recuperating neglected citizenries in an
all-too-human universe is the subject of Olson's strange, hilarious
performance from the late 1950s, "Rufus Woodpecker," a visionary sortie
into the televisual vocabulary of frantic blandness saturating the Eisenhower
years:
Rufus Woodpecker visited the President
today. The subject of their discussion
was foreign policy. He advised
that bi-partisanship must be replaced
by symbiosis, or else. . . .
On all hands there is
the thought that though normally,
and normally, the, and in certain
seasons, not eat, and actually
the young are born,
Rufus Woodpecker wouldn't
come near these shores . . .
(CP 451)
This satiric reinscription of an ecological worldview on to the glossy
mediatized surfaces of corporate representation ("where states previously
boasted/they had democratized creation") goes beyond satire; it amounts to a
detournement, to use the situationist term, of America's dominant image-
discourse in order to rescue "an earth of actual value" from it. The
woodpecker, last seen as "the representative of the rest of creation/nesting
inside the Mouth of the nation, and pecking/broccoli out of it, clearly
concerned/that if he went any deeper he was apt to find more/foodstuff
buried in the Defrost" is both frozen-vegetable corporate icon (Birdseye?)
and ambassador from a world where "union is possible" and all inhabitants
begin "chirping excitedly at the approach of each other." Thus Rufus's
arrival may signal a climatic return to the Ice Age, or herald the coming of a
global warming in interspecies relations.
*
The counterparts of these happy 'toons in "The Gonfalon Raised Tonight,"
written at the same time and with a similar appropriationist twist, appear as
teen gang-members from the grim-faced world of _Time_ magazine reporting:
They declare
no interest whatsoever
in the state of the world,
demark the nation as turf
on which it will be as they say
or it won't be any longer
allowed to go undisturbed by
their active attention.
(CP 449)
"Human Universe": "it behooves man now not to separate himself too
jauntily from any of nature's creatures" (10). And nature as human, now,
is no more
than man's
acquisition or improvement
of her--or at least his entrance
into her picture
(M III 203)
--a picture that nonetheless holds _him_ captive.
*
Another citizen of the earth, appearing in Volume III of _Maximus_, is the
star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) from "West Gloucester" (M III 26).
Maximus encounters this creature, discombobulated ("probably . . . knocked
in the head"), in the middle of the highway:
actually fighting all the time,
with its fore-paws at
the lovely mushroom growth
of its nose, snow-ball flake pink flesh
of a gentian . . .
like a flower dizzy
with its own self . . .
drilling
itself into the
pavement
The futility of this burrower's dazed attempts to spiral itself into the road
clearly resonates for Maximus (the poet-historian as mole, "batted on the
head" by accident; its spiralling motion reenacted in those late poems where
the lines whorl in upon themselves, following the flower-vortex; the mole
as spy, descrying the earth's secrets, seeking the underworld). The
attraction of the image is perhaps too clearly thematic, indeed, unless we
consider that the freak magnetization posited as "what was wrong" with the
creature ("that the highway/ had magnetized the poor thing") is as exact an
instance of illocutionary performance as anything in _Maximus_. The
poem's elements, with this stroke, configure in a total assembly.
If I twist West I curl into the tightest Rose, if right
into the Color of the East . . .
in this aspect the Nation
turns now to its Perfection. (M III 106)
In its third sense the "mole" is the causeway (Route 128 encircling Boston)
built to reach former islands Tyre/ Gloucester (for analogously imperial
purposes, in Maximus's view), and thus the very highway whose
magnetizing agency distracts its namesake. It is in this sense that "it does
take a mole to join Gloucester to the Nation" (M III 225).
*
Feminine
Writing so that all the World
is redeemed, and history
and all that politics,
and "State" and Subjection
are for once, done away with,
as the reason
of Writing
(_The Archaeologist of Morning_)
Olson's much-vaunted return to "the feminine" in the last decade of his
career has been read in a variety of ways. From the perspective of writing
the republic, one thing becomes clear: the public matters of constitution,
attention, and governmentality that preoccupy the Maximus of the early
poems, that return in inverted form in the satires and topical commentaries
of the late fifties and early sixties, and that acquire their widest
environmental context in the late work--these singularly and resonantly lack
a context that acknowledges women except in mythological-archetypical
terms. Yet "the fire-cleansed place of the polis" is preeminently a female
topos, as are various of the most prominent landmarks that increasingly
become the poet's mainstays in an ever-cloudier phenomenal world. What
to make of the links between female-coded environmental power and male-
coded political address in these late poems? How can such links be used to
address the political problem that informs the _Maximus Poems_
throughout, "the democratic proposition" hinted at in its epigraph? Does the
idea of "the feminine" as symbolic debt, to use Andrew Ross's formulation,
speak to the symbolically empty space that Lefort locates at the vacuum
center of the modern democratic state-form?
care of such an order
love itself was put down as over-
ably, as, if she chose and she had
still no choice to organize
every thing
(M 566)
*
In an unpublished essay entitled "Culture and Revolution," dating from the
early 1950s, Olson addresses and embodies the paradoxes of organization as
they relate to the problem of locating poetry's task: "inside totality, where
are we, who are _we_?" (emphasis added). Totality, Olson intimates, can
be taken in two divergent senses: on the one hand it is the System, the
"goods" that evacuate "good" (value) and lead in the end to systemic suicide
by commodification--organization as death, totalitarianism (exemplified in
its extreme form in the model of the concentration camp); on the other it is
"the work," the active principle of making that includes working toward the
society to come--organization as art, the democratic self-creative
proposition. Olson sees totality in postwar terms as "culture" rather than
(politico-economic) "revolution"; yet there is a "revolution of culture" that
must speak to the Good after the "ruin" wrought by commodification. The
question he poses is whether, again, totality can be rescued ("inverted") to
its second sense of aesthetic-political work, the social body to come. In this
essay, Olson contrasts the possible approaches to this question in terms of a
(European) "ideality" and an (American) pragmatism, arguing for the necessity
of developing a relativist, skeptical basis for the democratic totality
that nonetheless presses the question of the good within it, as alternative to
it, finding place and name for it, without lapsing into the idealisms of
absolute faith and martyrdom that motivate the "aristocrats" or saints of
spirit. It is in the light of this position that the question of "the
feminine"
needs to be taken up in considering the later work.
*
Added to
making a Republic
in gloom on Watchhouse
Point
an actual earth of value to
construct one, from rhythm to
image, and image is knowing, and
knowing, Confucius says, brings one
to the goal: nothing is possible without
doing it. It is where the test lies, malgre
all the thought and all the pell-mell of
proposing it. Or thinking it out or living it
ahead of time.
(M III 190)
A revealing moment occurs in _The Republic_ when Socrates alludes to the
absurdity of the phrase "master of himself." For if the self is subject to its
own command, who is mastered and who does the mastering? Socrates
goes on to recuperate the sense of the trope by arguing for the self's
division into good and bad elements and positing a hierarchical relation
between them: the many dominated by the few. "Do we know of any greater
evil for a state than the thing that distracts it and makes it many instead of
one, or a greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?"
(701) A policing of the unruly subjects of the subject within the bounds of
the composite imperial self: the king's two bodies; the state's incorporate
body; democracy's nobody. It is a measure of Olson's achievement in
writing his republic through the late _Maximus_ poems that it strives less
and less to cohere as organizational totality derived from the poet's own
willful agency--that it is less _his_ republic, more an active seeking out of
the full constituency of the earth as polis, beyond its constitution by
appropriation: totality as necessary perceptual and compositional _process_.
It is the degree to which _Maximus_ restricts extension of such process to
the common denominator of the poet's own perceptual horizon ("the ownership/
solely/mine")--occlusions of a singular bodily template--that it leaves
asymptotic limits for subsequent readings to trace, other writings to overcome.
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