[courtesy The European Legacy]

Gerald Bruns

The Poethical Wager. By Joan Retallack
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xii + 279 pp.

The purpose of Joan Retallack's The Poethical Wager is to develop an aesthetics of complexity, where complexity (as in chaos theory) has to do with the singularity and irreducibility of things and events in contrast to their subsumption into categories, hierarchies, systems, or any of the forms of conceptual determination that we use to make sense of our experience. And so her first recourse is to a pun: poethics, which means something like leaving things to chance but nevertheless taking responsibility for what happens. Poethics is a multifunctional term that has application in art, science, and politics, as well as in everyday life, where the economic necessity of reducing our actions and experiences to schedules, rules, offices, and programs forecloses possibilities that, opened up to experiment, just might satisfy our basic desire for the good life. So poethics entails a poor ethics of responsibility to and for the other as opposed to the traditionally forceful ethics of universal rules and the sittlichkeit of integrated communities.

The Poethical Wager is a book of twelve essays plus a substantial introduction ("Essay as Wager") on the essay as a form of conceptual art, which is what each of these twelve essays turns into as it constructs itself. In her second piece, "Wager as Essay," Retallack says: "Essays, like poems and philosophical meditations, should elude our grasp just because their business is to approach the liminal spectrum of near-unintelligibility-immediate experience complicating what we thought we knew. In this case, 'to write' means to engage in a probative, speculative projection of the often surprising vectors of words as they graze the circumstances of ongoing life" (p. 48). "Unintelligibility" is the keyword here and throughout The Poethical Wager. It is not a negative concept but a concept of freedom. Intelligibility by contrast presupposes confinement to reproductive systems whose progeny either mirror one another or are cast aside if they don't. Retallack wants a theory of what does not fit. "Wager as Essay," for example, sketches very quickly a brief history of the essay as an anarchic form of writing-Montaigne's essays, for example, which, as Retallack says, are more like puzzles than discourses. The later Wittgenstein's "remarks," thoughts that cannot be integrated into "a natural order…without breaks," are likewise among her models, as are Adorno's Versuche-not just Prisms, but even the forbidding Aesthetic Theory, which is not a systematic treatise but a book of large fragments that articulates in uncompromising terms the basic thesis of modernist aesthetics: "The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility [Unbegreiflichkeit: literally, ungraspability] that needs to be comprehended." Arguably all of Retallack's work-her critical writings, her conversations with John Cage, and above all her several volumes of innovative poetry-is an exploration and extension of this thesis.

Like Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, Retallack's experimental essays are a calculated affront to the academic paper and the institutions that mass-produce it, gripping literary study in what Charles Bernstein calls "frame lock." To break the frame Retallack turns to the essays of Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and her contemporaries Leslie Scalapino and Rosemary Waldrop-as well as herself. Retallack's first chapter, "The Poethical Wager," is a self-interview on thickening poetics with an h. "Poetics without an h has primarily to do with questions of style. Style is the manner in which your experience has understood, assimilated, imprinted you" (p. 38). By contrast, "your poethical work begins when you no longer wish to shape materials (words, visual elements, sounds) into legitimate progeny of your own poetics. When you are released from filling in the delimiting forms…. If you persist, patterns in your work may become more flexible, permeable, conversational, exploratory" (p. 38). To which Retallack might have added: more complex. Poethics is a theory and practice of turbulence, of nomadic forms or forms that never settle into place but rather consist of breaking patterns (like breaking news). Retallack herself prefers the concept of swerving, "the sudden zig or zag of rogue atoms" to which Epicurus gave the term "clinamen" (p. 2). So we are to think of the poethical essay as having the fragmenting structure of the weather rather than the unitary repose of objects.

As an example Retallack gives us "Blue Notes on the Know Ledge," which begins:

What is the metaphysics of the ontology of the physics of the neurophysiology of the epistemology of blue? How many was could I you s/he they we reshuffle the order of these fun-house nouns. Blue-tipped, blue light distance signifiling past slide rule's blue shift. A Western poetics of blue (Is pink the navy blue of India?) is blind sighted at an intersection of the optics of blue (peripheral vision and distance) the paradoxical psychology of blue (religious hope and historical sadness) the epistemology of blue (peripheral vision and cognitive distance). Linea, punctus, circulus, sanctus, sanctus…. blue (p. 63)

If, for instance, you were ordered to paint a particular shade of blue called "Prussian Blue," you might have to use a table to lead you from the word "Prussian Blue" to a sample of the colour, which would serve you as your copy (p. 65).

Blue skies, blue water, blue laws, singing the blues, the poet Carla Harryman's "Dimblue," blue noses, "wild blue blunders" (p. 68), cool blue, true blue (as opposed to false blue, or betrayal. But now imagine a blue truth, or blue knowledge, on the model of the blue movie). One recalls William Gass's On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, which Michael Wood excoriated in the New York Review of Books (August 5, 1976): too many word games. As Gass noted, there's something philosophically off-color about blue. It is the color of incertitude (which is, philosophical opinion aside, not a condition of skepticism but a condition of hope). Certitude forecloses hope. Just so, Retallack's main concern in this wonderfully unruly essay is the danger of "knowing for sure," an assertion of the ego that exposes everything to Plato's sun:

The light of the Enlightenment was not to be blue-not full of misplaced and otherwise abused objects, displaced spectators, short-wave blurred edges of historical lament. It was to be the white light that as we know, but cannot see except refractively, contains the entire spectrum-the light of programmatic optimism: Utopian light. The light of hope, with its dependence on undependable pleasant surprises, is, on another hand-to-mouth, blue. It arises out of a strangely luminous pessimism, late in the day. Blue light to be perceived as light at all requires an oblique angle of vision, an averting of the eyes from the glare of our cultural foreground toward the silent periphery that is our future. Blue-last and first color visible at twilight (p. 77).

The feminine is the chief recurrent topic of the essays in The Poethical Wager. For Retallack the feminine is a mode of complexity-not so much a gender category as a form of life that a man might inhabit if willing to chance it, as when John Cage says: "'I am willing to give myself over to the weather. I like to think of my music as weather, as part of the weather'" (p. 198). The feminine in this respect is different from the expression of suppressed experiences that constitutes more traditional feminist writing (p. 116). In ":RE:THINKING:LITERARY:FEMINISM," Retallack examines the work of Nicole Brossard, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Carla Harryman, three contemporary writers committed to the invention of new forms of language as an alternative to the picturing of states of affairs organized around an "I" or a "We." These writers are closer to Finnegans Wake than to feminist thinkers like Judith Butler, Alicia Ostriker or to poets like Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton. In addition, Retallack frequently invokes someone you will not have read before, Genre Tallique, author of Glances: An Unwritten Book, a Borgesian masterpiece of feminomasculine anarchism

Gender/genre is pure experiment. Every boundary construction is a gamble, a dare, a hypothetical with consequences. That most have chosen to repeat old experiments does not logically negate the possibility of new forms…. There are energetic experimental traditions in our culture. It's in their direction our lucky glance falls. Glance, yes. I refuse the word "gaze." The gaze turns self and other into stone. The glance is light in the gossamer breeze of chance, un coup de dés, inviting the unexpected (cited by Retallack, p. 132).

From Genre Tallique Joan Retallack borrows and elucidates her concept of the "experimental feminine," an aesthetic that cannot be contained within the agonistic M/F lines of so much of recent theory because these terms, masculine/feminine, are merely limit-concepts "for a very complex range of mixes and possibilities that wiggle, slip, slide, elide, combine, recombine, morph, mongrelize" (p. 99). One recalls the philosopher Cora Diamond's great essay, "Losing Your Concepts," with its argument that losing concepts like masculine/feminine opens the way for the formation of new possible worlds. Economically loss is not a deficit but a gain in freedom.

Just so, Retallack's "The Scarlet Aitch: Twenty-Six Notes on the Experimental Feminine," is a series of Wittgenstein-like "remarks" against conceptual purity and in favor of "lettristic play, which "operates illegally, strictly on the diagonal, the glancing, tangential, transgressing left-right regulations, right angles of history, institutional rights to dictate meaningful grammars. It streaks through official texts, illuminating subtexts and subliminal noises as letters swerve, collide, coagulate in the wound-the scar in scarlet-the scars of historical/etymological silences" (p. 106). Lettristic play links Hester Prynne's Scarlet A (adulteress swerving through time into angel) to the dropped aitch that situates poethics (or, as one might begin to prefer, poethicks) on the odd side of the street. (Recall the quintessentially lettristic moment in The Scarlet Letter when the narrator, the misbegotten customs inspector, having discovered the faded letter A, presses it to his breast: a gender swerve if there ever was one.) As Retallack happily observes, aitch is "A with an itch" (p. 106), the itch being that there is no is no pure h-sound but only an endless play from catch to cough to ugh! to fish to Henry-no time to list the whole phonemic inventory. The adulteration of sounds and letters, genres and genders, art and poetry, texts and concepts trumps purity in all of its versions of transparency and single-mindedness. Hence Genre Tallique: not so much an alter ego as a mind/body double.

Not surprisingly, Retallack devotes concerted attention to Gertrude Stein and especially to John Cage. "The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein, I & II" is a defense of Stein's "failed" detective story, "Blood on the Dining Room Floor," which contains a corpse but no detection because it has no story to tell. But Retallack's point is that Gertrude Stein's "fractal" sentences are more at home in opera than in rationative fiction, because opera is a genre open to simultaneities, interferences, and the production of variations that defeat forms structured by their targets. Stein perfected "open form," the insubordination of elements to any hierarchy, before any of her male contemporaries (Pound, the Objectivists, Charles Olson). Stein's "open form" can be traced back to William James, with his preference for a loose and anarchic way of thinking and speaking that does without universals. As Retallack observes, "open form" has become a well-worn term, but one can rejuvenate it by returning to Stein and renewing the anarchic through new paratactic experiments.

The idea is to appropriate Stein's gift of attention to the singular, trivial, oblivious, seemingly random and meaningless detail. Attention is the central ethical concept of Retallack's feminine aesthetic-an aesthetic she tries to capture with the phrase "complex realism," which like all realisms is made possible by a concentration on the differences embedded in indifferent, disposable materials. Attention is the main theme of the four essays on John Cage that conclude this volume. In Cage's and Retallack's aesthetics attention is not passive; it is constructive, a mode of assembling of what is happening into new kinds experience-something human beings are very good at doing, if only they would let themselves go, break their routines and leave their comfort zones. Attention cannot happen without change-to be attentive is to alter oneself (no one has to think during routines). This is the motive of John Cage's work, namely to produce experiences of complexity that cause people to change. The assumption here is of course utopian: it is that change is always a surplus, because loss is a modality of freedom. The complex point is that freedom is also a dimension of responsibility-in the end, it is as much an ethical as political concept. You don't walk away from your experiments; or your experiences; you try to understand and justify them practically by how you go on to think and live.

In Cage's work the main idea is not to build structures but rather to set processes in motion, such that what happens in the environment of these processes is to be experienced as internal and essential to the work or event as a whole. So ambient noise is, famously, to be tuned in rather than out. Cage's intention was explore various modes of non-intentional composition that could produce multilayered, unpredictable events in which many different things can happen at once, whether the material is visual, aural, corporeal, or linguistic (or, as was frequently the case, all four together). Retallack shows that the basic principle at work in Cage's compositions is essentially that of the "butterfly effect," in which large-scale formations develop from simple initial conditions. Chaos-theorists try to map these formations via mathematical equations. Cage was interested in the anarchy of what he set in motion. However, Retallack's chapter on "The Poethics of a Complex Realism" studies the internal kinship between Cage and one of the inventors of chaos theory, Edward Lorenz. What comes out in this chapter is Cage's incredible capacity to appropriate the intellectual world around him to his own aesthetic explorations-for example, in the use of the computer to score events of indeterminate complexity. Lorenz's work on modeling weather systems, Retallack says,

could also describe Cage's approach to composition in which initial conditions (e.g., sound sources, pitch, timbre, amplitude, duration) are fed into the variable slots of a random-number generator program that replicates the operations of chance in the I Ching (a program called ic, with a time values specific version called tic) and then asks the computer to determine how the score (which will initiate the performative music system) is to be notated. Because Cage's scores always incorporate significant elements of indeterminacy, each performance of his music, like each performance of the weather, has a built-in difference of initial conditions whose variations can produce major changes in the system that unfolds (p. 204).

Cage: "What can be done with the English language? Use it as material. Material of five kinds: letters, syllables, words, phrases, sentences. A text for a song can be a vocalise: just letters. Can be just syllables; just a string of phrases; sentences. Or combinations of letters and syllables (for example), letters and words, et cetera. There are 25 possible combinations" (Empty Words, p. 11). In other words: lettristic play, in which the text becomes both phonetically and visually a work or event of complexity, a turbulence of alphabetic noise that we can read by playing along with it, collaborators in an illicit freedom from the usual conditions of semantic compliance. The surprise is that the words one then experience are not empty at all but extremely rich in virtue of the complexity of their arrangement, especially if one is also a careful reader of Thoreau.
Just so, there is a moral to Joan Retallack's story about complex realism, it is that nothing is meaningless so long as we do not foreclose our capacities for attention.