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Here are some questions I came up with relating some of
this week’s readings to Benjamin’s “Doctrine
of the Similar” (which I will be presenting on):
Susan Stewart writes of Hopkins: “The role of sound
here [in Hopkins’s 1885 sonnets] becomes foregrounded in
such a way as to obviate any distinction between the form and
theme of the poetry” (Close Listening 42) (also think of
Prynne’s discussion of Pope sound echoing sense). Is
this unification of form and theme similar to what Benjamin imagines
the “sensuous shape-giving” language of the “ancients” was
like?
Nick Piombino identifies “certain effects of indeterminacy
in writing, reading, and listening” as “aural ellipses” (Close
Listening 53). He also describes a coming toward comprehensibility” (54),
and I wonder if this can be compared to the “flashes” of “nonsensuous
similarity” that Benjamin discusses. For example,
compare the following two quotes from Piombo and Benjamin, respectively:
When reading or listening to the words of a poem with an
open form of attention, it does appear possible, at times, for
the reader to decipher subliminal levels of significance that
follow latent stream running apparently parallel to the explicit
content, or to sound out encoded message content by tracking
meanings primarily through the apprehension of patterns of rhythms
and sounds” (54)
The most recent graphology has taught us to recognize, in
handwriting, images or, more precisely, picture puzzles that
the unconscious of the writer conceals in his writing” (697).
Are the “subliminal levels of significance” identified
by Piombo analogous to the recognizable (or “similar”)
images/picture puzzles that Benjamin’s author unconsciously
conceals in her writing?
Finally, does Benjamin develop a relevant critique of language,
or is this little more than nostalgic mysticism? Also, do Prynne’s
myopically close readings of “The Star” and “The
Tiger” approach what Benjamin calls “magical reading”?
Here are the notes I’ll be using for my presentation, slightly revised from the notes I sent out last week. They may be of some use in reminding you what the Benjamin essay was about. "Doctrine of the Similar”:
Understanding the “similar” will allow us insight
into “occult knowledge” (or clairvoyance”).
3 key terms:
1. “mimetic faculty” (694) inherent
trait, we imitate things, nature, other people, etc. and also
to recognize similarities within nature itself, or what B. calls “natural
correspondences” in nature; B. wonders “What advantage
does the schooling in mimetic conduct bring to a human being?” (or,
what is the phylogenetic significance of mimetic conduct”)? While
this faculty still plays a dominant role in our lives (it had
a more dominant role in the lives of the “ancients”),
it is a largely “unconscious” role (e.g. tip of the
iceberg phenomenon) this faculty has grown increasingly “fragile,” and
B. writes, clearly the perceptual world of modern human beings
seems to contain far fewer of those magical correspondences than
did the ancients or even that of the primitive peoples” (695),
so B. wants to know whether this faculty is dying or simply transforming
itself (B. decides on the latter, as we will see, which has become
a linguistic system of “nonsensuous similarity”)
2. “sensuous shape-giving”: B mysteriously
writes, “We must assume in principle that processes in
the sky were imitable, both collectively and individually, by
people who lived in earlier times; indeed, that this imitability
contained instructions for mastering an already present similarity” (695);
the recognition of this similarity is transitory, fleeting, a “flashing
up”
3. “nonsensuous similarity”: (a relative
concept) “we no longer possess in our perception whatever
once made it possible to speak of a similarity which might exist
between a constellation of stars and a human” (696) constellations
as analogous to speech or text
How these three terms relate to language:
Language: onomatopoeia is recognized as a mimetic
function, but does all spoken language possess a mimetic function,
and, further, does script (the written word) have a mimetic function?;
Leonhard: “Every word indeed, the whole language is
onomatopoetic” (696); B. asserts that we must investigate
how words with the same signified come to have myriad signifiers
(e.g. cheese, queso, fromage, etc.); script, more so (perhaps)
than sound, helps clarify “the nature of nonsensuous similarity” (the
example of the Hebrew letter beth and how this represents the
relationship between spoken word and meaning, written word and
meaning, and spoken word and written word [696]); handwriting/script
(the signifier) is the “unconscious” representation
of “images” or “picture puzzles” that
were once sensuously similar to the signified they represented
but are now unsensuously so (somehow modern graphology teaches
us that), B writes, “Script has thus become, like [spoken]
language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous
correspondences” (697) this correspondance between
language and reality, this “mimetic faculty” of language
is referred to by B. as the “magical aspect of language” (697) important
to emphasize the ephemeral nature of our recognitions of similarity,
what B. calls the “flashing up” (because thy have
become obfuscated since the time of the ancients) of similarity
(in a sound, text, constellation, etc); our phylogenetic process
has brought us from a time in which we “read” the “stars,
entrails, and coincidences” as the similar, or as a source
of “clairvoyance,” to a time in which language (spoken)
and script now embody, in their nonsensuous similarity, the sensuous
similarity experienced by the ancients (the ancients received
flashes” of similarity from “natural” sources
that have now transmuted into linguistic sources for us, thus
the need for “magical reading”):
If, at the dawn of humanity, this reading from stars, entrails,
and coincidences was reading per se, and if it provided mediating
links to a newer kind of reading, as represented by runes, then
one might well assume that this mimetic gift, which was earlier
the basis for clairvoyance, very gradually found its way into
language and writing in the course of a development over thousands
of years, thus creating for itself in language and writing the
most perfect archive of nonsensuous similarity. (697)
Thus, in order to not go away from a reading “empty-handed,” one
must allow the similar” to “flash up fleetingly out
of the stream of things” (698).
Does B. develop a relevant critique of language, or is this little more than nostalgic mysticism? B. completely refutes Saussure’s claims about thearbitrary nature of language, and goes further than Jakobson when he assertsthe mimetic nature of language (he would not be content with a few phonemicuniversals), but what would Benjaminian linguistics look like? JULIETTE / KIM This is the first major "section" of
the first poem "And Sing We" from her debut book Under Flag (Kelsey
Street 1991). and "409" from the poem "Lamenta" in her latest
full length collection Commons (U. California 2002).
I'm also going to refer us later to the PENNsound recordings
from her SUNY Buffalo reading of "405."
from And Sing We
Must it ring so true To span even yawning distance What would the sea be, if we were near it
Voice It catches its underside and drags it back What sound do we make, “n”, “h”, “g” Speak and it is sound in time
Then follow wood then water, then stones and metals, slow to heat bbi-du-rruh-jut-dah askey leaning twisted
In the bowels and studies of interiors Seaweed stench
JULIA ....As I was walking home the other night, I had a conversation with my new downstairs neighbor, who as it happens just took her Ph.D. in folklore from Penn. I told her about the Tedlock we'd been reading and admitted that I didn't really have a firm grasp on what folklore studies was. I learned that she studies the "unofficial culture" of the former Yugoslavia, and as she was describing her research, I suddenly thought that maybe we need folklore studies in order to formulate the kind of ethnopoetics Jason was suggesting in class last week, the kind that can be a poetics of banal life in any culture, and I started wondering about Greg's point on the list that the differences between folklore and lit studies might begin with the imagination, and Sarah D.'s question about how to think about the Susan Howe reading tonight in the context of our class.
One of the things I love most about Susan Howe's work is the way her intertexts seem Olsonic in their scope yet exert a fine control over the visual field. Speaking of taxonomic impulses - often, as a reader, I feel there's a thin line between the ecstasy of locating and synthesizing intertext and the sheer terror of references, so as a purely subjective point I'll say I like being able literally to map things out in the particular way Howe invites us to. I started wondering to what extent, if any, a passage like this one from Midnight might be folkloric:
This is one of those moments in posting on this listserv when I suddenly think that I'm posing a question that's either totally irrelevant or totally obvious. But I guess because I'm interested in genre, I ask this question about folklore and Howe so that - even if the answer is a resounding no, her work is not folkloric or no, if you ask the question that way - I can get to another issue, which is how the disciplines or methodologies of folkloric and literary studies serve and don't serve us in an inquiry into the link between poetry and national, ethnic, and cultural identity. In her work on Emily Dickinson, Howe taught us that the stray mark is poetry, that when textual production gets tamed for aesthetic consumption this process isn't necessarily a matter of distorting the intent behind a text, and that the antinomian poetic impulse in the United States has a specific genealogy. If Charles Olson's project in The Maximus Poems was to create a geo-mythic, specifically American (if only by chance) landscape by following many of the same historian impulses Howe takes up, is it possible that Howe's work, in its mixed media, interdisciplinary commitments, opens up a space for reconsidering the status of the cultural artifact and its relation to the formation of culture?
ERIC SARAH D It was interesting to see how the machine
character of the voice inflected all
of the questions that we might have otherwise asked about
a human voice. For
example, a machine's accent - the meaning of a machine's
accent seems
fundamentally different than the meaning of a human's. ...I think that while the machine seems to suggest absolutely minimal inflection (it's a machine, so it can't read with feeling), the way that a machine simulates collectivity, specificity, sexuality, etc. seems like a really rich area for analysis.
Thomas ALSO: WHAT IS CLOSE READING? Music is called the most abstract of the arts because its
mimetic connection to reality is so weak, and yet is is precisely
this semantically "blank" quality of musical sounds
invites associative colonization on the part of imaginative listeners. {cf
Piombino: aural ellipsis}… Attali presents noise as a
disruption of dominant cultural discourses. This is an
interesting point for me. On the one hand, this idea, in
one form or another, underlies many modernist programs, at least
in music. But at what point does this strictly negative,
transgressive, resistant understanding of the function of modern
art become its own caricature? I've read enough Adorno
to be skeptical of "affirmative" artistic gestures,
however politically well-intended; but the notion that the most
radical thing we can do is add more "noise" to the
mix seems suspect. It could be argued that the effort to
disrupt the hegemony through noise has become itself hegemonic,
as the order of things feeds off communicative deformation and
has perhaps even made noise its lingua franca.
JEN
JANA
STEVE
MATT ... ::STEVE The loopiness (no derogation intended) of Andrews's argument
makes the essay itself a holding environment (in trademark
langpo
fashion). He makes a number of unsettling points; to start
with,
Andrews says "infatuation with the sound material -- its
pure
factuality as an end-in-itself -- is no better as an alternative.
Isn't 'mere sonority' just as likely to become fetishized
and
transfixed in space?" (77). Since he is attempting to establish
distinctly /poetic/ praxis, we can, I suppose, overlook
his dismissal
of the medium of pure sound.
Cage would say Andrews is guilty of fetishizing "the 'touch'
of
personal resonances".
To negatively define his interests on the other side of
this personal
axis, Andrews wants to "disrupt the cozy traces of personalization"
(74). Is Andrews defining the borders around a "just right" level
of
coziness, or (inclusive or) is he contradicting himself,
in line with
his championing of noise that "refuses any projective resolution
of
social contradiction" (85). His "do" list, after all, contains, "To
disrupt clarity" (74-5).
GREG ::JASON: ::JULIA For similar reasons,
this is why I like to write in response to American Idol,
where the
connection to the nation state is more explicit, plus the
show, as an
import from our old colonizer, has something to teach us
about
globalization.
...I'm trying to figure out what does Benjamin mean by "language" here: "An examplet that is appropriate because it is derived from the acoustic sphere is the kinship between song and the language of birds." (73). I do not think thatBenjamin is according human language capacity to birds here. What is being accorded to them and to humans here?…I think that Benjamin might allow us to relax and expand our ability to overhearand to let the world communicate / sing its names through our speakings. Meaning, more channels of music might open. What are we listening for? ... ADRIAN
And perhaps most noticeably, affect and emotional connection
seem to be the
strongest indicators of AI sustainability. What does that
say about the
pop-poet-prophet if transference of emotion trumps actual,
measurable issues of
sound (pitch, rhythm, timbre) in a singing competition?
In a not unrelated aside, I'm also working on an extended project about the black female blues singer in American literature and music.
I propose that the
black female blues singer is a national symbol/dispenser
of affective comfort
(think Marian Andersen on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
Nina Simone's
concert the day after Dr. King died, Alicia Keys playing
Donny Hathaway in that
9/11 Heroes concert). Also, I propose that the black female
blues singer
continues an oral history tradition that allows access to
a non-literate,
non-masculinist "his"tory (cf, for example, WEB DuBois on
the tactical
strategies of slave songs and gospel in _Souls of Black
Folk_). I don't want to
make too overt a connection, but I think the transfer of
affect might be
inseparable from performance and poetry. And I'm not sure
what to do with that.
ERIC Does "aural ellipticism" preserve
the weird, short-circuited moments of consciousness or is it
a step along the way to something larger? The way he talks about
it seems to suggest that there is a move toward transparency,
even if he keeps talking about it in terms of a holding pattern
or transitional space. Is something being transitioned to? I
sort of hope not. ::DOTTIE ...Like an Edward Hopper painting or an all-nite motel (complete with flickering neon lights), this voice of the American deadpan contains all of thespectacle of American culture within its reticence. (And I want to say that this reticence is Midwestern, but this may be my own Midwestern bias.) CAROLINE Which, like the instance above, raises the question of “reading
voice”,
that special timbre or phrasing that “speaks for” the
telling, (over?)voices it, even when the reading doesn’t
involve exaggerations of expression or theatrical emoting…
... acade, face aid, face odd, fack odd (cf G. Stewart) JEN ..., I wonder whether it's possible to think about
the poetry reading as
encompassing these archival, proleptic,
and performative registers at the same time.
Is Stewart's promise in the same theoretical register as Piombino's aural ellipses? And what does the promise of recording do to the form of the poetic reading? I was thinking, too, about Howe's reluctance to make the "unscripted" discussion public--a reluctance I'm somewhat sympathetic to--and was struck again by a comment Sarah made at the beginning of the semester of sound, bodies, and vulnerability. I wonder, to wrap up, whether the perfect memory of the recording device changes the way we think about vulnerability and speech.
::BRENDA |