»July 19, 2006
il faut se manifester
¶ Poems (like humans) do better when treated by poets as ends, not means — manifesting, not causing. The insistence that poems should be instruments toward some social end is limiting and damaging.
¶ However, critics might take poems as means — as part of social production; this is independent of the poet's making of the poem-as-end. These are fundamentally distinct conceptual matters.
¶ This fact and nothing else explains the diffident relations between poets and critics, though the fact often appears masked and in costume.
¶ The recognition of this categorical difference is shaped historically by the catastrophe of instrumental reason that defines Western modernity; said recognition and nothing else is what is meant by "the death of the author," though this fact too often appears masked for occasions.
¶ Though the categorical difference often appears adversarial, this conceals the actual adversarial relations.
¶ The poet's adversary (and we are not at all abashed to speak in such terms) is reification, spectacle — that is to say, dead manifestation.
¶ The critic's adversary is, in short, the advertiser (or politician): someone who, adopting the critic's position regarding social production, recuperates art-as-means toward the end of consolidating and advancing current conditions.