February 04, 2009
followup to previous note on word clouds as material
I cite has posted a predictably thoughtful response; I admire Jodi's care in thinking these things immensely. The Seminar Three discussion of language and psychosis is a crucial one for poetry, though as readers will know, it is the issue of the point de capiton that we take as most suggestive (see note here).
It remains unclear in this case that referring the matter back to a redescription of Lacan's register of the symbolic resolves the matter. Indeed it is the case that the register includes "lies, disagreements, distortions, metaphors, etc," and allows Zizek's sense of language irrationally able to mean contradictory things at once — all of these effects (with the possible exception of "distortion," but not really, if one takes it in Lacan's sense re symptomatic language) still depend on denotation/connotation, rather than on all the other characteristics of language. They still depend on the signifier's capacity to stop sliding (or not) and align with its signified (or not) so as to denote+connote successfully (or not).
Which is to say, the necessary recognition of the differing possibilities of expressivist and constructivist language is neither answered nor neutralized here. Our thought experiment about music (see paragraph 2, below) stands. Moreover, it's worth noting that these characteristics are present and operative in all language, and only foregrounded in poetry as such (tautologically, one might say) — not just in "a formalist poetry," which simply names in the best case the category that attempts to isolate these effects.
That said, we are grateful to Jodi for thinking about these matters with her usual impressive care; are on the same side, as it were, regarding language's desire toward effectivity; and don't want to wrangle so much as continue to develop these ideas. The next post will concern very much related matters: poetic language and Franco Moretti's idea of "distant reading."
Good faith addendum: we don't mean to argue here for the great political possibilities of the word cloud, and in that sense are more or less on the same page as Jodi. Rather it seemed an occasion to reapproach the particulars of poetics, that much-appropriated and equally-debased category. The appropriate averral here would probably have been a simple repetition of Wittgenstein's now-familiar admonition, "‘Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." The doubt around Zizek's account is that it finally treats of symbolic efficiency within the terms of giving information, even if that information is allowed its ambiguity, mutability, elasticity and so forth.
February 03, 2009
notes on poetics and politics: five paragraph essay
Over at I cite, Jodi Dean offers a thoughtful post on Tag clouds and the decline of symbolic efficiency. She seems to mean word clouds, of the sort produced by Wordle. Not much need to summarize her point at length: it concerns the descending trajectory plotted by Zizek through which language is decreasingly able to fight the power, and these word clouds as exemplary of same. "The meaning of words is not at stake in tag clouds," she writes. "Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration."
We're sure this gets at something about word clouds, but not everything. Certainly not at what might be interesting and even communicative about them, or how one might think about them as possibilities rather than symptoms of decline. To encounter instantly the limits of Jodi's argument, imagine making the same claim — "Meaning is replaced by frequency, proximity, and duration" — about the notes in a piece of music. Language is not music, but neither it is qualitatively different; indeed, as Louis Zukofsky reminds us, some language approaches the limit of music to rather fine effect. And this brings us to what is most remarkable about Jodi's claim.
What is striking about the argument is not the small confusion regarding tags, a barely-relevant slip. Neither is it the potentially cranky kids-these-days aspect which periodically haunts Zizek. Rather, it is this: the claim depends, utterly and absolutely, on a rather narrow sense of "meaning," one on which the essay imagines we all agree without question.
The straitened sense of "meaning" is most evident from the position of poetry, poetry exactly. For Jodi's (and Zizek's) supposition is that meaning is merely a matter of denotation and perhaps connotation; that words don't bear anything else. Every poet knows this as mere error — that words communicate via a cloud of other mechanisms and avenues that get summarized (rather abruptly) under the heading of the materiality of the signifier. Even poets who don't cotton to such terminology make endless use of the material. And of course this has been true not merely of sound experiments and hermetic adventures, but the most politically charged poetries on record.
The implications of such a basic mistake bear some patient unfolding. For the moment, we'll note only that such a definition of meaning proposes what is basically an evidentiary account of language. Or, in the more common terms of the discussion, presents language as purely an expression of other material, rather than a material construction, generative of its own effects (including rhetorical and social effects). Language always includes both these characteristics, though poetry can be most sufficiently described as the form of language that most messes with the latter. One bears this in mind less as a definition of poetry than a description of what is parlously lacking in some considerations of the fate of the word.