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.
Posted by jane at February 4, 2009 07:39 AM | TrackBack