infinity
The conversation/debate with Thomas over in the comments on Dagzine continues to take unexpected turns. (Thomas is a marvelous interlocutor, by the way. The conversation has kept me on my toes and helped me refine some of my own thinking about Wittgenstein and poetics -- both separately and as they may or may not relate to one another). Recently I proposed the following summary and rewrite of Wittgenstein's picture theory of language.
- A proposition’s articulateness amounts to its being picture of a possible state of affairs in the world; and it shows but cannot say the logical/pictorial form that it must have in common with reality in order to represent it. That propositions have logical/pictorial form means that the elements of the propositional picture stand in the same determinant relation to one another as the elements of the state of affairs. (Because a mere set of names isn’t determinate, it lacks logical/pictorial form and is thus inarticulate).
- A poem’s articulateness amounts to its being a projection of the silent truth of (possible) impasses and injunctions within historical-political world; and it shows but cannot say the poetic-projective form that it must have in common with the truth in order to project it. That poems have poetic-projective form means that the associative play (e.g., metaphor, metonym, word-play, free unconscious association, etc) among elements of the poetic projection enacts the evolution of the social-political-historical situations and injunctions from which they are projected. (Because a mere set of associative elements doesn’t enact the evolution of any possible situation or injunction, it lacks poetic-projective form and is thus inarticulate).
Thomas made quite a few suggestions for improvement then added, as if channelling Wittgenstein himself, that he couldn't make sense of my reference to "silent truth". And why didn't "emotion" suffice?
"It just goes a lot 'deeper' than that for me," I anwered, "and [poetry] is as close to something spiritual as I generally get. Poetry (and art and music, etc.) open onto a kind of infinity for me, and maybe 'truth' isn't the best word, but it feels right to me and I could only substitute it with something else that (possibly) designates an infinity, such as 'the real'."
Thomas chastised me for what he perceived as a careless venture into metaphysics, pointing out that "an experience that is always geared to the horizon is, I’m afraid, totalitarian. Which has always been the problem with 'the sublime': it emphasises the total meaning over the sense of detail."
A few years ago I would have agreed (though I wouldn't been able to state it so succintly and effectively), and it was the shock of the accusation that I'd made a totalizing/totalitarian gesture that forced me to admit that the degree to which my thinking has changed over the past several years. It feels strange to admit to this to myself. Totalizing gestures, the danger of metaphysical notions like infinity . . . these were pivitol elements of my so-called intellectual life. I'm not who I used to be.
What's happened during that time? I haven't been in school. I've worked a corporate job. I've read less philosophy and more poetry. I've started writing poetry. I've lived in San Francisco. I've become more politically aware and active, encountered more radical politics, taken part in peace rallies, direct actions, etc. I've become less cynical, more frightened for the future, yet more optimistic than I've ever been. Deleuze and Hegel and Spinoza have all started to make much more sense. I've started reading Zizek and Lacan, from afar, has started making sense.
At least those are some of the biggies that, somehow, feel congruent with the shift in thinking.
At any rate, not to make a long and rambling entry longer, but I realized that I wanted to defend my use of infinity. I'm not sure that I did a very good job, but this is what I came up with:
I’d like to start with the notion of a totalizing gesture. I usually think of these as gestures which attempt to encompass the world as a whole, the kind which are likely to produce that “mystical feeling”. Strange as it may sound, this isn’t what I had in mind when I hastily defined poetry as a projection of something infinite. What I meant was something more like limitless, endless, or even infinitely divisible. Not a limited whole, but rather something unlimited and to which the concept of “whole” couldn’t possibly apply. You spoke of “an experience that is always geared to the horizon” but that notion of infinity presupposes a horizon in the first place, and then, yes, I’d agree, that’s probably totalitarian. I’m not talking about the “he’s got the whole world in his hands” kind of infinity (or the Hegelian “he’s got the whole of history in his head” kind of infinity), but infinities along the lines of the following: The “extensional” infinity of the landscape, say, in a painting of a landscape, it’s “going on forever” beyond the frame. The “intensional” infinity of the city (or the cityscape), its division into worlds within worlds. The infinity of the loss of loved one who has passed away. The infinity of relief that accompanies forgiveness. The infinity of an institution, its endless proliferation of regulations and laws (similar to the infinite divisibility of the city). The infinite novelty of something experienced for the first time. There’s a sense in which all of these are merely metaphors, or in which they’re only “potentially infinite”, or in which they merely exceed our ability to grasp them. “ No matter how long I live, no matter how deeply I grieve, I will never cease to grieve.” “I can’t conceive of an end to this landscape – as soon as I think of it ending in an ocean, I think of another landscape beyond it, and I could continue thinking in this way for the rest of my life.” “Nothing could have prepared me for what an earthquake feels like.” But I want to say that, in ordinary language, that’s sometimes precisely what “infinite” means. |
I imagine Thomas will take issue with some or all of this. And I hope he does -- it's been a great conversation and I'd hate for it to end now. But I wanted to post this part because, well . . . six or seven years ago, a philosophy professor of mine remarked that we've got find non-totalizing ways of thinking infinity -- or else risk not thinking at all. She didn't believe it was possible to do so until she read Deleuze -- and then thinking felt really alive again. Though Deleuze is only part of the picture for me, I think that, after all these years, I'm starting to see her point . . .
5 Comments:
Fabulous & corrective for me! Thanks so much,
Laura
Thank you, Laura!
Thanks for the kind words, Jay. Here's the response I posted over at Dagine to your last post. I'll get back to the discussion soon.
Tony Tost once posted a nice, terse aphorism on his blog that ran (if I recall)
The sentence converts grief into language.
I think I'm saying that we're consigned to horizonal experience, there is always already a horizon . . . and an ecstacy . . . a being-between-the-interior-and-the-horizon (I think I get that more or less from Heidegger).
I want to introduce the notion of "definity", a bringing-to-the-end. This happens in language.
The sentence (the strophe or the remark) defines grief.
This cannot, of course, happen in the moment of loss, which is infinite in the sense you propose AND intractable to poetry (if I'm right). And ordinary language does indeed operate on the basis of these show-stopping infinities.
When I speak of "definition" I mean this not as we encounter it in dictionaries, but in musculatures, i.e., embodiments. Bodies are finite.
The totalizing gesture is not, you are right to correct me, geared to the horizon but BEYOND the horizon. I'm not sure that we can negate the horizon, not by poetic or other means, but there is the (totalitarian) attempt to make people "feel" that they can (even must), as it were, clear a space ABSOLUTELY.
Poetry, by contrast, affords us greater precision in our emotional apparatus.
Poetry does not bring grief to an end, but it does indicate the horizon of our grief, the hope that we can ALSO do something other than grieve.
Flipping through The Sacred Wood, I found this at the end of the essay on Dante.
"The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he _sees_, and the absorption into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite--that is not even a test of his success--but to set something down. . ."
When Eliot talks here about "seeing" and later about "perception", I think he means "imagining" and "imagination", and I think he means what a Tractarian poetics (if not Wittgenstein himself) would mean by "making ourselves pictures of the facts."
You mention Deleuze. In _A Thousand Plateaus_ we get the lovely observation that there is no difference between what a book is about and how it is made. Ditto for poems, strophes and, a fortiori pictures (images imagined.) How are pictures made? Out of what?
The phrase "of the facts", we have been saying, indicates a scientific orientation, just as "of the act" would move us into politics: "of the thought", philosophy; "of the feeling", poetry.
The strophe is the definition (in the qualified sense above) of the feeling, the poet having "set it down" in words.
It is because the reader's body and the body of the poem are finitudes that we must be very careful with the gesture that indicates what lies beyond the horizon (your "truth"?). The "test" of poetry must lie on this side of that horizon, this side of the "paradoxical limit of its contemplation" (a phrase which no doubt goes to underscore the shared "modernism" of Eliot's _Sacred Wood_ and Wittgenstein's _Tractatus_: "the aim of the book is to set a limit to thought.")
If Wittgenstein's thesis is that we can never address the world as a whole but we can address bounded portions of the world, then it may be valid to say that there are an infinite number of bounded portions of the world. This resembles most your description of the cityscape and the "intensional". Nevertheless, each statement is about the world is its own limit. Therefore I disagree with your assessment of the landscape painting and the landscape that continues beyond the frame. The bounded landscape is all that is there to be considered.
The boundless--all that is out of bounds--is the poet's terrain. And when I say that we have moved beyond form, this is what I am getting at. Form is formless. It is that which is not part of the piece but outside the piece. It conforms to each fragment. Clothes do not the body shape.
loving all this. let's continue.
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