IF THEN IS TO BE CHANGE: WORKING BEYOND THE AESTHETIC
“Literature is here undergoing an exquisite and fundamental
crisis.”
--Stéphane
Mallarmé (201)
Mallarmé’s
“Crisis of Verse” essay has become the meat of many a French intellectual’s
career in philosophy or literature, and the latest of these is philosopher
Jacques Rancière. His early work on the poet showed a literary flair, and his
later work on the logic of “regimes” in art’s history makes pivotal use of the
concerns of “Crisis” and of creative works like the prose poem “Conflict.” Crisis
itself is one of the hinge concepts in that history. It also figures neatly in
our art’s history of poetics. Some form of “crisis,” literary or social or
philosophical, is often posited in poetics statements. Real social crisis can
be found in the background of these statements from Whitman’s to Pound’s to
Rich’s or Baraka’s and on to Silliman’s or Spahr’s or Yepez’. The ’08 economic
crisis is very much with us here today through what it has revealed about our
social structure, certainly, and right there in Brian’s call for poetics
considerations that take it into account. All through this era, from Whitman to
now, though, the positioning of art in relation to the social and political has
put some sense of crisis into poetry itself.
Rancière
offers us a schema that helps begin effective considerations of this double
crisis. He has proposed that we recognize a series of “regimes” ruling the
standard sense of the arts. His logic reveals a dialectical sort of progression
through crises into fresh forms and concepts of art-making and “art-taking”—the
way that art gets appreciated or used in society. Mallarmé’s terms
“fundamental” and “exquisite” actually say a lot about the kind of crisis that
poetry once again faces as the arts move to the brink of change. The crisis
that Mallarmé felt fits into Rancière’s schema of regimes, and through that
concept of art’s history it makes sense in a way that speaks clearly to our
crises today. It’s not too hard to see that one aesthetic framework basically extends
from 1848 to 2008 and regulates, through what responses are seen as possible,
what art can do “in the world.”
Rancière’s
schema clearly rises from European art history’s shifting relations to tribal,
aristocratic, and bourgeois social structures. He proposes a series of
“regimes,” purposely choosing a political term, that regulate and normalize how
we think of the production of art and the functions of art produced in our
societies. These show some applicability to other societies as well, though
they probably got conceived with France in mind. It appears that Rancière began
from the Aesthetic Regime, looking at how we operate now and have for some
while. What he says came before this
appears to be derived from our standard notions of a noble tribal society and
our sense of the aristocratic world that modern aesthetics revolted against to
establish itself during the bourgeois revolutions. Even Rancière’s system is a
kind of looking back at crises to explain the evolutions that he has proposed.
He names an Ethical Regime, a Representative Regime, and our Aesthetic Regime
in describing what art has worked its way through in the last few hundred
years.
The Ethical
Regime was that regimen of producing and seeing art’s productions as iconic
presentations of “the powers that be” in a society. These iconic images are
there to educate the citizenry about what is of value: the heroes and gods of
the good. This evolved into the Representative Regime of dramatic stories in art
works that exhorted citizens to “seek the truth” played out from that iconic
basis past its challenges and conflicts in being lived out. Both of these
regimes were inherently conservative in the sense of propping up the
political/social regimes that couched them. The arts would seem mostly to have
served hierarchy and keeping things (and people) in their places.
What came
after them was a sort of “revolution” in the sense of breaking with this
“global analogy” (as Rancière calls it) between social order and artistic rule.
despite this shift, the Aesthetic Regime has had its own version of
co-operation and co-optation within the socio-political regimen of the
bourgeois world. That is our crisis, and the one that Mallarmé felt from an
artist’s perspective if not also from that of a citizen. The Aesthetic Regime
rose along with the bourgeois revolutions in France and elsewhere (see
Eagleton). It allowed the emphasis on the individual that was focal for bourgeois
values. The artist was moved to the fore, along with the perceptions and
feelings that characterize what we now think of as “artistic vision.” In this
new regime, the regimen called for paying attention to what this artist had
seen and found a way to say.
Rancière’s
basic concept behind the schema of regimes is “the distribution of the
sensible.” This idea focuses on how a regime of art or politics is all about
its partitions among people as to who can see or say what’s going on. In the
Aesthetic Regime, the myth is that “anyone” can be the artist and the audience
must be seen as also including “anyone.” This is its democracy, but it must be
constantly re-posited and there are ways that the focus on “artistic vision”
fights against its openness. The double bind lies in how the Aesthetic Regime
is based in an autonomy and open rule for art while this is counter-balanced
with the play of forms of thought in the art world that may offer something new
to the social world. There is a “backfire” mechanism firmly in place in this
structure. The “separating out” that gives autonomy to art was created in the
bourgeois “turning to” the individual as the locus of the realization (in both
senses) of truths. We are expected to learn for ourselves, but we look to the
visionaries for models. The art product and the artist herself are appreciated
through a model of exemplarity taken originally from the Representative Regime and
put to fresh aesthetic uses in sublimation of the person through Art and its
work.
Mallarmé’s
crisis was in seeing himself as a poet stuck between all of these forces so
that he had to declare the need to disappear from the work at the same time
that he tried to make the work take on the demonstration of truths rising from
its form and the exercise of its content. Ranciére has described that exercise
as a kind of theatre where the artist and reader are engaged in and by a
“shared performance” involving the “tracing of signs and the interpretation of
those signs” that gives a materiality to the idea or feeling-perception in the
work (Mute 140-142). This is where the new regime has its constitutive
focus, in the feeling-perceptions (aisthesis)
of the artist and the audience mutually making meaning through seeing what
there is to read in things and saying how it feels to see it. This links with
the old poiesis (forming) of the
iconic Ethical Regime and the mimesis
(imitation) of the dramatic Representative Regime and moves art away from its ancient
rigors toward new forms of presentation. The “normative principle of inclusion”
in the arts had rested upon “partitions between the representable and the
unrepresentable” and “the distribution of resemblances according to principles
of verisimilitude, appropriateness, or correspondence.” These formed “the
distribution of the sensible,” in the sense of partitioning out what can be
seen and said or done by any particular one, for the old regime. The Aesthetic
Regime unfolded from these norms toward an inclusivity that made the partitions
a little softer, though in giving the artist the power of vision through
linkage with big-A Art, it opened a whole new can of worms. “In the aesthetic
regime, artistic phenomena are identified by their adherence to a specific
regime of the sensible, which is extricated from its ordinary connections and
is inhabited by a heterogenous power.” Rancière identifies this as “the power
of a thought that has become foreign to itself: a product identical with
something not produced, knowledge transformed into non-knowledge, …, the
intention of the unintentional, etc.” (Politics of Aesthetics 16-19).
Mallarmé’s
prose poem on a confrontation between a poet on vacation and a work-gang sent
to the same spot to begin a new railway, “Conflict,” shows an example of this:
the poet is not satisfied until he has worked through all of his feelings about
these guys, and finally he can read them into a vision of their place in a
shared world they may not even see. Though they made him reflect on his own
work as work, the workers are tucked back in to a proper place in the vast
ceremony of life’s energies as the “work-stoppage” of their after-labor drunkenness
is read into a sublimating notion (Mallarmé 46). This is as far as Mallarmé
could come, to a poet “racked with contradictory states” (44) wishing he could
offer something “useful … in the general process of exchange” (45) and coming
up with this displacing sublimation. His crisis is still ours as we strive to
demonstrate truths and open up forms; the distances between writing and
reading, words and things, the way it is and the way it oughta be, all link
poet and audience in an impossible quest. Our much belovéd Bernadette Mayer
seems to mock this in her 1983 piece “The Obfuscated Poem”:
Poetry’s
not a business; it was not her business or his to remake the world.
Holding to a course with the
forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine
what is unclear to be unscrambled later from its perception of perfection by
that continuing. Which is to change the world. As it does, which is why,
nothing individually lost, there’s a difference to be told. (167)
She has out-Mallarméed Stéphane here, gathering phrases he
might have used that we all have heard about poems and poesy, combining them
consciously as he would to make syntax and interpretation a living part of
understanding, and including the reader‘s role in this theatrical staging of
ideas in words. Mayer’s playfulness reminds us that a space has to be opened
between all that sublimity and our work-a-day world as poets. Rancière, in his
discussions of Mallarmé, points out the “poetic space” where readers and
writers apply their “ingenuity to a blank page, where a spectator ‘juxtaposes’
his inner theater with the spectacle on stage” and “the poem finds its place” in
“the scene of its shared performance” (Mute 140). This is what the
Aesthetic Regime has opened up, and it holds open possibilities for engagement
that have only slowly been unfolded by us. We who may want to de-sublimate the poem have this space,
this “stage” of “shared performance,” for staging our work to make a world of
difference.
We work where
“things of art are things of thought” and the “existence of poetry is tied to this
identity of contraries”: the immanence of thought in non-thought, and the “contradictory
mode of a speech that speaks and keeps silent at the same time, that both knows
and does not know what it is saying,” that seems to require bridges for “this
gap between speech and what it says” (Aesthetic Unconscious 27-33). We work with the sensuous space where writer
and audience constitute the sensible out of these contradictions and gaps. We
have been moved to embrace them in our labor and have become very subtle about
it. We celebrate writing that embraces “that continuing” and claims “a
difference to be told.”
At then end
of March in L.A., the AWP celebrated two fine poets who reach into our social
consciousness: Rae Armantrout and Claudia Rankine. The front jacket flap blurb
on my friend Rae’s 2011 book, Money Shot, claim that it presents
“forensic” investigation of what’s “seen, what is hidden, and how … we know,”
as well as “new ways to organize information” and “wonderfully stringent
exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in
capitalism”—all things we would be proud of being able to produce, I’d guess.
Even with this Rancièrean investigation and post-Marxian explorative exposure, Money
Shot still focuses on insight and its expression. We feel the impulse to
“get it,” to absorb ourselves in the wisdom even if it gets worded a little
snarkily. The poet is providing us with a vision even if it is in the form of
critical thinking or an attempt to incite that in us by phrasings and
juxtapositions. This is one of the challenges of our age, the late Aesthetic Regime,
that goes back through Mallarmé’s “Crisis” and his drive to “eliminate the
author” (208). He also, more fervently, wanted to eliminate chance—that sense
of hazard in the encounter of the poet-personality, the language gap, and the
meaningfulness of experience. His poem wanted to almost erase itself as it
enacted the staging of its own gestation and its search for understanding. Money
Shot also has among its back cover blurbs this grand claim relating to our
seminar topic: “Pulitzer Prize-winning poet searches for new ways to understand
the world in the wake of the Great Recession.” It nearly belongs in the book as
a mock headline of our times. The Aesthetic Regime encourages us to search “for
new ways to understand the world” and promises the possibility of change
through our understanding, especially if it comes in the form of new forms for
understanding. Poems like “This Is” and “Money Talks” (72-73) make good on the
promise of “meta-epigrammatic attentiveness” and “wry empathies” in Rachel Blau
DuPlessis’ cover blurb, but the book’s opening salvo (“Everything will be made
new” 1) doesn’t necessarily come true as insight through epiphany still seems
to shape the poems.
Claudia
Rankine’s Citizen risks a further dimension in its composition. She uses
photographic “images” interspersed with her text in what seems at first a
collaborative venture with the reader. However, seeing her read from this book
two times in a row with the same explanations of how the images were selected
to illustrate ideas or feelings in the text left me aware of a gap again here
between writerly and readerly perception of this book. We were told that the
photo on the second page of the text was fought for, and paid highly for, to
accompany the narrative about not being seen with the sign for a “Jim Crow Rd”
that calls up the distribution of the sensible in the “separate but equal”
concept. Most other images in the book fit, and were selected as illustrations,
in similar ways. This is not an integration with the reader in meaning-making
but a positioning of the reader’s responsibility to “get it.” The book falls
back upon “feelings” as the arena of contention (152-153 & 61). It hovers
at the edge of looking at our usual answers and finding the questions hidden by
them, as Jimmy Baldwin (I seem to recall) called upon us to do. If its urge is,
as one cover blurb says, “to instruct us in the depth and variety of our
participation in a narrative of race that we recount and reinstate, even when
we speak as though it weren’t there,” then finding those questions in us is the
next step. Otherwise, the book merely re-frames “answers,” and we of any color
can pick them up and show them off as ours. The Aesthetic Regime leaves itself
open to this dead-end, where we adoptingly bow to the wisdom and insight or
equally dismiss it as “just what poets do.”
Some poets are now doing
differently or even turning sharply against the aesthetical approach. Heriberto
Yepez sternly warns us about the policing in the aesthetic approach. His
language might even be borrowed from Rancière as he writes: “Art is a context
in which the concept of police circulates among its participants.” The concept
of “la police” is central to Rancière’s recognition of how standard partitions
of the sensible are kept going among us by their quiet imposition as
assumptions, and how true “politics” or political action is an assertion of
dissent from any one of those. He writes about political action or its critical
thinking as “dissensus” presented in what he calls a “montage of proofs:
‘logical’ arguments that are at the same time a way of reshaping the
relationship between speech and its account”
of what is wrong (Disagreement 40). These logical proofs take
syllogistic form and require the positing of equality as the major premise wronged
in a minor premise that describes the wrong-doing. For example: if all are
equal but some women are being paid less for the same work, then we must either
expose the myth of equality or enact a change to align the situation with its
major truth. For artworks to do that, they must show the old account and open a
new one. It is our accounting of the world that polices it. As Heriberto
writes: “Every element of art polices the others,” and “Police is the ruling
concept of art.” To assert that artworks “are part of the pacification
apparatus” where “you are supposed to be the detective who finds additional
meanings in art and never finds the police and the crime” is almost funny, but
it leads him to an abrupt conclusion about art:
Art will not change. Art will not
change art. Art will not change the world. The world needs to destroy art. The
transformation of the world will involve the destruction of every form of art.
Art’s self-destruction is not enough.
This is the opposite of where Rancière stops, holding onto a
faith in the aesthetic to provide transformative insight. When Yepez hears
Olson’s “What does not change / is the will to change,” he hears it as speaking
the limit that the Aesthetic Regime will not surpass. It will not let go of “high-culture
status and functions” nor the “respectability” of “dialogue” that “gives time
for the killing machinery to continue.” Its function, Yepez says, “is to
sabotage individual discontent and prevent violent collective explosions” just
as the management of finance tries to do with the other crises. These
hyperbolic statements fit the schema that Rancière has shown us, but one more
element is evolving from it that could move us beyond this aesthetic impasse.
The
critical thinking that poets like Armantrout or Rankine are famous for
provoking, or at least relaying, is now asking for the space it properly needs
in the account of art’s work. Armantrout’s attentiveness and wit spark outside
angles on what we’re used to seeing and hearing and how it composes a world and
even a policing. Rankine gives us the interplay between text and image in our
minds to shape the outside angle. It is this angle that must be kept from
collapsing into mere learning for us readers. Art has built up from poiesis to integrate mimesis and aisthesis.
So far, that fails to take it out of the hands of its deniers. It may effect
learning for some, but many can quickly shove it aside or first enjoy it in
dialogue and then set it aside. This liberal aesthetic effect is perfectly
packageable. In it, nothing changes, especially not the “will to change” when
art’s autonomy protects both itself and the world from effectuation of art’s
thought. The evolution of a fourth element has begun to challenge that, though.
That element is the critical thinking or questioning (noesis) that doubles our perspective.
If we open
art to the sort of double negative that Molière had so much fun with in The
Bourgeois Gentleman, then it may find a way to keep the “shared
performance” open and critical. This may allow “dissensus” a fresh opening, and
help stage critical interventions through aisthesis, mimesis, and poiesis. To add noesis would change Rancière’s triad
ruled by aesthetic feeling-perceptions into a Greimasian Square. It would form
a structure of doubled oppositions between the objective and subjective
aspects, between the conservative and progressive elements, and between the
critical and the creative. When the bourgeois gentleman in Molière wants to
understand the partition between poetry and prose, the tutor he has hired with
his nouvelles richesses teaches him
that poetry is not prose and prose is all that is not poetry. The serious laugh
in that comes from the way that we account for things similarly all the time.
The double negative of poetry being “not prose” and not “not poetry” is funny,
but it may also show us the serious structure of art’s own partitions. Rancière
mentions some contemporary art films that bring critical questioning alive in
“shared performance” by focusing audience attention on partitions at different
levels (Dissensus 149-151). He also asserts that such art uses signification
in “a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a
sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which
resists signification” in order to move minds (Politics of Aesthetics
59). My nominee for an outstanding and provocative exemplar of this doubling is
Sun Ra. His is not great poetry on the page, but his “act” is an intellectual
doubling that escapes aesthetic measure because it can’t be pinned down. There
are elements of his approach in the works of many of our contemporaries,
perhaps because he simply sprinkled the world around him with his magic. When
taunted on the streets about his appearance, he explained himself as “a myth
not a person,” and he happily taught kids that they could see themselves this
way too.
Ra
transformed himself out of Alabama poverty into the embodiment of a myth quite
simply, by keeping the double negatives flowing even in blatant assertions of
simple truths that “couldn’t possibly” be true. His times were full of the new
science and science fiction of space travel. He simply “realized” that he was
from Saturn, which he couldn’t be; right? Herman Blount took the legal name “le
Sony’r Ra” and let himself be known as Sun Ra in an effort to blend Egyptian,
pan-African, and outer space elements. He took to dressing like this:
(Ra, Space).
(Ra, Space).
There were others using Space Age imagery or terms to fit
their art into the times back then, but Ra built a huge “myth-science” offering
a framework for his music and writings and stage performances. He gave us a
chance to take him as a spaceman delivering messages of progress to Earthlings,
as a social critic, and as a broadly engaged musician delivering everything
from standard tunes to free-form sounds some might call “noise.” There is no
way to nail him down at any one point except perhaps if you choose to dismiss
him as “crazy,” but that kind of partitioning is exactly what all these aspects
of his art are “talking about.” No matter which corner of the square you enter
from, poetic or mimetic or aesthetic or the critical questioning of the noetic,
you suddenly have more than just a little art appreciation can handle. Ra
breaks up the policing of art by giving aisthesis
over to support noesis. What he
has formed (poiesis) is iconic and
clearly mythical, what he has imitated (mimesis)
is stories that have been told amongst us of gods and of slaves, what he brings
across to us in terms of feelings and the sensual (aisthesis) we can “relate to,” and what he critiques (noesis) is our way of handling all of
this and our urges to solidify him between partitions. He made sure to
hyper-visible, contrarian, and fun.
The humor
in Ra’s work comes from the way he is “black” and “not black” and not “not
black,” all while he is “playing music” and not playing “music” and yet not
“not playing music,” and while he is being a “serious artist” and not a
“serious” artist and not “not serious” entirely. We can join him in this
unsettling dance with a little noesis
added to our works in ways that double, and refuse to sort out, our
“readability” in terms of “political signification” combined with “that which
resists signification” in any simple terms. We can keep thought dancing between
assigned positions, and not let it sit down in any one place too long. Ra’s
praxis offers a way to hold both sides of literary effort in one set of
gestures and thoughts. Rancière has observed that the “literature” concept born
around 1800 has two contesting relations to the embodiments of meaning in our
world: “On the one hand, literature reads signs written on bodies; on the
other, it loosens bodies from the meanings people want them to take on” (Politics
of Literature 44). These are the impulses we combine in our poetic writing.
In fact, Rancière asserts that literature has become “a powerful machine … for
the re-poeticization of life,” reading and de-mystifying it both (29). Ra’s
practice goes further by intensifying these tendencies and putting them into our hands. He reads by loosening things up
for our reading, and he makes it possible for us to loosen socially imposed
meaning by reading in a “Yeah, but this too” kind of way. “Appearance and
reality are not opposed,” writes Rancière in his explication of “The Method of
Equality.” Together they may serve to construct “a new sensible world in the
given one” and show “the knot that ties equality to inequality” in a way that
can “enforce the presupposition of equality tied up with the presupposition of
inequality and increase its power” (280). Ra works such a doubling by “enacting
the disjunctive junction of story and argument, legitimization and
delegitimization, equality and inequality” in the war of stories over
boundaries and divisions in this life (281). Ra’s truth is more than true
because it makes us chuckle: “What is this—some kind of joke?”
This doubling is part of “the self-defense
of the surround” that Harney and Moten call for in The Undercommons (17),
and part of that book’s important “reversion of terms against the common sense
of things that we are used to” (Marshall, “The Under-Standing”). That is
Rancière’s sort of work, redistributing the “sensible,” but here it moves
beyond the far edge of the aesthetic. It becomes a key part of questioning the
policing that we all actuate, and of breaking open the “exquisite and fundamental” question of who the police really are:
(Marshall, Every).
WORKS CITED
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Johnson. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap/Harvard UP, 2007. Original
1897.
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