tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post4268743076485498631..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: It Is Understood By This Time that Everything Is the Same Except Composition and Time: Joan Retallack’s The Poethical WagerCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-51631713451399416682008-05-07T17:30:00.000-04:002008-05-07T17:30:00.000-04:00Another great post EJ. A couple of things strike m...Another great post EJ. A couple of things strike me: you can take them are refinements, quibbles, or, better yet, interactions. And also recapitulations, rewordings, not because your words are lacking, but because I want to make them mine.<BR/><BR/>So: the emphasis on 'seeing' in the Stein quote, Calvino's call for "a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego," and, from a different post, Jeffrey's assertion that <I> it is no use doing cold history any more, one in which a disembodied "I" surveys the evidence from a dispassionate (lacking in time and place) viewpoint and renders judgment</I> all remind me of some recent reading. <BR/><BR/>Ralph Acampora's <I>Corporeal Compassion,</I> a short and very vital phenomenological take on interspecies ethics, argues repeatedly that the Cartesian subject/object separation is a kind of "psychological malady or hyperintellectual pretense" (5). Thus he does not need to argue for his phenomenology. It's anti-phenomenology that needs justification: "it is the movement toward dissociation and nonaffiliation that needs to be justified against a background of relatedness and interconnectivity" (5--see also 94). Dissociation and nonaffiliation are also a simplistic understanding of how creatures have come to be. The ongoing evolutionary process does not create us as discrete blocks of creatures--contra the Hexaemeron--but rather as interreliant: he cites Neil Evernden, "our [anthropocentrist] assumptions of separateness are unacceptably simplistic...we might more closely approximate the facts of [living] existence by regarding ourselves less as [homo-hypostatized] objects than as sets of [transpecific] relationships" (45) He also cites Kuang-Ming Wu, "we ourselves are communal first, before being individuated into isolate units" (79). And thus "cultivating a bodiment ethos of interanimality is not a matter of mentally working one's way into other selves or worlds by quasi-telepathic imagination, but is rather about becoming sensitive to an already constituted 'inter-zone' of somaesthetic conviviality" (84). We do not present each other to each other; we are already present, in a space that constitutes us and that we constitute: "What we and the great majority of other animals are to each other is not so much citizens-of-the-world as fellow- inhabitants-of-the-earth. The ones that we encounter in habitual proximity are our neighbors, literally near-dwellers" (87). From these arguments, Acampora argues for a concept of "symphysis": physis to stress bodiment, bodiment to argue against the notion of being <I>in</I> the body, and sym to counteract the workings of "empathy": Acampora writes, "Empathy is a force that builds bridges of identification across separation, whereas symphysis is a state or condition of merging through commonality...empathy establishes atomic or molecular connections as external relations, but internally relational symphysis has no atoms to begin with" (78). <BR/><BR/>What does this have to do with Stein and Calvino and, to a much lesser extent, Cohen? Simply put, that Stein's "seeing" must be understood as a bodied action, that Calvino's hope for a work that shatters the loneliness of the self attempts to break free of a loneliness that is actually self-deception (and here, we should understand this in the sense of a self-<I>producing</I> deception), and that Cohen's call for "warm" history is a call for something that, at least in some sense, has always been happening. Disassociation requires vigorous effort; loneliness must be guarded against symphysis; history, no more nor less than anything else, can only pretend to be cold. Judgment is always already engagement.<BR/><BR/>And our engagement should not imagine that we are putting anything to rest. If we do it right, we stir it up. To use Caputo's words, we "provoke." Now, Caputo writes, <I>We might say that a poetics is a discourse with a heart, supplying the heart of the heartless world.</I> I prefer <I>pathos</I> but, given my druthers, I'd choose <I>joy</I> as what drives my stirring up. "Heart" evidences a bias towards a central font of feeling, and "pathos" towards the notion that something sad underlies all authentic emotion. To return to an earlier conversation, it's likely not possible, in good conscience, to discover ourselves engaged with--note, NOT "study"--York 1190 without pathos. But, following so much thought here--from Benjamin, Ingham the pastoral, Jeffrey on touching and loving past times, Eileen on "holding things open," it might be possible to engage with York 1189 with some kind of joy that might, by holding pathos off, hold open the pleasures of that present moment and also the joy for what might have been and what might yet be. <BR/><BR/>Within the month, I'll read the Retallack.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-33092519257560871012008-05-05T08:47:00.000-04:002008-05-05T08:47:00.000-04:00Jeffrey: I completely agree with you that Pascal's...Jeffrey: I completely agree with you that Pascal's wager stages an unnecessary crisis [and a binary at that] that also does not admit of a middle way. Retallack borrows her idea of "wager" from him, but also notes in her book that "Pascal's wager was framed in the computational science of his era, as our wagers must be cast in terms that construct our time."Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-54297166415148737152008-05-05T07:36:00.000-04:002008-05-05T07:36:00.000-04:00Thanks, Eileen. That Calvino quote really spoke to...Thanks, Eileen. That Calvino quote really spoke to me, and I very much appreciate the thought about my own work that went into choosing it. I appreciate your gift.<BR/><BR/>As to the wager ... that is pretty much what I was asking, though in the back of my mind I always wonder if Pascal doesn't perform a crisis rather than discover one. That is, at stake in his wager are two ways of seeing the world that don't allow for a middle space ... a forking road that he resolves by saying that there really is only one choice to make, one direction to travel, even if the destination may not in fact exist. The limit of his wager though is in the frame of his question/crisis: assumptions that if God does exist, then He is good and just; that beauty and justice and happiness are aspects of the same; that divinity is aligned with reason; that divinity is singular; that divinity is just the ultimate version of enlightened humanism.<BR/><BR/>Your wager -- and, I think, Retallack's -- has more at stake, because it assumes less in its framing: the outcome is truly unknown in advance, and the choice isn't forced by the assumption that all choices amount to the same thing. That's why Nicola's insertion of a meditation on the new is so apropos.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-3949477327011915072008-05-04T21:54:00.000-04:002008-05-04T21:54:00.000-04:00Nicola: I, too, agree that Glossator is one such e...Nicola: I, too, agree that Glossator is one such experimental adventure that, as you say, in some small way might help us to re-adjust out habits/habitus.<BR/><BR/>I read your comments on the "new" over at The Whim and enjoyed them very much, especially your ["objective"] description of the new as<BR/><BR/>"as an ontological threshold in the objective sense, as a liminal property of things, something between what they are and their taking place, between, in Western philosophy’s classic terms, the what and the that."<BR/><BR/>I will include here yet another [and longish quotation] from Retallack that speaks, I think, to the concerns of your post, and also invokes some of your metaphors:<BR/><BR/>"The horizon of the future is visible only as it has become that part of the very recent past we call the contemporary. The contemporary rises (as the sun doesn't) out of the residue of the past. One might even think one glimpses a thin crack of light in the near-hallucinatory state of envisioning that moment as the future breaking over the dotted line of the present. (Tear here.) This is of course image of a mirror image; the horizon is the mirror of futurity only as envisioned out of history. (Cf. Hegel: 'Philosophy concerns itself only with the glory of the Idea mirroring itself in the History of the World.') Insofar as they exist at all (in the imagination) the horizon of the future and the horizon of the past are one and the same. There is no temporal direction for gazing at the past or at the future, other than nondirectionally outward. Get up and look around as [John] Cage once said. You will see everything there is to work with right (t)here, at the conceptually contingent location of your besieged senses." [p. 14]Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-32440230240650900342008-05-04T21:07:00.000-04:002008-05-04T21:07:00.000-04:00Woops, messed up the Glossator link.Woops, messed up the <A HREF="http://glossator.org" REL="nofollow">Glossator</A> link.Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-40949768806207532992008-05-04T20:34:00.000-04:002008-05-04T20:34:00.000-04:00In relation to my own work, I want see if I have t...<I>In relation to my own work, I want see if I have the courage to imagine and put into practice what might be called an avant-garde and poethical scholarship, to engage in what Retallack calls “experimental adventures” that form the “inbetween-zones” of “historical residue and hope” [pp. 15, 16]. This would also mean, however, taking on the “against-all-odds project of recomposing some small portion of the habitus” [p. 17] which, to be sure, would be quite difficult, maybe even terrifying.</I><BR/><BR/>Word! Way to pull back the reins on the self-entombing assumption that the end of knowledge, or the world for that matter, is a book. <BR/><BR/>And I am certainly hoping and thinking of <A HREF="http://glosstor.org" REL="nofollow">Glossator</A>, as an invitation to think scholarship as practice, might represent such a small reconfiguration of habitus. <BR/><BR/>Yesterday I attended a conference organized by the Brooklyn College graduate students on the theme of the new. In relation to your passages on time, work, and newness, it was inspiring to see among the presentations a lot of serious questioning of the temporality, historicity, and ontology of reading, scholarship, poetry--present textual practice. Michael Stone-Richards gave an excellent keynote address on the time of the subject. I also made some <A HREF="http://thewhim.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-poverty-and-plenitude.html" REL="nofollow">remarks</A> you might enjoy.<BR/><BR/>See you soon!Nicola Masciandarohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01279665722551517693noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-1326486789617907982008-05-04T14:40:00.000-04:002008-05-04T14:40:00.000-04:00Jeffrey: I actually chose that quotation from Calv...Jeffrey: I actually chose that quotation from Calvino, partly because it appears in Retallack's book, in the second chapter, which is an interview/conversation between Retallack and Quinta Self, in the context of their discussion of Calvino's praise of a multiplicity of epistemologies in writing and his ideas of a "hypernovel," but the real reason I chose that quote is because it seemed very apropos to how you have been talking about your "weight of the past" project, and I was thinking even more particularly of your "At Avebury" post and Alexander's comment about the stone megalith, after "listening" to it, "It knows it killed someone." And you admit in that piece that you kind of lied to your son when you said you could definitely feel/hear something in there, too, but at the same time, much of your project here, which deals with stone megaliths as well as human corpses and abandoned barrows, is about considering whether or not these artifacts of the past bear particular "messages" or how they might "speak" in their own languages, etc., and so I thought the Calvino quotation was apt for thinking about your project: how to get out of what Calvino describes as the limited perspective of the individual self in order to give speech to what, essentially, does not possess, let's say, *human* speech. And I think this would require what Retallack calls the "dicey collaboration" between the intellect and the imagination. At the same time, however you approach this project, in which you have very purposefully chosen, in a sense, the most mute and in/non-human and *pre*-historical objects and landscapes, whatever styles and forms of articulations you choose and experiment with, you're really undertaking a project that is as much about the present as it is about the past, because your very writing itself is a kind of struggle for meaning *in* the present, for articulation in what Retallack calls the historical-sontemporary present. And by thinking about your writing [your "composition"] as you are now, you are in some small measure "taking part," as Retallack argues, in making "new time."<BR/><BR/>As to the question: what are the limits of my wager [?], hmmmmmmmmm . . . one way of answering that would be to say that, in imagining the possibilities of the poethical essay, there are no limits, but in terms of the term *wager*, where limits might mean: what are the things you are betting *between* [i.e., what is at stake? for Pascal, obviously, it was partly the existence of God that was at stake, but more so, his own happiness and beliefs], or where the question might also mean: how much of yourself will you stake in this wager [?], I would say that:<BR/><BR/>1. what I am wagering *between* is a Western-centric rationalism and a more complex realist perspective [let's say, between science and art], or, between sense and meaning [explained this way by Retallack: "sense has to do with patterns and logics; meaning (which is larger than but includes this sense of sense) is what makes life worth living"]. This also means wagering for the mess of fluid complexities, every time, over the singular and straight lines of certainties. The "bet" is, that if there is an meaning at all, it will always be located in what Retallack calls "the middle spaces": inbetween the different "zones of intelligibility."<BR/><BR/>2. as to how much I will stake of myself on this wager [what I am willing to risk, what I am willing to give time- and effort-wise, etc.], I would say almost everything, because happiness depends on it, because writing is also a "form of life," and when practiced rightly, it is utopian.<BR/><BR/>But those may the right answers to the wrong questions. Perhaps you could define in more detail what you were thinking in asking about the "limits" of my wager?Eileen Joyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13756965845120441308noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-43146115193504653162008-05-04T13:33:00.000-04:002008-05-04T13:33:00.000-04:00That was beautiful (I will wager). May I ask why y...That was beautiful (I will wager). May I ask why you used the Calvino epigraph? Specifically I'm interested in the lines:<BR/><BR/><EM>to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic</EM><BR/><BR/>What are the limits of your wager?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.com