an ethnopoetic perspective: poetry as modality

In a short but incisive essay, anthropologist and ethnopoet Denis Tedlock seems to offer a perspective that bypasses what I termed below “the subject of poetry”, the binary that posits the force of an unnameable desire on one hand, and power/knowledge apparatus on the other.

 

Tedlock proposes what might be called a “modal view” whereby poetry, as any linguistic expression, is the paraphrase/translation of something else. Desire and Codification are not separated and juxtaposed (natural/artificial), but reconfigured as a middle third. Expanding on Tedlock (maybe with a little help from Latour) poetry becomes a modality that constantly translates (rather than double binds).

Tedlock is at least in part reacting to the rigidity with which poetry is composed and discussed (especially lyric poetry) --an attitude of normativity and separation that he identifies with Western sensibilities, and to which he juxtaposes a “middle” in which formal concerns are present but more fluid and flexible. The paraphrase or negotiation he argues is an intrinsic part of poetic texts and their performance. In other terms, you cannot separate the text as object from its modality. Form is not a set of fixed structures but it is a process that develops in interaction –interaction however takes place around a text, it is a three way process, not a dialectic between self and other.

 

[The text in being the third, and the presupposed third, plays again a theological role, despite Tedlock’s “anti-monotheistic” stances. This is also related to his juxtapposition of West and non-West even though, at this level, he does argue that every poetics is an ethno-poetics. But what matters is that this theological pole is what enables the construction of a modal system. Does this recall Spinoza -- one substance, infinite modes?]

 

[this modal formulation also joins Vico's view of poetry as about "understanding and being understood", and his idea of poetry as a natural necessity]

[among many, one point needs much further reflection. this modality shall not be equated with a functionalist view of communication]