the subject of poetry

Both De Certeau and Cixous, in opposite terms, constitute poetry as the site of a constitutive desire. This desire is both set against and related to an apparatus, a power/knowledge nexus that represses and yet enables it.

 

In De Certeau what prevails is the diagnosis of how an impossible desire (ravishment) is turned into an instituted (ethnographic) power. In Cixous what prevails is an assertion of an emergent body/writing/desire against an already instituted power (phallo-logocentrism).

 

In both desire is the site of an unnameable/unrepresentable force, a force that is able to move, a force that needs to be separated, sent against, dialectically opposed in order to be effective. (both channel Hegel via Lacan).

 

This view of poetry as the site of the Real has theological underpinnings.

 

This is what makes poetry “inconsumable” (Pasolini) but also what places it in a constitutive outside that cannot but betray its expectations. We could call this “the subject of poetry” to name the process through which in both ethnological and political terms, poetry is endowed the power to be, the power to assert, the power to go beyond. One could also think of the relationship between poetry and the sacred.

 

The subject of poetry articulates itself in two forms.

 

One form is related to the paradigm of the person. In this form, poetry comes to embody (incarnare, enter the flesh) the transformation of God/nature into the will of a person. The person becomes the receptacle, but also the matrix of the poetic. In our age, when personhood has subsumed in itself both the human and the self, this form of the subject of poetry has taken a solid grip on the world. This is poetry as self-expression, or reading poetry for self-recognition. Jakobson calls it the “emotive” function of language, but an emotive function that has subsumed into itself all the other five functions of language, to the extent that the poetic function (the focus on the message qua message) has become indistinct from it. The relationship between personhood and capitalism could not be tighter. 

 

The more the subject of poetry betrays the expectations to realize personhood, the more the emotive function dominates, the more poetry comes to stand for that which is unattainable.

 

The second form of the subject of poetry is apparently opposite to the first and as such has a somewhat diminished traction in the contemporary epoch, but it is nevertheless active. This form is related to a meta- trajectory, whereby the subject of poetry, rather than mediated via personhood, is abstracted into an external will, or agency to which the power to move is endowed. God, technology, the nation, society, nature or politics generate the subject of poetry.  

 

This form of the subject of poetry might maybe be related to the “phatic” function of language in Jakobson’s model: the establishment of communication.

 

The more the subject of poetry betrays expectations to realize any of these agencies, and becomes the site of a necessary but impossible communication, the more poetry comes to stand for these agencies.