Poetry as a Mode of Existence
Mode of existence here refers to a way of
being.
Not so much in relation to Latour, but to
the idea of ethos.
Following Greek etymology ethos is a mode
proper to existence --at least as interpreted by Bollack and Wismann in relation
to Heractlius:
“l’être
de l’homme, c’est avant tout une certaine façon d’être”.
(Bollack and Wismann, Héraclite ou la separation, Paris: Minuit, 1972, p. 329)
A certain
way of being. The question is therefore not an ontological one, nor even in the
sense of a modal ontology, but one about the specificity that articulates a
modality.
Deleuze said nothing different when using
the term “mode of existence.” For him a mode of existence meant an assemblage
of many different parts characterized by varying degrees of power, expressing
itself in different series of relationships --all these relationships
determined extrinsically.
Hence what matters are these relationships
and their movements. The question one asks in relation to a certain way of being
is: what can a body do? What are the relationships and the movements that a
body effects in varying degrees of power, in varying degrees of “affection”?
(Deleuze, Spinoza et le problème de
l’expression, Paris, Minuit 1967, p. 183-196; 213).
Bateson is also relevant here.
What is poetry’s mode of existence? What
can poetry do?
If it is an ethos, it is not an ethic. Kierkegaard
posed a drastic aut/aut: either a poetic (K uses the term aesthetic but many of his descriptions and discussions revolve around the figure of the poet) mode of existence, or an ethical one.
But the aut/aut is also a path to be walked, and each of these modes of
existence has its compelling articulations: in order to be ethical one has to
engage the poetic, if nothing else in order to take distance from it, to
recognize it as something that it is not ethical. At the same time for K these
different modes of existence corresponded to different, in some way
incompatible, perspectives, which could only be examined by constructing
avatars/authors that could write from their singular point of view. There is no
possible reconciliation between the poetic and the ethic.
Current discussions of ethics in anthropology seem to
long for a stoicism that should be put in perspective rather than embraced. As
if existence could only be taken into account in relation to means and ends. An ethos is not an ethic.
This is the long running ambivalence of
religion and philosophy towards poetry (Plato, Qur‘an) replicated today in
Alain Badiou’s approach.
Geertz called this the ambiguity of poetry:
“not sacred enough to justify the power it actually has and not secular enough
for that power to be equated with ordinary eloquence (Geertz, “Art as a
Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge,
Basic Books 1982, p 117).
“Half ritual song, half plain talk,” for
Geertz Moroccan oral poetry sits "in between," and makes sense of this “in
between,” gives a unique voice to it. For Geertz recognizing this ambiguity means
discussing poetry as semeiotic, provided that signs here are considered not
just as expressions (art for art’s sake), but “for their impact,” their use.
Geertz however seems to gloss over the
very ambiguity (or shall we say ambivalence) of poetry he has just asserted.
Turning meaning into use, arguing that poetry as semiotics should be studied
not in abstraction but towards a study of signs in their “natural habitat – the
common world in which men look, name, listen and make” (Ibid. 119) Geertz
reabsorbs the “in between” status of poetry.
The untimeliness of Geertz only corresponds to his
subterranean ever-present influence in contemporary anthropology. Discussions
of meaning and signs are so saturated that no one dares to address them
anymore, but Geertz looms large in the practice of anthropological thought.
Pleading for the study of signs in action,
for poetry in its use, Geertz divests poetry from its relationship with the
sacred. However, in so doing, following his own discussion, he ends up
neutralizing the power of poetry he has just asserted. Rather than
“naturalizing” poetry, recognizing its power as a modality of existence, Geertz
neutralizes it.
The present task is therefore to try to
offer a description of poetry as a mode of existence that brings the power of
its ambivalence to the foreground. In other words, rescuing the ambivalence of
poetry from the Protestant trajectory that juxtaposes sublimated pleasure to
individual commitment, the current research shall open up a different
understanding of the ambivalence and its suspension.
A preliminary move is to recognize that rather
than a property of poetry itself, the power of poetry as a mode of existence
stems from its extrinsic relationships or rather in the power to turn extrinsic
relationships into a certain mode of existence, a certain way of being: a sort
of operation of capture that creates the power of ambivalence.
It is legitimate to wonder how this rather esoteric
disquisition might be relevant for an ethnographic approach to poetry. These
reflections apparently go towards higher and higher degrees of abstraction,
but instead they try to articulate something concrete, something that happens
in the practice of poetry. In order to grasp the ethnographic (Geertz would
say “natural”) power of poetry one has to provisionally try to analyze the way of being proper to poetry (a "certain" way of being). Where does the power of poetry come
from? And what does it affect?
To articulate this juncture, the ways in
which poetry captures relationships and turns them into its own power, one can
turn to poetry itself, and use one of the most classical articulations of the
relationship among poetry, desire and pleasure as a way to elaborate the terms
of the analysis.
Poetry is made of words and these words are
already relationships, not just among themselves, but with the world (suffice
here to recall Malinowski’s discussion of language as action, followed by the
whole pragmatic tradition).
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