poetry, technology, mysticism

Since Mauss theorized the emergence of personhood as a historical category, it is logical to assume that his approach can also suggest the disappearance of personhood.

Already announced in the second half of the twentieth century by German, French and Italian philosophers, the idea of an impersonal existence is taking hold in concrete forms, although these forms are yet to be envisaged.

This “hold” is foremost historical: in the sense that conditions are being realized for the articulation of a form of existence that is not predicated on the split between a naturalized “drive” on one hand, and a volitional core on the other (to take Esposito’s discussion of the paradigm of personhood).

In poetic terms, this would suggest that the centuries old (but in no way eternal) partition between techne and inspiration --between form and desire-- might eventually be reconfigured; and these two terms will cease to constitute the rebound through which existence is defined (law and desire, necessity and freedom).

An impersonal existence is unbound by volition and hence telos. As the term itself suggest, and as many of the philosophers involved in this discussion attest, “impersonal” remains imbricated into the vocabulary and demands of subjectivity, thus referring less to a new beginning than to an unfulfilled orientation. But this is also the mark of a quality which is built on a non-negative substraction: im-personal. A sort of non-neutral neutrality that washes away.

Most of what concerned personhood/subjectivity --and poetry is no exception-- has worked to modulate the opposition between techne and inspiration, recombining them into the impossible wholeness of a “work” [of art] which at its best marks the sublimation of this fracture. That this happens mostly through a negative, so to speak apophatic modality, it is only the confirmation of such tendency.

Nobody knows and nobody can predict how an impersonal existence will look like. However, it would be a misstep to postulate that it will be something completely new. It will rather be the intensification, modification and combination of a set of elements that are currently bounded in other configurations.

For this reason, it is possible to trace, to put to the foreground, to give relevance to a set of elements that might be current trajectories of the impersonal.

Both technology and mysticism, apparently opposite, do articulate portions of impersonality: technology via a sense of automation, be it inorganic or organic, and mysticism via a sense of presence that cancels out the partitions that otherwise structure daily life.

Poetry is both technological and mystical, both a mechanism and a presence, to the extent that, as many have theorized, it is a mechanism that produces presence, and in so doing it often confounds its own mechanicity to project a sense of immediacy. Poetric traditions usually always made sure to highlight within their own mechanism the artificiality that produced such immediacy. Hence the medium mostly appears as the medium that it is. Romantic poetry (and contemporary “sensuality”/sensoriality) instead, pretends to erase the artificiality and works to institute immediacy as its own medium.