power of poetry

(variations between Deleuze and Jackobson)

1.

Poetry’s power rests on the production of a space (plan) of immanence.

The power of poetry is predicated on a tautological structure. Poetry exhibits its own power of expression. The power of expression is a sign of the power of expression. “it says” (intransitively).

[ethnographically, this corresponds to the moment in which a reader enters the space of immanence – usually this is a bodily posture which is only very indirectly accompanied by a verbal sign. It can be a more marked inspiration or expiration, a glance, faraway eyes, an exclamation (the proverbial bah bah). More rarely, a full sentence çe khub gofte [how good s/he/it (the poem) said] which while being on the threshold of meaning, see below, is still an expression of the power of poetry to say (intransitively). There is a tendency to understand çe khub gofte as a remark about the form of the poem: “how well the poem expresses X (a certain meaning, a trope, whatever this might be)” and hence to underline how the “form” matters—yes it does and this might be the case, however this misses the intrinsically phatic function of poetry which (pace Jakobson) cannot be detached from its power (hence it is not just a matter of “expectations” confirmed and betrayed, hence metaphor and metonym do not just concern “something that could be expressed otherwise” but are precisely signs of what “cannot be expressed otherwise” hence its immanence]

**so the idea that poetry says what cannot be said works if its taken out of its theologico-political trajectory: poetry says exactly what it says, not in the sense that it is a sign for something that cannot be said, but because it could not be said otherwise. There is no beyond. It’s the immanence (neither sacred nor profane).

This might be achieved via a split between law and desire or by a more totalizing investment in either (pure form on the side of the law, pure chance/freedom on the side of desire).

Either way, self-sufficiency is achieved by act of mediation which tends to obscure the mediating process.

Even when exhibited (“this is what the poem is doing”) the emphasis (the resolution and hence the point of application of the power of poetry) is on its immediacy: there has to be a point of no return, a “click” to make poetry (and hence its power) work. To use Barthes’ terminology, a point when pleasure and juissance coincide, when stadium and punctum coincide.

The coincidence, the immediacy is a very mediated product (the “artifice”).

A secondary effect is to make the intransitivity transitive, that is to say to translate the “it says” onto a “this is what it says” (=a sense/a truth). This process of objectivation marks the exit from the plan of immanence into meaning which is already a re-territorialization of the power of poetry towards other aims. (poetry being captured by other powers).

2.

The plan of poetry is contained, not infinite, limited in time and space.

But the plan is contained only towards the outside, but not towards the inside.

On the outside the power of poetry is limited by other competing powers or simply by its temporalities and spatialities. Poetry is certainly not infinite, it is a spatio-temporal event.

On the inside, in relation to its own constitutive elements, poetry’s plan is infinite. It is an event that institutes its own temporal and spatial coordinates.

This seems a more apt description than one that focuses on performance, because despite the current tendency to emphasize the event over the product, poetry is poesis in the sense of a concrete act of production oriented at building an object, however ephemeral. (this I take from Agamben’s Creativity and Anarchy)

This is what makes poetry impossible to locate from a theological/philosophical point of view. Too concrete and self-defining to be just metaphysical, too abstract to be just speech/writing (see Geertz discussion). And this is also why the formulation “there is no poetry, only poems” obscures part of the relationships that constitute the power of poetry.

To this a corollary should be added (a divagation using some Lacan but steering it in different direction). What is desired is only a byproduct of desire rather than its cause --to the extent that the object of desire works as a guarantee/stand-in more than something desirable in itself. A poem will be desirable if the conditions for the constitution of the plan of (the power of) poetry will have set desire in motion. Therefore, the techniques/technologies (=forms) for the constitution of the plan are paramount to its production, not just a medium for a (desired meaning). However, they are not sufficient, in that they do not establish the conditions for desire by themselves. A “third”—the desire of the other, would have to set the mechanism in motion. Once triggered, the technology delivers (or not, in this case generating disappointment).