Accretion

A long tradition in anthropology strives to distill forms to their essential features to make them intelligible (“elementary forms” etc…). This tendency goes hand in hand with the idea that anthropology should identify the fundamental articulations of the human. But a poetry of anthropology does not achieve its aims through this process. On the contrary, thinking anthropologically with poetry is a form of concretion, augmentation, complexification, sedimentation, stratification, variation, oscillation. All these operations are “subtractive” only in the sense that they take away weight from any idea of finality or commitment while reintroducing play, rhetoric, displacement. This also suggest that nature is not a reduction to its fundamental features. Nature in this perspective is metamorphosis.

And all this accretion, diversion, intensification, augmentation is both necessary and useless. Necessary because while being artifice, poetry is not superfluous: without it things would not be. And while necessary, poetry is useless, in the sense that its functionality cannot be reduced to an algorithmic directionality. Poetry has many uses, but none exhaust it, this is precisely because it is a structure of accretion, complexity, duplicity, bifurcation….