the poetry of anthropology

The poetry of anthropology

The poetry of anthropology aims at examining anthropological approaches to poetry, while also considering anthropology as a form of poetry.

In between the polarity of the subjective and objective genitive stands a third option, the partitive. From this third perspective, the poetry of anthropology defines that component of anthropology which cannot be paraphrased, cannot be said otherwise. The poetic moment in anthropology-- the conjunction of form and desire.

1.     The poetry of anthropology distances itself from two approaches:

An approach reduces poetry to the abstract category of the "poetic."  Posing the question of the poetic would require engaging in acts of inclusion and exclusion, or defining the poetic as a specific quality. The transformation of this quality into a function (Jakobson: the poetic function) is important in establishing the libidinal economy of poetry but cannot be abstracted into a definition of what constitutes the poetic without cancelling the equally relevant question of the "warranted and frustrated expectations" which poetry generates.

Another approach reduces poetry to its instances, the poems (visual, textual, oral). As if everything could be exhausted in the performance. Without denying the relevance of the pragmatic dimension (language as action), one has to be weary of the preconceived idea of productivity that any action oriented approach implies.

2.     Part of the task of the poetry of anthropology is to make explicit the existential import of poetry without reducing it to an articulation of self. In other words, the task is to delineate a concept of poetry as a modality of existence.

In this modality, expression, or to express, is an impersonal activity

to paraphrase Althusser, poetry, is a process without a subject

3. A poetic modality of existence is articulated in two parallel motions. one could call them form and desire.

The combination of form and desire, which takes place in composition, is what develops consistency across time, that which does not exhaust itself in performance. There is a virtuality inherent in this combination.

Poetry as a modality of existence has a specific temporality, in the sense that it takes place in a definite time, which coincides with the production of expression, and is taken up again in its repetitions which constitute a virtuality.