poetry without end

Poetry is a modality of existence without end. It is useless and endless. As Spinoza argues, one can presume that in seeking what is useful to them, humans project finality/ends on all phenomena, including poetry, thus thinking that the combination of certain sounds into what appear to them as meaningful words is useful to them and serves a purpose (to narrate deeds, to express feelings, to question their existence). However, poetry in itself is endless. poetry is inhuman. This also implies that poetry is perfect as it is, it is not the sign of a lack, a reference to what lies beyond, the expression of what cannot be expressed.

This view might seem opposite to an idea of poetry as artifice, trick or deception, a view of poetry as imagination as opposed to reality. On the contrary, arguing that poetry is without ends is to argue that imagination is an articulation of reality, not something opposite to it. 

In a similar manner, arguing that poetry is without end does not mean that it is useless in itself. On the contrary, poetry is useful for itself and in itself, and can be useful to humans if it increases their capacity to act, their power, or un-useful if it diminishes their capacity to act. But poetry has no finality beyond itself, it does not aim to achieve anything, and though it is about stating something (the very act of speech), poetry does not say anything beyond what it says. 

Malinowski’s “functionalist” view of language, retrospectively seen as a pillar of pragmatics, might appear at first glance opposite to the idea of poetry without end. Malinowski argued that the meaning of utterances could only be understood through the analysis of the “context of situation” in which such utterances were uttered, as serving some purpose in relation to the social order or situation. “A word is as a word does,” Malinowski wrote in an unpublished paper in 1941. 

Poetry without end does not mean without effect. It means without an end not contained within itself. The power of poetry resides in its capacity to move, i.e. to alter the “context of situation.” To do something. The efficacy of poetry should not be confused with intentionality (the latter would reintroduce ends, where there are none). It is precisely of poetry to “happen” and to generate effects by happening, and to have meanings only in relation to its happening.

The concept of performance, central to the “context of situation,” works via difference and repetition. Poetry is constituted in the relationship between difference and repetition. To argue that everything is performance would be to miss this relationship and flatten the very power of poetry which resides in the resonances that it leaves in the temporalities of its repetition.