[Reader-list] The noisy nativist crowd

[Prem Chandavarkar]

Dear Vivek,
A few thoughts / comments on your post:


> I obviously have nothing against metaphors as a form of thought-- I use
> them myself all the time.  And yet, this is precisely why I want to note
> that they can be misleading as well as seductive.


I have found Cynthia Ozick's essay "Metaphor and Memory" most useful.  One
cannot say that all poetics uses metaphor.  She talks about the fact that
people tend to associate creativity with inspiration, whereas she prefers to
talk about metaphor.  This is not because inspiration is not used by artists
(it is used frequently), but because inspiration does not demand any memory,
it does not require any starting point.  But because metaphor seeks to
transform one thing into another, it has to start with what the other person
already knows. Metaphor demands memory, it demands engagement, and is one of
the means by which one can sustain memory.  So if one makes that distinction
between inspiration and metaphor, and looks at metaphor as a way of engaging
in relationships, then perhaps that puts a check on the seductivity of
poetics.

 As an aside, I think
> that the notion that metaphors (while being, admittedly, indirect) are
> the opposite of direct, rational thought is not quite true.  Moreover,
> the commonly held belief that poetry, or poetics (while being,
> admittedly, indirect) is purely a place for the "irrational" or the
> "emotional" is also not quite true-- a poem's real charge (and I think I
> could show this with examples) really comes from the interaction of the
> rational and irrational within its structure, its mingling of "emotion",
> "thought" and "logic", not to mention the words in which these things
> are inseparable.


Here, let me cite the Russian Formalist - Viktor Shklovsky (who articulated
these thoughts early in the 20th century).  Shklovsky contested the popular
notion of poetry as providing a window that frames a view of the world;
where the aesthetic beauty of poetry lay outside itself in a content that
resided in a reality that was external to the poem.  He argued that the
aesthetic of poetry lay in its form, and that is sustained by an opposition
between ordinary language and poetic language.  We typically use language on
a daily basis in such a routine manner that we become anaesthetised to what
we say.  But poetry - through devices of form that are not found in ordinary
language, such as rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, metre and so on - forces us
out of our stock modes of perception and makes us see language again, and
therefore the world again.  Shklovsky defined the central aesthetic function
of poetry as "making strange".  He defines a powerful metaphor when he
argues that all art is like the knight's move in chess - one move straight
and one move crooked.  The straight move relates to established memory,
whereas the crooked move makes strange.

Keeping those questions on hold for a second, I want to turn briefly to
> your idea of the "poetics of resistance"-- it fascinates me and I want
> to hear more of course, but I'm a bit uncertain about that old bugbear--
> resistance, aka negation.


I do not agree that if we are talking about resistance, we are necessarily
only talking about negation.  That would be to argue that the issue only
exists at its extreme poles and there is no space inbetween.  Then you also
wind up stuck in other binary oppositions such as "speaker/audience".  Let
us use a metaphor from science for a minute, and look at a technical
definition of resistance as existing in the capability of a device - the
rheostat.  The device recognises that if electric current is allowed to flow
unimpeded in one direction, then that is not necessarily productive, and can
in fact prove destructive.  By creating a resistance to the current, it
channels the energy towards productive use - for example the capability to
adjust the speed of a ceiling fan.  Would the ceiling fan be a useful gadget
if we could not control the flow of electricity through it?

What we have been calling "noise" is a demand that the energy flow of speech
should only go unimpeded in one direction - a group of people has to be
divided into two, where only some are speakers, and the rest are only
listeners.  So if speech is the primary energy, an unimpeded flow in one
direction translates only into power and dominance - a destructive energy.
So the first level of resistance is to attempt to also reverse the direction
and transform speech into conversation - an effort to make the energy
constructive.

Conversation takes some important first steps.  It introduces the other side
of speech, which is listening, and therefore defines the grounds for
engagement with others.  It suggests that a minimum level of symmetry should
characterise all forms of engagement.  But mere conversation is not enough -
one should also introduce the notion of "critique".  We have tended to
define criticism as a form of judgment, of categorisation of good and bad,
and therefore trapped by a subjectivity that limits its utility.  I would
propose another notion of criticsm - one proposed by the architectural
critic Alan Colquhoun who said: "Criticism occupies the no-man's-land
between enthusiasm and doubt, between poetic sympthy and analysis.  Its
purpose is not, except in rare cases, either to eulogise or condemn, and it
can never grasp the essence of the work it discusses.  It must try to get
behind the work's apparent originality and expose its ideological framework
without turning it into a mere tautology".

This notion of criticism as the uncovering of ideology is most useful.  It
should start with the notion of critical intimacy: criticism (like charity)
has to begin at home, and the first level of criticism is to seek to uncover
one's own ideology.  And it would go on to argue that if we do not embed an
impulse to uncover ideology in our routine transactions with each other,
then that allows ideology to wear a mask that permits power to seem
natural.

So I would strongly contest a notion of resistance as restricted to
negation.  I would prefer a notion of resistance as the productive
channeling of energy, resistance as criticism (in the sense
identified above).  That would define resistance as laying down the
conditions of "deep engagement" (which I defined in my earlier message), and
to liberate the emergent potential that is created by engagement.  To only
look at resistance as negation, is to shift the discourse away
from engagement, and trap it within a formal logic of binary oppositions.

Regards,
Prem