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3.0
I Yield to Incomprehension
Poetry is a remedy for the temptation to reify words as things other than words. This is why it can be difficult. The urge to make words into things that are not words is powerful. We become frustrated when that urge is inhibited. We try to interpret poetry as we typically interpret prose, as literal descriptions of things outside of language. The result is ideology, dogmatic religion, and endless family quarrels. But poetry won’t allow these things. Poetry insists that words are things that only have relationships with other words. It shows that killing for, believing in, and using words to describe ‘what just happened,’ is a mug’s game.
So where does that leave prose? Is prose just an open sham, a visible but unacknowledged scandal? Do we cynically employ it ‘as if’ it had definite connections to things outside of language? Poetry gone bad? Or are we just ignorant about the character of language and exploit it when we need in order to get and keep power. These are the questions we are led to by modern epistemology - not which words better represent ‘reality’ but the ethics of using words at all.
This applies to philosophical prose most acutely. When philosophers talk about things like ontology and teleology and existence, are these terms any less poetic than theologians gossip about original sin, judgement and salvation? Or for that matter, are scientific references to gravity, quarks and black holes as prosaically ‘unattached’ as the vocabulary of philosophers and theologians? Could it be that science is in some obscure way just better poetry?
The implication of Agamben’s discursive remarks (Poetry? Prose? Something halfway between the two?) is that if thought (the domain of prose) is to say anything meaningful at all it must be “incited” to do so along with the imaginative daring of words that refer explicitly only to other words (the domain of poetry). Neither prose nor poetry alone is adequate to communicate about reality. The Idea of Prose explores that interaction by reference to the most well known 20th century European philosophers, interpreting and re-interpreting them with elegance and erudition.
I don’t claim to understand Agamben’s argument, or even his thesis. It is beyond my intellectual abilities to comprehend how the interaction of poetry and prose gets us beyond the 20 volumes of The Oxford English Dictionary (or the considerably shorter Garzantia Linguistitca) and into something approaching reality. The suggestion appeals to me but I can’t grasp the reasoning. Perhaps that is not his intention at all. If there is anyone out there in GR land who has a suggestion about where to plant my ignorance, I would welcome advice.
Poetry is a remedy for the temptation to reify words as things other than words. This is why it can be difficult. The urge to make words into things that are not words is powerful. We become frustrated when that urge is inhibited. We try to interpret poetry as we typically interpret prose, as literal descriptions of things outside of language. The result is ideology, dogmatic religion, and endless family quarrels. But poetry won’t allow these things. Poetry insists that words are things that only have relationships with other words. It shows that killing for, believing in, and using words to describe ‘what just happened,’ is a mug’s game.
So where does that leave prose? Is prose just an open sham, a visible but unacknowledged scandal? Do we cynically employ it ‘as if’ it had definite connections to things outside of language? Poetry gone bad? Or are we just ignorant about the character of language and exploit it when we need in order to get and keep power. These are the questions we are led to by modern epistemology - not which words better represent ‘reality’ but the ethics of using words at all.
This applies to philosophical prose most acutely. When philosophers talk about things like ontology and teleology and existence, are these terms any less poetic than theologians gossip about original sin, judgement and salvation? Or for that matter, are scientific references to gravity, quarks and black holes as prosaically ‘unattached’ as the vocabulary of philosophers and theologians? Could it be that science is in some obscure way just better poetry?
The implication of Agamben’s discursive remarks (Poetry? Prose? Something halfway between the two?) is that if thought (the domain of prose) is to say anything meaningful at all it must be “incited” to do so along with the imaginative daring of words that refer explicitly only to other words (the domain of poetry). Neither prose nor poetry alone is adequate to communicate about reality. The Idea of Prose explores that interaction by reference to the most well known 20th century European philosophers, interpreting and re-interpreting them with elegance and erudition.
I don’t claim to understand Agamben’s argument, or even his thesis. It is beyond my intellectual abilities to comprehend how the interaction of poetry and prose gets us beyond the 20 volumes of The Oxford English Dictionary (or the considerably shorter Garzantia Linguistitca) and into something approaching reality. The suggestion appeals to me but I can’t grasp the reasoning. Perhaps that is not his intention at all. If there is anyone out there in GR land who has a suggestion about where to plant my ignorance, I would welcome advice.
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