The themes of these seven essays emerge from and deepen discussions started in Voegelin’s previous books, Listening to Noise and Silence and Sonic Possible Worlds. Continuing the methodological juxtaposition of phenomenology and logic and writing from close sonic encounters, each represents a fragment of listening to a variety of sound works, to music, the acoustic environment and to poetry, to hear their possibilities and develop words for what appears impossible.
As fragments of writing they
respond to ideas on geography and migration, bring into play formless
subjectivities and trans-objective identities, and practice
collectivity and a sonic cosmopolitanism through the hearing of
shared volumes. They involve the unheard and the in-between to
contribute to current discussions on new materialism, and perform
vertical readings to reach the depth of sound.
It is thus within language, now grasped somehow mathematically as our milieu of transformation, that we must pose the problems that concern us – this is to say, outside of the notion of a character (to the degree to which you, actors, authors and readers of this life, you take yourselves for characters, you give in to the mythology of our society, you identify yourselves with a trivial and limited identity which is not your own); and also outside the notion of a product (for to the degree to which you valorise the product, you posit the existence of the museum and sooner or later of the academy; you favour a collection of things arrested and frozen in the pseudo-eternity of value, in contradistinction to the way in which what we are looking for ought to lead us on beyond all value). Sollers
In the post-war period, poetics would retain its historical weight especially among post-structuralists, gathered in the 1960s and 1970s around the magazine Tel Quel. Tel Quel was not only a magazine, it stood for an intellectual movement based on the principle of a non-activist approach to societal events and consequently the group was often regarded as conservative (Marx-Scouras, 1996). The revision of the attitude toward history is expressed through a particular standpoint toward theory as a special form of social activity, as a particular temporality innate to language. The temporality of theory is not built through its conversion into rational social action, but it is associated with a special level of history which creates a time for itself and represents an area of experience which is built between play, fiction, and sacrifice. It would be wrong to conclude that the theoretical activity was limited to literature in the classical sense of the word. Its activity, starting from analyses of new novels to analyses of language in general, was self-determined as social deviation, as a code of existential behavior, as a tendency to transform the space of the avant-garde into the space of the text. The idea of the necessity to preserve and develop textuality as a form of being is based on the historical criticism of total instrumentalization and ideologization of thought. From there derives indignation, or even contempt, for the concept of revolution. However, these orientations are not exhausted even when denoted as ‘art for art’s sake’, since they represent an expansion rather than self-sufficient limitations to the field of art. This is, therefore, poetic terrorism: an attack on the very concept of reality, actuality.
Additionally, this new approach to history represents a special form of elitism, insofar as we understand elitism as building a separate and special, rather than general and common, experience, available to the disciples of a special approach to text. Therefore, Tel Quel’s activity can also be understood as a form of special auto-ironic esotericism—mythopoetics and mythobiography. The poetic language was understood as an autonomous affirmative force, and the concept of radical textuality was related to the self-determination of intellectuals against the ideology-saturated social context. It is likely that the key concept of “ideology without ideology” formulated at Tel Quel could be reduced to the request for preserving text and textuality against the attacks of instrumentalized thinking (Richardson, 2001). Thus can also be interpreted the predominantly critical view of Marxism or its revision towards the increasing autonomy of text. Distancing from ideology and focusing on text as a special field of experience, a special field of the policy of action, was built on a discontinued relationship towards social reality, developed all the way to the complete dissolution of narrative and to a new attitude toward fiction, which leads to distancing from the issue of real and unreal, objective and subjective experiences.
There was also an observation that logocentrism cannot be overcome, but insisting on separation from it and this in the form of historical consciousness through the special mission of textualizing history, through initiation into the infinity of text, through holding onto the string of constant criticism of representation, affirming fiction not only as pure linguistic experience, but also as the paradigmatic field of language itself. Therein lies the radicality of this approach and at the same time its historical weight. Its initial focus on radical critique of instrumentalized social reality, which in its extreme (most superficial) aspects becomes exhausted in the de-objectivized and empirically vacant social engagement could be called conformist rather than radical. An effort to maintain, exhibit and carry out the autonomy of textuality as a special form of social consciousness and social action was the basic characteristic. At the end of the Hegelian dialectic junction of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, we now also have deconstruction, as the introduction of a fourth term which will mimetically shift the entire frame (of referencing something) into the text. In that respect, it could be said that dissemination contains elements of sacred experience. The sacrality of that approach is not explicit and is evidenced indirectly, through an effort to create a distance from its ‘dirty’ content of the gift, ‘dirty’ content of experience—more precisely, simply from experience. To erase experience means to write. Writing is a form of forgetting and a gestural form of gifting.
It would be inconsiderate to pretend that in these ideas we do not recognize features of Nietzsche’s poetic decomposition of experience, where poetics functions as a mechanism for decomposing the rational attitude toward the world and as affirmation of power in the prophetic sense of destiny, tragedy—willing confrontation with what is repressed and destructive. Still, it is not that simple to derive conclusions on what is precisely being ‘killed’ by Nietzsche’s poetics and what exactly is heralded in that historical sense. It refers to a certain kind of action and thought opposed to rationalist projects, and through this it leads to changing the very attitude toward history— deconstructing it, “satirizing” with it, and destroying it in its meaning of linear events and metaphysical derivation. The poetic prophecy that announces the arrival of superman is the stake of power in the space of historical discontinuity, in which it moves, with only a certain risk, rather than certainty, through ambivalence of thinking. This is a general trait of prophesies: they largely depend on how they are read. Later, this Nietzschean context of writing will be denoted by Derrida as freeing the signifier from its determination by Logos, in the way that reading and text become primary operations with respect to Logos (Derrida, 1998).
Introducing poetics and its irrational contents into the space of philosophy has always been somewhat subversive, with a tendency to overstep and transform the boundaries of this discipline. At the same time, it has always been political to an extent. This subversive dissent could not be completely avoided from the beginning; poetics in its authentic form is sublimation without referential return, possible for every human precisely because they are detached from their simple origin (Bachelard,1983).
Alain Badiou recognizes the ontological difference between an art of representation – official art – which presumes that the result of political emancipation is present, and an art able to create emancipatory change through its own presentation – militant art – that is an art of the current situation which is not compatible with the official politics of the state. And despite not being very recent, Badiou’s lecture remains extremely relevant.
“I think documentary is not about confession, but about what it means to confess or to testify. My own position trades on overturning the question, on saying that it is not true that people want the real, that it is not true that they don’t want fiction. Fiction is everywhere. The question is: where do we situate the starting point of fiction? What kind of arrangement makes something happen? In a way, we can say there is fiction whenever there is some kind of narrative that tells, or shows, us that something is happening. That’s why, in my recent work, I have mostly been interested in exploring the edges of fiction, the edge between nothing happens and something happens. I think it is time to dismiss all these suppositions that people are stupid, that they don’t want fiction anymore because they want flesh. They don’t want flesh, they want emotions. The question is what kind emotion is produced by what kind of fiction.”
“I criticized neorealism for remaining subjective and lyricizing, which was another feature of the cultural epoch before the Resistance. So, neorealism is a cultural product of the Resistance in regard to its content and message, but stylistically it is still tied to pre-Resistance culture. Basically there is something rather hybrid about it. Anyway, if you think about other products of the European Resistance, much of the poetry is written in the same style as before the war—in the use of surrealist elements, for example. This hybridization is a phenomenon common to the whole of Europe. Compared with neorealism, I think I have introduced a certain kind of realism into the cinema—but, I have to say, it would be rather difficult to define exactly what that realism is.”
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 2009 Author: Mark Fisher The book analyses the development and principal features of capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience.
Traumatic Realism 2000 Author: Michael Rothberg Analyzes the impact of historical trauma on contemporary culture, in particular, the question of realism as one of the central problematics that the Holocaust forces back into view.
Living in the post-traumatic age – after Auschwitz – and still witnessing on a daily basis various forms of barbarism ranging from local wars, nationalisms, to classism, racism, sexism and numerous other yet-to-be-named ‘-isms’, we have reached the point when awareness of our own being has been radically shaken. Self-doubt prompted many academics to depressively proclaimed that writing poetry – after Auschwitz – is barbaric; that we do not need philosophical thinking anymore and that this is the time of the end of history and of truth.
In The End – A Conversation(English translation available July 2019), Alain Badiou and Giovanbattista Tusa contend that:
“The notion of the ‘end’ has long occupied philosophical thought. In light of the horrors of the 20th century, some writers have gone so far as to declare the end of philosophy itself, emphasising the impossibility of thinking after Auschwitz. In this book the distinguished philosopher Alain Badiou, in dialogue with Giovanbattista Tusa, argues that we must renounce the ‘pathos of completion’ and continue to think philosophically.”
People who have experienced the proximity of war or of the horrors of war have quickly realized that there is something in their experience which rejects thought, which rejects uttering. War is a true epistemological minefield. It is a frowning, terrifying, tyrannical Absolute swallowing and devouring all meaning. The horror given ‘by itself’ and ‘for itself’ sets itself down in front of thought as a simple anti-subject of thinking. The truth of war is radical anti-truth. No constructive, functional, or affirmative thought is possible. Such thought is possible only in the form of ideological ‘truths’ which are themselves participants in the war, which produce war, which start it. But if in war there is no truth about war, that is not only because truths themselves are used to wage war, with one sets of truths against another, but also because no speech about war, however adequate, that is, true and neutral, is able to express what is unutterable in war, its horrifying essence in front of which even the wisest of speeches, or logos , remains simply dumb, without words.
Poem as witness, as transmitter of multiple meanings, coming from an unknown space, remaining beyond the reach of universal language and aesthetic forms and norms, is conditioned as an act of resistance and struggle, a protest against violence and political order – carrying the ghost of witness through time. Celan calls upon his readers to become not simply recipients of an achievement of language, but to become someone capable of experiencing and responding in multiple ways – of being able to bond together the multitude of witnesses instead of the multitude of victims in our post-traumatic age. (I wrote this while studying and working as a graduate assistant at the University of Toronto on the topic of Poetry of Witness.)
Starting tomorrow a very interesting workshop – Paul Celan in Translation. Praxis, Poetics, Resistances. Paul Celan et la traduction. Pratiques, poétiques, résistances – will be held at Université de Genève. This two-day workshop will provide a forum to reflect on the relations between poetry, poetics and translation around the figure of Celan. If the work of the poet Paul Celan was chosen as the foundation it’s because Celan’s œuvre bridges three major preoccupations of contemporary criticism: the emergence of the figure of the poet-witness, the importance of translation and the inter-language, and the relationship of poetry and philosophy. It will also investigate the importance of Celan for certain contemporary philosophers and poets – whether it is true that Celan is a provocation to think about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for a large number of 20th century philosophers (Heidegger, Adorno, Gadamer, Derrida, Badiou, to cite a few).
