Note on Blanchot & modern poetry

Blanchot:

'In the world of practical life satisfaction suppresses desire (I am thirsty, I drink; the matter is done with, classified) .... [The aim of art, on the contrary] is to organize a system of perceptible things able to make themselves asked for again and again without ever being able able to appease the desire they provoke. Creation consists in making and object that elicits desire'.

Poetic language is, therefore, a suspension and 'suppression' of the rules of practical life. The poem relishes and perfects, as it's own end, that desire which in practical life is immediately burned up in fulfillment. This is part of the way that modern poetry seeks to produce a micro-world foreign to - indeed the very inverse of - practical life. As part of this 'inversion', says Blanchot, there is of course a radical reorientation of language. Language loses its representional relation to the world and turns inward. We are meant to listen to the specific frequencies of language as never before.

The intention is not to empty language of its materiality, even if Mallarme et al appear to be jettisoning the material weight of the world to which language refers. On the contrary, the whole point of the project is to stop language evaporating into the world and to rescue, at some cost, its material density. This is meant not just in the sense that suddenly the material envelope of language - sound, rhythm, typographical embodiment - become objects of interest and enjoyment in their own right. It's rather that the whole relation between language and representation is being turned inside out, the very distinction is being attacked and transfigured. Here, again, is Blanchot:

'This is what any reading of poetry like that of Mallarme's presupposes. It imposes the momentary belief in the evident power of words, in their material value.. One instinctively believes that in poetry language reveals its true essence, which lies completely in the power to evoke, to call forth mysteries that it cannot express, to do what it cannot say, to create emotions or states that can not be represented.. in a word to be linked to profound existence by doing it rather than saying it.'

Purged of the pragmatic burden of representation, words are free to be incantatory; they perform actions - conjuring, summoning, commanding. The implicit dream - surely - is of a return to a kind of primitive magic. But it is not now a communal magic - unless we count those small esoteric societies, with their back room theatrics, that certain modern poets were drawn to. The new magic unfolds in the 'cell of pure inwardness'.

Blanchot quotes Valery thus:

'poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express."

A kiss or caress are not simply the representation of affects, they participate in those affects. A cry is not a representation of a feeling but a manifestation* - and an amplification - of that feeling. Its not that poetry aspires to actual sobs and grunts. Rather poetry aspires to have the same relation to being - that of pure emanation - as does a cry or tear. Once more words are wedded to things, not by force of representational accuracy, but by force of participation, or by themselves becoming thing-like.

But is not this spectre of 'lost materiality' generated retroactively by peculiarly modern linguistic usages. It is here one has to be (in the allotted space) some what of a vulgar materialist. For the world that modern poetry seeks to estrange itself from is surely one wherein language is commercially saturated, reduced to a pure means, empted and serviceable. Again, the argument is familiar - retreating from the degraded linguistic register of commerce, language clings to that is most irreducible in itself, re-discovers its specific weight and efficacy. It is this commercial register which produces the nostalgic dream of a language fat with being, still part and parcel of what it 'represents'. Hence the fascination with magic and conjuration - forms of language which are, as we would now say, performative, bringing into being or 'causing' that to which they 'refer.'

In the closed laboratory of the poem language has certain primitive rights restored to it, the evisceration of the word through commerce and instrumental reason is reversed. Poetry is an isolated cell of protest and a dream of Nondum. Indeed, it is no accident that years later the Situationists (Debord at least) would insist that their project was in effect to actualise modern poetry, to generalize this hermetic laboratory throughout society. Debord insisted on perceiving, in the microcosm of hermetic poetry, the germ cell of the total event.

cf Wittgenstein: 'A cry is not a description.. And the words 'I am afraid' may approximate, more or less, to being a cry'.