Poeta Doctus

Time constraints and temperament restrict many of my thoughts to remarks. Thus, what follows are emphatically fragments, metonymies (parts) of potentially more-extended discourses and drafts (essays) holding the promise of future elaboration….

“The greatest danger to the poem is the poetic.”—Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948). I would compose for those for whom these words demand no explanation…

“The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses…”: the emancipation of the senses, an aesthetic project…

“The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard of colour, an unheard of sound.”—Byung-Chul Han

Three from Jacques Lacan’s My Teaching (1967):

• “My teaching is in fact quite simply language, and absolutely nothing else,” 26.
• “The least we can ask might be for psychoanalysts to notice that they are poets,” 44.
• “The subject is what I define in the strict sense as an effect of the signifier,” 77.

The cosmos of the Metaphysical poem, whose principle relation is the “is” of metaphor is magical and ‘pataphysical, for every thing is soluble in the solution of language: metaphor is the ab-solute, for therein are all things soluble—But this cosmos is likewise a world of conditioned conditions, a chain or web of universal equivalence, a world of infinite replaceability, mirroring the commodity form (exchange value) and the Spinozist (non)system of sheer differance…

Metonymy, on the other hand, reinforces the individual, however much the metonym is merely a component in the context it evokes. Metonymy is holistic, but, at the same time, a site of resistance to the equivalence of the “is” of metaphor…

The environmental crisis determines all poetry as ecopoetry. It is the horizon of any and all poetry written now; all poems are therefore “about” this matter: it is their inescapable topos, even if their content is otherwise. That the climate is novel to the point that it renders earth a planet never before inhabited by Homo Sapiens also makes all poetry “avant garde”, cast into and for the future, both essentially (the past is passed and the present ephemeral) and especially now (e.g., the recent work of Jori Graham…).

Contemporary “theories of consciousness” are flights from real, material existence, dialectical compensations for the threat of extinction. The technological utopianism of the Singularity is an escape from “incarnation” (a self-deconstructing expression), while the dialectical other to its reductive identification of consciousness with functions of matter (and just here, consciousness-as-software overturns itself in the tacit dualism written into the hard/software distinction…) is the Analytic Idealism of Bernardo Kastrup or various panpsychisms, which again are negations or flights from the body, emodiment…