The Intellectual Gauge

forthcoming in Emerging Possibilities, eds. Elizabeth Bonapfel and Alexander Hennig (Leiden: Brill) The Intellectual Gauge Adam Katz “That those which are not are in a way, it has to be, if anyone is ever going to be even a little bit wrong.” —Plato, the Sophist1 This essay identifies a tradition of American poets for whom metaphysical inquiry is the condition of possibility of vital poetic form. The essay further considers ways in which such poets’ social politics may undercut such inquiry, and thus such form. The essay meditates on how, in Plato’s late dialogue the Sophist, nonbeing and untruth in turn constitute the conditions of possibility of metaphysical inquiry. The essay uses this dark metaphysics of the Sophist to frame the differences between the metaphysical visions and thus aesthetics of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Gertrude Stein on the one hand, and Fred Moten on the other. Human beings on Earth make art out of words, and words are by nature abstract. With the possible exception of proper names, each word comprehends a range of possible referents. The word cool, in itself, expresses all cool things. The word breeze has a similarly broad connotation. The phrase cool breeze specifies a narrower subset of existence, while holding in reserve the full intensions of both of its terms. Poetry mobilizes phraseology’s vast penumbra of dormant reference as a resonance chamber for intensifying specifications to the point of animating a network of copies of poems in the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), initially a teacher and preacher in Antebellum Massachusetts, sought to found a uniquely American poetics on “[t]he perception of […] ideal affinities,” which make it possible for breezes to be cool, for poetry (as in my previous sentence) to be like a violin, and for literal to be like metaphorical usage (as in this sentence).2 To Emerson, “the poet 1 Plato, Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 240e. Thanks to Dale Smith for conversations in which some of this essay’s ideas emerged. 2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Essays and Poems, eds. Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane (New York: Library of America, 1996), 36. [email protected] 2 communicates the same pleasure” as philosophical “attention upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, upon Ideas,”3 words’ abstract “natures,” in whose realm “affinities” abide. In a later work, Emerson calls Ideas and affinities “identity” and “reaction,” and writes that “[t]he perception of these laws is a kind of metre of the mind.”4 This remark reinforces the contextual indications that, when Emerson writes in “The Poet” that “it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,” he has in mind one specific kind of argument, which we might call metaphysical, as the mindframe and content that is poetic form’s condition of possibility.5 For poetry to be possible, metaphysics, a discourse not of things but of their identities and affinities, must be possible, as Emerson writes, “prior.”6 + Poetry’s condition of possibility is alethic, but its criteria of success are aesthetic, as Emerson notes in his remark that poetry shares philosophy’s “pleasure.”7 For some reason, however, Emerson’s ideas “will not,” in George Oppen’s (1908–84) words, “substantiate themselves in the concrete materiality of the poem.”8 Emerson’s poetry lacks the scintillation of his prose. He was a popular poet in his day, but Whitman (1819–92) and Dickinson (1830–86) have eclipsed him because, unlike them, he does not use ideas to pressure and transform poetic form. By his own logic, this points to an error in his metaphysics. One cannot overstate the the metaphysical mindframe’s prevalence as the “horizon note” of Emerson’s writings.9 According to Stanley Cavell (1926–2018), Emerson’s difference from other philosophical writing is, I think, that it asks the philosophical mood so purely, so incessantly, giving one little other intellectual amusement or eloquence or 3 Ibid., 34, 37. Emerson, “The Uses of Great Men,” in Essays and Poems, 622-3. 5 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Essays and Poems, 450. 6 Ibid. 7 Again, Nature, 34. 8 George Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” in Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: U of Cali P, 2007), 32. 9 Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” in New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1992), 72. 4 [email protected] 3 information, little other argument or narrative, and no other source of companionship or importance, either political or religious or moral, save the importance of philosophy, of thinking itself.10 Yet Emerson is aware that a discourse of Ideas and affinities, identity and reaction, or categories and relations is not an alternative to living among things, but rather constitutes a system of classification for the world as we live it. Metaphysics only exists as an advancement of, and must therefore remain adequate to, what we might call physics: “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.”11 Emerson’s error might lie in what he thinks comprises this “common.” He wants “to see the miraculous in” “[t]he meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body […] the shop, the plough, and the leger. […]”12 More than a century later, the late modernist American poet Robert Duncan (1919– 1988) flagged what lists like Emerson’s “excluded”: “The female, the lumpen-proletariat, the foreign; the animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure. […]”13 Focusing on the first item on Duncan’s corrective list, we should note that Emerson’s zeal for “the near, the low, the common […] the familiar,” which he calls “a great stride,” does not, though he namechecks “the meaning of household life,” extend to the domestic and affective labor into which patriarchy conscripts women.14 In a note on wastes of time, he writes, “We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations. […]”15 These privileges of forgetting, solitude, and sanity are evidently not enough, or perhaps too much, to reveal to Emerson the problem with statements such as that “the manly contemplation of the 10 Stanley Cavell, “An Emerson Mood,” in Emerson's Transcendental Etudes (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 27. Nature, 47. 12 Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Poems, 69. 13 Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book, eds. Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman (Berkeley: U of Cali P, 2011), 154. 14 “The American Scholar,” 68-9. 15 Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays and Poems, 492. 11 4 [email protected] whole” is alone not “unpoetic.”16 It is illogical to call contemplating the whole, which means putting one’s particular combination of affinities in relation to everything one is not, by a name of one’s particularity, such as “manly,” unless one works to reinscribe that name, something that Emerson does not attempt. + In this context we can hear the resonances of Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) question, “Also there is why is it that in this epoch the only real literary thinking has been done by a woman.”17 “Literary thinking” is an apt term for the kind of abstract content that, according to Emerson, “makes a poem.” Stein does not introduce the same error into this “thinking” by calling it womanly. Instead, she draws attention to Emerson’s error by asking how, were it essentially manly, could it have “been done by a woman.” The plural verb in Stein’s statement “The human mind write” expresses the impersonality of the faculty that she thinks does literary thinking and thus produces poetry.18 She rigorously opposes this to the personal, “human nature.” Even animals are capable of such personal identity: it is what the dog “knows” in the phrase “I am I because my little dog knows me” which Stein adapts from Mother Goose19 and meditates on throughout The Geographical History of America and its coda, “What Are Master-pieces.” Thus “human nature is just the same as any animal nature and so it has nothing to do with the human mind.”20 Above all, as Stein never tires of reiterating in The Geographical History, human nature is “not interesting.” But just as for Emerson “metre-making” metaphysics must be a way of framing the physical, so for Stein “master-pieces have to use” “the subject of human nature […] to become existing.”21 The way that the human mind can do this without stooping to human nature’s level is by disabling 16 Nature, 43. Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, in Writings 1932-1946, eds. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 472. 18 Ibid., 399. 19 Ulla Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923-1934 (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003), 551n20. The phrase appears in several of her works from the early to mid ’30s. 20 The Geographical History, 407. 21 Stein, “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them,” in Writings 1932-1946, 359. 17 5 [email protected] human nature’s constitutive faculty of memory and recognition, what the dog uses to “know” who its owner is and what the brain uses “to complete the whole” from a necessarily partial set of visual perspectives.22 The cubist painter, Stein’s analogue for the writer,23 must “make a picture of” only this incomplete set.24 + Whereas Emerson’s indifference to female experience may have enervated his poetry by compromising his “contemplation of the whole,” Stein’s antipathy toward blackness warps her cubistic “attempt to express [precisely the] things which are there,” suggesting that her revolutionary poetry could have gone farther.25 She is one of the key chroniclers of cubism’s emergence. It happened on her watch and, at least by her own account, in dialogue with her ideas. Her dismissal, relative to other accounts, of African art’s role in the transformation is troubling. She acknowledges African sculpture as an intellectual26 and formal27 precursor of cubism, and she writes that her close friend Picasso’s (1881–1973) “intensive struggle which was to end in cubism” began in early 1906 with his portrait of her,28 but she wants to establish his 1909 trip to Horta de Ebro in Spain as the definitive inception. She points to the likeness between his landscapes and photographs of that period as proof that cubism began as merely the “realistic” expression of how, unlike “[t]he architecture of other countries…Spanish architecture always cuts the lines of the landscape.”29 Thus “cubism is a purely spanish conception. […]”30 22 Stein, Picasso, in Writings 1932-1946, 507. “I was expressing the same thing in literature….” Ibid., 508. 24 Ibid., 507. 25 Ibid., 522. 26 Ibid., 507. 27 Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Writings 1903-1932, eds. Stimpson and Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 723. 28 Ibid., 714. 29 Picasso, 502, 513. 30 Toklas, 754. 23 6 [email protected] Picasso’s paintings of Horta de Ebro, however, diverge from his corresponding photographs in important ways.31 Meanwhile, his packing list for this trip included binders full of African women.32 According to Anne Baldassari (1955–), “a decisive step toward Analytic cubism” was Picasso’s “grafting” together “borrowings”33 from such photographs of how Africans adorned and carried themselves, during what Stein calls his “negro period, 1907.”34 Yet in the face of cubism’s complex origins, Stein is comfortable asserting that African art was a “diver[sion]” and a “crutch” that tried to “deceive[]” Picasso.35 Black culture was also more than a “diversion” for Stein’s own formal breakthrough. Her long story “Melanctha,” which she calls “the beginning of her revolutionary work” and even “the first definitive step away from the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century in literature,” achieves its stylistic distinction, readers’ first real taste of Stein’s signature idiom, in large part through the all-black cast repeatedly exhorting each other by name.36 Stein hints that she was imitating the speech patterns of the black women whose babies she delivered while enrolled at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.37 According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1950–), “‘Naming’ someone and ‘Calling [someone] Out of [his] name’ are among the most commonly used tropes in Afro-American vernacular discourse.”38 In “Poetry and Grammar,” Stein’s screed against the noun, she carves out an exception for proper names and claims that proper naming leads “natural[ly]” and “inevitably” to repetition.39 There is a case to be made that she found her voice, which is repetitive enough that many readers “thought it was repetition,” by appropriating the genius of black vernacular.40 31 Anne Baldassari, Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror, trans. Deke Dusinberre (Paris: Flammarion; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997), 74. 32 Suzanne Preston Blier, “Africa and Paris: The Art of Picasso and His Circle,” in David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The Impact of Africa (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014), 85-6. 33 Baldassari, 45. 34 Picasso, 505. 35 Ibid., 510, 521. 36 Toklas, 742, 714. 37 Toklas, 742. See also James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Praeger, 1974), 44, 71. 38 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988), 87. Brackets in original. 39 Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Lectures in America, in Writings 1932-1946, 316, 329. 40 Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures, 295. 7 [email protected] Stein’s captivating self-theorization thinks nothing of this because she does not think that black people have their own culture. She recalls telling Paul Robeson (1898–1976) that she “did not like hearing him sing spirituals [because t]hey do not belong to you any more than anyone else.”41 She downplays Picasso’s debt by asserting that African sculpture is itself “derived from Arab culture.”42 Otherwise, she wastes no opportunity to disparage black people’s cultural contributions. Jazz, for example, like other regressive performance, “makes you nervous,” and is moreover “violent” about it.43 Emerson’s misogyny and Stein’s racism conform to and reinforce norms that undermine women’s and people of color’s safety and full societal participation. Precisely because these attitudes were unexceptional at the time of writing, they constitute conditions of impossibility for the authors’ poetics of transcending “partial[ity]”44 and “habits.”45 + What is a different way that an author who draws a line from metaphysics-style speculation to poetry could handle the unavoidable contention with his or her own particularity? Where Emerson and Stein presume the universality of masculinity or whiteness, the contemporary poet and thinker Fred Moten (1962–) makes an explicit case for blackness’s metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical “access.” He writes that, in view of “the brutally imposed difficulties of black life,” “[b]lack people are poor in the world,” and that “this worldly poverty […] is manifest in a kind of poetic access to what it is of the other world that remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized in this one.”46 Moten substantiates this claim by reinscribing blackness, in its poverty (more technically, “political death” or epistemic death47), as a name of the “other world” or first principle. Thus 41 Toklas, 894. Picasso, 512. See also Toklas, 723. 43 Stein, “Plays,” in Lectures, 245. 44 “The American Scholar,” 62. 45 Picasso, 528. 46 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4 (Fall 2013), 742, 776. 47 Ibid., 739, 741. 42 8 [email protected] renamed, the first principle is no longer simply that of which ultimately poverty is poor, but also paradoxically the basis or explanation of its own “brutally imposed” absconsion: “blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology […] it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground. […]”48 This nonbeing of all being, “centrifugitivity” of every circle,49 itself reinscribes the Steinian human mind’s constitutive relation to essence, “what it is is all that it is. […]”50 Reinscribing blackness as the first principle enables “a theory of the universal machine”51 insofar as “immersion” in blackness now doubles as what I will argue that, pace Moten’s precise deconstruction, we can still call metaphysics.52 Moten connects blackness’s “political death” with “a radical relegation to the social,”53 and writes in a poem, “What I want to say is that having something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life,”54 where “tru[th]” both retains connotations of correspondence and, superordinate to “say[ing]” “something,” models black “immersion” on monogamous devotion. Further along this methodological discourse, Moten is candid that the “ante-foundation” called blackness is “somehow given for thought by way of some kind of spooky action at a distance. […]”55 He seems to have Derrida (1930–2004) (in addition to Einstein) in mind, but Moten’s advanced textual strategy and its appropriately paradoxical object also suggest Plato’s late dialogue the Sophist (360BC) as a resource for extending the speculations that absorb the poets we have looked at. We do not have to leave the metaphysical tradition to find a version of it that answers Derrida’s reservations.56 48 Ibid., 739. Moten, “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings,” in consent not to be a single being, Volume 1: Black and Blur (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), 91. 50 The Geographical History, 399. 51 “Blackness and Nothingness,” 742. 52 Moten, “Entanglement and Virtuosity,” in Black and Blur, 272. 53 “Blackness and Nothingness,” 740. 54 Moten, “it’s not that I want to say,” in The Service Porch (Tucson: Letter Machine Editions, 2016), 98. 55 “Blackness and Nothingness,” 749. 56 See Adam Katz, “There’s Difference and Then There’s Difference,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48:4 (2017). 49 9 [email protected] Something or someone must “make[] our souls believe [… t]hat those which are not are […] if anyone is ever going to be even a little bit wrong.”57 A certain kind of the being of nonbeing, and logos’s “association with” it, are the Platonic forms that are the conditions of possibility for not all discourse being true, and therefore for philosophy or metaphysics being a kind of discourse whose truth makes it exceptional.58 If Emerson, Stein, and Moten are right that it is this exceptional discourse that “makes a poem” or when “access[ed]” amounts to the “poetic,” then Moten and the Sophist elaborate that it is a “spooky” “tru[th],”59 conditional upon nonbeing, wrongness, and association. Moten’s phrase “poetic access” raises the question of whether poetry is merely a technique for fortifying a hierarchy that truth, however remodeled, still dominates. Truth is good, but not necessarily the criterion of success even of a poetics that takes truth as sufficient condition. Emerson hesitantly avers that the poet “proposes Beauty as his main end.”60 Stein frequently appeals to the value of liveliness, and calls a master-piece “an end in itself.”61 Moten dodges such aesthetic and tautological formulations when he writes that the “black thought” that we have followed “animates the black operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the absolute turning of this motherfucker out.”62 In a like vein, the Boston occult school poet John Wieners (1934–2002), who according to Duncan reinscribes addiction like Moten does blackness,63 aligns himself with poets who do not “seem to care for the division between expression and excessive actuality.”64 Wieners concurs with Emerson, Stein, and Moten that what Emerson calls an “argument” and Stein calls “literary thinking”65 is the active ingredient in or condition of possibility of the “excessive” accomplishment 57 Sophist 240d-e. Sophist 261a1. 59 Again, “it’s not that I want to say,” 98. 60 Nature, 36. 61 “What Are Master-pieces,” 358. 62 “Blackness and Nothingness,” 742. 63 Duncan, “‘Taking Away from God His Sound’: John Wieners’ Ace of Pentacles and The Hotel Wentley Poems,” The Nation, May 31, 1965, 596. 64 John Wieners, “A Talk with John Wieners,” interview by Robert von Hallberg, Chicago Review 26:1 (1974), 113. 65 Again, The Geographical History 472, 476, 479. 58 10 [email protected] that is poetic form: when asked “what principles…govern your own rhythms?” he replied, “The gauge is intellectual.”66 66 “A Talk with John Wieners,” 114. [email protected] 11 Works Cited Baldassari, Anne. Picasso and Photography: The Dark Mirror. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Flammarion; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997. Blier, Suzanne Preston. “Africa and Paris: The Art of Picasso and His Circle.” David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The Impact of Africa. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. Cavell, Stanley. “An Emerson Mood.” Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. Duncan, Robert. The H.D. Book. Edited by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. Berkeley: U of Cali P, 2011. —. “‘Taking Away from God His Sound’: John Wieners’ Ace of Pentacles and The Hotel Wentley Poems.” The Nation, May 31, 1965. Dydo, Ulla. Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises, 1923-1934. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2003. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” Essays and Poems. Edited by Joel Porte, Harold Bloom, and Paul Kane. New York: Library of America, 1996. —. “Experience.” Essays and Poems. —. Nature. Essays and Poems. —. “The Poet.” Essays and Poems. —. “The Uses of Great Men.” Essays and Poems. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. Katz, Adam. “There’s Difference and Then There’s Difference.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48:4 (2017). Levertov, Denise. “Some Notes on Organic Form.” New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992. Mellow, James R. Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Praeger, 1974. Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112:4 (Fall 2013). [email protected] 12 —. “Entanglement and Virtuosity.” consent not to be a single being, Volume 1: Black and Blur. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. —. “The New International of Rhythmic Feel/ings.” Black and Blur. —. “it’s not that I want to say.” The Service Porch. Tucson: Letter Machine Editions, 2016. Oppen, George. “The Mind’s Own Place.” Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers. Edited by Stephen Cope. Berkeley: U of Cali P, 2007. Plato. Sophist. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Writings 1903-1932. Edited by Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. —. The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind. Writings 1932-1946. Edited by Stimpson and Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. —. Picasso. Writings 1932-1946. —. “Plays.” Lectures in America, in Writings 1932-1946. —. “Poetry and Grammar.” Lectures in America. —. “Portraits and Repetition.” Lectures in America. —. “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.” Writings 1932-1946. Wieners, John. “A Talk with John Wieners.” Interview by Robert von Hallberg. Chicago Review 26:1 (1974). 13 Index terms: poetics metaphysics cubism Plato Ralph Waldo Emerson Stanley Cavell Robert Duncan Gertrude Stein Picasso Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Fred Moten Jacques Derrida John Wieners ?(Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson George Oppen Denise Levertov Anne Baldassari Paul Robeson Suzanne Preston Blier Ulla Dydo) [email protected]