Notes on Kant and the Subject 2

One of the more interesting aspects of Kant's positing of the Subject is its perpetual condition of non-stasis, of motion. This subjectivity-as-moving target in human consciousness inheres, in Kant's schemas, because what he calls the unity of apperception (the cogito, "I think") must constantly re-position itself between levels one and two of his cognitive model (sensibility and understanding). The Subject, within his/her cognitions, interprets the manifold of intuitions drawn from spatial/temporally determined sensibility as a mode of vertical ascension into the formation of conceptions of the understanding as a function of judgment-within-understanding. In other words, the Subject inheres as a go-between for the functional interplay and interaction of levels one and two of the Kantian cognitive model. The point of interest here is the Subject's unrest, non-stasis; and what the significations of a non-static model of Subjects and subjectivity might be. As to the connection between the noumena and the unity of apperception (substance and Ego), as it is posited here- there arises a striking and superficially unlikely contradiction. The noumena, substance, causality accompanies the phenomenal appearance of objects but without being affected by their changing forms- in other words, substance/causality is not supposed to be subject to formal change. The unity of apperception, site/home-base of the Ego in human consciousness, does nothing but move, darting back and forth perpetually between cognitive levels. Thus, there must be a disjunct between the human Ego, as distinguished in human consciousness by Kant, and whatever of the noumena, substance, causality lies hidden behind the phenomenal appearances of interior or exterior temporally/spatially limited forms.

The posited disjunct between the human Ego and the noumena cannot be healed by any readily available connective cognitive tissue. It points back to an issue I raised in the first portion of these notes- whether there is a visible route towards secure belief in the noumena, as defined by Kant, or not. The route to solidifying the noumena, in the manner that Kant has solidified and consolidated the theoretical apparatuses of cognition itself, via his three-tiered model, is one which must first establish a secure relationship to this model- and the mystery inhering in how this might be done has to do with the incompatibility of states of rest and unrest, stasis and dynamism, implacable stillness and change.

Notes on Kant and the Subject

The split posited by Kant between phenomena and noumena, effects and causes, creates a strange kind of reductio ad absurdum around subjects and subjectivity. The subject, in Kant, owing to his/her phenomenal appearance in a world of things, is (exists/subsists) as phenomena and noumena, effect and cause- yet, self-reflection, originating from conceptions of the understanding (employing the Kantian cognitive model) reveals the subject (bound to the unity of apperception or cogito) to evince the ability to objectify his/her own consciousness as an object-in-itself, as phenomena and effect- yet this consciousness, inaccessible to others, constitutes the subject's substance/causality for all perceiving subjects other than itself; in other words, the noumena, the thing-in-itself, is also an object for the perceiving subject in whom it inheres- creating the aforementioned reductio ad absurdum when the dialectic, for logic, is around self-reflection and potentialities of the subject's self-knowledge. It leads to the ineluctable reflection, for the perceiving subject- is the noumena there at all; and, if it is, is it completely inaccessible even for the perceiving subject, owing to the constraints of sensibility and understanding?

In another fashion: is the noumena, the thing-in-itself (substance, causality) so merely a subsistent, rather than existent, entity, that what is behind phenomena/effects are a reductio ad absurdum of more effects, more phenomena, and substance impossible even to hypothesize; and, if what constitutes the noumena is subsistent matter (half perceptible/half imperceptible), why the noumena should be presupposed as anything (in our dialectics) but this posited chain of effects/phenomena, in terms of what is available to our understanding; and, if this is so, why Kant's distinction can never touch the subject in such a way that, through self-reflection, the noumena can be grasped or encompassed. In other words: the subject cannot necessarily merely be the noumena for other subjects, or for itself. As to whether subjects should project likeness onto other subjects- the sameness in human subjectivity, as judged by the phenomena of consistent human behavior, may be determinative of the dialectical necessity of a quantitative judgment on this level- of half-causes, half-noumena, half-substance; if Kant's conceptions are to address the empirical reality of human subjectivity to the fullest possible extent.

Notes on Keats 3

Keats' "Negative Capability" has become a lit-crit commonplace, so that scholars and readers forget the richness of its significations. To balance psycho-affective polarities without "irritably grasping after reason" (or principles, in the Kantian sense, which specifically suggests deductive reasoning and its sobriety, against the aesthetic) is one cognitive level Negative Capability accounts for; but the other question (which the Odes answer) is how polarities might be expressed in text in a negatively capable fashion. To achieve this end in the most spectacular possible fashion, Keats has recourse to dialects of sense/sensibility, initiated from a subjective stance of acknowledgement of the darkness of physical extinction, while maintaining affective vivacity in relation to his own psycho-affective processes- all the data being processed finds worthwhile and illustrative objective correlatives in what Keats opens textually. Keats' objective correlatives in the Odes- his nightingale, Grecian Urn, autumn, melancholy, and the rest- have a way of jolting his textual gambits up from sensibility to understanding and then (importantly, by induction rather than deduction) distilled/principled reason, not initially grasped for but floated up to gracefully and artfully.

The time/space coordinates projected by Keats onto his Odal objects create dynamic tensions which torque and transform depending on any given reader's subjectivity- the succession of vignettes in "Nightingale," in particular, create a warped sense of temporal textual succession, in which a succession of disappearances is enacted (the poet, the nightingale, the song, the state of consciousness and entire sensibility which illuminated the succession as a landscape, a forest scene), so that conventional space/time coordinates are replaced as the eruption of time zones is followed by dissolution of the same; and the conceptions which arise from this enactment, animated by the Odal objective correlatives, have to do with an essential mutability inhering in the congealed formal matter of Keats' subjectivity, which it is the unique province of major high art consonant poetry to reveal. This breach in time/space coordinates is explosive, spectacular, compulsively demonstrative; in short, Romantic; and that, the demonstration of psycho-affective mutability potentialities, is what Romanticism at its best brings to the philosophical table, against the conceptually grounded stability of the higher echelons of (philosophic/scientific) prose, their vistas onto human collectives.

The lyric poet, Adorno writes, is self-posited against society; and defines himself in relation to the entire human continuum of types which he is not; isolated by his (or her) capacity for mutability (on psycho-affective levels) and cognitive boundary-dissolution (into, presumably, transcendental realms once conventional frameworks are eliminated), but also ossified into a kind of stunted adolescence by his (or her) inability to view things plainly, and discern profound truth from illusion. That's why, though Keats' textual bravery exceeds Wordsworth's, and his confrontations with mortality are affecting, his appeal still lies in this inducement, often via prosody, of states of intoxication. If textual truth accords with textual beauty (to follow Grecian Urn through), Keats must fare relatively poorly next to philosophic prose, whose concerns and efforts wear more comfortably over long periods of time. Through this textual strainer, Keats' apogee of intoxication is assimilated and the central Romantic fallacy pierced through- that the dissolution of boundaries, psychic and otherwise, is commensurate with a kind of enlightenment, aesthetic or otherwise.

Notes on Keats 2

The ultimate edge Keats holds over Wordsworth- of strangeness, odd proportions, the uncanny, intriguing semantic juxtapositions, "heavenly prosody"- is especially apparent once the limitations of Wordsworth's system have defined themselves against textual systems which exceed it. The chiasmus of nature (natural forces) and the mind of man- how nature, once perceived in the most purified light (as, perhaps, a set of principles), imposes heightened cognition, understanding into distilled reason- must fall, once the acknowledgment is made that Wordsworth's system is just another mode of Romantic (at least semi-adolescent, in its projected narcissism) escapism. The escapist valve is towards a subjectively held and maintained psycho-affective transcendence, which the rigorous demands of human society, its labyrinthine, ineluctable complexities could easily disperse into the nothingness of raw sensibility again. The antithesis: an impulse towards understanding and distilled reason not merely as an escape, but as transcendence-via-direct engagement, not seeking understanding in the otherness of natural forces, or pronouncing facile, half-understood blessings on a human continuum falsely linked to natural forms employed as intoxicants. These forms subsist at a distance from human systematic reasoning, or attempts at such.

The manner in which Keats intoxicates himself (and the extent to which his intoxication is a simultaneous movement towards ecstasy and agony, fulfillment and denial, consummation and abandonment) is more grounded in human reality- especially, the confrontation between the human mind and physical mortality. The nature-cocaine Wordsworth imbibes is too much about living forever/eternal life- despite evident technical mastery and a prosaic style fluid, limpid, and complex enough to place the Prelude in proximity to Keats' Odes, Wordsworth's simplified thematic dynamics, and what about human reality is forced by his own systematic fronts to escape notice, relegates him to a position beneath Keats, whose textual bravery and boldness exceed his. Moreover, there are few angles from which the Odes do not appear strange- their formal-thematic angularity and balance of finely crafted and misshapen textual elements render them interesting for reasons past their vaunted Romantic passion, sincerity, and object-animating prosody. In other words, to understand Keats' Odes by the Kantian cognitive model (sensibility-understanding-reason) is to get caught on each level by a kind of camouflage which hides how the circuitry is connected, how it coheres to impose an impression of depth, solidity, inevitability, and formal gorgeousness.

Thus, the Odes for me are strangely fascinating and enduring- no less systematic than the Prelude, but the inscrutability of whose system makes the Odes seem to torque or twist each time they are encountered. That sense- that the Odes themselves have a manner of being sentient, evincing sentience- is unique in the canon of English-language poetry. It also has a way of making the Odes a kind of last word in poetic avant-gardism- because the Odes have inhering in them this strange, vibrant, oscillating light of change/dynamism, they cannot leave the cutting edge, no matter who then or later was or is cast up as standing in an aesthetic position of extremity and innovation. The contradiction- the Odes are largely about disappearances (on physical and metaphysical levels), yet they refuse to disappear- is their principle, and then the compelling power of strangeness, the glory/gorgeousness of the misshapen.

Notes on Keats

Keats, and what the phantasmagoric has to offer in coherence/complexity- the phantasmagoric being a mode of the visionary- Keats' phantasmagoric approach in "Nightingale" argues for the manifest complexity/density of mere subjectivity, and this argument is a critical commonplace in relation to Romanticism, but lifted into a kind of textual ether by a dazzling array of polarities, swimming in and out of textual focus. They all vie for predominance, generating friction which gives off an intense visceral heat, heightened by melopoeiac/prosodic mastery, into a sense of the text as a juggernaut or conflagration, an intense, sustained, and burning moment. This is the unique province of major high art consonant poetry over prose. The momentary nature of the lyric poem- maximum coherence/maximum complexity as an inspiration, in and out, and over- has, as its principle, and as Keats noticed himself, intensity as its signature virtue against prose and other forms of literature. Why the Odes establish Keats as an almost peerless lyric poet is that when a phantasmagoric edge is added to cognitive-affective intensity, the lyric poem creates a map of creative cognitive consciousness which prose, for all its expansive objectivity and perspective adumbration, cannot.

Phantasmagoric vistas, the romanticism of extreme momentary intensity- in short, genuine poetry- the principle to achieve these effects is inclusion, movements towards things (material and cognitive) and embraces of them. Wordsworth enacts the same textual process, even in his semi-objective Prelude. Prose writers are compelled by other imperatives- yet, genuine cognitive ascension towards profound understanding and solid principles is more fulfilled by the objectivity of the non-romantic plain glance. Ultimately, the two approaches don't need to negate each other- the 60-40 advantage I give to objectivity and prose (especially in relation to philosophy and science) owes to the inaccessible nature of real intensity in the human world, and the Odes especially are such rare birds that they cannot age completely gracefully over the larger, more imposing realities of human life as they manifest, and permanently so, and as consciousness ages towards understanding of sense past sensibility and the allure of the momentary and its phantasmagoria.

Getting Arcane : More Apparition Poems

Towards the end of the composition of Apparition Poems, there was a serious fire three doors down from me (I lived in apartment 408) in Westminster Arch. It happened in the early morning hours, when (it so happens) I liked to write. I heard the alarm, and wandered into my hallway— it was filled with smoke. I was in a numbed-out enough writing-trance not to notice too much, and calmly found my way down the stairwell four floors to the lobby. Shortly, the whole building was in the lobby in their pajamas, as a squad of firemen entered Westminster Arch with their axes. It turns out that the guy, my neighbor, had left a candle burning overnight, and somehow the flame had latched onto something else. The apartment in question was absolutely gutted; nothing left standing, everything charred. The firemen were compelled to force my door open and open my windows to fumigate the fourth floor. There is a punchline to this story— the firemen wedged my door open with a copy of Coleridge's Biographia. Interestingly, some Londoners did wind up finding the book incendiary.

By the day of the fire, I was using some pretty arcane methods to loosen myself up creatively. One of my tricks that January and February was what I called the "pile of books" trick. Because my bookshelves were directly to the left of my desk and desktop, which led to a window and an unflattering fourth-floor view of 23rd Street sloping upwards to intersect with Market Street, I thought it would be interesting to attempt this kind of serendipitous composition. I would select books semi-randomly, speed-read a page of them, then compose. This was especially helpful when I made the decision to do a run of Apps which directly addressed philosophy and philosophical issues, Kierkegaard being one of my more frequent choices: 

Follow Abraham up the hill:
to the extent that the hill is
constituted already by kinds
of knives, to what extent can
a man go up a hill, shepherd
a son to be sacrificed, to be
worthy before an almighty
power that may or may not
have had conscious intentions

where hills, knives, sons were
concerned, but how, as I watch
this, can I not feel that Abraham,
by braving knives, does not need
the one he holds in his rapt hands?

On the other side of things, I dared descend to the homely Amer-Lit of Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace to retrieve this nugget:

Here’s where shifts (red shifts)
happen in perspective, I thought,
slopping dark meat onto my plate,
here’s where angles converge to
put me past the nest. General
laughter over pictures, womb-
like spaces, but I was in hers as
I was in with them. It hurts, but
he’s dead, I never met him. It’s
a shame, I never met him. Blood
moves through air: between her,
me, them— leaves on concrete.

This brain-shattering, Gysin-like compositional technique is one I have not dared to employ since Apparition Poems. The Cheltenham Elegies and The Posit Trilogy are too specific, too goal-directed, even in the tiniest of their specific parts, to allow anything this loose or free-ranging to enter, even as they reprise a mise en scene of what I call visionary deadness. It is also the case that Apparition Poems' manner of being tight but loose is closer to the expansiveness of the epic form, initiated in Greece, than anything else I've written; which is why I like to call the book an epic of fragments.  A representatively American epic, and an edgy one, in the wonted manner of post-avant (or noir): something singular. 

Also back in February '10, I arranged with Matt Stevenson to do an Apparition Poems video, and record some Apparition Poems to send as mp3s to PennSound, at the Eris Temple in West Philly. The Eris Temple is so located (52nd and Cedar) that it hinges, from West Philly, on North Philly, and the neighborhood is a dangerous one. We shot the video in the Temple's front room, with its east-facing facade, high white coffered ceiling, and derelict/ghetto ambiance. I was still into wearing the flannel I'd picked up in New Hampshire in '05 (thanks Jon Anderson for the ride to the Concord Wal-Mart) with the little scarf I'd found at Barnes and Noble in the early Aughts. This was still a remnant of Aughts Philadelphia— no make-up was applied, and the video was a first-take, as were (mostly) the mp3s. Matt and I were still on friendly terms— but there already wasn't much from my Aughts Philadelphia life left standing. And then came Jacket.

Aughts Philly : The Missing Year

I watched President Obama’s victory speech from Dirty Frank’s at 13th and Pine with a few friends. It was quiet in the bar; you could’ve heard a pin drop; and I was anticipating something, and someone, extraordinary. We all were; and when all we got was a bunch of tired, crass, generalized clichés, we made (I noticed then) a silent collective decision not to notice it. Broad Street was crazy that night— everyone was out celebrating. Aughts Philly had its levels of oddity and irony, one of which was that, for all our joie de vivre, the Republican regime in control of Washington and its attendant media juggernaut was a continual, joy-inhibiting bummer for us. Obama was supposed to deliver us into a new, politically liberated era; yet, that November night in ’08, I feared the worst— that we were looking at a different version of the same corruption and complacency, and that the change which had come to America was none at all. Obama, indeed, was perfunctory that night; and Dirty Frank’s and Broad Street were perfunctory for me, too. It was the culminating moment of my, and our, strangest Aughts year (2008); one which passed without a sense of distinction, and with a sense of Aughts Philly in general drifting out of focus and towards the sense of stalemate which ushered in the Teens. If I linger on 2008 now, it’s because I’m fascinated by my own inability to pin it down, define it, give it a determinate shape the way I can all the other Aughts years, including the 2009 which followed from it.

Among other things, it is the year I came closest to actual alcoholism (thus catching up, finally, to Mike, Nick, and Jeremy); my life at Temple was so full of drudgery and thankless compromises that just to get through the nights which followed the days, I’d have to knock back several Jack and Cokes. Some of the pictures taken of me at the time show me looking uncharacteristically soggy and fish-faced. When I moved, that summer, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch, it was a down-sized and down-sizing move; the new flat had low ceilings, an unpleasant view of parking lots, and I felt claustrophobic in it. Mary and I had broken up again in late ’07; yet we couldn’t get out of each other’s pockets, and when she showed her Eden portrait of us at PAFA that spring, I was very proud. I was also amused that the portrait seemed to suggest me on solid, balanced ground and Mary falling all over herself— that’s not how I felt. Abs was still showing on First Fridays and elsewhere, but she was off my radar at the time— I hadn’t yet noticed that she’d transformed herself into a first-rate artistic genius. She was also, I later discovered, flailing on other levels. Jeremy had disowned me completely— and when he began a reading series in ’08 called Toiling in Obscurity with some U of Arts foundlings, and affixed the tag-line even our minor accomplishments are overshadowed by our utter anonymity, I could sense there was a strange and ghastly crescendo issuing from all Philly Free School sides. Jenny Kanzler consolidated all these snafus in my conversations with her then. The essential snafu being, of course, rock-solid in its axiomatic regularity— that the enterprise of being a creative individual in the crass, material world, is a painful one, romance being beset as it is on all sides by squalor. 

When I think of my own 2008 as a complete gestalt entity, including risky (and confrontational) affairs I had going at the time, I think of Aughts Philly starting to go cock-eyed. Yet, everyone was still in the bars and in the streets, and a sense of isolation didn’t seem to be a problem, quite. 2008 was my first adult “bridge year,” with, in it, a sense of the liminal and of blinkered confusion. I wrote Chimes as I was moving that summer, in a great deal of emotional pain from the necessity of reliving my childhood, and with a sense of foreboding about what awaited me at Temple that fall. The White Album, also written at this time, showcased the funnier, Rabelaisian facet of all the grunginess, while Rubber Soul reveled in drunkenness. When autumn arrived, Otoliths was putting out When You Bit... and, as usual for that era, the reaction online was intense, while the crooked, vituperative Philly poetry scene continued to cold-shoulder me. That Philadelphia poetry world— of clowns, impostors, and henchmen— was not intriguing to me on any level. In terms of quality of work produced, you don't get any more effete or half-assed as they were then. Or anti-historical, or impersonal. The world of no gifted individuals started at home with them, for sure. I was, as of '08, still having better poetry luck with Chicago, both online and in the flesh. Poetry Chicago was more for real then. The stint I did at Loyola that summer is a case in point. 

One night that May, on returning to Logan Square from a reading in South Philly, I was mugged at gunpoint, and had my wallet stolen. My assailant actually stuck the pistol into my ribcage— yet, I had an intuition he wouldn’t shoot me. The whole year was cock-eyed— I even (if you can believe this) saw an identifiably angelic being on 21st Street one July afternoon. If ’08 needs to be remembered distinctly for how non-distinct it was in the run of major Aughts Philly years, its because the weird evanescent character it has will remain frozen forever in what we created and disseminated that year, along with ricochets back of what has already been released. The most important facet of ’08 for me personally is that it is the last of my Mary years— one in which we were together, at least in spirit. After ’08, we kept in touch, but things could never be the same again between us. To see that cycle of death and rebirth turning, with some hindsight, is as terrible and beautiful as it was to live the agonies, ecstasies, and convulsions of the first time through.