Notes on Milton Pt. 3

Applying a Deconstructive critical approach to Milton, and ascribing to Paradise Lost a certain opacity, takes from Milton what is almost invariably attributed to him- the textual rectitude of a "true Englishman," whose earnest directness and moral-ethical fortitude behind earnest textuality does not preclude complexity and nuance. Involving Milton in a French sensibility, its perversity around issues of formal-thematic side-winding and general destabilization, is in many ways a more interesting theoretical approach to an artist too long left parochial now that the twenty-first century is underway. The Aughts did not, to my knowledge, include a convincing apostrophe of Milton from the avant-garde elite; a perceived parochialism, both in Milton and in his entrenched critics, may have been the reason. The Aughts, in a general sense, were Edenic for many of us; we had leave to cherish our Satanic voices (Silliman, Bernstein, and the rest) as foils, forcing us to sharpen our rhetorical wedges and employ them in the most dramatic possible contexts to highlight our own aesthetic rectitude within innovation, its perpetual upheavals, and the meta-narratives of the time we developed, in the comprehensive manner of Raphael and Michael.

The level flatness of the Teens is richer terrain from which to begin a new approach to Milton. What we had of Paradise has been lost- the avant-garde has no real momentum left to progress in any coherent direction, many of its leading Aughts lights are missing in action, and to light a textual candle in the direction of possible momentum now is to be left stranded and derelict. To Frenchify Milton- to point out seams which show in Milton's staunch textual rectitude- is an act loomed over by a zeitgeist which takes for granted that a drastic recession will force seams to show, both in present moments and in interactions with the English-language canon, willly-nilly. Our Satanic mentors (again, Bernstein, Silliman, etc) scoffed as they plummeted from the Heaven of historical awareness and consonance, and not only subjected canonicity to radical interrogations but adopted rhetorical positions against the canon and canonicity in (as is the case with Milton's Satan) face disfiguring fashion. We listened; and one reason I, personally, did not believe is that (as I intuited) the canon is the only rock to fall back on when a zeitgeist party ends. I would challenge the notion that any serious student of literature could fall back on a Bernstein or a Silliman text in 2014; and the Stygian Council of Language and New York School poets will only live forever beneath the proverbial earth. The Frenchification of Milton is more than a mere past-time- it takes the aggregate of our Aughts theoretical influences and places them within the rich textual history of seduction, salvation, and damnation. By forcing friction, against a zeitgeist stalemated between venues and impulses, it may take us into a realm (again) of ferment-within-destabilization, so that we might again fight the Heavenly battles which were, and remain, our due in the avant-garde.

Notes on Milton Pt. 2

On repeated readings of Paradise Lost, an edge emerges, one of internal contradiction- by including apostrophes to classical antiquity, and its pagan Gods and heroes, Milton creates a space for himself in his own text less comfortable and more contradictory than is usually supposed by readers and scholars. This space, its darkling hint of distance and alienation, renders suspect aspects of the text, such as Milton's misogyny, more open to interpretation and less "owned" on a first-person narrative level as Milton's own. Milton's misogyny, in fact, may not be what it appears to be at all- merely a faithful representation of something imparted to him, rather than a closely guarded thematic shibboleth of a more ideal state of human affairs (Eden, the Edenic). How Milton is willing to posit himself- both as an aggregate of textual traditions and representative of an occupied middle space or ground- takes the Biblical myth of Eden and Man's fall and regularly, at intervals, destabilizes it, placed among other myths, other histories, other modes of narrative, textual, and, within textual, formal-thematic awareness. Once we view Paradise Lost as a destabilizing agent, we are prepared to acknowledge that the parallelism between Milton, behind his text, and Milton's Satan within his text, is very acute, and both Milton and Milton's Satan employ direct and indirect rhetoric to destabilize conventions and the enactment and non-enactment of "obedience," in both general and specific senses.

The profanity of pagan Gods, both their exploits and the manner in which they are worshiped- Milton's quest for an aesthetic ideal, "ideal textuality," necessitates that he include apostrophes in their direction. The implicit suggestion is that Milton's aesthetic quest is, and must be, commensurate with his quest both to represent, and embody within the confines of textual creation, spiritual purity. Paradise Lost is thus aligned with both an art-aesthetic history and a strictly spiritual, or spiritualized, one- and Milton prefigures Keats by the exercise of Negative Capability within this duality. Milton knows, of course, that his eventual audience will be more artists than spiritualists, and that he will receive his verified ranking as an artist, rather than as a sage- so that the dissolution of his constitutive subjectivity into unresolved binaries, hewn together by dedicated force and aesthetic intent, delivers him into a textual consummation whose opacity is, and must be, irretrievable, against the hermeneutic impulse to valorize Milton as a purity-signifier, which he is not. The sense of bifurcated intentionality is very prevalent in Paradise Lost- as is the irony that one literal, concrete "paradise lost" by the author is the paradise of fulfilling singular intentions in a singular (as in not multiple) fashion.

Notes on Milton Pt. 1

There exists for me an amusing connection and chiasmus between Milton’s Satan, Stygian Council and the remainder of his infernal crew and the malignant forces in twentieth century America which have propelled us off a precipice into this drastic recession. What light Lucifer carries with him into Chaos and beneath renders him, perhaps, still one third angel; thus, the efficacy of his rhetoric and its subtle variations, stratagem, and twists. What Satans twentieth century America produced were bimbos in comparison, sans “angelic third,” also producing rhetoric and strategies but in so crass, reductive, and barbaric a fashion that we in the twenty-first century could laugh, if not forced to bear the weight of the collective forgeries and mutilations. Since we have not lost Paradise but the simulacrum of Paradise, our task is to begin the construction of an Edenic space for ourselves (as artists, as dialecticians) from the ruins of a now-revealed, quite totalized charnel ground; whatever Angelic Third now remains in America’s inhabitants needs to find a manner and means of developing, extending, and exercising itself; a tall order, and the work of several decades, at least.

That both Milton’s Heaven and his Hell are overrun with bureaucrats and red-tape protocols is also a source of wry amusement to me. As is not often pointed out, God develops his own strategies in the tasks he delegates in different directions; and his omniscience must be balanced by the imperative to exist in the same time/space coordinates that everyone else does. This impossible existence-within-omniscience makes of Milton’s God as beleaguered a presence, in some ways, as his Satan. Milton’s God is a suffering God, an immaculate artist forced into reckoning the free will and imperfections of his creations. Undercurrents in Paradise Lost suggest that God is cognizant almost upon his creation that Man must fall, and thus Satan partially triumph over him; and God, with the help of his son, scrambles to make plans accordingly. Procedures with bureaucracy and red tape shield him from the direct, painful glare of his own failure as creator, ruler, and sustainer.

One wonders: what culmination would attend the spectacle of Adam refusing to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge once Eve eats, and falls? Would God “take Eve out,” and replace her with a new Eve? Would he create a palimpsest over Woman generally? Perhaps, Eve remaining, God would be forced to configure a plan of action around half-fallen Man; a race then granted partial access to Eden, requiring the half-intervention of God’s Son, and mired in the half-life of the half-disobedient. A story with this resolution (the Choose Your Own Adventure of Milton, as it were) would make for an interesting half-epic; less sturm und drang, less pathos, more banality and even a hinge to the drollery and insouciance of Swift and Swiftean satire.

Notes on Kant and the Subject 3

For Kant, the noumena is cloaked in mystery- and his cognitive model forces him, against his own judgmental capacities, into a contradictory conceptual position. He assumes that there are universals inhering in human consciousness, beyond his own consciousness, while also stipulating implicitly that assuming universality is both necessary for discourse and contradictory to his own premises about the inaccessibility of the noumena, behind phenomenal appearances. What the systems of organized religion, and some systems of philosophy, claim- principles of pure reason/pure conceptions of understanding about/around the noumena- is an issue which Kant invests textual time in debunking, but without placing his own conjectures in their stead. Thus, the central mystery inhering in Critique of Pure Reason, the noumena- is one that Kant appears to respect enough not to address. That cognition, at all points and on all levels of his three-tiered cognitive model (sensibility-understanding-reason), ends with phenomena, and that the noumena can go so far as to be named and nothing else- renders the textual situation around Kant and the Subject rather shrouded- especially because the Subject, we see, must have some inherent relationship to substance, causality, an interior past the merely phenomenal. This is why the book's central premise/conceit- that very little in human consciousness can, in a rigorous and properly grounded way, pass from the conceptions of the understanding into the solid principles of pure reason- makes the sideways acknowledgment that the Subject, for Kant (or raw subjectivity) is one that is troublesome to manage, even for the most disciplined, and orderly, forms of understanding.

On the mystery of the noumena- and to bring Kant's inquiry, somewhat ironically, back to Deconstructionism- Kant evinces a kind of impressive textual modesty, against the grain of the authority with which he presents his Transcendental Aesthetic. Specifically as a text, Critique of Pure Reason has a premise as much negative as positive- to demonstrate the lack of grounded rigor in the vast majority of posited principles and premises, and the cognitive structures capable of generating principles to begin with. The balance, in Critique, between textual modesty (around the noumena) and iron-willed ambition is a unique one; veering to the left or right of arrogance (as Schopenhauer does not), while never eschewing the imperative to command.

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.