Saturday 17 March 2012

Pas chose faites :Poetry, Barthes, Bakhtin and Whitehead’s ‘object’ theory


‘Whitehead’s ‘object’ theory emerged from a desire for a philosophy of perception and cognition that engaged with materiality in a way that didn’t relegate sensual and psychological experience as mere “psychic additions” to an external, concrete reality. Whitehead was interested in a philosophy that took the realness of perceptive, cognitive, imaginative and creative experiences as stuff of the world, as objects of sensual engagement and conscious inquiry. Whitehead’s focus was process, convergence, encounter, flux, extension, simultaneity, regeneration and transformation. For Whitehead, ‘objects’ are “ingredients of events,” and events are the processes of all experience, all nature, all perception, cognition and creation….I take this literally – objects as ‘things’, and things become an entity of experience.
http://www.pushandpull.com.au/2009/06/09/objects-of-experience-stein-meets-whitehead-meets-olson-meets-kaprow-you-me/ (27/2/12)
Many poets have ‘performed’ the object, and writing as if an object is a subject. Sylvia Plath does this, and certainly to read one of Gertrude Stein’s intentions in her poems is ‘to feel the glyphs as they move in patterns on the page, to feel the sounds as they’re made imaginatively in the reading-mind’…..Reading text, and objects simultaneously comes through lived experience, and invites the reader to experience themselves. Poetry is an act of engaged thinking and observing, a way of being attentive to the intimacies of being in itself.
Concrete poems transform words into objects. Writing on objects, there is interplay between differentiated lived experience. Feeling the glyphs’, exploring, aligning and intervening with them, and their arrangement on a three-dimensional plane, they behave as indexes: each object might refer to any other thing or event. Each word may or not ‘play’ and perform and create dialogue with the objects in combination. The words and the objects both attain ‘objecthood’ through active engagement and movement. (Michel Serres). They are taken-up, as in play, creating performance and event.The ‘performed’ event is fragmented. ‘Fragments more truthfully represent history than falsely complete narratives of human progress’ (Barthes’ lovers discourse;fragments, p.127)Instead of fracturing meaning, fragments allow multiple interpretations through juxtaposition and play.
Text is as ‘a braid woven in an extremely twisted and devious fashion between the symbolic field of language and the image repertoire, back and forth between the imaginary and the symbolic’. (Barthes, from Purves). Objects introduce an extra strand of visual, and textual symbolism. Playfully displacing subject, and object through a patient weaving and unweaving, and disappropriation of text, the idea of coalescence forms. A semi-legible surface of words on objects acts a contrario, like Bahktin’s ‘profane illumination’, ‘bring[ing] to deadened objects new and revitalized constellation’. Objects come alive when put into new constellations, they are never fixed and past, closed nor dead. We may wrest new answers from them and ‘new insights into its meanings and even wrest from it new words of its own’.( Bakhtin, from Beasley-Smith).

Words and objects, are like music, notes, letters, things arranged and re-arranged, physically negotiated by the reader. In objets-textes, text flows over and around, and the reader is at once negotiating the territory of the object, the text, the self and the author. The journey of ‘I’ over the non-page is different, drunken and weaving relationships between spatial and temporal text:object;subject:object .Objects become a metaphor of the body, and a form of jouissance, the experiencing body feels the performance of things, in relationship to the substance of the words.

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