Lecture Persona: Hybrid (mix of straightforward lecture/discussion)
*note the use of slide work, & the use of the console (as we split into groups, and as you begin lecturing–more on that soon!–think about whether you’ll be using various media)
FIRST 5 MIN: writing to the music of Schoenberg (2nd Mov., the opera Moses und Aaron)
Follow-up to Freire:
Last time we concentrated on Freire’s main contributions, and focused on lecture format, how or whether it can be squared away with Freire’s dialog-based co-learning, and regardless, what the efficacies of the lecture are for the generation of poetic engagement, and engagement in writing generally, maybe a unique kind of knowledge or thinking.
We began posing the question about what art has to do with education, and here we’re talking about radical educational projects, thus radical or avant-garde poetic and other text arts projects.
One way to follow-up on where we ended last time is to suggest that the lecture which involves the greatest praxis comes closest to the dialog based education of Freire. Why?
I want to divide this lecture time up into to strands, two arms of discussion: 1) talking thru 2 earlier, that is, historically modernist (poetry of the two world wars and just after) notions of the use value of poetry: ideas about the poem as autonomous sensuous experience, and a unique interactive/collaborative endeavor insofar as the text begins to be thought of as not simply what is on the page, but a complete ecosystem involving the reader as worker; and 2) a growing divide in the alternative education movement, beginning prior to Freire, dating back to the 1930s and Black Mountain College, the divide between radical education as change within the institution, and radical education as emancipation from the institution.
But first, on to earlier modernist poetry and praxis:
– Aristotle wrote in The Ethics and in The Poetics that there were three basic activities of “free men”: theoria, poesis, and praxis. There corresponded to these kinds of activity three types of knowledge: theoretical, to which the end goal was truth; poietical, to which the end goal was production; and practical, to which the end goal was action.
–Praxis is the practice, or active involvement of participants, in generating knowledge.
Does it follow that:
–The less passive you are in a lecture, the more involved the lecture allows all to be, the more praxis-oriented it is. At its outer limits, the extreme lecture is rather a conversation, a dialog—a seminar, basically.
–Modernist poetry and poetics is often marked as such due to reactive and dramatic shifts in the way the poem is thought of, the way it is situated in its cultural context, and the way that context shapes the way the poem is thought of. What I want us to concentrate on among the elements of this shift is the idea that poetry increasingly becomes thought of as a kind of praxis.
–The easy book, the book that entertains, involves little to no praxis—it’s not making you work to understand anything, its content is driven towards capturing your attention, not helping make meaning out of the piece; the book is the locus of activity, and the story, or the idea within it, is a world unto itself. Detective stories for example. For modernists such as Stein, there is a reaction was to late 19th century Romanticism and the popular lyric.
Difficult poetry (Bernstein), avant-garde poetry, is considered as such because it not only pushes boundaries of the form, but pushes you, the reader, to make meaning in various ways. And this is a learning experience. A unique kind of learning experience: an aesthetic one.
Does it follow:
That the most like a Freirean dialog the text is, the more praxis-oriented it is, the more it has use value beyond other functions it may have, such as entertainment, or beauty, wrote memorization, or database like knowledge, or offering a world view in totality, etc.
Again, a unique kind of learning experience—an aesthetic experience that involves indirection, or often, disjunction—getting the brain and the body to activate in ways that are unusual, leading, as James and Dewey conjectured, to different ways of knowing. So as reaction to various movements within poetry, but also as influenced by early proponents of the alternative education movement, the avant-garde text is disjunctive, deeply dialogic, where one thing doesn’t easily lead to the next, but the order isn’t necessarily random. There is meaning there, but you must help to create it. You are now closer to being on equal footing with the writer/teacher. The relationships here break down, even if this is not historically the writer’s intention.
Let’s start with Stein.
First, as to her poetics. Stein studied psychology before turning to poetry, and studied with William James. It is with him that she developed the idea of Normal Motor Automatism – a kind of cognitive (and sensory) process that she hypothesized occurs when the attention is split by doing more than one intellectual activity at a time, and for Stein, her interest was in the simultaneity of writing and speaking. The output, notes contemporary poet and expert on Stein, Keith Waldrop, is the poem as a kind of “inner speech,” a sort of writing that mirrors, or is the written equivalent, of the “voice in the head” prior to the brain assembling that language into propositions, full sentences—subject, object, noun, etc.
So I want to do 2 writing procedures here:
1) we read the poem aloud, where anyone can jump in at any point. Then play with varying numbers of readers, reading aloud, from different points of entry. Read for 5 min.
2) Predicating Stein: take one small section and turn it into “predicated sentences,” that is, what you imagine these lines to translate into as a full, “normal” sentences.
Discussion about the aurality of Stein: some of you said it accessed the poem for you; others said that you had already felt at home playing with her work, reading it aloud to yourself prior.
Further discussion:
–noting, after predicating Stein, that a lot of the “predications” had similar narratives
–we looked at the structure of “Picasso”: the revealing, the pre-cognitive linguistic fragments in the head plus sensorial mode of relating to;
–this, as function of the heavy reliance on parts of speech and conditionals without adjectives; nouns without many modifiers, typical of Stein;
–such lacks in the line, such constructions, give one “the effect of experiencing a thing/person” rather than a description of “what the thing is like”
–one “makes meaning” WITH Stein, one can say.
–and this collective re-calibration of the way one thinks has POLITICAL implications, insofar as (some of you spoke about this) the work becomes radically juxtaposed to DOMINANT MODES OF DISCOURSE, and so as SUB-DOMINANT, it sort of frees us up in tiny ways, and this spills over, however minutely, into our everyday ways being in the world.
–THE RADICAL ACT OF PLAY: Play, here, play in Stein and in how we make meaning thru this sensuous material, is itself a radical act–
–some discussion about how play is sanctioned in our society (insofar as play is not instrumental, or thought to be “productive,” the playing individual is “useless” in a system of commodity exchange, a cultural economy that prizes usefulness, purpose, goal-oriented behaviors)
Slide of Picasso’s painting of Stein, which she is claimed to have tried to described via talking out loud while writing, thus producing this piece.
http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/cubism/images/PabloPicasso-Gertrude-Stein-1905-06.jpg
This is praxis at work, and a particular sort: ekphrasis.
Ekphrasis: literally, the translation of visual art into language (now has broader meaning)
Stein was not herself firmly political—eg, part of any political movement per se, but her work has influenced most, if not nearly all, left political poets.
Turning to Oppen and excerpts of Of Being Numerous (we will pick up on Oppen and the Radical Education divide next week—here we’ll just introduce some ideas):
–Turning to the radical act of play to the possibility that we are less free to play than we might think, as evidenced in the way our language is used, and how we use language in ways we might not even be aware of:
Oppen, though his poetics and his politics are severely different, was influenced by Stein’s praxis-oriented work, and this plays out how?
–Some brief discussion about the background of Oppen, where his work and Objectivism are situated (thought to be, often enough, at least)–
–Oppen: “Relevant thought begins with mistrust of language”
From his Daybooks, a series which is then sculpted, much of it into Of Being Numerous comes the poem
Possible To use Words provided one treat them As enemies. Not enemies — Ghosts Which have run mad In the subways And of course the institutions And the banks. If one captures them One by one proceeding Carefully they will restore I hope to meaning And to sense. (NCP 116; SP 51)
[NOTE THAT THE LINEBREAKS HERE ARE LOST DUE TO THE FORMATTING OF WORD PRESS]
–SOME BRIEF DISCUSSION OF THIS PASSAGE IN RELATION TO OUR EXCERPTS: Observations, thoughts on how the poem is functioning, what we notice
–MISTRUST OF LANGUAGE: a mistrust of the culture that produces our language(s)? Our economies?
–LANGUAGE AS MORE THAN INFECTED BY, e.g., CAPITALIST VALUES, BUT CENTRAL TO THESE SYSTEMS/VALUES, hence INESCAPABLE (here, we come back to the possibility of being unable to freely interrogate anything, let alone radically play–for we who use this language are its culture’s products)
Also, for Oppen, as one of the major proponents of the Objectivist school, agreeing with William Carlos Williams, another objectivist colleague, we have the famous phrase (from Williams’ long poem in 4 books, Patterson)
“no ideas but in things”
–What does this mean? In relation to the poem and the Oppen quote above? In relation to the excerpts of OF Being Numerous that we have here?
Which is to say that language –words—are “things” ?
Some background on Oppen’s politics of language—poetic action (remember Aristotle: generation of one “kind” of knowledge”) and it’s relation to political action
–In these excerpts of the much longer poem: a clear investigation of the material of language and its relation to things; an interrogation of what it means to know (brief discussion of what Oppen’s epistemology might be…):
–Note that the work is disjunctive, disjunctive, however, in ways quite different from the concerns (poetic and otherwise) of Stein; also the use of pivoting–around “If’s or “Might’s” and various conditionals that point to the potential of the future (that it might be different than we often expect, or assume, say?), OUR POTENTIAL to perhaps change it, via looking at present conditions– or at least change in the sense of knowing the present, knowing that we do not know, hence do not know “a” future, let alone “the” future?
Looking at Stephen Cope’s writings on Stein:
–in a world where writing and speech are used primarily as means of exchange — and “for private purposes,” to say what this or that person thinks or feels, to give orders, to make contracts between private parties, to objectify the anguish of our isolation” (57) — words do behave like phantoms of “some counterfeit social currency, dwelling amidst a populace that is likewise so abstract”
–So praxis here, is in the idea of poetry as a sort of precise, yet unfinished, interrogation of language, a shared language, where to interrogate the poem is dialogic:
–seemingly easy, due to the simplicity of the lines, Oppen’s wrestling with how we come to know, and how we come to be ghosted, yet truly difficult, as we are, in looking at this work, dialectically entangled with the construction of language as (now) late capitalist commodity—and so is the work itself, it becomes what it tries to describe/interrogate (the act of ghosting and abstracting people–and their potential–into a sphere of exchange, a becoming invisible).
How does this hook up to the politics of language, but politics generally?
Does this POETICS allow us to re-think, or re-imagine, or investigate the efficacies of, our POLITICS?
–Does one in form the other?
Cope writes of Oppen’s short passage below:
Oppen’s conditional rhetoric — “as ifs,” “if/thens” and Aristotelian “might bes” — ought then be regarded as crucial to the social and historical (if not precisely “political”) character of his poetics as much as they are pivotal to his epistemological thought. For this justifies Oppen’s conception of “art” and “politics” as necessarily distinct arenas of praxis. “Is it more important,” he asks in a candid moment of reflection in his papers, “to produce art or to engage in ^take political action^.” He offers the following comparison in response:
art and political action are in precise opposition in this regard: that it can always be quite easily shown that political action is going to be valuable; it is difficult to ever prove that it has been in the past ^that political action has been valuable^. Whereas art is precisely the opposite case: it seems always impossible to prove that it is going to be valuable, and yet it is always quite clear that in the past it has been. the art of the past has been of value to humanity. I offer it only as a suggestion that art lacks in political action, not action (Daybooks, 89).
But the interrogative aspects of the everyday here in this piece, Cope would argue, as would many others. For Oppen, the work of art is not so much justified by its immediate or apparent efficacy as it is justified by the place it takes in and effect it has on history –cultural and/or human history writ large
For Oppen:
“Yet, because art is also inescapably determined by the terms and conditions of the present,” writes Cope, “it must remain incomplete, impassive, critically aware of both its own limitations and — faithfully — of the possibility for its realization that the future holds.”
–so not only the sense that epistemology (how we might come to know, and what “to know” might mean) informs us in ways maybe not “precisely political” but pivotal to “The Political” arena; but ALSO :
PRAXIS writ large (the future = a society, hence societal praxis): that the future (us, say), referring to the Cope and to Oppen’s quotes above, will help make meaning (use) of this work, and THIS is where poetic and political action cross paths — that we are in some ways not completely beholden to what the future brings, hence what the poem now means–we must MAKE THAT MEANING. A deep puzzle: why would this be the case? How do these notions thread together into “a poetics”? This is also to ask: what can the poem DO?
–is this poetic praxis as allegorical of political action?
Going back to individual lines in our excerpts (section 26 of Of Being Numerous)
BRIEF DISCUSSION
DAVID ENDS DISCUSSION A BIT EARLY—TO PICK BACK UP WHERE WE LEFT OFF NEXT WEE—SO THAT WE CAN BEGIN SHARING PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIENCES (the writing assignment)…
–3 shared experiences to help us begin this discussion in groups for Saturday!
–We’ll workshop these Saturday, so BRING ALL WRITING YOU’VE DONE SO FAR FOR THIS COURSE TO CLASS ON SAT—
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Questions for beginning of next lecture:
Look at the questions regarding Oppen again, read Oppen again–bring more questions. Try to find an analysis of what this work that we’ve looked at is doing or describing, with or without the help of what we’ve discussed, Oppen’s own notebooks, and/or Cope’s writing – what are your own thoughts based in the poem excerpt alone?
So we will have looked very briefly at 2 trajectories, and of course there are more in text arts, that hook up poetry with praxis, and praxis with political action.
How, then, do these trajectories hook up to pedagogy? Specifically to the review I had all of you read? (think about Johanson’s review)