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Sign In or Create an Account. Sign In. Advanced Search. Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Make something of it. Other similarities are less obvious because acts of description can take radically different forms in any and every discipline depending on the terms and logics of the operative conceptual framework.
Languages of description may need to change under pressure of new angles of inquiry into how complex interrelationships make sense. And vice versa as well. In the early twentieth century, Niels Bohr was concerned about pressures that new theories in physics the successful ones that were being hailed as discoveries were exerting on conventional visualizations of causality.
It could not be accounted for by descriptive conventions embedded in the language of theory to date. Bohr argued—against those calling for a return to reason, i. Language could catch up later. Taking the indivisibility of the quantum of action as a starting-point, the author suggested that every change in the state of an atom should be regarded as an individual process, incapable of more detailed description, by which the atom goes over from one so-called stationary state into another On the whole, this point of view offers a consistent way of ordering the experimental data, but the consistency is admittedly only achieved by the renunciation of all attempts to obtain a detailed description of the individual transition processes.
Are there similar pressures on our uses of poetic language? Ludwig Wittgenstein, who felt the language of poetry could express certain things unspeakable in ordinary language, lamented the effects on philosophy of a general reluctance to change language habits:.
What we long for is implanted in our grammatical structures as much as it is in our vocabularies. An examination of the language of relations probable and improbable between subject and object is of course squarely or not so within the purview of the poet as radical epistemologist. The constant question: what things can be known only by means of poetry?
Pound explored ideographic visualizations. Gertrude Stein transformed character description to such an extent it is no longer recognized as description at all. Page becomes stage transfigured into time-bracketed instances of a continuous present; written language becomes a surprising performance of its charged materiality.
I think of this strategy as quintessentially experimental because it begins with an operational question: How to create an experience ideally, a profound understanding of character as it is beginning to be understood in twentieth century psychology, using materials of language absent nineteenth century literary devices. Stein, for personal as well as aesthetic reasons, was interested in creating things with language that could be felt without directly stating what they were meant to be.
She praised Shakespeare as a genius of this kind of indirect palpability. Interesting coincidence that methods of indirect detection turn out to be central developments in the physics of her time. It was participation in experimental design involving character typologies in William James's lab at Harvard that drew Stein toward medical studies in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, but ultimately she preferred to continue experimentation as poet rather than scientist.
A close study of this progression—from laboratory to page—brings into the foreground important differences in methodologies as well as in what can be known scientifically and what can be known poetically. And what everyone is doing is the composition of the time in which we all are living, as Gertrude Stein herself a product of scientific interest and training put it in her essay Composition as Explanation , and many elsewheres.
Borrowing from procedural methodologies, devising procedures to be enacted by vocabularies and lettristic logics, begins with questions I want to explore in a poetic context and must admit, on the scale of the poem, some aspect of the complexity and indeterminacy of every phenomenon touching our lives.
In any case, what for me constitutes an experiment of any kind is interrogatively driven from beginning to end — a poethical wager. On the page, letters, words and proportional space become, in effect, notation for a score to be temporally activated by the reader's moving eye in silence or with vocalization.
The simplest example of a computer programed weather forcasting model registers three initial conditions, or variables: wind velocity, temperature and barometric pressure. In the A-I-D-S poem you ask about in your forth question, those four letters are the first set of variables, followed by letters in a series of statements that become additional variables.
In transmigration the initial conditions are repeatedly complicated by Google Translate, which has been widely used by refugees to negotiate borders in languages they don't understand. In both cases, there is no way to predict what patterns the variables will create, while they observe the coherence of dynamical systems in nature.
This is of course consonant with John Cage's interest in literally bringing experiences of nature into the arts, as I mentioned in my answer to your first question, not by description but by employing her "manner of operation. Winnicott describes in Playing and Reality as the play that is reaching out to touch things beyond our desires for fantasy, or C.
Peirce's "real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them" while affecting our senses Values in a Universe of Chance. Like Cage's father, mine was an inventor.
His profession was research electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. As a child, I was in an environment full of diagrams of electrical circuitry, with passionate art and music and nature-loving, bird-watching parents.
A father who was always tinkering, making things on the kitchen table or making music with his cello. I started observing and doing and making as my preferred form of play. From another perspective, observing, and participating in "nature's manner of operation," is actually what we're doing all the time whether we know it or not. From today's ecological perspective, the question of what to notice, what to do when everything is dynamically interacting with everything else can be daunting.
Only five million? That refers to weather but is also true historically, culturally, socio-politically. Anyone who thinks of their art as socio-political intervention is engaging in a very long-shot wager. As someone who has had since childhood a ridiculous number of intense interests, I was excited as undergraduate philosophy student to discover Francis Bacon's early 17th century, empirically simple literally down to earth guide to his Novum Organum, or True Directions Concerning the Interpretation of Nature.
The problem of the intrusion of one's subjectivity pathos overcoming ethos and logos into what should be grasped as much as possible in its own distinctive nature is one of many things treated in his beautiful, cautionary and inspiring aphorisms.
The poetry is already there. I can't resist these two excerpts:. The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which might be called "sciences as one would. All the truer kind of interpretation of nature is effected by instances and experiments fit and apposite; wherein the sense decides touching the experiment only, and the experiment touching the point in nature and the thing itself.
Bacon is advocating a passionate observational rigor that, far from desiccating one's mind, redirects the will and affections with the experimental procedure that can mediate contact with "the thing itself. Language "touching the point in nature and the thing itself" is something I can think about in Wittgenstein's sense of language as a form of life inseparable from how we are doing things with words, which is in turn nseparable from the living we and others are doing and who and what we are.
And what everyone is doing is the composition of the time in which we all are living, as Gertrude Stein herself a product of scientific interest and training put it in her essay Composition as Explanation, and many elsewheres.
Borrowing from procedural methodologies, devising procedures to be enacted by vocabularies and lettristic logics, begins with questions I want to explore in a poetic context and must admit, on the scale of the poem, some aspect of the complexity and indeterminacy of every phenomenon touching our lives.
That means, as John Cage developed it, kinds of precision that admit chance in what chaos theorists have called "pattern bounded indeterminacy. In any case, what for me constitutes an experiment of any kind is interrogatively driven from beginning to end — a poethical wager. JB: Unlike certain forms of European experimental writing more specifically: the Oulipo tradition of constrained or procedural writing , you insist on the necessity of having a a socially and politically relevant content, and b a linguistic tapestry that is open to as many forms of language as possible.
I don't remember a time when I wasn't aware that certain people were treated unfairly relative to privileged others. As a child I had the benefit of weekend excursions with a doting aunt who humorously referred to herself as an "intellectual revolutionary" but was entirely serious about inculcating in me a sense of social and racial equality, respect for people of all kinds.
One result was my writing a play in the third grade of my racially and ethnically diverse New York City elementary school. It was about the importance of choosing field-trip partners who were different from oneself and was performed at the principal's insistence for a very restless plenary assembly.
The neighborhood I lived in was populated by many first generation Americans whose parents spoke in native languages or with fascinating accents. I've continued to enjoy what I value as the "ambient polylingualism" of this immigrant enriched country. Not only overheard, but showing up in packaging, "how to assemble" instruction sheets, guides to museums and libraries, pamphlets to inform patients about medical tests or procedures.
Al l government notices now include this reassuring statement, "You have the right to get help and information in your language at no cost" — in over a dozen languages. I meant the title as a one-word manifesto for all three parts. Unfortunately Paradigm Press had to discontinue the series for lack of funds. What started as seriously playful, experimental uses of multiple languages has attained a greater sense of purpose without, I hope, affecting the buoyancy. For instance, a collaboration with American poet Forrest Gander stemmed from a weeklong international meeting of poets on the theme of Poetry and Violence at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
We noticed we were both "writing through" the nightly poetry readings that took place almost entirely in languages we couldn't follow adequately, or at all.
It turned out we were both acutely attending to, and transcribing unintelligible words on the phonetic level, sometimes triggering associations with vocabulary in other languages. Normally, in our own languages, we tend to miss musical sound patterns as we concentrate on transmission of information. In fully conceded ignorance, the heightened musicality is richly pleasurable. Forrest and I compared our transcriptions out of curiosity and decided to collaborate by putting them into conversation following the sequence of parallel responses.
I relate the quality of attention this procedure required, and replayed with even more pleasure, to John Cage's idea and practice of "anarchic harmony" — the great unexpurgated chords generated by the rich diversity of sound makers on planet earth. This is also an example of the poethical beauty of silence as Cage redefined it: sounds, sights, socio-cultural phenomena to which we've tended to be oblivious.
And, I think of Genre Tallique's "Translation is an embrace that goes on too long. Since then, during the dark night of Trump's grotesque shadow, patriotic xenophobes have formed armed civilian militias; people have been physically assaulted, shot, murdered in stores for their audacity to speak Spanish in "America.
The arts must and do address that. JB : How do you manage in your writing the perhaps difficult meeting of verbal experimentation and political action. And would it be possible to briefly comment upon a short text where you think you have solved this problem in an exemplary way?
I've already said quite a bit that pertains to this question but perhaps I've made things appear too seamless. There was an early period when my aesthetic across media and genres was most engaged with modernist and postmodern work that I considered "apolitical" in marked contrast to what I was experiencing in the sixties activist milieu as insufficiently nuanced political advocacy. In the visual arts, I was excited by both abstract expressionism and minimalism. Two major realizations ultimately healed the seeming dichotomy between formal considerations and sociopolitical content.
The first was beginning to invent procedures. For many, procedures are a way to avoid emotional or socio-political content. For me they are a way of incorporating it. The other was the realization that everything we create aesthetically — that is, every act of poesis — enacts an ethos. What was my ethos? It had to do with what I consistently, deeply cared about.
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