Читать книгу The Constructivist Moment - Barrett Watten - Страница 10

The constructive use of uncertainty in the Language School evokes similar — if more global, less local — processes at work in the expansion of poetic vocabulary in the romantic period. This expansion of language, an historical entailment of the creation of new meaning, was both source and consequence of the instability of the romantic subject, perhaps never more evident than in the forms as well as arguments of Coleridge’s oeuvre — from the gaps between poetic works to his continual accounting for linguistic detail in the notebooks to the “failed” construction of the Biographia.²³ A key passage from the Biographias chapter 13 registers simultaneous processes of expansion and contraction at work, which we may interpret in terms of language and poetic form:

Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. (297)²⁴

Poetry, as the form in which we find ourselves in the infinity of language, is a moment of condensation that makes meaning out of an ever expanding world of representations. Such a moment of balance or tension, between the radical openness of language and the normative condensation of poetry, tends to come undone when we consider the shape of Coleridge’s (poetic and critical) work itself, a disjunct practice that was never identical to the normative ideals of his practical criticism.²⁵ This is in part due to the paradoxical fact that the activity of making poetry, as well as the critical practice of determining its value, involves a restriction of the possibilities of meaning by virtue of the nature of poetic form. Paul Hamilton, in his historicizing account of Coleridge’s poetics, cites the latter’s acknowledgment of the necessary restrictions of poetic form as compared to prose: “Poetry demands a severer keeping — it admits nothing that Prose may not often admit, but it oftener rejects.”²⁶ In mysteriously “presupposing a more continuous state of Passion” but not simply expressing it, poetry for Coleridge sorts out meanings both by creating new ones and disallowing discrepant ones: “Poetry justifies, as Poetry independent of any other Passion, some new combination of Language, & commands the omission of many others allowable in other compositions” (137). While such a dissociation of form from expression is evident as well in Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas, Coleridge balances the possibility of poetry’s “new combination of Language” with the authoritarian “command” of its “severer keeping,” which restricts new meaning to that which is justified by the consistency of poetic form. Coleridge’s restrictions on language are the historical origin of Mac Low’s question to Eliot about the admissibility of the word Coronamatic to poetry.

Such a simultaneous creation and restriction of new meaning is not simply expressive but rather formally constructed, and it is here that Coleridge’s poetics confirm as they try to regulate the famous negative capability John Keats later claimed Coleridge lacked in his rage for poetic order: “I mean Negative Capability, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason — Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.”²⁷ But poetic form, for Coleridge, produces distinctions that catch such “fine isolated verisimilitude[s]” at that same time that it remains “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge”; more simply put, poetry’s centripetal tendencies (poetic form) are ideally in balance with its centrifugal ones (new meaning). Poetry’s stabilization of new meaning (seen, for example, in the restricted vocabulary of Robinson’s poem) may at the same time be an exemplary moment of, it turns out, romantic negative capability, as in the openness of the restricted vocabulary given by the Dolch words to semantic change. While such a paradox depends on a dissociation of language from expression, the fact that Keats could only hypostatize a perverse authority in Coleridge’s “irritable reaching after fact & reason” identifies a problem for poetry in its reception. Keats turns Coleridge into an irritable tormentor rather than an organic genius, revealing a negative investment in authority on Keats’s part that subtends Coleridge reception as author.²⁸

Hamilton’s historicizing approach to Coleridge’s poetics gives alternative terms for the legacy of organic form and expressive immanence at the origins of twentieth-century American verse culture (typified by the lyric poetry celebrated by New Critics). Another line of poetic development to be derived from a reading of Coleridge, then, begins by seeing his poetics as a response to a historical period of expanded meaning and thus relevant to many of our more recent concerns with a cultural poetics. In pursuing this line, Hamilton motivates Coleridge’s investment in poetic form not only in its reflection, as it were, of the transcendental “I am” but in its relation to “customary and habitual principles” derived from British commonsense philosophy (and everyday life). As evidence of this tension, Hamilton constructs a countermovement to the buildup to the missing transcendental deduction of Biographia’s chapter 13. In this alternate line of development, Coleridge pursues the poetic implications of the linguistic act of “desynonymy” — a discrimination of meaning at both lexical and historical levels — in the chapters leading up to the missing deduction as well in the subsequent chapters on the practical criticism of poetry. Hamilton explains the key term desynonymy as follows:

Desynonymy for Coleridge means increasing the vocabulary of a language by showing how words which were thought to be synonymous in fact mean different things. The original thinker adds to the number of meanings in the language we use. He does this by coining new words, and showing that we need them. Or he can desynonymize existing words by showing that we are putting words which we mistakenly think are synonyms to quite different uses. (CP, 65)

For example, in chapter 4 of the Biographia Coleridge claims historical originality in being “the first of my countrymen, who had pointed out the diverse meaning of which [metaphysics and psychology] were capable,” immediately relating these not only to “the faculties to which they should be appropriated” but to the prior linguistic synonymy between them.²⁹ Coleridge’s better known distinction between the faculties of imagination and fancy would follow as well from the act of desynonymy. In a kind of circular logic, the act of distinguishing between faculties becomes valorized as an imperative to distinguish between word meanings as, in turn, that which distinguishes between faculties:

When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or more words, (and such must be the case, as sure as our knowledge is progressive and of course imperfect) erroneous consequences will be drawn, and what is true in one sense of the word, will be affirmed in toto. Men of research startled by the consequences, seek in the things themselves (whether in or out of the mind) for a knowledge of the fact, and having discovered the difference, remove the equivocation either by the substitution of a new word, or by the appropriation of one of the two or more words, that had before been used promiscuously. When this distinction has been so naturalized and of such general currency, that the language itself does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense. (BL, 86)

The relation of the faculties of understanding to distinctions between the meanings (and senses) of words has a key consequence for romantic and modernist aesthetics as it leads to the notion of defamiliarization, the Russian Formalists’ ostranenie. In the above passage, we see a movement from the defamiliarization of language, accomplished by “men of research,” to the habituation of common sense, when language “as it were think[s] for us,” which might end in merely normative senses if it were not for the recognition of an expanded register of meaning that is historically irreversible, “as sure as our knowledge is progressive and thus imperfect.” Habit, here, exists by virtue of a linguistic before and after, between which is an act of reflection on language and polysemy that appeals to “things themselves” (both interior and exterior, empirical referent and psychological faculty). In Hamilton’s view, Coleridge introduces his account of new meaning only to give it over and subsume it to the ideality of poetic form, which as a sublime horizon of unmediated expression provides the values of sensory immediacy that precede desynonymy in the first place, demanding the distinctions of nature made by “men of research.” Poetic expression, in other words, overrides the slippage between form and “the more continuous state of Passion” it assumes; its relation to the transcendental imagination is its own presentation of a passion that passes understanding (as with the notion of the egotistical sublime, leading on to the now predictable result of Coleridge’s cultural conservatism). There is another reading of Coleridge’s argument, however, in which a radical approach to poetic form can be found that is comparable to, even derivative of, the relation of the expansion of new meaning to desynonymy. Hamilton does not develop this argument, but it provides a way out of identifying form with expression in poetry after Coleridge.

The crux of this undeveloped argument depends precisely on the relation of habituated thought to the reception of experimental poetry, which is evident in “the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been . . . doomed to encounter” (BL, 71). Coleridge is dumbfounded that such disparate judgments of the poems in Lyrical Ballads could be made by men of equally good taste: “The composition which one had cited as execrable, another had quoted as his favorite” (73). Of course, prescriptive modernist followers of Coleridge such as Richards would see this inconsistency of taste as a failure of poetry as communication to inculcate proper values. For Coleridge, the point is that readers’ negative experience of Wordsworth’s authorship of new meaning turns them back on their own deficiencies of judgment, challenging their basic self-understanding:

Not being able to deny that the author possessed both genius and a powerful intellect, they felt very positive, but were not quite certain, that he might not be in the right, and they themselves in the wrong; an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarreling with the occasion of it, and by wondering at the perverseness of the man, who had written a long and argumentative essay to persuade them, that / Fair is foul, and foul is fair; / in other words, that they had been all their lives admiring without judgement, and were now about to censure without reason. (71-72)

Readers’ experience of negative projection onto poetry they cannot cognitively process reveals a gap in self-consciousness that in turn betrays the ideological nature of these seemingly benign but in fact pernicious defects of judgment. Both cause and effect of such defective judgment is not simply an incoherent but a paranoiac reaction to the new meaning of experimental poetry: “In all perplexity there is a portion of fear, which predisposes the mind to anger” (71). The emotional regulation of taste later advocated by Richards here is undermined by a disjunction between two forms of self-understanding that ought to be desynonymized, as Coleridge shows in a remarkable footnote that follows. In it, Coleridge thinks through, well in advance of Louis Althusser, a diagnosis of ideology in terms of the desynonymy of two pronouns of identity, I and me — one that is fully accessible to Jacques Lacan’s account of identification and misrecognition:

In opinions of long continuance, and in which we had never before been molested by a single doubt, to be suddenly convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault. There is a state of mind, which is the direct antithesis of that, which takes place when we make a bull. The bull namely consists in the bringing together two incompatible thoughts, with the sensation, but without the sense, of their connection. . . . Thus in the well known bull, “I was a fine child, but they changed me;” the first conception expressed in the word “I,” is that of personal identity . . . the second expressed in the word “me,” is the visual image or object by which the mind represents to itself its past condition, or rather, its personal identity under the form in which it imagined itself previously to have existed. (72)

The fundamental desynonymy of I and me shows how identity has been confused between terms of which there is a “sensation, but without the sense, of their connection,” and Coleridge brilliantly sees this synthetic confusion as the “antithesis” of a paranoiac investment in the object of inadequate judgment (that is, the Lyrical Ballads) by the inadequate critic. Such critical incoherence is the symptom of a slippage in the social reception, thus ideological reproduction, of authority; its symptoms may, in Althusser’s terms, be seen as resulting from a kind of negative hailing by the object of judgment that leads to a condition in which one feels that to be “convinced of an error, is almost like being convicted of a fault.”³⁰ For Coleridge, there is a direct connection between inadequate self-consciousness and an emotionally ungoverned response to being addressed by the defamiliarizing form of poetry’s new meaning: “I have heard at different times, and from different individuals every single poem [in Lyrical Ballads] extolled and reprobated, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which . . . seem to have won universal praise” (BL, 74). Taste must be brought under regulation, finally, to counter the destabilizing antagonisms of new meaning in poetry, and the rewards of taste are not only aesthetic pleasure but power and mastery, a cultural imperative: “In energetic minds, truth soon changes by domestication into power; and from directing in the discrimination and appraisal of the product, become influencive in the production. To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate without loss of originality” (85).

While Coleridge’s desynonymy of identity and identification (I and me) leads, on the one hand, to the inculcation of power as appropriate response to and judgment of poems “of the loftier kind,” the vagaries of poetic indeterminacy — that is, the problem of differences of judgment due to the slippage of language in the aesthetic object itself — are addressed to a different standard of regulation than the inculcation of critical mastery. In other words, Coleridge desynonymizes terms for identity as an example of an even more general linguistic process by which meanings that have been subsumed under imprecise terms should, and even historically will, be distinguished by a desynonymy. This historical moment of the construction of identity has immediate practical consequences for the unity of the subject, lest it fall (as in the fundamental misrecognition of me as I) into errors of judgment by means of a more general misrecognition of language as eliding differences between terms. There is strong support here for Hamilton’s reading of Coleridge (in favor of language rather than transcendence) in Coleridge’s prematurely abandoned argument for a self-consciousness produced through language as an alternative to the imagination that will be “transcendentally deduced” in chapter 13’s missing account.

Coleridge includes his desynonymy of identity in a series of related linguistic moments that distinguish general from particular, identity from relation, standard from idiosyncratic. In a bizarre overlay of the biblical notion of primal androgyny onto both biology and semantics, linguistic history takes the form of a parthenogenetic paramecium in making such distinctions happen as language splits meanings off from its original body:

There is a sort of minim immortal among the animalcula infusoria [scholia: “a ‘barely-there immortality’ of the tiny organisms”] which has not naturally either birth, or death, absolute beginning, or absolute end: for at a certain period a small point appears on its back, which deepens and lengthens until the creature divides into two, and the same process recommences in the two halves now become integral. This may be a fanciful, but it is by no means a bad emblem of the formation of words, and may facilitate the conception, how immense a nomenclature may be organized from a few simple sounds by rational beings in a social state. (83)

Recent accounts of linguistic change propose an altogether different notion of new meaning occurring at such a protoplasmic moment of division and polysemy; in one account, original meanings are distributed between different metaphorical domains and interpreted by different pragmatic contexts, resulting in linguistic innovation.³¹ Coleridge at times seems to understand such contextually reflexive processes of semantic change, as when “sounds” lead to an “immense nomenclature” as a result of their use by “rational beings in a social state.” Going through the chain of antitheses that structures his meditation, however, we perceive a more monovalent account of semantic change in which the practice of desynonymy, much like that of the Russian Formalists’ ostranenie, works to undo the bad symbolizing produced by habituated judgment in providing both the “sense as well as the sensation” of differences Coleridge thinks of as simply binary oppositions. In this sense, meanings seem to have devolved, psychologically as well as historically, from an idealized originary moment Coleridge elsewhere postulated in language as the “Verb Substantive,” a linguistic/existential monad (the verb to be) that can only be dissociated by the subject in the vagaries of actual grammatical predication.³² As a result, Coleridge cannot entirely account for the new meaning brought about by cultural change, as much as he is provoked by its linguistic evidence. This is one explanation for Coleridge’s preference for Wordsworth’s sublime address, in opposition to his borrowings from common language, in the second half of the Biographia, a judgment reflecting the contradiction between self-consciousness and language that produced the moment of desynonymy in the first place, especially as it devalued social contexts for discriminations of language. Thus the paradox of Coleridge’s criticism for Hamilton is its advocacy of a transcendental “emptying out” (identifiable in both romantic and postmodern poetry) where “the sublime . . . only becomes sublime by losing its sense” (166). If Coleridge had known the later uses to which a sublime poetics of organic form were to be put and rather had developed the fuller implications of his account of desynonymy, it might have saved him from the defensiveness of his Christian conservatism, as well as saved us from some bad poetry.

It is here that a reversal of polarities occurs between romantic and modernist poetics — from Coleridge’s valuation of subjective immanence as empty sublimity to at least a reconsideration of the epistemological stakes of desynonymy. In the work of a number of cultural as well as literary critics in the modern period — from Richards, William Empson, and Owen Barfield to Laura (Riding) Jackson and Raymond Williams (many of them grouped together under the rubric “Cambridge English”) — the question of poetic diction developed in Coleridge’s practical criticism extends to meditations on the larger question of a poetic vocabulary seen as not only adequate to meaning but also responsive to culture. BASIC English clearly had Coleridge as its precursor for his insistence on the “good sense” of words; the resynonymy rather than desynonymy that resulted depended on an emptying out of the sublimity of poetic form while maintaining the prestige of literary authority as the basis for the moral imperative of its semantics. In Coleridge, original thought expands vocabulary, which in turn will become habituated as the common sense of language, thus condensing the judgments of literary authority in everyday life. BASIC’s “men of research,” on the other hand, proposed a semantics of definitional substitution by which meanings would be collapsed into strings of predetermined symbols. This restriction of signification was motivated by concerns for both scientific specificity and normative communication; Ogden and Richards relate both in The Meaning of Meaning: “The recognition that many of the most popular subjects of discussion are infested with symbolically blank but emotionally active words . . . is a necessary preliminary to the extension of scientific method to these questions.”³³ In the name of science as well as culture, BASIC’s operators proposed a linguistic hygiene that was socially regulative.

BASIC’s reversal of Coleridge’s poetics of desynonymy used a restricted vocabulary precisely because it would avoid the mutability of original meanings in being grounded in a set of terms that not only “men of science” but everyone should hold in common. In order to discriminate complex meanings, BASIC would begin by “symboliz[ing] references by means of . . . simple routes of definition. . . . We must choose as starting-points either things to which we can point, or which occur freely in ordinary experience” (127). Rather than devolving on the authority of literary discrimination, then, desynonymy would be put on an empirical basis that assumed the transparency of certain fundamental terms. But, as discussed above, the attempt to extend ostensive reference through strings of substitutive terms to precise technical senses in BASIC malfunctions precisely at the point of a polysemy that is a constituent of semantic change. Hopeless redundancy results from the attempt to patch definitions that involve mutating, unstable word meanings onto precise technical senses (as inevitably occurs with the semantics of many of the most simple words in the language).³⁴ Rather than being able to specify and desynonymize meanings, BASIC’s capacity would be continually outstripped by increased load on its fundamental units. Robinson’s Dolch Stanzas shows just how many embedded idioms are engaged by a restricted vocabulary that can neither contain nor anticipate them.

BASIC tried to contain the expansions of meaning produced by mass culture and developing technology by the same means: a reduction of vocabulary. Its goal was a final transparency of language once it had been analyzed into minimal components: “For many purposes ‘dictionary-meaning’ and ‘good use’ would be equivalents. . . . The dictionary is a list of substitute symbols. . . . It can do this because in these circumstances and for suitable interpreters the references caused by the two symbols will be sufficiently alike.”³⁵ The final test of BASIC’s desynonymy is thus to be found in an interpretive community, a scientistic version of the institution of Coleridge’s clerisy evident in the notion of “suitable interpreters” presumed to be “sufficiently alike.” BASIC, here, is designed to inculcate, through linguistic means, a norm of transparent subjectivity as it simultaneously adjudicates problems of meaning so that “we” all may agree. It is not surprising that a number of modern writers were drawn both to admire and contest Ogden and Richards’s claims to have authored a language-centered reform of modern society — both for its notion of the power of language to change the world, positively; and in reaction to its leveling of differences of perspectives within social modernity, negatively. The fascination of transition’s translation of Finnegans Wake into BASIC is therefore that it seems simultaneously to identify modernism with and distance it from the cultural authority of science. From the 1930s on, this interest continued among modernist and postmodern experimental poets, particularly Louis Zukofsky and Jackson Mac Low.