- On Flaws : Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment
“...it is precisely out of the flaw or excess in an equation that meaning springs”
Barbara Johnson “Disfiguring Poetic Language”
When you pick up a piece of old crockery in a second-hand shop, often there is a
littlewhite tag on which the price is written, along with the phrase “as is”. “As is”
indicates that
the object, say it is a cup, has a flaw: a crack or a chip or some other anomaly
testifying topast use. If the object in question is a textile, say a slip or a sweater, “as is” indicates
a rip,or a stain. As is suggests the distance from perfection from which the object has
traveledthrough the course of time, its fall from Platonic grace or virgin purity; “as is” is a
variantof “as if”, the way in which desire ineluctably turns into fulfillment or
disappointment, andin that turn, “something” is simultaneously lost and found. As has become
abundantlyclear, and not to overstate the obvious, contemporary poetic practice negotiates this
terrain and itsrecapitulating dualities —- presence/absence,
materiality/tranparency,text/performance,
and so on, more insistently than any other current human activity.
The lost/found place of “as is” thus could be seen as a poetic methodology, through
which wemight revise the modernist “fragment”. The poem now is rendered as an address
which
eschews totalizing concepts of origin, unity, closure and completion, and is
construed as aseries of flaws or openings through which both chance and change register a matrix
ofdiscontintiuous distributions, where contingency itself is offered as an affective
response tothe “is” as is. Meaning is rendered as an unstable relation to objective and
subjective value. The reader/listener participates in the construction of significance
not by filling in the gaps and elisions, but by appropriating whatever fragment is
“useful” to her. The hope is that the relation between epistemology and power is
kept regenerative.When President Clinton remarked “It depends on what the meaning of the word Is
is” heunwittingly allowed us to witness the flaw between the reified “is” of
an imaginary but knowable present and the imperfect or furtive is of the actual as
is. Between thefirst and the second “is” is —-however inadvertent on the President’s part —- an
acknowledgment of chronic interpretative vigilance whichthe generation he and I (we) share came to understand as the only possible
negotiation with realityand the ways in which language pictures or captures it.
For a while I have been interested in the notion of a whole fragment. This fragment
is notone in which one laments a lost whole, as in Stein, Eliot and Pound, but which
acknowledges the factof our unhandsome condition, where we suffer from having been being, and in that
acknowledgment foreground, or priviledge, what is: the abraided and indefinite
accumulation of an infinite dispersal of sums. In this construction, meaning abides
or arises exactly at the place where “use” appears, use here as both pragmatics
and as wear. It is my desire or intention to construct a poetics in which meaning is
foundwithin the terms of such a vagrant contingency.
The consolation of a distilled or stabilized “reality” is nothing if not an illusion of
syntax, where syntax stands for any logic of recognition. I share a love for this
construct ofa normalizing stability, but I recognize its habit of formulating, at the least impulse,
categorical imperatives which obscure and resist the actual conditions, posssibilties
andcomplexities in which we find ourselves.
The world constellates significance out of habits of congruence, continuity, and
context.These signifiying terrains elude and evade my own sense of being on a flexible and
indeterminate boundary or frame, even ones which eschew frames and boundaries
to “celebrate” upwardly mobile margins.I think world presses on language and language on world at every point, and by
world I mean material,spiritual, political and cultural presence,
a continuous flux of is recouperated as is.
Ann Lauterbach lives in New York City. She teaches at Bard College, where she is the David and Ruth...