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Joan Retallack | 321 poetics statement Procedural Elegies: N Plus Zero WHY use procedures when one can simply note the succession of things that “naturally” or “logically” come to mind? “Act so that there is no use in a centre,” said Gertrude Stein. Good advice, particularly if the center is “self” without the benefit of centrifugal artifice; equally so for a center composed of official logics. Procedure: Instructions for how (even why) one is to go on : what Didi and Gogo were missing; what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus so deftly employs until he acknowledges the limitations of his numerically sequenced linguistic logic and catapults into (inexpressible) neo-Kantian transcendence. Whether or not one likes Wittgenstein’s turn to the “mystical,” one can admire his sense of procedural limits. Fibonacci numbers, which have often been used as organizing principle of literary procedures are of course a self-perpetuating sequence ad-infinitum except when conjoined with nature: e.g., with spiral growth in plants and mollusks, with human projects. Nature (the complex interrelatedness of things) will always provide limiting conditions that self-singularity is not programmed to acknowledge. Self-limiting may in fact be an oxymoron. Self-criticism, self-abnegation, selflessness, social awareness, collaboration don’t come naturally, must be consciously built into procedural projects— literary and socio-political. Strange concept, self. (Online dictionary def: self. a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, esp. considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.) At the inception of modernity, the world divided into not facts but selves. The newly invigorated self-created selves became self-equipped to divide the world into facts, self-inscribing invisible selves as self-creators of self and other therein; all the while energetically and righteously devising methods to by-pass and/or sabotage subjectivity. It’s always been a complicated project to be human. And so it went, and goes, despite scientific method, unto the “naturalistic fallacy.” Philosophies and fictions and poetries and laws full of naturalized facts and processes legitimate (unnoticed) the very selves that have in (naturalized) fact created them. This has little to do with nature (complex interrelatedness of things) even as “naturalist” achievements in fiction and non-fiction alike are heralded as honest and real and win prizes for their honesty and reality. There may be an unfortunate misunderstanding here that can perhaps be relieved by 322 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century certain forms of procedural artifice—robust or deviously good-natured elegies to the limitations of the unexamined naturalized self. But first must go our persistent yearning for an idea of nature that clarifies what/who we are rather than complicating it. Yes, the complex interrelatedness of things (nature) is the final arbiter, even as it registers the sad consequences of our disavowal of its nature. Poetic procedure (in healthy and necessary contrast to the necessary and productive realm of scientific method) is a form of authorial agency which need not attempt to disguise a subject position while importing a tonic presence of otherness into the composition. The subjectively valued object is to deflect single point perspective with its tedious thrust toward lonely vanishing points. Those points, so highly valued in the imperial panopticon , are locations of simultaneous self-affirmation and disappearance from the world at large. How to (why!?) undertake the difficult work of opening the aesthetic field to dialogic alterity, alter-texts, alter and after-egos (messy afterbirths)—all in equally disadvantaged conversation? This is first-off a matter of humor. Humor, in an only slightly renovated medieval sense of temperamental and cognitive fluidity, makes incisive conceptual shifts possible.Those shifts, on many different scales, are what vital experience is all about. Humor is the thoroughly embedded (in every cell of our bodies) prototype of the cognitive swerve into startling acknowledgements; acknowledgments of unsettlingly foreign perspectives; perspectives just coming into barely legible view, newly fledged monstrosities intruding upon pleasantly predictable natural schemes. We constantly over-localize predictability; underestimate the ubiquitous presence of pattern-bounded indeterminacy in action. The humorous conceptual shift is the stealth objective of every procedural project on which I embark. It requires a figure-ground relation of stability (grid) and mobility (composed chance or aleatoric intervention). The alertness of the whole being that it requires is requisite to the discovery of a world of otherness extending into self’s own terra incognita. Think of humorous recognition bringing on a frightening and delicious Ah-Ha, rather than I-Thou. (“Thou” being tender honorific...

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