9/13/08

Technically, it's 9/14, but I'm doing my writing for yesterday today. Specifically, an hour into today.

With the advantage of the added perspective of today, I think I'm going to try to write these posts such that they can be published. I'm not entirely convinced I want people to read this--I may password-protect it--but I think it'll be worth writing as if I do. It changes the type of practice I'm giving myself.


For now, here are the rules.
*6 days out of the week, I will write in this space (or elsewhere, if I have to) for 20 minutes.
*I'll do my best not to make one miss become a series of misses.
*Each post will be written with a minimum of editing. The goal is to get my fingers to convert ideas into sentences more quickly. I know that I can edit appropriately and intensify my arguments; the purpose of this space is to generate ideas through building a time in which to think about texts officially, and to train myself to get sentences out of my head and into a space in which I can edit them.
*I will recognize that I am thinking and not blogging. When I want to blog, I can do so elsewhere.

Starting the clock now. It's 12:53 on Sunday morning. I'm thinking about one of Robert Herrick's poems:

A SWEET disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher:
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat:
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

I'm reading (and at the same time re-reading, because one time through doesn't help me very much) Zizek's /Enjoy Your Symptom/, I suppose as a way of starting to think about Lacan. My goal is to be able to think about how desire works in Lacan and how it works in poetry.

Herrick's poem, if I understand the chapter I just re-read, is a good example of Lacan's interpretation of the the way the death drive works with the pleasure principle. Lacan suggests that the existence of a death drive, in addition to the pleasure principle and the reality principle, implies that the limit to the pleasure principle, that keeps the subject from becoming a closed circuit of self-enjoyment, is internal to the pleasure principle itself. There is, that is, a gap in this circuit, a foreign body blocking the way--the objet petit a.

In light of this foreign body, the pleasure principle takes on the role of enjoying its own failure to complete the circuit--it takes "satisfaction in failing again and again to attain the object." (A note on quotations: I'm writing right now after having just put a book down. I suspect that lots of my non-quoted words are actually stolen and my direct quotes are inaccurate.)

Zizek's suggestion, then, is that this gap in the circuit is the origin of the Real, as the pleasure principle tries to posits its own failure as the action of a resisting force.

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness...

The poem pretends to be an exercise in looking: it takes the form of an observation stated generally, what can be presumed to be five examples, and a restatement of the observation. As the eye of the poet reader takes in a series of surfaces, it finds itself captivated by a lawn, a lace, a cuff, a petticoat, or a shoe string. The eye, disturbed by disorder into attention, still caresses its failure to attain order.

But we are not as far into the world of the social as this suggests. Herrick signals towards a sort of projection at work when he writes that disorder kindles wantonness "in clothes," when he describes the lace as "enthrall"ing only the stomacher, the "distraction" of the "lawn," and the "confusion" of the ribbands. These words, slightly misplaced, are the "sweet disorder" of his verse; they suggest the triads poet:poem:reader, women:dress:viewer.

Even still, the first line suggests that a sweet disorder in a poem must kindle a wantonness in a poem. And we know how a poem can be wanton--with this disordered, distracted gaze that runs over the surface of the woman object: poet:poem:reader; woman: dress:poem.

This is a desiring poem, which attempts to understand its desire in conjuring up a details. What's fascinating about these details is that they both matter completely and don't matter at all--like all literary details, it is their specificity that gives substance to the artifact, while it is their arbitrariness that make up the specificity of the artifact. There can be no exhaustive list of disorders. In a sense, each detail seized upon is the same detail; the same noting of the gap in the fulfillment of the pleasure drive.

At the same time, something builds out of the succession. To change metaphors briefly, a pearl crystalizes around the foreign body of disorder, and that pearl is the existence of the outside world. The progression "wantonness," "distraction," "enthrals," "wild civility" mimes the slow evolution of the outside: wantonness is a objectless feeling entirely interior to the subject; distraction implies the existence of precisely one thought-thing which prevents the focusing of attention; to be enthralled requires an external enthraller; and "wild civility" repeats the contrast of "sweet disorder" with two terms that are entirely externalized. [To be wild is not to be under the dictates of law/civility; to be civil is to be around other people.--terrible sentence, but I'm getting too tired to rewrite, and the rules say I can do this.]

The end of the poem is an anticlimax--its content simply restates the opening observation, more plainly with a chiming rhyme. Herrick perhaps thought it was necessary to introduce "art," in order to explain that he was not merely talking about women's clothing, but other than that, the line seems almost simpleheaded.

Except: being "too precise" is (a) another flaw and a potential subject for the same sort of pleasure short-circuit that motivates the poem, and (b) a precise description of the failure of the closing couplet. The couplet falls flat precisely because it lacks the tension and interest of the diction of the previous lines.

It's become a cliche to remark that a given poem thus enacts its own subject matter. Here, though, that re-enactment makes the subject matter more challenging, because we experience the discomfort of the poem's ending much more strongly than we do the disorder of the imagined woman's dress.

In some sense, the ending of any work of art is disappointing. The spell always breaks, eventually, even when the poet makes you follow his last gesture way off into the horizon:
in that dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea

I suppose the sense I'm talking about is one of duration--the poem must end at some time, the time after the poem must be different in some sense, and the felt difference between the two times is what I'm calling disappointment. (I'm aware that there are many different affects that can be involved in this felt difference--excitement, catharsis, in at least one case for me, awakening)

The finitude of an end is the alternative to the poem's treatment of absorption--absorbed by disorder, the eye is either distracted and running freely (and unteleologically) around the surface of something or enthralled and not moving.

Disorder is sweet, in part, because it constitutes the bounds of the aesthetic as something internal to it.

Charm, on the other hand, the typical affect associated with Herrick, deals with perfection maintained within tiny bounds. The power of disorder comes from the fact that its sweetness is not, according to Herrick, located in the object, but generated in and by the subject--"wantonness"--and productive of the Real outside of disorder. I've gotten myself turned around a bit, but I'm interested in the claim in the previous paragraph.

I think I'll bold it and call it a night.