On the Origin of Poetry

On the origin of poetry. - The lovers of what is fantastic in humans, who also advocate the view that morality is instinctive, reason as follows: 'Supposing that usefulness has always been venerated as the supreme deity, then where in all the world does poetry come from? This art of making speech rhythm counteracts rather than contributes to the clarity of communication, and yet it has shot up and is still shooting up all over the earth like a mockery of all useful expediency! The wildly beautiful irrationality of poetry refutes you, you utilitarians! Precisely to want to get away from usefulness for once - that is what has elevated humanity; that is what has inspired it to morality and art!' Now, in this case I must side with the utilitarians for once - after all, they are so seldom right, it is pitiful! In those ancient times that called poetry into being, one really did aim at utility, and a very great utility at that; back then, when one let rhythm penetrate speech - that rhythmic force that reorganizes all the atoms of a sentence, bids one to select one's words and gives thoughts a new colour and makes them darker, stranger, more distant: a superstitious utility, of course! Rhythm was supposed to make a human request impress the gods more deeply after it was noticed that humans remember a verse better than ordinary speech; one also thought one could make oneself audible over greater distances with the rhythmic tick-tock; the rhythmic prayer seemed to get closer to the ears of the gods. Above all, one wanted to take advantage of that elemental over- powering force that humans experience in themselves when listening to music: rhythm is a compulsion; it engenders an unconquerable desire to yield, to join in; not only the stride of the feet but also the soul itself gives in to the beat - probably also, one inferred, the souls of the gods! By means of rhythm one thus tried to compel them and to exercise a power over them: one cast poetry around them like a magical snare. There was another, stranger notion, and it may be precisely what contributed most powerfully to the origin of poetry. Among the Pythagoreans it appears as a philosophical doctrine and as an educational contrivance; but even long before there were philosophers, one acknowledged music to have the power to discharge the emotions, to cleanse the soul, to soothe the ferocia animi - and indeed precisely through its rhythmic quality. When one had lost the proper tension and harmony of the soul, one had to dance to the beat of the singer - that was the prescription of this healing art. With it, Terpander quelled an uprising; with it, Empedocles pacified a lunatic; with it, Damon purged a youth who was languishing from love; with it, one also sought to appease the ferocious, vindictive gods.25 One began by driving the giddiness and exuberance of their passions to their peak, that is, one drove the madman wild, made the vindictive person drunk with lust for revenge. All orgiastic cults wanted to discharge the ferocia of some deity all at once and turn it into an orgy so that the deity would feel freer and calmer afterwards and leave man in peace. Etymologically, melos means a tranquillizer, not because it is itself tranquil, but because its effect makes one tranquil. And not only in the cult song, but also in the mundane song of the most ancient times there is the presumption that rhythmic quality exercises a magical force; when bailing water, for instance, or rowing, the song is a bewitchment of the demons believed to be at work here; it makes them compliant, unfree, and a tool of humans. And whenever one acts, one has an occasion to sing - every action is tied to the assistance of spirits: incantation and conjuration seem to be the primordial form of poetry. When verse was used in oracles - the Greeks said that the hexameter was invented at Delphi - rhythm was also supposed to exercise a compulsion. To ask for a prophecy - that meant originally (according to the derivation of the Greek word that seems most probable to me) to have something determined: one thought one could force the future by gaining Apollo's favour - he who according to the oldest views is much more than a god of foresight. The way the formula is pronounced, with literal and rhythmic precision, is how it binds the future; the formula, however, is the invention of Apollo, who as god of rhythm can also bind the goddesses of fate. In short: was there anything more useful than rhythm to the old superstitious type of human being? One could do everything with it: promote some work magically; compel a god to appear, to be near, to listen; mould the future according to one's own will; discharge some excess (of fear, of mania, of pity, of vengefulness) from one's soul, and not only one's own soul but also that of the most evil demon. Without verse one was nothing; through verse one almost became a god. Such a basic feeling cannot be completely eradicated - and still today, after millennia of work at fighting such superstition, even the wisest of us occasionally becomes a fool for rhythm, if only insofar as he feels a thought to be truer when it has a metric form and presents itself with a divine hop, skip, and jump. Is it not amusing that the most serious philosophers, strict as they otherwise are in all matters of certainty, still appeal to the sayings of poets to lend their thoughts force and credibility? And yet it is more dangerous for a truth when a poet agrees with it than when he contradicts it! For as Homer says: 'The bards tell many a lie'.

section 84, The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882

the complete absense of good or bad taste.

Because of the importance of its nonvisual contextual frame, the readymade was not a purely visual phenomenon. As Duchamp told Pierre Cabanne when asked about which objects he chose, “In general one had to defend oneself against the ‘look.’ It is very difficult to choose an object because after a couple of weeks you come to like it or detest it. You have to achieve something so indifferent to you that you have no aesthetic emotion. The choice of ready-mades is always based on visual indifference as well as on the complete absence of good or bad taste.”(1) According to Rosalind Krauss, it owed something the to the photograph, or more specifically, the snapshot: “The readymade’s parallel with the photograph is established by its process of production. It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection.”(2) In both cases, what you see is not what you get, because of the insufficiency of the decontextualized image by itself.

Duchamp’s provocations, like those of other artists in the Dadist camp, could quickly be recuperated by the ideological and commercial pressures of the institution he tried to subvert. It is now in fact commonplace to note that museums proudly exhibit the “originals” of his readymades, as indeed he himself knew they would. (3) Duchamp’s more radical gesture then was the virtual abandonment of artistic production itself after 1924 in favor of chess, a game he played with considerable success. His deliberately uncompleted Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), damaged in transit after its exhibition in Brooklyn in 1926, came to be seen as symbolic of this rejection. Or at least so it seemed until the posthumous installation of his remarkable Etant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1969, a surprising revelation that he had in fact been working on something for the previous twenty years.

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay, 1993 (p.163)

1. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris, 1967), pp.83-84

2. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p.206

3. see remarks to Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, p.139

the individual into a malleable commodity

The acceptance of the carte portrait as an item of exchange, a collectable, by the middle class and the subsequent adoption of the practice by the workers themselves represent to the insidious transformation of the individual into a malleable commodity. Direct human intercourse was in a sense supplemented by the interaction with a machine-generated and therefore irrefutably exact alter-ego, a fabricated “other.” The creation and popularization of the care de visite during the Second Empire therefore represents an early step toward the simplification of complex personalities into immediately graspable and choreographed performers whose faces rather than actions win elections.

A.A.E. Disdéri, Anne McCauley, 1985. p. 224

precisely the present moment

If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who are somewhat acquainted with its actual history; it would certainly astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some of the enterprises which I have cherished.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate.

Walden, Henry David Thoreau, 1854

Starting

If you know me personally, then you know that my critical approach to technology developed right alongside the first wave of social media, that novelty which I had the strange misfortune of coming of age along with.

Now, in 2023, with the country balanced on a razor’s edge before another wretched season of division, the absence of virtue at the social media platforms seems to be apparent to all. There is revisionist thinking even among those with a stake in the system. As for the possibility of corporate space providing a freedom worthy of democratic ideals, Jill Lepore puts it with concision and force:

This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” (link)

The tacit obligation to partake in this debasement of culture is pervasive among those very same individuals who profess themselves the producers of culture. The adoption of this form of media is so widespread that to forward a critique is considered bad manners. Yet the platform’s ambitions are to colonize all modes experience and bring them under the sway of their measly products. The logic of these systems is not only operational in the active consumption of the digital flow, but oozes beyond, so that lives habitually take shape according to their dictates.

Lepore points to the media’s infatuation with the rapid and stilted discourse of these platforms as the locus of larger social breakdown, but it is not as if only certain thought leaders could wrench themselves from out of the echo chamber the situation would be abated. It is the widespread adoption of these products which seems to have thrown up structural interference with our capacity to function as a polity of even nominal cohesion.

Yet the efficiencies of digital tools are thrilling, and consciously working with and against them seems necessary in any attempt at crafting a truly contemporary art. Since the crafting of any art begins with the shaping of ideas, I will attempt a digital injunction into that mental aspect of the practice. Last year, my long-running, free-to-use, and much beloved Indexhibit web portfolio finally crashed. My own bandwidth had been exhausted elsewhere, and rather than wrestle with the coding, I have switched to a new service that has offered me this posting platform. I have fond memories of personal blogs on previous iterations of the web that I found important at that time, in that spirit I will try to take up such a practice.

I am going to call the text that I build here, Synthetic, as it will be made from disparate sources, a collage of notes and images that strike me at a specific moment, but which I might not otherwise revisit. While at the level of biochemistry, “synthetic” and “organic” might cut a clean distinction, we must be careful because the concept is not so analogously expansive. While “synthetic” is suggestive of a denatured and inhuman thing, the shape of our human character is nothing if not synthetic, a melange of inherited traits and received knowledge pieced together from here and there, even as they remain in contradiction.

Capitalism calls it a business plan, for science its a hypothesis, while artists make a proposal. None of these apply here as my principals of form will be ad-hoc with ends unknown. If it serves a purpose it will find that purpose in the process of its making and without recourse to external metric. The hope is (as always with this type of thing), the self imposed pressure of making it public will lend the practice a fresh rigor, helping better trace themes that develop in my reading and thought over time. Our conditions of existence make it so we risk losing the possibility of adhering to Benjamin’s dictum that “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.” So let it be an aide to thought, not a distraction from it.

jbm 9.2023

When brand awareness is the goal shared by all...

When brand awareness is the goal shared by all, repetition and visibility are
the only true measures of success. The journey to this point of full integration between ad
and art, brand and culture, has taken most of this century to achieve, but the point of no
return, when it arrived, was unmistakable: April 1998, the launch of the Gap Khakis
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No Logo, Naomi Klein, 1999