The Interpretations of Art, Part I Neoclassicism

Itinera

Christopher Norris is Emeritus professor at Cardiff University. Recently, he began to address philosophical questions through poetry. In his paper, he explains why. Rather than expressing definite ideas in an elegant way, poetry can be intended as a process from which new ideas (also philosophical ones) can emerge. The result are a number of poems which cover a variety of issues, ranging from philosophy to politics, arts, history of ideas and science. Itinera has already begun to publish a few of these poems in previous issues and is now presenting three of them on painters (Turner, Matisse, Magritte).

I would like to begin by observing a peculiar fact. Nowadays, many more concepts of philosophy and critical theory can be found in art than there are artistic ideas or tropes feeding back into the philosopher's Imaginary. The paradox is that the eloquent overuse of notions such as "body-without-organs" (BwO) by artists today overlooks the indebtedness of the artists' favorite philosopher (Gilles Deleuze) to an artist (Antonin Artaud) in this glaring example. My interest isn't to restore the legitimacy of art discourse proper and "pure," a stance that would be hard to defend. Rather, I'm compelled to ask what has happened to the conceptual imagination of the artists today? Does the fact that philosophy and critical theory enjoy the status of intellectual authority in matters of art mean that artists, in spite of their linguistic proficiency and excellence in self-reflectiveness, lack conceptual imagination? The claim remains recklessly general unless we limit and define the sense of our interrogation. That is, we might have to address the problem from a historical-materialistic account of the conjuncture in which contemporary art is produced today. 1

Is poetry a topic for philosophical reflection? This paper seeks to argue that it is by exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge. What the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge amounts to, is that something can be knowledge in virtue of being poetical and poetical in virtue of being the (kind of) knowledge it is. Various kinds of skeptical doubt about this claim are considered. It is argued that such doubts are based on distorting pictures of poetry. Two strategies to justify the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge shall be explored. The first strategy is a broadly Wittgensteinian one, relying on grammatical reminders. The second strategy is a broadly Hegelian one, exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge by showing that the concepts of two other forms of knowledge – practical and second-person knowledge – due to internal incoherences, point beyond themselves towards the concept of poetry.

1993

Anglistik, 2022

In his essay collection The Age of the Poets (2014), Alain Badiou suggests that poetry and knowledge are diametrically opposed: "[A]t the farthest remove from knowledge, the poem is exemplarily a thought that is obtained in the retreat, or the defection, of everything that supports the faculty to know" (31). When Badiou talks of the poem as that which "create[s] silence in order to say that which is impossible to say in the shared language of consensus" (25) and when he claims that the poem "neither communicates nor enters into circulation" (24), he speaks in particular about modernist poets like Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Trakl or Celan, and it is at least questionable in how far the latter statement in particular would apply to pre-modernist poems. Yet, I would like to probe Badiou's suggestion that the poem "might well be a form of thinking without knowledge, or even: a properly incalculable thought" (33) in the perhaps unlikely context of Victorian poetry. Victorian convictions about the moral value and uplifting virtue of poetry may have been anathema to the modernists, and yet I would like to suggest that applying Badiou's observation to Victorian poetry may extend our understanding of the various ways in which verse form itself shapes knowledge and its limits. In general, the Victorian poem-in contrast to the modernist poetry Badiou focuses on-does aim to communicate, but what is communicated is often the limit of communication and knowledge. The Romantic commonplace that poetry conveys truth retained much currency among the Victorians. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth had claimed that poetry's "object is truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative" ([1802] 1992, 73). Percy Bysshe Shelley maintained in his "Defence of Poetry" that "[a] Poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth" ([1840] 2002, 515), and Samuel Coleridge asserts that, in comparison to science, poetry offers "a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of pleasurable emotion, which the exertion of all our faculties gives in a certain degree" ([1836] 1907, 10). Such Romantic positions reverberate throughout the 19 th century, as when John Stuart Mill maintains that the "truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly" ([1833] 2005, 564), or A.C. Bradley, later professor of poetry in Oxford, posits that poetry's "object is to express a general and unqualified truth" (1884, 9). However, increasingly a gap can be seen to have opened between knowledge and truth. Knowledge can be acquired through study and observation, but it is no guarantee for an access to truth. The latter rather takes the form of a synthetic intuition, an insight into the deeper workings of the world and the soul. 1 1 For a more detailed examination of this relation of knowledge and truth and its intersection with the juxtaposition of science and poetry see Huber (2019).

Axon, 2014

Following from Karl Popper's notion of 'subjectless' knowledge, this article argues that poetry, like the other arts and sciences can be construed as a distinct 'world'. This world is constituted by internal relations both in a structural and an intertextual sense. Utilising Yury Lotman's formalist-structuralist approach, the difference between an internal relation and an external relation is made clear through a close reading of John Kinsella's 'The Silo', where the antipastoral elements are shown to be in an external relation to it, whereas the gothic mode is in an internal relation. A close reading of Philip Salom's Keepers trilogy further explores the kind of knowledge possessed by poetry.

Teachers and Writers, 2002

Academia Letters, 2021

The use of mystical rhetoric to discuss secular ideologies is a long-held literary tradition, especially evident in mid-century Latin American literature. To understand the way in which this mystical application is suffused with secularities, I turn to poetry, and specifically, a new notion I term "mysticality." And to elucidate mysticality, I employ Spanish philosopher Maria Zambrano's principal argument: poetic reason. Zambrano sought a reasoning that was broader than reason itself, a concept that "slips into the interior, like a drop of soothing oil, a drop of happiness" (Filosofía 15). This philosophy is poetic reason, or poiesis, which valorizes the role of being, the metaphysical, and one's intuition. Zambrano's philosophical praxis examines the exteriority of poetic words (referred concepts or ideologies) versus an interiority they can often express (the poet's inner sanctum); the function of her poiesisis to engender this spirit as a rejection of more secularized philosophy. Here, I offer Zambrano's definition of poiesis itself: It is simultaneous expression and creation in the sacred form, from which poetry and philosophy are successively born. Birth is necessarily a separation-poetry into its different species, and philosophy (61).[i] The poet is the ideal artist to push the limits of the self in order explore such limits. As such, poetic reason carries a great discursive advantage over other reasoning[ii]: the ability to allow for the unsaid, "the poetic word shudders over silence and only its rhythm's orbit lifts it up, because it is music, not logos, that wins over silence" (El sueño 102). The poet neither renounces nor searches, because he has" (Filosofía 17).[iii] The poet is responsible for expressing not only what they sense in the physical world but also what they access in dreams and interior ghosts, thus rendering any kind of expression a possibility (18). Their creation is an ongoing process of "poetic being" approaching full self-consciousness. There is a centrality to the human psyche, for Zambrano, and then a series of underlying, unseen

Ratio, 2009

Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley's thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discovered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read 'as poetry'. A shift of emphasis from talking about 'meaning' in poetry to talking about 'content' is promoted, as is a more prominent role for 'experience' in characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be 'interest-relative' such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the experience of a poem can be heightened. My title 'The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning' can be construed in three ways: first, that the meaning of some poems is elusive, i.e. obscure or hard to grasp; second, that the very idea of 'poetic meaning' is elusive to critics and philosophers seeking a theory of poetry; and third, that poetic meaning has the peculiar feature of eluding adequate paraphrase. These construals are separate in that each could be true without the others (a poem might be obscure, for example, but nevertheless open to paraphrase, by an expert reader; and a satisfactory theory of poetic meaning might be hard to obtain without poetry being either obscure or unparaphrasable). These kinds of elusiveness, then, might be separate but they are also related. The aim of the paper is to explore them and to relate them. I will come last to the issue of obscurity in poetry as that will fall out of what I have to say about the other kinds of elusiveness. My starting point, indeed the focus of much of what is to follow, is that old chestnut, the relation of form and content in poetry. It might be supposed that post-New Criticism, indeed post-Literary