Poem Unlimited

New Perspectives on Poetry and Genre

David Kerler, Timo Müller, David Kerler, Timo Müller

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783110592405
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110592665
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire anglaise

The peer-reviewed Anglia Book Series (ANGB) offers a selection of high quality work on all areas and aspects of English philology. It publishes book-length studies and essay collections on English language and linguistics, on English and American literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the present, on the new English literatures, as well as on general and comparative literary studies, including aspects of cultural and literary theory.

The Politics of Genre

Possibilities, Responsibilities: On Poetic Genres and Political Poiesis

Pierre-Héli Monot

Abstract

This essay discusses the recent renewal of interest in the political works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and in the poetic works of George Oppen (1908–1984). While Castoriadis produced one of the earliest substantial critiques of the emergence of a bureaucratic class under Stalinism and developed a theory of democracy as the production of political autonomy, George Oppen worked for the Communist Party USA for a quarter of a century, during which time he did not write any poetry. This essay discusses the implications of Oppen’s return to poetry in the mid-1960s and suggests that the Whitmanian accents of his mature work presuppose a renewed consideration of the political possibilities of traditionalism in democratic societies. While academic discussions of poetic genres have often voided cultural history of its precarious relation to contextuality and practical ends, Oppen and Castoriadis both suggest that instituted poetic genres fulfill the crucial function of elaborating and clarifying the public deliberations of democratic societies.

Keywords: Cornelius Castoriadis, George Oppen, Walt Whitman, democracy, autonomy,

1 Paideia, humanitas, “The People”: The Genres of Political Community

How curious! How real!

(Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose 176)

In his later essays, Cornelius Castoriadis frequently expounds on the idea that liberal, globalized capitalism remains dependent upon a number of cultural and political institutions and dispositions it cannot itself produce. Castoriadis speaks of these institutions and dispositions as “deposits” (“gisements”) that are sedimented by and in history: deposits that are inherited from previous historical configurations and then drawn upon, evaluated, subjected to reasoned inquiry and to imaginative transformation, preserved or discarded by each succeeding era; yet also deposits that have been pillaged by capitalism since it has made the privatized, creative-destructive citizen its sole officially sanctified anthropological norm. Castoriadis takes the example of modern, European societies:

The institutions in these societies include a strong democratic component. But the latter has not been engendered by human nature or granted by capitalism or necessarily entailed by capitalism’s development. The democratic component is there as residual result, as the sedimentation of struggles and of a history that have gone on for several centuries. Among these institutions, the most important one is the anthropological type of the European citizen: a historical creation of a type of individual, unknown elsewhere, who can put into question the already instituted and generally religious representation of the world, who can contest existing authority, think that the law is unjust and say so, and who is willing and able to act to change the law and to participate in the determination of his or her own fate. This is what is, par excellence, not exportable, what cannot appear from one day to the next in another culture whose instituted anthropological presuppositions are diametrically opposed.¹

These deposits, “anthropological types” ranging from the “upstanding Weberian civil servant” to “workers with at least a minimum of conscientiousness about their work” (1996: 79), rely on instituted and incorporated values that affirm and point towards a not-yet-achieved democracy that is deliberative, direct, and the object of both collective and individual responsibility. Here, Castoriadis is implicitly commenting upon Marx’s and Engels’s introductory definition of the “bourgeois regime” in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify” (Marx and Engels 2012: 38). Where liberal capitalism posits personal interest both as its metaphysics and as its anthropological narrative, and always tends to its own de-historicization (notably through the affirmation of perennial Economic Laws), democracy, in Castoriadis’s view, posits a high degree of historical self-consciousness: “Democracy is the self-institution of the collectivity by the collectivity, and it is this self-institution as movement” (79). Consequently, the kind of democracy propounded by Castoriadis rests on the transmission of an open set of political and cultural possibles instituted by a historically reflexive society, as well as on the transmission of historically constituted abilities and attitudes that allow this transmission itself to become the object of reflexive, deliberative democratic processes.

This, then, outlines one of the paradoxes of the institutional dimension of democratic reflexivity: the assessment and critique of the instituted schemes at work in a democratic society is predicated upon reflexive abilities that are instituted by this democratic society itself, notably through the collective task of education and its corresponding, specialized institutions (cf. Castoriadis 1999: 252–254). For all its obvious limitations, notably its neglect of heterosystemic or non-institutional forms of critique, Castoriadis’s model mirrors the contingency, acknowledged and sanctioned by the pedagogues of Classical Antiquity, of the educational ideals of Ancient Greek παιδεία. As Werner Jaeger pointed out, participation in a deliberative democracy rested on the transmission of a set of abilities – analytical and rhetorical – that called a “universally valid model of humanity” into play, yet one that, crucially, had assimilated “every stage of its history and intellectual development” (1946: xxiv). Because it emerged out of a cultural move towards historical self-reflexivity, this anthropological ideal did not exclude the co-existence of its previous stages of development; as such, the universality of these ideals was predicated upon locally, historically and institutionally specific conditions of possibility: for the educator Isocrates, Universal Man was Greek, because the Greeks had predicated universality upon self-reflexivity.

Cicero, commenting on the works of Isocrates, and facing the difficult task of finding a rough equivalent for the political implications and cultural techniques enclosed in the word paideia, famously settled for the word humanitas as a suitable Latin signifier. Aulus Gellius’s discussion of the implications of this translation, or transculturation, is worth quoting at length:

Those who have spoken Latin and have used the language correctly do not give to the word humanitas the meaning which it is commonly thought to have, namely, what the Greeks call φιλανθρωπία [“philanthropy”], signifying a kind of friendly spirit and good-feeling towards all men without distinction; but they gave to humanitas about the force of the Greek παιδεία [“paideia”]; that is, what we call eruditionem institutionemque in bonas artes, or “education and training in the liberal arts.” Those who earnestly desire and seek after these are most highly humanized. For the pursuit of that kind of knowledge, and the training given by it, have been granted to man alone of all the animals, and for that reason it is termed humanitas, or “humanity”.

(Gellius 1927: 457)

For Aulus Gellius, humanitas, with all its contingency, institutionality and technicity, is essentially a category of cultural politics. The normative image of the well-wrought man, passing its own contingency, institutionality and technicity on to the next generation, in turn secured an attitude towards tradition itself, that is, towards the institutional conditions of possibility of transmission. Plato’s own metaphor for the well-wrought man in The Republic is that of “moulding” (πλάσις). “Bildung”, from Old High German “bildunga”, i.e. “image”, “effigy”, “creation”, carries similar connotations. “Bildung” is, notably, also Jaeger’s own translation of παιδεία into German. Henri Irénée Marrou’s classic account of the educational ideals of Ancient Greek paideia, overdetermined as it is by the disarray of post-war France, insists on the political and metaphysical consequences of this doubly self-reflexive involution of tradition as culture and transmission: “Free, utterly free, faced by the crumbling walls of his city and abandoned by his gods, faced with a world with no end to it and an empty heaven, Hellenistic man looked vainly for something to belong to, some star to guide his life and his only solution was to turn in upon himself and look there for the principle of all his actions” (1956: 226). This passage has striking similarities with Whitman’s poetic definition of American Pragmatism in Democratic Vistas – yet Whitman comes to a conclusion that is directly opposed to Marrou’s: “How long it takes to make this American world see that it is, in itself, the final authority and reliance!” (Whitman 1982: 956; Rorty 1991: 178).

I understand Castoriadis’s discussion of the institutionality of the conditions of possibility of criticism in democratic societies to be derived from Hellenistic pedagogy, and to be a critique of the slight misrepresentation of its consequences by modern, that is, pseudo-democratically socialized, Altertumswissenschaftler or classicists such as Marrou. Castoriadis’s arguments in favor of a narrowly etymological reading of “democracy” can be understood, ex negativo, as a definition of what Castoriadis considers the common political system of contemporary Western societies: “liberal oligarchy” (Castoriadis 1997: 68). The permanence or historical stability of the anthropological types produced by Hellenistic education was something a democratic society could hold on to in spite of the demise of all other referential schemes. These anthropological types acted, to return to Castoriadis’s term, as deposits that enable the demos, the people, to think about itself in terms of its responsibility for itself. On the scale of individual responsibility, Castoriadis’s rephrasing of paideia as the crucial epistemic virtue of democratic citizenship echoes Rorty’s conception o...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Poetry and Genre: An Introduction
• Canonic Genres Reconsidered
• The Politics of Genre
• Genre and Mediality
• Notes on Contributors
• Index