Maya Kronfeld

There has been a long felt need to investigate what the study of poetic language contributes to an understanding of ordinary language, and how posing the question in this way may indeed shift some of the assumptions about the way ordinary language works. Metaphor remains an important case in point: How do we get from “He kicked the bucket?” to “He died”? In this metaphorical idiom, the process is unavailable, without going into etymological hypotheses, because the meaning is already given – it’s lexicalized, a “dead metaphor” -- no semantic construal is involved and the literal meaning doesn’t play a role in understanding the meaning of the expression. A poet might break up the idiom and say, “He kicked the bucket and broke it to pieces” – defamiliarizing the automatic reading of the idiom as “he died” and opening up suggestions, for example, of overcoming death; thus lending plasticity to and making present both the figurative and literal meaning. But true access to the process of metaphorical meaning-making is only available in cases of novel poetic metaphor, where the domains brought together are often disparate. I argue that there are good reasons for seeing poetry, fiction and literature in general not as speech acts but as representations, or semblances of speech acts (Searle’s notion of a pretend speech act doesn’t do this justice). Poems stage dramatic situations in which both poetic speaker (that is, the lyrical “I,”) and addressee, if any, are part of a fictional world, rather than the biographical poets themselves addressing a reader. The often ironic gaps and dialogical tensions between the norms and values projected by the poem itself and those expressed by any one of the voices in the poem – including the lyrical ‘I’s perspective – have a crucial expressive force unto themselves. As Searle realized, the indirect speech act model for poetry does not work; whereas “Could you pass the salt?” is a request masquerading as a question, there is no such one-to-one relationship between the poetic utterance and a single determinate speech act hiding behind it. Searle’s and Austin’s approaches couldn’t fully succeed, on my view, because there are key aspects of the language-game of poetry that distinguish poetry from ordinary language speech acts. Let’s say these are three aspects of a Gricean poetic contract between speaker and hearer : 1) the distinction between the lyrical ‘I’ and the biographical poet; 2) what I call the "quasipropositionality" of utterance in poetry (and fiction as well); and 3) poetic form and the ways in which it makes meaning through textual strategies of mediation, like point of view, parody, irony, enjambment, rhyme, meter, rhythm, sound-play, allusion, and metaphor. These forms of aesthetic mediation make it very problematic to isolate the serious or not-serious utterance of a single-line as a primary semantic unit.

This essay is part of my project of reclaiming the concept of spontaneity for philosophy, jazz, and literature. I bring together Immanuel Kant’s notion of spontaneity from the Critique of Pure Reason with Elvin Jones’ album Puttin’ it Together and Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz to address critical impasses around the concept of spontaneity and its cognate term, “improvisation. I need to make it absolutely clear at the outset that the spontaneity that concerns me is epistemic spontaneity; it has more to do with the imaginative underpinnings of knowledge production than with vitalism. This may be confusing to readers steeped in the colloquial use of the term (see section 3 below). My claim here is that verbal and rhythmic art can make palpable the spontaneous possibilities of knowledge-making that are always there but are either negated through structural violence or just ignored. But the epistemic sense of “spontaneity” is exactly what has become muted in the dominant reception of the term.

Stream of consciousness fiction is often recruited to enforce empiricist paradigms of the mind. I contest this view and argue here that Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), by its very form, discloses what Kant called the mind’s spontaneity – the structural creativity underlying everyday acts of object-constitution. Drawing primarily on Kant’s first Critique, I wager that cognitive spontaneity in its theoretical sense has an untapped potential for literary aesthetics. While Woolf may take the sensory impression as a central unit of analysis for her depictions of a consciousness at work, she also routinely exceeds and indeed ironizes the empiricist framework she inherits, laying bare its limits. In representing the internal synthesizing abstractions that underlie the appearance of objects, Woolf’s fiction joins Kant’s epistemology in requiring a type of representation different from description, since what is being rendered has not yet taken the form of an object.

Abstract:This article recovers a submerged philosophical debate between Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions and T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Russell's concern with immediate experience ("acquaintance") underscores a dilemma troubling literary modernism generally and modernist abstraction in particular. In "Prufrock," acquaintance with reality marks an epistemic failure whose social form is the "etherization" gripping the city and everything in it. The conversation between Russell's philosophy and Eliot's poetry is grounded in but exceeds the men's real-life acquaintance. Rather than influence, at stake is a circulation of ideas between philosophy and modernist poetry and the questions of knowledge raised by both.

The philosophical significance of rhythm in the United States has been undermined from both sides of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’. When rhythm has not been falsely exalted, promising a fetishised, racialised ‘return’ to the body, it has been devalued through the tainted associations of rhythmic synchronisation with fascist regimes and the demand for compliance. In this article, I engage these issues as they inflect the politics of musical form. Adorno’s notorious critique of jazz – developed across a wide range of essays spanning three decades (1933-1962) – has been rightly disparaged, but his concept of the politics of metric regularity has not been repudiated. In what follows, I provide an analysis of how metric regularity works for Adorno as a concept – its limitations and presuppositions. Adorno opens up new critical thought about rhythm by taking seriously the problem of the bass drum in jazz and its historical and structural relation to the military march. However, he gets seriously wrong the different implications of marching rhythm for African-American (and therefore American) history, failing to understand its radical difference from the dangers of European fascism for its victims. Transnational rhythmic forms in the black diaspora (including the United States) and the interracial experiences that these forms enable, at least as in-principle possibilities, continually contest the ‘the divisions between life and thought’ that have been taken for granted by majoritarian philosophy in the West. From this perspective, the segregation of intellect from feel (a technical term among musicians to indicate those normatively right aesthetic choices that nevertheless emerge in excess of predetermined rules is not tenable given the polyrhythmic background that must be presupposed in order for any piece of diasporic music, including and especially in the United States, to be intelligible.

Poe’s experimental fiction revitalizes Hume’s ambivalent empiricism, the complexities of which were sometimes obscured in the philosopher’s nineteenth-century American reception. Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ broaches formally the question of how one thought leads to another, while ‘The Man that Was Used Up’ stages the question of what grounds the unity of one’s thoughts. Reading both tales together exposes the scope and limits of an associationist paradigm often traced back to Hume. But reading Hume through Poe’s verbal art reveals that Hume’s ‘mitigated scepticism’ about personal identity is more difficult to grapple with, and potentially more devastating for Western Reason, than the modes of scepticism that more comfortably entered the English canon. In ‘Rue Morgue’, Detective Dupin’s presumption to reconstruct fully the narrator’s train of thought may be the real locus of the tale’s horror. In the ‘Man that Was Used Up’, the heroic General A.B.C. Smith disintegrates on the floor into a talking ‘bundle’ that parodically literalizes Hume’s most famous metaphor in the Treatise. Hume’s bundle thus reappears in Poe as the proto-surrealist ‘terminus’ of a reductive explanation that has become physically real. To say with Hume that the mind is a ‘fiction’ is not to deny the goings-on of mental phenomena, but to attempt a much more challenging claim: that our minds conceptualize themselves out of their own limited nature, but not in a way that necessarily accords with that nature. If Hume brings out the parody in Poe, we might also say that Poe amplifies the irony in Hume.