Paul Magee

One often hears a version of the following: “A poem is never finished, just abandoned.” I have always found this proposition irksome. The fact that Paul Valéry seems to be the source of it, in something like the above form, makes me feel a certain trepidation in writing this. But I do find myself thinking, when I hear people say that their poems are never finished, only abandoned: why don’t you just finish them? I want a poem to be finished. But is this the same as demanding it be perfect? This article is resolutely opposed to perfection, whether it comes in poetry or any other art. I start by citing a passage from Kant, as a way of offering an initial sketch of that opposition. I then turn to two brief...

Problematising the opposition Hegel makes in his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics between art and science, an opposition which is of course not just Hegel’s, this paper attempts to theorise the aesthetics of non-fiction. From considering Wittgenstein and Peirce’s views on the logic and aesthetics of being, it turns to consider its author’s own writing practice. For I am producing all this, and sending it out into the world in this fashion, as part of my literature search for The 14th Floor, an experimental novel. And this article is actually a letter to my supervisor. Conceived literally as a science experiment, The 14th Floor, and the resultant prac report I will produce about the process of its writing, will aim to undermine something of the illusory divide between art and science, fiction and non-fiction, novelty and knowledge. The article also constitutes a consideration of how we might use the new doctorates in creative arts to stage collisions between traditional knowledges and contemporary creative practices, and so generate the new. I plant a series of autobiographical disruptions into the above, in the form of descriptions of Moscow in late Soviet perestroika, where I lived and first learnt that life blows up, sometimes. And that realities, facts and fictions, follow in its wake.

In what follows, I want to discuss three audience responses to ‘Kierkegaard: The Movie’, a paper I delivered at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia’s annual conference in December 2001, and to show where those responses led me. The reason I am doing so is that I am more and more convinced that our theories of ideology suffer a fundamental flaw. They fail to incorporate the richest source of data that we, as humanities academics, have at our disposal: the fact that we are all teachers. What richer source could we have for studying the transmission of ideas and beliefs than our own social practices? I am referring not only to the classroom, but also to our conferences, and even to our collegial visits to the pub. Wherever it is that university people garner new ideas and directions, that is where we will be most likely to learn about the mechanisms of cultural and indeed political transmission.

Art does not deceive its readers with an illusion of reality, as the common-sense notion has it, but rather pretends to deceive them. For the communicative power of the work of art lies precisely in the fact that we recognise its artificiality, its status as a work within a given genre, following certain conventions, set in a particular frame. What the work really points to, beyond the page, is the existence and actions of a creative consciousness, as that consciousness works through a given set of symbols to express itself. For reading is all about experiencing another’s mind. In the lack. Which makes it a matter of desire. My purpose in the following is to use literature to crack open the everyday, to write about neurosis and psychosis, how they write their way into the real world around us, the dinner table, this novel, a Greek tragedy, I mean Oedipus complex.