Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Harmanian Conjunctions: Meillassoux and the Meno

With a digression through de Man and a pendant to Exodus

Graham Harman’s been reading Meillassoux (just a name to me) on Mallarme (another name, but far more familiar). Of the Meillasoux Harman says:
So far, it’s a brilliant reading of Mallarmé’s famous poem, Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard. (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.)

Meillassoux finds a numerical code at work in the text, admitting all the while that many will find secret codes to be “puerile,” but he makes it work nonetheless. He draws on a number of techniques to establish this.
Meillassoux’s right there, but it’s puerility well-authorized by slightly older critical practice, which R. G. Peterson summarized in “Critical Calculations: Measure and Symmetry in Literature” (PMLA vol. 91 no. 3, pp. 367-374), a fascinating article. For instance, Peterson points out that the rhyme scheme for Dylan Thomas’ “Author’s Prologue,” a poem of roughly 100 lines, is one giant mother (or is that mutha’ or even mofo?) of a chiasmus. That is, the first word rhymes with the last, the second with the penultimate, the third with the antepenultimate, and so forth. That can’t possibly be an accident, nor even the result of unconscious intent, no? Thomas must have done so deliberately. But who’d even notice such a thing unless one went looking for it?

It was Peterson who first put me on to ring-form composition, which I found in, e.g. Disney’s Fantasia,* and which occupied the late Mary Douglas in the last decade of her career (Leviticus as Literature, In the Wilderness, Thinking in Circles).

So, there IS something there in all this counting and symmetry and structure. But just what, and where, that’s a bit of a mystery. I figure half this stuff is nonsense, half not. And I don’t know how to draw the separating line. Maybe a properly compositionist literary criticism will be able to figure that out in, say, an intellectual generation or three.

Later in the post Harman summons the specter of authorial intention:
So, why didn’t Mallarmé just tell us the code was there? Meillassoux has an answer for this. Un Coup de Dés can be read as a response to a poem by Alfred de Vigny about a message in a bottle. By inserting an obscure code into his major poem, Mallarmé is thus also performing the act of sending a message in a bottle rather than simply describing it.
Paul “Dr. Destructo” de Man swatted th intentional fly in an early essay “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism”. It was first delivered as a paper to the History of Ideas club at Johns Hopkins and published in Blindness and Insight (p. 25, 2nd Edition, Revised):
“Intent” is seen, by analogy with a physical model, as a transfer of a psychic or mental content that exists in the mind of the poet to the mind of a reader, somewhat as one would pour wine from a jar into a glass. A certain content has to be transferred elsewhere, and the energy necessary to effect the transfer has to come from an outside source called intention. This is to ignore that the concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological in its nature, but structural, involving the activity of a subject regardless of its empirical concerns, except as far as they relate to the intentionality of the structure. The structural intentionality determines the relationship between the components of the resulting object in all its parts, but the relationship of the particular state of mind of the person engaged in the act of structurization to the structured object is altogether contingent.
Ah, yes, and it keeps going, like the Energizer Bunny. The last time I read this piece I thought that the take-away was simply that, when Meillassoux, for example, reads the Mallarmé text, the intention that holds the text together is Meillassoux’s, not Mallarmé’s. For intention, indeed, cannot be transferred from author to reader through the bottle of the text.

But on further reading I see that de Man is more clever than that. On the next page (26) he makes a distinction between the intentionality one has toward a tool and that one has toward a toy: “The esthetic entity definitely belongs to the same class as the toy, as Kant and Schiller knew well before Huizinga.” His choice of tool is surely no accident. Did Heidegger ever write about toy being?

And with that, I’m going to get off this particular bus, as I do not want to go to that particular there now. Or by that route. I’ve got another route, and perhaps another there, in mind.

* * * * *

In another post Harman remarks that he’s teaching the Meno in an intro phil class. Another book I’ve not read in decades. But, as I recall, it sets forth a notion of learning as recollection, and I think that’s just right for the kind of knowledge that’s embodied in literary texts. Not for all knowledge, I’m not going to follow Plato that far, but for literary texts (which he so much distrusted), yes, that’s a good way to think about it. Consider this passage, roughly 81 c (Gutherie translation, p. 364 in my beloved Bollingen Collected Dialogues):
Thus the soul, since it is immortal and has been born many times, and has seen all things both here and in the other world, has learned everything that is. So we need not be surprised if it can recall the knowledge of virtue or anything else which, as we see, it once possessed. All nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, so that when a man has recalled a single piece of knowledge—learned it, in ordinary language—there is no reason why he should not find out all the rest, if he keeps a stout heart and does not grow weary of the search, for seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.
Consider the oral story-teller, perhaps one of the many in the original Committee of Homeric Raconteurs. He stands before the group and recites a tale he’s told many times before, as did his teacher before him and HIS teacher before HIM, back into the mists of time. Recollection. But everyone in his audience has heard the story before (except for the very youngest). They heard it that last time he told it, and the time before that, and so on. And their parents heard it the last time HIS TEACHER told it and . . . you know the drill.

There’s nothing new here. It’s all being retold. But why? Why, if everyone knows it, why retell it? To keep it fresh? To ensure that everyone knows that everyone knows?** The trick, of course, is to abstract the critical elements of the oral situation and apply them, just so, to the world of written texts, a world in which readers can read new stories. I note, however, that even the great Shakespeare mostly retold old familiar stories, familiar to him, familiar to his audience.

More points of departure for a compositionist literary studies.

* * * * *

*This post contains some OOO bonus materials, like the toy prize in the cereal box, or the afikoman hidden for the children to seek out during the Seder. For Jane Bennett there’s animism and for Tim Morton there’s magic.

**For the beginnings of answers to these questions, see this post on story telling in cultural evolution.

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