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Poetry As Epistemological Inquiry: Reading Bernstein Reading Cavell

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Poetry As Epistemological Inquiry: Reading Bernstein Reading Cavell Poetry as Epistemological Inquiry: Reading Bernstein Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein Von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Doktorin der Philosophie genehmigte Dissertation vorgelegt von Ursula Göricke aus Geilenkirchen (Kreis Heinsberg) Berichter: Universitätsprofessor Dr. Richard Martin Universitätsprofessor Dr. Ludwig Jäger Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 24.03.2003 Diese Dissertation ist auf den Internetseiten der Hochschulbibliothek online verfügbar. Für meine Eltern Contents Acknowledgments 4 0 Introduction 5 I Philosophy and Literature 17 I.1 Philosophy's Aspiring to Literature 17 I.2 Literature's Aspiring to Philosophy 33 II Politics 50 II.1 The Social Contract 50 II.2 The Politics of Poetic Form 73 III Skepticism 93 III.1 The Truths and Wrongs of Skepticism 93 III.2 The Poetics of Negative Capability 111 IV Reading Dark City 143 V Conclusion: Redemptive Reading 215 Works Cited 239 4 Acknowledgments During the writing of this thesis, many people have been supportive of my efforts. I wish to express my gratitude to the professors on my dissertation committee Richard Martin and Ludwig Jäger. I also wish to thank my dear friends: David Kessler who carefully read and proofread a considerable part of the manuscript. I thoroughly enjoyed our transatlantic exchange. Birgit Schütz who supplied encouragement and support for the final stage of this dissertation during our stay in Austria. And last but not least Dr. Jan Schneider for his continuous inspiration. I very much enjoyed our weekly conversations about Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Very special thanks are due to professor Marjorie Perloff for reading my dissertation and discussing its issues with me. I am grateful for her continuous support, advice and encouragement. I wish to express my gratitude to the Graduiertenförderung des Landes Nordrhein- Westfalen for three years of funding which made this work possible and the DAAD for granting a three month period of research at Stanford. I wish also to acknowledge help received from my husband Helmut Göricke whose support during the work on the exposé for this thesis was the beginning of our love. And finally I am greatly indepted to my parents Gisela Nobis and Dr. Klaus Nobis to whom this dissertation is dedicated. I wish to thank them for supporting me all those years and always showing a great interest in my work. 5 0 Introduction Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Value) Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite truth. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right. Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Self-Reliance") In his 1986 essay "Writing and Method," the poet Charles Bernstein claims that "forms of art […] investigate the terms of human experience and their implications." And concludes that "poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures of phenomena" (Content's Dream 220). He thereby clearly defines the alignment and concern of his work. His affinity with philosophy, in particular with the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, however, does not make him into a philosopher nor does it mean to obliterate the distinction between philosophy and poetry. But it gives expression to the mutual attraction of poetry and philosophy. Bernstein describes the relation like this: "the natural condition of philosophy is to aspire to ("reunification" with) literature and that of literature to aspire to the power of philosophy to speak to and of our lives" (168). It thus comes to no surprise that the philosophers to which Bernstein is in particular indebted, Wittgenstein and Cavell, also hold a threshold position between philosophy and literature. While still holding to their status of philosophy, for Bernstein, they aspire to literature: Wittgenstein in claiming that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry" and Cavell in, as Bernstein has it, "making the case for immersion inside moods, 6 fears, hopes--not to make philosophy literature but to call philosophy back to its sources of judgment" (Content's Dream 168). In this dissertation I want to claim that literature is the only adequate medium for such an epistemological inquiry. Only the realm of aesthetics in which the production of a work of art takes place is able to provide an access to the sources of judgment. Chapter I elucidates this peculiar relation between epistemology and aesthetics and by extension epistemology and literature. The epistemological project of poetry, however, also has a political dimension, which can be justified in Cavell's comparison of Wittgenstein's "possibilities of phenomena" (Philosophical Investigations 90) or differently put "our agreement in judgments" (242) with Rousseau's concept of "consent" (to the membership in a society) which he develops in The Social Contract. It prepares the ground for my second claim that poetry as epistemological inquiry fulfills more than a philosophical function but is motivated by a political need. The need of the politically mature citizen to know what he or she has consented to. Cavell's discovery of the similarity and comparability of Wittgenstein's concept of "agreement in judgments" and Rousseau's concept of "consent," thus gives a political dimension to epistemology which often goes unnoticed, furthermore it illustrates the inseparability of ethics and aesthetics1, which has also been claimed by Wittgenstein in his dictum from the Tractatus that "ethics and aesthetics are one" (6.421). Another aspect of epistemology which falls squarely into the realm of literature and philosophy is skepticism. According to Cavell both disciplines are drawn toward, perhaps struggling with the "truths and wrongs of skepticism." He, for instance, reads the work of Shakespeare as an incessant reflection on skepticism2. One of the truths of skepticism, Cavell draws our attention to, is the human being's "metaphysical finitude" which I relate to 1 For a similar view of the inseparability of ethics and aesthetics see the Language poet Joan Retallack. In her essay "The Poethical Wager," Retallack coins the term "poethics." 2 For instance in The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. and Disowning Knowledge. In Six Plays of Shakespeare. 7 Bernstein's poetics of "negative capability," a term he borrows from Keats who describes it as the quality to "remain content with half-knowledge,"3 to "accept the limits of knowledge" (Content's Dream 328). In this way negative capability has a therapeutic function and serves as a constant corrective against metaphysical delusions and confusions. An explanation of the philosophical background informing Bernstein's work is given in chapters I.1, II.1 and III.1. It supplies an aid for approaching his poetry by introducing and recreating the spirit in which his work is written. Such knowledge of the political and philosophical breeding-ground is essential for an adequate understanding of the work. In the second part of chapters I, II and III, Bernstein's poetics will be brought in relation to the epistemological background introduced in the first parts. This approach provides a view of Bernstein's poetics which to the present moment has not yet been given. The dissertation at hand takes seriously Bernstein's claim that "poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities of phenomena." It takes this claim as a point of departure and investigates its meaning in all its implications, acknowledging its political, philosophical and aesthetic interrelations. As a consequence, such an analysis necessarily has to be multidimensional. Or differently put, only an interdisciplinary approach is able to fully realize the political and philosophical relevance of Bernstein's poetry and to do justice to it. As the reception of Bernstein has shown, the interpretation of Bernstein's poems is not an easy task. Perloff describes the issue as follows: most critiques of Bernstein's work, as of Language poetry in general, have raised the issue of the work's nonreferentiality. Thus Eliot Weinberger dismisses Language Poetry as "an endless succession of depthless images and empty sounds, each canceling the previous one;" it is made up of words set free of any possible meanings, sentences that ignore or contradict what has just been said, words whose effect is not meant to go beyond the second in which they are uttered, words without history" (Radical Artifice 172). 3 Letter from Keats to his brothers George and Thomas (Dec. 21st, 1817). 8 In this passage Weinberger alludes to one of the main slogans associated with Language Poetry: "the death of the referent." Many critics like Weinberger happily take this slogan as an opportunity to categorize Language poetry as just another instance of postmodern "senseless play" and "anything goes". As Bernstein is not only associated with the Language group but is one of its most well-known proponents, I will give a brief introduction to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in general. The literary phenomenon known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, originated in the early 70s as a counter movement to main-stream poetry, a "mode of resistance to institutional or critical demands for fixed aesthetic value and direction" as Linda Reinfeld has it in her Language Poetry. Apart from its critical attitude towards all traditional forms of writing, there are no common convictions shared by all Language poets, no central pamphlets or manifestoes.
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