‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ - Report by Calum Gardner
‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ - symposium at Goldsmiths, London, 18th March 2017
The
‘Neurosis, Poetry, and the Present’ Symposium at the Centre for Philosophy and
Critical Thought at Goldsmiths, University of London, organised by Daniel Katz
and Benjamin Noys, brought together four speakers on the relationship between
poetry and ‘neurosis’. Opening remarks by Daniel Katz drew attention to that
fact that ‘neurosis’ is an ill-defined term, taking in a range of psychological
states including anxiety, depression, phobia, panic, and addiction. But rather
than seeing neurosis as a problem which, in the progress of things, would be
solved, it was pointed out that the practice of poetry seems to be founded in
states relating to neurotic sensitivities and the resultant ‘weakness’ of the
position from which one speaks.
*
For this reason, the first talk was given by Emma Mason on ‘Critical Vulnerability and the
Weakness of Poetry’, and elaborated the notion of ‘weak thinking’. Many of us
have a hostile reaction to being accused of weakness, but Mason articulated the
idea of ‘weak thinking’ as a critical vulnerability which might allow us to
agree with those we disagree with most. Explicitly linking the idea to Brexit,
Trump, and the recent far-right resurgence, Mason also positioned the work as
part of both a lesbian and a Christian analysis of power.
But
while very early Christianity can make a claim to speak for the weak, most
institutional forms of the religion do so now from a combination of entitlement
not to question and a fear of questioning. In this analysis, Mason drew on the
Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the notion of weak theology.
Etymologically, to debate is to fight. To the strong, the weak thinker is the
outsider, and weak forms of expression appear irrelevant. However, a critical
vulnerability or weak thought might be able to disperse power. Vattimo argues
for a rethinking of Catholicism, and for the support of fragility, of what
makes the subject. He takes the idea of Verwindung from Heidegger, a
kind of progression which, rather than getting stronger, becomes a lightening
or weakening of what has gone before. The death of Jesus is the death of God –
the Nietzchean moment is not a failure but the origin of the religion. The
secularised position Christianity now occupies was always the point, and we
have reached a point of kenosis or emptiness. ‘God’ empties Itself out to be
known, twisting away from the strong terms of God to the weak terms of kenosis.
This
is a charitable mode and, as Vattimo writes in his essay ‘The Shattering of the
Poetic Word’, a poetic one.[i] Mason thus capped the talk
with a ‘kenostic’ reading of Anne Carson’s ‘Gnosticism I’, but made an
impassioned case in doing so that instrumental teaching of literature,
philosophy, and any subject in the university often makes this impossible; the
weakest thinkings are under the greatest attack.[ii] Questions revealed an
audience interest in weak thinking, Mason explained that there is always a risk
of weak thinking becoming strong, and that this remains a conversation, and
said that weak thinkers are always in conversation with others and their
environment and are thus never alone. Weakness can make it feel that way, but
vulnerability brings one out of it.
*
Daniel
Katz followed, with a talk entitled ‘Modernist Neurosis, Impersonal Politics’,
on the political potential of the moments of loss and remainder. Neurosis is
the need to leave a trace of one’s own, or of oneself, but does not thus
valorise a poetry centred on self-expression; the lyric ‘I’ should be empty
centre around which neurotic poetry would turn. As Katz says, ‘high heroic
modernism militates against neurosis’, whereas the core of confessional poetry
turns it into something normal to be managed.
This
is what Lowell and Berryman do, anyway; a poem like Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, he
argues, is neurotic in the ‘wrong way’ for either modernism or confessionalism,
in that it assumes ‘incompatible affective positions’ without making an attempt
to reconcile them. Thinking neurotically (perhaps weakly) would let us consider
a social order which relies neither on plenty nor on scarcity, the tension
between which, and the affective relations between them, lie at the base of
ideological struggles, as we were to see in Noys discussion of Diane di Prima
in the afternoon.
Paradoxically,
Katz observed, imagism removes the contour and flow of things but has often
been codified by reference to the work of poets who are feminine or queer,
which made increasing sense as the link between the female and queer neurosis
was explored further in Natalia Cecire’s paper in the afternoon. Katz’ paper
discussed Robert Duncan’s H. D. Book, which in its ‘daybook’ form models
the practice of seriality, by means of which a writer can avoid the effect of
ego bound up in a ‘final’ production.[iii]
Neurosis,
Katz suggested, is the true ruin beneath modernism; Pound and Eliot cover it
up, but it can be made sense of with a the decadent, ‘hysterical’,
non-phallocentric style that H. D. opens up for Duncan. The talk, and therefore
the morning, concluded with a neat aphorism: ‘if the subject of cognition
cannot be the subject of politics, then the subject of neurosis must be’. This
line between cognition and politics was a bolder one than I had so far dared to
draw but, as the afternoon’s events revealed, neurosis was to be a more
political tool than the title of the symposium might have led us to believe.
*
Natalia
Cecire spoke after lunch about ‘The Cell, the Shell, and the Death Drive:
Marianne Moore and the Open Secrets of the Natural World’. Cecire began with a
close reference to D. A. Miller’s study Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style,
where it is argued that Anne Elliot, Austen’s only real spinster heroine, is
the site of her loss of ‘godlike’ detachment.[iv] Moore speaks of the
‘criminal ingenuity’ required to avoid getting married. A colour-coded slide
demonstrated the nested grammatical forms of Moore’s poem ‘The Pangolin’, nouns
wrapped in the shell-layers of modifiers.[v] Cecire related this to
what Roland Barthes calls the writer’s ‘secret mythology’, style (and
particularly modern[ist] style) as a form of ‘solitude’.[vi]
The
‘shell style’, Moore’s version of Austen’s ‘secret style’, is defined by Cecire
in terms of Sianne Ngai’s ‘irritation’.[vii] The ‘labile and
contested surfaces’ of such texts are embodied in the interactions of hard
shells and variably vulnerable cells. To those of us familiar with Cecire’s
illuminating work on Moore and precision, it seemed a natural move for her to
discuss the multiple Moores of criticism: there is the anal-retentive,
‘syllabic’ Moore and the (often considered overly) dominant, assertive one. The
reason Austen’s style is queer, in Miller’s analysis, is that the spinster
functions as a ‘relay’ through which gay men can access femininity through a
shared relation to marriage and reproduction (this is part of the connection
between Duncan and H. D., although H. D. is not [quite] a ‘spinster’). The
shell surfaces in Moore are charged with feeling as well as meaning because the
shell serves as a kind of closet for Moore, and not just because of their
hardened, enclosing form.
In
the early days of psychoanalysis, Cecire explained, cells were thought to be
miniature models for higher order functions, including psychic ones, and
exposure to stimulus made them develop hard outer surfaces. At Bryn Mawr
College, Moore was taught in a department which had been home to some of the
pioneering cell biologists of the age, but as Cecire says, contrary to what
some writing on the subject implies, Moore ‘did O.K. but not great in biology’;
its real importance for the poet was to offer a means of socialising apart from
her unusually close family life and to explore her sexuality, a place where she
met and formed intense relationships with other women. It was possible to draw
a link, not dependent on this biographical context but certainly more potent in
it, between cellular biology and both spinster and queer identity.
So
is the ‘precise’ Moore
writing from the position of a pangolin or a lab technician? Perhaps the most
exciting part of the talk was Cecire’s projection
of a meeting-place between queer studies and natural history. Cells can be
neurotic: once they are susceptible, penetrable, and able to be touched, they
can also be killed. This is the source of the shell style, which is both
protective and probing; I was reminded of this paper reading Anne Boyer’s essay
‘No’: ‘The no of a poet is so often a yes in the carapace of no.’ The shell
style is this kind of ‘carapace’.
The
talk, which had allowed us to linger in the relative comfort of a Bryn Mawr
biology classroom, finished by crashing into the present, and looked at the
relevance of neurotic sensitivities to the way the media has responded to the
present US presidency and its barely disguised disinformation. The ‘epidemic of liberals “bringing
fact-checkers to a knife-fight”’, says Cecire, is the product of a
misrecognition of the ways in which the administration makes itself
invulnerable to analysis and critique. Reading through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
paranoid reading, it is suggested that sometimes it is neurotic reading, not
fact-checking, that is best able to combat structural inequalities and the way
they reproduced by the far right.
*
Benjamin
Noys concluded with a paper entitled ‘The Cosmogony of Revolution: Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters and
Anti-Neurosis’ – the discussion of anti-neurosis a self-admittedly neurotic
move at the neurosis symposium. Noys’ analysis positioned the Revolutionary
Letters as poems of the revolution, and of a revolution which did not
happen (or hasn’t yet happened). They are poems of anti-neurosis and heavy
optimisms. Indeed, di Prima’s is a revolution with no place for neurosis: it is
an im-personal revolution, a smash-the-separation, natural revolution.
In
many ways, the activities of May 1968 seemed to bring to life (or to be about to
bring to life) some of the wishes and desires expressed in the Revolutionary
Letters. However, Di Prima’s revolution sees the irruptions of ’68, the
demonstrations, occupations, and riots, as merely the ‘ghost dance’ – the
spiritual rehearsal – for the true revolution. The response to this dance is
just as crucial: to be ‘surprised when the magic works’ undermines the
potential revolutionary power of such activities. This is the politics of ‘hard
optimism’, to hope against possibility and take it in your stride when the
demands are fulfilled. But they must also be the right demands, and di Prima
has clear ideas about what those are, as hard optimism is a rejection of other
optimisms; Noys drew attention to di Prima’s railing against sci-fi utopias in
Letter 19. ‘you are still / the enemy [if] you have chosen / to sacrifice the
planet for a few years of some / science fiction Utopia’.[viii]
For
a talk from one who made the disclaimer that he was not a ‘professional reader
of poetry’ (we wonder, in this context, who would want to be?), the discussion
was extremely conscious of the forms, traditions, and conventions in which di
Prima was writing and which have emerged after her, refusing to collapse the Revolutionary
Letters, as other readings have done, into either emotional overflow or
instruction manual, and yet also acknowledging the place of both of those
functions in anti-neurotic practice.
*
The
final moments of the day saw three of the panelists (Mason had had to leave
early) take questions and attempt to summarise a varied and stimulating set of
discussions. In the context of the politics – from presidential to
revolutionary – that the papers had raised, Katz said that even a massive
social change will not solve our neuroses; ‘we’ll still be unhappy, but we
might as well be unhappy in a just society’. What was most stark about the
meeting point of what are often, even or perhaps especially in academic
analysis, taken to be phenomena experienced by individuals, was how political
and indeed revolutionary it positioned itself as being. Ultimately, the
symposium was a sketch for a poetic-critical-political analysis to be achieved
by attention to the lessons and practices of neurosis.
Notes
[i] Vattimo, ‘The Shattering of the Poetic Word’ in The End of
Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. by Jon R. Snyder
(Cambridge: Polity, 1991).
[ii] Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New
York: Vintage, 2006).
[iii]
Duncan, The H. D. Book
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 [1984]).
[iv] Miller, Jane Austen, or, The Secret of Style (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 31.
[v]
Moore, Complete Poems (New York:
Macmillan, 1967).
[vi]
Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1967 [1953]), pp. 10-11.
[vii]
Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005).
[viii] Diane Di Prima, The Revolutionary Letters, 3rd edn (San
Francisco: City Lights, 1974), p. 21.
