Poetry and the unpoetic

Left to right: Marjorie Perloff, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Plato.

Early on in her 1996 study of “Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary,” a book entitled Wittgenstein’s Ladder, Marjorie Perloff puts forward the thesis — one which has circulated widely — that Wittgenstein wrote “‘philosophy’ as if it were ‘poetry.’”[1] Both “philosophy” and “poetry” appear in quotation marks, giving us to understand that a certain metaphorical grammar may be at work here, although equally it may be the very literality of these terms that Perloff wishes to insist upon, in order in some sense to “undo.” In evoking this proximity of poetry to philosophy, even by way of an analogy — of an analogical writing — Perloff calls to mind, without naming,[2] the figure (we might say spectre) of a form of “poetry” that writes as philosophy; which negates itself (as poetry) in a moment of zealous assertion of its truth (as philosophy). Perloff’s implied interlocutor here is the Plato of The Republic. In the background of Perloff’s discussion of Wittgenstein, of “poetic language,” and of “estrangement,” the three books of the Republic dealing with the exclusion of “poetry” from the ideal polis — in fact its interdiction — evoke the ambi-violence of a type of primal scene: on the one hand describing a castration-effect of language under the dominion of the philosophic Signified, and on the other describing the locus of a return of the philosophical “repressed,” its Unheimlich, its strangely resemblant yet disconcerting and innately threatening other. They rehearse in inaugurating political consciousness, towards whose “thought” — or rather rationale — language (and so-called poetic language above all) is henceforth subjectivized as “obedient, dutiful, servile, fawning” — to borrow the words of Zambian-born poet Karen Mac Cormack.[3] Plato’s consolation to poetry is to allow it to plead, to “make her defence”: in any case, poetry is under no circumstances to speak for itself, or to speak in its own name, it must rather be represented before the tribunal of reason by others, speaking in proseas if it were philosophy.[4]

It has gone without saying, of course, that poetry “speaking as prose,” enters upon the purview of the philosophical only by virtue of this fact, that it does not speak (just as, in the Platonic schema, the truth — under the name Socrates — remains the last word of a philosophy that does not write). But though it is prohibited from speaking in its own name, the eliding of poetry into prose, into the “language of” philosophy, evokes a type of Freudian symptomatology — a type of “return” of the philosophic repressed — by way of this seeming aporia: as if it were philosophy (or even what Badiou, addressing Wittgenstein, calls “antiphilosophie”). There is a corollary, of course, in that the “repressed” is never any detachable thing, but rather a symptom of an inaugurating gesture, such as — analogously — of the Platonic schema. The impetus of poetry’s threat to the polis is entirely apportioned in the inaugurating action of this schema (to the extent that one might indeed argue that poetry — or if not poetry in its generic sense, then poiēsis in the broader tropological sense — “is” this inaugurating action “itself”). “La poème,” writes Badiou, “signifie l’être, et enregistre l’imminence de l’acte.”[5] In any case, poetry henceforth becomes that of which, in its own turn, philosophy will not speak — other than in the proscriptive mode or (equivalently) as an exemplum.

If the republic of Plato stands as a summa of philosophical-political accomplishment, poetry then assumes something of the contrary “function” — of détournement, of ostranenie, of disconcertion and masking: which is to say, it does not state itself as thought, but enstates a type of thought (the unheimlich poetic object, so-called, puts us in the position of thinking at the same time as it maintains a critical distanciation, a “persona”). It is able to do this not because poetry may be applied “philosophically” or “politically” (i.e. as a vehicle for thought in competition with philosophy/politics), but because it itself constitutes a condition, an illicit possibility of the “philosophical” and of the “political” (Plato’s exclusion more than implies it).

We see in Plato that the very activity of formalizing the political as philosophy as thought presents itself as the locus of a kind of obsessional neurosis. The poetic exclusion becomes the bellwether of an entire system and the necessary condition for its terms and the discourse they represent to uphold their claims to a sovereign reason (one unperturbed by internal contradictions).[6] By excluding dramatic poetry from his ideal polis, Plato strictly excludes the possibility of such a thing as “poetical reason,” even if (or rather because) the logic of “personae” employed in dramatic poetry is ostensibly the same logic as underwrites philosophical discourse: i.e. the logic of hypothesis. And philosophical discourse is no mere descriptive system — it is not, as Wittgenstein rightly argued, theoretical, but rather an action, an activity (eine Tätigkeit), thereby commensurate with thinking, with “thought,” and thus commensurate also with a “poetics” of thought.[7] Despite Plato’s objections to the contrary, the activity of philosophy (and Plato’s own philosophical “mode” — aporetic dialogue plus interrogative suspense — is very much exemplary of this) brings together what Badiou calls a syntax continually tempted by mathematics and a semantics equally tempted by a “poésie hermétique.” It aspires to a “crystalline univocity” at the same time as it is drawn towards an “absolute equivocation.”[8]

If Wittgenstein himself formulated no “poetics,” his investigations of language and propositional structures themselves articulate a poetics. In a note, Perloff cites Stanley Cavell to the effect that while “in Plato, philosophy retains a given reality, an autonomous cultural, intellectual, institutional life,” for Wittgenstein such an autonomy no longer obtains.[9] We see that in part this has to do with the view, given in the Tractatus, that language in all its modes — including so-called “philosophical discourse” (as much as “poetic language”) — is either commensurate or contiguous or (to the extent this is possible) both, its autonomy founded solely on a series of rhetorical (poetical) manoeuvres, such as those played out in the Republic. Wittgenstein, however, doesn’t merely dismiss “philosophic” or “poetic” language as categories, but rather — and quite significantly — demonstrates that the logic of Plato’s gesture (the foundational gesture of the philosophy/poetry dichotomy) is itself vested in precisely this contiguity of language (and there is a temptation here to emphasize its as such, if this itself were not a pleonasm): it is a language-effect, an operation of a certain as if. In a very fundamental sense for Wittgenstein, philosophical language and poetic language are hypotheses which are mutually implied if yet in no proper sense equivalent. As Badiou observes:

Words take on, in philosophy, a sense both imperious and troubling. They are at the same time made axiomatic by the effort to systematise and poeticised by the rhetorical energy of doing so.[10]

The Tractatus (an attempt, in Badiou’s estimation, to produce a work sans extérieur through an evocation of linguistic materiality: “the contrary of the entire rhetoric of Platonism”)[11] — though concerned with articulating principles of “logic” — commences with a series of aphorisms, in the guise of axioms (replete with its own numerical pseudo-system, “un principe de montage, codé par les numerations”), about delimitation and discourse, summed up in 5.6: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt). It is important to understand Wittgenstein quite literally here. If Browning by way of McLuhan says “a man’s reach much exceed his grasp, else what’s a metaphor?” this “reach,” for Wittgenstein, means the possibility of language, and thus the possibility of a world — which is to say, of an idiom.[12] The aporia of language, of poiēsis, for Wittgenstein organizes itself around an absolute alterity that is only ever able to announce itself by way of “paradoxes” that are nonetheless fully in accord with what is conceivable — as for example the type of hermetic statements we find in the films of Jean-Luc Godard, such as in Notre Musique when one of his actors proposes a two-fold definition of “death” as both “the impossibility of the possible” and “the possible of the impossible.” In both instances — Godard and Wittgenstein — paradox is not a descriptive pragmatics, but a “syntax” and a “stylistic” (“une stylistic de l’aphorisme,” e.g.).[13]

For Wittgenstein, language — whose “limits” are contiguous with those of the possible — is “everything that is the case” (proposition 1). But what “is the case” in language? Or let me return to Perloff’s formulation, from which two questions seem to want to present themselves: What does it mean to write as if? And what is poetic language?

The institution of Philosophy, according to a certain tradition, is properly founded with the writings of Plato. Voilà. This idea has recently been restated by Badiou, who points to Plato’s de-suturing of “philosophy” and “poetry,” in the republic, as the foundational moment.[14] It is a moment reflected in the birth of the Enlightenment, in the de-suturing of science and metaphysics. It suggests that, in-advance of itself, “philosophy” remained alchemically indistinguishable from the “poetic,” wrapped up in so much subjectivism. Badiou’s point hinges on the nature of the exclusion of poetry from Plato’s ideal polis — specifically the exclusion of dramatic poetry, in which the persona of the speaker is not grounded in the selfhood of poet or listener/reader, and not consequently bound by any criteria of truth (it evades the juridical, in that it disavows responsibility for its avowals) — thus permitting philosophy to constitute (or believe it constitutes) its own rule-governed class of language. At the same time, Plato’s gesture of exclusion presents itself as a type of necessity, without which philosophy would not be able to assert its claims over reason and truth, though equally the fact of poetry’s exclusion has always — however subtly, however discreditedly — represented a certain embarrassment, a certain disquietude, like the continued existence of a Britannicus in the eyes of a Nero.[15] Ostensibly, the dramatic poet is regarded by Plato (who for his part appropriates the figure of Socrates to rail against the deleterious influence of Homer on Athenian morals) as a species of sophist, whose language presents an especial dilemma for philosophy because it is able at every stage to simulate the discourse of truth, without, as it were, being responsible for its own words.[16] However, paradox is situational, it finds a way of inhabiting the very systems that seek to reduce or exclude it; it is produced “complementarily” with them (as anti-matter is to matter) and abolished in their abolition (as Barrett Watten says, “A paradox is eaten by the space around it”).[17]

It is for this reason that we find the “poetic exception” consistently undermined throughout Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In order to account for language at all, it is necessary to account for language in its broadest ramification. Wherever a theory of language exists which maintains a poetic exception, the spectre of “poetic language” constantly haunts and undermines its definitions, its suppositions, its “world view.” And yet the relation of poiēsis to philosophic logos also assumes the character of an aporia. Poiēsis, like the sophist, will not be pinned down. It presents, in fact, the allure of an anti-paradigm (of which, more later). Our ability to know what “poetry” is remains here negatively defined, either with regard to the master discourses of philosophy or politics; and in light of a historical project which has maintained the autonomy of aesthetics (to which the term “poetry” has been most often affiliated) a number of questions arise as to the systematization of poetry, the reconvergence of poetry and philosophy by way of a poetics, and the designation of an “unpoetic.” Between the inflection of the definite article and an apparent appropriation of the exclusionary prefix, the term “poetic” hesitates between two seemingly contradictory tendencies: a paradox. On the one hand, there is the consolidation, from the classical era by way of the Renaissance, of both formal and ethico-aesthetic delimitations of the poetic (to the exclusion of elements deemed “unpoetic”); effectively a re-inscribing of Plato’s originary gesture, by means of which poetry — as the formerly excluded — redeems itself once more for the good and the beautiful. On the other hand, there is — primarily associated with modernism, but finding diverse antecedents — the assumption of a critical stance which seeks both to upset the ideological foundations of such an aesthetics and at the same time to extend the idea of the “poetic” by means of the “unpoetic.”

If there exists an historical moment at which the consolidation of the “poetic” by way of an exclusion of the “unpoetic” shifts towards an extension of the “poetic” by way of an engagement with the “unpoetic,” then problems of more than merely definitional character arise. (Is it true, as Roland Barthes claims, that “it is only recently that literature comes into existence — as a problem”?)[18] What is of particular interest, however, is how the poetic/unpoetic dichotomy re-inscribes, in a reverse movement, the signal exclusion of “poetry” from Plato’s ideal “polis.” The history of modernism suggests a politicizing of the “unpoetic” (or an acknowledgement of the “unpoetic” as the “political”) orientated towards a critique of official modes of discourse, including official modes of poetic discourse (and consequently, official modes of modernist poetic discourse, once these too have become reified). Nevertheless, this “politicization” (in truth, the “poetic” is political from its origin) necessarily tends towards a recuperation of “poetry” for the “polis” (in one respect or another, the “poetics of the unpoetic” tends to assume a stance with regard to the polis, or the “cultural police,” and thus to be defined by it). In almost every instance, the poetic “avant-garde” — as it has manifested itself, however diversely, throughout the history of modernism, and in its more recent incarnations — has nevertheless maintained a social-transformative function (a re-negotiation of the terms binding poetry to the polis): for Surrealism it was to bring about a poetico-social revolution by means of a change of consciousness; for Dada, the abolition of “false” moral-aesthetic values (“Art” or “Kultur”) etc. The question, then, is how can we treat the “unpoetic” as a paradigm of “poetic” critique? What does it mean when we accede to the idea of the “poetic” in advance of such a critique? And what does it mean when we seek to extend, or progress, the “poetic” by means of the “unpoetic” — whether in its singularity, or as a plurality? And this raises again for us a question posed by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Is poetry [therefore] a sign or is it an instrument of power?”[19]

But to return to my first question: What would it mean to write as if?

One recent exploration of this question is Karen Mac Cormack’s 2008 book, Implexures — whose title refers to an archaic usage, defined by the OED as “an infolding, a fold.” Mac Cormack’s text might be loosely described as a kind of “dramatic poem” (though for the most part in prose) whose “poetics” is organized around certain constructs of persona articulated through a matrix of travelogue, letters, journal entries, diary entries, notebook entries, memoire, self-quotation, quotations from diverse sources — scientific, historiographical, philosophical, literary (including Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Deleuze and Guattari, Max Beerbohm, Aphra Behn, Marcel Duchamp, and Petrarch) — newspaper clippings, civic ordinances, parliamentary records, etymologies, genealogies, trivia, photography, diagrams, dreams, mythology, political commentary, number tables, and the odd forgery (a letter, for example, from “Susan Hicks Beach,” the author’s great-aunt, “to Jacques Derrida circa 1880”): all arranged in thirty-one sections, plus postscript, plus index of “sources.” Incorporating conventions of philology, Implexures examines the functional distinctions between poetry and artefact, record, testimony, document, facticity, and ultimately what it means to speak of truth statements (Mac Cormack: “promotion to meaning enlists words”[20]). The montage-effect of the work — the paradoxically seamless and yet inassimilable “demarcation” of the so-called poetic object — demands accounting for: firstly with regard to the logic of dichotomy (which not only underwrites whatever may be said about the “poetic” and “unpoetic,” or dramatic poetry and philosophy), but of genre and consequently of discourse as a whole; and secondly with regard to the possibility of montage, of expropriation or re-expropriation (whether of the poetic for the philosophical, for example, or of philosophy into the poetic): montage here describes a syntax, the implexure of language.

During the late nineteenth century, Hans Vaihinger’s Philosophy of As If specified an array of instances in which “fictive” thinking lent comparative impetus to biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence. For Vaihinger, all discourse, all genres, are structurally reducible to the sequence of thought encapsulated by the “as if.” Additionally, Vaihinger argued that science, in a strict sense, is speculative, since we can never really “know” (or directly experience) the underlying reality of the world. Rather, we construct systems of thought and act “as if” these correspond to some objective reality. The worldview presented by science is, for Vaihinger, ultimately constructed upon certain fictional foundations, even if it is a highly coherent and effective one. This view reflects the practical reliance of science upon hypothesis, but also the dependence upon indirect verification. Meaning that much of what underwrites our reality cannot even be represented by means of analogy. Often, science is concerned with what, for us, remains fundamentally unknowable. For Vaihinger, the as if underwrites the very notion of hypothesis, of modelling, prediction, predication, possibility, and fiction. It also evokes synonymy, similitude, analogy, metaphor, representation, and signification. In short, an entire poetics. Here, the quasi-oppositional dichotomy gives rise to a theory of radical contiguity. Not equivalence, but a structural contiguity of discourse, of language. Importantly, the as if also generalizes our thinking about such things as hypothesis from the “object” of a given discourse (what it knows or can know), to the character of that discourse itself. For example, with regard to Plato’s ideal polis, we can treat philosophy (in the sense of being founded upon a certain dichotomization) as a type of as if. That is to say as a hypothesis, or a set of similar hypotheses. The coherence of philosophical discourse thus devolves, in a certain sense, upon the coherence of its hypothetical foundations: the as if. Vaihinger’s theory of fictions, which begins with a consideration of knowledge and hypothesis, attempted to address questions of human subjectivity, and the preponderance of individuals to employ psychological fictions to mediate their experience of “irrational” social realities (ideas which echo those of Charcot, Breuer, and Freud concerning hysteria — in which psychosomatic illness is recognized as indistinguishable from “conventional” illness. The forms of simulation encountered in hysteria, for example, point towards a functional equivalence of reality and fiction at certain crucial points, echoing not only the methodological dependency of science upon a philosophy of “as if,” but also the status of this “as if” as foundational for scientific method and its forms of verifiability. Mac Cormack:

How the unknown becomes the known (process again) and sometimes becomes lost, misplaced, suppressed, de-known, subjectively and collectively, from culture to culture …[21]

This “process” is given throughout Implexures by way not only of the concatenation of discourses, but by way of a type of archaeology or paleo-etymology, in which the “evolution” of language(s) articulates a logic of as if whose terms are themselves thus “propositions.” One example, early on in Implexures, has to do with the contiguity of the terms “grammar” and “glamour” — tending towards paradox:

The word glamour “developed” as the Scottish spelling of the English gramayre or gramarye (entered into English in the 14th century denoting grammar or learning) but by the 15th century it signified occult learning. By the close of that century (in its modern spelling) glamour meant a specific form of magic spell or charm cast by devils through the agency of (usually) female witches, and supposedly caused the illusory disappearance of the penis …[22]

The politico-philosophic evolution that will have elsewhere conjoined phallus and logos, here encounters an “illusory” castration at the hands, so to speak, of a grammar gone astray along a path of orthographic deviancy — precisely what Plato was so anxious to preclude in his well-known discourse (written in the persona of Socrates) against writing; a companion-piece to his treatise against poetry (with which analogy seems unavoidable). For Mac Cormack, the evolutionary pathways of these terms describe a “poetics” of the possible: each term acting as an open hypothesis, suggestive of a shifting locus of meaning which “circulate equivocally,” in Badiou’s reading of Wittgenstein, “between the sense of the proposition … and the sense of the world.”[23] Just as for Wittgenstein, the “world” for Mac Cormack (everything that “is the case”) is language-dimensions (“without exteriors,” as Badiou says). Mac Cormack:

From string theory to M-theory (one dimensional strings giving way to higher-dimensional membranes) but apparently “most of the known physical forces operate only within a particular (mem) brane” — except perhaps gravity. If gravity “leaks out” it might allow an inferring of a parallel “brane’s” presence. And so what’s presently referred to as “dark matter” could be ordinary matter on one of many (?) parallel branes, its emitted light “trapped in its own world” but its gravity now also in ours. How to infer the “curled up” extra dimensions of language …?[24]

Mac Cormack’s Implexures — via what Badiou terms “le principe syntaxique du montage” — evokes writing as multiple personae, a writing as if, which puts to work the dichotomic interval of “parallel branes” — so to speak — in order to “infer the ‘curled up’ extra dimensions of language.” To return to Perloff, if Wittgenstein is seen to write “philosophy” as if writing “poetry,” this would not mean the one in “imitation” of the other, or a reverse “expropriation” of the one to the other, or even an “anti-philosophy” in any simplistic sense, but — let us hypothesize — a writing by which “poetry” and “philosophy” are re-inaugurated, and again re-inaugurated, tropologically, across this “complementation” (as Buckminster Fuller used to say) of as and if. Mac Cormack’s Implexures, to paraphrase,

is an engagement with depiction abstracted, skewed, the poetry a layering of interactions internal and external so too “on” and within linguistic forms.[25]

It would be incorrect to suggest here that Mac Cormack’s text records an attempted “intervention” by means of the poetic, or poetic “strategies,” into those discourses from which it is conventionally viewed as excluded. Nor is it merely an act of serial appropriation. It is not enough simply to “change all the sentences,” as Charles Bernstein has said,[26] just as it is ultimately self-defeating to submit to an anti-paradigm such as the “unpoetic” for the purpose of pursuing “poetry by other means.” The paradigm/anti-paradigm of the un/poetic (just as much as Badiou’s anti/philosophie dichotomy) needs to be reviewed in light of Derrida’s response to Foucault in his 1963 essay “Cognito and the History of Madness” (concerning Foucault’s attempt to employ “madness” [unreason, alogos, and — by declensions implied — poetry] as a paradigm of the critique of history-as-reason [i.e. philosophy], Derrida poses two basic questions: If history is a rational concept, how is it possible to write a history of madness? and second, If Foucault claims to speak for a madness that by definition must remain silent does he not risk re-appropriation by the very mode of exclusion that he claims to avoid? “We have the right,” Derrida argues, “to ask what, in the last resort, supports this language without recourse or support …? Who wrote and who is to understand, in what language and from what historical situation of logos … this history of madness?”).[27] At the very least this has to do with the fact that poiēsis, if not necessarily “poetry” as a genre of literary discourse instituted in one sort of Platonistic gesture or another, already articulates structures contiguous between all modes of discourse — including the technical and even mathematical. Like Wittgenstein’s logic, poiēsis — the poetic[28] — doesn’t give a picture: it is foremost structure and situation. It internalizes its dichotomies in advance, so that to speak of “poetic language” is at once to stipulate a general condition of the signifiable, while at the same time evoking a fundamental aporia, paradox, or pleonasm. The “impossibility of the possible” and the “possible of the impossible.”

 


 

1. Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3. In L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein (Paris: Nous, 2009), Alain Badiou in a similar vein describes the Tractatus as “Une saison en enfer écrit dans la forme de Un coup de dés …” (102; the comparison with Mallarmé is also made earlier, on page 88).

2. Except in two endnotes, on pages 246 and 254. Perloff’s intervention necessarily casts back — in light of Russell and Whitehead’s failed Principia Mathematica — to the very foundations of philosophy and, explicitly or otherwise, concerns itself with an inherence of what is sometimes called “paradox” or aporia in the project of reason from Plato onwards and its haunting by the figure of “poetry.”

3. Karen Mac Cormack, Implexures (Tucson: Chax Press, 2008), 58.

4. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1955), book 10, 607d-e.

5. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 112.

6. What this in part amounts to, is an acknowledgement that poetry is effectively excluded by Plato because it cannot be instituted, that it cannot be reduced to the type of definitional regimen he seeks to employ throughout in order to establish philosophy etc. on axiomatic foundations. In other words, that this “exclusion” is always a “pragmatique descriptive,” as Badiou says, since “by definition” poetry already writes itself out of the Platonic equation in advance, at the same time as it haunts each of its terms (philosophy defines itself, we might say, with poetry very much in mind, while poetry is only arbitrarily concerned with the philosophical as such, and this is what philosophy, to Plato’s way of thinking, cannot bear). See Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 109. Another consequence of all this is that, despite yoking together the terms philosophy, politics and thought, Plato succeeds only in describing a type of theoretical complex, under whose rarefied conditions a philosophical “way of life” might become possible.

7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, intro. Bertram Russell, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 4.112.

8. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 99, my translation.

9. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 246n20.

10. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 98.

11. Ibid., 99.

12. What can be thought or expressed is both inherent in language but also contingent upon a state-of-affairs of language: its poiesis, its making. Charles Bernstein, in an interview with Tom Beckett, argues: “A task of poetry is to make audible (tangible but not necessarily graspable) those dimensions of the real that cannot be heard as much as to imagine new reals that have never before existed. Perhaps this amounts to the same thing.” Bernstein, “Censers of the Unknown — Margins, Dissent, and the Poetic Horizon,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 184.

13. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 99.

14. Badiou, “Language, Poetry, Thought,” trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, Theoretical Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), 239ff.

15. Poetry in this sense is the subjective in language.

16. Plato, in seeking to exclude those aspects of discourse that contradicted any systematization of language-as-reason (logos), above all paradox, was possessed by the same demon that drove Bertram Russell. The system of dialectical reduction in Plato produces the aporia of indeterminacy, just as the system of mathematical reduction in Russell produced the logical ambivalence of a whole class of sets.

17. Barrett Watten, “Plasma,” In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), 27.

18. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), xv.

19. Mahmoud Darwish in the film Notre Musique, dir. Jean-Luc Godard (2005).

20. Mac Cormack, Implexures, 14.

21. Ibid., 64.

22. Ibid., 25.

23. Badiou, L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein, 100.

24. Mac Cormack, Implexures, 88.

25. Ibid., 89.

26. Bernstein, A Poetics, 152.

27. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 62.

28. On this collocation, see Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell. Revised edition. (London: Routledge, 1993), 308.