Buggeryville

More Lakoff-inspired thinking about categories and poetry. (Though first, via Silliman, an article about Lakoff and politics.) Warning: I make a few logical moves here that I'm not sure I stand behind, although I'm more or less OK with where they end up.

Lakoff likes to refer to certain interpretive models as being psychologically "real", meaning something like "not just an interpretive model, but one that can be clinically shown to have meaning." I'm not sure that's different from a non-"real" ("ideal") model?

But: One categorical concept he wants to suggest is "real" is the notion of the catch-all category, the "other" or "misc." category, where anything that doesn't fit into the other categories might fall. In English, we nouns are replaced by pronouns, and some nouns fall into the "he" category, some into the "she" category, and some into the "it" category. We can say that "he" and "she" are determined by rules -- categories which seem to have definitions -- and "it" is the catchall. Nouns in the "it" category don't necessarily share positive characteristics the way nouns in the "he" or "she" categories do. (This is my example, not Lakoff's, and like all such examples it might be philosophically problematic, but it still might be useful, so let's go with it.)

So I want to suggest that "poetry" is an "other" category. If you take the category of "writing", you can come up with rules that pull out various subcategories ("prose", "plays", "memoirs", "three-hundred-word album reviews", "personal ads") and what doesn't get pulled out has to be "poetry" -- what else could it be? (Well, "nonsense"? But we recognize spam as poetry! As better poetry than our own humble efforts. Well, many of us do, anyway.)

(I wonder if poetry in the small sense might not actually be an "other" category.)

Anyway I don't necessarily think this conceptualization of "poetry" as "catch-all" in necessarily true (or "real") but it at least points to a desperate plurality and heterogeneity within poetry (no shock there).

But that heterogeneity -- this possibility that poetry is not a thing but a collection of unthings -- might be why asking a question like "is poetry a technology" is so itchy-making. Poetry is not as specific or coherent as the sorts of things we call "technologies".

And so when Kasey wants to ask: "I want to ask if there's a way of thinking about this in which it becomes clear that poetry absolutely cannot be a technology, almost by definition." -- we can suggest that because poetry is so indefinite, it can't comfortably be a technology. (Though is the Shakesperean sonnet a technology? Is whatever you want to call the method that Kenneth Goldsmith used to write The Weather a technology? Probably yes.)

And when he adds: "And at the same time, I wonder whether poetry assumes an ironic relation to technology, in which it exploits technological resources, explores technological themes, and generally behaves as though it were a member of the set 'things that are intelligible under the rubric of technology,' precisely in order to burlesque that relationship, to flaunt its total resistance to any subsumption by (modern) technology." -- we can suggest that again, poetry is by definition heterogeneous and not assuming, en masse, a relation to anything (except those categories of "writing" that it is not falling into).

But then, is Kasey making a definitional move here? Is poetry, for him, going to be writing which "assumes an ironic relation to technology" (or things like technology), which aims for or acheives this (potential political) end? Is this descriptive or proscriptive thinking about poetry? Does it take into account Susan Polis Schutz (or is her work "not poetry")? Is this less a query towards the status of poetry than it is a query towards the formulation of a manifesto?