Consider two vectors whose points of origin have long ago vanished from the map. One now has the form of a broad swathe, narrowing as it passes through the present moment. Still its full force has been diverted into many side channels through which it continues to flow. Say the present moment, as you or I experience it, yields to a stream that passes through a gate of some sort, the individual human iris. Possibly some of us have learned to block its passage, or the gate has been battered shut from the outside. Still the stream passes through many side channels unbeknownst to you or I. Possibly an individual soul could never sustain its full force. Luckily desire tends to overflow its banks and wander off as rivulets that thin out and seep into the soil [suffusion of affect].

The State needs to subordinate hydraulic forces to conduits, pipes, embankments, which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid, and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 363)

Does the Milky Way flow through the individual human iris?

The human universe might be thought of as a net or network of individual gates through which the stream of desiring passes: whole civilizations and their mores, the behaviors that they accept or refuse to accept. Imagine little signs over some of the gates labeled 'Do not enter'. In some manner, such provisions have come into place and now define the present with respect to memory, even in a limited sense with respect to history, for some side channels remain untraceable or we flinch within our shells at their presence.

In a rarefied way, I have described the relation between the superstructure and the base of Marxist thought. Walter Benjamin, (in a text that my students read in HU 340), writes:

The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production. Only today can it be indicated what form this has taken.

The little gates and nets are a superstructure: the way that humans organize themselves for purposes of production, always scrambling to harness some as yet untapped portion of desire. To rephrase Benjamin then, modes of cultural production change more rapidly than modes of producing desire.

The classical structure for producing desire is the family. When the owner of a factory sees himself as a father-figure. The superstructure is reflecting the base. In fact, the workers have become ants, and the owner is the CEO. The day may come when we see our families in this light and then finally the base will reflect the superstructure, but it never will: the relation between the two is always dialectical.

Infancy is fundamental to human-ness. The infant as index of human potential represents the ability to shuttle freely between ways of knowing. This thesis has been advanced by Max Delbrück in Mind from Matter. Seeing is always partial and the adult no longer sees as many sides of a face as the child. Attempting to explain the objective qualities of Picasso's way of seeing, Gertrude Stein writes,

A child sees the face of its mother, it sees it in a completely different way than other people see it, I am not speaking of the spirit of the mother but of the features and the whole face, a child sees it from very near, it is a large face for the eyes of a small one, it is certain that the child for a little while only sees a part of the face of its mother, it knows one feature and not another, one side and not the other, and in his way Picasso knows faces as a child knows them and the head and the body. He was then commencing to try to express this consciousness and the struggle was appalling because, with the exception of some African sculpture, no one had ever tried to express things seen not as one knows them but as they are when one sees them without remembering having looked at them.

Seeing in the adult has been shaped by the gates through which desire has passed. It is less flexible now than it might have been. With respect to history, the tendency has been to commodify desire, but surely the family, the infant at the teat or the embryo hearing the mother hum is the source of desire not the market.

Does perception of an effect always precede knowledge of the cause?

The philosophers who best explain, for my purposes, the phenomenology of desire are Baruch Spinoza and Giles Deleuze (often with the collaboration of Félix Guattari, for instance, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a study that situates both Freudian and Marxist thought in relation to the production of desire in ‘modern’ consumer societies). But Spinoza is closer to the inception of early modern history. He is an excommunicated Jew, hounded by Calvinists (including our Puritan forefathers), writing in internal exile near Amsterdam around 1650. For many people the history of the soul had already become a separate matter from the history of the body at this time. Descartes and Galileo had been published. Writing of Spinoza’s Ethics, which he reads as an ethology or study of the capacity of man or animals for being affected, Deleuze distinguishes between passions and actions:

Now, from the viewpoint of an ethology of man, one needs first to distinguish between two sorts of affections: actions, which are explained by the nature of the affected individual, and which spring from the individual's essence; and passions, which are explained by something else, and which originate outside the individual. (27)

At stake here are qualitative differences between modes of existence. Do actions or passions in relation to one another produce relations that can be described as either good or bad?

Affect:

One of the most significant modern poems, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, links its integrity to the quality of the affection expressed by the poet.

What thou lov’st well remains,

                                    the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

Whose world, or mine or theirs,

                        or is it of none?

First came the seen, then thus the palpable

Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,

What thou lovest well is thy true heritage

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee (LXXXI, 520-21)

Pound’s thought is demonstrably influenced by his reading of Spinoza, as much as is Deleuze’s. "First came the seen …" then the spirit. Spinoza is one of the lights that Pound brings to bear on the subject of immanence in medieval and Renaissance love poetry, as in his reading of the "Donna Mi Prega" of Guido Cavalcanti.†

That coherence is immanent is a conviction that extends from Spinoza through Pound and Kandinsky to the postmodern language poet, Lyn Hejinian:

Coherence is always immanent in this literary situation, which I can picture, for example, as a scene in which the writer is standing on a concrete curb in the commercial district, the reader is standing beside the writer, and many people are moving up and down and across the street—many heads, many stomachs, many bags, many shoes and boots. … Every person is born preceded by its desire. (168)

My first book was Coherence (an anthology of poetry and statements on poetics); my most recent Fields. My projects have always involved a mapping of distances and an examination of the rifts that score a surface.

Of particular interest to me, in The Book I Need to Write are the incommensurabilities or ‘jarring effects’ that mark the surface of both the modern and the postmodern text. I believe that these arise somewhere in the interstices between desire and expression. They relate to ways of knowing (or seeing), to an engagement with language and form as both limit and embodiment of what it is possible to communicate, and to a variety of social facts. Instead of reductive contrasts, In this book I propose to trace some of the tangled threads that make the postmodern a child of the early twentieth century avant-garde.

Literature and art present complex realities of substance.‡ In the postcolonial world, an uneasy relation of ritual to desire gives way to a focus on means of production, on ways of seeing and knowing that make language and composition crucial. Under postmodern conditions of knowing, the movement is away from intrinsic qualities of coherence or energy associated with form toward pastiche and improvisation. Understanding both affect and mimicry have become crucial. Emily Apter has written that affect "is about miming the human when the human has come increasingly to be embodied in posthuman constructions" (20). She concludes the introduction to Continental Drift by surmising that "the aesthetics of affect clearly participates in the identity politics of performative mimicry." For her, "affect has emerged as the ‘theory lite’ version of virtual subjects who have little real stake in national. ethnic, or gender affiliations" (20). I will seek in my reading of modern and postcolonial poetry an antidote to the mimicry of the cosmopolitan "other" that proponents of a new global culture valorize.††

I am still following the first of two lines which I have proposed to trace in this talk. The broad stream of desire over time, for which figures like Spinoza or Galileo serve as a hinge point or points of re-doubling, as desire moves from the archaic through the modern to the post-colonial. Both production and desire have been organized differently at different times. I should provide examples:
 

Reliquary figure from the Congo, similar to the one that inspired Picasso while creating Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.	John Heartfield Zwanglieferantin von Menschenmaterial Nur Mut! Der Staat braucht Arbeitslose und Soldaten!  (Forced supplier of human ammunition! Take courage! The needs unemployed and soldiers!)	Hannah Höch  Mutter: Aus einem ethnographischen Museum  (Mother: From an Ethnographic Museum)  Photomontage, 1930; 18x24 cm	Jordan Isip Illustration for Time  June 20, 1994

The images read from left to right read as archaic, modern, modern, postmodern. The reliquary figure from the Congo provided the inspiration for Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, often taken as the the starting point for modernism in the arts. If one examines the bronze figure closely, marks resembling woven mats distinguish the quadrants of the face (framed by the central cross). In some of these figures, like the one at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, bronzed cowry shells are used as eyes. The Kota people placed such reliquary figures in small urns filled with ashes. They served to protect the spirits of ancestors. Each image above combines power over life in some relation to death. Only in Isip's image are life and money equated. Nickels, dimes and pennies each bear the face of one of the great men of American history. A lecture on the development and use of collage provided my original impulse in locating these images. I skip that here, but you may wish to visit my use of these images in the context of my course, Studies in Modern Culture. Instead I have pursued the theme of mother and child, as I did earlier when quoting Gertrude Stein. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Koch, Michael Taussig writes of the womb, "as the mimetic organ par excellence, mysteriously underscoring in the submerged and constant body of the mother the dual meaning of reproduction as birthing and reproduction as replication" (35). Film (for Benjamin and I would now add media), in so far as it makes optical experience tactile, has come to serve a similar mimetic function to that of the mother's body. Relationships between power over life and death and the power to mint and distribute coins is perhaps not news.

I do not intend by this to suggest that the archaic has any particular value over the modern or postcolonial. It just is. It exists like frogs eggs or other spore on that stream I have mentioned. So there are always traces of the archaic, unless it is possible to imagine a universe composed entirely of machines (possibly a postmodern or posthuman characteristic).

Individual desires, if its possible to imagine such, wrap around the banks of this stream like twine of morning glory. The seething web of Darwin's tangled bank is an example. So is Thoreau’s sand bank at spring thaw.

Darwin: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Thoreau: Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their semi-cylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you can trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the ripple marks on the bottom.

My first line, you see is a very complicated set of tangled threads. The more tangled, the more absorptive of the flows it might be thought to be. My second line is modestly my career. My course. The work that I have done on these topics is one way to map this course.

Very recently (10.12.00—10.15), I prepared a seminar paper on the subject of coherence (Modern Studies Association, University of Pennsylvania). I chose the title "[tracings]" This occasion presented a chance for me to review my career since the publication of Coherence (1981). Over this span a notion of immanence as underlying coherence has been a constant. By this I mean that the contingencies of day to day life are subject to an apprehension that envisages (imputes or discovers) some order, some underlying structure or paradigm. In parallel with this presentation, I have traced some of that course (1891-2000) in the notes that appear below.

Whether coherence and related 'jarring effects' are reflections of some eternal principle (material or spiritual) or an effect of language or other social facts and their constructions is another way to frame the turning point from modern to postmodern. Under most postmodern ways of addressing this problem, we can only study a world that mimics the world of our desires. Nothing is necessary and a certain joy in pastiche and mockery, replaces what for modernists was a spiritual quest. Saturation of the neurons replaces ecstasy. Mediated forms of distraction have become an intoxicating poison with systemic effects. Again, the book I need to write will be phrased in some measure as an antidote to such systemic effects.

[Post-mortem]

†Seminar Paper: "[tracings]: Coherence and Immanence." Modern Studies Association. Second Annual Conference. University of Philadelphia, Oct. 2000.
2000 Conference Paper: "Olson and Subjectivity." National Poetry Foundation: North American Poetry of the 1960s (University of Maine June 28 - July 2).
††2000 Conference Paper: "Emergent Subjectivity and the Intercultural Test." Association for the Study of New English Literatures (ASNEL), 23d Annual Conference. Aachen and Liege (May 31- June 4).
1999 Conference Paper: "Incommensurabilities." Post-Colonial Literature II, Seminar, New Modernisms Conference,  Pennsylvania State University (October 199).
1998 Conference Paper: "Scaling the Sublime: Olson's Poetics and the Intercultural text." American Literature Association Conference, San Diego, CA. May 1998.
1997 Conference Paper: "Charles Olson and Subjectivity." American Literature Association Conference, Baltimore, May 1997.
1996 Conference Paper: "Outer Darkness: Charles Olson, Nathaniel Mackey and the Poetry of Incommensurable Realities." MLA Convention, Washington DC, Dec. 1996.
1996 Conference Paper: "Cultural Cannibalism and the Intercultural Text." Assembling Alternatives, UNH, Durham, NH, Sept. 1996.
1996 Conference Paper: "Jack Spicer's Conceptualization of the ‘Book.’" National Poetry Foundation. Conference on American Poetry in the 1950’s, University of Maine, Orono, Maine, June 19-23.
1996 Conference Paper: "On Stevens, Bishop, and Olson." American Literature Association. Conference on American Literature, San Diego, May 30 June 2, 1996.
1996 Conference Paper:: "Meaning and Method: Presence in Projective Verse and Language Poetry." Twentieth Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville, Feb. 22-24, 1996.
‡1995 Conference Paper: "Re-reading Spring and All as Seminal for Postmodern Poetics." American Literature Association, Conference on American Literature, Baltimore, May 26-28, 1995.

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