{"id":456,"date":"2014-03-30T15:21:57","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T20:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=456"},"modified":"2018-01-06T00:08:30","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T06:08:30","slug":"against-procrustes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/against-procrustes\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Procrustes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Toby Altman, Series Contributor<\/h2>\n

Toby\u2019s series \u201cBodies in Space<\/a>\u201d is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At the end of his recent article in Poetry<\/i>, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek proclaims, \u201cThe most elementary form of torturing one\u2019s language is called poetry.\u201d Ok, so poetry is a form of political violence in and against language\u2014this is an old and storied avant-garde conceit. The novelty of \u017di\u017eek\u2019s account lies in the relation it posits between language and subjectivity. Language, he argues, following Lacan, is the \u201ctorture house of being,\u201d a scene of sustained political violence against the self. Poetry merely returns the violence of language to itself. Or, more precisely, it reverses the roles: the tortured subject of language becomes language\u2019s torturer. This is, needless to say, a bleak view: here the economy of political violence is total. Poetry does not offer a way out; it provides an opportunity to reverse the vector of violence. An empty alternative: the possibility of such easy alternation dissolves what might otherwise be an ethical and structural distinction between torturer and tortured. For \u017di\u017eek, they are one position: to inflict violence is already to be its object.<\/p>\n

However, \u017di\u017eek\u2019s closing proclamation is itself amputated; as a commenter on the Poetry Foundation\u2019s website points out, much the same language appears in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s monumental exegesis of Hegel, Less Than Zero<\/i>: \u201cThe most elementary form of torturing one\u2019s language is called poetry\u2014think of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of fixed forms of rhythm and rhyme.\u201d \u017di\u017eek\u2019s habit of repeating himself\u2014particularly his jokes\u2014is well known. The repetition of these quips and stock phrases tends to naturalize them, leveling their humor and their eruptive, disruptive, force. Procrustes seems to have suffered such a fate, a casualty of repetition. (He\u2019s been \u201cdisappeared,\u201d as \u017di\u017eek would have it).<\/p>\n

In the myth, Procrustes\u2014who lives in a castle on the sacred road between Athens and Eleusis\u2014offers shelter to passing pilgrims, and then stretches or shortens their bodies to fit an iron bed. He is eventually subdued by Theseus, who punishes him by \u201cfitting\u201d him to his own bed\u2014a \u017di\u017eekean conclusion, in which torturer becomes the tortured. The myth has become a stalwart of debates in poetics, so much so that we might think of a Procrustean tradition. For instance, it appears in William Drummond\u2019s Conversations with Ben Johnson <\/i>and in Thomas Campion\u2019s attack on rhyme in Observations in the Art of English Poesie: <\/i><\/p>\n

\u2026there is yet another fault in Rime altogether intolerable, which is, that it inforceth a man oftentimes to abiure his matter, and extend a short conceit beyond all bounds of arte: for in Quatorzens<\/i> me thinks the Poet handles his subiet as tyrannically as Procrustes <\/i>the thiefe his prisoners, whom when he had taken, he vsed to cast vpon a bed, which if they were too short to fill, he would stretch the longer, if too long, he would cut them shorter. [as originally appeared in Early Modern spelling]<\/p>\n

Campion has roughly reversed \u017di\u017eek\u2019s position: the torturous violence inflicted by rhyme is not an occasion for celebration, but rather an impingement on the poet\u2019s liberty as an Englishman. This is again a false and fleeting difference: beneath their disagreement, Campion and \u017di\u017eek agree that form is political violence, inflicted on the body of the poem.<\/p>\n

The hinge upon which a Procrustean poetics hangs, however, is the metaphorical conflation of body and poem. For the metaphor to work, the poem needs to have a body that can be violently stretched or shortened. More: that body must precede the poem\u2019s encounter with Procrustes and his tyrannical violence. Torture is not a form of productive power: it requires, structurally, a preexisting body which it can threaten with irreversible pain transformation. And here the metaphor begins to break apart. Poetic form is <\/i>generative and <\/i>productive. As the new critics taught us, the poem is not separable from its form\u2014nor can it be said to precede it. If form is a kind of political violence exerted against the body of the poem, then it also produces the body it acts on. Pace <\/i>Kafka, form is an instrument which produces the body (of the poem) by writing on it.<\/p>\n

Procrustean poetics thus relies on a projected before: the fantasy of a body which precedes form and is, in a sense, the reality of the poem. In other words, it produces (and it relies on) a distinction between form and content. And this entails a further distinction between ordinary language and form. Recall \u017di\u017eek\u2019s formulation: \u201cthink of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language.\u201d Form acts on language, transforming it into something other than itself\u2014and language precedes form as an organic totality, the natural and unimpeded body which is violently interrupted by meter and rhyme. Language becomes the metaphysical presence which underwrites the poem\u2019s absence. \u017di\u017eek tries to avoid this position by equating language and violence\u2014a move which, as we\u2019ve seen, tends to erase the distinction between language\u2019s action on the subject, and the subject\u2019s action on language in poetry. This suggestion seems to me the most productive in \u017di\u017eek\u2019s brief and equivocal essay. If we are to think about poetry as a kind of violence, we will have to rethink form itself. It can no longer be the fence which separates poetry from other kinds of discourse. It must instead betray that difference, inciting us to imagine poetry as a separate and protected sphere, and then disappointing the desire that it has itself created. It\u2019s easy to imagine how this argument applies to texts in the modernist tradition\u2014texts which ostentatiously betray their own formal limits. But these betrayals involve a set of assumptions about traditional forms: that they need to be broken open, dismissed, discarded. That, in other words, their machinery protects poetry from generic rupture and ensures its difference from ordinary language. In this centennial year of Anglo-American modernism, it might be profitable to interrogate this foundational conceit. Can we conceive of traditional forms as themselves as a false and porous fence between poetry and its other?<\/p>\n

\u2245<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Toby Altman is a conceptual poet. His poems have appeared. He is the author of and the recipient of. He currently lives in, where he works as and serves on the editorial board for. For more of his, please visit his and follow him on.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Toby Altman, Series Contributor Toby\u2019s series \u201cBodies in Space\u201d is about sustained thinking of the physicality of the body and its relation to poetry. Here, critical essay fractures, moves like poetry. At the end of his recent article in Poetry, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[153,149,154,152,155,148,157,151,150,156],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bodies-in-space","tag-hegel","tag-lacan","tag-less-than-zero","tag-poetry-foundation","tag-procrustean","tag-slavoj-zizek","tag-thomas-campion","tag-torture","tag-violence-of-language","tag-william-drummond"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}