“Ideology, as in a particular and restricted point of view, way of hearing, tendency of preferences and distastes, everywhere informs poetry and imparts to it, at its most resonant, a density of materialized social being expressed through the music of a work as well as its multifoliate references. To pretend to be nonpartisan, above the fray, sorting the ‘best’ from the ‘weak’ without ‘ideological grudges’ – as a highly partisan poet recent put it, as if to mark his own partisanship in the course of denying it – is an all to common form of mystification and bad faith aiming at bolstering the authority of one’s own pronouncements”

Charles Bernstein, A Poetics.

Instead of starting with the words by the Portuguese modernist poets Fernando Pessoa and Mario de Sa-Carneiro, as I did in Tucson, I now start with words by the American poet Charles Bernstein to distinguish between what I identified as two different trends present at the University of Arizona Conceptual Poetry Conference.

Following Brazilian anthropologist and literary critic Alfredo Bosi, in its Dialectics of Colonization, I dare refer to one of these trends as an “anti-modernist ‘post’-Modernism”, in the sense that this kind of poetry seems to be refusing the radical epistemological challenge that Modernism meant, i.e., the challenge for an enlargement of human consciousness that inevitably depends on the practice of consciousness— on the work on consciousness that is, primarily, as Modernist poets well knew, a work on and with the materiality of language. This modernist challenge was (is) trying to give back to the poet/artist the responsibility of poetry’s original social function: poetry (poiein, making, in and through language) as a process dealing with representation, a process that did neither separate the form from the content, nor the intellect from the spirit/emotion — poetry as a creative work-in-process that was a rite of participation, with and within the polis, towards another form of/for conceiving, towards the extension of human consciousness (as in Plato’s Phaedrus, or Aristotle’s Poetics).

The recognition of the paradoxical nature of language as “the first extension of the body” (Bernstein) and as “a forgery” (Bernstein) is therefore nothing new, but rather something quite archaic: physis/nomos as well as intellect/spirit are agonistic units (in its social implications), but units. One only has to read Dante’s De Monarchia to realize how the artifice of that separation was coming into being at the inauguration of our paradigm of modernity (and how Dante was already repudiating it – like Shakespeare and Blake would do later in two different historical moments of this paradigm’s hegemonic construction). The same paradigm that Modernism was/is questioning in its linguistic turn, in the manifold approaches to the problematics of language, which, of course, must unavoidably deal with ideology and/or the politics of representation (“particular and restricted point of view, way of hearing, tendency of preferences and distastes (…) a density of materialized social being expressed through the music of a work as well as its multifoliate references”).

What was happening in History that led to the inauguration of such a modern rationale? Well, for one thing, the Portuguese “Discoveries” and their net of “reciprocity denials”, as Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos claims. For, Santos argues, when one discovers somebody one is also discovered – there is a reciprocal relation. But that was not what the Portuguese (and, later, Spanish too) Discoveries meant, since this reciprocity was always denied and, moreover, anything that could jeopardize the dominant form of “discovering” was immediately destroyed. Modernity was/is erected on this succession of epistemecides and “reciprocity denials” (be they racial, ethnic, gender, class, linguistic, etc, etc). So, I guess I am not done with Modernism yet, let alone modernity. Not because I am a humanist, but, eventually, because I like to think of myself as a post-Nietzschean anti-humanist humanist. But Nietzsche, as we all know, was unfortunately read in very dangerous ways… The acknowledgement of human frailties and pathetic failures, imperfections and impossibilities doesn’t mean the impossibility of human creativity and/or expansion; instead, it means the realization of the capability of re-orienting all possible language and creativity towards that expansion of the subject and/or of the real – into a search, an epistemological (re)search that can only be poetic (in the making in language; or, rather, language in the making of the multiple constellations of self and/or reality). Aware of the fact that “that that is is” (Shakespeare), it is a strong subjectivity that must agonistically, not only survive, but live: with incompleteness, decentering, impossibility of totalization – towards the only paradise that we will ever know and, therefore, must struggle to discover.

You see, I grew up in a country, Portugal, where “the acknowledgement of human frailties and pathetic failures, imperfections and impossibilities” meant “the impossibility of human creativity and/or expansion”. So, we were “instructed” to repeat what was already there. They wanted us to be robots, all the same, speaking and behaving the same – because there was nothing better. This way, we “were safe”. The problem came when we didn’t want to be safe, didn’t want to repeat, and didn’t want to be robots. And thus, I guess to save us from ourselves, we were tortured, put in jail or sent to exile. For 48 years, many Portuguese poets and artists, as well as many other people, had this “sensuous” experience. On the contrary, the “sensuous” experience of repetition was never felt as sensuous…I don’t know why.

So, at 14, I was already going, with my older cousins, to some bookstores cellars in the middle of the night, to find some books of poems that, were we caught reading them, would lead us into a lot of trouble. Poetry mattered, you see. It was part of the resistance, changed our minds, changed our lives. And, in 1974, on the night of the Revolution, it was a poem by a poet who was not repeating, who was, as a matter of fact, in jail, that gave the signal, on the national radio station, for the avant-garde troops to start the most poetic experience of our lives. We all found out that when deterritorialized, when abandoning the hegemonic forms of linguistic representation, one does not find a lack but “the violence of language”, as French theorist Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls it. One finds an excess of possible sounds and articulations, an excess of possibility to be explored, and, in that infinite unterritorialized territory, also the reproved, the unproved, or the yet-to-be-proven meanings, as Susan Howe illustrates it, in her The Nonconformist’s Memorial. One finds, inscribed in the tapestry of hegemonic language, “those maddening little women who kept calling/calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)/and retreating, always retreating, behind it”, as Elizabeth Bishop chooses to write about “Brazil, January 1, 1502”. I believe these “little women/birds” can come from behind/inbetween the tapestry and discover us – if we only allow them to, if we don’t threaten to impose and/or destroy them. Only then can counter-hegemonic forms of globalization affirm themselves (against the globalizations inaugurated by the Portuguese “Discoveries” that led to a market dominated world): counter-hegemonic globalizations like cosmopolitism or humanity world heritage. This is the other trend of conceptual poetry that was present at the conference and the one that interests me: because this poetry is interested in the exploration of these (and other) threads, these “undertones”, the tones that are counter-hegemonic, inbetween the tapestry of dominant language. This poetry is trying to open locations for the inscription of what is there – and, yet, not part of the dominant cartography. This is the trend that I see as embracing the modernist project and its ultimate challenge. What Alfredo Bosi would call an “ultra-modernist ‘post’-Modernism”. This is the poetry ready to accept reciprocity in the Discoveries of one’s selves and the others’. These are the poets holding to their social and political responsibilities, unafraid of taking their own authority in the struggle for authority that all language is – emotions included (especially because, according to Portuguese neuro-biologist Antonio Damasio, the part of the brain where language is located can only start when the part of the brain where emotions reside moves first). And the discussion around emotion and expression sounds so over! The question is not whether anything is true or cheating. I don’t believe in programmatic non-referentiality the same way I don’t believe in programmatic referentiality. The question is what is the power beyond this form of imagining truth? Who imagines, why, to what purpose? In an agonistic model of language, one anchors in an empowering subject-position – in each context – in language & through language. Subjectivity/identiy (to be accurate I should say “subjectivity/identity constellations”) doesn’t exist outside of language: the first expansion of the body and the first forgery, yes, but, still, I anchor – always looking for a radical trangressive paradigmatic re-orientation of concept.

“To pretend to be nonpartisan, above the fray, sorting the ‘best’ from the ‘weak’ without ‘ideological grudges’ – as a highly partisan poet recent put it, as if to mark his own partisanship in the course of denying it – is an all to common form of mystification and bad faith aiming at bolstering the authority of one’s own pronouncements” – I find this to be the most disturbing form of authority, because there is always a subjective choice of the material which comes masked, as if the poet were transparent, i.e., speaking with “universal” (non?)meaning…. But then, that’s probably my historical problem… A machine as a poet, and a machine as a poem (one that refuses to “make” meaning) is beyond the recognition of the materiality of language and the new technological conditions. The stereotype repetition, the celebration of the poem as “thing”, makes it nothing but another product in the market, something purely instrumental.

My problem with Charles Bernstein’s “the answer is not the machine but the politics” is that the decision for the machine is already politics… The kind of politics that is very disturbing and that I cannot help but take position against.

My final question then becomes: what if this is precisely the social function of this kind of conceptual “anti-modernist ‘post’-Modernist” poetry? Even if the poet said he didn’t like comedy, but a robotic repetitive poetry for the future robotic society and literature… Well, I finish as I started in Tucson: in doubt. Because there was a Modernist Portuguese poet who once said: “I’m neither my Self nor the Other. Only something intermediate/intermediary” (Mario de Sa-Carneiro, my translation). And the manifold heteronymic Fernando Pessoa, the major Portuguese Modernist poet claimed:

The poet is a faker.
He so completely fakes
That he even fakes as pain
The pain he actually feels.

(my translation)

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