Autopoiesis in P. K. Page's ＂Arras＂: The Peacock Image as a Vision Machine

Abstract

This essay explores Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of autopoiesis, primarily focusing on its machinic aspect of self-positing creation, through a reading of Canadian modernist P. K. Page's early poem ＂Arras.＂ The poem reveals itself as an artistic model for understanding visual imagery as it takes up the ecological theme of the transformative renewal of living elements. Rather than interpret Page's poetic imagery as allegories of the conceptual terms theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, this essay reads ＂Arras＂ as envisioning the process of imagerization in terms of the relationship between the new and the classical-a relationship embodied in its images of the habit and the peacock. The self-positing aspect of autopoiesis builds a machinic system in the habit-image, which unfolds across a passage between territorialization and deterritorialization and in all directions across ethico-political concerns. The poem illustrates what the plane of the virtual expresses, what the machine does, and specifically what the peacock becomes. The peacock image functions to expose the speaker's vision and transforms the poem's linguistic elements. Whereas this new but classical habit is read to indicate the function of the machinic, the peacock exposes the image quality that operates as the deterritorializing trajectory and so reveals an auto-generative relevance in artistic production.