In and Out: How Poetry leaves the Book and is better for it

Abstract

How does art operate today? No longer reproducing the status quo according to an equivalence between form and idea (naturalised in the good human equipped with taste and magnanimity, as opposed to the other bestial and inept sort of person), but by making known the flux, which never ceases to reallocate things from the core of a contentious sensible perpetually frayed and redefined on its margins. (2) Such is the theory of rupture introduced by Jacques Ranciere with his concept of the aesthetic regime of art. (3) Art works on sensibility as free play or natura naturans, rather than on abstract categories which would structure that sensibility a priori, as emanating from a natura naturata. (4) It can do so either directly (being primarily concerned with modes of perception and their physical, material and concrete dimensions) or indirectly (focusing more on symbolism and code, such as the conventions of the story or fable). Affects and precepts are, according to Gilles Deleuze, the two products (as well as the two criteria) of this new aesthetic grammar, radically open and connected to life, rather than meaning. Meanwhile, in literature this programme is complicated by the resolutely iconoclastic nature of the medium. (5) Obliged to exist as a purely abstract sign, lacking any intrinsic relationship to what it denotes, (6) literature cannot rely, a priori, on the many resources of the sensory apparatus. Its language exists in the absence of any necessary association with real things. But in fact, this negative is a positive because what it sanctions, through the tenuous relations that it creates between objects and language, is the intuition that the meaning of the real is as elusive as that of the sign. (7) Ushering in negative association (8) and syntax as a combinatorial game, (9) the absence of any necessary link between words and things thus establishes an order founded on a gap (Lacan's signifying chain, Derrida's differance, Barthes' signifiance, Deieuze's early concept of the empty square). This is a performativity of an unusual kind: it is a dysfunctional machine. But, for precisely this reason, it is capable of figuring what flows and passes between, against or in spite of the consistency of systems and their weightiness, and is likely to offer the new and unforeseen at any given moment. We can try to outbid the halting structurality of language (Oulipo), attack it with chisel (Antonin Artaud) or file (Gh6rasim Luca), or stress the polysemy of self and world that it reveals (realist or dialogic novel), but at its core, this is a question of dialectic; it takes the rule to make the exception. Ranciere sees the ultimate paradox of this game in Flaubert's novels. Liberated from all external standards predetermining the sensible and ways of accounting for it, literary art is defined by its heterogeneity (of genre, theme and style), and its identification is brought about through the very negation of identification. Once the sensorium is disturbed, to represent, grasp or tell in literary terms (or to attribute a sensation to a signifier via a sign) supposes a passage--more or less asymptotic and deliberate--across other arts, as locations of the plurality and heterogeneity of the sensible. Commenting on the famous assertion, style etant a lui tout seul une maniere absolue de voir les choses, (10) Ranciere analyses the visionary power which the sentence must have to distinguish order from disorder as essentially musical: musique des affections et des perceptions deliees, brasses ensemble dans le grand fleuve indifferent de l'Infini. (11) He continues: En faisant basculer Ieconomie du systeme expressif, le style- maniere de voir pen-sait supprimer la contradiction, accorder la subjectivite de Iecriture romanesque l'objectivite de la vision. Seulement, cet accord se risque a chaque phrase dans P6quivalence de la syntaxe narrative et de I'anti-syntaxe contemplative. …