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Tractatus Logico‐Poeticus Author(s): Charles Altieri Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 527-542 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/513526 . Accessed: 25/07/2011 15:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical Inquiry. http://www.jstor.org

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Tractatus Logico‐PoeticusAuthor(s): Charles AltieriSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 527-542Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/513526 .Accessed: 25/07/2011 15:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to CriticalInquiry.

http://www.jstor.org

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Critical Inquiry 33 (Spring 2007)

� 2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3303-0001$10.00. All rights reserved.

527

Tractatus Logico-Poeticus

Charles Altieri

If I am going to be arrogant enough to model my discourse on Wittgen-stein’s, I probably should be willing just to let this text speak for itself. ButI fear it needs an introductory supplement. It will be clear that what I presenthas none of the authority of Wittgenstein’s text and little of his pursuit ofan ideal of logical form. Moreover Wittgenstein would not treat matters ofpoetics as if they could be correlated with the logical form of propositions;poetry for him is a matter of showing and not at all of telling. Yet I find theformat of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a fascinating one for poetictheory. This format establishes conditions for writing that are as close as Iwill ever come to what artists do. Because each sentence must stand vir-tually alone, each creates a challenge to capture what is distinctive aboutthis particular segment of one’s thinking. The less one can rely on the con-text to flesh out one’s prose, the greater the need for careful labor in artic-ulating each point and the greater the sense that every sentence is endlesslyperfectible.

More importantly, this format affords a very promising means of ad-dressing a fundamental problem facing many literary critics: how does onereconcile the awareness of being trapped in ideological frameworks withthe hope that one’s efforts will at least slightly transform the boundariescreated by those frameworks? How does one convince oneself that one’sarguments can address the concerns of those representing diverse tradi-tions? While one knows that one cannot escape ideology, one also knowsthat in most cases it remains impossible to say just how specific argumentsare bounded by one’s presuppositions or prejudices. So it seems reasonableto hope that being as precise as possible about one’s assumptions and theirconsequences provides a significant test of the limits of ideological con-

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straints because it also provides the greatest possibility of a concretenessand coherence that may appeal to others with different conceptual orien-tations. One’s arguments might in fact prove compelling to a broader au-dience than anticipated; or spelling out the building blocks of one’s beliefsand values may reveal significant limitations that interlocutors might beable to describe in language intelligible to both parties; or the enterprisemay by its seriousness at least provoke others to specify their own positionswith the same concern for clarity about the foundations of their beliefs.

All those possibilities create conditions where third parties can enter thediscussion, clarifying where one’s claims become narrow and sectarian andspecifying new challenges that might inspire cooperation in reaching agree-ment. At the least, such interventions require taking responsibility for whatproves insufficiently subtle or supple and so facing up to one’s limitationsin all their painful concreteness. And, at best, these discussions can achievethe Lyotardian sublime of communication across differences and so makea contribution to our understanding of what is human about the human-ities.

1. A text is a unit of language that is not reducible to a series of propositions.

1.1 Texts do not establish how “the world is all that is the case” but insteadfoster imaginative inquiry into all that could be the case if appropriate sce-narios could be constructed. To treat writing as a text is to set it against thefixities of the world and against the disciplines we trust to establish thosefixities.

1.11 Considered historically, texts weave into one another in networks ofintertextuality. So in dealing with textuality there is no feasible principle ofclosure. Texts are generative.

1.2 Contemporary writers often emphasize the principles of indetermi-nacy built into the concept of textuality. They redirect language from de-scriptive and expressive purposes to explore the various ways a text foldsand unfolds relations to other uses of language. It becomes impossible tolimit one’s sense of meaning to what an author probably intended.

2. Works are those created objects that society regularly treats as needingor earning the versions of identity possible by attributing and discussing

Charles Altieri is professor of English at the University of California,Berkeley.

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intentionality. (I will speak of works and texts as if they required language,but the concepts apply figuratively to all artistic media.)

2.1 Intentionality is the force by which we make determinate an otherwiseindeterminate field. To attribute an intention is to attribute the power tomake a this or a that of a situation by organizing a perspectival renderingof it (even if the perspective attempts to be a view from nowhere).

2.2 Once a text becomes a work in any discipline, it clearly establishes adistinctive role for the ideal reader.

2.21 An ideal reader is one who suspends possessive appetite in order toidentify provisionally with the intentional process by which the text be-comes a work. This reader assumes that he or she must give the embodiedintentionality space to manifest its own interests before making judgmentsabout the degree to which the agent can participate in the imagined worldoffered by the work.

2.3 Works using language can be divided into semantic structures thatstress applying inherited methods of analysis (conceptual or heuristic) andsemantic structures that are less bound to method and so call upon an au-dience to attribute modes of intentionality characteristic of performance orenactment.

2.4 Works that emphasize performance also may be divided into two gen-eral classes. Some works emphasize the role of rhetor, of a performer whoconcentrates on activities that will modify specific general beliefs and soelicit specific actions from an audience. Here the character or ethos of theauthor will matter, but only as a supplement to what is explicitly argued.Other works make authorial performance the principle vehicle for elicitingparticipation from the audience.

2.41 Works stressing authorial performance will vary a great deal in howmuch they rely on methods of argument and how much they rely on theexemplary qualities of the speaker. This is why the domain of rhetoric ex-tends to both argument and to works offering fictional worlds. And this iswhy treating either domain only as rhetorical activity, without attending tothe qualities making for persuasiveness, distorts what the various practicescan accomplish.

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2.42 In works offered as literary, participation typically takes the form ofimagining how what is presented can play an exemplary role for an audi-ence. The force of such works depends on what they make imaginativelypresent as dispositions toward the world—rather than arguments withinit—both by developing attitudes toward what the work asks us to imagineand by inviting us to participate in how writing takes on figurative actualityin its own right, as in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.

2.5 If works of art make present possible dispositions of imagination, webest treat that activity as demonstrative rather than argumentative or de-scriptive. Therefore, semantically, we have to treat such works as ways ofproviding samples and examples of how language might be used.

2.51 Samples, therefore, are not descriptions but function as paradigms.They do not refer to discrete particulars but make it possible to refer byindicating the semantic resources available for that descriptive activity.

2.52 Typical samples and examples are names of colors, cardinal num-bers, models for weights and measures (like the one-meter rod at Green-wich), and illustrations of grammatical and lexical structures. A practicalexample of the semantic use of example would be showing someone thepossible meanings of terms by indicating their range of applications.Amoresublime instance of example would be Socrates offering his death as a modelof how to respond to state power.

2.6 In its capacity to dramatize examples, the demonstrative functionsas a distinctive mode of speech act.

2.61 Demonstratives are like J. L. Austin’s performatives in that they donot use language to represent facts in the world but call attention to whatlanguage can accomplish in the utterance.

2.62 But the similarities end there. Performative speech acts accomplishsomething social by meeting conditions of felicity; if the situation is pre-pared properly, and one says the right words, one is married, regardless ofone’s psychological attitude toward those words. Demonstratives are theopposite of performatives. Demonstratives do not satisfy social conditions,and they depend on the intentionality of the agents uttering them. Whereasperformatives satisfy conditions, demonstratives call attention to what anindividual is trying to exhibit in a situation and so do the work of exem-plification. Demonstratives have the status of examples.

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1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schattle,ed. G. E. M. Anscombe (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 6e–7e.

2.621 The two most common uses of the demonstrative are specifyinghow something can be done in imitation of the speaker and clarifying whatis going on for the speaker as he or she reacts to a situation. Elegies show uspossible ways of grieving; romantic meditations like Wordsworth’s “LinesComposed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” bring self-consciousness tobear in order to clarify the very event the subject is experiencing.

2.622 The situation can be real or imaginary, and so the speaker can eitherbe an actual person or an imaginative construct. And the imaginary di-mension of the demonstrative is not limited to the aesthetic domain; learn-ing how things can be done or how attitudes can be expressed is a crucialdimension of education into a culture. As Wittgenstein puts it, sentencesoffering examples “are often used on the borderline between logic and theempirical, so that their meaning changes back and forth and they count nowas expressions of norms, now as expressions of experience.”1

2.63 A variety of speech acts is included within the category of demon-strative (just as there is a variety of performatives). But the various cases allshare at least one of three related practices: clarifying how something canbe done, clarifying how something is characteristically used (especiallywithreference to grammar), and displaying various capacities of the agent, es-pecially capacities for feeling and for making. The fundamental demon-strative claim is that I am showing you how I do something so that you cando it, or appreciate it, or at least understand its motivation.

2.631 These are typical demonstrative utterances:

“In English we use this expression.”“Try to perform the piece in this way.”“The story of that can be most imaginatively told in this way.”“Try this on for size.”“In this kind of situation I am likely to respond in this way.”“Here I am trying to show you what I am feeling.”

2.6311 There is a huge difference between pointing to the object one feels,like sand in one’s shoes, and clarifying how one feels by offering a chain ofmetaphors or gestures. The former case offers a description of what causesthe trouble; the latter attempts to clarify by means of an expressive act.

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2.64 Writers are often tempted to explore how demonstratives utilize theshifting borderline between logic and the empirical. Employing thatshiftingborderline allows them to be intensely concrete and at the same time pursuethe metaphorical possibilities that might make the experience representa-tive for larger audiences. Here the metaphoric refers not to the status of anyparticular verbal expression but to the capacity of the work as a whole toserve as an exemplary attitude. Appreciating the exemplary qualities of at-titude makes it possible to bring that attitude to bear in related real-worldsituations. In this respect artworks have a great deal in common with in-structional videos.

2.7 Stressing demonstratives helps us see how art plays significant cul-tural roles.

2.71 Works of art typically combine two aspects of demonstration. Theyforeground how the work is constructed and composed in order to displaywhat the artist’s style can do in relation to the work’s implicit or explicitheritage, and they make a display in a projected world of what imagination,can offer as a means of modifying our sense of possibility in the actualworld.

2.711 Typically, critics emphasize how the work of construction is em-phasized in twentieth-century painting and writing. But demanding tra-ditional poetic forms like the sonnet or the ode almost always requireambitious artists to foreground how meeting the demands of the form alsoprojects those energies of verbal activity into the world beyond the text.

2.712 One ideal figure for the demonstrative function in art is Cyrano deBergerac, who provides characters with terms enabling them to expresstheir loves. At the opposite pole, the ideal demonstrative would become asliteral as chant or prayer in fusing a medium with its possible significancein the actual world. Think of how Kazimir Malevich’s White on White dou-bles the most elemental color in order to produce the emergence of a non-objective spirit. There are significant affinities to Malevich’s work in therhythms and juxtapositions of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which at oncepromote and attempt to transfigure the materiality of the medium.

2.72 In Western aesthetics there is general agreement that one basic valueof art resides in its resistance to synonymy. Because style highlights internalrelations allowing strong claims for the work’s distinctiveness, we misssomething substantial if we treat the work as paraphrasable. Therefore, weare invited to respond to the intentionality of the work as if it could take on

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2. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evanset al. (Boston, 1974), 2.2.3, p. 1068.

3. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in The NortonAnthology of Poetry, 3rd ed., ed. Alexander W. Allison et al. (New York, 1983), l. 49, p. 524.

4. John Ashbery, “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat,” Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror(New York, 1975), p. 2.

force as a particular event that exemplifies what an aspect of the world mightbe or become.

2.721 Demonstrative works emphasize intricate interconnections be-tween the artist’s making and the language’s telling (or the labor embodiedin the handling of the medium), so there is a strong sense of present activityeven when the work takes the form of narrative about the past.

2.73 The metaphoric dimension of the work of art is one basic way thatdemonstration seeks representativeness for the exemplary qualities it offers.Classical theory treats metaphor as supplementary, that is, as a means ofdeveloping an attitude for an observation. The writer names an object insuch a way that the name brings to bear a broader frame of reference. “Julietis the sun” indicates to the audience both her beauty and Romeo’s enslavedworship of that beauty.2 Romantic and postromantic theory tend to dra-matize the construction of such equations so that metaphor increasinglyshifts from playing the role of predicate in an argument to serving as a cen-tral force pervading what seem immediate affective conditions of obser-vation or thinking. These writers are tempted to treat metaphor as arecognition of dynamic interconnections fundamental to the force fieldsconstituting given situations. They set metaphor against the authority ofempirical observation, whether the issue is how perception connects us tothe vital world or how the unconscious disconnects us from what sheerdescription seems to offer. For the first, consider the blend of simple ref-erence with metaphoric scope in Wordsworth’s line “We see into the life ofthings”;3 and, for the second, John Ashbery’s “night, the reserved, the ret-icent, gives more than it takes.”4

2.731 Both traditional and romantic approaches to metaphor have to ad-mit that metaphors ramify into indeterminacy as possible qualities of thecomparison multiply.

2.8 Works stressing demonstrative performance require a different, morediffuse and complexly distributed model of intentionality than works of-fering propositions or emphasizing rhetorical performance. The more the

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5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 65.

emphasis is on the activity, and the greater the reliance on the singularityof the example, the less any account of an intention prior to the actual per-formance will suffice. For in such cases it will not do to characterize theintention in terms of a plan or a purpose. Rather the relevant state of in-tentionality resides in a taking of responsibility that cannot be representedby statements. The responsibility resides in how intentionality becomes aself-reflexive state we attribute to a manner of performing. Authors takeresponsibility by staging themselves as releasing the work to engage judg-ments by audiences.

2.81 If we seek to equate intentionality with a specific set of intendedmeanings, we do best to rely on biographical evidence specifying what anauthor actually planned to say and hence tried to mean. But demonstrativesthat are works of art encourage a view of intentionality that stresses internalrelations providing many layers of integration but no stateable coherentplan.

2.82 There are many intermediate cases where it is appropriate to com-bine a model of purpose sustaining a chain of arguments with a model ofintentionality that stages performative qualities modifying that chain.

2.9 We best capture this difference in the kinds of intention if we adaptfor psychology Kant’s distinction between purpose and purposiveness.

2.91 Purposiveness is contrasted to establishing a purpose. Purpose isdefined as “the object of a concept insofar as we regard this concept as theobject’s cause (the real basis of its possibility).”5 Under standard circum-stances we regard the purpose of a chair as something to sit on; the effectis possible only through a concept of that effect. Purposiveness occurs whenwe must attribute purposes without having a clear idea of cause. Kant’s par-adigm is the attribution of teleology from what we observe of the naturallaws. But purposiveness also occurs in relation to attributions of will, hencethe importance of the concept to attributing intentions. We attribute pur-posiveness when we cannot locate a specific will (in contrast to moral judg-ment), yet we need a concept of will for the explanation of how phenomenaappear related to one another in a presentation. In such cases we have asense that what is being demonstrated requires an authorial presence notbound to a rule but establishing the rule as it goes along. Purposiveness isthe possibility of a work having a rule that is specific to its ways of unfolding.

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6. Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. Anscombe, ed. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (Berkeley, 1967),§294, p. 54e. On alternatives to “calculating rules,” see ibid., §§295–308, pp. 54e–56e, andWittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe (Oxford, 1958), §227, p. 86e.

Hence Wittgenstein writes: “In one case we make a move in an existentgame, in the other we establish a rule of the game. Moving a piece could beconceived in these two ways: as a paradigm for future moves, or as a movein an actual game.”6

2.92 There are two basic directions of purposiveness, paralleling the twodirections in which works become performative. Purposiveness can be pri-marily invested in how the author gives a particular cast to ideas. Or pur-posiveness can reside in how the work develops internal structures likesound patterns or patterns of imagery so that these qualify as features al-lowing the demonstration to model distinctive possibilities of experience.(Think of how Ezra Pound turns the representation of a scene in a metrostation into an apparitional world.)

2.921 The two directions of purposiveness often have to be correlated inquite complex ways.

3. Fictive modes of demonstrative writing are concerned primarily withthe making of possible worlds and the shaping of attitudes within thoseworlds.

3.1 There are three basic fictive models for building those worlds, al-though many authorial acts try out different combinations of the resourcesmade available by those models.

3.2 Probably the most popular fictive mode is storytelling. This tellingrelies on skills in developing representations of experience so as to provokeimaginative responses to why events occur, how they play out, and howaudiences can develop attitudes enabling them to attune their emotionallives to those actions.

3.21 Narrative fictions connect details to the world not by picturing it, aspropositions do, but by implicating it within the activity of purposive imag-ining. Typically the focus is on the author’s judgments about how the char-acters act in various situations. So we hold the author responsible for howthe fictive demonstration achieves representativeness in the actual world.

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3.22 The demonstrative force of stories lies primarily in how the authorcontrols the resources available to narrative form. These resources includeat least four important features: the opportunity to choose where the author(and the embedded characters) narrate and where their lives are presenteddramatically as aspects of the events; the possibility of varying how muchdevelopment is given to particular details (Ovid tells the story of Aeneas’sfounding of Rome in ten lines); the capacity to control whether theaudiencesees from within a given character’s perspective or is presented with some-thing approaching a common social agreement on what is occurring; and,finally, the need to establish internal parallels among details that governhowwe make judgments about the characters’ attitudes and actions.

3.23 The most important effect of controlling these resources is the ma-nipulation of how audiences identify with characters (including the authoras character) or maintain their distance from them. And, in turn, identi-fication is the means by which stories become representative and hencecome to model attitudes, and the consequences of those attitudes, that areimportant to the life of a society.

3.231 Identification and the refusal of identification within fictionareveryflexible processes. Different degrees of distance and intimacy are readilyavailable. Audiences can treat identification primarily in terms of specificlikenesses with given groups, as in contemporary criticism’s concern forrepresentatives of race, gender, and class, or identification can be extendedto approach classical Western concerns for everyman.

3.2311 This very flexibility provokes the imagination because writers aretempted to explore degrees of intimacy with strange particulars that can atthe same time be projected as encompassing universals. Kafka’s The Meta-morphosis might serve as a demonstration of strange yet intimate interplaybetween the singular and the general.

3.3 Fictions presented in the theater can be distinguished from storiesbecause they maintain very different routes of identification and hence ofrepresentativeness. Characters are not described but presented, so that theyexist entirely in what they say and what is said about them by other char-acters. Where storytelling labors to establish interpretive scope for its sam-ples and examples, most Western theater instead seeks to narrow the scopeof the example, at least initially. We are not so much invited to see how thecharacters assume representative attitudes as to experience how the actualcharacter takes on literal force as an individual. Hence what becomes rep-

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resentative is less a general attitude than a specific, concrete person—orperhaps force—challenging the audience to come to terms with what canbe brought to life in real time. The wondrous transformation of Hermionein The Winter’s Tale literalizes a basic drive in Western drama.

3.31 Where stories are fundamentally responsive to questions about whyand how something happened, dramatic performances raise the basic chal-lenge of interpreting what is actually present and happening on the stage.Drama is less an interpretation of experience than the actual making of apowerfully distinctive experience for an audience.

3.312 When Hamlet comes on stage he enters speaking in puns becauseClaudius’s powerful rationality leaves very little room for unequivocal al-ternative perspectives. Macbeth must become lucidly conscious of how dif-ferent he is from those who in the beginning of the play seem to be hisbrothers in arms. And in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Estragon andVladimir must convince us that their absurd situation is an aspect of whatmakes their waiting significant and compelling. (The banality of latetwentieth-century American theater stems from the tendency to build toconcluding revelations that don’t reach far beyond the characters’ personalsituations.)

3.3121 Many works of art aspire to the condition of theatrical event sothat they can minimize the gulf between the demonstration or particularityof the author’s project and the sense of actuality with respect to the product.

4. If narrative is concerned basically with how and why people act, andif drama is concerned primarily with what can be made present as action,lyric is concerned primarily with the question of who an agent becomes byvirtue of how agency is composed in language, especially in spoken lan-guage. The lyric emphasizes the substance that speech can take on by virtueof the quickenings or subtle gradations of sense established by the choiceof words and the patterns they enter into—as overt syntax and as elementsthickening the texture of the attitudes projected by such gradations.

4.1 If one imagines a series of steps from discursive works to narrativesto lyric poems, the definition of the particular speaker’s character (eitherthe poet or a dramatic surrogate) exclusively by linguistic choices ratherthan physical actions becomes increasingly important. This progressionculminates in the possibility of language itself assuming the position of theauthor, as idealized in L�A�N�G�U�A�G�E writing.

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4.11 Reading lyric poetry requires treating words simultaneously as ameans of referring to imagined worlds and of forming patterns that cangive these imagined worlds significance. We get to the what through the howembodied in these particular choices.

4.12 Reading lyric entails directing attention to how and why the pur-posive making establishes the intricacies constituting this particular expe-rience. In lyric the authorial role is typically the primary affective focus ofthe reader’s response.

4.13 Because of the focus on the authorial role, the lyric emphasizes whatoccurs in the activity of composing the poem and the possible implicationsof that activity for our imaginative appreciation of the situation rendered.

4.131 We need not limit the authorial role to the expressive activity of adistinct psychological subject. It also comprises the possibility of redefiningagency because of the rules the composer evokes—from the rules of sonnetconstruction to the rules of a Fibonacci series.

4.132 Lyric typically brings authorial activity to the foreground by drivingout expectations that the use of language is primarily discursive. Hence thework foregrounds what seems excessive in language (excessivelyconciseandspare as well as excessively lush in semantic and sonic registers) and so in-vites us to set aside our practical interest in what can be accomplished bymeans of perlocutionary speech acts.

4.133 Just as fiction stresses the present tense involved in narrating thestory, lyric stresses the actual experience of finding the words by which anattitude is composed. Lyrics drive out practical expectations in order tostress the gradations of sense possible when we become self-consciousaboutthe difference between reports on experience and the eventfulness that oc-curs as we experience the force of language at work.

4.1331 Gradations of sense (in both senses of sense) depend on the com-bining of two distinctive registers. One register consists in how the authorialposition foregrounds the formal features that the medium of languagepossesses—from aural patterning to rhythmic intensities to treating syntaxas a metaphoric extension of or comment on what the sentences literallyrender. A second register consists in how such formal features help realizepossibilities of meaningfulness, possibilities of participating in imaginedconditions that implicate and extend the linguistic frameworks we use to

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characterize experience in the actual world. (There are obviously other waysof attributing affective coherence to works, but they have less powerfulmeans of dramatic focus than authorial intention provides, and thereforethey also can attribute less resonance to moments when the language un-dermines or otherwise resists where the prevailing consciousness wantsthings to go.)

4.2 Lyric poems solicit identification with the effort to develop means ofexpression for the affects that emerge in the experience of forming an at-titude. The wording and the worlding have to be seen as built into the lyricexperience from the start.

4.3 Lyrics invite being read literally as affectively and metaphoricallycharged demonstrations providing samples of what goes into forging anattitude toward some aspect of the world. An attitude is a psychologicalstructure producing provisional coherence for feelings and enabling themto have visible effects on thought and action. Therefore, the reader’s fun-damental task is to give the maximum force to the poem’s articulation ofthat emerging attitude and the possible difference it can make within theworld it addresses.

5. Those subtle gradations that constitute the quickening of sense areusually registered affectively in lyric experience by an emphasis on feelingrather than on emotion, even when the poem engages with conventionalemotions. Lyrics bring to consciousness the range of feelings possiblewithinstandard emotional situations like the declaration of love.

5.1 Fictive attitudes can emphasize either emotions or feelings. The for-mer comprise those affects that are organized in terms of projected or imag-ined actions, while the latter are closer to the immediate and polymorphousworld of sensation. Feelings can be aspects of emotional attitudes, but whenfeeling is emphasized the concern will be with how the attitude is formedrather than with the consequences produced by the attitude.

5.11 Feelings are best defined as supplements to sensation that elicit self-reflection while resisting concepts—hence the need for a notion like atti-tude. Feelings add a comparative dimension to sensations because theyencourage using relations of “asness” to extend what seems immediatelygiven in experience. (Elizabeth Bishop provides a good example of this ina poem where the speaker’s careful attention to the behavior of a sandpipergradually evokes human analogues.) Emotions, on the other hand, usually

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take the form of attitudes that are shaped by the logic of a plot. There is aprecipitating cause, a distinctive overall orientation of sensibility, and a pro-jection of consequences. Anger projects striking out at someone; fear pro-jects flight.

5.111 There is a problem in using the term feeling because it has distinctiveuses as both a noun and a verb. As a verb the term refers to the subject-position that is the locus for all kinds of affects, including moods. We thenfind ourselves having to say we occupy the position of feeling the affects thatwe want to identify as feelings. But because we need both terms, awarenessof the duality will have to suffice as the basis for keeping things straight.

5.2 One important reason to stress how lyric engages feelings is to makeit clear that the affect in poetry need not stem from representation thatcopies or narrates emotional states. The quickening of sense that poetryproduces becomes an immediate and actual means of composing affectivestates, analogous to the effect of musical composition.

5.3 Modern poetry usually does not offer itself as the record of an emo-tional state but rather stages itself as enacting the search for means of ex-pression that enable a cogent awareness of the feelings involved in a givensituation. That is how syntax and structure function as aspects of feelingand not just means of representing feeling.

6. Because the lyric involves identification with the creative activityquickening the world, it also provides an implicit model of readerly satis-faction.

6.1 The simplest version of this model consists in the awareness of thedifference it makes to the psyche when the relevant quickenings occur.Poems provide possible states of being for possible selves.

6.11 Lyric quickening is reflexive. It turns consciousness back on the agenteven as it expands the world into a field where consciousness can make asignificant difference in what is seen and felt and appreciated.

6.2 Because the composing agency in lyric so manifestly depends on theresources of a given language, the poem offers an opportunity for the au-dience to reflect on how it then participates in powers of articulation inprinciple available to all who speak the language.

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6.21 The conjunction of lyrical and linguistic agency affords readers aposition from which they can respond to affective turbulence by at onceintensifying it and giving it a reflective focus for a polity.

6.211 There are two basic routes to satisfaction in dealing with such tur-bulence. Lyrics can encourage readers to feel an expansiveness resultingfrom the world seeming to open itself to the rush of the ego’s imaginativeenergies. Or lyric can celebrate the power to restrict those energies and forcethe audience to recognize how intelligence demands resistance to the ego’squest for self-fulfillment. Precision becomes a significant position for theego. Think, for example, of the difference between Yeats’s “A Prayer for MyDaughter” and Marianne Moore’s “The Steeplejack.”

6.212 In both cases the power of the lyric lies fundamentally in the sensethat one is learning to recognize the elements that make a difference in elic-iting these states of expanding and diminishing affective modalities.

6.3 If one stresses identification with the making presence, one can ex-perience the work as developing a reader’s capacity to appreciate how pur-posive states can take on these affective qualities and expressive powers.

6.31 Lyric encourages a dialectical process of identification in which oneappreciates who one becomes as one gains the power to reflect on how thetext shapes the possibilities of experience.

6.4 Developing such visions of affective possibility is the basic social func-tion of poetry.

6.41 These visions of affective possibility are not simply abstract ideali-zations or instruments for imaginary self-satisfaction. Rather, they indicatepossibilities for experiencing the affects deriving from sharpened under-standing and focused participatory energies. Lyrics test and are tested bythe qualities of attention they invite agents to bring to experience.

6.411 If we turn this argument toward psychological values we can seehow the lyric might elicit identifications that not only reinforce a sense ofagency but also dialectically develop it by exploring possible ways in whichsubjects can minimize their self-protective tendencies. Lyrics can explorethe possible satisfactions of identifying with strange and frightening situ-ations where propositional knowledge seems impossible.

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7. In poetry there cannot be a fixed opposition between silence andspeech or even between perspicuous particularity and the logical form thatmakes a limited whole.

7.1 In poetry silence is also a means of eloquence—witness Moore’s “Si-lence.” Poems, then, can develop attitudes encouraging identification withthe kind of silence that makes a clearing and helps inhabit that clearingwhilewarding off anxious efforts to take comfort in words. Think of Words-worth’s love of ending his lines with “still.”

7.2 One important clearing is, in fact, the questioning of the epistemicvalues that leads Wittgenstein to draw sharp distinctions between what canbe known through propositions and what remains the domain of tautology.

7.21 Poetry’s focus on the how of making and its consequences asks us tospeculate on the possibility of a theory of language more attentive to in-dividual manner than general matter and the methods that secure its pres-ence. Poetry asks us to value individual choosings, in part for the roles theystage silence as playing.

7.3 Poetry criticism driven by the values expressed here will not strive toexplain the poet’s interests or even to specify what poems might discoveror disclose. Rather, the aim of criticism is to flesh out the affective intensitiesavailable as we read poems.

7.4 Lyrics foreground the ways in which demonstrative activity invitesattention to manner. This mode of attention cannot be adequately char-acterized by generalizing argument but must be carried out primarilythrough close analysis of discrete examples.

7.41 The power of these literary examples will ultimately render the as-sertions in this text mere ladders that we must throw away when we realizehow they are at best provisional ways of making people hear and see. Par-ticular authors can wring complex interrelations by having rhetoric mergewith poetics, purposiveness mix with the pressure of mechanical and ideo-logical forces, efforts at narrative distance fuse with the immediate pressureof engaging concrete situations, and the fluidity of open-ended identifica-tions blend with the desire to establish stable identity.