Humans, according to Stacy Alaimo, are “always already part of an active, often unpredictable, material world” (17). That the transcendental subject, as grounding the conditions for possibility as such, no longer holds any theoretical currency is evident when one realizes the necessary outside to thought that trans-corporeality entails. The autonomous outside means that the world does not begin and end with subjectivity. Given micro and macroscopic exchanges of flesh, politics, toxins, weather, and culture, ethical considerations must emerge from “a more uncomfortable and perplexing place” (17). This imperative marks a refusal to peal culture away from matter.
A physicalist perspective is needed; but one that operates within an “epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge.” Moira Gatens draws from Spinoza's philosophy to describe "human bodies that open out into the more-than-human world" (13). Following Gatens' lead and engaging with Alaimo’s attempt to “trace how trans-corporeality often ruptures ordinary knowledge practices" (17), I want to introduce Spinoza's theory of matter in order to look for ways in which Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path thematizes the embodied interface that always exists between manuscript and reader.
A physicalist perspective is needed; but one that operates within an “epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge.” Moira Gatens draws from Spinoza's philosophy to describe "human bodies that open out into the more-than-human world" (13). Following Gatens' lead and engaging with Alaimo’s attempt to “trace how trans-corporeality often ruptures ordinary knowledge practices" (17), I want to introduce Spinoza's theory of matter in order to look for ways in which Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path thematizes the embodied interface that always exists between manuscript and reader.
For Spinoza, thought and extension are attributes of one irreducible substance. Pierre Macherey articulates this position with precision. He states, “Spinoza is not content to resolve the question posed by Cartesian dualism: he reverses the problematic completely" (105). Attributes are identified as two ways of expressing substance, and as such, “are unified at the same time as they remain really distinct. This unity is expressed in a well-known proposition: 'the order and connections of ideas are the same as the order and connections of things'" (106). Thought and world mutually condition one another. This relationship manifests in Alaimo's observation that the, "the material self cannot be disentangled from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial" (20). Ben Lerner's Mean Free Path explicates this kind of embodiment.
They are passing quickly, those
houses I wanted to
speak in. Empty sets
Among my friends, there is a fight about
The important questions
cannot arise, so those must be hills
where the famous
winter. I am familiar with the dream
Windmills enlarge
experience, killing birds
but I have already used
dream too often in my book
of relevance. Nothing can be predicated
Along the vanishing coast
tonight. You'll have to wait until
remnants of small fires
the eye can pull new features from
The stars
Consistently, Lerner's text offers authorial agency to the reader. It evokes play, the feeling of being free to rearrange lines. If we ask from where can "the eye", or the reader's eye, "pull new features from," then the very lines of the manuscript become reasonable sources. Consider, "The important questions /cannot arise, so those must be hills/ where the famous/ Windmills enlarge/ remnants of small fires." Or, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/The important questions/ of relevance/ Nothing can be predicated/ tonight. You'll have to wait until/ the eye can pull new features from/ The stars". Through play, two sides of the same coin, matter and thought, mesh, collide, and disrupt one another. Trans-Corporeality is thus thematized as one redistributes signification across the material space of the page.
The body must literally change its orientation, as downward reading is replaced with a playful down-up-and-around style of exploration. We can see how this mediates a relation between Spinoza's theory of matter and Alaimo's interactionist ontology when we observe how Mean Free Path flattens the distinction between the discursive and the physical. Thought and matter are explicitly obverse relations. If we begin to read downward, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/ The important questions" slams into "cannot arise, so those must be hills." The eye might move back up the page and connect "Empty sets" with "cannot arise" when one realizes that, in set theory, the empty set cannot "arise," but always exists in every set.
Operations such as these implicate the reader's body as being both textual and physical when subjective and objective space become two ways of saying the same thing. In the reader/page network, material distances are crossed through assemblage. Consequently, Mean Free Path reminds us that reading functions, not according to the chimerical structure of transcendental subjectivity, but within the strange space of matter.
__________________________
1. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
2. Macherey, Pierre. Hegel or Spinoza. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.
They are passing quickly, those
houses I wanted to
speak in. Empty sets
Among my friends, there is a fight about
The important questions
cannot arise, so those must be hills
where the famous
winter. I am familiar with the dream
Windmills enlarge
experience, killing birds
but I have already used
dream too often in my book
of relevance. Nothing can be predicated
Along the vanishing coast
tonight. You'll have to wait until
remnants of small fires
the eye can pull new features from
The stars
Consistently, Lerner's text offers authorial agency to the reader. It evokes play, the feeling of being free to rearrange lines. If we ask from where can "the eye", or the reader's eye, "pull new features from," then the very lines of the manuscript become reasonable sources. Consider, "The important questions /cannot arise, so those must be hills/ where the famous/ Windmills enlarge/ remnants of small fires." Or, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/The important questions/ of relevance/ Nothing can be predicated/ tonight. You'll have to wait until/ the eye can pull new features from/ The stars". Through play, two sides of the same coin, matter and thought, mesh, collide, and disrupt one another. Trans-Corporeality is thus thematized as one redistributes signification across the material space of the page.
The body must literally change its orientation, as downward reading is replaced with a playful down-up-and-around style of exploration. We can see how this mediates a relation between Spinoza's theory of matter and Alaimo's interactionist ontology when we observe how Mean Free Path flattens the distinction between the discursive and the physical. Thought and matter are explicitly obverse relations. If we begin to read downward, "Among my friends, there is a fight about/ The important questions" slams into "cannot arise, so those must be hills." The eye might move back up the page and connect "Empty sets" with "cannot arise" when one realizes that, in set theory, the empty set cannot "arise," but always exists in every set.
Operations such as these implicate the reader's body as being both textual and physical when subjective and objective space become two ways of saying the same thing. In the reader/page network, material distances are crossed through assemblage. Consequently, Mean Free Path reminds us that reading functions, not according to the chimerical structure of transcendental subjectivity, but within the strange space of matter.
__________________________
1. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
2. Macherey, Pierre. Hegel or Spinoza. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.
Tom, this is really interesting, and I think you do a pretty effective job in this post of drawing together a lot of texts in a small space, although if you were going to think more about these relationships I think I'd want to know more about how Alaimo and Spinoza interact, possibly without Lerner as a mediator.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what it does to trans-corporeality to identify the two interacting bodies as the subject and the words on the page. It seems like in this post you're arguing that the physical space of the text AND the experience of the text's "meaning" are pushing the reader toward a trans-corporeal understanding ("subjective and objective space become two ways of saying the same thing"), but would Alaimo or Spinoza or you argue that the subject's experience of textual bodies differs from the experience of say, a table or a cup or some air? Poems are texts; what about objects that don't speak so obviously?