Habeas Corpus! (Shred the Paper Wittgenstein & Uncover an Ethics in the Grotesque Body)
by Evan Willner

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Some Poets Dream

James Pate’s recent essay in Action, Yes is a delight. I would gladly hand it out on streetcorners first because in it we get to watch a subtle mind at work as he exposes the False Wittgenstein. When he notes the conservatism of Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy – misperceived by poets who use him as theoretical support for a laudable but impossible revolutionary project – Pate opens the door for the restoration of the true prince. The second pleasure of Pate’s essay is his characterization of “the Political Grotesque,” an esthetic we find cropping up more and more lately, which “is as politically subversive as that of the Language Poets.” But there is something to add: in its return to the in- or pre-human body, the Political Grotesque provides an alternative, more realistic ethics, one more in line with the later Wittgenstein.

While Pate’s reading of Wittgenstein is careful, it is incomplete: it captures the limitations of using his method of “describing and not explaining” to produce a political poetry, but it doesn’t entirely examine his linguistic philosophy (this may have been outside his aims), and this I think is what leads him to argue that books involved in the Political Grotesque “move away from the Wittgensteinian approach.” So here I would like to build on the foundation he poured by arguing that in fact Wittgenstein may not be such a supporter of the Wittgensteinian approach.

As Pate notes, we have chosen Wittgenstein as a major standardbearer for the Language revolution, but he was exactly the wrong person. More rabbi than revolutionary, Wittgenstein paces and puzzles. Like the Talmudic rabbis, he won’t state his conclusions outright; they are built into the exploration and illustration, and when his puzzles test the idea of a transformative language, they conclude that it is impossible. Wittgenstein actually poses a fundamental problem for Language and Post-Language poetries, which hope to achieve a conceptual and therefore political renovation through language. In this essay, a reconsideration of Wittgenstein will lead us back to Pate’s Political Grotesque to sketch out the Wittgensteinian attitude toward rhetoric and revolution that seems inherent in grotesque art – as well as the gentle ethics involved in its violence and disgust.

Yes, Wittgenstein is conservative. Maybe we gagged him or maybe we just hadn’t noticed: even the literature-oriented Wittgenscion Stanley Cavell will tell you (ask him) that a careful understanding of the later Wittgenstein is rare in the literature community. We tend to see what we like in him (and in philosophers generally), reading his work in the way that philosophers read a poem – as if it were divorced from a tradition, outside of any esthetic and philosophical discourse. (1) Or worse: we read Wittgenstein as somehow providing grist for a nouveau-Marxist politics, a claim that would send him to Norway to pace and rage. For him there is no escape: we are as caught up in the language of our community as we are in the community assumptions that have formed us. The question, Pate points out, “is whether or not Wittgenstein’s approach to language in some ways limits a radical approach to poetry,” and the answer is Yes.

A morsel of support is necessary here. First, watch Wittgenstein explain that our communal assumptions – our shared presuppositions about the world – are unchangeable and at work in our every thought and action:

Think of chemical investigations. Lavoisier makes experiments with substances in his laboratory and now he concludes that this and that takes place when there is burning. He does not say that it might happen otherwise another time. He has got hold of a definite world-picture – not of course one that he invented: he learned it as a child. I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is a matter-of-course foundation for his research and as such also goes unmentioned.(2)
          But now, what part is played by the presupposition that a substance A always reacts to a substance B in the same way, given the same circumstances? Or is that part of the definition of a substance? (Philosophical Investigations §§167-8)

Lavoisier’s conclusions are grounded in his assumption that the physical laws are stable, and who can blame him? We consider his conclusions objective in part because we share this assumption. However, what we take for granted as the very ground on which scientific study proceeds essentially cannot be proved: while we agree a foot is this long (agreement in definitions) and consider it a stable unit of measurement (agreement in judgment), it is only verified by its ability to provide us with a constancy of measurement when we accept this agreement. Our verification is tautological because

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. (On Certainty §105)

The larger system of tacit knowledge, the basic assumptions about the universe beneath everything we do (our belief in causality, in the stability of physical laws, etc.), determines the rules for investigation, which affects what we investigate and the conclusions we reach. The rules and our assumptions can’t be “proved” to us because we cannot appeal beyond “the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false” (OC §94) for understanding. This may seem like the kind of dormroom sophistry that the sun disproves with its daily and indifferent reappearance, but that’s due to a necessary epistemic chauvinism: another community could as easily be shaped by the assumption that, without daily prayer, the sun would not rise. If this seems like an unlikely example, consider the extreme branch of fundamentalists in America today: their politics is formed in part by their inability to reconcile science and democracy with the assumptions that inform their very being. One can’t argue with them because they live in a different universe, one in which a scripture trumps empirical investigation, in which the physical laws can at any moment be suspended by miracles, the intercession of the hand of God, and often are.

But being blind to the ways in which our lenses distort our vision is one effect of living within a set of assumptions.(3) And we can’t escape:

“A new-born child has no teeth.”—“A goose has no teeth.”—“A rose has no teeth.”—This last at any rate—one would like to say—is obviously true! It is even surer than that a goose has none.—And yet it is none so clear. For where should a rose’s teeth have been? The goose has none in its jaw…. Why, suppose one were to say: the cow chews its food and then dungs the rose with it, so the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast. This would not be absurd, because one has no notion in advance where to look for the teeth in a rose. (PI 188-9)(4)

The rose’s teeth appear when we reconceive of the body. We who assume that roses end at the tips of their petals and roots cannot help but smell something of the metaphorical or the hypothetical about Wittgenstein’s cow-rose. A community relies on a shared understanding of basic concepts such as individual boundaries, so the cow-rose complex is difficult for us to accept because it conceives of the individual as one organ in a larger corporeal economy – in fact, it defines the individual as that economy. Only an alien community would know where to look for the rose’s teeth; our attitudes and assumptions don’t even justify the search. In games such as this one, where we are presented with rules that are foreign to us, we are invited to play participant-observer in another community and to perceive the world according to its norms.

However, the martian nature of these strange worlds – of course the physical laws are stable; of course a rose is a rose is not a cow – point to Wittgenstein’s impatience with the notion that language has liberatory potential. Wittgenstein hands us many instances of fundamentally different conceptions of reality – visions of what the world could look like through the eyes of someone with a different set of assumptions, living in a foreign community. Pate quotes Wittgenstein’s “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life,” and the opposite is also true: a community that saw not cows and roses but cow-roses would live in a language that reflects this.

Therefore, in order to achieve a revolution through stylistic novelty, one must assume that we’re able to fully inhabit a new set of assumptions – an entirely other way of perceiving the world – as we inhabit a new language. Wittgenstein denies the possibility of this, but you can test it for yourself: go through your day perceiving objects not as discrete, but as limbs of a body of objects; believe and speak as if each object is a system made up of objects that are systems.

If you can do this you can think in another life-form, but now how will you communicate it with the rest of us? Your speech would come out like one of Marianne Moore’s animal poems: when we’d say “buffalo,” you’d speak a conglomeration that included plush toys, oxen, Christians, the Buddha, as well as buffalo myths and the economic uses of buffalos. But if you do learn to speak and live in Moore poems, congratulations to you, and seriously: it takes a circus flexibility of mind and imagination. Now see if you can live this way for the rest of your life.

This is how an experimental poem works: its foreign style implies a foreign set of assumptions about the world, as Language poetry posited, and the poem allows its reader to inhabit its new way of thinking. By taking part in a language appropriate to an alien community, one joins for a moment the people of that community, escaping maybe our flawed way of being in and conceiving of the world. But this is where the reading of Wittgenstein as politico-linguistic radical falls down: nobody exists in an experimental poem’s language, its stylistic logic: at the end of the day, we speak and think, in the language we’ve been given. We assume the largely syllogistic and symbolic logic of our community, which our language reflects. We think in terms of cause/effect relationships and sleep secure in our belief in the physical laws. We return to the assumptions we were born into, the logic that composes us. We can visit foreign lands, but we have to settle down, return home, close the book. We are tourists, not explorers.

The point: a careful reading of Wittgenstein raises doubts about the project of a Linguistic Revolution that produces a Political Revolution. No poetry can change the world by reforming hearts and minds with new logics; nothing can fundamentally change the assumptions that justify our way of being in the world, terrible as it is. One cannot achieve Leslie Scalapino’s “continual conceptual revolution” or anything more than a momentary conceptual rebellion. The belief in our ability to transcend the minds that make us us is the poets’ dream.

And here I admit my naiveté: I was actually surprised to read the attacks on Pate’s essay – and their vehemence. Is it because he struck at a foundational assumption of the Language poetry revolution and the institution that grew up after it? It is. Pate acknowledges that Language poetry has opened new conceptual and stylistic doors, but his argument suggests an awareness that it hangs itself on a fundamental misperception of what language can reasonably be expected to achieve. So of course I should have expected the response: Pate’s argument, implicitly, marginalized no small number of mid-career poets and some reacted predictably; who wouldn’t react likewise?

Some Poets Scream

So what can poetry do if it can’t change the world through the disruption of the usual modes of discourse? Pate’s essay points us to one alternative that has poked its head above the soil, the Political Grotesque. And it’s no accident that his essay is published in ActionYES, which has picked up the scent and collected artists such as Reines, Gudding, Pafunda, Pate, Borzutzky and Glenum. Is this a cabal: is there a movement? Not as far as I can see. Pate, I think, has characterized a set of concerns common to some individuals’ work.

This set of concerns is what constitutes the Political Grotesque. It carries the stink of Francis Bacon (the flimsiness of bodies, and their deformation), maybe Ben Marcus (who perceives the manipulation of bodies by the discourses of commerce, religion, etc.), Matthew Barney (body parts as material objects and material objects as body parts), the Brothers Quay (mechanization of bodies; vivification of machines), Michel Nedjar (tortured ragbodies), as well as the more obvious Earl of Rochester, Mr. Burroughs, St. Artaud, and others interested in the body as meat, the body as manipulatable, the body as pathetic, the individual as golem, as toy, as full of literal shit, as killable. The Political Grotesque includes a broad variety of styles, but it always involves a foregrounding of the physiological – and this produces physical discomfort or pleasure.

Is there a political element to this attention to the body, or is it only shockery? If it makes us uncomfortable, it may be because we feel implicated by the well-performed abuse of bodies and language: in it we can often watch ourselves fighting to take up space, attacking, breaking, shouting ourselves, and we can see the alien, mindless thing at work in our bodies. This is the body, not the individual, as political object. Every day that I wake up, because I woke up, a child in Malaysia is punched in the face, no matter how carefully I shop, and the grotesque confronts me with the fact. Every book I buy supports a global system of commerce that necessitates slave labor, child prostitution and worse. My body is being eaten away by the world and chemistry, and my failure to pursue violent revolution is a tacit acceptance of the Administration’s policies – but my success would change nothing, since, as Wittgenstein and the French Revolution teach us, we will remain us, armed with guillotines, murderous and stupid.

We generally experience the visceral in commodified form (e.g., “torture porn” horror movies, action movies, nature shows, war on tv), because the presence of the visceral, unmediated, is as impossible as a corpse; it refuses to deny what comes before the human – not the inhuman but simply meat – and this is what the Political Grotesque can confront us with: the specter of fucking, the kind of fucking we don’t admit to thinking about, Videodrome fucking, and dying.

While some examples of the Political Grotesque are noxious or obnoxious, not all are: we can include Whitman in the constellation. In his search for an American poetry, he depicts himself having sex with God, his “loving bedfellow,” and he is doused by the ocean’s orgasm (“You sea! // Cushion me soft . . . . rock me in billowy drowse, / Dash me with amorous wet . . . . I can repay you”). Whitman has sex with man, woman, and the natural world. The poem of personal and national identity is visceral in the most literal way; it includes the slap n’ tickle(5) and the rot of being in the world, and their ethical implication: we must remember the body. Whitman and other Grotesque authors give us the fullest face of Habeus Corpus.

Notice that these are not abstractions: Whitman does have sex with the ocean; whatever you want the act to represent, Reines’ cows and the Quays’ puppets with livers are concrete objects and we are attracted to them not maybe out of a love of being disgusted but out of an ethical pull to pity and hold together, with staples if necessary, a life which is torn by abuse, which is any life. We are responsible for creating and therefore loving broken toys and Goya bodies.(6)

There are three safety catches that keep me from shitting myself: the external and internal anal sphincters and the puborectalis, a ridiculous rubberband loop of muscle that tightens around the large intestine like a kink in a hose. The only thing that prevents my body from reminding me that, fundamentally, I’m less human than I am chemical meat is a Rube Goldberg machine in my ass. What does this mean? Maybe the body doesn’t mean, but it is definitely unnerving and nerving.

One Poet’s Spleen

Apology 1. Wittgenstein teaches us that poetry won’t change the world and I’m sorry for it. As a political tool poetry’s worth may in fact appear in Mayakovsky’s recognition of failure and his very physical act of shooting himself in the face. We can acknowledge that poetry is a rhetorical object, as Wittgenstein believes all language is: it defines our world before we can, and it keeps us in our mental place or fiddles it. This Wittgenstein is the one I’d like to couple to Pate’s essay because this Wittgenstein has a realistic linguistic politics, one unsuited to a Language revolution.

Worse, if poetry is built out of the tools of rhetoric, it begs the question: what gives poets the right to tell us that their alternative conceptions of the world are better than our own? When we set out to change hearts and minds, aren’t we all doing exactly what we pick on Pound for doing? Are poets such brilliant philosophers (in Deleuze’s sense, as inventors of modes of thinking) that they can tell us how to live? It seems to me that one’s place on the x-axis of rhetorical ability and effectiveness has no relation to one’s place on the y-axis of wisdom: poets are craftspeople like potters, only with fantastic pretentions about what their art can achieve.

What’s left to do? Maybe poetry can encourage, through its style, its rhetorical moves, the visceral feeling of responsibility for the weak body, even the machine, the recognition that it’s us who made them up and ground them down (just as they do to us and others), the recognition that there’s nothing we can do to stop us or them, and the recognition that we are bodies, needy and disgusting, and maybe that itself is the source of our vulnerability, which is the mother of lovability and the tug of responsibility. Maybe poetry can pull muscles, not heartstrings – the visceral as a way to escape the sentimental. Maybe poetry can’t do much more than a). acknowledge that language and art will not save us, and b). ask us to feel the guilt of, and maybe the care demanded by, all that we fuck to exist, and this is the politics of the Political Grotesque. Does this sound depressing or defeatist? Look at the next person you’re having missionary sex with: visceral, needy, beautiful. Does this sound like an expression of personal psychological trouble? Chalk it up to whatever makes you comfortable, but ask yourself how much of what we’ve built up to justify art’s technical/rhetorical machinery, to give it a moral/political/revelatory/self-revelatory function, is wishful thinking and feelbetterism.

Apology 2. Let me be clear: this is not a manifesto. The Political Grotesque is a convenient term to describe the effect of some work – the ethics and therefore the politics that come of body-focus. We are not coming to get you, linguistic revolutionaries, because there is no we. Like your poetry, this poetry will change nothing, except maybe to introduce a useful kick in the crotch and a realistic attitude about what poetry can be asked to do.

Notes