No More Learning

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"Once out of nature" the poet's voice rejects the form of natural things, the category "bird" in the later poem in order to enter the " artifice of eternity" as an aesthetic form "as Grecian goldsmiths make". This collapse of natural form into artifact is what Wittgenstein, in Investigations, called the sublimation o f the machine into a symbol: where the normative structures o f language, rules, conventions, etc. are confused as the causal structures o f our psychology determining what we actually say. A symbol built out o f this confusion can seem to stabilize our linguistic practices. The structure o f a symbol so constitutedoutofthisstabilityisdeterminedasaformofidentity. Thus,Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus:
Only the proposition has sense; only in the context o f a proposition has a name meaning. (3. 3)
Every part of a proposition which characterizes its sense I call an expression
(a symbol).
(The proposition itself is an expression. )
Expressions are everything--essential for the sense o f the proposition-- that propositions can have in common with one another.
An expression characterizes a form and a content. (3. 31)
Identity functions as a metaconcept, or rather as the logical possibility that allows propositions to be decomposed and recharacterized as expressions. In this sense propositions function as expressions when they have a sense, in Frege's picture when they can stand in for each other. This commonality or conceptual identity functions as a repeatability that lies behind and extends the Cartesian idea of animal
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animation as mechanical, a rule-bound persistence, to that of the mind: a picture of the soul as a perpetual motion, or rather expression, machine. This is like the picture o f the soul in Swift's Tale o fa Tub as clothes or the kind of person described by Adams in his preface as "a manikin. . . clothes . . . the same value as any other geometrical figure o f three ormoredimensions,whichisusedforthestudyofrelation"(xxx). ForAdamsthe collapse into the mechanical attends a despair over the virgin's failure, the failure of spirit, to limit, let alone convert, human violence. This renunciation requires that he convert himself into a vision o f mechanical time and identity, into at least a metaphor o f the algorithmic: "Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed" (471-72).
This vision of self-transformation is quite different from what we find in Keats: "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it. " A proverb in its generality and structure is formulaic. This formula, however, is not applied to the world, but you interpret yourself as expressing it, that is, it becomes a proverb to you only when you can use it to describe your life. "Life" and a "Proverb" articulate incommensurable and irreducible domains, as do picture and text, and thus the aptness o f the word 'illustrate,' as a means o f mapping one domain onto another, as a picture illustrates a text. But what allows ones' life to be such an illustration? This is a question not only of application but of intentionality (the formulaic aspect calls for application: apply this formula across this domain; an application that leads to illustration opens up a problem of intentionality: what exactly is being illustrated? Matisse was commissioned to illustrate
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Joyce'sUlysses. HeproducedaseriesofdrawingsillustratingHomer'sOdyssey,not having bothered to read Joyce's book. What if he had read the book would he have then been able to illustrate it? ) What an illustration picks out in a text is like an interpretation, but its application to the text remains unclear or even tenuous: Is a movie an illustration of a book? Is it a translation ofat least a word, or phrase, or character into another medium? A particular shot in a movie might be an illustration; the musical score might be an illustration; but the movie itself is an interpretation, an attempt to tell not illustrate.
Asking "What does it mean? " leads to interpretation; asking, "What is it like? " leads to illustration. The first gives us a logic or a language we can understand; the other shows us the answer to a riddle.
A proverb is a fragment, as Schlegel called it, a kind o f self-articulating totality pointing, however, beyond itselftoward the world or experience which it describes or to which it can be applied. Schlegel's fragments function organically; they are not analogized into machinery as in Modernism (poetries appealing to Newton under the pressure of further scientific and technological transformations), but, akin to Goethe's conceptualizations ofthe Urphanomen, the ground phenomena, the principle ofform out of which and through which all other forms metamorphosize. This principle of holographic gestalt, organic self-articulation does not describe the mutual identification of ontogenyandphylogeny,butratherthereductionofbeingintoorganicmorphology. For Schlegel this form was the hedgehog:
A Fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world like a hedgehog.
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Ein Fragment muss gleich einem kleinem Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Ingel. (Athenaeum, 206)
Fragments define an holographic ecology: "Fragmentary totality, in keeping with what should be called the logic ofthe hedgehog, cannot be situated in any single point: it is simultaneouslyinthewholeandinthepart. Eachfragmentstandsforitselfandforthat from which it is detached" (The Literary Absolute, 44). Schlegel describes this symbolic function as constituting a mode ofbeing, a function ofa particular kind ofart: "I have expressed a few ideas pointing toward the heart o f things, and have greeted the dawn . . . from my own point ofview. . . Let anyone who knows the road do likewise . . . from his own point ofview. " (Ideas, 155). This is what Blanchot called "a totally new mode of completion" (358), the "demand posited by poetry that it reflect itself and accomplish itself through its reflection . . . poetry no longer wants to be natural spontaneity but solely and absolutely conscious" (353). This requirement displaces the site o f poetry away from the
"poetic work" and towards "the poetic activity" (357). The relationship between consciousness and the world takes place through animation. For human beings this describes knowing as a poetic activity and for the world describes its dynamism. Blanchot describes this as a "mode of completion" that "mobilizes . . . the whole through its interruption and through interruptions various modes" (358). Gasche explains this mode as the consequence o f "a cross-fertilization between the Romantics' practice o f writing andKantiandoctrine,which. . . dealswiththeuniversalconditionsofcompletion"(ix). I will tilt my way to one side of such a characterization of the relation between the two
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senses o f the aesthetic playing out in Kant: the aesthetic as "reflective judgment" (in the Critique o fJudgment) and the aesthetic as the constitutivejudgment determining the relation between concepts and experience (in the Critique o fPure Reason).
Schlegel analogizes the relation between science and art as between the dissipating force ofthe individual mind and the organized rigidity ofa system. The systemic supports the ground o f the real and is thus necessary; the dissipating force o f the mind constitutes the subjectively true and is also necessary. Thus "it's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two" (Athenaeum 53). This integration follows by constituting the individual as embryo system, and thus the implication between individual and system follows from phylogenesis: "All individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency" (Athenaeum 242). Human beings are embedded in the a priori, which functions as a determining system.
The categorical imperative universalizes the individual outside of the semantics of 'morality'. The force ofthis universalizing functions as an 'ought', a necessity determining the moral autonomy of any particular human as the microcosmic version of the universal law. The categorical imperative determines moral necessity "without reference to any purpose", but rather through the "form ofthe action and the principle from which it follows" ("Grounding for the Metaphysics ofMorals", 26). In Kant's picture, moral action measures the distance between someone who acts and rational moral criteria. This distance is measured by the special character o f 'ought' which marks the criterion for action and serves as the motive for action. Kant describes the criterion for moral action in a self-reflexive proverb which appeals to and contains another proverb:
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"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' ("Grounding", 30). The embedded proverb divides (1) an action (moral action) into a personal act in a particular situation and (2) an act ofwill universalizing this action. Kant's model for action, therefore, enacts the way of seeing described in Blake's "Auguries o f Innocence" as a description o f moral action:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm o f your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Kant imagines human moral failure to be a failure in the application o f moral precepts. Underlying this assumption is a theological picture translated into a logical problem: how to translate the universal, in which the moral 'ought' and the ontological 'is' are related as a conditional (if x, then y), into the particular contingencies determining human action. Kant's 'is' is not Hume's: Kant's criterion for existence is not grounded in human practice but in the simultaneous demand for individual human moral autonomy (to act and
judge through and as being 'I') and the necessity of a universal moral law. The means by which he accomplishes the translation of the 'I' into the moral universal proceeds through our formal equivalence as human beings within the formal limits o f our identity as agents. Within the categorical imperative this takes the form of a textual self-reflection that in itselfservesasamodelforhumanaction. Thustheproverb"Actonlyaccordingtothat maxim" describes the application of "that maxim". This textual self-reflection functions as a means of application that displaces the implicit 'act as if. . . " in the embedded proverb
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into the initial proverb concerning action. This initial "Act only. . . " assumes that we act outside o f moral commitments (and thus these commitments must be shaped and ordered). (I think this is a skewed picture but I cannot criticize it here).
Because ofthis assumption, however, this new proverb would require a proverb of application ad infinitum. Kant's response is to characterize 'acting' itself as a form of self-reflection: "Actinsuchawaythatyoutreathumanity,whetherinyourownperson or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means" (36). The particular concerns o f any action are dissolved in his designation o f humanity as the defactoobjectofanymoralact. Thisispossiblebecauseanyindividualisalsoanexample of humanity ("whether in your own person or in another"). Characterizing someone as an example (or even an exemplar) aestheticizes being human, and translates the question 'when are you a good person? ' into 'when are you human? ' This follows from Goodman's description of art in Ways o f WorldMaking (or mine ofFinnegans Wake in
the next section) as a function marked by the use or perception of something as an exampleofart. Thisfollowsfromthefailureofthequestion'whatisart? ' Artrequires the question 'when is art? ' Such a question replaces the quest for substance with a kind of dual perception of ourselves (when are we seeing art? ) and of an object or text (is this an example o f art? ). Kant has displaced the model o f a moral example (or exemplar) with a model of an ontological example (or exemplar). (Such a displacement is for Kant a requirement of morality, part of its universalizing demand). If we say 'he acted like a
monster' or 'he's no longer human' or 'he acted like an animal', do we imagine he is really a monster or some other species? Do animals murder in the way that humans do? Kant
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provides a picture o f how content or qualities can be translated into form. T becomes a universal law through which we act toward and as our species being, our essential being, so that the universal law coalesces into the form of all moral actions as if it generated an animateuniversalbeing. AlthoughIcannotpursuethisfurtherhere,Iwanttosuggestthat Kant's attempt to integrate moral autonomy with necessity organizes the form o f the moral 'ought' and the universal law as the form o f our animation as human beings.
The problem with Goodman's picture is that he reduces the function o f art to the recognitionofart. Kantinhismodelreducesbothbeinghumanandbeingmoraltothe recognition of the human and the moral. The application of morals reduces to the recognition o f the form o f morality which further reduces to the recognition o f being human; these recognitions are applied to oneselfto such a degree that moral action becomes a species o f self-recognition.
The fragment can work as a fragment, that is, it can preserve its unity and coherence (seemingly) without a clear discursive context (what is its scope, its truth value, the discursive rules determining its use or expressive force as literature or philosophy or theology or whatever? ), by pointing beyond itself by pointing to itself. The fragment exists through the logic ofKant's categorical imperative read as a theory of meaning, as if the 'I' and the word invoked their context and significance through the same ontological claims or presuppositions about themselves. (Why the temptation to personify fragments and word? ). If the good is what can be universalized for all other individuals, then the systemic is split into the abstraction of universalizing, a mode of equality determined as
fundamental human identity, and the a prioric ground ofjudgment and subjectivity that
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determines the scene ofmorality as the individual will. The world is dissolved into identity;theforceofthisdissolutionispartlythecrueltythatNieztschesmelled. Thissplit follows from the confusion between personhood and citizenship brought out in Locke. But this abstraction must be supported by the a priori conditions determining the human relation with the world: supported by metaphysics.
Stanley Cavell argues that "maintaining fragmentariness is part o f Emerson's realizationofromanticism"(TheNewYetUnapproachableAmerica,21). Ininterpreting Emerson's essay "Experience" as "a theory of the fragment" (21), the discoveiy that philosophy as a way ofgoing on is "a work ofmourning" (26), Cavell appeals to Schlegel (or rather the reading of Schlegel in L 'absolu litteraire) for an epigraph: "Many works of theancientshavebecomefragments. Manyworksofthemodemsarefragmentsright from their beginning [generation, Entstchung]. " (Athenaeum, 24; Cavell, 22): "In 'Experience,' the condition o f existing from birth, that is to say, existing from the condition of birth--call it the congenital--is taken as the condition of fragmentariness" (22). SuchfallenessrewritesPlato'sdivisionofouroriginaryandrogynousunityintomale and female with our continual alienation from God described in Genesis. The fragment functions here as the organic resistance to the mechanistic description o f the mind developed from Descartes mechanistic description ofthe body and the application of
Newtonian logic to the mind in the British empiricist tradition. The organicist fantasy (as ifwe know what 'birth' means as a description oftime or what the 'organic' means as a description of our thinking) and the mechanical fantasy (thinking our way out of our consciousness or replacing ourselves with higher level machines) each describe an extreme
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(insane? ) response to loss. Schreber enacts this insanity: "As long as he remains male, Schreber is not subject to the travail of mortality. Only after he has mothered a new breed o f humanity, a new Geschlect (spirit), will he die a natural death and be assumed, bodies andsoul,intoheaven"(103). Self-generationisanadmissionofmortality;itsdenialan assertion o f continual identity.
Schlegel, in Vorlesungen uber schone Literatur und Kunst, asserts that art must mimic the generative process ofNature:
That means it must--creating autonomously like nature, itself organized and organizing--from living works which are not set in motion through an alien mechanism, like a pendulum-clock, but through an indwelling power. . . In this manner did Prometheus imitate nature, when he formed man out of clay of the earth, and animate him with a spark stolen from the sun . . . (281)
Art functions like a fragment, "itself organized and organizing,' animated not by mechanisms but by an "indwelling power", animated by animation. But would Schlegel suggest that Nature as a whole functions like a fragment? Prometheus embodies and enacts this "indwelling power" and thus is an extension, a fragment of this same natural creation. As an animating principle ofNature he creates man, who is, therefore, analogized to art. This animation as an extension or fragment o f Prometheus semantically or mythically describes the autonomous metabolism ("organized and organizing") constitutinglife. Oneisanimatedbycontinuallyre-animatingoneselfwithinthelimits defined by that which initially animated one. Nature, Prometheus, Man, Art, as if collapsing metaphor and metonymy into an holographic, ontplogical trope, are all
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fragments, each a deus exfragmento or deus ex anima: "The more organic something is, the more systematic it is. --The system is not so much a species o f form as the essence o f the work itself' (Gasche citing Schlegel's Literary Notebooks, xii). Gasche comments that Schlegel equates "fragment=system=work=individual. In the closed-offindividualities of the fragment, unity is achieved in chaos, but at the expense o f any systematic relation as the absoluteness, or isolation, o f the fragment suggests" (xii). The absolute reduces to fragments within fragments: an infinite set o f finite sets.
The promethean generative power Coleridge calls the primary Imagination functions in the same way that the soul does for Keats, as a grammatical surrogate for the self and world: "the living Power and prime Agent o f all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM' (Biographia I. 13; 304). The creation o f these grammatical surrogates describe models o f a mind. Artificial Intelligence uses the mathematical syntax o f computer languages, or the potential syntax o f an idealized language and machine, as this kind o f surrogate. This mathematical syntax, as it does for Adams and Yeats, animates as a proximate cause a mind as a fragment. In Artificial Intelligence, the Infinite I AM is divided into the proximate cause within a mind, usually as consciousness (animation having been reduced to this) and into the interpretive complexity of our experience, and thus as an epiphenomenon resulting from a conscious machines interaction with its environment.
Wecannotspeakofcauseshere,butonlyofinterpretations. Theself-reflective attachments between the self-standing fragment and its reflective containment and expression o f systematic totality creates a symbolic distance that is meant to picture the
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relation between T and 'world'. Within this economy o f mirroring there exists no conceptual outside (there is no, as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake, "surview over all the factionables" (FW285. 26). Interpretative meaning or significance must be generated from insidethissystem. Thetropethatallowsforthisisirony. Blanchotwrites:
The'T ' of the poet, finally, is what alone will be important: no longer the poetic work, but poetic activity, always superior to the real work, and only creative when it knows itself able to evoke and at the same time to revoke the work in the sovereign play of irony. (The Infinite Conversation, 357)
Irony here, however, is an act o f creation, an act o f creation that produces analogic knowledge at the site of our manifestation as descriptions (in writing), that as Keats suggests, we illustrate.
This is not what Blanchot says, but it is an implication o f how he illustrates the romantics, who "bound to the act of writing as to a new knowledge they are learning to take up anew by becoming conscious ofit" (354). The dynamism ofthe mind describes an education (as it will also for Emerson and Adams). Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy translate this picture o f dynamic self-illustration into an aesthetic that more clearly reflects Kants' transcendental aesthetic. They claim that "[w]hat makes an individual, what makes an individual's holding-together, is the 'systasis' that produces it. What makes its individuality is its capacity to produce, and to produce itsel? first of all, by means of its internal 'formative force'-///e bildende Kraft inherited from the organism of Kant. . . " (49). Adams realizes that the ontological limits enacted within our scientific descriptions o f the world make this "capacity to produce . . . itself' impossible, except as biological and physical effects (as in the way our eyes 'reproduce' the world or our genes
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reproduceus). Ifhumanbeingsarereducedtoan'acting'thatrequirestheapplicationof a moral maxim (as in Kant), then this reduction to biological effect means we cannot apply moral ideals as a function o f self-reflection (more o f this latter).
For Adams, the fragment (what he calls Multiplicity) is a consequence of science (pictured as broadly mechanical), whereas for Schlegel (and in the logic of Keats' proverb) fragments resist this mechanization. This difference is partly a battle between Newton and Goethe. Novalis writes in Grains ofPollen: "Fragments ofthis kind are literary seeds: certainly, there may be sterile grains among them, but this is unimportant if only a few of them take root"(2. 463). The play between particular and containing universal, figured here as a seed and its growth into its determining form, is a conception o f the infinite that, as in Hegel, unites self-reflection in infinite dynamism. Romantic poetry, both in particular poems and as a totality, "should forever be becoming and never be perfected" (A22).
Because these fragments (as models ofthe moment or instant) contain or describe a totality they are essentially infinite (describing a kind o f self-contained infinite divisibility as between the numbers 0 and 1), and in this describe gods or our godhood: "every infinite individual is god" and "there are as many gods as there are ideas. " (This set o f ideas will latter be limited and humanized by W. James when he says that one has as many selves as friends: this turns the infinity o f the individual into a void becoming through its interactions, this is one form o f modernism, but one failing against grammar). As Charles Rosen explains, such a fragment is a "closed structure, but its closure is a formality: it may be separated from the rest ofthe universe, but it implies the existence ofwhat is outside of itself not by reference but by its instability" (Romantic Generation, 51). This fragment
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defines what a fragment should be, but such a definition transfers the ambiguity of "fragment" to what it means to be complete and separated" when this fragment-definition itselfpoints at itselfbut also at all other fragments, the ganz Welt, and the obscurity of being like a hedgehog. This instability is what Keats answers with "illustration": the fragment in its separateness and completeness invokes a logic or interpretative frame, but one that resists us, like a riddle.
What is to be illustrated is obvious--the proverb. Is the interpretation clear? Keats' claim about proverbs is itselfa proverb illustrating another proverb--"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. " Something becomes real in this sense when one views one's life as such an illustration. In this case, Keats offers us an ontological criterion in order to make sense, or rather to make the world in which the first proverb functions: Proverbs become proverbs to us when our life illustrates them, because nothing is real until we experience it. Experiencing is a kind of illustration--that turns the type (the proverb) into the token (the proverbfo r us: we can use it because we have become its token: this is an illustration of meaning from given types into particular tokens: from language to us). The proverb is meant to be true in all cases, let us say, within its world, or within the language game in which we mean (self-reflection or instantiation within the language game) as an illustration o f the proverb, where we can measure ourselves as real (as defined by the proverb: the proverb measures us), and we can measure the proverb as True: "'p' is p". Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves as one ofthose cases, within the totality defined by that "all". Whatever is real
is something we have experienced, in which case everything we have experienced is real to
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us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb, let us say it is a true statement about what is real, i. e. , what we experience, when we recognize it as an accurate description o f what we count as real.
Proverbs for Keats, therefore, are curious examples of aspect seeing. Instead of seeing a duck or a rabbit, however, we see ourselves, our life--as a narrative? a picture? what do we see? But what is illustrated for whom? The proverb does not illustrate our life, weillustrateit. Thusitisseeingourselvesasanillustrationandtheproverbasa descriptiontobeillustrated. ThetransformationofProverbintoproverbandourlifeinto an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change ofbeing but as a transformation of aspect. The proverb is not strictly speaking a description of our life but it is a way of our seeing ourselves, a description ofmeaning as opposed to experience; that is why we illustrate it.
Adams is calling for a more radical transformation, an objectification o f himself mirroringhisnarrationofhislifeinthirdperson. TheironyofAdams'provocationto become a formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss o f humanity is required in order to be. Human beings have become fragments under the gears o f the totality o f the world. This inversion marks the end not only o f human beings but o f human beings as Newtonian machines, as clay pot with gears inside. It is as if the demands o f the world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens, or, more specifically formulaic, descriptions ofthe world in order to enter into the conditionsofbeingandactingdeterminingwhatisreal. Ineffectourabilitytomeasure the proverb as True becomes impossible, collapses into our vanishing into a formulation of
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the criteria determining the real. This is a way of saying that we are replaced by ontologicalcriteria. Ourexistenceisimpotentbeforeorwithoutthesecriteria,these determinations. Do we imagine someone in Adams' world asking "Is this formula true for me? " as one might about a proverb? Adams can only become real if he refigures himself as what counts as real in what he already knows and what he cannot resist as Real. Skepticism in this world begins as a case ofseeing oneselfas unreal and the world as real;
oneself as a projection, a fantasy, a dream: the world exists, but do I?
The systematic totalization of the real, where we are presented neither with objects
nor fantasies, but with the conditions of reality, where the criteria determining what counts asrealbecometheobjectswesee,removestheworldassomethingweexperience. Our science is not a science o f empiricism, but an attempt to determine and articulate ontological conditions or descriptions. By this I mean that empiricism has been replaced by metaphysics. The picture underlying much o f biology is "Genes determine what counts as a human being": it is not that we illustrate the genes--we manifest them in a particular way; we are determined by them, and, therefore, they are always ours in a way a proverb canneverbe. Aproverbisanideal,aplatonicformunderwhichwegainrealityandit
gains truth; a string o f nucleic bases describes us for the world, into the real, where being human as opposed to being a chimpanzee is the effect o f this description enacted through biochemistry. Are we true copies? Maybe, but that either means we are positing other determining factors, environment for example, or we lose our claim-usually our life, to being human. Genes make us real. Biology is becoming, as Chemistry has already become, o f course in varying degrees, engineering. One does- not have to think o f science
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in this way, it is, as Wittgenstein might say, the picture is forced upon Adams and to a large degree upon us. But it is a picture that competes with another cultural picture--half Cartesian, with our bodies as forms to be filled, and halfromantic, with the filling allegorized onto language, the world, and our pictures of ourselves.
The disorder ofour language is a function ofthe disorder ofour culture and its failure to organize human life in relation to the order ofthe world enacted through science and technology. The effect ofthis is to require the kind ofjustification ofone's being, identity, life, picture o f the world that Conrad asks for when he requires that art justify itself in every line if it is to be called art (The Nigger o f the Narcissus). This can be understood as a drive toward totality, as either a resistance or response to, what Adams' calls, "that path of newest science [where] one saw no unity ahead--nothing but a dissolving mind" (434). I f "Mind and Unity flourished or perished together", then the dissolution o f the unity guaranteed by God results (at the time Adams was writing) with
"Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had once seen lines of will. Adamsconcludes"thatthesequenceofmenledtonothingandthesequenceoftheir society could lead no further, while the mere sequence oftime was artificial, and the sequence o f thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence o f force" (382). Adams further reduces the grounding o f moral being in the recognition o f a common humanity to therecognitionofuniversalizingconstitutiveforces. Theproblemofmoralapplication that concerned Kant, however, is dissolved into individual powerlessness: Act is replaced with being acted upon. Human beings mean as the nexus of forces within the world. In
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being the nexus o f forces the relation between being human and the being o f the universe is constructed as a pure limit, as a contentless unit o f self-reflection:
The sum o f force attracts; the feeble atom or molecule called man is attracted; he is the sum ofthe forces that attract him. . . The universe that had formed him took shape in his mind as a reflection o f his own unity, containing all forces except himself. (474-75)
This unit o f self-reflection is contentless because unity is the act o f self-reflection itself (notthecontentofthisreflection). Consequentlyself-reflectioncanonlygeneratesymbols not the forces that constitute what is (476).
For Adams the sense of life requires some commonality, some meta-identity into which the seemingly incommensurable logics, forces, sequences o f the dynamo and virgin can be converted: this identity is his mind (383). Adams required that intellectual energy reduce into a kind of physical energy, or that they both reduce to some more primal form o f energy. This is one way o f conceiving Artificial Intelligence. Such a picture, however, lacksanyscientificvalueorvalidity. Adams'translatesourpictureofthemindintoan analogic language in which incommensurable and irreducible realms could be re-valued. Mind in this sense separates from materiality but so does science, in that they both are mapped into the language of special objects, concepts, forces, energy, or mathematics, and in this allow human values to be refigured with ontological force. Such force remains, however, only analogic, and with Adams, therefore, depends on scientific ignorance, not suspended belief, and on philosophical naivete.
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In Y eats the temptation o f Adams' reductive conversion o f mental into physical, a version o f which he pursued in "Sailing to Byzantium," is itself converted into a kind o f hierarchical equivocation:
Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud In glory o f changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.
What is it that is described as possibly miracle, bird or artifact? "All that man is"? The bodily form ofthe golden bird ofthe emperor's smithies? Whatever is also "image, man or shade" of the previous stanza? These are all versions ofthe soul or rather versions of the mind following our intentionality backwards from the things it picks out to the limits oflanguage pointing inward. The realm ofspirit, itselfanalogic for that which or who fears death and desires immortality (hades' crow), gains a greater claim on us, a claim greater than bird or handiwork. But is this partial priority only for us, as a function of our desire for its power? Do 'we' identify, commit, and recognize ourselves to and within this realm? The miracle is that we find ourselves planted and crowing within the mythic, star-lit golden bough, like the cocks of Hades. The equivocation between "image, man or shade" and "miracle, bird, or golden handiwork" is not resolved by the "more miracle than. . . ",
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but shifts from asking 'what is it? ', and expecting an answer to 'who is it? , to asking 'which world do we inhabit, a world ofmiracle or handiwork? ' Are these the same world?
Is our choice between being image or handiwork? Miracle and handiwork are both possibledescriptionsofhumanbeings. Withinthepoemtherearenowaysorresources for deciding between these two possibilities. Miracles cannot resist their degradation into handiwork and then into mire and blood.
We flip aspects from miracle to handiwork in the rest ofthe stanza. The light is no longer traced back to a tapestry of stars but to "the moon embittered. " Crowing can be heard as "scorn aloud". The mechanical form ofthe earlier bird returns as "changeless metal". The sublimation into the "glory" ofthis metal or into the miracle at best remain aspects of the "common bird or petal/ And all complexities o f mire or blood. " The demand forjustification that propels Adams into the figure ofthe machine remains the condition of our being within these complexities of chaos, life and death. The movement Adams finds himself attracted to gets formalized in the "dancing floor', but again as a pun in which an object as the context for human activities, as a version of the world, can be read as dancing itself (synecdochic identity encapsulating human interaction: as in let's go to a dance, where what is to be done becomes totalized as a place, activity, and social entity all
analogized through the transformation o f verb into noun as a kind o f thing). This too is a way o f animating the inanimate.
These versions o f animism and mind-making resist transcendence and moral development through a kind of instability (chaos for Adams; the pull of mire and blood for Yeats) that inverts romantic soul-making. What is being made, described, converted, etc.
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becomes mysterious, even it if one calls it "mind" the varying aspects with which it conformsemptiesthistermofanysense. Itiswewhoareindangerofbecoming senseless,nottheworld(asonemightimagineKeatsfearing). Adams'problemof introjecting chaos into order can be seen both as organizing the forces o f the world according to a religious sense and in projecting the scientific order describing the world into the chaos ofthe mind.
If Yeats desires transformation in "Sailing to Byzantium", then it is not into the self-beggettor, the magi, but into a machine that mimics the form o f art in its body in order to speak within what is itself a formed world, and beyond this into the ear o f the powers determining the wealth, the power, the freedom ofthis world: the emperor somewhere off stage. WhatYeats'narratorinvestsinthe"formtheGreciangoldsmithsmake"isthe desire to be made, to function as a symbol o f some whole. (Not to use the world like Keats, but to be used by something besides the world). Both an "aged man. . . studying monuments o f its own magnificence" or "Soul clap its hands and sing" act as an "it"; the choice here between singing and studying does not offer to make us human. The objectification o f both ourselves and what we study as things lies confused in our desiring and knowing: ". . . sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is. " If we imagine that desire operates in the face of objects pinched off into otherness, itness, then our failure to know ourselves, except as dying animals, and thus as nothing to desire or nothing stable, translates into a fragmented form of life, "[a] tattered coat upon a stick",ifnotforthedelusionsofyouth. Thisform,emptiedanddecaying,akintothe
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Sibyl prefacing The Waste Land, cannot be filled, but only remade into a stability that tries to work language to a standstill in paradox:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic ofa wall
These icons can act upon us as a golden bird made by the decree ofthe emperor in order tokeephimselfawake. Hisgoldsmithsbecomethewayinwhichhe(allofuswithinour heads)talkstohimself(toourselves). Orthepoeticvoicecanspeakasaproductofthe empire, and thus talk to lords and ladies. In every case, however, these 'human beings' and 'things' speak ofwhat they already know: "Ofwhat is past, or passing, or to come. " If as tattered coats and decaying animals the soul or aged man knows not what it is, then the measureofthisignoranceliesinthemeasureoftime. Thismeasure,however,liesoutside ofthe caring about what is past, passing, or to come. Being made into pure form and animated by sages mastering his soul determines being human as, what Yeats will call in
"Byzantium," "an image, man, or shade": "I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. "
In "Sailing to Byzantium", he calls to these sages to "be singing-masters of my
soul", as if this singing could animate him through his being possesses (by a formula maybe) by another (a revocation ofLocke's grounding our freedom in our own self- possession). This is an inheritance as a form ofbeing possessed, (an inheritance that possesses one, something not unknown to happen). This possession and the gathering up "into the artifice of eternity" is a way ofturning Keats "illustration" into our becoming, what Wittgenstein calls, a "machine-as-symbol", the seeming representation o f a future as apredeterminedexpressionofamachinesstructure. Ifwestudyourmonuments,these
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machines or golden birds or words, we measure them as things made, as diagrams of our ownmaking,andthusasproductsofhowwemadethem. Thismightbethemeasuringof a space for a wedding bed in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro", or the confused resistanceto andmarkingoftimeandofdesirebyElizabethBishop'snarrator"studying" the "Monument", or a critic's, or an engineer's, or a philosopher's description o f a text or a mind. But as Figaro measures out his bed he sings, and in this measures himself as the music and in duet with his wife's singing.
Would we say here then that the music illustrates him measuring out this bed? And if we silence the music do we have a scene like the following described by Wittgenstein?
Put a ruler against this body; it does not say that the body is of such-and-such a length. Rather is it in itself--I should like to say--dead, and achieves nothing of what thought achieves. "--It is as if we had imagined that the essential thing about a living man was the outward form. Then we made a lump of wood in that form, and were abashed to see the stupid block, which hadn't even any similarity to a living being. (PI? 430)
A bed and a wooden body--asleep maybe, a "humptyhillhead" as Joyce calls such a sleeper seems to have lost something essential. No amount of measuring will be able to describe the nighttime experience of any block of wood, human or not. Such a picture of our humanity is a picture ofdeath: what ifthe block ofwood looks like you? And then you might ask with Descartes in the First Meditation: "How could I deny that these hands and this body is mine, were it not that I compare myself to certain persons . . . who imagine
that they have a earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or made o f glass? " Such a
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picture is o f a Romantic fragment, a hedgehog, "complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world" : one picture o f a human being. (What's the history o f this? ). A modernist fragment like a modernist machine works differently. The movement
from microcosm to macrocosm, the universe in a grain o f sand, is replaced by golden birds in a Byzantine court or by a disjunction between the logic of the world (the real) and our willing or choosing; or as Conrad describes it "the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness ofone ofthose misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination ofmoonshine" (Heart ofDarkness, 7). In this the machinery has not been replaced by something else, we will still find wheels and gears and a dead pumpkin-head frightening our neighbors if we look, but we find ourselves within another 'machine' designing these wheels and gears, and we do not know how to describe this machine. We can see its effects in Darwin's discussion of intentionality and evolution:
Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end we are justified in saying that it is specially contrivedforit. Onthesameprinciple,ifamanweretomakeamachinefor some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys, only slightly altered, the whole machine, with all its parts, might be said to be specially contrived for that propose. Thus throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living machinery o f many ancient and distinct specific forms. (197)
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Dennett understands this as a kind ofinterpretative functionalism, where there are neither "real functions . .