Introduction
This is the web site of Paul Harrington. Paul Harrington is the nom de guerre of the poet Paul Wilson. To date I have completed two books of poetry: Bridges to the Body, which was largely written in the early 1990's, and Theoria, which was completed in 2008. On this site you will be able to read and download parts of these books and, hopefully, at some point, obtain them. In addition you will be able to access some of my critical writings on literature. These refer both to my own work and to other philosophical and aesthetic texts in which I am interested. As I improve and refine the site I hope to make more of my writing available. My main motivation in constructing this site, aside from the hope of ensuring the survival of the texts, is to stimulate critical thinking about contemporary poetry. In particular I am interested in the problem of what a radical poetry would look like today. This is because the trajectory of my own development as a writer has been towards the construction of a full blown and revolutionary avant-garde practice. Theoria, for instance, which is the culmination of many years of labour, is an unambiguous attempt to produce a revolutionary aesthetic work fully comparable to the great works of aesthetic modernity such as Ulysses. The question of whether it is a successful attempt, or, as is more likely, an attempt in which failure was already certain from the outset, immanent, as it were, to the nature of the endeavor, probably cannot be answered at the moment. Nevertheless, since the problem of the construction of a radical aesthetic practice has been my chief concern over the last few years, the critical reflections I intend to sketch out on this site will be skewed to a consideration of this question.
For readers who have little or no interest in this kind of thinking then I advise you to skip to the poetry right away. After all, making this work available is the main purpose of the site. In addition it is important for me to stress that an awareness of the intellectual context from which the poetry is produced is not necessary for an experience of what I conceive to be the revelatory power of the work. This is at least in part because, as we shall see, the work is designed to constitute what I call, following the French philosopher Alain Badiou, an Event. In particular Theoria is what I call a poetry of the Event. It is one of the chief tenet’s of Badiou’s work that the question of who does or does not become a Subject at the site of the Event is a priori undecidable. It is perfectly possible, in other words, for a reader with little or no awareness of the philosophical ground on which the texts arise to feel that these poems are important. It is precisely the fact that any individual can become a Subject at the site of the Event which constitutes its “miraculous” element. Theoria, which is a poetry which formally affirms the possibility of the impossible, is much concerned with this theme. And it is no coincidence, of course, that two paradigmatic Evental sites – those of tragedy and the miracle - are central to my practice and thinking on aesthetics.
Having said this I have learned from many years of wrestling with the problem of whether a revolutionary poetics is still indeed recoverable that such a practice can probably not arise any longer on the site of a hiatus in thinking. This is due to the historical situation of the contemporary writer. It is important to emphasise that my thinking is situational, that I grasp aesthetic practices as above all a response to the contingent, to historical exigencies, and certainly not as existing in some kind of cultural or historical vacuum. And what is contingent to the historical situation of the writer today, of course, is simply the historical event of modernity itself, the fact that no avant-garde practice could be imagined which was not in some way engaged with the problem of the new, that there could be no going back, in short, to some pre-modern aesthetic practice. Of course the centrality of the problem of the modern, of the new, does not at all mean that contemporary artists should simplistically adopt, say, a specifically modernist style or practice in pursuit of a progressive work. Such an approach would not only be completely anachronistic – it would miss the temporally mediated nature of myth; a practice which was radical or progressive ninety years ago may be entirely reactionary today. Nor does the category of the “postmodern” hold much appeal for radicals since this is an aesthetic which tends to posit all contemporary practices as belated, as if present day art were incapable of anything other than a parodic or ironic repetition of the Gestus of modernity. Instead the historical situation calls upon contemporary artists to adopt a much more sophisticated approach to the problem of the modern, to mediate what Walter Benjamin used to call the truth content of modern art in their own aesthetic practices. And the nature of this truth content has, after all, long been clear – it was intimated by Theodor Adorno long ago. The truth content of modern art is freedom.
It is in fact through their attitude to the problem of freedom that contemporary writers enter into a relation of mediation with the truth content of modern art. Characteristically this content emerges dialectically in contemporary literature. For on the one hand very few present day writers could actually be said to be engaged with the problem of freedom in any explicit or thematic sense. This is presumably because, of course, they believe freedom has been attained, a view which, incidentally, stands in marked contrast to the attitudes of the great writers of aesthetic modernity, few of whose works are born out of the assumption that freedom has been realised. No doubt this reflects the fact that the material, social and political situations of most contemporary artists, at least in the west, are immeasurably better than that known by their forebears in the early part of the last century when the great works of aesthetic modernity were being produced. Indeed this thematic indifference to the truth content of modern art is actually only symptomatic of a much deeper ideological conviction as to the relation between freedom and contemporary aesthetic practices. For what contemporary art tends to reflect is the idea that freedom is immanent to aesthetic expression, that expression is somehow coincident with freedom, that aesthetic expression, in short, is a form of freedom. This belief turns out to have important consequences for the character of contemporary works. For in fact the view that aesthetic expression carries the signature of freedom radically transforms the intellectual basis and function of art. In particular art's truth content ceases to be produced by aesthetic mediation; it is not so much abolished as posited as pre-extant. It is precisely for this reason, of course, that the vast majority of contemporary artworks can know nothing of truth content in any emphatic philosophical sense. In such works, after all, truth content is in effect regarded as formally identical with aesthetic expression. Truth content is not something produced internally by aesthetic practice; instead it is posited as being identical with the act of expression which gives rise to that practice. Thus a largely unmediated, indeed reflexive conception of freedom turns out to have a decisive significance in contemporary aesthetics after all. It is important to emphasise how historically unique a situation this is, how it is quite unlike any other situation in the history of art and why comparisons of the present historical moment with past moments in the history of art are quite futile. For in no past historical moment has the act of aesthetic production been regarded as an expression of freedom in quite this way; instead the purpose of art was more to produce a synthetic experience of freedom by way of a detour through the contingent i.e. via the mediation of heterogeneous materials, precisely because this very experience was not immanent to expression.
To be sure this unprecedented historical situation produces all kinds of consequences for aesthetics. For when freedom is posited as the a priori of aesthetic practice art’s relation to truth content withers. The mediating function of art becomes externalised and displaced, expelled outwards into the social realm. Mediation, which was once immanent to technique, becomes hypostatised in the perspective of the consumer, whose own “freedom” the work exists to pander to. Thus, in a society in which freedom is regarded as having been realised, it may be expected that aesthetic works proliferate in which a vast number of heterogeneous materials are simply posited without actually being subjected to dialectical mediation, since mediation would be a sign that freedom was not immanent to practice but instead had to be produced. This is the situation, of course, which pertains today, where countless examples of contemporary art in effect entirely lack mediation and instead settle for (re)presenting what is allegedly existent back to the viewer. Indeed, in so far as instances of mediation can be found in contemporary art, they tend, if anything, to reinforce the belief that freedom has already been attained. Popular music, which is both highly technologically mediated and in which freedom is, as it were, the soul of expression is the most obvious example of such an art. However it cannot be gainsaid that when art's truth content comes to be identified as something external to art since that content serves to provide the ideological basis for art in the first place then the purpose of art changes. The goal of producing truth content becomes obsolete; instead art becomes a vehicle for self-expression, a moment in the production of the self as a commodity. Aesthetic works, so far from perpetuating a critique of the historical moment, end up passively reflecting it. This is the template for much contemporary art, the majority of which does little more than return the mirror image of the deeply conservative cultural moment through which we are living to perception, with its pernicious anti-intellectualism, full blown consumerism, and rampant individualism.
It is clear that this extraordinary historical situation calls for a new response from radical artists, who must categorically reject any aesthetic practice which settles for tamely reflecting back to perception the (supposed) facticity of the existent. The idea that this latter arises naturally rather than being ideologically produced must also be resisted. Above all revolutionary art must strive to attain an attitude of critique; it must explore, for instance, the way late capitalist ideologies discursively frame the construction of reality per se as an alternative to, for instance, merely describing subject positions which might serve as focal points of resistance within those realities. For, as is now well known, in late capitalism modes of reality are ideologically produced through and through and they invariably serve to mystify rather than illuminate our actual situation. Radical art responds to this by embracing alternative forms of socially mediated production; it takes the form of a critical enquiry into our real situation rather than a pseudo enquiry into an imaginary one. Furthermore a radical practice would develop a critical distance to the hegemonic conception of art which dominated its own present; the belief that freedom and expression are coincident in effect structures the field of reality in art today, determining the character of even supposedly progressive works. Indeed much allegedly radical contemporary work seems to me to be deeply conservative since it, too, naively constructs freedom as identical with expression, thereby passively reproducing the imaginary relation of human beings to their situation within late capitalist societies rather than developing a critique of their actual relations. The renewal of an art where the experience of freedom is produced through mediation rather than merely posited as expression ought to be the goal of any progressive contemporary aesthetic practice; such an art would not only undoubtedly constitute the new today, it might also go some way to recovering the experience of the Novum as revelation. The new, as Adorno used to say, is the abstract, in the sense that it is not immanent, it is not just lying around; reconstructing the link between aesthetic practice and truth content would have the aim of emancipating literature as a site for critical thinking and recovering the new for truth. It is a question, then, of producing linguistic works which resist assimilation by the standard instrumental forms of rationality which dominate society and which perpetuate an impoverished conception of freedom, whilst at the same time thinking of art as a place in which non-exploitative forms of understanding might emerge. A radical art today, for instance, might aim to delimit the pretensions of western rationality by, for example, asserting the centrality of love, as the power of non-relation, to a truth process. Indeed the widely recognised correlation between the search for forms of non-dominative rationality and the production of revolutionary aesthetic form itself is one of the reasons for thinking that radical artists would be as likely to draw on the philosophical or theoretical tradition as a resource than the aesthetic one.
If it is true that it is in the aspect of their form that aesthetic works “converge with critique”, as Adorno used to put it, then it is no less true that the problem of freedom has been a central concern of what Habermas likes to call the philosophical discourse of modernity. This body of writing, of course, includes a series of texts which are usually referred to more loosely as “theory” and there is a temptation to regard the rise of theory in the second half of the last century as the correlative to the defeat of the avant-garde in the first. On this view the theorists sought to save the truth content of avant-garde works by developing the implications of that content for conception. A figure such as Derrida, for instance, is unimaginable prior to writers such as Joyce and Proust; his work is an attempt to incorporate that thinking of non-identity, which was always intrinsic to the great works of aesthetic modernity, in order, amongst other things, to undermine squarely metaphysical notions of truth. What has perhaps been explored less is the question as to how artists themselves might appropriate the insights of the theorists to arm themselves against the awesome powers of homogeneity which late capitalism perpetuates. The problem of how that discourse might be mobilised by artists is at first opaque; what must be avoided at all costs is some kind of positivist appropriation of the philosophical texts. In fact it turns out that this is a question which can be resolved by revolutionary technique. Put simply technique operates here by dramatically expanding the materials of art - a procedure which will surely be familiar to anyone who understands the modus operandi of modern art. This ability to exponentially expand the materials of art, let it be said in passing, is in fact a permanent possibility of modernity; it insures the chance of a revolutionary art today, just as it did for our forebears, all protestations of received opinion to the contrary notwithstanding. Thus progressive practice, in an Act which entirely negates the cynical or world weary Weltanschauung of the postmodernists, attempts to transform the cultural scene one more time by grasping the historical idea of theory as such as a new material for art. It is important to emphasise that this is not at all the same thing as merely positing the discoveries of this or that theorist in their content as the generator of the aesthetic work, as the basis of form, which has hitherto been the way in which artists have appropriated the critical tradition. Radical art, by contrast, opens this new material, the idea of theory in its historicity, to the dialectical mediation which aesthetics affects.
It is worth reiterating here that it would clearly make no sense for poetry to attempt to unfold some kind of positive content of the idea of theory. If poetry were to do so, after all, it would quickly become not poetry but – philosophy, or a shallow imitation of philosophy within aesthetics. And so the long and the short of it is that aesthetic practice must focus intensively on the new material itself, which is to say on the actual signifier, on script, on the material word theoria. This is all the more apposite a strategy for poetics since this is not only a material practice through and through but above all the site of the word’s mediation. Mallarme was implying exactly this when he pointed out, on a famous occasion, that poems are not made out of ideas but from words. This is why I take as my starting point Heidegger’s definitions of the origin of the word theoria in his Science and Reflection. It ought to be said that in doing so I do not imply the philosophical primacy of Heidegger’s text; on the contrary I am personally sceptical as to the efficacy of phenomenological approaches which tend to posit the object of experience as knowledge (pseudo knowledge, Adorno would have argued) rather than grasp it dialectically. However, as Hannah Arendt used to point out, the power of Heidegger’s philosophising lies in its ability to provide arresting definitions of words by positing their origins in a new way, and its value is to be discovered in so far as these definitions are regarded as poetic constructions which stimulate critical thinking rather than mystical disclosures of the truth of being. In fact Heidegger suggests the word theoria has two specific roots: horao, which means to look at something attentively, and which has similarities with the traditional definition of theoria as contemplation, and thea, a second root which has been obscured but which means the aspect in which the phenomena shows itself or appears to perception and which Heidegger suggests is related to the word theatre. He thus happily posits a productive dialectical tension at the etymological root of the word theoria, a tension which the text proceeds to mediate, precisely by drawing out the theatrical or apparitional nature of the second term, in order to produce a theatre of the word in which the relation between perception and appearance can be staged, can be subjected to a process of immanent critique.
In fact in Theoria the historicity of the idea is staged as the drama of the appearance of the phenomena (a.k.a the signifier) to perception, an Event which shatters the positive order of being and opens a new perspective on the world through which emancipatory possibilities – political, social, aesthetic - may stream. The text occurs in the interstices of being, constructing tears or ruptures in the fabric of the miserable sphere of facticity which a certain species of animal has come to inhabit and takes up Badiou’s conception of the Event as an instant when the ontological order is dislocated in such a way that the Real of existence – hitherto invisible, hitherto unspeakable - penetrates the visual plane. Thus Theoria is an enquiry into the non-existent, into that which has not yet emerged fully into being; the text encompasses an attempt to bring that speechless world into language, naming the Event as it is produced. If it makes little sense to grasp the conception of historicity operative in Theoria conventionally this is because the whole effort of language is directed toward punching holes, as it were, to adopt a metaphor used by Lacan, in the homogeneous flow of temporality in order to open a passage to a new discursive universe. What is going on here, in other words, is less a Heideggerian recovery of a lost origin of the signifier than a Benjaminian reconstitution of the “origin” as it emerges into appearance from the ebb and flux of becoming, a reconstruction affected by seizing on flashes of perception, by forcing disparate and heterogeneous historical materials violently together to produce a series of dialectical juxtapositions or images within the textual world. Historical materials are shocked into a revolutionary constellation in which the present moment becomes the blank space through which the Messiah may enter.
Thus the revolutionary work here recovers the new less as form than content, as the drama of the production of an emphatic conception of truth. Truth appears at the site of the Event through the production of a Subject, a discovery which introduces the central philosophical conclusions towards the presentation of which these reflections have sought to generate momentum. For I hold of course, and above all, that the aim of a revolutionary poetry today is to produce a new Subject, in all the variegated meanings of that word. I am thinking here not just in Badiou’s terms of the transformation of the individual at the site of the Event but also of the construction of a linguistic work which the philosophers would call ontologically indeterminate, a work, in short, which cannot simply be thought of as either philosophy or literature. In fact Theoria opens a space between the subjects of philosophy and literature; it marks the clearing of a new image space for truth. A new Subject of the enunciation is born through an Act of linguistic revelation; this Subject, conjured into being by an agent of non-identical alterity (i.e. the textual receiver), is signified by the production of a new name. The name is the signifier of the conjunction of the two; it intimates a life beyond capitalism, a new community founded in freedom. Truth is discovered in the essence of language, in the revelation of the non-existent. Revolutionary art expresses what is non-communicable and realises the linguistic antithesis of late capitalist societies. The mutilated language of social existence, locked up in myth and speechlessness, is negated in its situation - and then annihilated. The poetic word, attaining to the sublimity of human expression, founds a place of justice in speech.
It is indeed an irony that on the one hand the production of a new Subject and on the other the recovery of truth content should be the conceptual terms under which revolutionary art renews itself today. Such language, after all, would probably have been an anathema even to our recent ancestors on the left. What this suggests above all, of course, is the power of late capitalism to transform the situation of the left in ways which demand not only new forms of art but also a new form of politics. It is important to emphasise, however, that this recovery of truth content in aesthetics has nothing whatever to do with a return to a metaphysical conception of truth, a return which is so evident in the early 21st century, whether it takes the form of religious fundamentalism or late capitalism's banal parody of it, namely a kind of incessant worshipping at the altar of the God of the reality principle (i.e. the power of Mammon). The fact that both the authentic (albeit deadly) form of religious obedience and late capitalism's moronic parody of it are so widespread is a matter of deep despair for radicals; indeed there are surely times when it does seem as if the most damning judgements of Nietzsche were right and that humanity is indeed in the grip of some kind of awful collective insanity. In any event no one on the left could possibly doubt the continuing power of myth in late capitalist societies, nor, indeed, that there could be any transcendence of what Zizek likes to call the “plague of fantasies” which structure reality to its roots. For if history teaches the left anything it is that it is outwith the capacity of human beings to escape the forces of myth. As Walter Benjamin once put it, “So long as there is a single beggar there will still be myth”. Nowadays, of course, surrounded, in the west at least, by all manner of technologically ingenious contraptions, the temptation to misrecognise our situation is at times overwhelming. Indeed what better expresses the ideological essence of late capitalist societies than the idea that myth has been done away with? But the free play of simulacra without purpose or end is myth in its purest form.
For, as the left well understands, there can no more be an outside to myth and history for human beings than there can be an outside to suffering and death. The contemporary fascination with viewing death from the outside, with the instantaneous transition from being to non-being, which is ubiquitous in present day cultural “products", from video games to Hollywood blockbusters, is the clearest possible expression of this fantasy of escape. Thus it falls to radicals once again to develop aesthetic practices which guard against the catastrophic danger implicit in such a fantasy, that is to say, in the fantasy of a fascistic surrender to myth, of believing, in short, that history has been or could be transcended. And so revolutionary language aims above all at developing a tendential relation to myth, to doxa; it seeks, as in the paradox of tragedies, to open a place beyond doxa (para - beyond). Revolutionary practice develops this tendential relation of language to myth. Through it language acquires a tendency – it moves away from myth. Hence, for radicals, what is at stake in the language of all revolutionary art is ultimately the question of the nature of this movement, of in what direction revolutionary language is departing to and, ultimately, of who it is for. And indeed it applies as much to Theoria as to any other radical work that the destination of its language is obscure, that the question of its reception is not only a question of ideology, of politics, but also of the receptiveness of the present towards the new. Could it be argued, then, that poetry is here merely a bridge to some Other who must remain opaque for us today? Or does the language perhaps speak to that dimension of human beings which cannot be reduced to their present day social identities? Or is it rather that the Other of Theoria is best understood finally as being non-existent, like the absent agent of political change?
In fact the language of Theoria does not address itself to any actual empirical individual but rather speaks to the silences between people since its aim is to tell its receivers that they are, precisely, not what they seem. This amounts to saying that Theoria develops a highly distinctive notion of truth content, that, in short, its conception of freedom is introduced in the terms of a linguistic ideality, a non-instrumental, inter-subjective form of expression. Note that inter-subjective expression would not be identical with Habermas's notion of inter-subjective communication, not least because the subject is less the foundation of this kind of linguistic practice than its goal. By contrast the notion of expression operative here is closer to Adorno's sense of the word as a “cry of pain”; inter-subjective expression opens a linguistic paradigm founded in the mutuality of suffering. Art flows from speechless aporias of truth to transcribe a common struggle with suffering. But the goal of radical practice is not the mere passive reflection of human suffering as expression but rather its redemption by a new Subject in love. How else, in a world of universal cynicism and left wing despair, could revolutionary art keep its promise to hope? This is why the paradigm of freedom operative in Theoria is not an ideality of communication between human beings but rather the evocation of the sublimity of inter-subjective expression before “God”, which is to say, before the messianic perspective of the absolute redemption of the meaning of human suffering. The redemption of the meaning of that suffering would be – freedom.
These reflections really comprise the intellectual starting point of Theoria and I shall do my best to try and develop their implications on this site. In his lectures on metaphysics Theodor Adorno suggests that "the spell which binds us today consists not least in the fact that it ceaselessly urges people to take action which they believe will break the spell; and that it prevents the reflection on themselves and the circumstances which might really break it." I conceive of this site as no more or less than a small contribution to that process of emancipatory reflection.
