Ex-silentio Eloquence
poetry and philosophy in the middle of it
book review:
The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy
by Robert Baker
reviewed by Camelia Elias
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008. Copyright © 2008 Camelia Elias and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Ex-tra-va-gant. This is how we should render graphically this adjective. The idea of extravagance itself is made up of paratextual elements: ‘ex’ for out; ‘tra’ for crossings, ‘va’ for forward, ‘g(r)ant’ for reward. Extra-vagrancy. Drift some more. Drifting aimlessly towards the margins is a rewarding act, although as it often goes for margins, they are not for everybody. A simple dissection of the word, such as the one above, gives us a brief, yet illustrative insight into what is at stake in the extravagant, namely, the desire to be different, the desire to transcend, transform and crisscross the mundane, and the desire to occupy a liminal space from whence the experience of something excessive can be thought of as gratifying. Nowhere is the extravagant better represented than in poetry. Ever since the ancient Greeks have defined the peritton, the extravagant has formally been associated with poetry. At the level of content the extravagant has been associated with prophesy. As the prophet’s language is a language of imitation—the aim is to have the divine reveal itself through language—the primary concern of the prophet is not how to put the divine into words, but how to experience it, and then pass it on.
In its more modern connotative form, the extravagant suggests a highlighting of the emotional aspect inherent in extravagance—the extravagant is extravagant also because it is conscious of itself being extravagant. Extravagant emotion conjures a sensual experience that goes beyond the intellect but not before crossing it, traversing it. The extravagant opens itself onto the kind of poetic language that hammers excess into prophetic genius. Here I like what the extravagant among extravagant poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, has to say about the act of prophesying as it ties in with poetic language and philosophy—the latter concerned with the question of the form and function of the extravagant. A prophet’s language is “that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing in its flights” (Letter to A. W. M. Baillie, 10/11 Sept. 1864).(1) All writers concerned with the question of genius point to the necessity of form as style to carry their messages through. Baker quotes Hopkins in passing: “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil” (31). The often vagrant prophets, often prophesying about some ominous vagary, have the extravagant built into their very nature. As they often perceive themselves in terms of wholeness, they thus also embody margins, or extremes. As such they can be thought of as being the product of their own interpretations, of what is marginal or central, what is extravagant or conventional. These interpretations in turn can be said to produce their own literatures (of exegesis one might add), poetics, and style.
Here it is interesting to note that existing studies on the concept of the extravagant, the most recent and the object of this review, Robert Baker’s The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy, tend to emphasize a period, rather than a sense of continuation where the manifestation of the extravagant is concerned. (I’m thinking here also of M. E. Edes and Dudley Frasier’s study from 1954, The Age of Extravagance: An Edwardian Anthology, which Baker incidentally doesn’t mention in his survey).
Any study of the extravagant that focuses on periodization is bound to answer the charge with constraint and take issue with the tension inherent in the definition of the extravagant as that which resists being contained. As the extravagant suggests wandering, escaping time, floating aimlessly, and probing poetic vision from the vantage point of prophetic power, the extravagant contaminates rather than lets itself be conjured up by a container.
Baker’s book does a good job in showcasing this awareness that the extravagant, while restricted to modern manifestations, is always articulated against the background of transcendence, and hence it is a-historical. Thus, while the book emphasizes the modern period, it also treats with equal measure concepts such as the sublime (in Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard), visionary quests and revisions (in Rimbaud, Nietzsche, and Bataille), and apocalyptic negativity (in Kierkegaard, Dickinson, Mallarmé, and Derrida).
At first eye glance, one is tempted to ask how Baker would pull off juxtaposing thinkers who have been influenced by Romanticism and avant-gardist concerns, on the one hand, with modern takes on concepts that have resisted becoming part of the instrumentalization of discursive and critiquing frameworks, on the other hand. But Baker anticipates this question quite early on. Especially Habermas and Allan Megill (author of the seminal study, Prophets of Extremity (1985)) are squared off against and criticized for not being very specific in their theories of how both modern art and philosophy have been influenced by the Romantic tradition. In their broad claims, argues Baker, about the ways in which Romanticism has been appropriated by philosophers but only so that they can formulate dystopian views of modernity, neither Habermas nor Megill engage in analyses of specific art works. Against this background, says Baker about his own project, which is central to his book:
I place poets and philosophers in close communication with one another in order to elucidate some of the similar paths they’ve pursued in their ambivalent engagements with modernity. Poets are not simply “mythmakers” who come along to seduce irresponsible philosophers, as both Megill and Habermas tend to suggest. They are writers who think and engage the world in their poems, which is a primary reason why they’ve had much to say to a number of Continental philosophers over the last two centuries. (10-11; author’s emphasis)
I like this idea. However, I wouldn’t dismiss so quickly the notion that poets are primarily, indeed, in the business of seducing—not irresponsible, as that would be rather uninteresting, but especially responsible—philosophers. Megill, for instance makes this point when he takes a poet such as Edmond Jabès to show how the poet embodies the philosopher and the philosopher embodies the poet, all in one, in that vision of excess which situates itself at the extremity of what one might call the limits of prophesying. Megill’s book Prophets of Extremity—whose subtitle directly engages philosophers by their names, and in an order that suggests performative contradictions: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida—is more concerned with what philosophers perform when they don’t really say anything, when they let their texts become their own interpretations. For Megill, someone like Jabès creates the link that Baker would like to see enforced between the rational, or responsible, philosophers and the emotional, or irresponsible, poets. For Megill, the site of extremity that the above mentioned philosophers embody is mediated by poets such as Jabès who have articulated philosophical positions for poetry as poetry and philosophy par excellence. For instance, Jabès’s statement in his supremely poetic and prophetic The Book of Questions leads the way in Megill’s book and functions also as a specific ‘artwork’ in itself which invites the reader to consider what a poem does in its philosophical thrust: namely, run a risky business—seducing philosophers being one of them. More poignantly and concretely, “a poem always runs the risk of being meaningless, and would be nothing without this risk.”
While the point here is not to offer a double review of Baker and Megill’s works, I want to stress the significance of the thought that sees extravagance and extremity not as contained within any one period but transcending time precisely through their inherent and meta-performative (extravagant and extreme) nature. Thus, the tension between containing transcendent thought within a certain period must be considered. Megill does it. In Baker’s scheme, the poem as a risk is seen as a rite of passage that philosophy has to go through if it wants to stand the chance of articulating anything interesting. The intersection between poetry and philosophy can thus only be made sense of at the juncture where the extravagant paves the way.
On a larger scale, Baker’s concern with the extravagant is not so much in terms of what is at stake—the risqué element in modern poetry—but in terms of the power of agency that the “translocative” function of the extravagant exerts on both poetry and philosophy. By way of quoting Osip Mandelstam, Baker defines the translocative thus: “What distinguishes poetry from automatic speech is that it rouses us and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word. Then it turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak means to be forever on the road” (5). For Baker, the stretched middle position via coercing words, as it were, in addition to other forms of transitions invests poetry with a negative kind of energy. Thus, creativity must be understood against the background of the negative. For instance, the transition from rural to urban concerns, agrarian to industrial machines, marks the displacement of older forms of cultural and religious manifestations and beliefs. As Baker rightly points out, the tensions that arise from these transitions create discourses of dispersing and erring through “the languages of unmaking and undoing, of dislodging and decentering, of negativity and indeterminacy” (13). As these are central aspects within negative dialectics, Baker proposes to unfold the notion of the extravagant through the prism of dedication—the assumption is here that any extravagant act must involve a degree of dedication that here we encounter both as a paratextual exercise and also as a performative. Following Yves Bonnefoy, again by way of quoting, Baker thus states in the beginning: “I dedicate this book to the improbable, that is to say, to what is” (3). The extravagant is not only “what is,” but also what we can’t figure out: the excess, the flamboyant, the extreme, the wandering beyond.
In the first cluster of texts, Baker analyzes the sublime through Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard—the latter because his work combines romantic and modernist poetics. Baker argues that through a reading of Lyotard the modernist project of setting in motion invention, metamorphosis, and otherness becomes more apparent when seen against the background of Kant’s romantic dialectics of unsettling and recovering the subject. As the poetry and philosophy of these three reflect the subject in motion as it departs from traditional models of representation, imagination takes over. But while Wordsworth, for instance, identifies the imaginative power as a subversive potential, for Kant imagination encompasses the thinking of an unrepresentable alterity. Baker makes a clear point here regarding the relation between transcendence, the sublime, and the notion of vocation—the latter as it also gets picked up by later (more modernist than romantic) poets and philosophers who rename it as “nomadic” thought. One need only think of Jabès again, a poet who, although peculiarly absent from Baker’s study, has influenced philosophers such as Derrida, whose poetic vision Baker, however, brilliantly charts in his last chapter. So the point in the first chapter is to demonstrate that if thought wanders and is in search of words to represent the poet, the poet’s task is in turn to find a voice that would articulate the relation between dangerous solipsism and ethical objectivity. The experience of the sublime, which Kant, Wordsworth, and Lyotard are trying to uncover, remains, however, just that: an experience that a drifting subject articulates within the boundaries of displacement and indeterminacy. Thus, insofar as boundaries constrain thinking, even if it’s the thinking of what can be imagined, it is informed by constricting instrumentality and is therefore not so radical. Insofar as Baker is interested in tracing just how extravagant radical thought can be, he shows that from the “dialectic of instrumental reason and creative negativity which has been at work throughout modern culture” (45; author’s emphasis), there is a necessary move towards visionary metamorphosis (discussed in the second part/chapter of the book) and thence on to the “sounding of boundless negativity” (discussed in the third part/chapter of the book).
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