Consciousness and Poetry

Before the first awakening of our consciousness language was echoing about us, ready to close around our first tender seed of thought and to accompany us inseparably through life, from the simple activities of everyday living to our most sublime and intimate moments – those moments from which we borrow warmth and strength for our daily life through that hold of memory that language itself gives us.

Knowledge begins with reflection... Consciousness was there before it was known.

All utterance is overfull with words gone, which went in making our words now. So Vico and Bakhtin, among others, have observed. There is no metalanguage because there is no outside of our talking. No discourse refers except to itself, its making and to its others. There is, that is, nothing but metalanguage.

Valéry tells us that the language of literary, as indeed other, word workers has the same materiality as that of the everyday "practical instrument... used for immediate needs and modified at every instant" (in Block & Salinger, 1960, 27), and this fact has the consequence that there never can be in the verbal arts the hard and fast line which divides, in other forms of aesthetic expression, talk about aesthetic production from the substance of that work itself. A musician might not absolutely require a music reading ability in order to improvise, might naturalise the practice of making music to the extent of feeling that the instrument s/he plays is an extension of the body, but the skills of the hands in this practice are essentially different from those involved in other everyday tasks.

Because language is partly a conscious and partly an unconscious activity and because the language of literary art has the same – partly conscious, partly unconscious – substance as everyday speech and as other (non-literary) forms of writing, we have no choice but to see these as contiguous parts of a single abstracted entity, as much formed by as forming the individual, which shapes and is shaped by all of the potential which individuals and their interaction entail. These are processes which, if not largely invisible, are at least ones from which our attention is usually drawn.

If there is, beyond a purely formal orientation, anything learnable about the process of literary writing, then it must be sought in a consciousness of how meaning is made and unmade, deployed and deterred, hidden, revealed, transformed; not only in poetries but in their general sources and in their destinations in other than literary uses of language. Socrates set the tone for this conscious investigation with his now clichéd dictum in the Apology: "the unexamined life is not worth living" (1952, 210 ). Nietzsche in The Gay Science, succinctly stresses the dangers of consciousness and its cult:

Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and consequently also the most unfinished and weakest part of it. From consciousness there proceed countless errors which cause an animal, a man, to perish earlier than necessary... If the preservative combination of the instincts were not incomparably stronger, if it did not in general act as a regulator, mankind must have perished through its perverse judgements and waking phantasies, its superficiality and credulity, in short through its consciousness. (1977, 158)

It should be recognised from the outset of this investigation that each of the word workers so far mentioned belongs – if only by virtue of the words with which they work – to the one complex tradition. It is the West which – through its often overlapping and contradicting strands of thought – has framed the abstraction we know as consciousness. Whether such an abstraction is now essential to the self-conception of other-than-western modes of thought it is certain that the West only imagines those other conceptions by means of reference to its own diverse efforts at reflection. Rather than track those historically my interest here is to understand the manner of aesthetic play which self-conception along these lines has offered poetry, canonic and current. Of particular interest is the contrasting self-conception which has operated through the development of western philosophy, perhaps poetry’s most obvious generic other. Each of these styles of conception may appear equally ill-informed from the point of view of serious psychology, notwithstanding that discipline’s dependence on their development. At stake in this investigation then is a kind of high-brow folk consciousness of consciousness.

Consciousness presents as a problem for poetry, not because poetry requires a definition of it in order to function but because the question of consciousness in relation to poetry ultimately resolves as one of asking whether (and to what extent ) poetry is entitled or able to know what it does or how it works. Khlebnikov writes in his essay "On Poetry": "Does the earth understand the writing of the seeds a farmer scatters on its surface? No. But the grain still ripens in the autumn, in response to those seeds" (1990, 153). The echo of Job is strong in every effort to assign sentience to the world as created:

'But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat? With the ancient is wisdom and in length of days understanding.'

Is the personification of the earth, of nature, an acknowledgement of the wisdom of unconsciousness, or of the beyond or before of consciousness? Does it acknowledge the failure of consciousness to approach the domain of truth: the real which humans seek by means of words to apprehend? Does such personification open consciousness on the other hand to a beyond of the strictures of thought? Or is it merely a case of symptomatising a divine consciousness in the perception of order or in the unity of perception? Merwin's 'one syllable between the earth and silence' implies a continuity between the world and speech for it (between sign and signified) which may be wholly imaginary and which yet enables speech and its echoes to participate in a community with the dark sea and the wind.

The aspect of consciousness which interests poetry is an openness to questions as to the relevance of self-awareness. Answers to those questions – along the lines of a scientific development – have the effect of foreclosing various co-existing possibilities, possibilities characteristic of the topography Freud maps for consciousness in ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’. In that essay Freud imagines the cities which were Rome superimposed, coexisting in time: all the buildings from every epoch piled on and into one another. The exercise of a particular consciousness in that circumstance is spectral, must involve some walking through walls. Rather than define consciousness one had better say that poetry’s ambivalence on the issue of consciousness – its own, those it harnesses, those to which it appeals – is definitive. Poetry becomes itself by knowing and not knowing itself, what it is, how and for whom it becomes. Poetry is both civilisation and discontent.

Nietzsche's dictum on truth as 'a mobile army of metaphors' (in 'On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense') naturally condemns all forms and means of knowing to the status of Job's personification:

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal. (1974, 180)

This kind of relativism (the absolute kind) may be healthy in the self-conception of poetries which function to challenge accepted truths. One might ask however, in the spirit of a poetry hoping to recover something in the way of naivety, what a poem is entitled to not know about itself. Thus in Ashberry's "The Skaters":

And if poetry is entitled to questions as to the viability of its metabusiness (its business with the business of writing), then those questions, though perhaps more generally avoidable, must be available to discourse and to thought in general. The patterns of assumption and intention in which these formulate each other may well involve contradictory investments, but involve equally, in Hayden White's terms (echoing Kant's aude sapere), a will to know (1978, 20).

Out of complex negotiations of cultural specificity (which indeed have been challenged as determinist) Benjamin Lee Whorf established a relationship among the investments of language, thought and consciousness:

Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is thrown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematisations of his own language – shown readily enough by a candid comparison with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in a language – in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese. And every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship or phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness. (1956, 252)

Following Whorf we may say that the amorphousness of language is that of un/consciousness. From the point of view of verbal arts, consciousness is the medium wherein originality and collectivity shape each other. If we admit a plurality of consciousnesses as including all styles and degrees of awareness – including those conventionally thought of as unconscious or other than conscious – then we need to acknowledge that such a plurality presents as an immanence borne of and demanding transcendence: communication requires of us the impossible position of being at once inside and out of consciousness. And because there is no access to the consciousness of others except in language, and because there is no language outside of the immanent/ transcendent loop of consciousness just described, we may say that these two abstractions, language and consciousness, are as the one river given different names, for the simple reason that we discover them from separate vantages.

Semantic change and the unconsciously tropic nature of everyday language both interest the shifts of consciousness with which poetries concern themselves. We know that language changes and is chosen in many respects and instances in conditions which could not be described as fully conscious. A linear model suggests consciousness and unconsciousness as more or less arbitrarily declared positions on a scale with no end points. This position underlies the (generally) metaphorical schemae in which consciousness is usually considered. (We come to realise things, we reach understandings, we wake up.) There is a still simpler conception of consciousness which also retains a powerful idiomatic force. This is best expressed in the lightbulb metaphor, which draws the popular conception of un/consciousness very close to that of sleeping/waking: consciousness is off or on.

We acknowledge that if the object of consciousness is to achieve a totality of meaning, then this is an object which the exercise of consciousness itself must frustrate. Consciousness will always find itself beyond itself. This is how the history of science (perhaps the history of knowledge in the West) generally presents itself – as an uncompleted path in the direction of complete awareness. Experience of the supersession of theories may lead us speculate on the manner of the demise we anticipate for them. Nevertheless, for the duration of their currency as best accounts, they appear to complete the thinking which enabled them. Their inadequacy likewise suggests that the conditions for which they sought to account, have somehow receded from our grasp. Awareness, we may say, is what incompletes itself. And whereas in science certainty is always about to be foiled and the scientist the one who will be mistaken; modern poetry begins in the destabilisation of its own view, as an avowal of consciousness shifting.

Just as it is impossible to attain a totally self-aware speech so it is impossible also to be fully unconscious in any use of (production or reception of) language. Meaning is sent, meaning received. The gap or lack between these, the mistakenness which inheres in such difference, may be taken as symptomatic of meaning's motions. Spivak asks the question: "Can a strategy be unwitting?" To which she replies: "Of course not fully so." (1988, 207) Semiosis takes place, even if it is as automatic, as apparently unconscious, as in the case of Malinowski's phatic communion: the keeping open of a channel (in Ogden and Richards, 1923, 315). Consciousness may transcend itself towards itself but, in its identity with language, it does not succeed in dispensing with itself. Consciousness is, for Spivak, not thought, "but rather the subject's irreducible intendedness towards the object" (1988, 154). Meaning persists even in silence because silence is always between two signs and in this position is itself a sign.

The problem of consciousness for poetry is one of meta-awareness; it sets the limits of what and how poetry can know about itself. But it is equally the case that poetic consciousness is thought to at least partly involve other than normative [1] or everyday states of mind. Such was the object of Freud's musings in his (1907) lecture "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (originally translated in English as "The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming"). In this work Freud divides writers into two camps. Freud believes we must distinguish "writers who, like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over their material ready-made, from writers who seem to originate their own material" (1959, 149). Freud tells us that the day-dreamer hides his phantasies because he is ashamed of them, that the disclosure of them would bring us no pleasure, but that "when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal daydreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources" (1959, 153). For Freud accomplishment of this is the writer's "innermost secret". The writer's "ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others" (1959, 153). Freud goes on here to postulate that the enjoyment of literature "proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds" and that this might be mainly brought about by "the writer's enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame" (1959, 153).

Freud's aesthete is, like the rhapsodist of Plato's Ion[2], one who is in touch with something s/he cannot hope to control or understand, let alone formulate judgement with. It is a commonplace, and as such one that ought to be seriously interrogated, that poetry and other forms of literary art entail a heightening[3] of awareness. This awareness must claim to be of how the past stands in our saying now and how we ourselves stand in relation to each other and the world.

But why should the desired position of poetic consciousness be assumed to be above that of the norms from which its measure must be taken? Jung warns us against assuming that we should find the unconscious below consciousness[4] but this is precisely the relationship in which both the popular conception and the Freudian topography place them. Heidegger, in "What are poets for?" cites a letter from Rilke in which the poet radically reverses such a topography of consciousness:

However vast the "outer space" may be, yet with all its siderial distances it hardly compares with the dimensions, with the depth dimensions of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable. Thus, if the dead, if those who are to come, need an abode, what refuge could be more agreeable and appointed for them than this imaginary space? To me it seems more and more as though our customary consciousness lives on the tip of a pyramid whose base within us (and in a certain way beneath us) widens out so fully that the farther we find ourselves able to descend into it, the more generally we appear to be merged into those things that, independent of time and space, are given in our earthly, in the widest sense worldly, existence. (1971, 129)

We should not underestimate the difficulty of separating, in the popular conception, the sense that awakening is from a lower and less knowledged state It is an ideological inversion par excellence for the discourse judging poetry to claim that poetic consciousness stands somehow above its own. The notion of poetry's knowledge of itself suggests a shorthand for the knowledges of those who have invested in poetry. That consciousness which is privileged in relation to the process of poetry's survival is waking, decisive and certainly, for all practical purposes, regards itself as superior to (at least able to stand above) those productions it sees itself as duty-bound to discriminate.

It could at this point easily be argued that this position above is the canonic view and that it is imposed on literature, by its mediators, as a kind of wishful thinking; these mediators hoping to glorify themselves by association with that clarity and elevation of view, to which poetic imagination is entitled. But the makers of poetry are, when we come to identify them, too thoroughly entangled in the investments, if not the actual practice of this view, for there to be any practical separation. In practice the poet is one of an infinite cast recomposed from a handful of players, the leading one of whom, as subject, is likewise continuously recomposed and in the process of becoming numerous. Walt Whitman sees himself as such a multiplicity in his poem "Salut au Monde":

Whitman's self as multiplicity suggests the cycle of immanence and transcendence implied in the conception of knowledge in Job. The world is what teaches. The ear tries words. The question as to the identity of selves is as uncontained as the question as to the provenance of truths, of words.

There is in fact, and this must be especially claimed by its mediators in order to justify their presence, this idiot savant aspect to poetic consciousness (which has likewise been attributed to the inventive aspect of the scientific mind): that it is capable of ignoring (or unseeing) the obvious in favour of making connections which the everyday world happens to miss, indeed must miss, in order to perform its functions. In Bronislaw Maj's poem "An August Afternoon", a childhood is recalled in terms which, it is demonstrated, cannot have been those of childhood; so that the reader is made aware of the process of recollection as a distorting glass:

The everyday is recovered by textual means to which the everyday need have no means of resort. The burial of the obvious which poetry chooses to work with or against in no way constitutes for language a problem needing to be solved. It is an inevitable consequence of the impossibility of meaning only one thing one at a time. In The Prose of the World Merleau-Ponty writes "the perfection of language lies in its capacity to pass unnoticed" (1974, 10). Whatever shifts of consciousness poetries entail, however poetries draw attention to themselves, they do not buy them out of this perfection.

Poetries' stumbling on or with the truth hardly need be constitutive of a view over anything. It is difficult, in this light, not to regard the heightening of awareness expected of poetry as involving it in an impossible movement towards the critical vantage point; a movement, which, because it cannot be completed, serves to reinforce the value of that consciousness which awards itself the privilege of judging poetry.

Completed self-consciousness, the identity of the authorial position with the sentience of context or the form of consciousness which declares and defines itself as a view over others: if each of these options is to be discounted, what then do we expect of poetry in the way of consciousness? In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" T.S. Eliot writes "the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious and conscious where he ought to be unconscious." For Eliot these are both errors which serve to make the bad poet personal. They are errors because poetry "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." The emotion of art is impersonal, its haunting resolved in the poet who lives "in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past", something of which he (sic) is unlikely to know "unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living" (1976, 21-2). Few would now seek to promote a poetry which avowedly does not know and takes no interest in what it is doing. Although we might accept a poetry which came to this position as a result of a process of negotiations available to the reader. A poem such as Wislawa Szymborska's "View with a grain of sand" avows what it cannot know by arranging the poem among those objects which cannot know themselves:

As for Eliot's idea that the bad poet is personal, David Antin devotes his work "a private occasion in a public place" to a problematics of self-consciousness which draws us from such a conclusion:

Once we discard both the intentionalist fallacy and the view over poetry which canonic criticism cannot but claim; once we sacrifice, that is, the prospect of definitive judgement for its turns with ambivalence, what choice have we got but to commit the ontological sin of regarding poetry as constituting a consciousness in its own right? Rather than make the abstraction we know as poetry a mere systemic reification of a certain form of speech, we may regard it as a corpus of instants of thought and expression, identical perhaps with what the canon contains, which in themselves as a unity constitute a sentience which outlives, for the reader's response, both the makers and the judges of poetry. It is a sentience on which these personae depend. Our task, in apprehending poetry, is to work at connecting this consciousness, outside of our own and on which ours already depends, with what we ourselves are able to make. That task depends on a risky kind of resurrection: of words from one context to another. It depends, as in Denise Levertov's poem "Witness", on a vigilance which cannot maintain itself:

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes that our thoughts are the representatives of all of our past feelings (1950, 678). Just as our words are alive in and to the fact of being ours, so poetry in its survival lives, and responds to us, anticipates us, as what we may regard as accumulative consciousness. Generically unconstrained, modern poetry like language itself (or like its shadow) behaves as a vast and evolving game in which each move alters imperceptibly, but nevertheless unfailingly, not necessarily the nature of the game but certainly the system in which it is constituted. Eliot acknowledges as much for the canon in claiming "the existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work among them" (1976, 15). What he fails to acknowledge is that the ideal order behaves like this because this is how language behaves; because, we might say, a lexicon, as a canon, reveals a snapshot of what language has come to contain. In structuralist terms one could say the canon is to its contents as langue is to parole.

What we expect of poetry under these conditions is that it show the workings, or at least enough of them, to demonstrate the exercise of consciousness necessary to its work. We demand of the poem, in short, not merely that it demonstrate a movement of consciousness (as for instance implied in William James' stream of consciousness), but that it should do this in order that it shift our state of mind as readers or listeners. Poetry achieves such a shift on the basis of an appeal to authenticity. Whether the observation betrays a modernist emphasis or not, it remains the case that here is no poetic form which fails to meet this criterion we might think of as epiphany or satori, the most straightforward examples of which would be the turn in a haiku or sonnet, in either case a confronting of the mind of artifice with the facts of presence. For Czeslaw Milosz, in his A Book of Luminous Things, epiphany is:

an unveiling of reality. What in Greek was called epiphaneia meant the appearance, the arrival, of a divinity among mortals or its recognition under a familiar shape of man or woman. Epiphany thus interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. (1996, 3)

The epiphanic moment of the epic for instance, that discourse least likely to be credited with such, is the means by which it locates its audience as present to the tale which accounts for them. The historicity (or pseudo-historicity) by which it makes the past from the here-and-now of its audience is a magical inversion in which the sharing of a past provides a present community. Whatever limiting of freedom or freezing of the past they entail, however they bury their endorsement of a status-quo, epic texts must turn the mind in order to account for where that mind finds itself[5]. Invocation is the means by which the epic discounts its effects as inspired and absolves itself of having any intentions of its own. The danger seen in such texts, from the modern vantage of freedom, is precisely that, by hiding them, they naturalise the intentions of the turn for which they speak. As which texts do not?

The consciousness we attribute to completed poetry, in its moving our consciousness, is that of an other. It is a consciousness which, while it moves ours, cannot move itself. To this extent it is a pseudo-consciousness. The poem, as artefact, has no recourse to mental or other acts. It demands a survival which we must facilitate. It thus presents us with the image of a de facto alterity, one which lives in our practice and always under question, if we are both readers and writers, as a continuous cycle of immanence and transcendence. The poem's alterity is between the genuine outside of others and that which has been associated with the unconsciousof psychoanalysis. Poetry as an exchange between enabling others, one living in our sentience, does indeed come to constitute a movement which we rightly regard as consciousness. Does it need to be explained? Does it need to explain anything? Is there a protocol in terms of which it could know, without bringing to harm, itself or others? Lucian Blaga writes in his poem, "I will not crush the world's corolla of wonders":

In identifying consciousness as in perpetuum mobile, and the possibility of poetic consciousness as a form of indirection[6], we merely acknowledge a post-romantic framework. It is not only poetry which depends, to locate itself, on all of the spatio-grammatical resources of the language medium in which it finds itself. The same may be said of folk consciousness generally and of the bodies which it infests. It is, as poetry, as language is, all over the place. And as these are and their subjects are always en route and bumping into each other, we can but conclude that our knowledge of them is a knowledge of borders and of provisional lines of movement. It is a provisional knowledge, describing phenomena in flux and solely by the means of those phenomena. Borders are necessarily sites of power and knowledge – sites, in short, of becoming. We bring them with us. And equally, we are the vectors between them, those straight lines, as seen from space, which everywhere mark the wake of humanity among the ragged edges of the world as found.

The divide between consciousness and unconsciousness replays the shift between waking and dreaming and we can easily claim the former as a more rigorous and esoteric version of the latter, one further abstracted from life. The unconscious, as lack, along these lines, contains all that cannot be conscious of itself or which the waking mind finds unconvincing. We could even say that it is the role of waking, the manner of its negativity and affinity with judgement, to constantly reject and discount what the unconscious presents to it. Dreams and mad states may believe they know themselves (as in the epiphany in a dream of the dream within the dream) but they are discounted as chimerical from the point of view of waking consciousness. But what could be more chimerical than the very idea and construction of the unconscious, which as lack must more or less contain all that the conscious mind will regard as rubbish whenever it has the opportunity? Not so much a floating as a drowned signifier, construction by the waking mind of its own alterity as abstraction, it has for us this attraction: that as it is utterly unable to know itself we are forced to credit it with an absolute authenticity.

Romantic and post-romantic poetries have interested themselves as practices in the ambivalence of a hiatus between consciousness and unconsciousness. Parallel to this interest has been a concern with the gap between denotation and connotation. Both relationships have been theorised as alternatively bipolar oppositions or as open ended scales offering multiple positions. In either case the privilege of conscious and denoted reality establishes as monist synthesis. The assumption of Romantic poetries has been that the conscious life is as the literal truth. If, as Derrida tells us, metaphor is never innocent (1978, 17), then neither is its supposed opposite number. Literality is neither a tropic degree zero nor the proper avowal of any trope. It is a phantom trope, a kind of buried metaphor, a Ø metaphor, where, not only (as in the case of metaphor) are the signs of an equivalence erased, but as well, the very signs of being: the literal participates in and as the stream of unnoticed words. Its function may likewise be characterised as that of unseeing worlds in order that a world be acted in. Back to Freud’s concurrent Romes of all epochs. Auden declares: "The greatest writer cannot see through a brick wall but unlike the rest of us, he does not build one." (1962, 31) The coincidence of the literal and the conscious is the result of struggles which, not needing to be argued, it is the duty of presence of mind to bury. A poetry which challenges as provisional the viability of all such abstractions as consciousness and literality needs to temper its questioning, not with a faith in the logic that formed us, but with the knowledge that there may be no other way to go but in such an assumption – of the literality of truths in life. This is despite the fact that speech and writing adopt all manners of style and degrees of consciousness. Our difficulty is in admitting at once, along with the impossibility of any completion of awareness in language, the impossibility (and necessity) of any language having a view over itself.

Language as, in Levi-Strauss' terms, unreflecting totalisation of human reason (1972, 259), involves a collectivity of buried patterning which the Russian Formalists knew as automatisation and which Whorf formulated as covert categories or cryptotypes, grammatical features "which may easily escape notice and may be hard to define, and yet may have a profound influence on linguistic behaviour" (1956, 92). Examples Whorf gives in English are gender, intransitive and copulative verbs, the order of adjectives. In Whorf's terms these cryptotypical patterns form an underlying logic peculiar to the grammar of a particular language, which defy translation and which are not able to be adequately expressed by native speakers.

Of all the ambivalences which poetry has come to express, that between consciousness and unconsciousness is perhaps its easiest refuge, because it is one shared with every instance of language, and one therefore available to all kinds of thinking. It is the refuge of all language to know and not know what it is up to.

The Freudian unconscious, however seriously we take its claims to a structural affinity with language, however seriously we take it in toto, relies on a similar kind of epistemological ambivalence. Its contents are something one already knew without knowing it. As such they have the same status as Socrates' argument in the Meno that there is neither teaching nor learning but only recollection (1952, 180). Whether we need this particular abstraction or not, whether it bends to purposes as they evolve, we shall certainly not dispense with the adjective unconscious, we shall not get by without acknowledging the unconsciousness of language.

There is a highly self-conscious process of patterning involved in the making of many modern poems – by highly conscious I mean not fully aware, but deliberately investing in self-awareness. This modern and later tendency is representative of a poetry which works or fails on the basis of judgements which must include the assumption that aesthetic practice involves consciousness of its own activity. This is a poetry of uncovering patterns and bringing words to pattern, and it forever runs the risk of trying too hard. The overly self-conscious work, risks in referring too subtly referring to nothing. Those most reflexive, most meta-aware texts, those most concerned with their own textuality (and the seamlessness or otherwise of their contextual connections) may today also run the risk of being indistinguishable from the rest of the wallpaper of context locating them.

In dealing with artefacts which are interested in erasing the signs of their making (ideological artefacts to this extent) we need to be wary of assigning them to any unified intention or position. The play which the canon allows between the poles of invisibility and unintelligibility is such that it will be difficult to claim for any text a specific place on an imagined continuum between these two. Wordsworth's diction in The Prelude may have altered the possible range of poetry but it is writing nevertheless of (from and to) a class and place and gender (rather than of rocks and streams and rustic musings) – if the canon shifted with it we also note that it was the canon which allowed it because it made sufficient sense in terms of what went before. (By the same token the canon continues to allow it on the basis that it makes sufficient sense with what comes after.) The same is easily said of another extreme: what might be perceived as the shift to a highly self-conscious poetry in a modernist classic such as Eliot's The Waste Land, with its display of derivativeness and drive to place and displace itself. In both cases it is the management of shifts of frame, of context and of expectation, rather than adherence to a position, which has allowed these texts, in becoming canonic, to supply the difference from which the canon was shifted.

The admission of the two risks, of being, on the one hand indistinguishable from, and on the other of being unintelligible from (any particular) context, should not be taken as implying that texts which lean towards either of these dangers either do so as the result of anything they have avowed or manage in so doing to avoid the other risk. Neither the avowal of consciousness nor the evidence of reflexivity, guarantees communication or response or the achievement of any sort of target outside of the poem. In the "Ars Poetica" of John Forbes' Stalin's Holidays "the poem sounds/ like a revolving door that/ makes the noise a car makes/ bumping into the dole –/ that's the target" And later "Put a brick through/ a real-estate agent's window/ and it bounces back/ and cuts you. That's what/ I mean about targets." (1980, 48)

In Revolution in Poetic Language and elsewhere Kristeva is interested in a transgressive poetry, one which, following Saussure's anagrams, concerns itself with words under words, text in text, a poetry which pushes in a plural and horizontal direction (in the direction of a text like Finnegan's Wake ), a poetry which stresses the dual nature of the poet as creator and created and the fact of language's being doubly constituted as text and as communication.

>From Bakhtin Kristeva borrows the true and false logic of carnival ambivalence and contrasts this with the true or false logic of identity. Kristeva's ambivalence entails the contradictory nature of a poetic language that includes always its own negation: speech and non-speech, real and non-real, norm and transgression (1984, 116-126).[7] A result of this position, whereby a poetic language refuses to obey the (thetic) rules by which language generally or normally proceeds is that it is virtually impossible to speak fairly of poetry (1984, 70); that is, in a way which accommodates the terms of its different, ambivalent logic. Thus the conflict between the poets and the academy is the conflict between ambivalent and bi-valent logic. We note here, in Heidegger's terms, the naturalness of this conflict: "Every decision... bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision" (1971, 55).

For Kristeva the carnival in poetic language is invisible, unobservable because it is the movement of language itself and unable to be contained by the conventional logic of language (1984, 16).

If we are able to claim poetry as an indirection of consciousness then its metabusiness cannot help but be a consciousness of that indirection. Far from being, as it is popularly conceived, a dwelling high above consciousness and its everyday productions, poetry labours consciousness with what appear to be erratic motions. Ever shifting, rooting out norms, whole movements, mere directions, all postures of the unanalysed life; poetry presents as a perversity always deserving rejection and always bringing its own methods on its head. Perhaps it is where Ashberry ends the first section of his poem "The Skaters":

As to the wishful thought that through words one might attain to a consciousness transcending words or thought itself; poetries have no greater immunity there than do other discursive modes. The ambivalences exercised in the name of poetry are such as to indulge all manner of wishful thoughts.

Poetry, that form of words which seems in and of itself least likely to lead anywhere, offers through its powers and means of indirection, a way out of the trap of consciousness. It may not however elude abstraction. Yet the naturalness of the forms of indirection which poetry cannot help adopting, provide us not with a beyond or an outside of thought, but with movements through it, different from those which reasoned writing or speech allow. Poetry's may be just the sort of inside-out thinking required to set right an upside down world; to find that lack of identity of the present with itself, which allows the play of ambivalence to battle the permanence judgement arrogates to itself; which offers a future as choice and not merely as given.

Notes

[1] Note for Bakhtin poetry, through the epic, is easily be associated with the monologic of official consciousness.

[2] Thus the composers of lyrical poetry create those admired songs of theirs in a state of divine insanity, like the Corybantes, who lose all control over their reason in the enthusiasm of the sacred dance; and, during this supernatural possession, are excited to the rhythm and harmony which they communicate to men. Like the Bacchantes, who, when possessed by the God, draw honey and milk from the rivers, in which, when they come to their senses, they find nothing but simple water. For the souls of the poets, as the poets tell us, have this peculiar ministration in the world. They tell us that these souls, flying like bees from flower to flower, and wandering over the gardens and the meadows, and the honey flowing fountains of the Muses, return to us laden with the sweetness of melody; and arrayed as they are in the plumes of rapid imagination, they speak truth. For a poet is indeed a thing ethereally light, winged and sacred, nor can he compose anything worth calling poetry until he becomes inspired, and, as it were, mad, or whilst any reason remains in him.

Socrates in the Ion (1910, 6-7)

[3] In his essay, 'Language', Heidegger echoes the Formalists on the relationship between poetry and everyday language: "Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos ) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer" (1971, 208).

[4] It should be noted here that psychoanalytic (and semiotic) theory offer us a number of options for configuring the relationship between the unconscious and consciousness, particularly that Freud's third term, later abandoned, the preconscious, has been dealt with in various relations to the other two. For Freud this category refers to thoughts which, though unconscious at a given moment, are not repressed and are therefore able to become conscious. Kaja Silverman (1983, 88 ) describes the relationship between the Freudian preconscious and conscious in the following terms:

The preconscious is the repository of cultural norms and prohibitions. It contains data which are capable of becoming conscious – memories which can be voluntarily recalled. Therefore, movement from the preconscious to the conscious is essentially fluid, although the conscious can accommodate only a finite amount of information at a given moment. Within this topography the conscious is no more than a kind of adjunct to the preconscious, a receiving room for internal and external – ie., psychic and perceptual – stimuli. (1984, 56)

Subsequent to Freud there are a number of arrangements of this topography among which to choose. For Metz, in Le Signifiant Imaginaire the category preconscious is maintained as separate from the others. This is a middle position compared with those of Lyotard and Lacan. For Lyotard the preconscious and the unconscious are antagonistic categories but for Lacan the preconscious is conflated with the unconscious.

For the purposes of this study a Lacanian version of the Freudian topography of the unconscious is preferred; one in which the Unconscious and the preconscious are conflated. This choice is adopted for a number of reasons, some more or less arbitrary. Foremost among these reasons are the availability of a correspondence between the psychoanalytic terms and the pair conscious/unconscious as used in a less technical sense in discussion of the language sciences and arts. A third term between consciousness and unconsciousness interferes with the idea of developing continua between these two. The Lacanian view entails certain pre-suppositions about the relationship between language and the unconscious and whatever structural properties they share, underlying which from the present perspective is the convenience of assuming the invalidity of the abstraction, langue.

[5] Ulmer, in Heuretics, cites a number of sources towards the contention that "the experience of eureka is inherent in the structure of mythology." (1994, 232)

[6] Cleanth Brooks saw indirection as a characteristic of all poetry. (1971, 1042)

[7] Bachelard gives ambivalence the status of "a basic law of the imagination", writing: "a matter to which the imagination cannot give twofold life cannot play the psychological role of a fundamental substance" (1971, 83).

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