DR CLAIRE COLEBROOK'S LECTURE

Ezra Pound

Univocity and Equivocity

Last week we looked at Derrida’s argument that language operates with two necessary but impossible poles.

Univocity: we must assume some presence, truth or sense that underpins various languages, signs and contexts. All language is directed beyond itself – or is intentional – and aims at presence. As an example of the project of univocity Derrida cites Husserl, but one could also include the projects of analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell) and the attempt to found various sciences on a pure logical form. For Husserl, there must be a truth and presence which is then transmitted by various concrete languages; the task of a responsible or ethical philosophy should be to go beyond closed cultural forms. There is, therefore, an ethics of history; one ought not to accept this or that cultural formation or definition but should seek truth in general. Without this assumption or telos of truth all we have are empty signs circulating without sense. So, from this point of view we could criticise Nietzsche’s essay on metaphor, and the assertion that truth is just a fiction. After, all Nietzsche’s essay has to take the form of a true statement on ‘truth.’

We could also see modernism as a mourning for a once unified language and a lament of fragmentation. Imagism presents the unique affect or perception, using language in a non-propositional form, almost as a pure and singular name, capturing an absolute and unrepeatable present.

Pound was heavily concerned with translation, the retrieval of texts from other cultures and epochs in order to revivify the present, to open the empty circulation of language as noise, to the very emergence of language. Not only did he retrieve the earliest moments of Anglo-Saxon poetry (in the sea-farer), he also made constant use of the Book of the Dead from the Odyssey, which was itself the inauguration of the Western epic tradition. Here Pound places himself at the origin, giving blood to the dead, allowing the past to speak and solicit the present.

Pound, also in the Cantos, narrated the fall of art and language into commodification. There was a time, going back to the Renaissance and patronage, when artists were crucial political figures: producing, selecting and deciding the very forms of experience. But all this is no longer possible in a world where art is dependent on the market. Now, Pound takes this historico-political point and gives it an aesthetic and a metaphysic.

First, aesthetically, Pound tries to smash received forms and the English tradition of accentual syllabic verse, which operates as a medium through which ideas appear to follow an inevitable sequence. Pound was interested in forces, before order, logic and syntax. He therefore retrieved poetic devices that were not the lulling and propelled metres of lyric poetry, but actively selected fragments of history that were avowedly ‘sculpted.’ The opening of Canto 1, for example, begins with syllabic, rather than accentual syllabic metre. Pound also uses the metres that were ‘discovered’ in the verse fragments of Sappho. One therefore escapes the forms of syllogism and sequence and opens a poetry of active selection. Pounds method aims to return to the very origin of voice and writing, to think a point in time when myth was not only original, but also when it was actively formed rather than passively received.

Equivocity: There can, of course, be no thought of the origin, nor a transmission or communication of truth without signs, language and historical tradition. So, on the one hand language aims at some sense beyond difference and distance; on the other, difference is required in order for truth and the origin to be communicated. Modernism was also, therefore, quite different from the logical projects at the turn of the century, such as Husserl’s attempt to think transcendental subjectivity, or Bergson’s appeal to ‘pure perception’, for the modernists were also concerned with equivocity – the concrete, specific and effective differences of language. Pound saw truth, not as something static and immutable, not as something beyond language, but as the force or power to differ which allows each specific language to emerge. We should not see language as a label or medium; rather we need to see the way true language cuts, selects and decides the ways in which we think and perceive. Truth is just this perception and awareness of the force of original signs, those signs which produce original differences. The truth of history is writing, and Pound gives this truth in the very style of his writing. His epic steps back from the commodified world of received truths and conventions and returns to the point of epic foundation. In the first Canto, he gives blood to the heritage of previous poets, those who have carved out forms and differences, those whose rhetoric was forceful enough to command power and respect.

It is in this necessary oscillation that we can raise the question of Pound’s fascism, and the fascism of modernism in general. Fascism is not one political position among others but a project to step outside the field of political communication, negotiation and rhetoric and produce a radically new form. Fascism is also directly aesthetic, operating not by argument but by affect: the direct and sensual investment in images of – say – racial, national or sexual desire. Fascism becomes possible when a disenchantment with bourgeois politics leaps beyond politics into a direct appeal to the future, devoid of corruption and distortion. Instead of acknowledging an essential equivocity – that any appeal to a radical outside – will also be caught up in the languages through which we approach it, fascism appeals to a mythic and pure present of the future, and produces various obstacles to that future. In Pound’s case this resulted in anti-Semitism, homophobia and violent elitism.

On the one hand, modernism was a profound criticism of capitalism, of market reification, of the subordination of truth, force and event to system, recognition and communication. Modernists were disenchanted with the bourgeois values of democracy, precisely because bourgeois democracy closed down political thinking; everyone communicates within the norms of humanism, but no-one asks how the very tradition of what is human was constituted, nor what its values are. So, the striving for univocity, for a point of truth outside cultural difference, is also a critique of capitalism and empty signification. However, this criticism takes an ideological and reactive form when the essential impossibility of univocity, the necessary impossibility of grasping an origin, is attributed to a specific cultural form. Pound was in general critical of usury, for he saw this as the historical demise of patronage and freedom in the arts. Excess production was no longer distributed to artists but accumulated as capital, with the practice of interest meaning that money only produces itself. Usury is also, therefore, a metaphysical and poetic figure for Pound. Usury signifies a circulation of the same material without creation, force, production or event, and so the only way to overcome a culture of reification is through a violent break in the constituted system. Here, truth would not be one more proposition but would disrupt the very notion of language as communicative and systemic – hence Pound’s appeals to the image, the vortex, the ideogram, persona and radical translation. To a certain extent, Pound was aware of the inherent impossibility of univocity, and this can be seen in his use of persona in Mauberley. One cannot step outside the corrupt compromise of language, so one adopts a position ironically, indicating the limits of history from within. In his Cantos, however, Pound increasingly develops the figure of usury – as that which turns in on itself and lacks the force to create and differ – and attributes this lack to specific political identities.

In a Station at the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet black bough

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;
Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!
The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

(Hugh Selwyn Mauberley)

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas
. . .
I sat to keep off the impetuous dead,
Till I should hear Tiresius . . .
                (Canto 1)
               

We might come to believe that the thing that matters in art is a sort of energy, something more or less like electricity or radio-activity, a force transfusing, welding, and unifying. A force rather like water when it spurts up through very bright sand and sets it in swift motion. You may make what image you like. (The Serious Artist, 49)

No state will be founded on the theory, or on the working hypothesis that all men are alike. No science save the arts will give us the requisite data for learning in what ways men differ. (The Serious Artist, 47)

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