One Essay - Neil Williams

Two Interpretations of Silence: The Un-Represented in Two Grahams.

Humanity’s reliance on representation goes hand in hand with its suspicion of it. We need to represent to remember, to pass on information, to preserve. Yet it is necessarily a remove from the original event, and each form of representation lends its own form of distortion. This problem has haunted Western philosophy since the ancient Greeks, but perhaps has never had so much real world relevance as it has in the last sixty years, when the issue arose of how to represent the Holocaust. With this in mind, this essay will read two post-Holocaust poems, revealing the particular problems of representation that each poem explores, and the potential solutions that each poem presents.

The first poem to be explored is Ten Shots of Mr Simpson[1] by W. S. Graham. The poem presents ten instances of the poetic speaker trying to ‘photograph’ Mr Simpson, a concentration camp survivor. Each of the ten numbered sections enacts a different photographic attempt, and increasingly the poem foregrounds the similarities between photographic and poetic representation. The immediate thing that strikes the reader is the violence inherent within the photographic vocabulary, which becomes more exaggerated as the poem continues: the ‘shot’ of the title, ‘the point[ing]’ (2:6) of the camera, connected to the action of the Nazis(2:7), the question ‘[s]hall I snap him now?’ (3:9) indicating the breaking of the subject through representation. None of this language is at all forced, Graham is merely bringing forth the aggression inherent within our language of representation. The violence reaches its explicit peak with the line: ‘I have you now and you didn’t even/feel anything but I have killed you’ (9:13-14).

The language of the photo-shoot isn’t just violent, but possessive, as the previous quote shows. Graham constantly refer to ‘having’(1:11), ‘wanting’ (5:1) ‘taking’ (3:10)and ‘getting’(6:22) the image he desires. In capturing the photo however, Mr Simpson is also captured, and though the speaker claims ‘I am to do him no harm’ (2:9), the artistic speaker increasingly comes to resemble a concentration camp guard. This is further revealed when the poem’s continual imperative tone is considered:

               

                Stand still get ready jump in your place

                Lie down get up don’t speak. Number?                

                                                                                                (4: 3-4)

The representative ‘capturing’ of Mr Simpson, photographically or poetically, is presented as intrinsically the same as his incarceration by the Nazis. Mr Simpson has moved from ‘[o]ut of the blackthorn and the wired/ Perimeter into this particular/ No less imprisoned place’ (8:8-10).

The poet Paul Celan, himself previously incarcerated in the labour camps, addresses exactly this problem when he refers to art as a ’medusa’s head’.[2] One can become ‘imprisoned by Art’ (3:7), the very thing that tries to preserve or represent a moment turns it to stone, and kills it by removing it from the complex and unrepresentable flux of experience and events. Whatever enters into this realm of representation, like Mr Simpson, is removed from the living world. Representation is at a necessary remove, what it ‘preserves’ is just a testament to the absence of the ‘true’ event or object.[3] But in thinking that representations, especially perfect likenesses such as photographs, are capable of ‘capturing’ the truth, we cover over the possibility of knowing at all. As Jean Baudrillard dramatically states, the representation of the Holocaust is a more systematic extermination than the camps themselves.[4] By believing the representation can represent the truth of a situation, by believing that ‘everyone knows’ the horror of the concentration camps through experiencing televised, photographic, filmed and poetic representation, we prevent ourselves from encountering the awareness that we are ignorant of it. One now kills Jews, claims Baudrillard, through the ‘sound track and the image track’ instead of the gas chamber,[5]  enacting this re-extermination for a revolting aesthetic thrill of emotion.

This issue comes to the fore in Graham’s poetry in this stanza:

                And who would have it in verse but only

                Yourself too near having come in only

                To look over my shoulder to see

                How it is done. You are wrong. You are wrong

                Being here, but necessary. Somebody

                Else must try to see what I see.                                                (6:16-18)

This is the problem with the representation of the Holocaust: it is ‘necessary’ to remember, but representation will always be ‘wrong’. We must try to see, but this looking is necessarily destructive. Moreover, Graham shifts the guilt of the aggressive poetic-speaker on to the reader: it is the reader who would possess Mr Simpson, who would ‘have it in verse’. Seemingly passively reading, or looking over Graham’s shoulder, the reader’s implicit participation in the violent and possessive representation is made explicit in the poem, when we are asked to ‘take him’ (3:10), and told it is for ‘our sake’ (2:12) that Mr Simpson stands ‘sillily’ (2:11). So it is the ‘gentle reader’, rather than the poet, as the consumer of the poetry and thus Mr Simpson’s aestheticised suffering, who is revealed to be the ‘deadly’ (8:17) and ‘wrong’ one.

And yet for all its loudly articulated achievement of capturing, and claiming to know the subject, Graham’s poetry is full of that which it cannot know. Never once is the ‘Holocaust’ named or even directly alluded to. Only hints such as Mr Simpson’s ‘number’ (3:10), the faded photographs of ‘gassed’ relatives (6:27), memories of sleeping in ‘Hut K’ (8:5), and the speakers treatment of Mr Simpson, serve to build up an idea of what the photographer/poet is trying to capture. Its two modes of address are imperatives and questions: the statements of ordered possession (‘I have him’ (8:7)) clash with the desire to know/capture him more (‘what is your category?’ (8:3)). In this way the statements claiming full possession are revealed to be false by the continued desire for further possession. The formality with which ‘Mr Simpson’ is addressed is not only ironic considering his treatment, but indicative of the lack of knowledge the speaker, and therefore the reader, actually possesses. His name is ‘unpronounceable’ (5:7), the light which illuminates him is ‘impossible’ (6:3), his gaze always ‘beyond’ (9:12) to something that the camera cannot see, the poem cannot represent. It is, paradoxically, this exact absence that the camera/poem wishes to make present:

                This time I want your face trying

                To not remember dear other

                Numbers you left, who did not follow

                                                                                (5:1-3)

The camera wants to portray Mr Simpson’s otherness, his absence, and his loss, those things that cannot be represented – because to be represented is to be captured, known and possessed by the camera/poem and the consuming public. The tensions at work between claimed knowledge and sought knowledge, between knowing and not-knowing, between preserving and killing, between presenting and absence, create paradoxes that chase each other around the page of Graham’s work. Amid the confusion the poetic-speaker Graham turns to the reader, guilty by collusion, like a magician revealing his tricks, and claims to show us ‘how it is done’ whilst doing nothing but gesturing towards a larger paradox, a larger aporetic absence that is representation.

One of the most resounding assessments of the aesthetic situation after the Holocaust comes from Theodor Adorno, who famously stated that ‘[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’[6] This statement has been taken as a dictum that states the one should not write poetry, or that poetry is now invalid,[7] but engaging with the work of the philosopher reveals a far more complex position, which I shall only outline here.[8] Adorno sees that any artistic position that takes up an ideological standpoint against the authoritarian perspective will be buying into it.[9] In turning away from society, poetry is still defined via negation by the thing it seeks to escape, and thus participates in the impoverishment of its own form (AR: 200). Indeed, far from being separate, it was the culture that artistic representation is a part of that perpetrated the atrocities of Auschwitz.[10] It is finalised ‘meaning’ and ‘aesthetic enjoyment’ that all art aims towards, and is to claim this from out of the suffering of Auschwitz that is barbaric. All literal representation is a form of dominion (As Mr Simpson shows): it claims to ‘truly represent’ and in so doing replaces. Moreover, it removes something of the horror in just claiming that it can be understood (AP: 189). Instead, art after Auschwitz must grapple with its desire to find meaning, whilst recognising its inability to do so, and so continue to exist in this state of paradox. This new art is a form of a-literal representation, it ‘challenges signification ... by its very distance from meaning’ and in doing so ‘disrupt the whole system of rigid coordinates that governs authoritarian personalities’ (AP: 179). Poetry of this kind is ‘negative knowledge of the actual world’ (AP: 160) that has the burden of ‘wordlessly asserting’ (AP: 194) what is unable to be said in society. It exists in a state of paradox, in that it is only through acknowledging and exploring its own ‘impossibility’ (AR: 210) that it creates its own possibility, and can have its wordless say.[11] This is connected to Celan’s claim that poetry ‘holds its ground in its own margin’, and tends towards silence.[12]

The tension at work in Graham’s poem creates an absence, or silence, revealing this absence to be representation itself. Once this absence has been created, Graham ends with what I’d like to call negative apostrophic language:

               

                Language, put us down for the last

                Time [...]

                Ah Mr Simpson, Ah Reader, Ah

                Myself, our pictures are being taken.

                We stand still.

                                                                                (10:7-12)

Barbara Johnson describes apostrophe as a ‘turning away’ or ‘digressing from straight speech’, manipulating the direct address to something absent, usually the dead or inanimate, to make the ‘absent, dead or inanimate entity addressed ... present, animate and anthropomorphic.’[13] Interestingly Graham turns this relation around and – enacting a completely direct speech and a literal representation – actually reveals the thing thus represented as dead and inanimate (turned to stone) via anti-apostrophe. The apostrophic language of such statements as ‘Ah Mr Simpson,’[14] which run through the piece, ironically undercut the poem’s surface capacity to present and control Mr Simpson, and reveals that what is ostensibly present is actually absent. Interestingly, as this absence is revealed, the speaker and the reader as participants in this representation, are themselves absorbed into this absence, and are themselves ‘put down’ and ‘still[ed]’ by the medusa’s head of artistic representation. The desire for aesthetic pleasure, the desire for understanding, is horrifically stilled in us as Graham turns the destructive poem onto us with a demented grin. The poem negates meaning, and its impossibility becomes the grounding for its possibility, as Adorno described.

W. S. Graham has revealed many of the problems inherent within the representation of the Holocaust (or anything at all), and has created, if not a solution, then a method of playing with the language that not just presents but enacts these problems, and shames the reader’s underlining need to understand. Jorie Graham furthers this enactment in her poem From the New World, [15]  which attempts to authentically represent the horror of the Holocaust in a non-destructive way, starting with the claim it ‘[h]as to do with the story about the girl who didn’t die/ in the gas chamber, who came back out asking’ (1-2). The word ‘story’ here takes on particular relevance considering the problems of representation revealed in the last poem:

                                

                                Can you help me in this?

                Are you there in your stillness? Is it a real place?

                                God knows I too want the poem to continue,

                want the silky swerve into shapeliness

                                and then the click shut

                and then the issue of sincerity, the glossy diamond-backed

                                skin – will you buy me, will you take me home ... About the one

                who didn’t die, her face still there on the new stalk of her body as the

                                doors open,

                                                                                                (From the New World:10-18)

The poem sincerely attempts a beginning, a ‘story’, but then halts itself within a few lines, with a direct plea for help from the reader, whose assistance is seemingly needed to continue the narrative. The poet-speaker claims that she too wants the poem – referring to the poem at hand and The Poem as a form – to be able to continue, but follows with a silence, a gap between stanzas that makes present the impossibility of that desire. The desire is further evoked as it describes the aesthetic pleasure (13), the closure (14) the supposed truthful sincerity (15) and the (getting more cynical) commercial viability (16) of the traditional poetic form. But the traditional form, the meaning giving structure, is revealed to be impossible with the caesura of the ellipsis (16), in which the possibility for the traditional poetic form ebbs away, and the poem collapses in on itself by returning to the image the poem started with (16-18). In this way the poem performs a self-negation of its own possibility to present a meaningful narrative, or evoke an aesthetic pleasure, from out of the horror of the Holocaust, and, again, utilises this impossibility as the possibility of its functioning.

Alongside the constant pleas for help from the reader, the poem also contemptuously dismisses any claims of knowledge the reader might think s/he actually has. ‘[Y]ou know this’ (59, 64, 69) the speaker states whenever the narratives threaten to become clear, implying an arrogant boredom on the part of the reader. Shamed, the desire for understanding is frustrated, and the reader is thrown back onto the site of paradox. In this way the silences remain open, are not covered over by leaps of understanding: ‘don’t you fill in the blanks’ (60), Graham forthrightly states. The blanks, the absence/silence that we naturally want to fill in by understanding, must remain open and present.

Otten, in his essay on the silences within Jorie Graham’s poetry, defines them as ‘a way of giving shape and solidity to an ethical dilemma ... the question of whether aesthetic objectification is a morally salutary response to annihilation.’[16] This is a similar dilemma to the one being presented in W. S. Graham, as well as Adorno, and Otten is no doubt correct. But this interpretation of the silence at work only touches on the surface of this absence. The poem not only finds itself merely, as Otten claims, ‘out of place’ in representing the Holocaust - it finds itself incapable of rendering the very thing it attempts to narratise. The absence it presents is created by self failure, only a part of which is ethical dilemma, and is the only authentic way to represent the annihilation of the Holocaust:

                                At the point where she comes back out something begins, yes.

                                something new, something completely

                new, but what – there underneath the screaming – what?

                Like what, I wonder [...]

                Like what, I whisper,

                                                                                                                                (103-108)

This passage occurs at the end of the poem, where the poetic speaker makes one last attempt to combine the narratives she has failed to present, to reach an ending. But all that is achieved is ‘screaming’. Underneath the screaming is a silence. This silence is incapable of being represented – comparisons, understandings of what it is like, are useless. The magnitude of the atrocity in question defies the human capacity for understanding.[17] Similar to Kant’s idea of the sublime, this enormous silence is the opposite of aesthetic pleasure: a displeasure, as the inadequacy of the aesthetic imagination is revealed when presented by something of such magnitude that it cannot understand it rationally. It cannot be represented to reason or imagination.[18] The Holocaust, and the experience of the victims, is not like anything, it just is – something ‘new’ and particular, and to suggest it is understandable in terms of anything else, in terms of representation, is to do a disservice to those who experienced it. More than a moral impossibility, Graham also enacts a rational one.

Rosalind Krauss, the American art historian, has presented a theory stating that the meaning attempted within much contemporary art is indexical, defining indexes as the ‘marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.’[19] Opposed to iconic signs, which are motivated by similarity (by the ‘like’ – the photo of W.S. Graham’s piece), and symbolic signs, which are motivated by societal convention, the indexical signifier is motivated by contiguity. Smoke, for example, is the index of fire. [20] With this in mind, a better grasp of the a-logical representation at work in the poem can be reached:

                                 one form at a time stepping in as if to stay clean,

                stepping over something to get into here,

                                something there on the floor now dissolving

                not looking down but stepping up to clear it

                                                                                                                (42-46)

The remove to the aesthetic representation – presented here as a place one can step into – is a move to clearness, a closure (‘the click shut’), and thus a move of avoidance. By entering into this area one has to ‘step over’ what one is avoiding. But Graham’s poem perpetually attempts to enter this clarifying representative area, and then reveals its (moral, rational, literary) failure to do so. This continual self-negation means the poem has to ‘step over’ the absence it is avoiding again and again, without directly looking at it. A similar effect is shown when the speaker locks herself in the bathroom, distinctly ‘not looking up at all’ (30) into the mirror, distinctly not seeing the ‘coiling and uncoiling/billions’ (34-35) of the dead within it. By stepping in an out of the representative field, the shape of the thing being avoided begins to present itself in a negative way. This thing, this un-representable thing, is ‘dissolving’, but the traces of it, the very absence and silence of it, appears as a presence within the poetry. This can be understood as a strange kind of negative indexical signification: the repeated failure and impossibly of the poem, the poet’s avoidance of ‘looking’, or representing, is in itself acting as a trace that begins to reveal the shape of what is absent. Rather than literal ‘looking’ – the photographic representation that W.S. Graham reveals to be destructive, Jorie Graham attempts an a-literal representation: the equivalent of looking from out of the very corner of your eye.

These are just two potential examples of the negative signification that Adorno has called for: what I have tentatively called apostrophic and indexical. Both revolve around deliberately revealed absence created through self negation, an absence that is in itself a more authentic mode of representation in the aftermath of Auschwitz. Though the two poems looked at here are visibly concerned with the representations of the Holocaust, Adorno’s concern was not primarily with the poetry of Auschwitz, but poetry after it. The problems of representation that have been brought to the fore after it, only some of which are examined here, are applicable to every form of representation and every subject. In this way, poetry after Auschwitz tends towards silence.

---

[1] W. S. Graham, Collected Poems: 1942-1977 (203-208). In the following references, the first parenthesised number refers to the section, the second to the line number within this section.

[2] Or Celan presents Buchner presenting Lenz, See Trotter(1984:219) and Celan (1960: 158).

[3] See Webster Goodwin and Bronfen (1993) and Derrida (1967): ‘All graphemes are of a testamentary essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is also the absence of the thing or referent’ (69).

[4] See Baudrillard (1981:49).

[5] Ibid. See also Kertész (1998), who argues that survivors themselves have their memories over-written by the phony consumer language employed by the media (268).

[6] The Adorno Reader (AR) (210).

[7] See, as just one example, Guber (2003:240).

[8] For a chronological description of Adorno’s comments about poetry after Auschwitz, see Caygill (2006: 69-71), and for an examination of the various attempts at interpretation see Jarvis (1998: 140-147).

[9] Aesthetics and Politics (AP) (179)

[10] As Steiner (1970: xi) states: ‘a man can read Goethe and Rilke in the evening ... and go to his days work at Auschwitz in the morning’.

[11] See Caygill (2006: 71) for elaboration.

[12] Celan (1960:163-164)

[13] Johnson (1987:185).

[14] The refrain resonates with Melville’s famous ending apostrophe ‘Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!’ (Melville,1853:49). See also Cohen (1994:165-167), for more on the apostrophe and it’s ‘anti-mimetic’ uses.

[15]Dreams of a Unified Field:106-109. Parenthesised numbers refer to line numbers.

[16] Otten (2004: 246).

[17] See Améry (1966), who describes his experience as an intellectual in Auschwitz, and how philosophical or artistic sensibilities were useless even at the time (15).

[18] Kant, primarily concerned with the sublime in nature, allows an element of pleasure in this experience also, though this is exactly what these poets are trying to avoid( Kant, 1790: 106).

[19] Krauss (1986:198).

[20] An example used by Alphen (1993: 31-32).

Bibliography

·         Adorno, Thodor. ‘Reconciliation Under Duress’ and ‘Commitment’ in Aesthetics and Politics. (London, New York: Verso, 1988)

·         Adorno, Theodor, The Adorno Reader Brian O’Conner (ed) (Oxford, Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2000)

·         Alphen, Ernst van. ‘Touching Death’ in Death and Representation. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen (eds)(Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993) (29-50).

·         Améry, Jean (1966). At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and it’s Realities. Trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

·         Baudrillard, Jean (1981). ‘Holocaust’ in Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (U.S.A: University of Michigan Press,2000) (49-52).

·         Caygill, Howard. ‘Lyric Poetry Before Auschwitz’ in Adorno and Literature. David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp (eds) (London, New York: Continuum, 2006) (69-83).

·         Celan, Paul (1960). ‘The Meridian’ In Paul Celan: Selections. Pierre Joris (ed) (Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2005) (156-169).

·         Cohen, Tom. Anti-Mimesis, From Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

·         Derrida, Jacques (1967). Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974)

·         Graham, Jorie. The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996).

·         Graham, W.S. Collected Poems: 1942-1977 (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1979).

·         Gubar, Susan. Poetry after Auschwitz: Remembering what one never knew (Indinapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003).

·         Jarvis, Simon Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998).

·         Johnson, Barbara. ‘Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion’ in A World of Difference (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987) (184-199).

·         Kant, Immanuel (1790). Critique of Judgement (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1964).

·         Kertész, Imre (1998).‘Who Owns Auschwitz’ in The Yale Journal of Criticism (vol. 14, no.1, 2001) (267-272).

·         Krauss, Rosalind (1986). ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1’ and ‘Notes on the Index: Part 2’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999) (196-209 and 210-220).

·         Melville, Herman (1853). Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street. (New York, London: HarperCollins, 2009).

·         Otten, Thomas. ‘Jorie Graham’s             s’ in PMLA (vol. 118, No.2, Jan 2004) (239-253).

·         Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (London: Yale University Press, 1970).

·         Trotter, David ‘Playing Havoc’ in The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (London: Macmillian,1984) (196-230).

·         Webster Goodwin, Sarah and Bronfen, Elizabeth. ‘Introduction’ in Death and Representation (Baltimore, London: John Hopkins University Press, 1993) (3-29).

Some Reviews

Jonty Tiplady

Zam Bonk Dip

Salt Publishing, 2009

reviewed by Andy Spragg

-

Choosing to engage with excess has long stood as a hallmark of a kind of poetry that tends to be labelled – sometimes pejoratively – as 'experimental'. As poetic strategy it is often embedded within a particular slipstream of theory; an acknowledgement that the poem's frame is one that inevitably works to exclude a variety of dialogues in favour of developing some form of narrative or epiphany-driven coherence. At its worse this exclusion creates a totality anchored in the tediously domestic, a sort of complicit agreement between reader and writer that asserts an absence of linguistic or thematic challenge. If such an approach defines itself by its ability to disregard the incongruities that hover beneath the surface of language then Jonty Tiplady's book forms its refreshing antithesis. He is all about excess, both linguistically and thematically. As a poet he evokes JH Prynne's 'Nearly too much / is, well, nowhere near enough' from Down Where Changed, an desire to engage with such a vast and eclectic range of stimuli that the poem's frame strains to contain it all.

Zam Bonk Dip collects together a number of Tiplady's chapbooks, and serves as an excellent showcase of his distinctive approach. The writing is defined by a technique that manages to be doggedly consistent without losing its innately compelling edge, a style that takes its cues from the saturated language of both the media and the internet. It's playful, funny and highlights the hyper-speed tenacity with which our vocabulary currently evolves. This is no more apparent than in the third section of the title poem, where Tiplady exclaims '{...}anoint the/blobject beckoning on the Olympic Stadium.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') He could well have pulled the whole thing out of a Guardian article on Stratford's latest folly, or from a comment posted under a Youtube clip, or found it amongst the quagmire of writing that populates blogspot – he may well invented it himself – and in that fact lies the most engaging aspect of Tiplady's work. It is full of such moments, and yet it manages to be tender as well: 'It's always time to sing again/careless soul.' ('Zam Bonk Dip') Here's Whitman's contained multitudes, albeit shot through with a twitter-feed attention span.

Tiplady is not the first of his contemporaries to make gestures towards an inclusive meshing together of high and low culture by any means. In fact, case could be made that it is an overly familiar strategy, even amongst the more 'mainstream' poets of the day. Luke Kennard (with whom Tiplady shares Salt as publisher) demonstrated an ambitious scope in source material throughout The Harbour Beyond the Movie, however his usage conceded to a certain authorial flourish, a sense of the writer signposting his own reading list. With Tiplady it feels like a natural extension of the language, the mode of expression itself, rather than a contrivance or device.

Another thing that distingushes Tiplady is his comparative fearlessness when it comes to the 'low' culture component in his writing. It's hard to imagine Kennard writing, 'I met this girl the other day, she had a nice ass. I wanted to tit-fuck that ass.' ('Dear World And Everyone In It') Taking such a line out of context is unfair as it strips away that which frames it; it does, however, highlight the intrinsic value judgements that usually deflate a poet's decision to engage with excess, that they tend to be guided by an unconscious aesthetic conservatism. For Tiplady no such reservation exists, or if it does then it plays out beneath the surface; his usage of such difficult concepts draws attention to the dialogues that infiltrate deep into culture. There is a curious double logic at play. Internet pornography's popularity embeds certain linguistic codes into the cultural strata, regardless of where the individual may stand morally; likewise when Tiplady exclaims 'LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE' ('OOV'), it is impossible to not know who he is referring to. There is an affirmation (a word that Tiplady charges with particular significance in 'Dear World and Everyone in it'): here are the dialogues, now what shall we do with them?

For all its heteroglossic intensity, Tiplady's work manages to describe patterns of love and human relationships in a novel and emotionally striking way. The poems that demonstrate real success are the ones that manage to contain elements of genuine tenderness in the narrative voice; no mean feat when you consider some of the aggressively chauvinistic language Tiplady's chosen to incorporate. Lines such as, 'and I love you, through to/pieces of heaven{...} give me my conker back' ('Manic Milk') are demonstrative of Tiplady's desire to communicate something of love, something of communication itself, through his fractal language games. It's the striking tension between these two that sustains Zam Bonk Dip throughout, a want for clarity amongst an excess of signification. Tiplady's success lies in his ability to make this a compelling exercise; one that acknowledges its own inevitable failure, but is no worse a read for it.

Sandra Tappenden

Speed
Salt Publishing, 2007
reviewed by Joshua Jones

1.

Sandra Tappenden’s second collection is a wilfully idiosyncratic, forcefully contemporary and strangely confessional work of fractured lyric and prose poetry, riddled with absurdism and wreathed in irony. It is for all of these reasons that it, initially, is a compelling read, but upon closer inspection reveals itself to ultimately be lacking in force. While she has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of striking imagery, her phrasing is always cocooned in a rather banal safety net of irony, and while she is evidently aware of the difficulties of using language, particularly in light of the philosophy of the 20th Century and poetry since the Language movement, she seems content to merely present an awareness of this, an acknowledgment of its difficulty{1}, the – “constantly uncapturable” (5) – before retreating from the danger of meaning into the supposed prevention of criticism that is blank irony; or, more irritatingly, into Bridget Jones-esque domestic singledom. In ‘Blame’, following on from the above quotation:

Tenuous moral concepts depend upon

where anyone stands. It’s easier

to lay down, groovy-single,

playing the same track

over and over.

True. But surely the role of poetry is to resist the easy option? Of course, the poem from which this is taken can also be read as ‘giving in’ ironically – earlier in it the speaker makes reference to her “compromised heart”. But where does that get us? For a collection entitled Speed, Tappenden really is often a quite lazy writer, happy to rehash postmodern poetics, sprinkle in a bit of self-conscious idiosyncrasy” (“I’ve found it helps to carry an egg in pocket” [1]) and trite, ironised confessionalism, and voila, we have a book of poems happy to sit there not really doing anything much other than chasing circles around itself.

Which is not to say the book is without merit. On the contrary – her imagery at the very least creates the illusion of singing with movement and vitality. So why not apply the same exuberance to content? In a characteristic line, again from ‘Blame’:

Naivete is forgivable when both parties

are unaware they’re innocent.

2.

The story now has gaps where once I knew all the lyrics.

[...]

There are clues here in a lyric full of holes.

(‘St Swithin’s Day’, p. 16)

In a long sequence – ‘Matthew Arnold Refuses To Exit the Building’ – Tappenden somehow manages to create what I can only describe as a pastiche of pastiche{2} . The second in the sequence (‘To behave repeatedly like an idiot does not mean I am an idiot’):

All I can think to say is that if I had a hammer

there’d be one less cat in the world or I’m sorry

I seem to have confused you with my dad.

But it’s not really a shop, it’s a mist-ridden 7 a.m.

Sunday boot fayre where you rush up in red or dead

hangover shades with a fiver for a something lovely.

It takes moments to realise crucial pieces are missing

but hey you say it’s all part of a long game

a bit like bridge or that other one called crevasse.

(25)

To which all I can muster is a yawn. Throughout the sequence, cats and arrows and other deliberately blank signifiers appear, their sole purpose being to relate with one another to produce the implication of a possible meaning, one that clearly isn’t there; but even this isn’t done with a purpose, with a political or philosophical aim the way the Language poets consistently did. Instead it is simply being ironic for the sake of being ironic, behaving like an idiot for the sake of behaving like an idiot. This is a poetry which seems terrified of even the possibility of having to engage with anything beyond banality and pointless circularity. More than that, she seems to actively have little faith in her own medium. References to poets and poetry abound:

Where does anyone live nowadays?

Certainty is a product like anything else

and poets are not much use are they

I often think I overhear someone say.

(‘People who are drawn to take free stress tests’, 42)

If I tell you the sunset is salmon topped with grey...

[a long breathless assault of imagery follows which is actually pretty decent]{3}

call me a liar will you

(‘Mastery’, 4)

I should like to be rigorous without seeming pedantic.

I should like to drink the Indian and the Atlantic.

I should hope. I do, but I’m howyousay? compromised, so.

(‘There must be something in the water’, 55)

Once upon a time being a poet meant more

(‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, 65)

And so on.

Tappenden knows how to write appealing, infectious, bouncy, exuberant images and how to play with enjambment and to deadpan &c&c. The problem is her poetry takes failure as failure, and despite all its energy it seems to me it has little faith in the concept of movement{4}. I’d recommend not bothering with this collection. Kennard’s nailed contemporary absurdist, ironic and distinctly English poetry that is actually doing something and believes in itself; Speed, on the other hand, is fluff.

Notes

1.  "to state the difficulty, to state the difficulty of stating, is not yet to surmount it – quite the contrary" - Jacques Derrida

2. I picture Fredric Jameson hitting himself over the head with his own book.

3. The parenthesis is, in case it’s not apparent, mine. (I also happen to think it would, if developed, make a far superior poem to the one that is actually there. But hey, that’s just me, right?)

4. For a nice summary of what I mean by movement see Neil Williams’ essay here. It is of particular interest in its situating its discussion of movement in Plato’s philosophy, which serves to reinforce and further explicate notions of movement familiar to readers of Heidegger and Derrida.
--

Jim Goar - Seoul Bus Poems and David Gewanter - The Sleep of Reason
by Rovert Van Egghen


Urgh, I thought, when presented with Seoul Bus Poems by Jim Goar. A collection of poems, most of which, according to the blurb, “began on a bus, [one] began in Bangkok, and others in rooms in rooms between Yonsei University and Bongwon-sa”. No doubt there will be a lot of gap yah anecdotes and half-baked political pieties in a bubble-wrap of self-righteousness. Fortunately, proving that old adage about books and covers true, I was wrong, very, very wrong.

Seoul Bus Poems is a subtle collection, and indeed at first reading it can seem rather flat and uninspiring. Opening with “I don’t want to write / about leaves. The change in / seasons. my love”, almost begs the response of well, good for you. It also does not help that Seoul Bus Poems contains some absolute clunkers: my favourite being “Just do me a favour, my suicidal rose / And get of the ledge / You’ll kill the dirt if you fall”. Emo angst has never been done so well. Yet it would be too easy to dismiss Goar’s collection as the kind of poetry the ‘experimental’ kid reads at your local Open Mic.

The key to appreciating Seoul Bus Poems instead lies in appreciating the sounds of the words on the page, the dances with language which Goar undertakes. Lines like “breaking little rakes akimbo” and “blocks of western migration / lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” roll around the tongue, and sound fantastic when read aloud. What Goar is doing then is creating a sensation of sound, a Cageian clangour of percussion in a most wonderful impression of the noise of a bustling Seoul. What does “lemon rubbed teeth of cicadas” mean? Who cares? What matters is how it sounds, the way the sound of a city rises from Goar’s words.

These poems appear then like little sketches of an environment, fleetingly viewed from a bus window as the landscape passes by, already gone before it can be comprehended. It is this transparency which gives Goar’s poem their curious lightness, There is a fluid lucidity to them, as images are revealed with all the vividness of rememberance. Witness:

        Opera of Korea

             fish in the store     window


                red lights

                    and around      more

                        red lights

Simultaneously a capturing of the fish viewed, the baffling uniformity of a city at night, and the sense of journeying through a city at night, Goar is able to create a challenging urban perspective through his masterful formatting and economy with words.

Goar’s collection then is one which promises little but delivers lots. Its loose fluidity means Seoul Bus Poems is unlikely to stay in the mind days after reading, but it does provide food for thought, evoking a landscape which is slipping away as it is being seen. It is, as Goar puts it, “a map under glass remembering”.

If only the same could be said for David Gewanter’s The Sleep of Reason. Again proving that old adage, The Sleep of Reason sounds great, promising “alternately delightful and startling poems” where “allegory comes alive” and “Gewanter’s delicate musicality and keen sense of humour sparkle”. Instead the only sound to come out of the collection is one big cumulative yawn. By the end of the collection, I felt like a cheerleader who had snagged a date with the star quarterback, only to find out he cried when we made love.

Not to say that our star quarterback does not have some good qualities; his hair is nice. And the concepts behind a lot of Gewanter’s poems are promising. ‘Gag’ is about a comedian who eviscerates his family for laughs, which could, indeed should, be fantastic but Gewanter does not so much press the moral of the poem as slam it in our faces, ending with “Should we call it art / just because real people / get hurt”.

This also occurs with the last poem in the collection 'Hocus Pocus' which begins with a quote from Mariah Carey. However, apparently Mariah is not enough name-dropping, as soon Cassius Clay, Adam Ant, Mr Graham and, inevitably, Oscar Wilde appear - none of them adding anything to the poem, other than giving it an air of burlesque comedy which jars with Gewanter’s moral about mortality and “the Angel / hustles back to the girl’s bed”.

The poems in the collection which are more focused, such as 'Cobbler’s Children and Divorce' and 'Mr. Circe', work better as instead of seeking to entertain, confuse and lecture us all at the same time, Gewanter demonstrates an effective tone. However, there is something flat about much of Gewanter’s writing - a lack of energy which means that what might be “an offbeat satire for an off-kilter age” is actually bloody boring.

Gewanter seems to possess neither an ear for the musicality of language, nor a mastery of form. Most of the poems in this collection take a vague free verse form, and on the rare occasion that there is a bit of variety, One-Page Novel for example, it seems tacked on and redundant.

The Sleep of Reason then is a disappointing collection. It sounded brilliant on the blurb. A poem about 100 rabbits with herpes?! Bet that’s brilliant, funny, quirky and off-beat. Well it’s not, not even a little bit.



One Essay - Neil Williams

The (Meta)Physics of Perfection: Aporia, Angst and Authenticity in Plato and Heidegger

We saw the river beating on the river bank

Oh the way that it held us on her river bed,

It’s cold

It’s dark

It’s not for people with uneasy hearts

But if you’re with me on the other side

Strike up the band

We have survived.

Spencer Krug, Bang Your Drum.

§1. Introduction

This essay is in no way an attempt to combine ‘Platonism’ and ‘Existentialism’, or subsume one to the other. Such a project would not only be doomed to fail, but be of little value overall. All I hope to do here is, taking key passages of the Phaedo, and looking at them under the lens of the existentialism in Being and Time, bring more to light what I believe the common aim of both philosophies is: better understanding of ourselves and the life we live. Taking inspiration from the Socratic elenchus, this essay will move from an examination of negation (aporia/angst) (§2), to the possibility of ‘authenticity’ or ownership of our ideas (§3), before finally examining the practical benefits of both belief systems (§4)

§2. ‘It’s Cold, It’s Dark’: Aporia and Angst

‘Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state ... like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb ... both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you.’


(Meno 80a-b)


Socrates’ ignorance is his defining feature, he is famed for it, it is the only knowledge he holds and it is this that makes him wise (Apology 23b). This ignorance, weaponised within Plato’s dialogues, is used by the fictionalised Socrates to negate his interlocutor’s knowledge and bring them to what Meno describes above: a sense of aporia (ἀπορία – lack of resources), a moment of admitted ignorance, confusion or doubt. In the Socratic elenchus, as defined by Gregory Vlastos[1], this is a key stage in the method Socrates employs in the dialogues – a cleansing of ‘incorrect’ knowledge, so that we might move towards more ‘correct’ knowledge, or ‘Truth’. Thus a particular dialogue, having met this absence, this aporia, can move towards a new ‘truth’ (in Meno from the aporia we get the conception of knowledge as recollection that is relied heavily upon in Phaedo), or can remain in this state of not-knowing (Euthyphro, Laches and Charmides are commonly held to be ‘aporetic’ dialogues in this sense). In my conception, Phaedo is an aporetic text, but in a radically different way.

What evidence of aporia can be found in the Phaedo? Surprisingly little, in terms of the actual arguments Socrates uses. Socrates prefers in this dialogue to exchange knowledge for better knowledge, without the aporetic step. For example: in the epiphenomenal argument that Simmias presents, that the soul is some form of ‘harmony’ (Phaedo 86c) arising from the body working in the correct way, Socrates does not proceed to demolish the argument by looking at its internal inconstancies, as is the way of the aporia, but instead shows that it is inconstant with a theory that is already ‘proven’ earlier in the dialogue, the theory of recollection (75e)[2]. Showing Simmias’ ‘harmony’ argument does not fit with the recollection argument is enough for Simmias to remove it, being that the recollection argument is ‘based on an assumption worthy of acceptance’ (92d), and he had ‘convinced [himself] that he was quite correct to accept it’ (92e). In this way, within Socrates use, the text is surprisingly un-aporetic.

And yet despite this, there is a ‘strange feeling’ that permeates the dialogue in a way that Phaedo mentions at the very beginning of the text: ‘an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and pain at the same time as I reflected that [Socrates] was just about to die’ (59a). This mixture of emotions, this uncertainty of how to feel, follows us everywhere in the Phaedo, is mixed up in every argument that Socrates presents. More than usual, Socrates is sure to relate the lack of stability of his own beliefs and arguments, as well as those of others. The claim that philosophers should accept death but not commit suicide, as we are the property of the gods, is riddled with caveats of untruth: he argues only from ‘hearsay’ (61d), about what he may ‘believe’(61e), about things that can only be discussed in ‘the language of the mysteries’ (62b) which is a doctrine ‘not easy to understand fully’ (62b), and can only reach a conclusion that is ‘perhaps ... not unreasonable’ (62c). We begin to see that the aporia presented is not for Socrates interlocutors, but for Plato’s readers.

The most striking moment of ‘doubt’ (88c) and uncertainty comes in the centre of the dialogue, when Simmias and Cebes present their counter arguments to Socrates conception of the immortality of the soul. The aporia is not felt by Socrates, who remains ‘pleasant’ and ‘kind’ (89a), but by those listening to the conversation. There is a removal from the Socratic scene to the ‘listener’, Echecrates, who in an aporetic state, cries: ‘What argument shall we trust, now that that of Socrates, which was extremely convincing, has fallen into discredit?’ (88d), and Phaedo admits he was lead to doubt ‘not only what had already been said but also what was going to be said’ (88c). The reader must mirror this confusion: If the argument of Socrates, whom the audience inside and outside of the dialogue have been relying on up to now to be a guide to the truth, has failed, then the aporia is not only a lack of knowledge here, but a doubt in the possibility of knowledge of any ‘truth’.

We leave Plato at this crucial aporetic moment, and turn to Heidegger to better understand the nature of negation. Like Plato, Heidegger finds that a removal of surety can lead us to ‘truth’, in this case truth of our own being. For Heidegger our everyday existence as Dasein (Being-there) is described as Being-in-the-world (BT 53/78)[3]. His conception of the ‘world’ is complex, but is best described and most used as ‘that ‘wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’’ (BT 65/93): the world is a chain of significations, is a collection of equipment, or more accurately a holistic sense of ‘equipmental whole’[4]. When the world withdraws itself through anxiety, we become aware of the fact there is no ‘anchor’ as such for the meanings and conceptions we have of the world, that ‘the ground of being is grounded on an ‘abyss’ or withdrawal of ground’ (Greaves, 2010: 122). If we take the literal meaning of ‘aporia’ as lack-of-resources, the similarities between the two concepts reveal themselves. When we experience anxiety, it is literally a removal of this chain of significations, this realm of equipment we call ‘world’. This state of anxiety could be literally described as having a lack of resources (aporia), as all meaning, possibility for use, withdraws with the world (is, in a real sense, the ‘world’), everything is left ‘completely lacking in significance’ (BT 186/231). We are left with only ourselves, so anxiety ‘provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being’ (BT 182/227). So aporia is the awareness of the impossibility of knowledge, anxiety is the awareness of the impossibility of possibility. This conception of ‘knowing ourselves’ is, I believe, primary to Plato’s use of the aporia within Phaedo.


§3. ‘It’s Not for People with Uneasy Hearts’: Angst to Authenticity

‘What would you say? Not, surely, that [Socrates] does not care that you know the truth, but that he cares more for something else: that if you are to come to the truth, it must be by yourself for yourself.’


(Vlastos, 1991: 44)

Phaedo links at the start (59a) his uneasy feeling with Socrates' death. The dialogue seems to attempt a certainty about what will come in death, or after death, and yet continually negates this possibility. Socrates confirms that, within life, it is impossible to ‘adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be truth’ (66b), with the apparatus of the bodily senses which ‘makes for confusion’ (66d). Often it is perceived that Plato is trying to present a genuine argument for the existence of the soul after death[5], and the weaknesses of Socrates’ arguments are indicative of Plato’s lack of philosophical acumen. But how then can we interpret Socrates’ repeated statements of belief (114d), hypothesis (101d) and uncertainty (66d)?

For Heidegger, Death is the ultimate aporia, Death is a primary source of anxiety, as it is itself ‘the possibility of the absolute impossibility’ (BT 250/294). Angst is one of the few states that liberates us from the ‘They-self’ [das-man] (BT 181/225)[6] – the chain of significations, made up of the interpretations of others, through which we gain meaning in the ‘world’ (and constitutes the ‘world’). We cannot represent ‘angst’ because to do so is to once again drop into the ‘world’. For example, the state of anxiety can be understood in terms of depression, but to do so would be to categorise, label, and explain away the unexplainable. Anxiety is an awareness of ‘nothing’ and ‘nowhere’[7]. In this way angst ‘individualises’ (BT 191/235), it makes us aware of ourselves and our freedom as separate from the consensus interpretation of the they-self. In a world where we understand ourselves in terms of roles and actions (the they-self world), any man might play any other man’s part. However ‘No one can take the Other’s dying away from him.’ (BT 240/284). It is the single thing that only we can face, making it our ‘ownmost’ possibility (BT 258/303). From this awareness of death, through the anxiety it brings, we can become aware of the possibility of an authentic [Eigentlichkeit][8] existence (BT 263/307). So by keeping death in mind, and by not falling into the dismissive ‘they-self’ conception of death which does not allow us the ‘courage’ for angst in the face of death (BT 254/298), we become an authentic Being-towards-death, which is ‘essentially anxiety’(BT 265/310).

What does this mean in terms of the aporia with which we have linked angst? Similar to Heidegger, Plato has a dualistic conception of existing in the world, rather than Dasein/das-man[9], he has soul/body (explored in 63a-68a). The body, with its imperfect senses is an ‘obstacle’ for acquiring information (63b) and it is through ‘reasoning’ (63c) that soul can approach ‘truth’ ‘through thought alone’ (66a). Now, being as we are in the body, unable to attain ‘truth’, Socrates draws two conclusions: ‘either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so after death’ (67a). Though we cannot learn truth in this world, the soul desires it, moves towards it, reaches past the body. This is why the philosopher should not fear death, for it is the point that the soul removes itself from the body utterly. The entirety of the Phaedo points towards the moment where Socrates dies, and although all present seem desperately to be attempting to prove that the soul is immortal, that death is not the end, Plato allows us no surety whatsoever – the only person that remains ‘convinced’ (109a) that he will survive is Socrates himself, as he laughingly admits at the end (115d).

So what is Plato’s aim? To leave us all in a state of anxiety? For Heidegger this would perhaps be no bad thing: the aporia/angst, as embodied in death, allows us to free ourselves, enables authenticity. But this does not mean to dwell on death, to be morbid or suicidal, but to except the individualisation anxiety in the face of it has taught us, and enter back into the ‘world’ with ‘anticipation’ [vorlaufen] (BT 262/306). Once examined in this light, Plato’s aim is perhaps similar. Socrates states we should not be a ‘misolouge’(89d), we should not be rejecting the possibility of knowledge and ‘studying contradiction’ (90c), and so thinking we are wise. The aporia is not somewhere to reside. Instead, in the same way as the Socratic aporia leads his interlocutor to believe his knowledge is wrong, and leads them to ‘truer’ knowledge, the Platonic aporia of the Phaedo, that is the ultimate aporia of ‘death’, leads his audience to realise the fallibility of logic. Consider this passage:

‘[G]ive but little thought to Socrates but much more to the truth. If you think what I say is true, agree with me; if not, oppose it with every argument and take care that in my eagerness I do not deceive myself and you’ (91c)

The aporia for the audience of the dialogue is realising that Socrates can be fallible. Recognising that ‘real cause’ (99b) is impossible to grasp in this life (imprisoned in the body), Socrates describes his ‘second best’ (99d) method for finding ‘truth’. This is to posit the ‘hypothesis’ (100a) one thinks is most likely, and then examine it with discussion with others (99e). We should not lose faith in logic (90b), but neither should we expect it to be always correct: ‘Learn the truth about these things or find it for oneself, or, if that is impossible, adopt the best and most irrefutable of men’s theories, and, borne upon this, sail through the dangers of life as upon a raft’ (85d italics mine). In this sense knowledge is neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’, but more or less ‘stable’. Knowledge is not of some external ‘truth’, but the ‘safest’ (100e) understanding to support us through this life. With one eye on the aporia[10] we keep an open mind, we continually re-assess our understanding for validity, we own our ideas. We become authentic.

Socrates account is not meant to be convincing, it is a myth, a dream that works for him and that, most importantly he has chosen. He is aware of the alternative, and has no illusions that it is ‘correct’ in any sense of the word (97b). The Socrates at the end of the dialogue is not positing his knowledge as true, indeed, he admits ‘no sensible man would insist that these things are as I have described them’ (114d). He is proposing his methodology as true, and this is a methodology of authenticity.


§4. ‘If You’re With Me On the Other Side’: The Possibility of Perfection.

‘[We] must put aside the Plato of the schools, who contrasted the sensible world with the supersensible. Plato has seen the world as elementary as we, only more originally.’


Heidegger (Sophistes: 580)[11]

It takes a great deal of courage to face our freedom, to face our fear of ourselves in anxiety, and to own our decisions. Far easier to be lost in the ‘they-self’ (BT 181/225). It takes a great deal of ‘bravery’ to turn away from the pleasure of the body and stay ‘ever contemplating the true’ (84b). Philosophy, then, is a route of freedom, and a mode of comportment towards death, what Heidegger calls ‘an impassioned freedom towards death’ (BT 266/311). This is what Socrates means when he states that living in philosophy is ‘to train himself to live in life in a state as close to death as possible’ (67e). An awareness of death frees Socrates’ ‘soul’ from the confines of the body as it frees Heidegger’s Dasein from the confines of the they-self. Is it possible that Heidegger would perceive Plato as running away from death, of retreating into the ‘They-self’? After all, Socrates tries to assuage the ‘fears’ (77e)of his comrades with ‘charms’ (78a). But here we have to distinguish between two concepts: Anxiety [angst] is separated from Fear [furcht], in that fear is fear of an entity in-the-world, where as angst is the feeling that is not located anywhere, is directed towards the world, which is to say ourselves (BT 186/230). Plato may show Socrates assuaging the fear of death as a thing that happens, but he does not remove the inherent mystery, un-knowablity, and uncertainty of death that makes it ultimate aporia, the source of angst. A belief in the after-life will always require ‘a good deal of faith and persuasive argument’ (70b), will never be given as true. To choose in it, as Socrates does, requires an authentic leap of faith. It is a ‘risk’ but a ‘noble one’ (114d). Plato’s aim in this dialogue seems not to prove what the ‘truth’ of death is, but to present us with a methodology of engaging with our ideas in an authentic way, using death as the ultimate aporia about which we can know nothing, proving the fallibly of our logic.

It is exciting to note the language of movement which both philosophers use, which shows their common aim. For Heidegger Being is always ‘thrown’ (BT 135/174)into existence, returning to the ‘they-self’ is called ‘falling’ (BT 181/225), authentic existence is equivalent to ‘Being-towards-death’ (BT 266/311). Similarly Plato conceives as logic as a ‘guide’, on the ‘path’, returns to the idea of a ‘journey’ again and again. In a separate essay I have argued for what I perceived as ‘the liminalising logic’ of Plato (Williams: 2010). Now that logic itself is brought under his methodological liminalisation. Brought to bear upon the ultimate aporia that is death, the soul cannot understand it using logos, and logos is itself liminalised, made into nothing. Logos is a thing that cannot reach truth, does not participate in truth, but that none the less stretches towards it. Like Eros in the Symposium, logos has become a guide rather than a source of truth. In this way the ‘logos’ is devised of true revelatory power in terms of something outside of existence, and becomes a tool to build our ‘raft’, builds the stable frame of knowledge that can continually be made more stable, and can move us towards the ‘true’. The soul becomes something that continually reaches for what it cannot know, moving into the ‘truth’, which is unknowable, in a similar sense to the Heideggerian conception of authentic Being-towards-death, where Dasein is thrown towards it end.

Ultimately, though Heidegger posited ‘authenticity’ and Plato posit ‘truth’ as ideals to strive for, they were only ideals in that they encouraged movement, self examination and self improvement. They are something ‘meta’ to our world, that none the less help us to navigate it. To be truly ‘authentic’ in Heidegger’s conception would require full and permanent removal from the world, which is an impossibility. Authenticity remains only ‘an ontological possibility’ (BT 266/311)[12], an ideal to strive for. We can only become aware of the distinction between authenticity/inauthenticity through angst, and therefore be able to move towards one of the poles. Similarly Plato/Socrates admits that ‘truth’ as a ‘form’ is unknowable, but something we desire and strive for – something, once the aporia frees us to move, which enables movement in our liminal existence. To return to Krug’s river metaphor, one critic described authenticity as the struggle for authenticity: ‘like swimming against the current’[13], and we are reminded of Socrates on his raft. The ‘other side’ may or not be reachable, the ‘music’ may or not be imagined, that is not the issue. The issue both of these thinkers wanted to assess is what we do whilst on the river.

Socrates was convinced of the existence of the Forms, as a ‘hypothesis’. Simmias, though mostly convinced, admits to ‘private misgivings’ (107b). Plato’s views are inaccessible, we have no conception of what he did or did not believe. If we believe that Socrates presents Plato’s views, Plato is a hypocrite; at once positing that the soul within the body cannot conceive of the ‘truth’, and that he has found it in the Forms. And so we are lead to a somewhat appropriate ending. We have the choice: to believe in the literal word of the text, or choose the (in my view) more ‘stable’ assumption that Plato’s text is internally consistent, acting as a guide rather than a manual, which will lead us to the much larger, braver and helpful conclusion that I have built to. Taken in this way, Plato’s text is helping us understand itself.

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Notes
 
1. Vlastos, 1983. Though the Socratic elenchus is a commonly held notion, it is not one that Plato stuck to or outlined in his works. Thus, we have arguments against the notion of Socrates having a definite method at all (See Scott, 2002). The aporia, however, even if not a stage in argument as Vlastos conceived it, is recognised as an existing event.

2. Actually, the theory of recollection isn’t correctly examined within the Phaedo, but in the Meno (Meno 86a). In Phaedo it is introduced by Cebes as an ‘excellent argument’ already existing outside of the text (Phaedo 73a).
 
3. All references to Being and Time come from the Macquarrie and Robinson translation, the first parenthesised number refers to the page numbers of the original Heidegger Sein und Zeit, the second to the translation.
 
4. See Being and Time §12 (BT 53/78 – 59/86) for an overview of this concept. Alternatively ‘World: The event of meaning’ in (Greaves, 2010: 36-49) provides an excellent account.
 
5. Something I won’t be looking into in this essay, but see the introduction to Bluck’s ‘Plato’s Phaedo’, 1955, for one amoung many examples of this assumption.
 
6. Tom Greaves, chooses to translate das-man as ‘The One’, or ‘One-self’, indicating a totality that includes the individual Dasein in question, and is not experienced as ‘Other’ in some way. See (Greaves, 2010:54).
 
7. Ibid. 69
 
8. Blattner (2006: 15), has commented that ‘Eigentlichkeit’ is better translated as ‘ownedness’ – perhaps a better word to use when understanding the similarities between Plato’s and Heidegger’s projects.
 
9. To call Heidegger’s conception ‘dualistic’ is to ignore the complexities of the connection between these two concepts that we cannot go into here.
 
10. Note that Socrates, when positing his belief, always admits to the negation of this belief. (67a, 76e for example) and is always aware that they are bases on ‘assumptions’(92b) that are mere hypotheses, not ‘truth’.

11. Quoted in (Zuckert, 1985: 43)

12. See also (BT 181/225): ‘‘The Self... is proximally and for the most part inauthentic, the they-self. Being-in-the-world is always fallen’

13. (Carman, 2002:24)


Bibliography

• Blattner, William (2006), Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Readers Guide (London, New York: Continuum, 2006).


• Bluck, R.S (1955), ‘Introduction’ in Plato’s Phaedo (London: Routledge, 2003) pp 1-34.

• Carmen , Taylor (2000), ‘Must We Be Inauthentic’ in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Volume 1, Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (eds)(Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2000) pp13-29.

• Greaves, Thomas (2010), Starting With Heidegger (London, New York: Continuum, 2010).

• Heidegger, Martin (1927), Being and Time, Trans. John McIntyre and Ian T. Ramsey (London: SCM Press, 1962).

• Krug, Spencer (2008), ‘Bang Your Drum’ in Wolf Parade: At Mount Zoomer (Montreal: Sub Pop Records, 2007).

• Plato, ‘Apology’ in Five Dialogues: Second Edition, Trans. G.M.A Grube (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company) pp 21-45.

• Plato, ‘Meno’ in Five Dialogues: Second Edition, Trans. G.M.A Grube (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company) pp 58-93.

• Plato, ‘Phaedo’ in Five Dialogues: Second Edition, Trans. G.M.A Grube (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company) pp 93 -155.

• Scott, G. A, ‘Introduction’ in Does Socrates have a method?: Rethinking the Elenchu in Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

• Vlastos, Gregory (1983), 'The Socratic Elenchus' in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy I, (1983) pp 27–58.

• Vlastos, Gregory (1991), ‘Socratic Irony’ in Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp21-45.

• Williams, Neil (2010), ‘The Logic of The Lack: The Concept of ‘Liminality’ in Plato’s Philosophy and Methodology’ on Etceterart.blogspot.com (http://etceterart.blogspot.com/2010/12/one-essay-neil-williams.html : 6/12/2010).

• Zuckert, Catherine (1996) ‘Heidegger’s New Beginning’ in Postmodern Plato’s (London, Chicago, 1996) pp33-70.