A poem from PERSONATIONSKIN by KARL PARKER

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

“Warm All the Time Now” in Personationskin by Karl Parker

(No Tell Books, Reston, VA, 2009)

Warm All the Time Now

Morning, the large reddish bush—in the middle
of a small public square in a town that grows

tinier this time of year—glitters with masses of
hangers-on from last night’s rain. One imagines them

evaporating as whatever will happen today begins
to happen, and sounds in the street increase. Still,

sitting in view of the bush on its slightly raised stone pedestal,
such imaginings—with all their little, glittery, liquid

differences—suggest there’s no observer here, except
insofar as companionable accidents accompany the scene.

*

This is a [speculative] realist poem. It is anti-correlationist. I think it’s important to understand what that means in order to understand its “kick”, its power. Since I’m not a philosopher, I’ll quote one, Levi R Bryant, who will explain correlationism:

As developed by [Quentin] Meillassoux [in his After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency], the predominant orientation of thought in contemporary philosophy is that of correlationism. […] the thesis of the essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. All we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself.

“This decision alone suffices to disqualify every absolute of the realist or materialist variety. Every materialism that would be speculative, and hence for which absolute reality is an entity without thought, must assert both that thought is not necessary (something can be independently of thought), and that thought can think what there must be when there is no thought. The materialism that chooses to follow the speculative path is thereby constrained to believe that it is possible to think a given reality by abstracting from the fact that we are thinking it.” (AF, 36)

As articulated by Meillassoux, “… ‘correlation[ism]’ [is] the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (AF, 5). As a result,

“[c]orrelationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object “in itself”, in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object” (5)

Elsewhere Meillassoux expresses the position of correlationism as follows:

Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something, you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you.

“Consequently, the sentence ‘X is’, means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception or a conception, or of any given subjective act. To be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation.” (Collapse, Volume III, 409)

…

Part of Meillassoux’s value lies in his articulation of the core argument common to a diverse variety of different contemporary philosophical orientations. The correlationist strategy consists in demonstrating that the object can only be thought as it is given, and it can only be thought as it is given for a subject. In drawing our attention to givenness for a subject, correlationism thus demonstrates that we can never know what the object is in-itself, but only what it is for-us. In short, any truth one might articulate is not a truth of the world as it would be regardless of whether or not we exist, but only a truth for-us.

(“Correlationism and the Fate of Philosophy”, at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/correlationism-and-the-fate-of-philosophy/ Larval Subjects, 13 Jun 08)

Anti-correlationism, simply put, removes human perception from the center of the universe. Roy Bhaskar has some interesting arguments suggesting that science (or at least experiment) does allow us access to “the things themselves”, or at least to things beyond the way we think them. Graham Harman argues along the lines that while every object in the universe is correlationist in a way, there is nothing privileged about human or any other sort of access. In other words, it’s not phenomena vs noumena, except to a crazy narcissist who thinks we are the center of everything. Realism suggests that the noumena actually are out there, independent of how we think them. It’s phenomena AND noumena. Different speculative realists have different ideas of what this might mean.

Parker here reveals his own anti-correlationist speculative realist vision, which doesn’t come til towards the end of the poem. We’ll get there.

“Warm All the Time Now”. The title suggests a Spring/Summer-like time frame for the poem.

Morning, the large reddish bush—in the middle
of a small public square in a town that grows

tinier this time of year—glitters with masses of
hangers-on from last night’s rain.

This is a kind of still life. I assume the large reddish bush has either leafed out or blossomed. And that the town grows tinier either because the citizens migrate due to the warmth, the tourists leave (let’s say it’s a ski resort) or for other reasons about which we can speculate. But it’s not The Incredible Shrinking Town or anything magic realist like that. And of course the “masses of / hangers-on from last night’s rain” is the morning dew.

One imagines them

evaporating as whatever will happen today begins
to happen, and sounds in the street increase.

There is a speaker/thinker here, imagining the day which is about to begin. It’s clearly early morning, before the town springs to life.

Still,

sitting in view of the bush on its slightly raised stone pedestal,
such imaginings—with all their little, glittery, liquid

differences—suggest there’s no observer here, except
insofar as companionable accidents accompany the scene.  

Here’s where the anti-correlationism comes in. Which isn’t only philosophically interesting. In other words, the imaginer, the speaker/thinker, is merely a “companionable accident”, coexisting with the bush, the pedestal, the town square, the town itself, the dew, the morning. He/she is in no way the determiner of anything.

Now, why is this interesting, why is it not just a “move”, as Elisa Gabbert might put it (not that a move is just a move for her, exactly, but that’s another essay)? Because it’s profoundly ecological. The destruction of correlationism destroys the barrier separating us from (note-the-caps) Nature, and renders us an indissociable and companionable member of the universe of objects, processes, etc. Many now argue that this barrier-breakdown is essential if we are to find our place in the universe. The importance of this is also another essay; let me just point you to the work of Tim Morton, who’s written about this in ways I never could. I don’t believe that this barrier-breakdown is in any way an abnegation of our responsibilities; it’s a way to get a handle on what they truly are.

In any case, and at the very least, I much prefer considering myself a companionable accident than the crown of creation. I feel actual “hope” when I consider myself that way. Well, not hope exactly; but the hope for hope, for a kind of joyous active peace, begins to seem like a possibility …

           

*****

[Editor’s Note: This is one of 50 reviews written, mas o menos, in 50 days.  While each engagement can be read on a stand-alone basis, there’s a layer of watching the critic’s subjectivity arise in a fulsome manner if the reviews are read one after another.  So if you have insomnia and/or are curious about this layer, I suggest you read the 50 reviews right after each other and, to facilitate this type of reading, I will put at the bottom of each review a “NEXT” button that will take you to the next review.  To wit: NEXT.  And an Afterword on John's reading process is also available HERE!]

John Bloomberg-Rissman is somewhere towards middle of In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam (picture Hannah Hoch painting over the Sistine Chapel) The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making, and Flux, Clot & Froth. In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, he has edited or co-edited two anthologies, 1000 Views of 'Girl Singing' and The Chained Hay(na)ku Project, and is at work on a third, which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg. He is also deep into two important collaborations, one with Richard Lopez, one with Anne Gorrick. By important he means "important to him". Anyone else want to collaborate? He blogs at Zeitgeist Spam.