On June 14, 2008, J. H. Prynne, an English poet, scholar, and critic, gave a keynote address to an audience at “Hunan Normal University, Guangzhou, P. R. China.”1 The published version of the talk named the location with precision, “P. R.” being the administrative designation for “People’s Republic.” The designation has all but disappeared from western journalism over the past three decades, during which time the People’s Republic has become more or less synonymous with China itself. While much of the Anglophone world accepts the claims of Beijing over its territories as a stable, if not exactly settled, affair, Prynne’s fastidious use of the name “P.R. China,” in distinction to the Republic of China (Taiwan), seems to invoke the tense détente between China and Taiwan, raising an awkward topic about China’s territorial claims when it appears to be most respectful.
The lecture surfaces Prynne’s abiding and somewhat eccentric loyalty to Mao.2 As a left-wing intellectual who came of age during the 1960’s and 70’s, Prynne may have been attracted to Maoism as an alternative to the increasingly divided left-wing politics in Europe. In this respect, he resembles a number of notable intellectuals from that era, including Sartre, Foucault, and Badiou, who all expressed sympathy with Maoism. For many, the American intervention in Vietnam clarified the need for an anti-imperialist overhaul of stagnant orthodoxies. Yet Prynne’s loyalty to Mao is far from straightforward. He never joined a Maoist party and has not contributed to Maoist publications in Europe. He did not campaign for a revolution that would emerge from the third world or the first; indeed he seems not to have campaigned at all. Stranger still, Prynne’s interest in Mao persisted as the facts about the cultural revolution came to light; it persisted after Tiananmen Square; and it persists today, even as the country has long since turned away from collective agriculture and toward the global marketplace. Here and elsewhere, it appears that his political identity is quite removed from “actually existing socialism.”
In a 2010 essay, entitled “No Universal Plan for a Good Life,” Prynne all but renounces the party as the horizon of political engagement. The purpose of reflecting on “choice,” he writes, is neither to raise consciousness, nor to organize around shared interests, but rather “to think and act in accord with one’s principles and to keep these principles directed towards a coherent aspiration.”3 It is tempting to call this ethics rather than politics, for the rhetoric seems to pertain to an individual in isolation, over whom the poet observes from something like a moralist’s high ground. And some leftists might see in this an aloof disdain for class conflict, in particular the account of contradiction between bourgeois and proletarian interests that has long served as the conceptual ground for radical politics. Taken as a whole, Prynne’s corpus seems to pose an intractable difficulty: on the one hand, a poet who writes from and for the left; on the other hand, a poet who does not engage with political tactics. If Prynne rejects the dialectic with which we are more familiar—Hegel’s drama of antagonism, struggle, and recognition, in which ideological misprisions are overcome—what is the basis of his commitment?
Prynne’s keynote address at Guangzhou takes Mao’s 1937 polemic “On Contradiction” as its central text. In this essay, Mao follows Friedrich Engels in claiming that contradictions exist in nature, rather than merely in thought or society; he argues that politics is the social task of resolving such contradictions; and he interprets the People’s Republic as the logical outcome of this process. According to a typology developed in this essay, contradictions that result from the difference between our knowledge of the world and the world itself are “external.” External contradictions involve misunderstanding and we tend to resolve them with the ordinary means common to scientific investigation, such as induction and generalization. But there are also contradictions that subtend the epistemology we otherwise take for granted. Unlike external contradictions, these “internal” contradictions structure the world itself. Internal contradictions do not emerge from misunderstanding, but rather from the very objects that are misunderstood. As a result, we are disarmed of our capacity to resolve them.
Prynne appears to want to reclaim the language of contradiction, or imagine it anew. And it is possible to see why this methodological turn might be appealing. A traditional leftist idea, associated with the Hegelian dialectic of recognition, is that the awareness of oppression will lead to popular emancipation. But if the political disappointments of the past two generations have taught us anything, it is that the knowledge of grotesque inequality and exploitation has not yielded success for the left, electoral or otherwise. In the ruthless skirmish for material advantage, mere knowledge is insufficient. Prynne seems to agree with Mao that politics will be stalled at a frustrating impasse until leftists can speak of internal contradictions with the same confidence that they have learnt to speak of external contradictions. What’s more, poetry may offer a language for doing so.
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The lecture at Hunan Normal University is an attempt to translate Mao’s political theory into literary practice.4 In a crucial passage, Prynne echoes Mao in suggesting that the poet bears a responsibility toward “intrinsic anomaly:”
The working-encounter with contradiction in the very substance of object-reality and the obduracy of thought; irony not as optional tone of voice but as marker for intrinsic anomaly.5
The translation into literary theory happens across the semicolon, where “contradiction” becomes “irony.” By conceiving irony as an analogue or instance of Mao’s idea, Prynne suggests that this technique will not serve poets as a trope that they may select from rhetorical manuals; rather irony must be the material of poetic invention. The point is captured well in Prynne’s phrase, “intrinsic anomaly:” if the contradictions that inhere in things also inhere in language, poetry can be defined and assessed by the oppositions it makes visible.
Prynne’s notion of irony serves as a rebuke to its use in the literary tradition, as the history of poetry is the history of irony, especially across the twentieth century. Modernism registered irony as formal experiment: the use of an improper, disreputable, or capricious voice; the disavowal (or parody) of meter and rhyme; the irreverence for line and stanza in otherwise sincere experiments. Whatever the putative radicalism of this poetry, it quickly secured a foothold at the institution which had anointed itself the arbiter of high culture: the university. Between the wars, literary studies grew into an important and powerful institution. The technique of “close-reading,” with which poems were interpreted absent context, proved a useful tool for the discipline to attract students who wanted to study vernacular literature but had little education in languages. The transformation of literary studies from philological criticism to close-reading was hastened by the fact that several critics essential to the promotion of modernist poetry were also professors. Due to changes in the economics of cultural production, poetry sold less than novels, newspapers, and magazines, and poets came to forego both patrons and consumers for the last enclave in which they could earn a salary. With the arrival of New Criticism at Cambridge and Vanderbilt in the 1930’s, students learned to read from poets with a vested interest in irony as a readerly paradigm as well as a writerly practice.
In another time, irony might have been an unlikely ally to the business of academic research. After all, there is a rich tradition that regards irony as an affective technique for exposing the difference between what things seem and what things are. The trope is supposed to give us pause, to destabilize the referential ambitions of ordinary language. But because literary studies found itself in competition with other disciplines, it was necessary not only to provide a coherent sense of what the study of poetry is, but also what students of poetry know. And irony was the surprising answer. The many poetry textbooks (which often sound like manifestos) that were published around World War II attest to the tremendous influence of irony—or “ambiguity,” or “paradox,” which effectively became synonyms for irony—in the education industry. If poetry was the representation of verbal difference or opposition, interpretation would be the process by which it was identified and resolved. Poems were problems, and problems have solutions.
The conspicuous use of scientific jargon by critics like I.A. Richards seems to have legitimized the discipline before an academic bureaucracy increasingly hostile to non-scientific work. Just as a string of carbon compounds would appear in an unknown equation on an exam in organic chemistry, students would be faced with poems that were difficult to interpret. The poet would desire contradictory things, or exist in a contradictory place, and the students were asked to explain how the poet overcame this irony. In one account, students were meant to find the poem’s “unity” and “organization;” in another, its “essential structure.” The presumption is that poetry is naturally whole, organic, and coherent, and therefore susceptible to scientific or pseudo-scientific ratiocination. What appears variable is constant; what appears irregular is law-like. The disturbance on the surface of a poem is but the exquisite confusion or deliberate reticence of a lyrical subject, and it is our pleasure to resolve an irony which was never more than verbal.
In order to approximate empirical science, literary studies had to commit itself, implicitly, to the view that irony was superficial rather than structural. As the premise by which knowledge was produced, advertised, and sold as literary studies, irony was diminished to a trifle. No less than sociology or astrophysics, the interpretation of poetry was made fundamentally consistent with—indeed grounded upon—this account of knowledge that has come to dominate nearly every sphere of academic life. Or to put it in Prynne’s terms, poetry became the representation of “external contradictions.” The problem with conceiving of poetry as external contradiction is that it tempts us to understand language as an instrument by which readers learns to transcend their limitations, altering the world by the sheer act of heroic intelligence. But such a fantasy is far from adequate to literary expression. By treating irony as an opposition internal to language, Prynne will suggest that poetry must yield an encounter with contradiction prior to knowledge as such.
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Nowhere is the character of Prynne’s irony more evident than Kazoo Dreamboats; or, On What There Is, a poem published in 2011. He has acknowledged that the whimsical title was meant to hearten readers who might have been discouraged by his philosophical ambition, but the poem’s philosophical ambition quickly becomes apparent to any reader.6 The poem amounts to a mere twenty-five pages in length, and consists entirely of verse paragraphs that resemble prose, with pronouncements that are dense as theorems. “What is not rock is voidally known, contra particulate in a time stream diffused evenly through a reservoir payzone,” he writes to the rhythm of an uncanny jingle; later he provides a gloss on the phrase “voidally known” with the remark that “rapid decay concerns the sonic void.”7 Where a philosopher is obliged to argue with propositions like this—What is the void? How do we know?-—Prynne exercises his poetic license to assert them without justification or proof. But his disdain for the conventions of argument should not be mistaken for indifference. The poem charts a covert but potent assault upon epistemology, warning that “empty truth is a medicine without a sickness.”8
In lieu of argument, philosophical concepts have been given poetic form. But the form is unusual: there are no line breaks, apart from the accidental pauses induced by a sentence having reached its margin. It is impossible to discern consistent rhyme or meter. When we are not confronted with Prynne’s original reflection on philosophical concepts, we encounter direct quotations from his sources. Several remarks are punctuated by long passages from Parmenides, Aristotle, and Boethius. Not that the poem is prosaic: it is a recognizable modification of our formal expectations. Kazoo Dreamboats is, after all, a dream vision. The setting is a “corridor,” along which language paces to and fro. What building the corridor belongs to is ambiguous, if it is a building at all. Though there is a first-person subject, “I,” who makes occasional but emphasized appearances, the pronoun seems not to refer to a human being. The “corridor” is a “corridor of near frequency,” and the subject might as well be a subatomic particle. We are left to speculate that the poem is a dream vision that emerged from no one’s unconscious.
But if Kazoo Dreamboats is an effort to express “instrinsic” contradictions, we must set aside our questions about genre. We will find contradictions not in the poem’s form but rather in its matter, which is to say language itself. A favorite technique is the repetition that resolves itself into a pun:
Funded in borrowed fun by cowardice, replevin bonded expiry hit your head on bricks which are in common knowledge the haunt of accident.
While “funded” seems to suggest high finance, the word comes from the Latin fundus, meaning base or origin, and it does not acquire the sense of monetary supply until the growth of stock markets in the seventeenth century. Prynne exaggerates the temporal dislocation by means of an internal rhyme with “fun.” This word comes from Middle English, in which it meant something trick, joke or deceitful scorn. Middle English appears again in the legal term “replevin.” Before the expansion of civil litigation, in which a plaintiff could seek financial redress for personal or proprietary harms, it was common to request direct compensation for what was damaged. The historical record attests to the particular importance of cattle, such that a stolen calf would be returned in the form of another calf. The physical comedy of the next phrase, “hit your head on bricks,” rounds out the carnivalesque scene.
Faced with images of exchange from two distinct eras, we must ask where the poem takes place. The answer is both then and now: though the gentle caricature of medieval England seems a wistful contrast with the present, it is clear that this period suffered from its own kinds of domination and control. The poem seems to suggest, despairingly, that people were no less attuned to their predicament before the rise of industry, the consequences of “which are in common knowledge the haunt of accident.” This is to say that the logic of exchange in medieval England—though infinitely simpler than the logic by which we operate today—also oppressed its subjects. The contrast between the decisively modern “fund” and the jocularly medieval “fun” begins to fall apart, and that is the point. The poem does not dwell in nostalgia for a society that was also violent and alienated. The envelopment of the planet by finance capital is only the latest mutation of a social order substantially built on exchange, the purpose of which has been, and continues to be, the mystification of social life.
While it may seem that false consciousness comes from an individual’s failure to grasp the truth, Prynne would have us believe that false consciousness is native to cognition as such. It neutralizes the methods by which we would resolve our errors. The dystopian rustic landscape of Kazoo Dreamboats is inhabited by several figures who represent our own helplessness in the face of false consciousness, as in the following passage:
The old folks just better stay at home or lose their reason too, mine and yours loaned against non-interest.
We do not recognize the misalignment between our interests and those of capital because we are disabled from doing so. Hence the “old folks,” who “lose their reason” if they walk outside their front-door. Prynne offers them a bit of sententious advice: stay home. Outside that place of familiar comfort, they risk physical exposure and mental weakness. It would be tempting to see this landscape as a parody of Yeats’s Byzantium, which was “no country for old men.” Yeats longed for Byzantium because he could be “out of nature” there, disburdened of his “aged” and “paltry” body, whereas Prynne’s “old folks” do not long for Eden. In the world of this poem, they cannot know such a fantasy.
Though faced with lived experiences that contradict our ideas and expectations, we are not able to test and reject our hypotheses. There is no sense of objectivity in Kazoo Dreamboats; no sense of autonomy; no sense that the mind can move beyond its own impasse, even with considerable strain. There is only struggle. Thought is not a laboratory, given to neutral experiment; it is the mosaic of a hostile landscape viewed through an insect’s dozen eyes.
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Prynne’s characters—if we can call them characters—often confront quandaries like this, what we would be right to identify as internal contradictions. Poetry seems an especially good vehicle for communicating cases of perplexity and impairment that place language under intense duress. But Prynne has made it clear that he wants the notion of internal contradiction to extend beyond false consciousness. Following Mao, he asks us to imagine that it is not just the mind, but also the world, that suffers from ineradicable opposition.
Unique to the natural philosophy of Marxism is the thesis that contradictions exist within reality itself. Friedrich Engels was its chief proponent, and his posthumous writings on the subject were influential in the U.S.S.R. and P.R.C. The Dialectics of Nature – extensive notes written between 1872 and 1883, unpublished in Engels’s lifetime – shows how the sciences of his day were grappling with problems that were essentially dialectical in character, in particular the change from “quantity” to “quality” that we now call “phase transition.” Recalling a famous passage from the Communist Manifesto, Engels cites as an example of phase transition the melting of solid into liquid and the evaporation of liquid into air. The idea is that the temperature of something can increase degree by degree without altering in kind—the solid remains solid, even if warmed—until, suddenly, it changes. Ice becomes water, and water becomes steam. Engels believed that transitions like this entail the genesis of one thing from another, indeed from its opposite. To the extent that nature would produce and reconcile contradictions of its own, it seemed to observe the law of dialectics. He argued that the dialectic could explain scientific progress not because it described in broad outline how human beings propose and refute hypotheses, but rather because it described—indeed, was identical with—the very processes that scientists aspire to understand.
This is the conceit that Prynne asks us to accept in Kazoo Dreamboats. Importing to the poem what we find in Engels and Mao, Prynne tests whether the dialectic of nature can withstand the discoveries of contemporary physics. His information about contemporary physics comes from two textbooks, one on van der Waals forces and the second on condensed matter.9 Though far from comprehensive surveys of the fields today, the books represent significant areas of active research. At issue are weak molecular forces, which sometimes arise when quantum mechanical systems reach a minimum degree of energy. They may attract or repel; they may emerge between permanent dipoles, or induce new ones. Prynne seems especially compelled by this apparent contingency and reversibility. Kazoo Dreamboats treats weak molecular forces as totems for the dialectical “structure of material things.”10 To demonstrate the truth of such a proposition is a difficult task, and requires an elastic idiom. As we saw above, Prynne tends to locate contradictions within language itself, as the case of “even” in the following passage:
Nothing that is not nothing will do it, across a vacuum referred by its overt container, from inside to side placed out interdict risen fortress narrow alert summation vectorial index, do alternated position even integral even average through time.11
The verb “do” in this sentence seems to require another verb in order to conjugate in the continuous aspect, the way that you would say “I do care” or “you do know.” We are held mid-line, waiting for a verb that never comes. As a result, “even” is strained. It may be one, or all, of the following: an adjective meaning “the same as”; an adverb meaning “unexpectedly” or “surprisingly”; and an intensifier, “indeed!”
The permutations of the sentence are practically innumerable, or at least they seem innumerable in the time-bound experience of a first or second pass. The suspense here resembles a line from a poem To Pollen, which concludes with a bewildering command: “Try doing it now.”12 Prynne wants to provoke in his reader an anxiety about the limits of our obdurate situatedness in the known world. But the command wields rhetorical force to the precise extent that it is impossible to execute, or, alternatively, as a mechanism of self-defense. Kazoo Dreamboats similarly yields indecision at a moment of dense—it is tempting to say confused—reflection, this time on the physics of “nothing.” Prynne tells us that this “nothing” is in fact “not nothing,” for else it could not “do it.” But he does not explain what this generic activity (the “doing”) or its generic object (the “it”) might be. What Prynne does specify is no more specific: the activity takes place within a “vacuum,” which is to say a place that is not a place. As the wordplay begins to exhaust itself, the sentence simply accelerates our consumption of jargon: “summation,” “vectorial,” “index” in quick succession. By the time the reader gets to the ambiguous “even,” the sentence needs a pun in order to clarify its argument. Treating nouns like “integral” and “average” as verbs, Prynne compensates for the failure to convince the reader of his view by exploiting the ambiguity of technical definitions in the textbooks from which he has taken them. If the sentence does fail to persuade, it nevertheless raises a troubling question: Is the physicist’s “average” an object, an action, or somehow both?
Pressed beneath the weight of its own structure, language seems to reproduce the contradictions believed to exist in the material world. Prynne’s chief discovery is that the laws of etymology and syntax imitate the laws of nature, if we push them towards the outer boundaries of their routine operations. But if this is Prynne’s conceit, we must ask whether etymology and syntax, however rich, can justify the philosophy that the poem sets out to prove. How can the contradictions within language—its “intrinsic anomalies”—express anything but ourselves?
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According to J.B.S. Haldane, the geneticist and socialist who translated Dialectics of Nature into English in 1939, Engels was more or less correct about much of late Victorian science. And where he was wrong, the mistakes did not seriously imperil his political claims. But as Haldane concedes in the introduction to his edition, the argument “is often hard to follow if one does not know the history of the scientific practice and theory of that time.”13
There is no shortage of philosophers—indeed philosophers who double as physicists—who have attempted to reconcile dialectical materialism with the rapid breakdown of the classical mechanical consensus after 1905. Several were active and prominent in Soviet Russia, most eminently Abram Ioffe. But they can be found the world over, from England (Haldane being a prominent example) to America to Japan. Shoichi Sakata—who studied under a Nobel laureate, trained several others, and barely missed out on the prize himself for his 1956 “Sakata Model” that anticipated the 1964 discovery of quarks—wrote “Theoretical Physics and the Dialectics of Nature” in order to suggest that the outstanding questions from the Bohr-Einstein debate of a decade prior could be resolved by dialectics alone. At the end of his life, he said that “Engels’s Dialektik der Natur has been continuously sending invaluable light into my studies of about forty years.”14
To “send light,” rather as the muse inspires a poet or the gods inspire a prophet. Even if we grant that the dialectic of nature may help to call the creative mind to invention, we must acknowledge that it is unnecessary to the progress of science itself. The truth is that physics can proceed just as well with or without the dialectic, for that matter with or without any logical source of invention. Some scientists depend on ideas like this, some do not. The diverse interests of Einstein, Bohr, and Sakata will show that speculation plays an important but contingent role in the biographies of individuals, and a negligible role in the field entire.
Whether the dialectic of nature can be reconciled with contemporary physics is a separate question from whether it is required for contemporary physics. Just as medieval theologians would reconcile Aristotle with Christianity, it is possible to imagine that competing structures of authority may fit together in an elaborate way. Arguments like this tend to rely upon the eloquence and learning of scholars, and bear little relationship to the bodies of knowledge they purport to study. And Prynne is certainly an eloquent and learned scholar. The propositions in Kazoo Dreamboats are lent support by citations (some direct, some indirect) from many kinds of literature. The poem owes its capacity of persuasion to this curiosity and resourcefulness, and it is nothing if not a daunting monument to the poet’s erudition. Each sentence contains a literary history, each word a philological discovery from a library he has accumulated across a lifetime of reading, writing, and teaching. His poetry resists any temptation to slow down, to stop making its frantic connections. As a literary artifact, the poem has produced a language that is the most obvious sign of its humanity. To the extent that Kazoo Dreamboats bears witness to some “intrinsic anomaly,” it is the singularity of his imaginative exertion.
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Prynne’s account of poetry has embraced contradiction as one of its constitutive features, and in doing so, rejected the law of non-contradiction, which is a fundamental value of western thought. But there is no proof for the law of noncontradiction. Philosophers don’t often put the issue in so many words, as their profession today exists to furnish the empirical sciences with intellectual support. Clutching axioms like pearls, they tend to imply that the law of noncontradiction is not a choice but a fact, and that thought which does not meet its criteria does not count as “thought.”
The point dates back to Aristotle, who complained in Book 3 of the Metaphysics that sophists who would admit contradictions into philosophy find themselves confused about the very nature of their task. Aristotle believed it was fortunate that such facile posturing was easy to refute. Should an honest philosopher want to dismiss the sophist, he (always he) would only need “our opponent to make some statement.” Then the philosopher would simply deny whatever the sophist had said. And with what could the sophist reply? Nothing, because he had bereft himself of the law of noncontradiction: “It is absurd to seek for an argument against one who has no arguments of his own about anything,” Aristotle smirked, “for such a person, in so far as he is such, is really no better than a vegetable.”
J. H. Prynne would quite like to become a vegetable—or better still, a rock. His corpus bears witness to a long-held desire to move beyond the subject. If the early poems slip into romantic anti-capitalism, they nevertheless move towards determinedly anti-humanist works such as A Note on Metal (1968), White Stones (1969), and Brass (1971). By this time the human subject appears in his poetry under increasing scrutiny, even scorn. When the collected Poems came out in 1999, the yellow cover had at its center a medium-sized image of no person—and certainly no image of Prynne—but rather a Chinese manuscript; the second edition had an envelope; the third a crystal.
Kazoo Dreamboats allows the subject to fantasize its own disappearance. Indeed it goes so far as to argue that its disappearance is necessary, a consequence entailed by material force. Yet the poet’s eccentric intelligence proves an obstacle in the attempt to carry out this task. Whatever the protests to the contrary, the poem is inimitably Prynne’s. But he also seems fully aware of this limitation, which is also a strength, that his poetry cannot be like anyone else’s:
This is and must be the thought of nothing that cannot be apart from what is, neither as or by cause, what it is to be, relentless and unsame.15
Besides the metaphysical content of this sentence—its meditation on causality and substance—what is at stake is the movement from “is” to “must.” Though Prynne again asserts that the world is necessary rather than contingent, he also says that this ontic necessity implies a deontic necessity: we are obliged to grasp the truth of contradiction. Contradictions are treated not as propositions but rather as commands or exclamations.
We tend to accept the law of noncontradiction on account of the inferences it makes possible, namely the production of knowledge and the falsification of hypotheses discovered to be inconsistent with evidence. But we should not allow this pragmatism to obscure that the choice to accept the law of noncontradiction is ours. Which is to say that it is, finally, a choice. Prynne demands that we broach this choice as that which is ethical for thought as such. Kazoo Dreamboats may not be able to demonstrate, or even persuade, that the world operates according to laws which are consistent with Engels’s and Mao’s hypothesis; indeed it may be infeasible for any work to do so; but the poem does disclose, by example, what is possible when we renounce our epistemological concerns about how to know and, as if for the first time, approach the question of what is. By abandoning knowledge as the horizon of each and every speech-act, we are free to follow language where it leads.