Deconstruction as "overturning binaries"

I'm a little tired of the description of deconstruction as the exploding of binary oppositions. Handled correctly, this way of describing the strategy is helpful, but in most cases, it's a bit deceiving. If you read a lot of Derrida, you'll begin to wonder why this description is even used in the first place, because deconstruction really only concerns itself with singularities, and can't really be deployed, ever, by approaching singularities with this general schema. What is needed is an emphasis on how what this description describes would only be the resulting appearance of the deconstruction, its product, if you will, and could only be perceived by foregoing the deconstruction--that is, by abstraction. If this emphasis is made, the whole situation changes. Unfortunately, it often isn't.
Why this description is used in the first place, is because Derrida precisely tried to abstract and generalize about what he was doing in his texts--texts which had already been published--in an interview in 1971. There he attempts to describe deconstruction as a strategy, and comes up with the following:

...What interested me then [when he was writing "La dissémination" and "La mythologie blanche," that is, in the late 60's], and that I am attempting to pursue along other lines now, at the same time as a "general economy," a kind of general strategy of deconstruction. The latter is to avoid both simply neutralizing the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these oppositions, thereby confirming it.
Therefore we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is both systematic and in itself divided, a double writing, that is, a writing that is in and of itself multiple... On the one hand, we must traverse a phase of overturning. To do justice to this necessity is to recognize that in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy... To deconstruct that opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment.... [And on the other hand,] we must also mark the interval between inversion, which brings low what was high, and the irruptive emergence of a new "concept," a concept that can no longer be, and never could be, included in the previous regime.
-"Positions," in Positions, 41-42

Now, one has to, first and foremost, see this strategy as itself, in the context of the interview, at that moment in history and in the history of the intellectual scene in which Derrida was working (the Marxists, for example, were pushing him hard, for example, for some concrete political positions or at least for some relation of what he was doing to political action, as they were all recovering and assessing May '68)--one has to see this description of the strategy as itself strategically organized. Unfortunately, this didn't happen, at least here in American classrooms, where Derrida was mostly being received: all over the US the passage (or more usually only a couple sentences from the passage) was distributed by overexcited professors getting off on the thrill of doing something new. The result was that they themselves knew--or at least sensed--what Derrida was up to, and believed it was very germane to crucial tasks in the university and culture more generally (and in their works it was used to engage in these tasks, confront these problems--quite rightly, I think), but their students only got their confused descriptions of what they sensed--this description being the most succinct and (what's most important) the easiest to teach.
But why so easy to teach? As always, one has to (beyond paying attention to the context) also pay very close attention to what is said here in order to really grasp it. Especially the phrase which precedes the remarks about overturning and marking, etc.: I mean the phrase about the "double gesture," that is "itself divided." Explaining this remarks--which indeed is a bit tough, I imagine, for someone to decipher who has not read a lot of Derrida--would qualify everything that follows. For what this means is that the description of deconstruction as the overturning and marking of a binary opposition would be seen not as a step by step schema so much as an aporia. But I have never seen this part taught: only what follows gets quoted. The result is a reduction of the complicated and, one would think, extremely crucial statement to a sound bite. The reason behind this, and the result's teachability, must lie elsewhere: probably in the vividness of an idea of overturning, and the vividness of the idea of hierarchies.
Let's look for this in what gets taught. This is--instead of close attention to the crucial passage-- that Derrida is saying here 1) what gets deconstructed is a binary opposition between two concepts belonging to metaphysics, and 2) deconstruction is undergone when you overturn the hierarchy of these concepts and show their opposition in the first place to be false.
Now, think of how odd this is! But also think of how easy it would be to see the action of deconstruction actually at work: deconstruction is like an approach you take to two things that you know exist--two objects--and it is the undoing of the perception of a difference between them--or, worse, the existence of them as separate. It isn't a resolution of these things--nicely sidestepping Hegel here, and an airy idealist "all is one" conclusion--because you also show thereby that the two things were hierarchically arranged. In fact, this is the real product of deconstruction: not the undoing of the difference--who can tell what two things would be like if they weren't different? student's ask in desperation--but the revealing of the hierarchy, the exposure of an injustice, of the fact that metaphysics isn't peaceful. Deconstruction is visible, then--as violence exposed.
So the original quote gets emphasized in all sorts of wrong ways--since, to begin with, for deconstruction nothing simply exists or is there. But this is besides the point: the point is that I might have done more justice to what Derrida said just now than some teachers simply by quoting even the little bits that I did. Of course, what gets taught isn't totally false: all the words like "hierarchy" and "overturning" and "binary" that were actually in the quote get used. Or, maybe it just is false: in any other discipline than literary or culture studies in the 80's and 90's, such a skewed rendering of a set of words would indeed be called totally false. But, I don't mean to knock literary studies: Derrida wouldn't even be in the States if it was up to philosophy departments--things would have stayed nice and clean and boring as hell until the late Rorty and the late Bernard Williams (but significantly they both had heavy continental influence). The point is really that the high stakes of literary studies--the particular political and social advances it was helping to make, and, essentially, its need to show that interpretation could (with a disturbing ease) reveal violence (that is, hierarchies that needed to be overthrown)--were more important than accuracy at that time insofar as teaching was concerned. So something extremely odd got thrown about everywhere when it probably should have been brought back occasionally to the actual statements from which it originated.
Or at least, more thought given to how it was taught. If we're going to talk about binaries in the future, then, I'd recommend a stress that falls less on the individual terms of the opposition than on the opposition itself. The point is not so much to see what is opposed as to see how the opposition is necessarily going to be there even before you grasp those two things--that is, how the binary or bifurcation inhabits the perception of something to begin with. Then the problem isn't one about the relationships between the opposed things in all of their structure, but about how exceeding this opposition looks impossible. That is, it makes it seem as if another and yet another series of oppositions will just replace the first one.
And this, this is the infinite regression or interminability that is the phenomenal mark of deconstruction at work. It is this appearance of the impossibility of getting out of using oppositions that is the real problem with oppositions, and what will, in the end, allow you to--as you try and get your way out of them--in fact deconstruct the original opposition by opening it up into this infinite replacement or displacement. In short, the process here, the procedure, appears interminable, as Derrida emphasizes in The Post Card (384), and it is this apparent interminability that, when engaged with or written about, will end up deconstructing of the opposition you started with. This is really what Derrida means by a divided writing or doubled gesture: at the same time as it it writing about its own operation's impossibility, it also inscribes the binary. The result is a dual writing that brings the terms of the binary out of the realm of their merely possible effects and into the realm where they will have to reorganize themselves in order to have any effect: that is, the realm where the terms of the binary break down their opposition because they have to reform otherwise to accommodate something beyond their current possibilities--that is, the impossible.
What is crucial here is, then, that the impossibility is still only an appearance, like the interminability of the replacements. But the impossible isn't hiding a real possibility that exists. So we can't ever be sure that, indeed, the impossible will at some point become possible, at the same time as we can't be sure that the impossible will remain impossible for the binary. But what happens here is that the terms have indeed been opened onto radical alterity, and that is enough: for then we aren't dealing with the two terms as if we can control them. This makes the operation one open to the singular nature of the two as they encounter alterity, because it isn't just fitting them all into some schema. The cultivation of the uncertainty is the point. If only to make us, at some point (but how could we be certain where?), uncertain of even uncertainty. But I'll stop here. All I want to do is mark how what Derrida is saying in this interview can otherwise be described--not as the application of a schema, but as a process open to (or of opening to) singularity as the uncertain advent of alterity within a constituted set of oppositions.

Dynamic, structural: explaining free and bound energy, and more, in Freud

Here is a little thing I wrote about two years ago, as I was first getting into the problems of Freud. It's a bit on the right track, but it puts a lot of things the wrong way. I hope to revise what it says eventually in another post, one that will more clearly explain the shuttling between the dynamic (or "economic") and structural (or "topographical") accounts of the mind in Freud. My ultimate goal was a bit more expansive than it should have been, which confused me: I was trying to relate how the unconscious related to the Id, and what displacement was effected there in the terms with which Freud was dealing with the mind. However, following Derrida, I got hung up on how these problems were already emerging in the Project for a Scientific Psychology and resurfacing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as well as, especially, "The Economic Problem in Masochism:"

In understanding the relationship between the Ego, Id, Unconsciousness and Consciousness, it is helpful to investigate what exactly underlies a comment Freud makes nearing the end of The Interpretation of Dreams. Recalling his discussion of the “primary” and “secondary” processes—what will be termed, descriptively, the unconscious and preconscious processes or, structurally (that is, in terms of how this process relates to the other processes of the mind when describing the dynamic operations of the whole apparatus), the Ucs. and Pcs.—Freud reminds us that what we are invited to assume by the postulation of these two different parts of the mind “is not the existence of two systems near the motor end of the apparatus, but the existence of two kinds of processes of excitation or modes of its discharge” (the first sentence of "Unconsciousness and Consciousness--Reality," the last section of the book). What Freud attempts to point out here is that these two processes can be made more distinguishable as results or effects of the dynamic movements of a basic psychical energy rather than as two static psychical territories that govern this movement. In other words, Freud reminds us that, when dealing with the two psychical processes he elaborates here, we should remain attentive not to the location of the psychical energy within the mind but to the two basic tendencies of movement of this psychical energy.
We may bring forth what underlies this comment if we see what happens when we heed his advice. Paying attention to psychical energy and its movements—that is, to its investments, its Besetzungen (translated in English as “cathexes”)—we find that Freud feels compelled to distinguish between two processes because he believes he has observed two basic tendencies of energetic movement or investment. As Freud explains here and throughout his writings, it becomes evident that the first (primary and Ucs.) process should be regarded as the process constituted by the tendency of energy to move or be invested such that it can be described as “free” energy, and the second (secondary and Pcs.) process constituted by the tendency of energy to move such that it may be described as “bound” energy. What do these descriptions mean? The aim, goal, or purpose of any accumulation of energy within the psychic apparatus being discharge (a fundamental point of Freud’s that we will discuss more in depth momentarily), energy is deemed “free” because it tends to move directly towards discharge along the path of least resistance—or at least along a path where there is as little deferral of the event of discharge as possible—and because when it discharges, it usually does so completely. On the other hand, the energy that makes up the Pcs. system is called “bound” because it is seen as “inhibited,” or more willing to defer its discharge and possess the tendency to discharge only partially (cf. “The Unconscious,” 135-6, “The Economic Problem in Masochism” 194). We may note in passing that these tendencies of movement amount as a whole into huge threads of energetic behavior that Freud calls “instincts” or, more accurately translated, “drives.”
Now that we more clearly understand this distinction between “free” and “bound” investment, we must turn to how Freud regards investment itself as existing only as differences of the quantity of energy. That is, at any specific moment in the history of the psyche, there exist no qualitative distinctions between units or even tendencies of psychic energy, and especially not between the “free” and the “bound.” The “free” and the “bound” are thus only different quantities of investment, despite their tendencies or mode of investment that we have just noted. The psyche is, indeed, like a portfolio: we may invest more or less rapidly, but at any particular point, if we ask exactly what we have invested, there will only be amounts of cash. However, throughout his work, Freud proceeds, after making this point, to keep these two distinctions of “free” and “bound” energy anyway, as if they were accumulations of investment so different in quantity as to be regarded for all intents and purposes as qualitatively different elements of the mind—so long as we remember these elemental qualities arise only from quantities.
We may ask, then, whether Freud should make this distinction in this way at all when he is attempting to set up two dynamic processes governed by the movement of psychic energy and not two static systems that, as it were, handle the energy with their own independent agency. Perhaps a simple criticism is adequate here: perhaps Freud could have explained this in different language so as to draw even more attention to the lack of a qualitative distinction between different movements of psychic energy, and thereby buttress his larger point about the radical difference of the dynamic and structural conception. For what the notion that we have merely one psychic substance made up of differences only in terms of quantity—what this notion helps to reaffirm is that we have two tendencies of psychic energy that simply operate in different ways, rather than two (or more) different types of energy within the mind warring against each other with no common battleground. That is, this quantitative conception eludes a horrific mistake of the systematic view: though this latter view is able to describe quite clearly the various parts of the mind and how they interact with each other, because it affirms a qualitative distinction between these parts in terms of the energy within them it actually forecloses an accurate analysis of the dynamics of these qualities’ intermixings. Each region of the mind gets divorced from the other based on the quality of its energetic unit, and we get only a reshuffling of the order of the qualities and their arrangement--Lacanians love this aspect of Freud the most, and generally all they do is this reshuffling (which of course has its own merits). So, would not referring to the two tendencies of energy within Freud’s structural and dynamic view in terms of their differing quantities then drive this point home? We quickly find, however, that our position is in the wrong: our hesitation to agree with this phrasing is precisely what Freud would have wanted to engender, but he only could engender it by keeping these two distinctions present in this way. That is, Freud’s decision to leave us with two types of energy, and thereby to seemingly contradict his own point by slipping back again into language that regards as qualitative what he claimed should be rigorously held as only quantitative, is not only to keep things simple for the reader so as to more fluently present the structural and dynamic conception of the mind. This contradictory phrasing remains because it also has the effect of actually reflecting and elucidating something else about the dynamic nature of the cathexes or investments that will eventually explain why a systematic view of the mind is essentially inadequate at an even more fundamental level: it is inadequate because to describe two manifestations of psychic energy in any terms other than qualitative ones (while appending disclaimers that this is, despite the language, not a qualitative distinction) is not possible if we are going to say that the psyche actually has a particular status, exists in a particular way at a particular time.
Let us elaborate: we find that this contradictory phrasing is in fact necessary for Freud because not only is he encountering a fundamental problem within the nature of the most basic element of his structural and dynamic theory of the mind, but he is also running up against a problem many thinkers--chiefly Nietzsche--have encountered. Essentially, the contradictory language opens up to larger, metaphysical levels because Freud here is tapping into a primordial contradiction: he attempts to describe something (psychical energy) that he wishes to assert ontologically exists as becoming while using language and logic that can only assert that something ontologically exists (and can only possess the quality of becoming). Thus he flips back and forth between quality and quantity. And because he is able to describe the psyche dynamically with quantities, he nevertheless must backtrack and describe it again in terms of quantity in order to say that, at a particular moment, it exists. If he were to forego the quantitative, he could only say that the psyche functions as organized, or looks as if it exists, in a particular way. This is the larger tension at play between the dynamic and structural accounts, and why both tend to feed off of each other's inadequacies.

Getting some with Kenneth Koch

(Photo taken by Koch)

I'm interested in a statement of Kenneth Koch’s from an interview with David Shapiro in 1972: “I like opera,” he says,

because you can celebrate anything. You can open the window and say: ‘The window is open. The sun is shining. My hand is on the window, and I love you.’ And somehow the music can make that beautiful enough.

There’s a lot to say about this little preference of Koch’s. First, the sort of ridiculousness of what he likes: he likes a simple action being sung over and above the action itself. There’s something superfluous about the singing. This indeed is precisely what constitutes the singing’s being a celebration, being something operatic: there is a sort of meaningless, dumb pleasure in the act, in the music that carries what is said just a bit beyond its literality.
But—and here is the crucial thing that allows me to refine a little what I’m getting at—there isn’t really an act itself, without this pleasure, without this superfluity. When we see the celebration at the window Koch describes, we don’t see an act with this celebration pasted on top of it. We just see the act of celebration. It’s all one fluid movement: the celebration, the pleasure, the superfluity is the action itself. Another way to put this is that, at the window, we have at the same time an act bathetic—this sort of anti-climactic, ridiculous superfluity of the celebration—and an act that is rapturous—full of pleasure, and in fact purely pleasure, absolute and abandoned to its own movement. It’s all a lot like an orgasm, if you’ll permit this leap in logic: a sort of expenditure of vital energy at the peak of its concentration. But it is an orgasm that we’re always having, such that orgasm, this sort of celebratory, operatic expenditure, becomes coextensive with action itself. Again, the superfluity isn’t something extraneous, even though it seems that way: like the redundancy of opera, it doesn’t come from outside to give us some extra pleasure, but remains something that we can only modulate, something of which we can only have more or less.
This is puzzling, to say the least: in fact, in one of his New Addresses, Koch describes orgasms precisely in this manner:

It seemed
Puzzling that we had you
Or rather that you
Could have us, in a way
-“To Orgasms,” in The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch. New York: Knopf, 2005. 623-4. Hereafter cited parenthetically as CP. I won’t note line numbers for now, because that would involve a lot of counting, but I’ll get around to it sometime.

So too it seems puzzling that we can have the celebration, the saying of “The window is open,” and that the act, the opening of the window, has us celebrating, singing, in a way. There is a sort of exchange where both the acting and the being acted—the transitivity and intransitivity—run into each other at once, so that we just get the whole operatic, celebratory action. In other words, puzzled, we nevertheless get some action.
I won’t say that this little phrase that we often use in a different context—a phrase I use not only because it gets at the peculiar nature of operatic or orgasmic action, but because, as we will see, it inscribes itself in a network of crass, stupid heterosexuality which plagues Koch’s work—I won’t say that this phrase can sum up Koch’s amazingly varied oeuvre. But I will say that it sums up a constant concern of that oeuvre. Or, instead of “constant concern” I should say that all this activity, vital energy, ridiculousness, and puzzlement involved in getting some action—understood in the wide sense of acting in a way that also “acts you” which I have just tried to give this odd phrase—constitute a sort of structure. Or, rather, since “structure” sounds too determining, a sort of Derridian texture—that is, something structuring and unstructured at once, a consistency that varies itself wherever it is attempted to be seen—that runs through the work of Kenneth Koch. This consistency is not exactly something I can say definitively exists. But at the very least it can be elaborated as a concept of action that drives Koch’s poetics, as the result—a result that is nothing other than the language of the poems themselves—of the way he uses and abuses language.
Now, in elaborating this celebratory, orgasmic consistency of the language of Koch, am I just coming up with a more expansive way to say that Koch is really a dramatic poet? That he makes a show of himself speaking? Perhaps. Koch seems indeed to many people to be a type of poet that is only good if he comes up with a catchy setup for a poem, a situation in which his words can gain an extra edge, a bit more showiness due to the context and the ironic distance to that context that they both create and inhabit, not unlike Browning. I use the vague word “setup” and make this reference to Browning because it’s not exactly form that is at issue here in Koch or in Browning’s monologues. Rather, it’s all the requirements of a particular performance: issues of content—like action, motive etc.—but also that of form—exposition, arrangement and tone especially—insofar as they interfuse and unfold before you on the stage that is the poem. Indeed, you can understand some of his great poems very well in this way: “The Departure from Hydra” (CP 156-171) is a great example, since it has a small cast of characters—Margaret, Norris, and Peter—and a narrative voice that gains some ironic distance from the voice of Koch—distance in which it can show itself a little, perform its oddness. When we read the following lines, somber and brooding, Eliot-like, over a pretty trifling incident (putting one’s stuff on a mule to be carried up a hill), we can’t help but enjoy it as a certain specimen of personality, not as a serious exhortation to also feel sorry for the mule:

I passed a mule—some men were loading up
His fellow-mule with packets—and I stared
At his wide eyes and his long hard flat nose
Or face, at which he turned away his eyes
And stamped his right hoof nervously. I felt
Guilty, a member of a higher species
Deliberately using my power against
A natural inferior because
Really I was afraid that he might kick
When I came past; but when he seemed upset
Then I felt guilty (CP, 156).

It is as if the narrator is simply out looking for the moment when he can say, truly, “then I felt guilty.” It is as if this was the last refuge for meaning for him for “solidity,” as he says (156), pleasure in life, in other things, being somewhat impossible. The poem continues as the narrator analyzes the reasons for Peter’s actions (he was feeling somewhat sullen, it seems, after Norris declined him on his offer to take a hiking trip of another Grecian isle, to which Norris originally agreed—already we see how sort of boring and useless it is to recount all these details, in the end), and meditates on all the minutia of the Peter’s sensibility, eventually tracing the whole incident back to old platitudes about Nordic or English blood versus Southern vivacity.
I’ll return to this poem momentarily, but I’ll note first that it would be too restrictive, I think, to think of this poem as a sort of drama, and Koch himself as a dramatic poet—thus I am hunting for something that is more evasive of these generic labels, something that could be otherwise than a genre. (Note: The word “camp” comes to mind, but, though I don’t have reasons for rejecting it totally, I will at least keep it in abeyance for now, since it seems at once a little too precise and a little too general—though it does work outside a rigid notion of genre, I think, and so I might just in the end be describing campiness. I have the feeling though that if we were to put this word in play, we’d find that Koch would be flattening out campiness into something more boringly straight, if only because he would be making camp out of a sort of Eliot-style modernism and a sort of machismo heterosexuality. These two things just seem more resistant to camp and dull it down, bring it closer to a simple, mean form of satire. I want to take this form and show what it is doing above and beyond satire, so I have to come close to camp, therefore. But I want to somehow thread the needle between them.) It would not be restrictive necessarily because Koch wrote poems wildly different from “The Departure from Hydra,”—that is, because there are counterfactuals out there, poems that are just not dramatic—but because this erases how Koch has his own concerns over and above the performance he might be putting on—namely, that particular active, operatic texture he brings about, that makes his poems celebrations. And this is why from the beginning I’ve also avoided parody as something that could pin down the particular gift Koch has for coming up with a great situation, a particular voice he can exhibit and exhaust. This is probably the more popular way to approach him, because it lays stress on his being comic, silly, and light. But Koch isn’t totally parodic: he doesn’t have an end or aim in the way that parody does. And this is true even when he is being arguably parodic, like in “The Departure from Hydra.”
How? Well, the answer will not only show that this isn’t parody, but that this isn’t drama either: the poem also does something crucial, something serious, to a conception of life, and so doesn’t have its end just in displaying just the characters. At some point the ironic distance breaks down and we’re left to ponder the result of this whole performance. Now, I’ll specify that point in a second, but let me be more precise. Of course drama, if not parody, can say something serious as well as be dramatic or be parodic. But I did not claim that the poem said something that made the ironic distance break down. I said it does something, and that makes all the difference.
And here is the point, so you can see what I mean. The speaker is reflecting on the enthusiastic outburst that Peter displayed by suggesting that he and Norris go on their walk, and that this outburst was tinged with a sort of neurotic hyper-enthusiasm more than a healthy, southern exuberance:

This sort of thing, however, often happens
To people from Northern countries, not just Peter,
And perhaps if one is English, Norse, or Swedish,
Danish, Finnish, Swiss or North American,
One cannot avoid a certain amount of tension,
A certain quavering in the hand which reaches
For a ripe peach or the shoulder of a girl,
One whom, as one walks back from going swimming,
One thinks that one could eat, she’s so delicious,
But only thinks it for a little while
(This thought itself is such a Northern one!
A Southerner would think about a place
Where he could go and jump on top of her)… (CP, 158).

This thought gets completed in the last lines of the poem: “Deep thoughts make helpless/ Men for small undertakings” (CP, 161). On the one hand, this is a lot like Koch’s more “didactic” poems on poetry, like “The Art of Poetry,” or even “One Train Hides Another.” You get the sense there that the speaker really is saying something that he really believes about the cause of Peter’s actions and about people more generally, just as the speaker, in those other poems, is really saying something he believes about poetry. On the other, if you read that back into the poem, it doesn’t give you anything. The statement just is there: at most it would add on another level of irony or parody, but—so what? You already have enough of those. So it just sits there and is more done—just enounced—than said. You can still try and call this drama, but at some point it just doesn’t matter what is said, but rather that and how it is said: at some point we just stop being interested in the display of the character, its quirks and its foresightedness, and we see the pure unfolding of the words before us, regardless of their meaning.
In the end, this sort of meaningless action of the poem, of irony that you don’t know what to do with, but that happens or is done anyway, makes the status of the text more similar to something like “Poems by Ships at Sea” (CP, 478-480) rather than a parody, or a dramatic monologue. Here, given the wonderfully brief and witty pretext—“It was not known that ships at sea wrote poetry. Now it is known” (478)—we find that odd knack Koch has for stepping into a certain voice, a certain situation, and letting that voice speak for itself—that is, celebrate itself, act itself out—but both the dramatic quality is reduced, and more importantly the process seems more positive than the sort of parody that Koch usually gets compared with—parody that is closer to satire, I should say, to a cutting down of someone else. Even the more naïve-sounding, rhyming, more formal lyric of the USS United States does not seem to really stage a voice, does not seem to progress so that we laugh at its inability to see beyond its own personality or character, even as it gathers its creativity from its being a performance of the setup:

AMERICAN FOAM

By the USS United States, United States Navy

You can talk about the Banda’s crazy waters
Where mermaids splash around and kiss and comb
You can yak about the Andaman and Flores
But there’s nothing like American foam.

You can say I wish that I were in the Tasman
Or that the Laptev froze me to a stone
But I will tell you, lads, that there is nothing
As soothing and as cooling as the foam

That slaps my keel when I am in Penobscot
Or Tampa Bay, or, when I’m heading home,
The West Atlantic and the East Pacific
Or Puget Sound, or Norton, close to Nome.

There’s nothing like the feel of U.S. water
It’s straight ad sharp and clear and it alone
Can make a ship feel she is Ocean’s daughter
Carried upon her parent’s shoulders home.

(probably) Tasman Sea, 1930s

Koch plays around with the setup, and he acts, but he doesn’t fully dramatize: if we must say he parodies, he parodies only in the positive, performative sense of this word—never wholly to satirize. The poetry doesn’t have that end to it, because that would restrict it to being something that means—it would erase the power of the language to also just happen.
So, I think in the end I’m not saying that Koch is a dramatic poet. The challenge however has allowed me to refigure (hopefully with more precision) what I’ve said about the orgasm as the conception of action or activity in Koch’s poetry. It’s clear that the only real way these two poems—“Poems by Ships at Sea” (and I might have chosen “In Bed,” which looks even more different) and “The Departure from Hydra”—can seem similar is because the point, for Koch, is not to stage something, or mock it, but just to let the words do what they do, to let them occur or act. Now, we have to qualify this with attention to what results, for we are now being more specific about the particular material that makes up the performance of Koch—that is, language: the words do what they do, but the poem does not become a medium for some inner voice. That is, the language is out there: we don’t see through the words to the performer who happens to use them like we would see through a character to an actor on stage. In short, the words don’t have an arbitrary, or chance status, because Koch is not their source, that to which they must always be ascribed. On the other hand, the poem does not becomes an object with a voice or activity of its own: it isn’t objective, it isn’t only just a thing there. In other words, you do look for where they are emitted from. The words do not work to establish themselves as self-contained, like an artifact. The point is to let the words act, and remain effusive—to let the words act in a way which is even strangely at odds, I think, with drama.
This has pushed my argument farther. I merely was trying to distinguish Koch from drama, but now I am saying that the sort of performance in his poems is at odds with drama—somehow incompatible with it or different from it in essence. How? It has to do with this origin of the words, that makes them not have the status of accidental emissions of a source—that is, a medium—nor, and at the same time, let them constitute themselves by establishing their own origin in themselves like an artifact. Where is this origin, to which the words are ascribed but which does not constitute them fully? They are ascribed to the setup, which is part of the language. Because this source is the setup, which lies outside the verse proper like a preface to a work, the words do need to be ascribed to something. But at the same time, because this setup is merely an occasion for the writing of the verse, it doesn’t make sense to say that the poem is a hermetically sealed unit that is only responsible for itself.
Another way of putting all this is that the problem Koch’s work brings to the fore is one of trust. Koch is easy to trust, despite all your efforts to get around his ironies, parodies, comedy or what have you. This is why we want to say he just finds forms to insert himself into—and why this characterization is a bit wrong, I think. For if we can’t trust him directly, we want to trust his staging of the thing. But what is really the case is that Koch has nothing to trust: the words just act, are there.
So, if we look at “The Art of Love,” for example (CP, 276-298), it isn’t a parody, even as it is—because there’s just a celebration of the particular mode—I hesitate again to call it a form or a content. Koch gets at the crucial thing about this poem right away—that what interests us about a piece like this is the speaker and the occasion. So what happens is that we take a certain ironic distance from him, but Koch already catches us at this and makes us think once again about how to regard the words that are being said and whether they really are emanating from some source—that is, are really a medium: this is the whole function of the end of the “rolling like a wheel” passage. At the moment that the speaker says, “forgive me,” and at this moment actually questions the validity of ascribing anything at all with legitimacy to the setup of the poem. So where we begin to take a certain distance that would be proper to parody, surely, but also to drama, Koch forces us to go one step further, and by revealing that the process isn’t that of an artifact—that it questions even its own setup—so that we must get rid of the notion of our distance from a real source of the words altogether:

Well, you can roll her like like a wheel, though I doubt she’ll approve of it,
Women rarely do, I knew one once, though, who did. For
This of course you use the right hand right ankle left
Hand left ankle arrangement, using splints on both sides of each
Knot so that the limbs will stay in wheel-position. Now that she
Looks like that which makes a chariot roll, roll her! If this hurts her,
Soothe her a little by kissing her all around, saying
“Ah my lovely wheel, when over a bumb, did it?” and so on,
Until she finally is resigned to being your wheel, your dear beloved one
And is eager to be rolled about by you. Small objects placed on the floor
Will give you brief twinges of sadistic energy and speed up your wheeling.
I suggest ending by wheeling her out an opened door
Which you then close and stab yourself to death. This procedure, however, is rare.
I was carried away. Forgive me. The next chapters will be much more sane (CP, 280).

But will they? Because, as far as the words are concerned, does it matter? (Note: What is so disturbing and creepy about the poem—as we noted in class—is precisely the fact that it means too much beyond this activity of language: in the end, the poem about nailing a woman to a wall is just satirical, and in bad taste. But this isn’t coextensive, I think, with the project of Koch insofar as language is concerned. I’m not trying to be an apologist for Koch, of course, but merely note that what moves the poem is what he is doing with language and the setup. When Koch veers away from this, it just becomes—and this is the case with his other, less controversial poems too, like “Variations on a Theme of William Carlos Williams” (CP, 135)—crass satire. The vulgar aspect of Koch and the more sophisticated project are connected, though, as we will see, though a concern or anxiety that haunts this activity of language.) The poem becomes just action, celebration, pleasure in one. The words don’t have an origin, at the same time as they are just like words that have an origin—they “are had” by something that isn’t them, at the same time as the poem “has” them.
As you can see, I’d like to inscribe this back into some language of orgasm and getting some action with which I started. The sort of drive of the words, what pushes them on and makes them occur one after the other, doesn’t remain entirely free floating and external, as it would in satire: for Koch it remains something essential about the work of language and action in general, which, for him, avoids being mediated or being artifactual at the same time as it is both—just as the orgasm is something that merely is had (it is a medium) and something that has itself (it is contained) at the same time. One could say his poetry is a refiguring of how we think of action, and a modeling of it upon the orgasm or at least along vital lines.
But why vital lines? This is the question with which I will conclude. Why the orgasm? Aren’t we just talking about a structure that can take its paradoxical form anywhere? I’d like to suggest that it is because Koch thinks of how the action of language happens as something energetic, as a sort of charge that can be expended, that we have to cast this paradox as one within the vital, within the orgasmic.
For, up to now, we might think of this model of action merely as something language does, not as something that language can stored up. The orgasm is had and has itself, it gets its action, and that is it; an action just performs itself, and is over. But Koch thinks that this doesn’t allow for any sort of continuity between actions: even if they don’t emanate from somewhere, poems do emanate instead of not emanate, and this difference means that even the pure performance that is the poem—and not the drama—itself must have come from somewhere. It must come from the collected result of all of these emanations—as what is built up over time through them. So he says, in “Energy in Sweeden” (444):

Those were the days
When there was so much energy in and around me
I could take it off and put it back on, like clothes
That one has brought only for a ski trip
But then finds that one is using every day
Because every day is like a ski trip…
This describes the orgasm, the sort of just stepping into and stepping out of an action, which means it has you and you have it at the same time. But then, he continues, after relating how he meets six young women in a boat in Sweeden,
It seemed to me I should have done something at the time,
To have used all that energy. Lovemaking is one way to use it and writing is another.
Both maybe are overestimated, because the relation is so clear.
But that is probably human destiny and I’m not going to go against it here.

The conception of action, of the unfolding of energetic activity, has changed. It no longer is a garment, or like an orgasm, but is something that has to be able to be collected together to make some ultimate sense. It is this tendency that invades the conception of action that Koch’s use of language develops, and which, I think, takes it over from time to time. It is, indeed, what pulls this orgasmic, celebratory superfluity out of the language and gives it a point, which usually makes the poems descend from their more performative status into the sphere of satire. This is often what gives his poems their force—that force that makes us want to read his statements on poetry as statements about his own poetry, adding one more level of irony instead of seeing that there is only irony, only performance, only distance, and that this is something essential to language, because language acts.