17

SPEECH SITUATION AND IMMANENT POETICS

(1966)

Literary superstitions. I give this name to all beliefs having the common trait that they overlook the verbal condition of literature.1

—PAUL VALÉRY

Semper mens est potentior quam sint verba [The mind is always more powerful than words] (Matteo Mattesilano).2 This core tenet of any extensive interpretation of the law could also be put forward as the condition of the possibility of any hermeneutics. The claim that thought is richer in its possibilities than language protects the legal exegete from the charge of analogy by leaving wide open the identity frame of the rule eadem ratio, eadem lex [the same reason, the same law]. For a concept of hermeneutics more broadly conceived, the claim that there is an essential surplus of thought beyond language retains the option at least to believe in the vitality of historical processes—unattainable though they may be—despite the historical inertia of the means of expression. The fundamental experience of a “poverty of language” demands that it be interpreted. Cicero felt the egestas verborum [poverty of words] of his own—compared to the Greek, philosophically indisposed—language and was probably the first to articulate that at the very least not every language is capable of capturing to the same extent what thought may be able to achieve. But could not the same be said for the situation of language vis-à-vis thought in general? Mystics of all epochs desperately suffered from the scarcity of linguistic means in relation to what they believed they saw. But it was also emerging historical experience that became aware of the poverty of language and of its own failure to capture those “total impressions” that presented themselves or were demanded, and that language could at best approximate by “tangents” (Justus Möser).3 This lagging of language behind perception has been a persistent topos in rhetoric and poetics ever since. It has been employed often but almost never believed. Hermeneutics takes as its starting point this basic experience, tries to overcome the difference that has become noticeable in it, and attempts “to feel oneself outward toward the author.”4 This operation intends to uncover the web of references in which the thought that can be formulated in language is connected to other thoughts, premises, and consequences, which cannot possibly enter the linguistic expression but can be partially inferred from it.

This conception of “language” with its implicit incongruence of thinking and speaking—for which, however, thought is always mightier than speech—meets its firmest contradiction in the idea of an exact language, whose criteria were laid down no later than in the prescriptions of clarity and distinctness canonized by Descartes. Their teleology of complete objectification ushered in a new and emphatic revival in phenomenology. According to this phenomenological faith in language, there is a “universality of the coincidence between speech and thinking,”5 and the “faithful expression of clear data” does not even require an artificial or formal language. There is a transition from common to phenomenological language: “The words used may derive from the common language; they may be ambiguous and their changing senses may be vague,” but they can be “furnished with distinct and single significations.”6

However, to the two concepts of “language” just outlined we can add a third, which downright reverses the juridical principle of interpretation quoted at the beginning by declaring language mightier than thought. In the modern philosophy of language, the complaint that the word is insufficient when faced with the claims of thought seems to have been retracted in favor of the opposite conclusion: that thought can only follow the anticipation [Vorgriff] of language, doing so always inappropriately vis-à-vis a depth of meaning that is unfathomable.7 Language appears as the untranscendable background phenomenon par excellence and its grammar as the imperceptible as well as tyrannical canalization of all processes, in the broadest sense, by which we engage with reality; at the same time, however, we harbor the illusion that we are equipped with a plastic medium for the measurement of the given, which, while not perfect, is perpetually getting closer to perfection. Benjamin Lee Whorf spoke of a “linguistic relativity principle” and saw the basic achievement of any language in facilitating certain factual conceptual systems, to which others can be added on equal footing, although not always ones of comparable capability. The implication is, “ ‘Talk’ ought to be a more noble and dignified word than ‘think.’ ”8 If, however, language in this way preforms the latitude of what is possible and impossible for thought, the critical task of philosophy must be methodically to reveal and dismantle the excess of language beyond real, verifiable, and justifiable thought—that is, to practice the kind of linguistic analysis and linguistic critique that continues to shape the face of contemporary philosophy.

These three basic ideas of the relationship between language and thought should help us gain a certain orientation to determine the function of poetic language. After all, an immanent poetics will by necessity depend on examining the function of a work’s language. The explication of the immanent poetics of a work will therefore depend on asking the “right” questions with regard to this work’s language. Of course, hints can be derived from the author’s exogenous poetics, from his self-testimony and self-observation, if this is indeed what they are and not simply the “offshoot” of a normative theory of art. This methodical preliminary question deserves not to be passed over. Already the classification of a text by its author as “self-observation” during the process of aesthetic production expresses a certain aesthetic position. This position permits experience to provide relevant information about the process of a work’s emergence; it does not know beforehand, as if by a preliminary decision, that this process happens in a certain manner that is empirically inaccessible. Someone struck by lightning—and be it merely the lightning of inspiration—cannot simultaneously take the minutes of this event or, rather, he is quite certain that he cannot do so without necessarily contradicting his own presumption. To disclose self-observations thus presupposes that it is possible in the first place to occupy the observation position at the same time as the production position; this is a presupposition of aesthetic objectification incompatible with the expectation of inspiring factors, from the muses up to narcotics. The mere presence of texts their author would like to have classified as self-observations independent of questions of their credibility and exactitude is therefore already a fact of an immanent poetics related to an oeuvre [Gesamtwerk]. This does not, of course, preclude that the self-observing authors who believe themselves to be capable of empiricism have their own exogenous poetics, and it is not unimportant to search their poetic works and poetic texts for any inconsistencies between their normative and effective elements. A text’s ability to be corrected—at first regardless of whether this question can be historically solved by looking at the manuscript materials or even at the printing history of a work—is a guiding thread to an immanent poetics, which can differ starkly from the position the very same author has taken regarding the alternative of inspiration or perspiration, that is, regarding what I want to call metaphysical poetics.

Among the primary observations (and self-observations) that need to be stated explicitly counts what is addressed by the question of how “language speaks itself” [wie sich die Sprache spricht]. Differentiations like that between a language type that is strongly associative or strongly constructive belong here. But even association, for example, which without a doubt is one of the motoric factors of poetic language formation is not homogenous. It can act from the background, conducting the process of language formation from the kernel of a concealed notion, or it can keep this process moving from the foreground, from word to word, in the realm of sound, most palpable in the leading schema of the rhyme. This last distinction is not unimportant, for it determines what the language is thought “to be capable of,” whether one abandons oneself to it as the leading constitutive ground or whether one sees oneself confronted with it as material to be overcome, as resistance to be overpowered. There are many different degrees of and reasons for trust in language. Trust in language need not be connected with the preliminary decision for inspiration; it need not mean that one has to listen to the appeal of “being” that acts not within language but itself is language. This is only the shape and premise of the modern critique of language that has been reversed positively, which nonetheless assumes the supremacy of language over thought, only with the difference that it, as it were, prohibits “listening” and strives to exorcise its appeal as a type of bedevilment, that is, to “enlighten” it. No, confidence in a language that speaks itself can dedicate itself to the pure musicality of the ever-continuing procreation of linguistic formation, whereby the language that speaks itself all too easily evades the question about what is thought or imagined in it; thus, even the author’s “authentic” interpretation is worth as much and as little as that of anybody else. There are strokes of luck: the titles of Paul Klee’s paintings are almost always, even if they come after the image construction or the pictorial association, inventively placed viewpoints, despite the obvious danger of treating them as authentic interpretations. I deliberately chose something outside of the realm of language to show that there are structural analogies to how a work of art can be interrogated immanently.

The question, extracted above, for a text’s implicit concept of language must certainly not amount to a static classification. Linguistic implementations have an immanent tendency that cannot be grasped within a framework that captures the relationships of congruence between thought and speech. I would like to describe this tendency by naming the two directions, “univocity” [Eindeutigkeit] and “equivocity” [Vieldeutigkeit]. This does not require us to ask for an expressly stated program. The language of science, independent of any presumptive considerations, tends toward the univocal designation of concepts, and this tendency can be captured no matter whether one can attest a text such univocity or not. It is also unessential whether scientific language is formed from ordinary language or whether a new nomenclature is invented and introduced by way of convention. The maxim of univocity is already in place through the peculiar mode of scientific communication, which barely allows inquiries or requests for clarification as would be the case in dialogue. The dialogue in ordinary language is able to waive the tendency toward the univocity of its linguistic means; indeed, it achieves clarity precisely by the interference of unclarities. But the tendency of scientific language comes at the cost of its breadth and universality: scientific language only ever exists as a plurality, as the embodiment of technical languages that are exclusive regional idioms, strongly isolated by a sociological factor that makes any translation into ordinary language be felt as a “disciplinary transgression.” The linguistic situation of the present is largely determined by its tendency toward univocity within its regionalization, or rather, at the cost of regionalization and thus being reduced to the mere function of transmission. The belief that through logical idealization—which proceeds from the existence of such technical languages—the tendency toward univocity may be converted into a rational common language of at least all the sciences amongst each other, will turn out to be an illusion.

Philosophical language takes a special position in this consideration. I would like to refer to its tendency as being aimed at a “controlled ambiguity” [kontrollierte Mehrdeutigkeit]. I cannot elaborate this further here, but this tendency is based on taking into service mundane language for the designation of transcendental concepts, for a specifically transcendental language can obviously not exist, just as the illusion of a language proper to philosophy has melted away since the late Wittgenstein. This phenomenon has a prehistory in the language problems of negative theology and mysticism, with an interesting transition in Nicholas of Cusa and his linguistic efforts that were as authentic as they were in vain. It is first clearly present in the two registers of Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais, which speak of the monad by keeping silent about it for the sake of the linguistic community with Locke. In the present, albeit on an even higher level of reflection, there seems to be a repetition of what had characterized the late Middle Ages: the seemingly paradoxical coincidence of two intellectual currents that in the medieval case are called “nominalism” and “mysticism.” What they have in common may be described as a certain type of cognitive attention, which at first wants to submit itself to the economy of the sayable, but subsequently becomes aware of how narrow the realm of such precision is and then seeks to evade this disappointment by escaping into the paradoxes of the unsayable. But it is only within this space—between the idealized programming of language to contain the sayable, and the explosion of the linguistic structure in favor of the unsayable—that the actual breadth of the achievements of speech unfolds as an interpretive community’s perpetually recalibrating, highly unstable regulatory system.

Where in this space can we place poetic language? Once it was possible to believe that it was the actual Ursprache [primordial language] of an early age that expressed itself in “poetic characters” and “fantastic speech.”9 Then, poetry appeared as the laboriously salvaged leftover element of a decay into prose that was only occasionally stalled or made transparent. The premise is not radically different if poetry is portrayed as the selection and collection of specific elements dispersed in language that want to be understood and gleaned. The linguistic situation I described as unfolding between univocity and equivocity allows a different view of the poetic possibilities of language. Suppose language is a potential of equivocity that requires an effort to keep it in service in narrow spheres of necessary informative univocity and that already in dialogue only works by way of the vagueness of idioms that have to become attuned to each other and are “indicative” precisely in mutually going wide off the mark. In this case, poetic language would mean precisely to set free language’s immanent tendency toward the multiplicity of meaning. But this eruption of equivocity salvages neither a remainder of that mysterious Ursprache nor that alleged wealth of quotidian language that in reality is vague rather than actualizing equivocity and that has a certain “tolerance” with regard to its function. In this question, mistakes are plentiful. Valéry, in his notes from 1928, gave a kind of substantialist interpretation of poetic language under the title of “Pure Poetry.”10 Purity here is understood as the selection of specific poetic elements that, in different combinations and transpositions, are contained in all other linguistic works. This “noble and living substance” can be enriched, developed, and cultivated.11 Poetry’s purity then means that linguistic state in which the originally dominant medium of the common language is no longer traceable, not even as an irritating impurity—a goal that is admittedly unattainable, and which, according to Valéry, the art of poetry can only approximate. The basic notion applies regardless of this concession that pure poetry is a fiction, albeit an empirically obtained fiction, that emerges from an observation of language. This basic notion is expressed in the sentence that what is called a poem “is in practice composed of fragments of pure poetry.”12 It is unlikely that poetic elements occur in language since language is “a common and practical element,”13 a crude set of instruments adapted to quotidian and individual needs. To poeticize language is thus to accumulate a rare material within it: “So the poet’s problem must be to draw from this practical instrument the means to realize an essentially nonpractical work.”14 We do not follow here this thought of a specific difference between poetic and nonpoetic elements in language, and thus reject conceiving of poetry as the extraction of a given, rare substance from language. By describing poeticization as a tendency of language, we do not comprehend the poetic moment as an inherent quality, as the result of a possible selection, but as a gain of language that is only possible and only realizes itself within the functional nexus of the poetic entity. The tendency toward poeticization is not aimed at the discovery of given meanings, no matter how root-like, the understanding of which would be the job of a poetic quasi-linguistics; rather, it is aimed at the production of new tendencies of meaning. This is very neatly illustrated in the fact that the expressive assets of specialized regional languages are imported into modern poetic texts, or that historically and philologically indexed and sedimented material can be dispersed within it. The most banal word from everyday language joins the most hallowed metaphysical term, and it is impossible to say to which the actual poetic effect can be attributed (for example, Gottfried Benn’s “großer Run der Äonen” [the eons’ great run]).15 This, too, would be a question that can be posed meaningfully only within the framework of the substantialist theory of poetic language.

The aesthetic effect of language’s tendency toward equivocity is, initially, the surprise at the familiar, the bare means gaining a value in itself, the obvious stepping outside the sphere of the “life-world” that as such goes unnoticed. In other words, nothing is “regained” that in some process of decay was historically lost but, at a specific time, could have existed in a primordial presence as a mythical elementary experience that might be restored. Rather, poeticization indeed entails novelty; it has a first-time aspect. The process of poeticization to which language is subjected can therefore be compared to the process of theoretical objectification [Vergegenständlichung], which likewise takes place in an elemental way—that what is obvious becomes problematic, and here, too, something steps out of the horizon of the “life-world.” Whether this commonality of the theoretical and aesthetic attitude can be assigned to a more comprehensive theory of consciousness is not at issue here. What is, however, certain is that the aesthetic function of language as such constitutes a new degree of the awareness of its quotidian performance and its possibilities.

But the process of dismantling common language’s obviousness [Entselbstverständlichung der Gemeinsprache] that happens in all poetry and has, as it were, become programmatic in modern poetry (and is free to be utilized toward the pretentious as much as the magical), is not yet a complete description of the aesthetic function of language. In the tendency toward equivocity something happens that could be called a “boundary event” [Grenzereignis]. The point is reached at which language fails to serve its semantic function. I will not claim that this boundary event constitutes the pinnacle of language’s aesthetic possibilities, but how close to peril this boundary event brings language essentially determines the aesthetic appeal of poetic speech. In this state of imperilment, the attention devoted to language—its attempts to exhaust the latitude of meaning and to interrogate the multiplicity of the possible as to whether it harmonizes with its context—threatens to become meaningless. Poetic language guides coperformance [Mitvollzug] down a similar path as mysticism did by means of “explosive metaphorics”16: the horizon of information, communication [Mitteilung], and instruction is shattered, and it is no longer designation and meaning that language is primarily expected to accomplish. If one were to take a typologizing and classifying approach, one would not be far from making imperilment itself the norm and seeing the goal of the poetic tendency of language in pure nonsense, in Dada. But here, as everywhere, the aesthetic allure lies in the approximation to the turning point toward impossibility and self-negation—in the approximation, I say, not in the identification with this extreme. To put it another way: hermeneutic belief and credibility remain aesthetic enjoyment’s conditions of possibility. To perform the aesthetic requires going along, following the guideline of the semantic context to certain points of irritation and bifurcation of meaning. And here, too, aesthetic meaning is not exploded into transcendence or left to nothingness, as in all kinds of mysticisms, but, on the contrary, this meaning-expectation is diverted from the referencing function of the word and reoriented toward the objecthood of the linguistic-pictorial presence itself. But I must stress here that “objecthood” does not mean the word’s mere phonetic materiality.

In the process of poeticization, then, language is not restored to a supposed primordial state, selected for its secret treasures, or revirginized. Instead, we start from language’s constantly critical functional status. Without a doubt, the conscious seizing and escalating of this possibility is something entirely modern that may be connected to a crisis of language, which, in turn, is itself merely a depiction of the acute state of a chronic set of problems that might be linked to the great and exhausted concept of “historicity” [Geschichtlichkeit]. History as an ominous, oppressive experience is a modern phenomenon. Connected to it is the circumstance that language is experienced indirectly (that is, by way of the semantic claims it is confronted with) as a contingent fact. Thus, early modernity has for the first time made obvious the indifference of the information toward the word: from the seventeenth century onward, the natural sciences retreated from representational words into numbers and formulae; likewise, music retreated from vocality into pure instrumentality. The autonomy obtained by these two formal, paralinguistic spheres has had a strong effect on the understanding of language’s possibilities. It also played a substantial role for the postulated ideal notion of a “purity” of language—not only and not primarily in aesthetic matters. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the notion of an absoluteness of music as idea and as fascination hovers constantly over the attempts at a self-definition of poetry and the poets: music appears as that which is not a medium, but is in itself fully engaging; it does not channel attention through itself toward something else; it is not a “theme-indicator” but a “thematic end” (Husserl).17 The ideality of music can be such a great temptation because its analogical value is easily forgotten, and this regulative notion is prone to misinterpretation as the demand to transform the poetic word into pure sound. In fact, however, the poetic word remains but word and does not dissolve into sound in a linear fashion; it stays behind the threshold of rescinding its semantic function, which lies between equivocity and the meaninglessly undecipherable. Pure obscurity would also be the end of “obscure” poetry as poetry.

The high degree of language’s imperilment in the process of its poeticization is unmistakable especially in the exemplary problem of the relationship between poetry and music. By approximating music, language ceases to be a reference to anything else and begins to signify only itself. But such substantializing can also mean that language changes into the most banal tintinnabulation, into homespun sound patterns or clichés, that is, as pure surface it not so much “condenses” as closes itself off. The poet’s attitude, as again Valéry has it, is a kind of matérialisme verbal [verbal materialism]; he can look down on philosophers and novelists who are subjected to language since for them, it achieves any reference to reality only through its content. For the poet, on the other hand, it is true that “the reality of a discourse is only the words and the forms.”18 But why, indeed, is language’s reference to reality so irritating, and of what does the new “reality” consist that language itself achieves in poetry? The acceptance of reducing the referential characteristics to pure linguistic materiality, writes Valéry, no longer provides any criterion by which to distinguish self-meaning from meaninglessness. In contrast to this, what I have attempted here was to describe this process not as a reduction to the pure phenomenality of language but as an intensification of the equivocity that is its inner tendency. In “Memoirs of a Poem” from 1937, Valéry explained his preference for ornament in the broadest sense and pure music—in other words, the freedom from having meaning—by the fact that here the bond to the factual was undone.19 In music, in the invention of the musical work, an entirety of possibilities is present at any moment, and this not only without a depicting and reproductive relation to a pre-given reality but also and primarily without limiting what is still possible by what has already been realized. With good reason, Valéry has called this attitude, which revolves around the programmatic term possibilité, an antihistorical state of mind.20 It is not by chance that the common thread running through his thinking about “pure poetry” is the irritation at the factum: not just the fact of nature and the pre-given world but also the fact of the pre-given language—that is, pre-given with a distinct arsenal of meaning—and the irreversibility of any mental process enacted through language, in which every presence finds its possibilities limited through that which has already been spoken. Musical formations do not create any such irreversibilities; they are, at every moment, in possession of all their possibilities. This is why “construction” is one of Valéry’s favorite words, and not so much as a notion aimed against the organic but rather pointed against the historical. What is fascinating about music for the poet is the purity of the constant presence of an unbounded horizon of possibilities. In one passage, in which Valéry expressly engages in polemics against Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, rejecting memory as the organ of the factual and thus the epic, he imagines the plan for a work that would have as its object the nodal points of the possible, the “possible at each moment”—and exactly at this point Valéry adds the remark that he had published different texts of the same poem, including some which had been contradictory.21 Valéry describes as the epitome of poetic self-experience a mental state of unfettered freedom, which has, vis-à-vis some fascinating object, gained the feeling of a latitude in which the object has returned from its current and completely determined reality into the state of possibility. Pre-given, historically developed language appears to Valéry again and again as a web of bonds and limitations for pure thought; thus, the relationship of the poet to language must for him be determined by the fact that he also restores language into a state of pure possibility and thus makes it into a medium of poetic freedom. From here, setting free language’s tendency toward equivocity is revealed as the correlate of the aesthetic restoration of the real into the horizon of its possibilities. The equivocity of poetic language conveys an awareness of aesthetic freedom itself. Language provides the “starting point” for intentional acts—in poetic language, however, such starting points are, as it were, compressed and can thus not initiate specific directions of understanding, but only create a certain sensitivity. Gottfried Benn speaks of a “latent existence” of words in poetry, only to add immediately the banality of “magic” and “last mystery.” Why “magic,” why “mystery”? It would be easier to say why “Phaiakians, megaliths, Lernaean domains, Astarte, Geta, Heraclitus”—examples Benn gives himself, “admittedly names, admittedly in part created by myself; but when they approach, they multiply”—have their effect even without, no, especially without, this commentary that is meant to add a historical pseudoreassurance. Elsewhere, Benn says, “Words convey more than the message or the content; they are on the one hand spirit, but on the other have the essence and ambiguity of things in nature.”22 This analogy with objecthood is important: where the word fails as an instruction for intuition; where it dispatches onto more than one path of a vaguely developing beginning of an intuition; where it shows many paths that cannot at the same time be taken—there it becomes charged with an anticipation that cannot be executed and brought to fulfillment. Precisely as such, however, as the horizon of unfulfilled intentions, it makes the experiencing subject aware of itself, turning it away from the quotidian speech situation of the objectivated and yet-to-be objectivated word and toward its own omnipotence of imagination.

An immanent poetics will not be able to avoid understanding the poetic quality of the available language from the opposition against the normalization tendency of language today. The frustration of the normal or standardized anticipation is itself a poetic means. It expels the recipient from his attitude of the fluid understanding of language, which always assumes, demands, and deems possible to claim univocity, and which is not bothered by the constant disappointment of this claim in everyday communication, and indeed does not need to be. The resistance of aesthetic language must therefore be all the more massive the more the public language consciousness finds its true or a supposed confirmation in its claim to univocity. It would be difficult to deny that the tendency of language in a world that is becoming increasingly scientific has at least the appearance of confirming the claim to univocity. This is not only true for the world in which science and technology are pursued but also, and especially, for the world in which philology and aesthetics have their place and business. The tendencies of objectivizing and poeticizing language, which point at essentially and immanently opposite directions, will therefore, as one may assume even before perusing concrete evidence, become exacerbated in this sphere. One may expect a poetic language that is vehemently obstinate against any function of reference; a language whose metaphors disturb and negate each other; in which the imagery employed does not resolve itself; which does not allow for any reassuring interpretation of its syntax; in which the original horizons of mythical allusions change constantly and without any aid; in which even a public accustomed to reading rather than speaking is forced to see printed language-images for which it lacks the phonetic equivalents; and where the educated reader all too often does not know, and cannot even guess, from where an “ingredient” might have been taken (I am thinking, for instance, of Ezra Pound); where, in other words, the most fully equipped arsenal of erudition cannot yield any reassurance. It is nearly impossible to define the limits of what the aesthetically receptive consciousness can be expected to put up with. Many examples of such poetry will retain their meaning only as fossils of a specific aesthetic and linguistic situation.

The oppositional quality of poetic language, which can be understood from the speech situation, is, however, not enough to constitute poetry—as if what is elementary only needed to be turned into a presentable form secondarily. Quite the contrary: equivocity is an atomizing, destructive determination; it is a condition but not a constructive factor of poetry. The necessary connection between any oppositional quality and a positive formal determination has been articulated most felicitously, I believe, again by Valéry, who was always flirting with mathematical categories in “A Poet’s Notebook” from 1928: a poem’s content of pure poetry consists, in the end, in the “apparent and convincing probability in the production of the improbable.”23 The “probability of the improbable” is the logical structural formula of the aesthetic object. Even though for language, too, disorder is the statistically most probable state, as such the tendency toward equivocity does not mean increasing probability and disorder, but rather that kind of loss of linguistic meaning in which univocity is simply that which remains in the end. Poetic language’s wealth of meaning is the improbable. But as such this is not yet an aesthetic quality; quite to the contrary: in isolation, it reverts to a pure signaling quality. The composition [Gestaltung] within which it appears as an element binds it to a probability that is unexpected from the perspective of the elementary—in the most fortuitous case, it binds it to self-evidence. What has been taken out of the life-world’s obviousness and is brought to surprising novelty in its constellation still integrates a context that constantly justifies itself through a new and compelling obviousness. The formal means for such consistency of the inconsistent, the probability from the improbable, are well known. Valéry has drawn particular attention to the much-derided rhyme and, in a note in the Cahier B (1924), connected it to his ideas about probability by saying that one had a better chance of finding an idea to match a given rhyme than to find a rhyme for an idea—and it is on this state of affairs that all poetry rests, especially the poetry of the epoch from 1860 to 1880. This is a highly characteristic remark that recurs in different variations, as in the depiction of how a poem originated during a walk from the automatically appearing rhythms of walking, which Valéry took to be an empty form asking to be filled.24 If one wanted to renew the schema of form and content, one now would have to start from the appropriateness of the content for the form, but this is quite unnecessary, since the equivocity of poetic language itself is a “formal” characteristic. There are formal determinations of different levels; by them alone, the “probability of the improbable” makes possible the criterion of the aesthetic object in its totality. What an “aesthetic stimulus” is—as the countervalue to aesthetic sensitivity—remains a reliable question of immanent poetics, but it does not allow the further premise that the aesthetic object as such is constituted by a summation of aesthetic stimuli. The aesthetic stimulus depends on increasing the elementary equivocity by way of the complexity of constellations and inductions of meaning; but for the constitution of the aesthetic object, this improbability is countered in the substructure by a contrastive “and yet” of formal integration, coping with what is close to being semantically excluded. The poem is spoken on a different linguistic level than its constitutive linguistic elements, each of which has to satisfy the maxim of linguistic poeticization: “We wait for the unexpected word.”25 But the poem is then still realized only as the unexpected fulfillment of an expectation that is, in its process, doubting [zweifelnd], if not desperate [verzweifelt].

Translated by Hannes Bajohr

Originally published as “Sprachsituation und immanente Poetik,” in Immanente Ästhetik—Ästhetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Paradigma der Moderne (Poetik und Hermeneutik II), ed. Wolfgang Iser (Munich: Fink, 1966); from Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 120–135.

  1. 1.   [Paul Valéry, Analects (vol. 14, Collected Works), trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 124.]

  2. 2.   [The source for the quoted expression is unclear; it can, however, be found in another work, not by Mattesilano but by Constantius Rogerius, Tractatus de juris interpretatione (Lyon: Frères Roxio, 1549), 14.]

  3. 3.   [Justus Möser, “Also soll der handelnde Teil der Menschen nicht wie der spekulierende erzogen werden,” in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ludwig Schirmeyer (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1954), 7:27; Justus Möser, “Über das Kunstgefühl: Von einem Weinhändler,” in Sämtliche Werke, 7:18.]

  4. 4.   [Justus Möser, “Wie man zu einem guten Vortrage seiner Empfindungen gelange,” in Sämtliche Werke, 11.]

  5. 5.   Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 24.

  6. 6.   Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. Fred Kersten, (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), 1:§66, 151–152.

  7. 7.   See, for example, Louis Lavelle, La parole et l’écriture (Paris: L’Artisan du Livre, 1942).

  8. 8.   Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956), 214, 220.

  9. 9.   [Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas G. Bergin and Max H. Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948) 19, 115.]

  10. 10.   Paul Valéry, “Pure Poetry,” in The Art of Poetry (vol. 7, Collected Works), trans. Denise Folliot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 184–192.

  11. 11.   [Valéry, “Pure Poetry,” 185.]

  12. 12.   [Valéry, 185.]

  13. 13.   [Valéry, 188.]

  14. 14.   [Valéry, 189. Emphasis removed.]

  15. 15.   [Gottfried Benn, “Chaos,” in Sämtliche Gedichte (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998), 78.—The substantive “run” as a stock trading term is a relatively recent import into the German language.]

  16. 16.   [See Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 122–126.]

  17. 17.   [Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 27, 250.]

  18. 18.   [Paul Valéry, “A Poet’s Notebook,” in The Art of Poetry, 183.]

  19. 19.   [Paul Valéry, “Memoirs of a Poem,” in The Art of Poetry, 100–132.]

  20. 20.   [Valéry, “Memoirs of a Poem,” 110.]

  21. 21.   [Valéry, 104.]

  22. 22.   Gottfried Benn, “Probleme der Lyrik,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1960), 1:513–514.

  23. 23.   Paul Valéry, “A Poet’s Notebook,” 180.

  24. 24.   Paul Valéry, “Poetry and Abstract Thought,” in The Art of Poetry, 61.

  25. 25.   Valéry, “A Poet’s Notebook,” 174.