Some Ways Philosophy Has Helped to Shape My Work
In a personal account of the relation of philosophy to the making of experimental poetry, Jackson Mac Low shows how his radically text-based writing may be read in terms of its intellectual history. Mac Low discusses the early influence on his work of the Chicago Aristotelians (Richard McKeon, R. S. Crane) and their revisionist reading of the Poetics, as well as the inspiration of Paul Goodman, a poet and cultural activist who argued for personal liberation during the political repression of the 1950s. The Chicago School admired Aristotle for valorizing poetry as an object of knowledge (in opposition to Plato); for seeing tragedy as a scene of instruction (versus aestheticism); for refusing formal proscription (as with the New Critics); and for unlinking art from history (as with the Left). Each of these interpretations would be crucial for Mac Low’s strategies for constructing alternative communities through formal experiment, particularly in his use of chance techniques after Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Mac Low also insists that an artist’s use of philosophy is serious even if it occurs through misreadings and conflicting lines of thought. Thus the influence of Asian philosophy—particularly Zen but also the I Ching—can make sense of concepts of synchronicity in C. G. Jung or occasion in A. N. Whitehead. In Mac Low’s essay, multiple philosophical traditions conjoin to provide interpretative frameworks for experimental poetics. Jackson Mac Low died on 8 December 2004.
Philosophy has always “influenced” my poetry and other art work, if what is designated by the term “philosophy” comprises both the published original and translated works of recognized Western philosophers, translations and interpretations of Asian religious philosophers, and published and orally communicated philosophical ideas of relatively contemporary Americans, Europeans, and Asians. In the space available I will be able only to outline briefly some of the ways philosophy has significantly influenced my work.
Although I “majored” in philosophy in the early 1940s at the University of Chicago and I have continually read philosophical works since then, my competence as a student of philosophy has never been very great. But possibly this very incompetence has been fruitful. That is, philosophers may have influenced my work meaningfully through misreadings or through misapplications (or skewed applications) of concepts (or even dogmas) gained from more or less valid readings and from oral teaching. I’ll try to illustrate this.
At the University of Chicago in the late 1930s and early 1940s certain members of the philosophy department (notably, Richard Peter McKeon) and of the English department (notably, Ronald Salmon Crane) developed what came to be known as “Chicago Aristotelian” formal criticism. Until he left Chicago in about 1940, Paul Goodman contributed crucially to this development, and his book The Structure of Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955) is his own later revision of his own c. 1940 doctor’s thesis. However, I did not study directly with McKeon and Crane until 1942, although some of my philosophy and English teachers in 1939–41 had probably been influenced by them.
Aristotle’s Poetics was then widely and intensively studied at Chicago, not only in the courses of the Chicago Aristotelians themselves, but also in many other courses in philosophy, criticism, comparative literature, etc. The reigning interpretation of the Poetics was one that ran counter to the “recipe book” view of the work that had mostly prevailed since the Renaissance. The Chicago Aristotelians and their fellow travelers viewed the Poetics as an empirical formal analysis of the particular type of tragedy exemplified preeminently by Sophokles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and Euripedes’ Iphigenia in Tauros. That is, the Poetics was seen as an analytically descriptive, backward-looking work, rather than as a prescriptive, forward-looking one.
It followed that one would have to develop a somewhat different poetics for other types of tragedy, e.g., those of Shakespeare. It would not do to condemn later tragedies for “not living up to” the general principles Aristotle had drawn from analyzing Oedipus T., etc. Goodman, in his Structure of Literature, even re-did Aristotle’s own analysis to come up with a somewhat different poetics of the Oedipus type of tragedy.
From this followed a general principle of criticism that has been of immense help to me during the forty-odd years since McKeon, Crane, and others brought it to my attention, namely, that critics should follow the artists rather than trying to tell them what to do. This attitude came not only from the Chicago interpretation of the Poetics but also from Aristotle’s view of history (as understood and taught by McKeon), namely, that although the past has been determined, the future is open. That is, one cannot predict the future (except possibly in short-term or trivial ways) in any field constituted by the actions of people. (The concomitant question of prediction in the physical sciences is too complex to open here.)
These principles, which I as an undergraduate may have misunderstood or which may have been based on erroneous views of Aristotle’s thought, protected me against the many influential prescriptive critics running rampant in the 1940s and 1950s, especially the anti-experimental New Critics and the Vulgar Marxists. (Crane, incidentally, used to lampoon some of the more prescriptive New Critics as “Disappointed Bards and Southern Reviewers” and as “The Huey Long Gang,” since the “Kingfish” had been instrumental in the founding and funding of the Southern Review—a bastion of the New Criticism—at Louisiana State.)
Aristotle’s view of history, as interpreted by McKeon, also helped immunize me against political arguments based on dialectical or historical materialism or dialectical idealism and, in general, against historicism and progressivism. So far, my present examination of Hegel has not de-immunized me. I still see history not as any kind of upward-tending line or spiral but as an irregular three-dimensional curve that is as likely to sink definitively below the horizon as to mount to the zenith. But this is probably a digression.
I have long ascribed my continuing openness to what is usually called “experimentation” in the arts, and eventually my adoption of aleatoric and systematic procedures and of indeterminacy in composition of texts and performance works, to my interpretation of Aristotle as viewed by McKeon, et al. An openness to experimental art is commonplace now, but in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in literary circles, experimentation was anathema. The New Critics reigned, and even their challengers shared many of their assumptions. “Tradition” was “in” and “experiment”—even the poems of Cummings, much less Pound’s Cantos or anything further afield—was altogether looked down upon. Eliot and Yeats were the great modern exemplars (and I must admit that I’ve never rejected them and have found some of their works inspiring—probably for what they would have considered wrong reasons), and even the collage method of The Waste Land was barely tolerated because of Eliot’s explicit traditionalism.
As late as 1954, when I began verbal composition using aleatoric and systematic procedures, experimental work was considered beneath notice by most influential critics. The latter thought Stein a mere eccentric (with the possible exception of Three Lives) and only “Joyce specialists” took Finnegans Wake seriously. Whether or not the Chicago version of Aristotle and my interpretation of it were “correct,” they helped me to feel free to experiment in the 1940s and 1950s.
However, the particular kinds of experimentation I embarked on in 1954 were largely due to a convergence of certain Asian philosophical traditions (and their Western interpreters) and Euroamerican left libertarian political philosophy. (Nowadays one must write “left libertarian” because of the neolaissez-faire capitalists of the Libertarian Party.)
The Asian traditions were those of Taoism, Buddhism—especially Zen and Kegon Buddhism—and the philosophy, both explicit and implicit, of the I Ching or Book of Changes. Superficially, the first two seem to run counter to the personal voluntarism of Euroamerican libertarianism, but in practice this contradiction eventuated in a fruitful self-nonself dialectic.
I had been introduced to Taoism sometime after 1945 by Paul Goodman, to whom I had, late that year, introduced the anarchist-pacifist group then publishing the magazine Why? (called Resistance from 1947 to 1954, when it ceased publication). Both through Goodman (who published several important theoretical articles in Why?/Resistance) and through myself and other anarchist poets and theorists, the principle of wu-wei (non-action or non-interference) came to permeate the thinking of New York anarchists and pacifists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Wu-wei in society was taken to mean the same as “anarchism”: the absence of a central institution exercising power over the individuals and groups constituting a society and competing for power with the central institutions of other societies through such procedures as diplomacy, covert and open warfare, and economic and political imperialism. The ideal society was envisioned as a community fairly limited in extent and population and in which decisions were made by members arriving at a consensus rather than by voting (in the course of which a majority overwhelmed a minority) or by fiat (through which the will of an individual or a relatively small group was imposed on the other members).
In my poetry, prose, and performance works composed after 1953 wu-wei has been exemplified in two principal ways: through aleatoric or chance procedures operative during composition, performance, or both; and through composition of works requiring performers or readers to exercise personal choice. Ideally, performances of works of the latter type exemplify or at least act as analogies for libertarian communities in that performers make independent choices throughout each performance while paying close attention to everything they can hear—both the sounds produced by other performers and ambient sounds—and relating very consciously with this perceived aural plenum as well as with the other performers themselves. The materials and performance rules provided by the composer act as analogies for the natural and social situations encountered by communities.
The principle of wu-wei amounts in practice to standing out of the way (at least to a significant extent) of processes conceived either as natural or as otherwise transpersonal. A motivation for following this principle (over and above those found in Taoist classics) is provided by Buddhism, which regards the ego as an illusory formation.
My own introduction to Buddhism (aside from the reading of translations of portions of the Dhammapada) came largely in the early 1950s from the writings, and after 1954 from the classes at Columbia, of Dr. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki on Zen and Kegon Buddhism. Suzuki and other historians of religion view Zen Buddhism as a major result of the meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in southern China early in the sixth century C.E. Thus Taoist wu-wei and Buddhist egolessness were probably closely associated from the earliest days of the Zen sect.
On the other hand, wu-wei and Zen egolessness were associated in about 1950 with the use of chance operations in artmaking by John Cage, who was also influenced collaterally by the philosophy of the Chinese classic or “wisdom book” known as the I Ching or Book of Changes. The work and thought of Cage’s older friend Marcel Duchamp, who had used chance operations in making both sculptures and music as early as around 1920, was also undoubtedly a leading influence on Cage’s work with chance, but as far as I know, the rationale of Duchamp’s aleatoric work came from neither Buddhism nor Taoism nor the I Ching.
My own acquaintance with the I Ching began in 1950, not long after Pantheon’s publication of Gary F. Bayne’s English translation of Richard Wilhelm’s German version of the Chinese classic. There is no room here to tell the sources or many details of this work, which, although adopted as a canonical book by Confucius and his followers, also shares crucial concepts (especially that of the basic Way of the universe, or Tao) with the Taoist writings of Lao-tse and Chuang-tse. However, an important, mostly implicit, principle of the I Ching was made explicit by C. G. Jung in his foreword to the Pantheon edition, namely, that events happening at the same time are meaningfully, though “acausally,” connected. (Jung’s term for this is Englished as “synchronicity.”)
As is well known, the I Ching may be consulted as an oracle by means of chance operations: either by repeatedly separating a bundle of fifty dried yarrow stalks or by flipping three coins a certain number of times. The person consulting the book performs the chance operations while holding in mind a bothersome or otherwise important question or problem. The result of the chance operations is a group of six broken and/or unbroken lines, known as a “hexagram,” and one or more or even all of the lines may be “changing” into their opposites, producing a second hexagram. Meanings traditionally associated with each hexagram as a whole and with the changing lines are given in the book and are considered relevant to the consulter’s problem or question.
About 1950 Cage adapted the coin method of consulting the I Ching to the composition of music, one of the first notable instances being his large piano work The Music of Changes. Since then he has usually employed chance operations, and very often “I Ching methods,” in composition.
Taoist writings read in the late 1940s, Suzuki’s writings and later his classes in the 1950s, and the I Ching from about 1950 predisposed me toward ways of making art that de-emphasized the ego of the maker, but at first I strongly resisted Cage’s musical use of chance. In the early 1950s I attended most of the first New York concerts in which chance-generated, indeterminate (greatly different in each performance), and unpredictable (different in important ways in each performance) works by Cage, Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, and Earle Brown were performed, notably by David Tudor, and I became personally acquainted with Cage in about 1953. However, it was not until late 1954 that the combined philosophical influences of Western libertarianism and of Taoism, Buddhism (especially Zen and Kegon, with its emphasis on the transparence and interpenetration of all entities and a picture of the universe akin to that of Whitehead—whose influence on me I cannot go into here), the I Ching, and Cage’s own Duchamp-influenced “take” on these Asian philosophies crystallized in me sufficiently for me to be impelled to begin employing chance operations in the composition of verbal texts and performance works, many of which are indeterminate or unpredictable in significant ways in performance. I continued developing and employing such methods for nearly three decades.
As I wrote above, I think it was the Chicago (largely McKeon’s) interpretation of Aristotle (who was so much on the side of poets against captious critics that he devotes the whole twenty-fifth chapter of the Poetics to answers that poets and their partisans may give to such critics) that made me feel free to begin using aleatoric and related methods at a time when work of that sort was unknown in the American and British literary worlds, where the climate of critical opinion was strongly antiexperimental.
The way this amalgam of Greek, Asian, later European, and American philosophical influences—some or all of which may have been misread or misconstrued, either by myself or by my teachers—helped crucially to shape my work after 1953 in poetry, prose narrative, theater, music, and the visual arts exemplifies some ways philosophy may influence artmaking. It would take many times the number of pages available for this essay to spell out the many interrelations and contradictions among my philosophical influences, and some—especially the work of Alfred North Whitehead—I have hardly been able to mention.
The fact is that at the present time I am studying a number of philosophers whose works may eventually have an influence on my art work and may help to turn it in entirely different directions than those it has taken previously.
PUBLICATION: Poetry and Philosophy (1983), 3:67–72.
KEYWORDS: philosophy; avant-garde; method; history.
LINKS: Jackson Mac Low, “Sketch toward a Close Reading of Three Poems from Bob Perelman’s Primer” (PJ 2), “Persia/Sixteen/Code Poems” (PJ 4), “Pieces o’ Six—XII and XXIII” (PJ 6); Charles Bernstein, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing” (PJ 9); Richard Blevins, “‘The Single Intelligence’: The Formation of Robert Creeley’s Epistemology” (PJ 9); Allen Fisher, “Poetry, Philosophy, and Difference” (PJ 3); Ben Friedlander, “Laura Riding/Some Difficulties” (PJ 4); Lyn Hejinian, “La Faustienne” (PJ 10); George Lakoff, “Continuous Reframing” (Guide; PJ 1); Peter Middleton, “The Knowledge of Narratives” (PJ 5); Dmitrii Prigov, “Conceptualism and the West” (PJ 8).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: 22 Light Poems (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1968); Stanzas for Iris Lezak (Barton, Vt.: Something Else, 1972); Asymmetries 1–260 (New York: Printed Editions, 1980); From Pearl Harbor Day to FDR’s Birthday (College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon, 1982); Bloomsday (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1984); French Sonnets (Tucson: Black Mesa, 1984); Representative Works: 1938–1985 (New York: Roof Books, 1986); Words nd Ends from Ez (Bolinas, Calif.: Avenue B, 1989); Twenties: 100 Poems (New York: Roof, 1991); Pieces o’ Six: Thirty-three Poems in Prose (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992); 42 Merzgedichte in Memoriam Kurt Schwitters (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1994); Barnesbook (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996); Doings: Assorted Performance Pieces, 1955–2002 (New York: Granary, 2005); Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works, ed. Anne Tardos (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); 154 Forties, ed. Tardos (Denver: Counterpath, 2012).