Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Aesthetics of Decision

"An aesthetics of decision precedes & grounds cognition and consciousness rather than either of these being grounds or preconditions for any process of decision."

"... for Whitehead, the decision in which private experience culminates is also what makes it public and potentially conscious...  Decision is what makes consciousness, cognition and public relationality possible in the first place.  Feelings or movements of appetition are the basic elements of mentality (aka inwardness or qualitative experience)."

-S. Shaviro


A Transposition.

There is a single transhistorical invariant operative in every attempt to poeticise.  Let's call this the poetic decision.  The structure of decision is a formal syntax governing the possibilities of poetry.  Yet this structure remains unrecognized by poets, precisely because of poetry's hyper-reflexivity that prevents it from identifying its own decisional form.  Decision cannot be grasped reflexively because it is the constitutive element of poeticising.

Since there are no rules for the singular (and unrepeatable) decisions that are involved in every "poetic" event/moment, these decisions are not volunteers.  They don't simply emerge out of chaos - and to the extent that they are new and unrepeatable, they're incompatible with autopoiesis.




[note: the above transposition is a found text at this point.  don't recall how it was constructed. dated 10/24/2009.]

1 comment:

John Olson said...

Each poetic decision is an incision in the membrane of a shared language. The rapture occurs when it is sewn back up. This is why it is called "artery."