A meditation on poetry and anthropology

April 15, 2012
The stress on the poetical within social science comes as a call for experimentation in freer forms, and a change in the politics of utterance. It is imported into sociology and anthropology as a solution, a tool, a vessel. But it turns out that the problem of ethnography, as of theory, only redefines itself as a poetic problem.
The task at hand: to explore the seriousness of the poetic within the scientific, theoretical. Writing is serious, taking upon itself the responsibilities of an adult expert. On the other hand, seriousness revealed from the point of view of the child. Turning the distinction between playing and seriousness as code and frame into a break, a sudden seriousness, an abrupt stop of playing. Writing transferred to an early moment of discovery; an epiphany. How to write the other writing; to make a difference between the disciplinary and the poetical – the serious play.

*

The child does not come at once. The third-first person of autobiography, and specifically, the autobiography of writing is connected with the scene of play and dream, playing with writing. Writing, the serious thing of big adults (the disciplinary), is also the wonder of a child. But I can’t remember a sudden wondrous leap from scribbling in a school copybook to writing. The leap of writing. In my memory it did not spring out of a copybook. It began with a break in play: 

Age five, I am playing in the yard of the three-story building in Givatayim (“town of two hills” near Tel Aviv) with papers, blueprints of my father, the water engineer. He gave me these thick sheets of paper to use them for drawing on their other, white, clean side. But I reversed them back to the printed side, with its obscure magical lines and drawings. Playing at being serious. I tried with words I can’t recall to pull my friend into my play. Suddenly, no! The hieroglyphs exposed me and my silly “as if” play, and left me alone with the dull papers in my hand, sad, bewildered, and suddenly serious, without my own. Perhaps it was my friend’s reluctance to join me that laid bare my lonely desire. No play was ever the same. The suspicion sneaked under my skin, determining a future of hesitation between the already written and the blank side of the paper, a beginning.

*

But also an end. The break of the moment is its memorial site. At the break of the moment I knew I will never be back. Time broke. Leaving behind is not a wake that forgets itself out of the movement forward, but an internal knowledge of the moment. Play revealed that it is play, and that it cannot, by playing serious, indeed be serious. To be serious one must stop playing. 

Everything stops. Progress is impossible. The moment is split to fore and before, inside and outside; an implosion. A ‘Memento’ (remember!) The retrieval of stored information, image, feeling or self of an earlier age we call memory, is here coupled with a sense of becoming a witness, remembering myself while still at the midst of occurrence. The early break informs those who come after, and becomes a kind of primal scene which although carrying with it the air of earliness in the lateness of today it still breaks news. The early moments of break are especially strong.

Observing the wheels of a moving car: at a certain moment their shiny “spokes” in the sun seem to be rotating and rolling backwards, against the direction of the car. Going back to the break in an opposite direction. The idea of break as the other side of the idea of progress, exposing the free flow of the future as a strung spring tied like a dog to its ‘memento’. Remembering is part of the moment, not just a late recollection of it. Haunted by it. Are not such moments the beginning of history? History, or at least autobiography, then, as broken continuity rather than continuity, the imprint of memory on the moment itself. 

“The time is out of joint” (Hamlet); time is running with a sprung ankle. The past has been doubled. Time flow and time stopped. The action continues, the plot plots and memory insists, pulls me back to doubleness as it emerged; a fold; a crease; a wrinkle; time doubled over. The psychological drama can tell the story but not the whole story. Not the story of the doubling itself at its break: the seriousness of it. Then the obsession: “I always hit on the same nail” (Beckett) or the nail pierced into Oedipus’ feet which gave him his name – swollen foot – the piercing wound, the break of continuity at the beginning of the Oedipal voyage, continuity with a break. 

*

The poetical as “a performance text where the fact-fiction problem is interrogated” (Denzin). Performance is a strong word that combines contradictory terms such as action/appearance, fiction/truth, and manages to find a reconciliatory medium for writing to go on. But the term performance also alludes to a return to the moment of writing as a separate existence than the moment of ethnography. Don’t stop there. But go to the (your) break. Break the seriousness of the discipline with performance, or play; break your own seriousness, break into a smile: “You must treat it as a contract and a binding law . . . combining in your oath taking a not unenlightened seriousness with the jesting that is kin to earnest . . .” (Plato, the Sixth Letter). 

The poetic as a measure against any frozen form. Put it on the move, go against as you go forward, open the space preceding writing, go through the serious to become light. This is not merely the crisis of representation but the crisis of speech that determines poetic speech. Not to be carried away by the telling of the story or the elaboration of theory which loses the moment, which calls, out of the moment, into the story’s tunnel of imaginary or conceptual thought. “The point is not to get a better narrative but to get to illegibility, to a deep and enlivening appreciation of it” (Clough). 

The formalist break: poetry breaking prose. It is not only a matter of the more or less absent presence of the writer in the field and in the writing of the field. Attention diverted from the moment out there to the moment of writing – to language’s dance which goes nowhere, unlike the walking of prose (Paul Valéry) . The breaking of prose becomes the occasion for the poetical. A return to writing. A performance. A prayer. An experiment. A flight. A break dance. 

*

The break of a dance: I am sitting in a room in the kindergarten that I remember mostly as a sense of space and presence from my angle on the bench in a circle with other children. My ears all cocked up and out of the circle to the ‘ganenet’ (kindergarten teacher) named Rivka (Rebecca) chatting with the ‘rhythmicist’ (a teacher of rhythm, dance). The rhythmicist told us to get up from our benches and dance around an imaginary lump of honey that she put in one of the corners of the room, be drawn to it like flies. The children got up to the dance but I remained glued to the chair, listening with unquenchable almost painful curiosity to the rhythmicist whispering to the ganenet that she really saw friends of hers putting honey in the corner of a room to get rid of the flies. That decisive moment, the turning of the head and the story I heard from which I couldn’t turn my head back. I couldn’t dance the fly dance. The circle was broken. I remained outside it, not with the rhythmicist and the ganenet who were talking of the dance, nor with the dancing children, but transfixed between talk and dance. 

*

What of now? It passes immediately. Not to stop here, though. i.e., not to close in on a detailed actuality of writing; the concreteness of finger movements, the room, the table. Let it go. Don’t mention it. The absent presence of writing. The break of the present moment is mild. Will it resurface tomorrow, in two years as a breaking moment of memory? All that remains is the writing. The moment itself is diffused in the writing. The paradox of the ‘moment’: it is both moment as momentum=movement and moment as in ‘just a moment’ – pause, stop, a step out of momentum, punctuation: “more or less syllables, commas for breath, a point for the big breath” (Beckett). 

Ask writing. Ask in writing: how to sound in the two voices (Oakeshott) of human conversation: poetry and science. Poetry (versus science) is not only emotion and selfhood – it is ritual, magic, voice, dance, tongue, the rhythm of heart beat (as in learning by heart, Derrida). To write poetry or poetic writing means to engage in the break of language. A beginning not out of nowhere, but out of end. The new question is not how not to finalize or how to disrupt closure, but how to begin. Poetic speech is neither talk (ethnography, narrative, theory) nor dance (magic, trance, play) but between them. So it is not a matter of choosing that side or the other, but the desire to return to dance at the break of dance.

The stress on the poetical within social science comes as a call for experimentation in freer forms, and a change in the politics of utterance. It is imported into sociology and anthropology as a solution, a tool, a vessel. But it turns out that the problem of ethnography as of theory only redefines itself as a poetic problem. The poetic is more of a question than an answer, a performance of a poetic problem: it fumbles, it looks for words, it jumps into writing. Jump! Play seriously! Become a “Serious Artist!” (Pound). A wild area opens whose strong commitments and consequences are not yet charted. 

It requires a new language which breaks disciplinary language and discovers a new seriousness. This is how I read the spirit of the new that invigorates the “new writing” of sociology and anthropology, and how it figures itself as poetic writing. The mere call for play is not enough. It is not simply a matter of genre, which would merely repeate the disciplinary only in a different way. The serious play, or the experimental, punctures any self-fulfilling gesture and returns writer and reader to a silent ecstasy, ex-stasis, of break, enthusiasm in a broken line.

Zali Gurevitch  
First published in Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 6 (2000), pp. 3–8.