![]() ![]() With Ron’s anonymous poems it is different, but only in part. #Scansion mending wall codeWe know better because it is obvious that our lack of familarity with the code in combination with our lack of familiarity with the context in which the code was generated makes for a totally opaque scene of reading, or non-reading. We know better than to stare at Lacan’s inscrutable stone and try to figure out the “author’s” gender or age or favorite flavor of ice cream. When he says that “Every element of time, place, gender, all manner of basic dimensions now have to be inferred entirely from the text itself," he effectively forces us to look to the text for exactly the kind of information that is best had elsewhere than from poetry. Now, it seems to me that what Ron is doing here by removing our knowledge of the author’s identity (and incidentally all the other knowledge that would go along with that knowledge, as of affiliation with different schools of poetics, publishing circles, political alignments) is reducing poetry to the status of that stone in the desert. On the other hand you define them as signifiers, by the fact that you are sure that each of these signifiers is related to each of the others. ![]() But it is an error to believe that each signifier is addressed to you-this is proved by the fact you cannot understand any of it. You do not doubt for a moment that, behind them, there was a subject who wrote them. Suppose that in the desert you find a stone covered with hieroglyphics. ![]() This exercise reminds me of the passage in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: In response to Ron’s Test of Poetry, and his discussion of “the question of naming & context, of anonymity & content”: ![]()
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