Arshake is pleased to publish the fourth of seven appointments of an essay on thinking, poetry and writing in the technological era by Brunella Antomarini, Professor of Aethetics and Contemporary Philosophy at the John Cabot University in Rome. The essay originally appeared on the magazine “Smerilliana. Luogo di civiltà poetiche” (Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop, in “Smerilliana”, n.17 2015, pp. 275-90), and it is here relaunched, translated into English.
Part I: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 7, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 14, 2018
Part III: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 21, 2018
Part IV: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 28, 2018
(…)
Thinking: the homeostatic goal of avoiding death (Pierre de Latil)
We think within the great thinking show of the world and we are thoughts, small contingent parts of thought.
The screen – the ‘digital’, the ‘virtual’ – contains what is not there and boils down to appearance what in fact is there. Thinking follows this modality naturally, although it now does so with the avail of this new technology. It is more important to show how the apparition disappears than the apparition itself.
In performing this gesture, the thought is there at hand: it does not aspire to overcome its limits, but rather to reduce its power as much as possible. The digital devices allow launching on the web virtual texts that display their resistance to the idea of a stable truth. The idea of a ‘stable truth’ was instead a feature of an intellectual mode of thinking typical of the XX century. Blurring logical and ideological distinctions, these texts and ideas, with their ‘oral’ and ‘immediate’ qualities, are nonetheless mutually inconsistent, because they are written, and as such, cause the information mechanisms to stop.
On the other hand, the poetic phenomenon is always thought to be connected to an idea of resistance. If we consider how weak is the intellectual and political thought today, and how irreplaceable is the activity of thinking – except when it surrenders to totalitarianism or to the logic of the market – it seems to me that writing, meant as auto-poiesis or as poetry, can create over time an active thinking that springs up from those forms of resistance.
Other verses by Vladimir D’Amora:
mirroring oneself to the tiny conditions of assemblage
being already assembled in the fashion
of a circus mode
I
and the rest of existence
are this tropic
line – to be reminiscent
of another resistance
The writers’ digital gesture of uploading and downloading, of abandoning texts and re-appropriating them through the social networks of the hour, is their withdrawal from presence and effectiveness – there is no sounding board –, a flight over the world, an access to an empty world (empty of ideas, objects, selves). In order to make that empty space worthy of being an object of thinking, the poet-spectator of an absolute show, measures and calculates with mathematical precision the intransitiveness of contingencies and the resistance to relationships, but incorporates them regardless.
“Where are we when we think?” asks Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind. Now, we are strangers within the Web, global spectators without a stage, if everything is a stage. Still, our detachment does not entail a maximum of distance and breadth of ideas, but indifference to that very breadth (an indifference that is way too human), a self-estrangement in bottomless things, in adjectives without nouns, in a confused syntax.
From Dickinson to Mandel’štam to Rosselli, the poet who betrays the syntax displaces the beginning and the end of a sentence, in order to avoid giving words a commonplace sense.
In this journey backward, the remote past is not distant, and the closest future has no location, so that thinking can hold to the minimum. It is, as Arendt says, “in the quiet at the center of a storm” (Arendt I, 209).
… to be continued…
This is the fourth of seven appointments of an essay on thinking, poetry and writing in the technological era by Brunella Antomarini that originally appeared on the magazine “Smerilliana. Luogo di civiltà poetiche” (Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop, in “Smerilliana”, n.17 2015, pp. 275-90).
Part I: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 7, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 14, 2018
Part II: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 21, 2018
Part IV: Pensiero poesia scrittura in feed back loop [Thinking poetry writing in feedback loop], Arshake, June 28, 2018
“Smerilliana” was first published by Enrico D’Angelo in January 2003, in the Marche region.It initially came out every six months. Later every volume of «Smerilliana» became a place of poetic civilisation, with the addition of the series “Poets of Smerilliana” and “Mosaic”. When it first appeared, Giovanni Raboni cited «Smerilliana» while writing in «Corriere della Sera», calling it the most open-minded and interesting poetry publication on the Italian scene. «Smerilliana» ideally continues the work of the literary biannual magazine «Plural» (founded and directed by D’Angelo in Napoli, between 1986-91), pursuing the pluralist outlook and style of the movement, as defined by the Orientalist Rahim Raza.
