PENAS CONVENCIONALES:

This section proposes that Altieri voids his key terms of fixed meanings by a ‘dialectic of emptying- out’ that Roberto Finelli traces to Marx’s Grundrisse, where ‘the abstract occupies and itself invades the concrete’ (2007, p.66). Finelli’s argument is based on a view of post-modernism as a more complete realisation of, rather than a rupture with, modernism that is in keeping with Altieri’s concern with ‘contemporary recastings of…Modernist heritage’ (Altieri 2006a, p. 47). Finelli ‘posits the abstract and the concrete in connection not through contradiction but through abstraction - emptying-out’ (2007, p.66). This sense of abstraction through the act of emptying is congruent with Elisabeth Loevlie’s use of kenosis14 _{to denote ‘a repeated emptying and weakening’}

through which poetic language unsettles language’s referential function. (2015, p.91). This section will examine the hollowing out of the terms ‘intentionality,’ ‘conative’ and ‘irritable reaching after’ via this mode of abstraction, not in order to suggest that the mode of abstraction they employ imbues Altieri’s language with a poetic function, but to emphasise features of its troubling of referentiality that prepare the reader for the more overtly kenotic manoeuvres of contemporary poetry.

14 _{Kenosis refers to Christ’s emptying of his divine self in order to be filled with the human nature, ‘the sublime Self-}

forgetfulness of the Son of Man, who on their behalf had “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”’ (McClain 1998, p. 88).

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Intentionality

In an endnote to the first chapter of Particulars of Rapture, Altieri defines intentionality in precise and comparatively specific terms:

The simplest definition of intentionality may be the most useful: intentionality is what it takes to turn a situation into this situation. Put more philosophically, ‘intentionality’ refers to those orientations of consciousness that give directedness and so make it possible for the activity of mind to engage a concrete world. Intentional states are those through which we make possible the offering of descriptions and the motivating of actions. (POR, p.260)

There are a couple of points worth noting in this definition. Firstly, in its orienting function it aligns closely with ‘attunement,’ 15 _{a central concept in his mode of valuing that will be discussed}

in the next section. Secondly, Altieri takes care to distinguish his version of intentionality, drawn from Richard Wollheim, from the traditional definition provided by Franz Brentano. His assertion is that Brentano’s definition limits itself to considerations of directedness without taking account of the contents derived from directedness (p.260). A passage synthesising Spinoza and Kant makes the assertion that ‘intentionality is dynamic’ (p.15) comprising, not just orientation, but the search for knowledge and the creation of consciousness. Given that Altieri’s unconventional phenomenology will be explored in chapter two, this section will attempt to address the extent to which his ‘dynamic intentionality’ hollows out the concept as it is understood inphenomenology. In his essay outlining Edmund Husserl’s model of intentionality, Jean-Paul Sartre positions it as an alternative to what he characterises as a Kantian ‘digestive philosophy of empirico-criticism’ (Sartre 1939, p.1), a philosophy in which all access to the world is reduced to the soft, digesting mist of the self (p.1). In the face of this queasy dissolution of world by self, ‘Husserl persistently affirmed that one cannot dissolve things in consciousness’ (p.1). Here, we have an intriguing point of contrast with Altieri’s model: while Sartre posits Husserlian intentionality as a counter-measure to a neo-Kantian absorption of consciousness of the world into the self, Altieri suggests adopting

15 _{Attunement, or attuning, is the term Altieri uses to describe the complex dynamic whereby agents engage with}

others, with artworks, or with the consequences of their own emotions (POR, pp.3, 5, 10). This form of engagement is also extended to the characters in artworks, whose attempts to process the aesthetic qualities of their own actions and relationships mirror and elicit the response of their readers (POR, p. 22-3). This, then, is a flexible, interactive process, one that will both enable and complicate Altieri’s conception of intentionality, and play a central role in his phenomenological thinking in Reckoning with the Imagination (p.22).

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Kant’s own notion of ‘purposiveness’ as a means of allowing for a more flexible, dynamic model of intentionality (POR, p.15). This proposal would appear to smooth over a distinction made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty between a Kantian process of detaching the subject by ‘showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it’ (Merleau-Ponty 2005, p.x) and a Husserlian ‘‘‘noematic reflection” which remains within the object and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity’ (p.x). It appears that Altieri’s version of intentionality privileges the very process of ‘bas[ing] the world on the synthesising activity of the subject’ (p.x) in contrast to which Husserl, Sartre and Merleau- Ponty all conceive of phenomenology. Chapter two will attempt to untangle some consequences of framing his literary and philosophical commitments as an ‘embarrassed phenomenology’ (POR, p.32).16 _{In Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (p.9) he proposes a ‘phenomenology of}

intentionality’ which would seem to reverse the usual direction of these terms. This, taken together with his development, in Reckoning with the Imagination (pp.32-6), of a version of intentionality that overlaps considerably with the concept of authorial intention, underlines the extent to which Altieri hollows out existing abstract concepts to fulfil the role he requires of them in his own process. Central to that version is the argument that ‘if we cannot structure our interpretive discourses around what the author is trying to do in the making, we are necessarily trapped in abstractions such as “meanings,” which breed counter-abstractions such as “free play” and “conversation”’(RI, p.34). This assertion will be returned to at the end of the chapter.

In Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s phenomenology, there are two related categories of intentionality: ‘intentionality’ of act’ entails the deliberate taking up of a position, and is described as corresponding to Kant’s thought in the Critique of Pure Reason (Merleau-Ponty 2005, p.xx), thus supporting Altieri’s Kant-inflected model of dynamic intentionality; and ‘operative intentionality,’ ‘that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life’ (p.xx), in

Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (pp.37-63) and Reckoning with the Imagination (pp.9, 35-6) both present themselves as forms of this idiosyncratically synthetic phenomenology.

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other words, an intentionality that originates in the world and in turn shapes consciousness of the world via our desires and evaluations, ‘furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language’ (p.xx). Thus Merleau-Ponty’s definition of intentionality gives ample support to Altieri’s recourse to Kant (pp. xix, xx), and to his dynamic presentation of intentionality, while simultaneously undercutting these supports and reversing the poles of the dynamic. While Kant proposes the world as the ‘possible object’ unified in the consciousness of the subject, Merleau-Ponty shows a world that is ‘always “already there” before reflection begins’ (pp.vii), source of the consciousness that shapes the subject and from which his consciousness is derived, in turn giving rise to the sense of the world derived from the intersections of subjectivity and intersubjectivity (pp.xix, xxii). Merleau-Ponty’s description of the dynamic of intentionality takes the world as its starting point and posits a subject formed by its interactions with what is ‘always “already there.’” In these two currents of thought, the poles of origin and end are reversed, but the dynamic flowing between them is otherwise strikingly similar. This reversal of the direction of intentionality mirrors the reversal of the ‘concrete to abstract’ poles, and reversal becomes a means of hollowing. It is striking, and will be further noted in chapter two, how little Altieri draws on Merleau-Ponty, or indeed Husserl, in elaborating his models of intentionality and phenomenology.17

Instead, he seeks to define it through opposition to cognitivism. Altieri’s concern to distinguish his thinking from that of cognitivist philosophy fuels the contrarian dynamic of his interaction with Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, particularly in his interrogation of her use of intentionality (POR pp.160-7), which allows him to refine his model of the concept through contradiction. He presents the outline of her argument in terms tantalizingly close to his own (‘Nussbaum is committed to making the theory of emotion much more sensitive than traditional cognitivism is to complex features of intentionality’ p.160), before turning his comprehensive

17 _{There is only one glancing mention of Merleau-Ponty in the body of the text (POR, p.211) and two in the}

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disagreements with her position into an opportunity to clarify his own (p.161). He finds fault with her unifying concept of ‘embodied beliefs’ and suggests that cognitive concerns and considerations of intentionality are fundamentally incompatible, and that it would be ‘more accurate to maintain a position that cognitive concerns have to emphasize how the emotion connects to the world, while intentionalist ones focus on the subject rather than the object’ (p.164). While this separation of domains is consistent with deeper ethical and literary disagreements with Nussbaum that will be returned to in the next section, the urge to corral intentionalist concerns into a category separate from, and untouchable by, cognitive ones, risks restricting their domain to one that is so circumscribed as to be unusable. A tendency to define his thinking through opposition and minute terminological distinctions risks leaving him with an impoverished and sequestered version of intentionality, unable to fulfil the dynamic and complex functions he has proposed for it.

Conative

The adjective ‘conative,’ derived from Spinoza’s use of the noun ‘conatus’ in his Ethics, occurs over 50 times in The Particulars of Rapture, beginning with the assertion that ‘[in making affective experience a source of value to be pursued] the arts seem to require our developing a fairly tight connection between our aesthetic interests and what Baruch Spinoza elaborated as our conative drives’ (p.4). It is striking that the first use of this central adjective goes unmarked with explication or para-text, given the centrality of both to Altieri’s procedure. The second instance occurs on the next page, in a description of valuing as an ‘abstract aspect’ of a process Altieri will go on to define later in this section (p.12) and elaborate in Reckoning with the Imagination (pp.22, 99) as ‘attunement:’

[This is] concerned not with how we engage the world but with how we reflect upon the values involved in our various ways of experiencing the world. For I want to use aesthetic models to foreground conative experiences of affective states as ends in themselves, experiences quite at odds with the philosophical tendency to treat affects primarily as means for generating actions and attitudes. An aesthetic perspective invites us to ask what states, roles, identifications and social bonds become possible by virtue of our efforts to dwell fully within these dispositions of energies and the modes of self-reflection they sustain. Rather than asking what we can know about the affects, or how they contribute to the work of knowing, we begin to ask who we can be by virtue of how we dispose our self-consciousnessin relation to affective experience. (POR, p.5)

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This passage proposes a central concern of Altieri’s thinking, ‘who we can be’ or become through self-reflexive engagement with art, that will be traced more fully in chapter two. It frames that process as using ‘aesthetic models to foreground conative experiences of affective states,’ therefore a lack of clarity regarding his definition and understanding of the concept of the ‘conative’ hinders access to meaning in what is already a recursively abstract passage. Adding to the potential for confusion is the fact that the conative is one of Jakobson’s six functions of language: as the aspect of language that orients it towards an addressee, it is associated with imperatives and direct addresses (Hébert 2011 n.p.). Jakobson’s ‘Statement on Linguistics and Poetics’ highlights these aspects of the conative function in poetic language, locating it in particular in poetry in the second person which is ‘supplicatory or exhortative’ (Jakobson 1985, p.154). This sense of the word does not fit its use in this text or in ‘Taking Lyrics Literally,’ neither of which references Jakobson or draws on examples of poetry in the second person. However, for the reader familiar with the ‘conative function,’ the discrepancy between that term and the use of the adjective in this text poses a challenge to understanding.

The term, and its Spinozan context, are next mentioned in a passage drawing them into a synthesis with Kantian ‘purposiveness’:

Conatus [from Spinoza] is a very general form of purposive orientation exercised by all living agents in their efforts to persist in their own being. Purposiveness [from Kant] seems to me a powerful way of identifying the dynamics of conative activity so that we can postulate satisfactions and interests that are not dependent on epistemic value stories. (POR, p.15)

This gives a brief synopsis, again without para-text, of the generally-accepted definition of the term conatus before reverting to the adjective and back into the flow of abstract exposition. Given the tendency in this prose to define and refine key terms with references and foot-notes, the reader is on the lookout for a substantial explication of this guiding concept that is not provided until chapter four (‘Why Manner Matters: Expressive and Conative Value,’ p.109), which promises to establish a speculative framework via ‘Baruch Spinoza’s account of conative activity’ (p.112). The realisation of this promise, however, is deferred again to a brief overview on p.140 whose endnotes cite two brief references to Spinoza’s Ethics and two secondary sources, one of which (‘Deleuze’s

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great book on Spinoza which I engage at length in my Subjective Agency,’ p.279) is acknowledged but not engaged with in the text. Attaching rhetorical weight to such a thinly-defined concept compounds the disorienting effect of this prose: terminological slipperiness prevents the reader from gaining traction on meaning. At this point it may be useful to get a sense of the origins of ‘conative,’ both in Deleuze and in Altieri’s engagements with his reading, to get a better grasp on what the word is doing in Altieri’s thinking.

Deleuze defined it as ‘being’s tendency to persevere in its existence’ (Deleuze 1981, author’s translation)18 _{and Hardt, synthesising both Deleuze and Spinoza, called it ‘the essence of being}

insofar as being is productive; it is the motor that animates being as the world’ (Hardt 2003, p.93)19

and it could be described as a tendency or a striving. In both cases, it is presented as a source of movement, ‘pure activity’ (Hardt, p.93) in which ‘the dynamic characteristics of conatus are linked with its mechanical ones’ (Deleuze 1990a, p.230). It is also a ‘rich synthesis’ of action and passion, mind and body (Hardt, p.93) so that ‘a composite body's conatus [is] only the effort to preserve the relation of movement and rest that defines it, that is, to maintain constantly renewed parts in the relation that defines its existence’ (Deleuze 1990a, p.230). It has been proposed (LeBuffe 2015 n.p.) that the concept allows Spinoza to provide a mental correlate for physical bodies’ tendency towards motion. This takes the form of tending towards what one perceives as good, and away from what is perceived as evil:

IIIp9s suggests that the fact about the person which the label reveals is her conative state:

It is clear that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it. (LeBuffe, 2015)

Thus the conatus, and its adjective conative, have rich potential for considering literature and art, serving to conceptualize and clarify relationships of movement and rest; relations between multiple

18 _{Deleuze (1981) emphasises that, for his reading. ‘persevering’ is more important than tending : ‘je comprends que dans}

l’expression « tendre à persévérer dans l’être », je comprends « persévérer » avant d’avoir compris « tendance »’ or ‘I understand that in the phrase ‘tending to persevere in being,’ I understand ‘persevering’ before having understood ‘tendency.’

19 _{Hardt’s doctoral dissertation, on which this book draws, was completed under the supervision of Altieri (Hardt,}

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composing parts; and the tendency to designate as ‘good’ that which one already desires, and ‘bad’ that which one does not.

The first uses of the term in Altieri’s work are in Subjective Agency, where it is proposed as an alternative to such infelicitous coinages as ‘myness’ and ‘selving’:

Were it not violence to the English language I would go on to refer to this sense of myness as “selving,” since that participle captures the distinction between the unity provided by self-images and the unifying activity that gives one confidence that one is the orienting intentional agent of one’s own actions, even when there is no clear concept of the self operating. But for this study I will use various circumlocutions for that activity, resorting to conatus when I am in real trouble. (SA, p.26)

This initial presentation emphasises the provisionality of the term’s use, pressed into service in order to avoid grammatical and terminological difficulties, and the coining of the present participle ‘selving’ will provide an analogue for suggesting ‘meaning’ as a present participle in chapters three and four. However, there is very little focus on poetry in Subjective Agency, other than a reading of Stevens preceded by a note on the conatus as a way to ‘establish modal colourings of Substance’ (p.86) that allow for a polar modulation between active and passive affects. The entirely theoretical argument is difficult to follow, and much of its detailed interaction with the specifics of Deleuze’s Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza takes place in the endnotes (SA, pp.259-264). However, it does emphasise the term’s dynamic and relational qualities more clearly than in some later uses.

‘Taking Lyrics Literally,’ on the other hand, appears to assign more agency or more conscious directing power to the concept than would seem justified by any of the readings from which it originates:

Conative force seeks to resist all those factors "that can annul" the sense of individual existence for itself. Then because this emphasis so tightly weaves feeling a being's distinctive existence into an imperative for activity, the conatus provides the basis for a teleological account of the affects. (Altieri 2001, p.274)

This reading makes the conatus grounds for a teleological view that would seem at odds with Spinoza’s use of the term as an alternative to teleological accounts of desire (LeBuffe 2015). Furthermore, the collocations used throughout his argument, from ‘conative powers’ to ‘conative energies’20 _{lend a directedness and force to the concept that does not seem in keeping with its}

20 _{The twenty pages of this essay include references to ‘conative powers,’ (x3) ‘conative energies,’(x3) ‘conative}

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formulation as a ‘tendency’ or a ‘persevering.’ This tendency that is more usually presented as underlying agency is here being credited with agency of its own, a manoeuvre that will prove very useful in reading meaning and material in contemporary poetry in chapters three and four. However, it does lead to a somewhat unconvincing reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet:’

More striking yet is the way that the concept of conatus helps us characterize the deep joke of writing this sonnet in thirteen lines. The fourteenth line need not be given any concrete specification because it has meaning simply