NPPF - Canto Four - more on Beauty

[Glenn Scheper]

I was taking a little break from work to assemble a
few more link pages, sources I surfed 5 months ago
(Smarandache, Nietzsche, then I got stuck reading
while screening the Hegel links. Progress stopped.)
I was caught by this equivalent new term for geek:

http://www.popcultures.com/bakhtin/pafrg.htm
 BAKHTIN LAID BARE

 On the one hand, the child can try to once again deploy the
 mechanism of primal sublimation, i.e., to sublimate the
 upsurge of self-preservative epistemophilia into sexuality.

I surfed for more by the author, Vadim Linetski, and found
stuff bearing on BEAUTY and TRUTH. -- Stuff NV would know:

http://www.popcultures.com/bakhtin/blb.htm
Bakhtin Laid Bare

 according to Bakhtin, an aesthetic object is a "non-verbal,
 immaterial" signifying entity which has no "empirical
 equivalent - be it spatial or temporal", and this because
 our object cannot be "localized empirically".

 And in fact we come to hear that
 "the so-called 'making strange' or 'device-baring'
 propounded by Formalism is nothing else than the function of
 isolation somewhat fuzzily described and more often than not
 erroneously located on the level of material: either it is
 the word which is made strange by means of quashing its
 conventional semantic field, or an object - by means of
 placing it outside of the normal conditions of its
 perception ... In actual fact isolation is an act of placing
 an object, value and meaning beyond the epistemic and
 ethical fields.

 Once it has been dematerialized, a work of art becomes an
 aesthetic object, i.e. an active force capable of
 participating in a dialogue. But this dialogue, as Hirschkop
 is forced to acknowledge, is precisely what Bakhtin has
 meant by monologism. The novel's active participation in the
 discursive event, says Hirschkop, depends on its opposition
 to the poetic genre and only by dint of this device-baring
 opposition the relativization of linguistic consciousness
 can be achieved. However, the result is that the dialogical
 novel acquires meaning, whereas, according to Bakhtin, it is
 precisely meaning - a main obstacle to dialogue - which an
 aesthetic act should suspend.

 in the most fundamental sense mimesis is nothing else than a
 translation/transformation of aesthetics into ethics. This
 is precisely what makes of it such a troublesome notion.

 the traditional
 view of mimesis leaves us an essential possibility of
 re-aesthetization. So long as there is an original and a
 copy there is a debt, ineluctably an ethical notion.

 What sets Bakhtin aside from current theorizing is his
 commitment to aesthetics, and it is this commitment which
 allows him to achieve the aim that Derrida is able only to
 state. Whereas Derrida's strategy aimed at supersession of
 logocentric binarism runs counter to his tactics which
 reinforces the latter, with Bakhtin we are spared this
 contradiction. And this precisely because Bakhtin's main
 concern is to annul debt and in so doing to restore
 discursive innocence, instead of promulgating universal
 indebtedness.

 Discursive innocence should not be confused with the notion
 of origin/originality from the logocentric paradigm. The
 innocence sought by Bakhtin is an aesthetic one and
 therefore cannot be appropriated by the logocentric world of
 ethics Derrida's complicity with which makes it possible to
 apply to deconstruction Bakhtin's definition of an ethical
 and cognitive deed: "here everything is ex origine and
 therefore nothing original" (1975b: 31; italics added). But
 by the same token innocence, "a crucial element of an
 aesthetic form" (1979a: 114), albeit it cannot be regained
 without the Other (98, 101), radically transcends the
 dialogue/monologue binary baring it as a logocentric affair.
 Which leaves us with the fundamental question as to the
 identity of this mysterious Other. The main surprise that
 Bakhtin still has in stoke for us is that this Other is the
 hero.

        ---

Youse luckys guys in the English dept. probably had to read
all this stuff to get there. But I quoted at length because
this Bakhtin is only heard of, not well known, to me.

My axe to grind is that the classic hero is the autofellator,
for some reason made strange, creating the stage for poetics.

The speech act of AF (certainly if spontaneously discovered)
is no mimesis, but baptism, confession and at-one-ment into
a brotherhood with no eldest brother, to never engender envy.
Again, my odd view basics are in web essay, _Heroic Alterity_.

Some ideas above may bear on PF's poem/commentary distinction.
 
Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.