POEMS J.H.

Prynne Bloodaxe Books Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1999, 440 pages La posie dite endort, announces Lacan in the April 18 lesson from Seminar XXIV. Poetry, when recited, has a hypnotic, assuasive effect. In fact, Lacan says here that a discourse will always have this effect of lulling one to sleep, except when it is not understood. Only then might one be brought round, awoken from ones slumber. It is solely in so far as poetry participates in the written Lacan speaks here specifically of a poetic writing that it is able to produce a modulation such that a sliding, tantamount to this awakening, can be achieved. It may not be poetrys principal mode of expression, but it is nevertheless a way, a properly poetic way, to introduce this sliding. Lacan makes this observation apropos Chinese poetry, acknowledging the concurrent research of his friend Franois Cheng. It is interesting that Lacan does not allude here to the avant-garde literature of his time. As ric Laurent has reiterated more recently, Lacan was critical of the potential of a literature, or a community of writers, orientated around the hors-sens, the outsidemeaning1. Lacan privileged the Oriental tradition for its ability to inform the analytic operation, to introduce modulations capable of producing ruptures in the subjects economy. Ruptures between meaning and jouissance that serve also to articulate them. Avant-garde writing meanwhile may well be the effect of a rupture, but this is far from guaranteeing the production of a rupture2. Lacan borrows the geographical signifier littoral to designate this rupture. The avant-garde, historically the domain of the pioneer, the groundbreaker, is always at risk of confining itself to the territory that it opens up; in short: of being run aground. The littoral is promoted at the expense of the play of the signifier. It is not a paradox to assert that duplicity of meaning is eschewed by virtue of the objection to discursive intent. Whilst discourse may produce a rupture at the juncture of the literality of the signifier with the littorality of the letter, the avant-garde

is apt to neglect the duplicity of meaning, the duplicity of the signifier that we write with the S index 2. With regard to the specifically Oriental mode of engagement with the world, as exemplified by Chinese poetry, we might ask, does the subject-position bind to the life-world by a different syntax? This is the question posed by the English poet J.H. Prynne in his afterword to a translation of works by the ORIGINAL Chinese Language-Poetry Group3. Rather than tackle the question philosophically, Prynne urges the reader to consult the poems themselves. But what does it mean to speak of a bond between subject-position and life-world as a specifically poetic bond? Is this to say that we are no longer within the realm of the social bond? Is poetry implicated at the heart of the subjects economy, rather than merely serving to reflect it? In his Seminar, Lacan taught his students to draw on something of the order of poetry in their analytic practice, but how many of us are able to consult the Oriental oeuvre without being beset by those very problems of translation which so often conspire to undo the specificity of the bond between the poet and his world? In the aforementioned J.H. Prynne, we meet a poet who, aside from being able to respond to this last question in the affirmative, succeeds in broaching related questions in his own poetry. Written for the most part in English, but greatly informed by the Oriental tradition, J.H. Prynne has long been championed not only for his range of linguistic novelty, but also for a broader, less transparent, discursive intention that has variously been termed, conscience, moral intelligence and so on. It might be argued nevertheless that Prynne merely contributes to the continuation of what we can now speak of as an avant-garde tradition, a writing confined to the hors-sens. The degree to which a poem is capable of functioning as discourse is contestable. What is observable, is that the challenge made upon the reader by the poetry of J.H. Prynne is being met by several generations of readers who demonstrate a degree of trust which would itself be worthy of analysis. *

The recently published collection of Prynnes poems contains, in addition to the volumes and sequences previously collected in the 1982 Agneau 2/Allardyce, Barnett publication, the six further volumes composed between 1983 and 1997. Here, I shall single out the 1967 text, A Note on Metal which, after appearing in Aristeas of the following year, was separated from the three poems contained in that volume (which were included in The White Stones (1969)), only to reappear in the 1982 collection. There, as here, it has the merit of being the sole prose work, yet it is difficult to use this classification without some degree of reserve. Drew Milne has spoken of Prynnes divided labours, and the folly of forcing them to cohere. Aside from his poetical career, Prynne is renowned as an essayist, a teacher, a man of letters, and yet this collection carries the simple nomination of its predecessor: Poems. Of the many interventions that Prynne has made in these capacities, not one of them will be found collected alongside his poetic works, with the notable exception of A Note on Metal. On first read, A Note on Metal is a condensed account of the development of production and exchange during the era of the first intensive international trade in the early Bronze Age. Prynne produces an account of the processing of value correlative to Marxs account of exchange value. When Marx speaks of value without a prefix, he is speaking of exchange value, and likewise in Prynne the value he considers is established on the basis of a specialised function dependent on the rate of exchange. Prynnes translation of Marxs metamorphosis of commodities into the historical development from stone as the principle embodiment of power, whether considered in the instrumentality of the neolith or the immutability of the abode and the tomb, to a theory of power occasioned by the increasing mastery of the copper and tin alloys, permits him to establish two contrasting yet to some extent co-existent systems, one constituting a profound modification of the other. Marx identifies power with labour. Together they form the basis of the substance of value. Likewise, Prynnes notion of power is identified with exertion, in turn implying a substance as the focus of that exertion. Thus, whereas power is initially a qualitative
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notion, more or less immediately apprehensible in the quantitative judgement of weight, the new alloys of the fifth millennium BC, by definition debased substances when considered from the perspective of the power-weight qualification, institute, by virtue of their extensive utility, a new abstraction of power. This abstraction is evidently dependent upon the metonymic property of the signifier. Value is the transfer of power from one object to another, by means of a signifying substitution. It is what allows Prynne to speak later of the power of displacement. Power can reside in the very fact of displacement. Despite its title, A Note on Metal is a history of a praxis: a history, not of metallurgy as such, but rather as Prynne announces in the opening sentence, of the origins of alchemy. To qualify it thus is to insist by implication on the factor of jouissance. When Lacan takes up Diderot in Seminar XI to contrast alchemy with science, it is precisely on the basis of the question of the practitioners desire, or as Lacan delicately puts it, the purity of the soul of the operator. One could say that in contrast to the scientists purity, the alchemist demonstrates an intent more akin to the volont de jouissance. Prynne points to this factor in the intent that gave rise to the Sumerian importation of Cornish and Bohemian tin, the displacement of the former being some 3,000 miles. In the final paragraph, this intent has reached what Prynne calls a critical overbalance. A Note on Metal insists on the factor of jouissance to the extent that it turns around the element of surplus jouissance, albeit in the sphere of political economy as opposed to that of the economy of the subject. The mechanisms are the same. In Seminar XVI, which dates from the same year as Prynnes text, Lacan demonstrates the homology between surplus jouissance and Marxs surplus value. The latter is merely the inscription of the former; a shift in status which for Marx amounted to a despoliation. When Prynne speaks here in the final paragraph of some entirely other interest into which the power of displacement has slipped, referring, it would seem, to the stratified functionalism of money economy, it is precisely in order to lead us to where we are at a loss.

This final paragraph is at once the most enigmatic and instructive. The literal is not magic, writes Prynne, with the adjunct, for the most part. At the beginning of the text, Prynne notes the coexistence of socio-political concerns and magic, each with their due place. This duality, fundamental to societies organised in accordance with the power-weight ratio, loses clarity with the metonymy established in the abstraction wherein any ratio of value is determined by the exchange rate. It is precisely this metonymy that can be considered as a process of debasement, as Prynne himself implies when he speaks of the item-form as perhaps not initially debased. In the transition from item-form to aes rude to aes signatum and finally to aes grave (coin as such), the quality of spiritual transfer becomes progressively obsolete. In likening this supersedure to the debasement of metal through alloying, Prynne echoes not only the despoliation of value in surplus value, but also the weakening of the bonds between money and the vestigial money commodity that we meet in twentieth century economics, a weakening that has advanced to the extent that now one speaks only of the possibility of a viable n u m e r a i r e , in place of the abandoned gold standard. Bullion, which was so critical to Marxs analysis of value, is mentioned only in passing here. This enables us to trace the same alchemists intent in the champion of our current floating currency system. It is above all number that Prynne considers as the definitive supplanter of power. In the poem How Many There Are: A Letter, Prynne affirms their incompatibility when he defines magic as, the presence of form / without number. We have seen how Prynne insists on a relationship between magic and power in the primitive economy, an economy wherein a certain limit is imposed on wealth, what Prynne calls a politics of limit. In contrast, the ensuing economy is dominated by what Prynne calls a politics of wealth, pointing to the aspiration for centralised national wealth, that is, surplus value. For Prynne this is what opens the door to number as the chief assertion of presence. Lacan, in Seminar XVII, also makes reference to this shift in political economy, a point from which surplus jouissance is calculable, from whence it can be counted, totalled. He continues, what

is called the accumulation of capital begins here.5 In short, with this inscription of surplus jouissance by means of number, the limit function no longer holds and wealth can accumulate, without regard for the safeguarding of commodities. This inscription may well be evidence of the way in which the capitalist reality maintains its relations with science, science in so far as it constitutes an imposition of number on the real, but does this advance from magical thought exhaust the category that Prynne opposes to magic, namely: the literal? Is he not attempting rather to promote another modality of economics, irreducible to either the politics of limit or the politics of wealth? Firstly, we might observe that Prynnes account is not solely a Marxist account to the extent that it not reducible to an analysis of value. Rather, Prynnes field extends beyond the scope of value, not simply by virtue of being orientated on the displaced power that constitutes the concealed origin of value, but in so far as he insists on the aspect of quality. The same concern is evident in other poems from The White Stones series, notably those that carry the signifier in their title: Quality in that Case as Pressure and Concerning Quality, Again. Each time we can observe a certain contingency of quality in contrast to the systems of political economy that constitute specific discourses with specific conditions of value. Nor is Prynnes quality homogeneous with either the philosophic quale or the scientific entity. And yet, Prynne approaches quality economically, that is to say, as an articulation of the signifier and the real. Quality, in Prynnes work, concerns the point at which the signifier is capable of touching the real to articulate a knowledge. In A Note on Metal it is a question of exposing what is eluded in capitalist discourse, of asking how it is that we can know so little about the conditions of the system that dominates our political economy. In the poems themselves, Prynne introduces what we can name, following Lacan, the interests of the subject, i.e., that which imposes itself on the subject as a disjointed knowledge, excluded from the political economy, but present to some degree as a response to it. It is in this sense that we can consider A

Note on Metal as having a discursive role with regard to the poems. Thus, Prynne invites another way of approaching economy. We might remark that it is at once the way of poetry and the Freudian way. It is precisely what Lacan aims towards in the lesson of 18 April 1977. Poetry, according to Lacan, lies in opposition to philosophic discourse by virtue of its violence toward language employed in the service of unequivocal signification. Whilst philosophy strives to efface the equivoque, poetry, when it is good, sustains it at the expense of a unilateral signification. Lacan concludes this lesson with a short commentary on the mot desprit, in which he argues that it is concerned, not with the beautiful, but the equivocal, or, if we follow Freud, the economical. Nothing is more ambiguous than this notion of economy says Lacan, but, all the same, economy founds value. A practice without value, that is what, for us, it is a question of instituting. Unlike Mallarms coin of common language, which Lacan was wont to invoke from time to time, whose effaced face value does not prevent one from finding a value therein, poetry constitutes a re-inscription of the coin on both sides simultaneously, thereby introducing a duplicity of value that cannot be resolved like the two halves of the tessera. Adrian Price
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Laurent (.), La lettre vole et le vol sur la lettre, La Cause freudienne 43, Paris, Navarin/Seuil, 1999, p.43 2 Ibid., and Lacan (J.), Lituraterre in Autres crits, Paris, ditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 18 3 ORIGINAL: Chinese Language Poetry Group, translated by Jeff Twitchell, edited by J.H. Prynne, Parataxis 7, Brighton, 1994, p.121 4 Originally published in The English Intelligencer 2nd ser., April 1967, pp. 286-89 5 Lacan (J.), Le Sminaire Livre XVII: Lenvers de la psychanalyse, ditions du Seuil, 1991, p. 207