Linking the Unlinkable: Technique into Ethics

Since modernism, linkage – what Raworth calls ‘connectives’ – has been an essential issue for any art which achieves formal defamiliarization and deautomatization through effects of fragmentation. Indeterminacy and discontinuity have long provided descriptions of radical art, as in Umberto Eco's poetics of the open work. However, Gilbert Adair, in the short document which furnished the term Linguistically Innovative Poetry, points out that because, for example, ‘advertisements are ample in “discontinuities”’, the term is not neutral and can only be used of British Poetry if it expresses ‘positivities’. He says, usefully, ‘Cutting across formations categorized as discrete, “discontinuity” is so only if it makes other relations; or else it is mimesis of actual informational chaos.’ In other words, to use terms appropriated from Lyotard's lecture ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”’, disjoining, to be efficacious, must simultaneously link. In literary experimentation, this is demonstrated most obviously in forms of collage, as long as it is remembered, obversely, that ‘to link is to disjoin’.

Indeed in this context it is interesting to see two major late twentieth-century thinkers, both of them students of Levinas, Derrida as well as Lyotard, consider the term linkage in its ethical dimensions, ones which I believe, ultimately lead us back to the heart of what is most effective and affective in British poetry of the 1980s and 1990s, and which are related to the ethical poetics I have offered so far in this study, particularly with regard to the paradoxically interruptive linkages throughout Raworth's work.

In ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”’, a lecture that introduces the terms of his major philosophical work The Differend; Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard considers the name that, for Adorno, risked overstamping all human endeavour, including famously, and relevantly to my current purpose, poetry, that is: Auschwitz. For Lyotard, ‘Auschwitz’ is ‘a model’ but not an example for ‘the incommensurability between the universe of prescriptive phrase (request) and the universes of the descriptive phrases which take it as their referent’. The essential difference lies in the Nazi's use of the prescription ‘Die’ which is utterly different from other commands, since to obey is to concede to ‘this immobilization clause in the game (i.e. death)’; it is the limit case for a philosophy of linkage, what Lyotard calls a ‘differend’.