I wanted to chime in on this thread - I think it is an important topic. I am unable to say anything about Wilbur, however - I have never seriously read him, only dabbled, and quickly developed a kind of allergy to his writing. But many people here have read Wilbur, so maybe their feedback will be useful to you.
My comment maybe somewhat left field as a result. I would humbly suggest that our efforts to explore what we called “quantum poetics” or sometimes “quantum field poetics” (you can find discussions under both topics) is an attempt to grapple with a kind of integral literary theory from another perspective. This was an effort largely led by Heather Fester ( @hfester) and myself, along with Marco Morelli (@madrush) - we actually presented on this work a collaborative piece at the 2018 Gebser Conference. I recently picked up another book Johnny (@johnnydavis54) has been talking about, Arther Wendt’s “Quantum Mind and Social Science : Unifying Physical and Social Ontology“ which proposes that at least some of work on quanta in the social sciences (and by extension perhaps also the humanities) is not just the application of analogies and metaphor, but may go a lot deeper. It is our hope to nurture along a kind of integral literary theory, and perhaps a plurality of means is necessary to achieve this, in any event I think it is a good sign.
Thanks for writing. I did some listening and reading in regards to Quantum Poetics and Field Poetics. While I was not able to listen to and read everything, I think (hopefully) I got a sense of the ideas, at least to a certain extent (I have absolutely no training in science). Having said that, I guess my take on this can be found expressed much better than me in a somewhat recent article by a critic and memoirist named Michael Clune, which was in the Chronicle of Higher Education (and is not - hooray! - behind a pay wall!). Here is the link:
I found the connection between Field Poetics and Robert Duncan, by way of Lisa Jarnot, to be interesting, but I don’t know enough about Duncan’s praxis or theories, and the article I want to read about this is currently unavailable on Jstor (I have my brother’s pw and login - he is an academic, so has access to these things - but I think they might have caught on to us, and I’m not able to get in).
I just seems to me that this is, in some ways, or many ways, an example of interdisciplinary thinking - in this case, between quantum physics and poetry - that is slightly off-kilter or something, and that I’m not sure would lead to actual readings of actual poems. From what I did hear, there was emphasis on interconnectedness, continuity, self-referentiality, and boundedness, but people have been talking about the first three things for a very long time. While I don’t know very much about boundedness, I would be surprised if it wasn’t addressed in the critical literature (I could be wrong).
Because there is such a crisis in the humanities nowadays, I am skeptical, like Clune, of these approaches that try to mash together two very, very different disciplines. I think these approaches are ultimately reductive, and that they don’t really honor the intergrity, history, tradition from which the disciplines emerge, and through which disciplinary knowledge is generated. (It reminds me in many ways of arguments that try to argue that something like Quantum Physics is a form of mysticism - “What the Bleep Do We Know,” for example - which I think, agreeing with Wilber, is ridiculous.) Having said that, I do think some very careful interdisciplinarity is fine and good - for example Jonathan Kramnick’s book that tackles these issues head on (I learned about this book through the Clune article and have been reading it; it’s very good so far, and is essentially an “integral” approach without using that term):
Here is another great book, in the context of studying literature but also very careful and fruitful interdisciplinarity (also by Clune) - there is a chapter on neuroscience and addiction in literature, but without reducing either:
Well, I hope I’m not being harsh or dismissive. I do think that interdisciplinarity is important, at least in some ways, but because the humanities are such a mess nowadays, I think interpolating other disciplines to study poetry (see “Against Literary Darwinism,” the link is also in the Chronicle article) is somewhat removed from actual poetry, the actual process of reading or writing a poem. Actually, I read a great quote about this a few days ago, which I saved for future use (and now that time has come!). It’s from David Orr, who is a poet and essayist and teaches at Cornell. It reads,
“I wish, though, that they had found space for someone — not a critic, necessarily, just someone willing to be honest — to talk about the actual experience of reading a poem. Not why poems are good at rehabilitating people. Not where poems come from. Not what they can help us do, or forget, or remember. Not what the people who write them are wearing. Just what reading one of them is like to one person.”
I love this quote, and I think it’s true - I’ve never found, for example, a convincing piece of criticism about the actual experience of reading Ashbery, (though Helen Vendler came close with something in the New Yorker years ago, which I am having an impossible time finding, at least in terms of thinking about what he is about to, I would argue).
I just want to add one more thing. I am definitely “guilty” of doing this sort of off-kilter interdisciplinary thing myself - for a very long time I tried very hard to fit Ashbery into a “Rortian” context (Richard Rorty, a postmodern philosopher). It involved a lot of squeezing and pushing, like trying to fit a too-large piece of luggage into an overhead container. I remember feeling very excited about my approach - I loved Rorty, and I loved JA, so I thought the two should go together. But I learned, after some time, that in reality they really didn’t fit together, and that my theorizing was obscuring what was actually there. I think, to be honest, it is very difficult just to actually read a poem - what is right there, plainly, in front of one - without importing various theories to understand it that don’t wind up understanding it. From my perspective, this happened in a very intense and even tragic way with the importation in the 90’s and beyond of approaches like deconstruction and French theory, that were I guess interesting in and of themselves, but did absolutely nothing in regards to understanding and experiencing an actual poem. While Quantum Poetics is thankfully not jargon-laden like these aforementioned theorists work, I feel it is somewhat in keeping with this refusal, or denial, or inability, that we are all “guilty” of, (me included) to actually read a poem as a poem, what is right there in plain sight.
I found his chapters on Language to be highly congenial. As you have a physics background I imagine we could develop this further.
This is a sensitive subject and I want to handle with kid gloves. Recently, Geoffrey and I completed a twenty week study of ecologist Gregory Bateson and his daughter, Nora Bateson, and we have tons of posts about the Second Order Culture. I suggest that the Interdisciplinary emerged out of a basically First Order Cultural Aesthetic.
Nora, a practicing poet and film maker, urges us to move beyond the disciplinary. She calls this Transcontextuality. In her view, the Disciplinarians are trapped in silos. As you poignantly shared your misery in graduate school, a misery that I have heard is widely shared, I wonder if there is a relationship between your miserable experience in graduate school and interdisciplinarity ? Perhaps, you have developed that in your paper, which I have not had a chance to finish. So, I will get back to you on that one.
I have some clean questions I can ask about your process.
My practice is to ask open ended questions about a person’s actual language. For example, I would love to process this sentence. I would invite you not to try to answer, as this is something that should be conducted in a live interview, and maybe in a future video we can explore this directly. Some clean questions I would ask,
And the actual experience of reading Ashberry.
And what kind of experience is that?
And does that experience have a size or shape?
And is there anything else about the actual experience?
And that experience is like what?
And when your read a poem, what do you want to have happen?
And when you write a poem, what do you want to have happen?
This kind of clean language interview comes out of grounded qualitative research. It has been used widely in therapy, coaching and education. I am interested in working with cultural workers of all kinds of shapes and sizes. Perhaps we can move towards a different kind of discourse beyond the Culture Wars spawned in academia? This would be a worthy research project.
As a non-academic, I am drawn to an in-between orientation. As an activist, I have a tendency to triangulate from the margins. And what happens next?
I can now take off the kid gloves. I hope this is a useful conversation and look forward to reading your paper carefully. I love your sincerity and hope you receive the support that you need to flourish artistically and critically. Thank you.
I don’t entirely view Quantum Poetics as a tool for analysis, but rather as a way of looking at poetry that bridges the study of it and the writing of it (and ultimately, this is not only poetry, but poetics, that is, any form of practice handled with poetic sensibility). I got interested in Quantum Poetics first of all as a writer, and I believe both Heather and Marco were drawn to that dimension of the work. My writing has changed since I started exploring this stuff - I could try to articulate how, but it will be for another time I think.
Also, of course I worry about the “intrusiveness” of the approach with regard to literature, that has always been a concern, what you call the “off kilter” component. I used to have huge discussions about this kind of thing with my wife, who was an award winning poet. But I have kept at it because it seems to have resonances that are not merely intrusive, not only an ”outsider looking in”, but speak to the figure looking back, from the inside out, not, or I would hope, not only, as a mirror image. Wendt, in his book, argues that certain kinds of recent enquiry suggest that quantum properties are found in social contexts, that is, that quantum properties do not always “wash out” at macro scales, and of course there are arguments, albeit highly contested at this point, that human consciousness may be a quantum phenomenon. This is convergent with other ideas, but is still very embryonic. I would not stick my neck out that quantum poetics is rock solid, it is only tantalizing at best. However I have found that people working within literary fields are open to the discussion, even if there are no definitive answers.
The link to integral theory is that the practice of viewing poetics in this way seems to open up a kind of intermediate leafing, even leavening, in which the spiritual has a natural voice. Again, from a practical perspective, if not a fully grounded theoretical point of view. As Johnny says, it’s not about categorizing or coding, but something more in the rhythmic interplay between words and senses. But I understand if you are not convinced!
If quantum properties were found in social contexts - or, if human consciousness was a quantum phenomenon - what would that mean in terms of poetry? How would that help us read a poem?
It’s also about moving beyond the materialisms of the last century which has suffered from hardened categories. Academia appears at my distance very good at labeling and dismissing everything. Jeffrey Kripal, a professor of religion, claims that academics only value what is depressing. And Wendt, who works in the field of International Relations, says the mind-body split, which has dominated all discourse, and is based on rigid materialisms, has no capacity for moving forward. A dead end.
It seems to me a bit obvious that those who share a language have minds that are entangled. Systems theorist, Stuart Kauffman, would say minds that share a language are enabled. I am open to the possibility space which has a different kind of logics than the actual if A=B and B=C then A=C. Possibility space operates with deviant logics. We need to embrace the excluded middle. Vision-Logic requires different kinds of Logic and much more complex Tempo-Rhythms. And what is the difference between a fact and a factoid? Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Hi Andrew, thanks for everything you’ve shared here. It seems there are a few different threads in play, with the discussions about your paper, Bloom, Wilber, academia, and interdisciplinarity ( vis-a-vis Quantum Poetics, but also, Lit Theory and Integral Theory) all open.
What I have observed over the years is that one can apply Integral Theory (in the form of Ken Wilber’s AQAL, “All Quadrants, All Levels…” system) to pretty much any field and end up with a useful expansion, along with some capacity to talk about the field in the terms of a ready-made interpretive framework—which can also be useful, to a degree—but that this “integration” doesn’t typically respect the field on its own terms or deepen experiential insight, which comes through immersive practice.
You’ve already put it really eloquently, when you write that interdisciplinarity “is somewhat removed from actual poetry, the actual process of reading or writing a poem.” As others have noted, this has been my observation as well, with respect to the application of integral theory to art.
However, what I’d point out about Quantum Poetics (as we’ve experimented with it here) is that it had a lot more to do with a practical process of different kinds of writers (with experiential training & formal learning in physics, philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, and various spiritual traditions) actually producing work together.
So it was actually a lot more about our poetic practice than about the theory. But the theory provided what I’d call a ‘generative framing’ for the work. (At its best, perhaps AQAL can be used in a similar way, enactively. But like Quantum Theory, I don’t think it actually explains anything that really matters.)
What most interests me in your story is the personal process of discovery in relation to Bloom and Wilber, and how they influenced you to become the reader and writer you are. I would love to hear that story more fully and intimately told, and would be glad to provide more focused editorial feedback, if you would be interested in that, in a private thread.
All I’d like to say about the “bizarro world” of USA academic literary studies is that I know it first hand, as a (continental) philosophy and comp lit undergrad/major in the mid-90s. I took some grad seminars, too, and discretely remember the moment in 1998, sitting in a conference room in a Critical Theory seminar which deconstructed poems by Keats, Dickenson, and other classics through the lenses of Adorno, Foucault, and various contemporary ‘theorists,’ and the morning when our aging, nearly unreadable professor announced to the room— in a sad, ironic moment of candor—that we were there to “spin our wheels” again.
Something welled up in me then. Some rage. And that moment was the end of my academic career. I decided I would not apply to any grad programs (as I had been contemplating doing, leaning toward philosophy), and very soon decided that instead I would travel to Central America to do volunteer work—which utterly changed the course of my life.
This is just to say, we don’t have to play by those rules! We can be framework-inclusive, without being framework-centric. Also, I believe that in practice, it is impossible to separate aesthetics and ethics. We can only do this philosophically and theoretically. In practice, our reading and writing are subject to forces and principles that are ethical, aesthetic, and more.
I believe that we can (and must) integrate ethics and aesthetics in theory and practice, and that an ‘integral’ literary practice is superior to one that is purely ethical or aesthetic alone.
So how does the Body( seems to be the framework which EROS uses to Play) from a young age bring Ethics & Aesthetics to Literary capacities as one is growing in an environment of Wholes & Parts? I want my Literary capacity to Live without Fear & yet Fear -is- was my First Dive in Words expressing through Flesh.
This sounds very interesting. What was this process like? Could you (or, really, anyone involved in this process) expand on it more?
I thought this was also very interesting. I think I sort of agree and sort of disagree, at least from my own perspective. For me, AQAL explains so very much in regards to how to think about differences between people in the context of structures (and states) of consciousness. It is a staggeringly comprehensive framework in that sense, is how I experience it. As someone who meditates (I"m sure many here in IC do, too), Wilber has been wonderfully helpful for me in providing the interpretive tools I needed to make sense of my own actual experience. For me, there has been a very tight and close relationship between Wilber’s theory and my own experience, not just during meditation, but on a very daily “ordinary” level.
So in that sense, I really do feel, on my own part, that AQAL explains quite a lot. However, maybe you mean that it doesn’t explain a lot sort of outside its own framework? And then, yes, I would agree - for example, Wilber offers a sort of literary interpretation in Eye of Spirit - it’s his essay on Integral Art and Literary Theory - which takes up a passage in Heidegger on Van Gogh’s painting of his own shoes. I guess I found the interpretation fine, but it was not very earth-shattering or anything like that. If I want to read literary criticism, therefore, I turn elsewhere. (I suppose that’s fair - Wilber, like the rest of us immortal mortals, can’t be everything at once, though I think he is tremendous at what he does focus on, i.e. consciousness and spirituality in the context of developmental psychology and philosophy more generally.)
Wow, thanks! I would be honored. I actually have submitted the essay to an online magazine called Empty Mirror - they published an essay I wrote about Whitman last year - though I have no idea whatsoever what the editor will make of it. If she accepts it, I will probably go ahead and publish it, unless you think there is quite a bit more to do (and we can talk more about this in private).
I like this distinction between “framework-inclusive” and “framework-centric.” It allows for a certain freedom between the margins, which is making me think for some reason of Bob Dylan’s description of his own music as that “thin wild mercury sound” - something about being free to change, move flexibly in and out of frameworks, dance, and borrow when it’s relevant. Eclectic, syncretic, quixotic.
I’m glad the last quote quoted here is the above one, because the relationship between aesthetics and ethics is probably one of the things I am most interested in (and puzzled about, tbh), and so am happy to here to talk about it at the end of this long post. I have felt for some time now that Whitman is the grand exemplar in American poetry of what it looks like to experience the world in deeply aesthetic ways (many of his poems) as well as deeply ethical ways (his work during the Civil War, helping to comfort and encourage wounded and dying soldiers). BUT, having said that, Whitman has many poems that are not so great, sort of lazier catalogs that don’t work so well on the page, where he begins to sound rather like a caricature of himself. SO, therefore, I have to raise the question about this idea that an integral literary practice that integrates ethics and aesthetics is where it’s at, let’s say. I’m sure Wittgenstein was onto something when he said that the two are one, but in the actual practice of reading and writing poetry, let’s say, or fiction or plays or short stories, I just don’t think ethics should be our criteria for judging them. I think we have seen that happen since the 90’s, and I also think this has not produced readings of poems that read poems as poems. When it comes down to it, I find aesthetics much more interesting and demanding than ethics - I know, intuitively, to treat others the way I’d want to be treated - but what exactly is interesting about this? Do you know what I mean? Whereas, if I read a poem by Jay Wright, say, now that to me is interesting, i.e. the actual experience reading him - and that actual experience, from my understanding, is not ethical whatsoever. (I suppose you could say, weakly, that it is ethical because it involves two people, but this doesn’t really get you anywhere - I’ve tried to make that argument elsewhere.)
A few years ago I read an article by the critic Charles Altieri that really convinced me in this way. I’ll try to find it. For a very long time I agreed with Martha Nussbaum - have you read her? - that ethical criticism was very important. Nussbaum is a very smart and very readable philosopher, and I really enjoyed parts of a book by her called Love’s Knowledge. But ultimately I came to the conclusion that ethical criticism did not do justice to the actual text, which, according to Altieri (and I agree with him) is something more (sorry for using this term, but I remember Altieri alluding to this) Nietzschean, which is to say, involving very intense valences of affect, and a sort of radical subjectivity that cannot be reduced to ethics, even postconventional ethics. Put another way, Picasso and Martin Luther King, Jr. might both be spiritual, reaching the highest levels of their vocations, but when you really think about it, are they really that similar? I think that they are really quite different, and that this difference between ethics and aesthetics should be honored, if we are to be honest about each mode, and not get into hopeless muddles about what are really, at the end of the day, aesthetic objects (i.e. poems, novels, short stories, plays).
I am watching this now - it might be sort of difficult, Altieri can be super hard to understand at times, at least for me in his writing - but I think his emphasis on secular imagination in the lecture could be relevant for the forum in the context of poetry and poetics.
One more thought. Think about Homer, let’s say. Is the world in Homer ethical? Of course not. Now, however, think about one’s experience reading Homer. What happens? Well, I’d say, with Bloom, that there is an augmenting of the self. Okay. Is this augmenting of the self in any whatsoever ethical? And again, I’d reach the same conclusion, that it is, but only in a very pale and weak and obvious sense, which doesn’t get you anywhere. Now this is what confuses me - Wilber argues that “deeper, higher” levels of consciousness are, in a sense, more ethical, because they are more loving, compassionate, etc. And I do agree with this, and have experienced this. So: is there a relationship between Bloom’s self-augmentation and Wilber’s deeper, high levels of consciousness? And here I would say, yes…there is, I think?, but that at the end of the day, Bloom’s account of reading, at least to me, is much more on point and interesting - in other words, at the level of language and thought, Bloom for me is original and imaginative, and so embodies for me what criticism can do with literature. Wilber, in this context, gets at important ideas, but the actual language he uses - such as his rhapsodic flights at the end of many chapters, which I often find repetitive and almost banal - suggests there is, in a sense, a lesser richness there in Wilber’s work, at least in terms of the poetic imagination. But Wilber is not a literary critic - he is a philosopher and psychologist - and we don’t really read the work of most psychologists (Freud is an exception, maybe others here feel this way about Jung) as high literature.
If the Self is, in and of itself, “more truly and more strange” (Stevens), than Bloom gets at this quality much more in his work. Maybe people feel this way about Gebser. Wilber is not interested in strangeness, at least in terms of his writing, because his writing is really not that strange at all. I think what essentially unites both of them is a certain form or blend of quixoticism, and that’s what I’ve been working on and thinking about lately - something I am calling happily “Quixotics.” But that’s another post for another day.
Why “of course not”? You kind of lose me here. Maybe I’m just not clear on what you mean when you are using the term. (Of course, I don’t want to break the flow of the discussion going on here, but I did stumble over this one.)
I haven’t read Homer in a long time, but my sense is that both the Odyssey and the Iliad are in many ways quite savage books, that the Gods are capricious and use us for sport, and that the Iliad is essentially a tragic story that takes place in a dark moral universe.
Savage to our modern sensibilities perhaps, but within the world in which they were written, I would think that very different values were in place determining good and evil.
Andrew, thanks for the detailed response. I will do my best to keep the convo moving; please know that I am in a (very pleasant) coffee shop atm waiting for an oil change. Will try to be quick and reply more fully (elsewhere) later.
First, I accept your correction, AQAL and QT do explain a lot of things, in different terms and ways. AQAL of course is a meta-theory that would claim to include QT (Wilber’s ‘Zone 4’, I believe.) Both are explicative of phenomena, in the sense that they give us models, concepts, metaphors, and language for articulating an order of things.
Sloppily, I was trying to say something more about the process of writing (or reading) a poem (or any aesthetic object)—basically agreeing with you. I am something of a literary phenomenologist: To the poems themselves! Which I think holds true for any discipline. At a certain point, you just have to do it. Explanation is secondary and may not be as necessary as we think. Can we explain the song of birds? The ecstasy of the (pro)creative act? The silence of deep, dreamless sleep?
On your piece, I will reply to your pm. The edits I would ask for would be intensive!
On aesthetics and ethics, let me just say (since time is short) that I agree about keeping the discourses separate—to a point. The most interesting writing, to me (perhaps this is an explanation of what I am going for in my work), would blend aesthetics and ethics without compromising either or collapsing one to the other.
I believe Nietzsche does this strongly. He is driven by the aesthetic implications of ethics and the ethical implications of aesthetics. I believe this was Wittgenstein’s point as well; considered deeply enough, ethical problems are aesthetic, and vice versa—thought and feeling are inseparable.
I reject unethical aesthetics, and unaesthetic ethics. There I’ve said it! Time to get my car…
