Writing and Reading in Autopoietic Fields

This'Patacritical approach to textual dementians is a meta-theory of textual fields, a pragmatistic conception of how to expose discontinuous textual behaviors ("natural language" so called, or what Habermas (1984) has better called "communicative action"). Integration of the dynamic functions begins not by abstracting the theory away from a target object – that is, the method of a taxonomic methodology – but by integrating the meta-theoretical functions within the discourse space itself. Informational discourse fields function well precisely by working to limit redundancy and concurrent textual relations. Because poetry – or imaginative textuality broadly conceived – postulates much greater freedom of expressive exchange, it exhibits a special attraction for anyone wishing to study the dynamics of textuality. Aristotle's studies of semiotic systems preserve their foundational character because they direct their attention to autopoietic rather than allopoietic discourse fields. His studies pursue a taxonomy for the dynamic process of making and exchanging (remaking) simulations. Plato's dialogues, by contrast, situate – or, more precisely, generate – their critical reflections at a standing point inside the textualities they are themselves unfolding. In this respect they have much in common with Wittgenstein's critical colloquies in the Philosophical Investigations or with Montaigne's Essais. But the dynamic play of even these textual fields remain, from the point of view of their readers, exemplary exercises. This situation prevails in all modes of critical reflection which assume to preserve the integrity and self-identity of the textual fields they study. Two forms of critical reflection regularly violate the sanctity of such self-contained textual spaces: translation and editing. The idea that an object of criticism like a textual field is an object can be maintained either as an heuristic procedure or as an ontological illusion. Consequently, acts of translation and editing are especially useful forms of critical reflection because they so clearly invade and change their subjects in material ways. To undertake either, you can scarcely not realize the performative – even the deformative - character of your critical agency. At this point let me exemplify the general markup model for autopoietic textualities. This comes as the following hypothetical passage through an early poem by Robert Creeley, "The Innocence." Because imaginative textuality is, in this view, an exemplary kind of autopoietic process, any poetical work would do for a narrative demonstration. I choose "The Innocence" because it illustrates what Creeley and others called "field poetics." As such, it is especially apt for clarifying the conception of the autopoietic model of textuality being offered here. "Composition by field" poetics has been much discussed, but for present purposes it suffices to say that it conceives poetry as a self-unfolding discourse. "The poem" is the "field" of action and energy generated in the poetic transaction of the field that the poem itself exhibits. "Composition by field", whose theoretical foundations may be usefully studied through Charles Olson's engagements with contemporary philosophy and science, comprised both a method for understanding (rethinking) the entire inheritance of poetry, and a program for contemporary and future poetic discourse (its writing and its reading). The text chosen is taken from Donald Allen's famous anthology (first published in 1960) The New American Poetry in its 1999 University of California Press reprinting.