'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Jody Norton

Being, in Heidegger's text, disseminates itself in a series of concept/essents, that are not, at one level, essential (that is, not synonymous with Being) but that ultimately expand into synonymous essences. Language, for example, is a way of naming/thinking "what is in essence" (Poetry 135); and in "The Origin of the Work of Art" we find that "Language itself is poetry in the essential sense" (74). All art, in fact, "is poetry," and poetry, it turns out, "is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is" (74). Here, the standard, dictionary sense of the words poetry, art, and language exists in a kind of duck/rabbit ambiguity with the idolatrous imagos of the same words. The status of such terms is typically resolved by Heidegger through a kind of reductive tautology: language is only (essentially) language insofar as it is Language, poetry is (essentially) Poetry, etc. And all of these, finally, are the Same. Language, Heidegger will say, when it is Language, "at one great moment says one unique thing, for one time only" (What 192).

Ashbery effectively follows Saussure and Derrida, and opposes Heidegger, in understanding language as a matter of differences which are ultimately inessential. Ashbery's postmodernity - his sense that identity is constructed out of words that cannot be capitalized - is exactly what sets him apart from Heidegger, for whom it is a point of faith - or if one would rather, a matter of unconscious desire/denial - that Being is transcendental.(8)

Everything in language is substitute

- Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (235)

Taking up Saussure's principle that "in language there are only differences" (Saussure 120), Derrida notes the importance of spacing as the condition of difference both within language and within the subject: "Spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other" (Positions 94). Representation both divides the subject from "himself," in that no representation, as such, can be self-perceived, and divides the "himself," in that the subject cannot be conceived independently of the Other. Yet only under these conditions can subjectivity come to be, as self-conception. The subject is "an effect inscribed in a system of differance" (28) - which for poetry is the system of language. The subject, finally, "is a 'function' of language" (Margins 15).

To think of oneself, then, is to think not of "oneself" but of a figure or sign of oneself. Derrida writes, "From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs" (Grammatology 50). Henry Staten points out,

"The thing itself is a sign" does not mean "there isn't really any 'thing itself'"; nor does it mean "the thing is really all in your mind"; nor "there are really only words - we can't get outside of words." It means approximately this: "Let us consider the experience of what we call 'things themselves' as structured more like the experience of signs than like the experience of an idealized 'full presence.'" (Wittgenstein 58)