Andrea di Serego Alighieri Student nr. 11139536
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Dr. Joost de Bloois
“A draft of Resistance”: on the exception of Analogy.
Unsettling forms of disposition on poetic bodies
from Aristotle to Charles Olson and Lyn Hejinian
Contents
0. Introduction: opening the circle
Towards a poetics of destituent potential...4
1. The nature of analogy (medieval theories)...15
1.1 A science of being as being? ...17
1.2 From natural bodies to forms of divine governance ...20
2. The powers of analogy 2.1 From Body Politic to the lost body of information ...24
2.2 Traces of the powers of analogy in contemporary discourse ...31
2.3 The poetic paradigm: demon, effect, rhythm ...33
3. New poetics of analogy ...39
3.1 Charles Olson: analogy and techniques of projectability ...40
3.2 Lyn Heijnian: poetics as a Language of Inquiry ...50
Conclusion ...63
Works cited ...68
We must (...) always look for analogies, with the hope that they are revolutionary. But its like looking for a needle in a haystack. Analogies are all over the place. Should we instead concentrate upon the hay? No, the proof lies in the needle. What is missing aren’t analogies but revolutions. We are for a philosophy of the needle, not for one of the hay. And such philosophy lies or falls according to the rotating fate of revolution.
Melandri, Enzo, La Linea e il Circolo: Studio Logico-Filosofico sull’Analogia, Quodlibet, 2004, 860
Charles Olson (right), 1946, Picture by Rosa Morgan,
0. INTRODUCTION: OPENING THE CIRCLE
TOWARDS A POETICS OF DESTITUENT POTENTIAL
Analogy functions as an essential part of language. Through analogy we not solely come to terms with and live relations, but come to shape and define our very life’s ethical, aestheti-cal and techniaestheti-cal endeavors. From medieval theology to contemporary information theory, to modernist and contemporary literature and poetics, this theme seems to have covered a funda-mental role. Thomas Aquinas based his theological framework upon it, defining analogy as the very fundament of his metaphysics1; N. Katherine Hayles, reading Norbert Wiener, identified
in analogy the bulging rethorical trope of cybernetics2 and Octavio Paz even claim that
anal-ogy, in the canon of Western poetics, came to substitute philosophical Reason3.
Withal of its undeniable relevance, its powers still remain somewhat ambiguous in the context of both modern and contemporary discourse. Taking this - both semantic and disci-plinarly - ambiguity as its starting point, this essay sets itself to initiate a study of the powers of this theme across some of its vast epistemological and literary legacy. As Italian philosopher Enzo Melandri described in a virtually forgotten and practically unknown book4, the reason
for this ambiguity lies in the fact that, from a logical point of view, analogy didn’t find yet its place in (or in relation to) Logic. Most specifically, this kind of approach is motivated by a cer-tain ‘distracted’ instrumentality upon which we seem to define our relation to language; With analogy, he contends, there is something that is not right, something that tends to exclude it from the context of rigorous discourse, yet after its dismissal in theory, we still keep ‘mak-ing use’(my emphasis) of it as noth‘mak-ing ever changed(LC XIV- XV). Melandri attributes this problem to a certain modern and contemporary approach that tries to bypass Logic’s binaries. However, as Giorgio Agamben reminds us in his introduction to the book, these attempts
1 Aquinas, Thomas, Lectio 1, n.7, Summa Theologiae, New Advent, 1920/2017. Further articulated in chapter 1. 2 Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Post-Human, Chicago UP, 91. This part will be explored in chapter 2. 3 Paz, Octavio, Children of the Mire, Harvard UP, 1976, 56.This point will be assessed in chapter 3. 4 Melandri, Enzo, La Linea e il Circolo: Studio logico-filosofico sull’analogia, Quodlibet, 2004.
di Serego Alighieri 4
1, n.7. Further articulated in chapter 1.
(such as the one by Procolus, or Nicholaus von Cusa, until Hegel) still shared a common vi-cious attitude with Logic: that of trying to articulate a ‘new Logic’ that should have precisely substituted its function in somehow governing knowledge(LC XXXVII). From a Foucauldian perspective where knowledge is always an exercise of power and power always a function of knowledge, Melandri contends, the great mistake of Western metaphysics consisted precisely in searching the hypothetical winner of this ‘civil war’ between Logic and analogy, rather then focusing on the potential for their reciprocal transformation(LC XIII).
In the backdrop of this discussion, this thesis will attempt to propose a critical study of the theme of analogy, tracing its unavowed legacy as a dispositief ofboth semantic and physical governance. Central to this study is a realization of philosophical nature5: from
medieval theology - where this theme aquired its most definitive prominence- we witness certain sets of (violent)forces to be progressively attributed as intrinsic to physical bodies via a linguistic framework; Here analogy, from being a fundamental linguistic construct that would explain (and justify) the relation between men, god and world, became an efficient device to actually shape and regulate the very workings of the physical world. In other words, analogy possibly constituted the very fisrt instance through which an image of the world, the represen-tation of its workings, came to directly affect its very nature. This kind of condition remains, to this day, a recurrent approach to modern uses of analogy. Analogical arguments constituted, in fact, since the Middle Ages the very device to transpose a theological paradigm to the nature of life, as well as to the activity of men, a tool that made representation synonymous with real-ity: “as the house pre-exists in the mind of the architect, so God created the world looking to a model in his mind”6. Furthermore, analogy results also fundamental to both Aquinas’ physical
theory of motion and his controvertial explaination of men’s semen, which, like a projectile, acted like an agent of the male in carrying out the work of developing the women’s blood into a body fit for a rational soul7; In this context, through diffrent forms of analogical framing (as
5 The research and analysis that will form this argument (especially in chapter 1.2) is inspired and informed by
an essay by Anita Burato titled On the Motion of Bodies, 2016.
6 Agamben quoting Aquinas in “Che cos’e l’atto di creazione?”, in Il Fuoco e il Racconto, Verona: Nottetempo, 41. 7 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, II, New York: Hanover House, 1955-57, 89.
a set of both metaphysical and socio-scientific devices) natural bodies come to be progressively ordered and governed by forces moving them not from outside (against nature) but in some way from within. As we will explain, from medieval theories of analogy, we progressivly come to understand (violent) force and motion as a natural inclination, an aptitude, rather then something exercized from without. In unfolding this context, we will progressively come to perceive how the excercize of power - in western theological-political tradition - comes to be more and more rooted in analogy; In this sense, this internalization of forces as essential traits to embodiment paved the way for an easier control over the action and declination of natural bodies. These sets of violent forces, governing bodies from within, will make it progressively impossible to articulate instances of resistance(we can more easily fight back what comes from outside that what comes from within us). This very theme of inside/outside becomes, we will explore, a necessary trait of analogy: on one side part of a need to overcome an opposition between inside and outside elements of both body and language - as Paul de Man’s interest in the unwitting interpretation of interpretation8 - on the other, the very reason why analogy is
never really directly adressed, kept conceiled as something already assigned too deep inside. In the midst of this discourse, the body becomes a greatly contested subject, the actual threshold where this discussions seem to originate. From Aquinas’ theory of instrumentality to Ernst Kantorovics’ political theology, we come to perceive how the body is but the center of agent/instrument discquisitions, how a person is a soul to which body is attached as a tool, garment or prison. Amongst a discourse that privileged Platonic dualism, the issue of bod-ily continuity, from the explainations of miracles, the cult of Saints and relics to the Kings’ two bodies seems to have been subtly central for medieval and political theology. As Caroline Walker Bynum argues, in her groundbreaking re-assesment of medieval spirituality9, what
Aquinas’ teaching actually threatens is body, since:
8 See Paul de Man’s Semiology and Rhetoric, first published in Diacritics, 3:3, John Hopkins UP,
(Fall 1973) 27-23.
9 Walker Bynum, Caroline, Fragmentation and redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, Zone Books, 1992.
in denying the plurality of forms, Aquinas must assert that the soul (our only form) is the form of our bodiliness, too, reducing what is left over to mere pri-mary matter or potency. (Walker Bynum 255)
This paper will stress that a thorougher study of this very theme - what we can call an ‘ana-logical aptitude’, becomes essential for questioning the fate of embodiment (and of language thereof) in an information age. Similar forms of analogical governability, in fact, seems to be crucual also to epistemological shifts appearing specifically central to discussions on the poli-tics of bodies (and physics of power) in cybernetic discourse; Feminist media theorist N. Kath-erine Hayles, in a brief but crucial passage of How we became Post Human, assessing analogy as the blurry but bulging rhetorical trope of cybernetic discourse, contends that: “understanding communication as relation suggest a deeper reading of this figure”(HP 91). In the context of an ever increasing mathematisation of natural sciences and culture more and more interested in calculating, ordering and predicting - physical bodies became the central focus not only of metaphysics and modern physics but of the discipline of politics10. Here analogy seems to
rep-resent the very mechanism through which this conditions found endurance: from homeostasis to reflexivity, to virtuality11, again translating a form of governability into a natural
disposi-tion, these operations share an emphasis on cognidisposi-tion, ordering and calculation that manipu-lates and re-defines forms of embodiment, ultimately contributing in preserving a liberal hu-manist subject - and with it, it’s racial, gender and technological normativities. In other words, whereas for medieval theology analogy created a fundamental framework through which the powers at play between body, nature, world, and the divine could be explained and directed, for cybernetics it constitutes both the mathematical and conceptual principle for overcoming (yet still regulating) subject/object biases (i.e. body/machine). In both cases, analogy seems to cover a double function, at times a liberating one - as in bypassing philosophical binaries - yet always generating a different asset of powers through which knowledge (and body) is again somehow controlled and governed.
10 See Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977--1978, 296. 11 Refer to chapter 1 of N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Post-Human.
This theme seems to act upon logical dichotomies in the point of their most paralyzing and extreme split not to re-assemble them into a superior synthesis, but rather to transform them into a ‘field of force’ traversed by polar tensions, in which they finally lose their substan-tial identity(LC XVII). Without forgetting the daunting powers of this liberating tool, Agam-ben, in his introduction to Melandri’s book, temporarily defines analogy as:
a dispositief that demonstrates the logical inevitability of every antinomy and aporia, and, together, makes possible not really their composition but rather their movement and transformation. (LC XVI)
It is in light of this condition that Melandri never really comes (and wants) to define analogy as a principle. Such formulation, in view of the author, would already bind the study to a layer of use(and abuse); Melandri’s choice becomes, rather, to outline a theory of it’s uses (my empha-sis), attempting to articulate what he defines as “a theory of the natural places in which we cannot but recur to it”(LC XV).
It is true; Once one starts looking at analogy from a different, more overarching per-spective, this ‘disappears’ behind its very use. This thesis will depart from this very paradox; Pausing it’s use, our tendency in instrumentalizing its powers, and concentrating rather upon its own nature, we will attempt to pave the way to investigate analogy’s subtle epistemologi-cal legacy from within the very tradition that, somehow, seems to preserve it through its own concealment. Could we ultimately re-read analogy through Giorgio Agamben’s theory of exception, a theme that, through its very exclusion comes to be included as an actual arché, a fundament? At the end of his last book The Use of Bodies the italian philosopher reminds us that ‘the strategy’ is always the same: “something is divided, excluded and rejected to the bot-tom and, precisely through this exclusion comes to be included as a fundament. For Aristotle, this is true for life, that can be ‘said in many ways’, (…) but also for being, who can be said similarly in many ways, one of which will be separated as a fundament”(Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 336).
Aquinas, in re-reaing Aristotle’s Physics, funds upon this very expression - that things are said in many ways - his declination of analogy12. It is a possibility, in a sense, Agamben tells
us, that the ‘mechanism of exception’ is in fact deeply connected to the event of language: language, when it ‘occours’, excludes and separates the non-linguistic, and, simoultaneously, it includes, captures it as something it is perpetually in relation with. The exeption (ex-ceptio), the inclusive exclusion of the real from language and in language, is, then, the originary struc-ture of language as an event(UB 334).
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Alas, although implicitly familiar to this discussion and fundamental to theories about lan-guage, analogy still remains a somewhat dormant trope especially in the context of literary theory and poetics. The fact that it doesn’t even appear as an entry on glossaries and encyclo-pedias of poetics (e.g. Princeton’s) – where it is rather redirected to the meanings of Metaphor and Simile13 – tells us that its consideration has been limited to what we can call its
instru-mental, ‘operational’ quality, e.g. its function in various Figures of Speech, and that the traces of its larger, paradigmatic legacy remain yet to be traced. Confronted with a daunting scenar-io, where an ominous reliance on analogy seemes to define language (and body) as a mere in-strument in a world of (technical) representation, this essay will attempt to search for instances of defiance, moments in which this operation could be turned on its head. Detaching from the more strictly philosophical question to focus on the potential of fiction to unsettle the powers of this very paradigm, we will concentrate upon poetic language and practice, as they seem to be of central concern in this discussion on power, as the sole mean to suspend, unsettle men instrunmental approach to reality:
Poet is not who possesses a power of ‘doing’, and, all of a sudden, decides to put it into act. To have power means, really: to be subjected by your own powerless-ness. In this poetic experience, power and act are not in a relation, but directly in contact.(Agamben, The Use of Bodies, 349)
12 This claim will be explored in depth in chapter 1.
What de-activates use, writes Agamben, is certainly still an experience of power, but of one that keeps tite its own powerlessness (or non-power) exposing itself for its non-relation to the act (UB 349). In this sense, poetry and the poetic text become the very realm, for their (use-less) tendency for sef-reflexivity, where politics and art become neither functions nor work, but rather a new dimension where linguistic, corporeal, acorporeal, material and immaterial, biological and social operations are deactivated and contemplated as such to free the workless-ness that remained entrapped in them(UB 351). Analogy becomes, for its double nature, the very field through wich poetry can perform its ‘inoperative’ gesture. This line of thought is ex-pressed again by Melandri in relation to a certain stasis - originated by the perpetual ‘civil war’ between Logic and analogy(LC XIII) - internal to literature and philosophy, where analogy becomes the very ground to “contest logic’s governament, norm and rigour, unveiling that the sense ascribed to the latter is as well, if not more, senseless”(LC XIII). An essential trait of po-etry, is, for Agamben, the passage form potentiality to actuality 14; Poetry, he contends, contains
the power of not exertion, a very condition that defines the reality of the act as endowed with the possibility ‘not to act’. Poetry, in this sense, keeping the act in relation with its own privation, undermines Logic’s univocal power of affirmation, undermining its coherency.
Following this theoretical path, we will focus on a peculiarity within a certain poetic legacy: modern and contemporary ‘projective’ and ‘language’ poets seemed to be increasingly preoccupied with figures from the world of physics, such as powers, forces, motion and dy-namics. In particular, there seemed to be a dissolute yet urgent interest, by certian poets such as Charles Olson and Lyn Hejinian, into probing the physical and material nature of metrics, as well as a necessity to re-assess politics thereof. Through this poets and specific forms of poetic experimentation this essay will come to expose how our body - its materiality, wheight and force - is in fact also of a two-fold nature: the very center of dispute of innumerable years of disqisitions about power, as well as the - possible - actual threshold to re-define, subvert
these. In this scenario, analogy remains the subtle framework through which this relations are endured, and perhaps the sole mean through which we can explore a margin of resistance. As Melandri puts it, in an attractively mysterious last paragraph of his opus (my translation):
The line acquired an imperceptible curvature to the naked eye. Finally, it also closed into a circle. There are good and bad analogies. Both ways, we can’t get rid of them. Good analogies are the revolutionary ones. They lead beyond anal-ogy, towards a novel rational asset. Bad analogies are the ones who lead back to the starting point, and they confirm by reaction its impenetrability. In any case, they both have a transitory existence. But when put in relation to the finitude of human condition, they become a necessary expedient. This makes of their transitory nature a definitive parameter. Only in the historical expansion of such insuperable finitude, that renders humanity into a mutable image of its own infinite complementary, we overpass time after time the transience of analogies. But the principle remains. And, to end, we ask ourselves if dialectics’ materi-alistic conversion (consequent to the Umwaelzung der Praxis) does not require as complementary the pre-dialectic and analogical moment of a Schellingian absolute. We must therefore always look for analogies, with the hope that they are revolutionary. But its like looking for a needle in a haystack. Analogies are all over the place. Should we instead concentrate upon the hay? No, the proof lies in the needle. What is missing aren’t analogies but revolutions. We are for a philosophy of the needle, not for one of the hay. And such philosophy lies or falls according to the rotating fate of revolution. (LC 860)
In The Vision of God(1453) Nicholas von Cusa proposes an exercise for the monks based on the center and circumference of a circle; Through a form of mystical geometry, we might reach for the unlimited even while we are aware that we cannot grasp what the infinite God may be: imagining a circle and a straight line or tangent that meets the circle, from a certain
perspec-tive, as the diameter or circumference of the circle increases, its circumference approaches the straight line and appears less and less curved. If we imagine the circumference to the infinite, we can almost ‘see’ that both straight tangent and curved circumference should coincide—a kind of ‘coincidence of opposites’. All this is mathematically impossible, of course. But non-theless possible - and somewhar real - von Cusa suggests, by analogy: wherein seeing from the circumference and being seen from the center collapses into a figure of mystical oneness: ‘being seen seeing’. Following a similar geometry - purpously ironic for its extreme dualism - Melandri continues suggesting the existence of two ‘types’ (or modes) of analogy: a ‘bad’ one, leading back to its own starting point - a closed circle - and a ‘good’ one, leading towards a ‘beyond’, an open, a broken circle. Both attributed with a transitory nature, they nonetheless exist as principles. But this dialectic ‘circle’ cannot be conceived without its complementary ‘absolute’ tangent: an absolute I that goes out of itself and opposes a Not-I to itself 15. Only
through this movement, between ‘closed’ and ‘open’, I/not-I, we can grasp the ambiguous nature of analogy, a movement that ‘falls according to the rotating fate of revolution’. Then, we may ask: what is revolution? For Foucault it was contingent, slippery, hard to define, but never impossible, where “more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resist-ance”16. There will be times, he thought - similarly to Melandri - when these nodes of
revela-tory force begin to grow, proliferate and interlink. In the same way that the state tries to pull together and consolidate its web of institutional tools in times of crisis, so too can “the strate-gic codification of these points of resistance” lead to “great radical ruptures(...)”17.
Inspired by both this urgency and philosophical tenor, we will link back to Agamben and try to ask: could we come to articulate - in light of its ambiguous yet definitive nature - analogy’s destituent potential, as a draft of resistance? Linking back to Melandri’s own analogy: we will attempt to find the needle to look through its own circle, searching for the natural places where analogy constitutes itself as revolutionary, un-making its own representation, breaking language and the image into something tangible and perfumed: becoming hay.
15 Shelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, Sämmtliche Werke, J. G. Cotta’scher Verlag, 1861 I/1, 175. 16 See Foucault essay The Subject and Power, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer 1982), 777-795. 17 Ibid.
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Taking this discussions as its starting point, this essay will be structured in three parts. In the first part, following Melandri’s archeological urgency, we will attempt to unfold at least some passages of this yet untold legacy of analogy as a powerful conceptual framework, still covered by a substantial lack of recognition (or blunt disregard) in contemporary discourse. In specific, we will asses elements of ancient and medieval philosophy through close readings of texts by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, where we will at first attempt to redeem Aristotle’s emphasis on experience and phenomenas against Aquinas linguistic framework. From here, we will briefly asses how analogy became fundamental in how natural bodies came to be progressively defined by a set of intrinsic forces, leading to forms of physical divine governance. Further-more, we will briefly assess this shifts in relation with the emerging discipline of politics as well as with similar tendencies of contemporary information theory; Then, through a re-read-ing of theories by Norbert Wiener and N. Kathrine Hayles we will investigate analogy against the backdrop of a discussion on body and embodiment in the context of an increasingly disembodied and technologically mediated culture. Here, Hayles’ methodology will come to result especially relevant. Elaborating upon such cross-currents, our aim will be to articulate the connections that run through these various discursive realms (literature, philosophy and science) by entangling abstract form and material particularity such that “the reader will find it increasingly difficult to maintain the perception that they are separate and discrete entities” (HP 23). It is in such scenario that the literary text becomes crucial for an analysis of analogy that actually bypasses a holistic perspective and starts from a ground of inextricably complex compoundings and entwinings between literature and science, culture and technics. Secondly we will depart from such context to focus on the powers that analogy brings forth in shap-ing the discourse on the body in literary production. At first we will assess analogy’s legacy in literary production, briefly exposing theories by Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and Octavio Paz, where this theme is seen as an overarching paradigm, a subtle but constant poetic trope,
which, for Paz, even came to substitute philosophical Reason(CM 56). Then, subtly guided by Melandri’s own quest to look for the ‘natural places’ of analogy, we will try to answer: can we complicate, subvert or escape analogy’s paradigm of implicit instrumentality? Is there such a figure as a ‘free analogy’, a way to ‘de-create’ language in which we can overturn the powers of this trope, finding a space of freedom within or whitout these?
The last part of this essay will look closely to the literary and theoretical outputs of the legacy of ‘projective’ and language poets like Charles Olson and Lyn Hejinian. Contempo-rary to the birth and development of cybernetics, as well belonging to an intellectual legacy where philosophical and theological disquisitions strongly defined their relation to language and writing, there seems to be an interesting line that links the use of analogy by these po-ets to an investigation of powers, forces, dynamics, and other physical qualities of bodies. Charles Olson’s, for instance speaks of a ‘projective’ (or projectile, recalling medieval disputes
18) verse as opposed to a ‘closed verse’, studying certain laws and possibilities of the breath “of
the breathing of the men who writes as well as of his listenings”(SW 15). Or Lyn Hejinian, for whom “writing forms are not merely shapes but forces: formal questions are about dynam-ics - they ask how, where and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number and velocities of a work’s motion”(LI 41-42). At last, we will try to answer to Melandri’s call for natural places of analogies expanding upon Hejinian unpublished poem ‘Resistance’ and her definition of poetry and poetics as “language of Inquiry”, not a form of knowledge but rather of acknowledgement, where analogy’s powers could rather be turned as a preservation of otherness. Through this poetic manifestations, we will finally come to sasses the ‘unsaid’ nature of analogy; Throughout its multiple conceptual articulations and phenomena, we will try to tackle analogy’s Entwicklungsfähigkeit, litarly, its capability to to be developed 19,
attempt-ing to expose and develop its intrinsic philosophical element, a fundamental yet ‘unsaid’ trait of modern and conemporary language and culture.
18 Ancient and Medieval theories developed analogical arguments studying projectiles motion to
explain violent motion of natural inanimate things; Further developed in chapters 2 and 3.
19 Literally: capability of something to be developed (from Ludwig Feuerbach), referenced by Giorgio Agamben in the preface to The Signature of All Things, 8.
1. THE NATURE OF ANALOGY (MEDIEVAL THEORIES)
Analogy has a unified history Santiago Maria Ramirez
In his multi-volume De Analogia Father Ramirez seems to be guided by the assump-tion that analogy has a unified history from antiquity to the present (whether in the original Greek, or in other languages). But is the history of analogy really that unified? In the follow-ing chapter we will briefly assess some key points in the history of the uses of this theme.
The origin of the word, as the Greek root analoghia suggests, is based on the math-ematical concept of ‘proportion’ (a:b = c:d) which establishes a similarity based on the equiva-lence of ratios. The transfer of the word from mathematics to Logic and philosophy seems to first date back to Plato who, however, never really devised a theory of analogy. Although Aris-totle was the first to articulate a thorough formulation of it in the field of Logic, it was only in the Middle Ages that Thomas Aquinas developed a theory of analogy with both a philosophi-cal and theologiphilosophi-cal aim. In medieval times, in fact, the necessity to respond to problems in both Logic, natural science, theology and metaphysics primarily converged on a re-definition of analogy. Already since the Greeks, the need to articulate analogy seems to have come by two kinds of questions: a first strictly 'logico-linguistic' and a second more properly meta-physical. Somehow we might say that the linguistic problem introduced the metaphysical, as from the logical point of view, both Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas observed and studied a certain confusion proper to common language, something more precisely related to its use and the structure of how thought seem to proceed: namely, that the same term (predicate) can be attributed to different subjects. How can we say that, for instance, both substances (e.g. flower) and accidents (e.g. the whiteness of the flower) exist when one is seemingly dependent on the other? Both Aristotle and Aquinas noticed that, between language and thought, a kind
of transfer is at play, a certain procedure through which one tries to understand the funda-mental multi-faced aspect of reality. However, whereas Aristotle would study this ambiguity within the nature of phenomena, with Scholasticism a system (or framework) of analogy was established through a subtle but efficient bypassing of experience, as we will see in the coming chapter. Used and functional to a purely linguistic framework, common phenomena become already filtered by a conceptual system, somehow already established, through a process of abstraction. In this sense, the 'artisan', the 'mirror' and the 'projectile' were not assessed as ac-cessible (through experience) analogies but as already processed tropes, lasting figures of proof for the scholastic framework. Closed into a conceptual fabric that presupposes something already known, analogy was privated of its heuristic quality, coming to serve as the main proof of the stability of an otherwise fragile world view that lasted millennias, and that we still, as of today, never really seem to have (epistemologically) come to terms with. Fundamental for the argument of this essay is to point out that in Aristotle, analogy was often used to mediate, study and observe experience and phenomenas, common to bodies and things that are not yet clearly explained. However, with Scholasticism, experience came to acquire a less fundamen-tal role. We might say that here common phenomena comes to be already filtered(rather then observed) from a linguistic/conceptual analogical framework that explains their workings as part of an already established, coherent theory.
In the following short chapter, we will briefly unfold the passages of this transforma-tion in Aquinas and Aristotle, with the intentransforma-tion to emphasize the importance for the latter and the role of analogy in experience and discovery for our inquiry. Whereas Aquinas fabri-cates around this term his own theological framework, we will rescue Aristotle's own articula-tion of it in the Physics. From here, we will further - briefly - assess Aquinas use of analogy in the articulation of a new theory of motion as a reconfiguration of the idea of natural body, culminating into new dispositions of notions of force and power and in a daunting pattern of analogical governance.
1.1 Analogy: a science of being as being?
Aquinas articulation of analogy seems to start with a controversy; In fact, Aristotle never uses the greek word analoghia(AA 33). Aquinas first uses this word in his commentaries on Aristotle; However, when we confront the Greek with the Latin text, what emerges is that whereas Aquinas specifically uses the latin word analoghia Aristotle speaks rather of “things said in many ways in reference to one”(AA 33), speaking about the nature of life and being. In order to understand more in depth what is at play in Aquinas' articulation of analogy, we shall look closely at some essential passages of both Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, annotated by Aquinas; Aristotle starts his investigation of the changing nature of reality in the Physics, spe-cifically, in his study of motion. Here he turns to the study of motion and change to enumer-ate various kinds of it:
It is always with respect to substance or to quantity or to quality or to place that what changes changes. But it is impossible, as we assert, to find anything com-mon to these that is neither 'this' nor quantum nor quale nor any of the other predicates. Hence neither will motion and change have reference to something over and above the things mentioned, for there is nothing over and above them. (Aristotle, Physics, III, 200b32-201a3)
Aquinas, commenting on this:
Nothing can be found that is common to these kinds which would be their ge-nus and univocal; that which is common to them is not contained under a cer-tain category: but being is common to them according to analogy, as is shown in Metaphysics IV. (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Lectio 1, n.7)
Here Aquinas directly structures his comment on a reading of Aristotle's Categories: change is not such a genus that the kinds of change coming under it are its species. If it were, change would be then predicated univocally of them(AA 32). Rather, it is as if change 'falls' into
category where being is predicated; In this scheme, Aquinas asserts, being is analogically com-mon to the categories.
But is this really what this passage from Aristotle's suggests? Before we move on in our close reading and look at Aquinas commentary of Aristotle in the Metaphysics, we shall first look back at what Aristotle is actually saying; It is important to emphasize how the medieval philosopher seems here to introduce a novel level of hierarchy into Aristotle's system: whereas Aquinas talks of something "not contained (…) but common (…) according to analogy", Aristotle speaks of "a reference to something over and above the things mentioned, for there is nothing over and above them"(Physics, III, 200b32-201a3). It is interesting to notice how Aristotle not only does not use the greek word analoghia (which he rather uses in the Poetics, with a radically different function) but most interestingly, comes to negate the very possibility of finding anything common to these (categories). We will place on hold this point for now, and first proceed to examine how Aquinas goes on supporting his point in the commentary by close reading that passage from the Metaphysics mentioned above and his own commentary:
There is a science which investigates being as being and the attributes which belong to this in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences; for none of these others treats universally of being as being. They cut off a part of being and investigate the attribute of this part; this is what the mathematical sciences for instance do. Now since we are seeking the first principles and the highest causes, clearly there must be some thing to which these belong in virtue of its own nature. (Metaphysics, IV, 2, 1003a33-b16)
Here Aristotle is concerned with answering the problematic question of how can there be, over and above natural science and mathematics, a science of being as being if being is not a genus (as explained in Book III). In other words: how can one science treat of substance and accident when there is no genus that contains them? The question seems to relate to the Pos-terior Analytics, where, by demonstration, the subject of the science is univocally common to
subjects of the demonstration which fall under it(genus subiectum)20. Against the backdrop of
this discussion, Aquinas comments:
Whatever have some one thing commonly predicated of them, even though not univocally, it being predicated of them analogically, fall to one science; but be-ing is predicated in this way of all bebe-ings; therefore all bebe-ings fall to the consid-eration of one science, which considers being as being, namely both substances and accidents. (Lectio I, n. 534)
For Aristotle, substances and accidents in reality exist and are perceived on a same plane (phenomenally). However, this horizontality does not apply to the same categories as consid-ered scientifically (e.g. where they fall under a hierarchy: substance first, accidents second etc). For Aquinas such split between phenomenas and science seems to be simply not there: reality seems to be defined as equivalent with scientia (and therefore with thought and language). In other words, the two points of view seems to come to coincide when we stop taking into into account phenomenal reality. For Aquinas "its what"(e.g. accidents) "is more like substance then really substance"(n. 1333). For Aristotle, on the other hand, accidents ultimately have an es-sence and that can be defined as in a sense secondary to and/or relative to substance. To "what is whiteness?" we would answer "color"; Although 'whiteness' is ultimately not a thing that exists in and for itself, in reality, color is what whiteness could be. The fundamental difference here is that whereas Aristotle leaves open a ground to interpret change from within a common nature, and leaves an open space to study and understand language and reality in their mutual relation, Aquinas introduces and establishes a new framework, namely analogy, that progres-sively sacrifices phenomenal processes in favor of a temporal quest (the articulation of the relations with the divine).
What we can retain from this brief medieval exegesis, is a fundamental difference
20 Refer to Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics; The genus subiectum is that which generates the properties
predicated of it in the conclusion of a demonstration. Insofar as that subject matter is common, the community and genus involved is predicable and univocal. Aristotle here asks: how then can things fall to the same science which do not come under a common genus? (AA, 32).
between a theorization of analogy as a form of experience and of its further declination into a conceptual framework. We are of course not claiming that Aquinas ‘misread’ or overinter-preted Aristotle, but rather that, for our present study, a consideration on the hows through which analogy came to be defined becomes an essential background for our attempt in tracing its epistemological legacy. We could come to sumarize this difference by saying that, when we consider reality, we speak more of Aristotle’s many ways, a form of commonality, without over and above, always in motion, where particular substances are ultimately undefinable; When we speak about a ‘science of being’, where reality equals language and the other way around, then we will speak of analogy as a conceptual framework, a science. However somewhat intrincly obvi-ous, this disctinction, we will explore, will tunr out to be illuminating, especially as a back-drop to dicussion on analogy’s philosophical placing as fundament or operation, arché or ‘theme’.
1.2 From natural bodies to forms of divine governance
In the midst of this discussion, analogy became especially essential in the development of medieval theories about the body. In specific, it becomes relevant to briefly untangle how medieval philosophers - specifically Thomas Aquinas - arrived to solve (or, rather, as we will see, overturn) through analogy the definition of natural body and the problem of violent mo-tion of inanimate bodies. We will see in this case how an analogical argument became essen-tial to the definition of what we still understand today as a physical body, and how its defini-tion is the result of complex construcdefini-tions on Aristotle's original study. Although, nowadays, classical physics (Newtonian) seems to describe with substantial linearity the status of physical bodies as literally 'any body' (be it organic or artificial, animate or inanimate) in the middle ages this issue originated a complex discussion. Aristotelian physics looked at, primarily, natu-ral bodies, defining natunatu-ral as physical, hylomorphic bodies divisible only in thought21. What
defined the nature of such bodies was their inner principle of motion, a capacity for change
21 Anita Burato, On the Motion of Bodies, p.4: “the physicist is concerned only with things whose forms
intrinsic to them and not imposed by any law applying from without. Similarly to the above mentioned discussion, natural bodies constitute a ground to study and experience phenomenas within the force of motion. However, for Aristotle motion can be of two kinds: natural and contrary to nature, a violent force acting from without. This last possibility was what consti-tuted a large debate amongst the scholastics, which created, next to a physical one, an even more urgent theological one: “how can God intervention in human life be considered violent if it comes from without?”(OMB, 5)
Finally, in order to come to terms to Aristotle's scheme, where this new inclina-tion of moinclina-tion must be substantial and not accidental, Aquinas (re)introduces the concept of aptitude22. In similar guise to the aforementioned discussion, Aquinas solves the problem by
introducing a new level of hierarchy to the scheme, where violent motion is finally managed to be placed from within the body, in the guise of a new form of receptivity:
Consequently, when lower bodies are moved by the higher bodies, the motion is not violent but natural, because in the lower bodies there is a natural aptitude to follow the motions of the higher bodies. But a motion is violent when no princi-ple of the motion is from within but only from without, as when a man throws a heavy body upward, in which body there is no natural aptitude for such motion. (Aquinas, De Caelo, Lecture 7, 590)
However, Aquinas still has not come to terms with a fundamental question: “how can some-thing move without a mover?”(MOB, 5) And its at this point that via analogy he first endors-es the theory of imprendors-essed forcendors-es (action in absence of the mover) in the mobile body itself, and most importantly, sets the grounds for the importance of this physical theory for theology (MOB, 5). In De Potentia, coming to consider whether “the sensible soul be created or trans-mitted through the semen”, i.e. the objection that semen cannot act in virtue of the father's soul because instruments cannot move unless themselves moved (by contact) Aquinas replies:
An instrument is understood to be moved by the principal agent so long as it
22 Anita Burato, On the Motion of Bodies, p.6. As explained by Aquinas: “something by which man’s very
retains the power communicated to it by the principal agent; thus the arrow is moved by the archer as long as it retains the force wherewith it was shot by him. Thus in heavy and light things that which is generated is moved by the genera-tor as long as it retains the form transmitted thereby: so that the semen also is understood to be moved by the soul of the begetter, as long as it retains the force communicated by that soul, although it is in body separated from it. And the mover and the thing moved must be together at the commencement of but not throughout the whole movement, as is evident in the case of projectiles.
(Aquinas, De Potentia, q.III, art XI, r.5)
From here on the nature of bodies ceases de facto to be an arkhé, an origin and principle of a body's own motion and change(MOB, 6). Through an analogical framework and a set of metaphysical devices natural bodies come to be progressively ordered and governed by forces moving them not from outside - therefore against nature - but in some way from within, in guise of a natural inclination, an aptitude(MOB, 6): “here it is as if divine governance move men to the end of salvation, not by interfering with their natural course, but rather, by infusing them at creation with certain dispositions, freely letting them move to this end by themselves”(MOB, 6). Far diverse from an Aristotelian natural end, this comes to rather describe an end beyond nature: supra naturam. Such scenario entails that from here on bod-ies become understood as portions of matter, as 'any bodbod-ies', defining the study of motion by a disinterest in body specificity.
Its interesting to stress, for our analysis, how this very movement from outside to inside, this subtle but coordinated internalizatin of powers and forces, later became of central concern also for how the very definition of Western knowledge - as scientific statement - also understood and regulated the body according to similar movements. Foucault, in ‘Thruth and Power”, speaking about the regime of politics around scientific statements, writes:
itself on science as of what effects of power circulate among scientific state-ments, what constitutes, as it were, their internal regime of power, and how and why at certain moments that regime undergoes a global modification.(TP 144) To link back to the beginning, to this end Newtonian physics becomes more and more con-cerned with the physical qua mathematical, rather then qua natural(MOB, 7). As the physical body becomes ‘any-body’, dynamics becomes increasingly concerned with the calculation, or-dering prediction and application of forces and motion, where the distinction between violent and natural bodies slowly disappears(MOB, 7); As part of a new regulative framework driven by analogy, all motions become violent and violence becomes natural, attributing analogy with a daunting asset of powers.
2. POWERS OF ANALOGY
2.1 From Body Politic to the lost body of information
However inscribed into a relatively unitary history, articulated traces of the afore-mentioned epistemological shifts seem to be hard to find in both modern and contemporary culture and discourse. Although this essay cannot have the ambition to unfold the legacy of this discussion in depth, we have to point out that what was also at stake in such disquisitions was of a disciplinary matter. More precisely, this disclosures becomes critically significant when we come to consider analogy as part of a large paradigmatic legacy, in which, after the theological debates in the 13th century, this principle seems to have forked, originating two opposing discursive paths leading to the end of the very possibility of metaphysics as a science and consequently of theology as a systematic science. Aquinas concept of Analogy, contains in fact, beginning with Aquinas’ contemporaries, the seeds of its future downfall. From as early as the 13th century, the two great schools of philosophical-theological thought in Paris and in Oxford were in opposition and would follow two different paths without ever coming to a mutual understanding. From there the Aristotelian path of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas would become of great importance especially for Catholic theology and, three centu-ries later, would be officially recognized in large part by the Council of Trent (1545-1563). The Platonic path, prevalent in Oxford, would concentrate on the problem of the mathematical formulation of the sciences, beginning with Roger Bacon, creating the methodological prem-ises for the development of modern science. In this way, there arose an ever more univocal and mathematical scientific way of thinking that took root and departed from a metaphysical and theological analogy-based thought. Duns Scotus would resolve the analogy of being in a mul-tiplicity of univocals, just as William of Ockham would dissolve the reality of universals into
pure names (Nominalism) by denying them a real existence outside of the mind. This develop-ment would then have an influence on the philosophical thought of Descartes (1596-1650), and later on Kant (1724-1805) and on the success of Galilean and Newtonian science23.
In the midst of this discourse, the body starts (and keeps) to become a greatly con-tested subject. In the context of an ever increasing mathematisation of natural sciences and culture - more and more interested in calculating, ordering and predicting - physical bodies become the central focus not only of modern physics but of the emerging discipline of politics. In one of his lectures at the College de France Security, Territory, Population Michel Foucault points out how, around the 16th century "the dynamics of politics and the dynamics of phys-ics are more or less contemporaneous"(STP 296). In this context, Newtonian physphys-ics, with its reduction of the physical to the calculable, paved the way for managing and predicting 'any body's' motion(MOB, 9). In this sense, the physical body resulted from the aforementioned theological and the mathematical dispute becomes a body whose specificity is not to be found in its materiality, but rather in its useful and productive aspects. Endowed with certain in-trinsic qualities and dispositions from within, which can be arranged and ordered and put to use without 'violent' force, the new physical body is defined by an intrinsic malleability to be predicted and controlled (MOB, 9). Moreover, by analogically providing politics with its own conceptual dictionary (i.e. power, resistance), the discipline of physics becomes more and more involved itself with aims of controlling, ordering and governability, turning physical bodies into what Foucault will later rename 'political-technological bodies':
There may be a "knowledge" of the body that is not exactly the science of its functioning, and a mastery of its forces that is more than the ability to conquer them: this knowledge and this mastery constitute what might be called the political technology of the body.(DP 26)
In such scenario, where the body constituted the primary focus of the application and declina-tion of power, analogy appeared to be fundamental for the political articuladeclina-tion of the body.
This is evident if we consider, for example, early texts of political theology, but, one can say, it could be as well detected already in Hobbes' Leviathan frontispiece (where a body formed of multitudinous citizens is surmounted by a king's head) and other works of social contract theory. Moreover, we could argue that the medieval concept of 'body politic' itself was based on an analogy - or even, it supplied thinkers with an actual analogical principle - where a na-tion became an actual corporate aggregate. However, for our discussion the most interesting reference comes perhaps from Ernst Kantorowicz book The King's Two Bodies (1957), a fasci-nating study demonstrating how early-modern Western monarchies gradually began to de-velop a ‘political theology’ (inspired by medieval theology). Through the analogy of the King's two bodies, Kantorowicz comes to attribute the King with what he calls both a 'body natural' and a 'body politic'. Whereas the king's natural body has physical attributes, suffers, and dies, naturally, as do all humans, the king's other body, the spiritual body, transcends the earthly and serves as a symbol of his office as majesty with the divine right to rule. Here, Kantorowicz argues, the analogy of the two bodies allowed for the continuity of monarchy even when the monarch died, as summed up in the formulation "The king is dead. Long live the king":
The state, around 1300, was not a ‘fictitious person’ but an organic or organo-logical whole. It did not exist apart from its members. The regnum or patria was not “personified”—it was ‘bodified.’ Mainly because the state could be conceived of as a ‘body,’ could there be constructed the analogy with the mystical body of the Church. The terminology should prevent us from lightheartedly discarding the old organic oneness of head and limbs in the body politic and rashly replac-ing it by the abstraction of a personified state.
Kantorowicz's theory becomes for this essay another reminder of how the body in fact pro-gressively lost its physicality in favor of a split and focus on cognition, leading to an ever increasing interest (from both politics and science) in calculation, ordering and regulation. However, although illuminating, Kantorowicz theory unfortunately falls off his contemporary
milieu (and this is perhaps exactly why it should be looked at with more urgency) in which emerging theories of information and cybernetics spoke rather of radical disembodiment, understanding the body as a set of informational processes(HP 2-7). However, it's interest-ing to notice how, although the center of both critiques was still a liberal-humanist subject, these two discourses (Kantorowicz - and perhaps also Foucault - on one side and cybernetics on the other) came to two radically different conclusions, where the issue on the physical-ity of the body remains utterly central. As feminist media and literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles contends in her seminal book How we became Post Human, although in many ways post-human discourse deconstructs the liberal humanist subject, it thus shares with the same an emphasis on cognition rather then embodiment: to the extent that cybernetics constructs embodiment as the instantiation of thought/information, it continues the liberal tradition rather than disrupts it(HP 5). This issue, we will explain in the coming chapters of this essay, becomes crucial aslo to the poetic discussion around analogy, where a re-definition of binary approaches to subjectivity is the fundamental characteristic of the poetic act. On the contrary, (some) political theology and theory (like the ones we just briefly considered) seems rather to see the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as an opportunity to put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in both political history an contemporary discus-sions about cybernetic subjects.
Attempting to reconnect back to our discussion on the motion of bodies and how, with Aquinas, we arrive to a progressive internalization of (violent)forces and motion in favor of a theory of (theological) governability, its interesting to notice how the theory of cybernetics strangely also echoes a similar - secular - attempts of internalizing forces. When reading Hay-les' brief history of cybernetics, we come to the awareness that a process of conceptual (and physical) internalization of forces is in fact at the basis of the cybernetic enterprise, where the body comes to be progressively understood as an object of control and mastery rather then as an intrinsic part of the self. Following an historical framework, Hayles contends that this very
tendency can be detected already when we look at cybernetics' three distinct waves of development: The first, from 1945 to 1960, took homeostasis as a central concept; the second,
going roughly from 1960 to 1980 revolved instead around reflexivity; the third, stretching from 1980 to the present, highlights virtuality.(HP 7)
In this sense, Hayles contends, from homeostasis to reflexivity, to virtuality, we witness a pro-gressive disappearance of the physical body: because information had lost (or it did no longer need) its body, embodiment became not essential to human being(HP 4). However, the set of references that supported this transformation came initially from the physical world. Tradi-tionally in fact, homeostasis is to be understood as the ability of living organisms to maintain steady states when they are buffeted by fickle environments. However, during the Macy Con-ferences in Cybernetics, this concept was extended - by analogy - to machines. Like animals and men, machines could now maintain homeostasis using feedback loops (further theorized as flows of information)(HP 7). Although the informational feedback loop was initially linked with homeostasis, it quickly led to the more threatening and subversive idea of reflexivity. Hayles defines reflexivity as: the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates(HP 8). Reflexivity derived from a focus on how systems are constituted as such, and from a ne-cessity to redefine homeostatic systems so that the observer could be taken into account. In other words: reflexivity started extending cybernetic principles to the cyberneticians (and their bodies) themselves. Beautifully exemplified by the theme of Borges' The circular Ruins, where the narrator creates a student through his dreaming only to discover that he himself is being dreamed by another, reflexivity is a system generating a reality shown to be part of the real-ity it makes. As this example illustrates, reflexivreal-ity has subversive effects because it confuses and entangles the boundaries we impose on the world in order to make sense of that world (HP 9). Virtuality - or the third wave - swelled into existence when such self-organization began to be understood not merely as the (re)production of internal organization but as the
springboard to emergence. Following this idea, the intent (of machines) becomes to evolve the capacity to evolve(HP 11). In this scenario embodiment continues to be discussed as if it were a supplement(Derrida, Jaques, Of Grammatology, 281) to be purged from the dominant term of information, an accident in evolution we are now in power to correct.
But are we really essentially information and could do away with our body? Are in fact information and materiality such distinct entities, or such split only contributes to a easier controllability of both? In the previous paragraphs we have attempted to highlight how transi-tions from homeostasis to reflexivity could be interpreted - in light of our previous medieval exegesis - as similar tendencies to progressively relocate and converge forces and powers from within the human body for the purpose of a form of governability. However on one side the cybernetic discourse critiques the liberal humanist subjects and sets into crisis the notion of the self, its conclusions seems to be finally directed to new forms of control. In this scenario, we have also implicitly seen how the role of analogy seems to be still fundamental for the construction of the cybernetic discourse. Since the 1950's, as we have partly seen, the articula-tion of the post-human seems to be directly dependent upon this principle, as subjects become perpetually entangled in a process of analogical redefinition with the object/machine(HP 91). Strangely echoing the context of its medieval disputes - i.e. a convergence of scientific as well as philosophical questions - here analogy came to acquire again a strong epistemological status, celebrating cybernetics as a new secular scientific spirit as well as cultural paradigm.
*
In his autobiography Wiener recounts of retreating to his family farm for a weekend after a row in company of some influential Harvard mathematicians. Once home, he fell ill and slipped into delirium, where he was subject to "a peculiar depression and worry [about the row and] … anxiety about the logical status of my mathematical work". He continues:
(…) It was impossible for me to distinguish among my pain an difficulty in breathing, the flapping of the window curtain, and certain as yet unresolved
parts of the [mathematical] potential problem on which I was working.(HP 92)
Musing on his own pain merged retrospectively with external stimuli and mental abstraction, Wiener seemed to have arrived to a key insight about his relation to himself, his research and the world: "the possibility that almost any experience may act as a temporary symbol for a mathematical situation which has not yet been organized and cleared up"(HP 92). But map-ping mathematics onto emotional conflicts was not the only way Wiener used analogy. This theme came actually to progressively define his own work to the point of having him reach a point of contradiction. Unfortunately, the state of critical discourse around this topic is far from being exhaustive. Analogy remains to this day a powerful yet still obscure trope in the history of information theory and cybernetics as contemporary forms of bio-political gov-ernance. Only but a few authors have actually reached the point to address the urgency for an inquiry around this theme. Amongst them, the most substantive is perhaps Katherine N. Hayles', who, in a very brief but crucial passage of How we became post human, trying to iden-tify the blurry but bulging rhetorical trope of cybernetic discourse, concludes:
Understanding communication as relation suggest a deeper reading of this figure. Analogy is not merely an ornament of language but is a powerful con-ceptual mode that constitutes meaning through relation. (…) Indeed, cybernet-ics as a discipline could not have been created without analogy. When analogy is used to constitute agents in cybernetic discourse, it makes an end run around questions of essence, for objects are constructed through their relation to other objects. (HP, 91)
Wiener himself, Hayles argues, contended that analogy was nothing less then communica-tion. The critique according to which cybernetics was "merely an analogy" was for him akin to saying that cybernetics was "merely about how we know the world"(HP 91). Moreover, Hayles reports that, hearing this challenge often enough, Wiener came to write "The Nature of Anal-ogy", a manuscript fragment dated 1950 that to this day remains buried in Wieners archives at
MIT(HP 97). Here, Wiener seems to offer a strong defense of analogy, venturing into a wide-ranging meditation on what analogy means in science, mathematics, language and perception. It slowly becomes clear how, for the father of both the scientific and cultural grounds of cyber-netics, analogy was then more then fundamental; Constituted as a universal exchange system that allows data to move across boundaries, it became the actual lingua franca of a world (re) constructed through relation rather then grasped in essence(HP 98).
2.2 Traces of the powers of analogy in contemporary discourse
A return to analogy seems to be transversally evident especially in (part of) today's most popular realist philosophical currents, such as speculative realism, new realism and speculative materialism - who seem to take (in their own ways) an interest in fiction, poetic forms and analogy as the ground for their ontologies and hermeneutic enterprises. Direct con-sequences of the above tackled post-humanist discourse, all these returns to realism somehow come to need and to use poetry and analogy - in different declinations - at the core of their arguments. Particularly, there seems to be a certain dissolute interest from anti-subjectivist philosophies into analogy, as if this alluring (yet ambiguous) term would somehow serve as a bridge between a reality independent from us and the still (hard to crash) interpretative vio-lence that acts upon it.
Amongst these, we find, for instance, Mauricio Beuchot's Manifesto for a new analogi-cal realism(2013). Arguing for a realism of knowledge and praxis, the manifesto introduces a seemingly controversial side to realism, one that keeps an “aperture to the analogical, attribut-ing a certain relevance to the ideal and the utopic, but also to imagination and the senses next to intelligence/reason”(MAR 52). Addressing the problem that certain aspects of rationality were somehow obfuscated, this new form of realism asks for a return to a 'symbolic rationality', ultimate-ly accepting a reality independent from us, yet not immediateultimate-ly and directultimate-ly mediated, as it involves
a hermeneutic interpretation(MAR 98). Here analogy is at first used as a frame of reference to the poetic as a valuable mode of revealing, but ultimately explained in terms of proportion, becoming a sort of device that should finally come to merge intellect and affect, defining ana-logical hermeneutics as the fundament of this new realism.
On the other side of the spectrum we might want to recall the anti correllation-ist proposition of Quentin Meillassoux's speculative materialism. In this case its interesting to notice how, after his main philosophical enterprise After finitude, Meillassoux chooses to continue his articulation of a 'philosophy of radical contingency' with a decipherment of a poem, or, one can say, 'the analogical poem' par excellence: Stephan Mallarmé's Coup de Des. Here Meillassoux's terminology and explanations tend to perform a sort of 'mechanical semi-otics', substituting code for sign, encryption for decipherment. Although analogy is explored (through the functions of metaphor) all along the book, and seems to have constituted, at least for Mallarmé, the reality of the poem, Meillassoux pushes to a step further; Having ulti-mately coded and located the key to the poem in a specific number, he asks: is there some way in which Number could be really, and not metaphorically, infinite?(NS 141) In his quest for reality, it seems to me, Meillassoux rejoins the subtext also permeating After finitude, e.g. the need to rejoin with (pre Kantian) modern science, able to set apart human knowledge, access-ing, through mathematics, an (absolute) world independent from thought. In this scenario, analogy becomes the useful ground from which to introduce the daunting task of Meillas-soux's speculative realist philosophy as re-absolutizing the scope of mathematics (AF 126-128) through a form of analogical procedure.
This brief account, it seems to me, is but a small part of a consistent - yet subtle and somehow disarticulated - return in the last decades of analogy as a prominent conceptual framework across both scientific and literary discourse. However, although there seems to be evident relations between the technological conceptualization of cybernetics and a certain literary pro-duction, we must say that if for the former we have a somewhat ‘solid’ theory (Wiener’s and then
2nd order cybernetics) and further criticism, generally speaking, this is not the case for the latter. 2.3 Analogy as a poetic paradigm: demon, effect, rhythm
As we have briefly mentioned in the beginning of this essay, analogy still remains a somewhat dormant trope especially in the context of literary theory and poetics. The fact that it doesn’t even appear as an entry on glossaries and encyclopedias of poetics (e.g. Prince-ton’s) – where it is rather redirected to the meanings of Metaphor and Simile – tells us that its consideration has been limited and confused to what we can call its instrumental, ‘operational’ quality, e.g. its function in various Figures of Speech. Only but a few authors have attempted to follow an inquiry into analogy's somewhat wider, ‘paradigmatic' legacy. Its intersting to notice how the very notion of paradigm seems to be particularely tied with an articulation of analogy as well as with the literary as well as physical dimension of poetry. In studying this notion in his book The Signature of All Things - that of which he drew from Foucault - Agam-ben noted how the french philosopher focused his own definition on the concrete mechanisms through which power penetrates the very bodies of subjects, thereby governing their forms of life (SOT 12). Paradigms, writes Agamben, are those figures, from concepts to historical phenomena, whose role was to constitute and make intelligible a broader hisorical-problematic context(SOT 9). Not obeying to the Logic of the metaphorical transfer of meaning but rather to the analogical Logic of the example(SOT 18), the paradigm is defined by a third and para-doxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular:
Its epistemological status becomes clear only if we understand that it calls into question the dichotomous opposition between the particular and the universal which we are used to seeing as inseparable from procedures of knowing, and presents instead a singularity irreducible to any of the dichotomy’s two terms. The domain of this discourse is not Logic but analogy. (...) The analogon it pro-duces is neither particular nor general.(SOT 19)
The paradigm’s first feature, Agamben continues, is that it is a form of knowledge that is neither inductive nor deductive, but analogical(SOT 310). Asking whether the paradigmatic character lies in things themselves or in the mind of the inquirer, Agamben replies that the paradigm refers not to the cognitive relation between subject and object but to being(SOT 32). All this, as well as analogy’s fundamental power in defining the paradigm, can be in sum best experienced, he continues, with the first lines of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Description Without Place”:
It is possible that to seem — it is to be And the sun is something seeming and it is. The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are. (SOT 32)
The poetic text becomes, in this sense, for Agamben, the very field through which analogy can, in full, be finally exposed for its double power; On one side a daunting force, a mecha-nisms through which power penetrates the very bodies of subjects, thereby governing their forms of life; on the other the very tertium datur, the potentiality for defying binary rational logics - and lingustic hierarchies therein - exposing poetry as the very realm where power and act are not in relation, but directly in contact(UB 349), where the violent, instrumental approach to language is ultimately placed into question. It is in this very realm that analogy, itself both a conceptual and material field of force, aquires the status of paradigm, exposing, in its double-nature, the very workings through which power controls and regulates bodies, threby governing them as forms of life.
Amongst the few authors that arrived to explore analogy’s paradigmatic legacy we shall briefly recall Mallarmé’s intriguing text the Demon of Analogy, Wallace Stevens’ Effects of Analogy and, most importantly a section of Octavio Paz’s 1971-72 Charles Elliot Norton Lectures in Poetics at Harvard. We will hereby succinctly list these theories which will become funda-mental to outline the context of the second part of this essay, i.e. a study of embodiment and
