Before it can seem possible to inscribe even the first word on the blank that poetry is expected to cover, a way must somehow be found into the pressurised state of feeling that potentiates the articulation of regulated meaning into the expression of wild meaning. This state of feeling is possible only in confrontation with the blank that poetry is expected to cover. The blank is not inactivity. During the extensive suspension of language prior to the inscription of the first word, the blank is active: it is exerted against poetic subjectivity, pressed up against the imagination as its primary generic defiance. Writing poetry has its outset in this confrontation that no relaxing or giving up can de-escalate, as though inscription were a compulsory pushing back against the blank in order not to be thrown down under it. The state of feeling that is actively pressurised like this is intensely indistinct. It seems a condition of this state that access to its potential depends on the blocking of its identification. It resists being approximated to other states of feeling that can be named and recognised; it is not just poetry’s ‘version’ of absorption, desire or need. This is because poetry itself is a singular kind of work, a kind that cannot be generalised into any other activity. The pressurised state of feeling in which the potential for wild meaning is activated and poetry begins to be written may be an attempt by consciousness to prime the blank with ‘unrepresented mental states’: voids of expression for which words are not yet ready to be found, where ideas are not yet ready to be ‘formed, strengthened, connected into narrative fragments and associative chains, connected to stable affects and linked together.’² The pressing back against the blank might then be an attempt to convert it into a ‘proto-psychic’ surface, to keep out or eradicate ordinary ‘psychic work’, that is, the continuous and at the same time consciously intermittent work to ‘create, structure and organize the mind’, since this work is always at least partly mechanical for poetry.³ But to interpret access to the potential for wild meaning as nothing but the exclusion of psychic work from a converted proto-psychic surface would be to caricature the real blank, just as it would be a caricature of the primary generic defiance of poetic subjectivity to name it prose or death. Unrepresented mental states are proto-psychic in the sense that they do not take part in the psychic work of binding and linking, but the state of feeling in which the work of articulation itself is potentiated into the expression of wild meaning is not freedom from ordinary psychic work but the possibility of its radical transformation.⁴ Another way of saying this is that poetry can change the world. Confrontation with the blank is the seizure of subjectivity in this possibility, which must be real if wild meaning is to be capable of expression. ‘Wild meaning’ is the name that Merleau-Ponty gave to what he called ‘an expression of experience by experience’, which might be interpreted as the power of experience to give voice to itself. This giving voice to itself by experience, ‘wild meaning’ or literally ‘savage sense’ [sens sauvage], is not signification or a signified but the act of ‘restoring a power to signify’.⁵ Trying to begin to write poetry—pushing back against the blank—is a protraction of this act, which must be stretched out to the point where there is enough ‘power to signify’ to transform psychic work itself. It seems impossible to know in advance where that point will be, or how long the pressurised state of feeling must be endured before inscription on the blank is ready to begin. A screen can be stared at without end. The idea that ‘the utmost tension’ is necessary to ‘catch even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that the ego itself is’ is a close translation of this state of feeling; but to treat the utmost tension as a condition of what will turn out to be only a glimpse at, not a radical transformation of, the world beyond the imprisoned subject would again be to caricature the blank.⁶ Confrontation with the blank is the seizure of the imprisoned subject in the possibility that poetry will come not just to explain the world but to change it: just catching sight of what exists outside the prison is not pushing back against the blank but leaning on it. Neither is even the most protracted confrontation with the blank essentially the ‘building up of a subjectivity capable of confronting the long run because it has confidence in itself.’ Badiou’s justification of communist poetry is valuable for insisting that subjectivity must be strengthened and not liquidated, congealed or simply denied if we are going to try to write the ‘lyric poetry of what communism […] will have been after victory.’⁷ But the subjectivity that is seized in the state of feeling which potentiates the expression of wild meaning is not there to be built up and made capable of surviving its confrontation with capital or the blank. First it must find a way to express in wild meaning what communism can be right now, not what it will have been in the deconstructive grammar of the future anterior. Also close to the state of feeling that must somehow be entered and endured before inscription on the blank can begin is the idea of a world ‘empty in itself’ that can ‘be taken as also void of all spiritual [geistig] relationships and distinctions of consciousness’, and which is primed to receive, and through the work of writing poetry actually to be substantially ‘filled’ with, ‘reveries and appearances produced by consciousness itself’.⁸ This empty world might be what Althusser when he was a passionate young Hegelian brilliantly called ‘the abstraction of the act by which the I purges itself, emptying itself of all it is not.’⁹ But the blank is not empty. Neither is the blank ever filled up by the poetry that comes to be inscribed on it. The screen covered in words is also still blank, because the primary generic defiance of poetic expression remains active in poetry, no matter how far poetry might stretch the ‘expression of experience by experience’, or how deep in wild meaning it might be abandoned. And yet the overpowering of that defiance through poetry must somehow be possible if even the first inscription is to be made. Before a word of poetry can be written, poetry must already have the last word, or at least be within reach of it. Certainly this is not what Marx meant when he wrote in his critique of political economy that the ‘absolute working-out of creative potentialities’ is ‘the end in itself’ [Selbstzweck] for every living individual, even right now within the capital-relation where for many people ‘absolute working-out’ can scarcely ever begin.¹⁰ But this belief, which was unshakeable for Marx, and on which his theory of exploitation and its necessary eradication deeply depends, does make poetry and the confrontation of what defies it essential to the communist critique of political economy and its power to signify the radical transformation of the world.

Notes

¹Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present, Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014: 36.
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²Howard B. Levine, ‘The colourless canvas: Representation, therapeutic action and the creation of mind’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis (2012) 93: 607–629.
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³The concept of ‘psychic work’ that originates with Freud is explained by its use in lecture XVIII of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1917. Psychic work [psychische Arbeit] is what produces the ‘inner transformation’ [innere Veränderung] of the subject which makes possible the particular kind of ‘knowledge’ [Wissen] that alone can free the subject from the tyranny of the symptom. The phrase ‘psychic work’ appears already in chapter 5 of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, but is not yet in that text what Jean Laplanche calls an ‘explicit concept’, but rather what he calls an ‘implicit concept’ or ‘quasi-concept’, that is, an intuition on the way to being conceptualised. See his Problématiques VI: L’après-coup, Paris: PUF, 2006: 34.
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⁴On ‘unrepresented mental states’ which are not yet capable of figuration even in the unconscious, see César Botella and Sára Botella, The Work of Psychic Figurability: Mental States Without Representation, trans. Andrew Weller and Monique Zerbib, London: Routledge, 2005. A precedent for this account of unrepresentable mental states might be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s reflections on the meaning of ‘death’ for Adam before the moment of transgression had brought death into the world. What could death possibly have meant before it had ever existed except in name alone and as a threatened punishment for an act that had never been done? Kierkegaard suggests that Adam could have felt only ‘the infinite possibility of being able.’ The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980: 45.
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⁵Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968: 155.
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⁶Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Continuum, 1997: 319.
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⁷Alain Badiou, ‘Poetry and Communism.’
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⁸G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford: OUP, 1977: 88-9.
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⁹Louis Althusser, ‘On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel’ (1947), The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso, 2014: 41.
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¹⁰Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973: 488.
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