Poetry of the Wastelands: Linguisticality and Worlding

Wastelands are the social detritus of currently conceived worldhood. The homo sacer of systems that can neither control nor understand these errant outputs. This crosses political, cultural, linguistic and technological fields, inhabited as they are by logistical colonisation. Logisticality as the purity of intercursive mediation to make interactants legible. What is illegible, lacking parsimony or summation, is the outside. Not so much a voluntaristic exit as an after effect of filtration. The excluded of a Deleuzian control society.

Linguistically, it is the primacy of assertion and its associated validation, the dichotomous imposition of validated knowledge. “For between the word which, after the promise of the serpent, knows good and evil, and the outwardly imparting word, there is in truth an identity at ground.”[1] This grounding serves as the basis for the division of outputs based upon their validating capability. Words are placeholders for resolutions in the absolutized secular dichotomy (productive/unproductive; part/whole; in/out). Thinking is only possible as the grounding of assertions toward the overcoding of the name (and its process). Naming is a settlement, a process-toward-the-end that allows for assertion of absolute truth that can be validated by repetition of universal conditions.

Conceptualisation and the bracketing of theory widen this coverage of assertion, taking categorisation into a worldhood of its self-systemisation. Cartesian duality is a metaphysics of extension, extending and contracting in relation to other bodies. We have conceptualised a field of variable forces that constitute the limits of interactants. I-hood as thinking is merely the extension of one’s understanding onto this field, interpreting the pregiven entities and theorising the full extent of their possible interactions. As Levin notes in relation to Descartes’ declaration that to look upon a crowd of men he could equally be viewing automatons in hats[2], the interpretative schema is directed by external forces that limit knowledge entirely to the empirical. I am viewing interactions happening and conceptualising on their possible moves, bounded by the moves limiting myself.

To think is almost meaningless because knowledge becomes a set of observations in a field of logical outcomes. Thinking is purely propositional, building blocks of observed patterns that develop into theories of moving bodies. Words are only there as observational symbols, designating these fields of forces. Entirely instrumental to the ends of naming these building blocks and their resultant systems. An innate telos of knowledge-discovery that results in a totalising understanding of all forces and the interactants within them. Visually, this is the fixed gaze of the quattrocento, the visual prism of a controlling analysis where the world is within the analytical purview, to be contrasted by the wayward glance or multivalent[3]. Waste in this system is that of the aleatory, the imaginative, the traces or shadows of concepts that occlude that sitting outside the vision. That that cannot be named. The paradisiacal multitude of naming that Benjamin observed[4]. The word beyond the definition, beyond the concept. These are the linguistic and perceptual detritus of the totalising world.

Naming power has a doubled feature, being both the ultimate power and its ultimate futility in the fall. The nameless naming of God is an infinity of potentiality, marking both the origin and extensivity of man from the creation. Inversely sits the void as the mystery of knowledge in the tree, marked neither by good nor evil but only as the opposite of paradisiacal existence. Language is the giving forward of God’s word, the signs of which sit in his creations as nameless beholdings. Naming not as the production of knowledge but as the poetical creativity of interrelations, their placing in the kingdom as a relativised manifold of potential understandings. But with the Fall the mysteries of knowledge become apophantic unfoldings (neither beheld nor lived alongside). “The name steps outside itself in this knowledge: the Fall is the birth-hour of the human word, in which the name no longer lived unharmed, which stepped out of name-language, the cognizing language, out of what we may call its own immanent magic, in order to become magical expressly, from outside as it were. The word is now to impart something (other than itself). That is truly the Fall of the spirit of language.”[5] Power to apophantically declare, to make propositions that are assertions of a truth value.

Language as power is the growth of hierarchised mechanisms for the organisation of lifeworlds. To define, make parsimonious and bring the outside in not in a relation of creativity and interplay but in the rigidity of a predefined world of already-existing entities. The dichotomies of justice and the textual weight of law[6] inscribe their legitimacy via the linguistic capacity to write the codes of legal exception and illegal transcription. Transcription here refers to the inability to copy or replicate the sovereign power once declared/instantiated. Legitimating violence is the inscription that breaks transcription of power (of illegitimate violences[7]). Naming power and sovereign power integrate as a dual taxonomy, codifying the allowable socio-economic and culturo-linguistic relations of their territory (with overcoding the institutionalisation of these codifications).

Thinking then is prescribed in the taxonomic restrictions of knowledge-power. The legal-scientific field is the clearing of the nameless beholding and relationality into the naming as identificatory. The name is only a sign of the thing being signified. We are already in pre-existent relations of a given world. Our being is then circumscribed by forces both beyond our control and without redress. A taxonomy of man via power relations and the inscriptions of code.

Yet this is a false metaphysical inscription, one that confuses the (con)textuality of power as an established lifeworld of preset and pregiven things. Being-as-withdrawal into the they of ontic reality. Thinking is little more than curiosities or tinkering, the centre remaining unquestioned due to its circumscription in the legal-scientific field. Words are placeholders designed to border thought, setting parameters of the allowable and thus the thinkable. Such a field is a flat space, one of homogeneity gradated in arrays. But it lacks being except as the being that withdraws, that sits within the various scripts (circum-;trans-;in-;pre-) of expansive naming-power.

The power is inverted, turned outside of itself into a logical pregiven of existence. We cannot exist without the power to name our environment, to control our space. What does existence mean? How has it emerged? How are we able to name? These are the unquestioned scripts that both centre and fragment the legal-scientific field, giving it knowledge but only via the building blocks of propositions and assertions that scale to concepts and theories. Their traces are just detritus, waste to be ignored.

“Since science does not think, thinking must in its present situation give to the sciences that searching attention which they are incapable of giving to themselves.”[8] Remaining trapped in this flat ontological space means retaining the unquestionable and proscribing thought as little more than a placeholder (much as language) for further conceptualisation toward a teleological endpoint of discovery (a true theory of everything). “In the phenomenon of space the primary ontological character of the Being of entities within-the-world is not to be found, either as unique or as one among others. Still less does space constitute the phenomenon of the world. Unless we go back to the world, space cannot be conceived.”[9] The worldhood of this spatial field is an empty one for the world is neither discovered nor beheld. It is assumed and only from that can knowledge emerge and expand. A timeless reality, de-historicised and taxonomized.

We must think the world and our being in it to grasp the emptiness of these totalities, drawing into the wastes of reality as a beholding of full existence (and not just as tools for further totality-construction, thus repeating the scientised discourse of the naming-power). We must throw ourselves into the world, into the voids of unknowability and mystery. Becoming ontophanic as the doing and living of theory, “the active theoretico-practical phenomena elaboration process.”[10] Recognising the contextuality and ephemerality of our lived existence and searching for meanings in the interplay of concepts and lifeworlds, rather than their taxonomizing into laws.

How does one think differently? Within the liminality of concepts that can open up these traces? One must first expose the rigid yet fragile framework upon which the totalisation has occurred, exposing its blind spots and fraying its gaze. Linguistically this expresses itself in the futility of the designative naming I mentioned earlier. Where the autonomy of language and the limitations of scripting mean to “lose control, to slip into a kind of slavery; where it is no longer I who make my lexicon, by definitional fiat, but rather it takes shape independently and in doing this shapes my thought. It is an alienation of my freedom as well as the great source of illusion.”[11] Slaves to language. What could be worse? Beholding as a waste product of knowledge becomes clear. If I cannot be the ultimate bearer of the word in its capacity to categorise, then I am only a participant in a wider field of potentiality. Here are the limits of Cartesian duality, being slaves to linguisticality as the autonomy of language is a relational field in its own right, one that is indeterminate, intra-conceptual and paradoxical – an endless unfolding of the word.

We begin to question the primacy of assertion and validation and their associated dichotomies of truth-value that spread via propositions. “It remains to ask with what justification we have taken assertion as a mode of interpretation at all. If it is something of this sort, then the essential structures of interpretation must recur in it. The pointing-out which assertion does is performed on the basis of what has already been disclosed in understanding or discovered circumspectively. Assertion is not a free-floating kind of behaviour which, in its own right, might be capable of disclosing entities in general in a primary way.”[12]

Heidegger further elaborates in the relations between Rede (discourse) and Sprache (language). “Rede is a social capacity to conform to pre-existing patterns for laying out or making intelligible ourselves and our worlds of concerns. In a word, all Rede or concrete discourse is conventional or normalized behavior. Language itself (Sprache) is an academic abstraction from our concrete talking or intelligibility-making practices.”[13] Social discourse has within it creative and pre-emptive dispositions that can lay things out within a given field (expose underlying tendencies or open up concepts but equally foreclose exploratory efforts). Similarly, language has multiple modes of its practice, from prattle and idle talk (the linguistic registers of the they) to purely ontophanic expressions (the interrelations of our being with linguistic material in word games and imaginative thinking) A synonymous term is intercourse as the expression of multiplicitous dispositions that are individuated in dialogues or conversational speech acts and systematised in regional/global flows of information. “What is crucial to language is what is realized in speech, the expression/realization of reflection. Language is not, once again, a set of instruments: words which have been attached to meanings.”[14] Words are themselves the interrelations of worldhood with being, expressive counterparts that are both foundational and explicated from their use.

“Language is the organization of significance-relations within which entities can manifest themselves, because it lays out and stabilizes certain ways of making sense of things.”[15] It is also more than this, having destabilising potentials in the turning of concepts and the traces/shadows of theories. Sense-making and unsettling. “Language is a totality of words – a totality in which discourse has a ‘worldly’ Being of its own; and as an entity within-the-world, this totality thus becomes something which we may come across as ready-to-hand. Language can be broken up into word-Things which are present-at-hand. Discourse is existentially language, because that entity whose disclosedness it Articulates according to significations, has, as its kind of Being, Being-in-the world – a Being which has been thrown and submitted to the ‘world’.”[16] This totality is not one of a totalisation that circumscribes knowledge and wills the naming power. Language has a being of its own that extends beyond the designative foreclosure, containing expressive potentialities that are there as virtual interactants shaping our own expressive capacities (and providing designative ones too). “What is essential to it is the activity in which by speaking words we pick things out as.”[17] An experience of language[18] rather than an instrumental configuration of word-signs.

Heidegger goes further in this exploratory potential of language, talking “of ‘spontaneous utterances’ (e.g., ‘the board is badly positioned’) in which we ‘speak out of’ disclosive ‘wholes’ in everyday contexts of meaning, which function ‘without any instruction or theoretical reflection,’ in other words, ‘specific contexts’ of speech that logic and epistemology overlook.”[19] Here we have the idiomatic or intra-conceptual. Creative happenings of word play that express contextuality and aleatory relations of spontaneity.

Idiomatic unfoldings are the linguistic detritus of circumscribed categorisation. Being-in-the-world is an expressive unfolding of our position within the world, one that reflects and refracts teleological endpoints of the legal-scientific field. Such linguistic waste has an ontophanic character in the sense of “a techno-perceptual emergence into the presence of things.” “The idea of ontophany is therefore no more than the idea of a comprehensive phenomenotechnique which encompasses all phenomena; meaning, that all phenomena, not just scientific phenomena, are phenomenotechniques. In turn, a transcendental technicity of appearance exists, implying that every phenomenal manifestation or ‘phany’ possesses an a priori technical feature. Thus technologies, prior to their existence as the tools that form our uses, are first the perceptual structure of our existence; they are the ‘devices’ or the invisible matrixes, produced by culture and history, into which our potential experience-of-the-world is cast.”[20]

Words and language are the invisible matrices of our being, clearing the ground for and giving the capacity to exist in the world, to act and express. The dual aspect of the naming-power is the grounding of the fields in a dichotomous parsimony and a creative unfolding. As Taylor noted, the expressive denotes the designative, providing the ground upon which we can designate things by an expressive capacity. We sit within a world of whirling potentials that our words can grasp at and name, categorising but not wholly totalising within an enclosed world-vision. “Words [are] the relational structures that allow there to be entities in the first place.”[21] The naming power is a power beyond us as it is worlding and worlded. They can only be understood ontophanically as the techniques of our grounding, perceptual indicators that construct the thing in its thingness. Making and identifying the thing within matrices of relations that are not wholly instrumental but phenomenal, expressions of our understandings of the phenomena that encompass us.

Language’s autonomy is ontophanic as a techno-perceptual presencing. Words are there and not-there, named and nameless as they approach voids of knowledge. “The nature of experience lies in the fact that it always looks for and finds out the word that can express it. We find the right word, which means that we find the word that belongs to the thing. Therefore, the thing is expressed through the word.”[22] Creativity in wording is an affectual aspect of worlding, creating interactions between autonomy and control in our conceptualisations and their inherent aporias. “Language’s inherent quality is to disclose and construct our understanding of the world around us. Language achieves its essence by being comprehended and is ubiquitous in its reach. Its true nature is as a medium for revealing the world.”[23] Its ontophanic quality is precisely in these disclosures/constructions as the cyclicality between discourse and intercourse (Rede and Sprache) plays out across fields of understanding. The spatial enclosures Heidegger noted are nothing more than ephemeral designations of cyclical output, a timeless freezing of interactive disclosing and scripting.

Worded beings that cannot be above the interplay of linguisticality. “Men are constantly shaping language, straining the limits of expression, minting new terms, displacing old ones, giving language a changed gamut of meanings.”[24] This straining of meaning introduces new impositions via world-visions, a furtherance of the social Rede as conformity to established and establishing discourses. Thus, there is no outside of knowledge, no penetrating gaze that fixes our vision toward an objective desideratum. And this means there is no stopping a transcriptive declension of the contextualisation of our wording, removing it as the parsimonious total of the explicable.

Declension is important as an aspect of language’s autonomous interplay with reasoning. “The ‘declension’ of verbs names a ‘decline’ or deviation from a standard form (first-person singular) that ‘stands’ as a reference point for grammatical specifications.”[25] Language’s immersion in a wider linguisticality emerges from these interactions of words and context. The etymology of context is that of weaving together not as a parts to whole relation but as a constructive integration of text with its surrounds. Above and through language as a liminal element of grounding that is inexplicable to the legal-scientific field. Those spontaneous utterances mentioned earlier.

Such linguisticality consists of “our ability to take a distance from ourselves, to be as [Gadamer] puts it ‘extirpated from the instinctive processes of natural life’. Perhaps even more important, however, is the human being’s unique ability to hold something absent in presence, as well as to hold the unintelligibility of its own eventual and permanent absence in front of itself.”[26] To think beyond oneself, beyond the egological foreclosure of theyness and the assumptions of ontic knowledge. Exploring the unsaid or symbolic as relational fields to be thrown into and fall through. Traces or shadows of concepts are brought forward through pre-linguistic or trans-linguistic experiences.

We can invoke Levin’s (via Heidegger) analysis of Gelassenheit as a parallel of linguisticality and it’s bringing forward the detritus of established discourse. Gelassenheit is an exploratory releasement and openness to the unknowable, to the traces of knowledge and the inversion of meanings through the interplay of discourse and intercourse, “a gaze which moves freely.”[27] A non-egoic being that brings the outside in, removing the barriers of objective knowledge as the pregiven wording-worlding. The linguistic Gelassenheit is the ontophanic leap into the pre-discursive, pre-judgmental wording, reconnecting with the namelessness of creative ontology as an exploration of being-in-the-world, resisting the withdrawal. An expression of “the ontophanic sentiment, which is understood as the perceived feeling and the experienced sentiment of the world’s presence. The ontophanic sentiment should be deemed the result of a process which possesses both a subjective psychological dimension and an objective techno-historical one.”[28] Falling into the cycles of discourse-intercourse. Falling is a useful term here, more than metaphor as it presents the dual nature of naming power as something we fall into, a phenomenotechnique that overcodes ourselves as the legal-scientific field is exposed as an ontic snapshot of greater spatiotemporal depth. Egoic selves fall into the slavery of linguistic autonomy as wording breaks down concepts and propositions via their pre-worlded origins and traces.

Linguisticality is the turning of power, akin to Benjamin’s analysis of the general strike, a clearing of the field of meaning into one of overturning, a resistance of the informatic or logistical toward something “wholly transformed.”[29] Language is an exit, if not the quintessential exit, out of the enframing of narrativisation and the flattening of knowledge into idle talk and curiosity (perception “just in order to see” as opposed to “the basic kind of disclosure which is characteristic of Dasein – namely, understanding, in the sense of the genuine appropriation of those entities towards which Dasein can comport itself in accordance with its essential possibilities of Being”[30]). A linguistic strike as a refusal of the logistical homogenisation of information, of the production of arrays of parsimony. To refuse the parsimonious in favour of the fragmental, to truly engage in the dance between Rede and Sprache in their cyclicality, to move toward deeper explication, deeper complexities of semantics and grammar and their relation to being-in-the-world.

Following Benjamin, language as a divine violence is a full clearing (in the annihilative sense), a removal from the field in that knowledges lose parsimony. Visionary or exegetical knowledges subjectivised and stretching the bounds of (established) communication. Cyphers as decentralised grammars. A generalised declension or idiomatisation as linguistic shadows that fracture the parsimonious. Benjamin notes the power to name as the quintessence of language yet notes the irony of its own declension (in the literal sense) in the Fall. The Fall as both the universalisation and declination of this power. “By receiving the mute, nameless language of things and carrying it over into names, in sounds, man accomplishes this task. It would be insoluble were not the name-language of man and the nameless language of things akin in God.”[31]

Yet this nameless language of things has been inflected (and infected) by the abstraction of the dichotomous judging between good and evil that the Tree represented. The power to name is both the extension of God’s will but also the introduction of the turn against him. A linguistic strike is one that, neither turning back to paradisiacal namelessness of origin nor continuing this power, would turn the task upon itself, aiming toward a quintessence of naming against man, splitting this power as the splitting of language and the splitting of wills toward new conceptualisations, new combinations of naming and un-naming that disfigures grammatical arrays. To move beyond the judging as an instantiation of preset categorisation toward a kaleidoscopic set of potential visions. To grow new trees that move beyond the outwardly imparting.

Comporting oneself to what is useful cannot be a re-instantiation of the instrumental designation, a return of the egological that scripts wording. It must be expressive of being as forms of potentiality to be unfolded. “Through the linguistic encounter with the other a world emerges for us that is rooted imperceptibly in the taken-for-granted Boden of the lifeworld that both precedes and exceeds our perspectives on it. Gadamer endorses this pre-thematic lifeworld in terms of ‘ethos,’ which he reminds us, ‘refers to the life forming and life unfolding of all animals and plants’.”[32] Lifeworld is an expressive opening above the perceptually inert, fully in-depth with the multitudinous fields of (virtual and actual) existence.

Linguisticality’s opening is one that moves away from formal language, examining the symbolic and trans-linguistic mechanisms of communication that aren’t amenable to a scientific reading. Falling into the wastelands is akin to poeticization of being and knowledge. “Poesy or poetry in the narrow sense is, then, a way of using language to bring us to recognize the ‘unsayable’ background source of intelligibility that governs our world.”[33] Exposure of the background to exploration, new gazes upon our being-in-the-world. Bringing thinking closer to “a primal telling and speaking of language”[34] that poetry can open upon. In poeticization “words can defy logical connectivity to open up hermeneutical fields for the coming forth of new meanings”[35], exiting into word play as an interactant of worlding, shaping and being shaped by metaphor and spontaneity that allows for an exploratory Gelassenheit.

The relation between thinking and poetizing is “a discourse with a long history of symbolic, mythopoetic stories and interpretations. Thinking (Denken) is different from poetizing (Dichten). But thinking must work, must be prepared to work, with those stories and interpretations: if it disregards them, it will lose touch with the experience which once, once upon a time, came to speech through their poetizing.”[36] Much as the cycles of discourse-intercourse bring forth new means of worlding, new interpretative schema bounded by their contextual origin, thinking-poesy sits between the brackets of naming power and its flattening ontology. The full extent of linguisticality is in poetry as the creative capacity to defy logical connectivity and stretch meaning toward new bounds.

Looking toward a poetry of the wastelands would mean entering the creativity of non-parsimonious wording as an interactant. Being-in-the-world becoming being-toward-collapse or being-into-the-fall. Such poeticization finds its telling in a variety of works that face towards death and open being toward a decaying worldness of the legal-scientific field, a field that desires its own timelessness and de-historicization. An expression of decay and degradation as platforms for the exploration of being.

Poetry can be the opening of a presentation of being amongst the wastes, a techno-perceptual presence disrupting the fixed gaze and forcing thinking outside itself. Outside the confines of egoic power and the sovereign will, seeing the seething mass that has been relegated as the illegible of modernity.

Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ presents the faceless decay of an institutionalised modernity, inert and inescapable with its traces in the desert. This world is that of the undead, a non-historical forever-presence in a frozen telos.

“A crowd flowed under London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.”[37]

The stasis of non-death as the dead flow over London Bridge, half alive in a permanence between life and death. The crowd is a representation of modernity’s institutionalism, the ultimate conformity into the they and the complete loss of individuation. Naming power’s duality comes to the fore as a futile force, categorising the lifeworld into a rigid functionalism, a machinic assemblage that quashes being. Worldness is shrunk to an industrial technics of inputs and outputs, crowds synonymous with cogs and nodes.

In the ‘Game of Chess’, the ambivalence between life and death becomes clearer, treated as “other withered stumps of time.”[38] The nature of being isn’t remembered, reduced to nothing but the question of whether one is alive or not. No memories, only elements. The wind and water in the ‘Fire Sermon’, or the unreal city. These are now foreign, forgotten landscapes that are purely spatial, losing their aspects of place. The placial becomes displaced as being is removed. Death as stasis turns places into sites of continuity, of forever-presence. Linguisticality through the naming power becomes logisticality of intercursive flows, at once ordered but beyond the reach of reasoning.

‘What the Thunder Said’ presents the juncture of being itself, looking toward the “dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit.”[39] Here are the wastes, their accompaniment in third person who walks beside the pair, a representative of the real, waiting for the collapsing bridge and breaking of the prisons, a new Coriolanus in the rupture. This third person, past the inside/outside dichotomy, is Dasein, that which we have withdrawn from and what we reach back toward in introspective and intra-conceptual thought. This accompanying figure is a Gelassenheit beyond our egoic selves, that caught in the glance at the edges of our vision. Linguistically, it is the collapse of meaning into so-called nonsense, the babble of intercursive information. The dead mountain a metaphor for our loss of heights as modernity falls into inertia, unable to reach such heights or explore new depths. The limits of abstraction come about, abstractness on abstraction producing meanings that are unreadable. Systemic self-consumption. Waste products multiply.

‘Gerontion’ shows the ambivalence of history and its masking of being into contrivances.

“After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions”[40]

We cannot grasp history for we cannot grasp being. To even speak of grasping is to fall into the metaphysical trap Benjamin noted with the Fall – that we can name our knowledge and so control it. We resist interaction for it presupposes an equanimity with other beings that displace us from our centrality. History’s deceptions cannot be overcome, only interpreted and lived with as a force of worldness. But this admits our linguistical slavery.

“To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it”

Nihilistic attitude on display. With nothing left but a bare hope of the maintenance of forever-presence, an annihilative violence, outwardly directed, is reached for. A pure terror that is only temporarily disruptive to logistical colonisation. This is the duality of the wastelands, detritus little more than an unthought waste product that has already been logistically sorted. Between inertia and schizo-terror, the latter presents one last bastion of action. Why think being when one can become non-being? Why be constructive when it is easier to be destructive? There are no right answers. The legitimated violence of the sovereign and the metaphysical clearing on behalf of the legal-scientific field are foreclosures that cannot be met by escapism. Linguisticality’s word games should be ontophanically transcriptive (copies beneath the legibility of their original), developing an alternative poetical technics with its own perspectival lens. This cannot be non-violent for otherwise it is as futile as the naming power it undermines. New technics mean displacing their forebears, whether this be in the technopolitical sense of Perezian cycles of innovation or in the linguistic sense of new phenomenotechniques for forms of presencing in the world. Material/non-material is another dichotomy that must be smashed in an overturning of existing orders. It is how violence is directed and presenced in these new technics, what they (de)legitimate and interactants’ play with the new obscurities and aporias they produce.

Finding expression in the poetical register, the wasteland is the placial background existing in the furtive glance, alternative junctures amongst the wreckage. Amongst linguisticality’s registers there is that of its historicality. Heidegger places this within Dasein’s “potentiality-for-being” via thrownness and projection. “The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. In one’s coming back resolutely to one’s thrownness, there is hidden a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to one.”[41] In relation to linguisticality this is its depth within language and preceding it in pre-linguistic and unspoken experiences (in the visionary field as the gesturing of wording to attempt to describe such experience). Words hand down both their definitions and the traces of alterity that can invert or stretch their meaning.

Nostalgia has such a role in linguistic historicality, the doubled handing down of a futile gesture and an alterity from which historical lineages can be drawn. Betjeman’s poetry does this through its multifaceted explorations of death, recognising both the fear and clarity of the departure. It also places death within a background of architectural and historical degradation, a postwar England of grey.

‘Death in Leamington’s’ evocative line – “Half dead and half alive”[42] – describes the drab departure to death set amongst the degradative background of postwar England. Death takes a double meaning of both the woman and its meaninglessness (the death of meaning to being). Both people in the poem are unnamed other than by their prescriptive characteristics (their role in the scene). The naming power is inverted as its futility is brought to bear as a meaningless destruction of relationality. Their roles take away understanding, obfuscating death as a mechanical procedure that must be wrought. The nurse must perform her duty.

“They are both foregrounded figures and part of the anonymous mass from which they momentarily emerge, complete with the accoutrements of modern life, with its makeshift arrangements, its fleeting sympathies.”[43] Their foregrounding is the expression of this mechanics of death. Arrangements, sympathies, little more than outputs of an inert system that must deal with these momentary aberrations. Contrasting with ‘For Nineteenth-Century Burials’, where a being-toward-death takes on a sombre beauty set amongst gothic stillness. Here is a historical snapshot, a moment in time of distilled stillness set amongst the quiet English countryside. While nostalgic, it is a thread toward a Boden that is uncoverable, explicitly faced as a representation of our being-in-the-world. What is it to be as a nation, an ethnos? How does death figure in this? As an ending or the beginning of a turn toward re-creation?

Amongst the whimsy and twee of Betjeman’s poetry, a being-toward-death emerges at both an individual and collective level, the former in Betjeman’s fear of life’s winding toward death and the meaninglessness potentially inherent in the act of death itself, the latter reflected in Betjeman’s decrying of English architectural degradation into postwar drabness and homogenisation. This mixture of whimsy and darkness comes through in ‘In Westminster Abbey’. Praying to God for the preservation of his country, yet defining its characteristics as ephemeral, material aspects (free passes, proper drains). In praying, recognising that the narrator has minimal faith, praying for the sake of preservation as a last resort, hurriedly rushing his atonement as the everydayness takes over from sincere faith. The potential for death and its closeness in the proximity of the war are treated almost as inconveniences, things to ruin planned events (the concluding luncheon). Much as Heidegger identifies the technical society as one in a state of stasis, a forever-presence, Betjeman sees a similar attuning to finitude. Falling bombs are a break in the temporality of everyday existence, to be extinguished not via the unification of a nation facing an enemy but through its externalisation onto God (in this case treating God as a mere politician or diplomat who resolves earthly conflict). The English remain half dead and half alive. This is similarly reflected in ‘A Lincolnshire Church’:

“Dear old, bloody old England

Of telegraph poles and tin,

Seemingly so indifferent

And with so little to win.”[44]

Before the presence of a beautiful church in the Wolds, a defining form of Englishness through its nature and faith, stands the returning presence of commercialisation and indifference. What built that church, the character of those who did it, no longer exists except as a pastiche. But a lineage can also emerge, an invisible handing down. Threads that break through onticity onto different existential planes, “realising with terror the uselessness of human endeavour in ‘Goodbye’, where the former enjoyments of ordinary everyday life are eroded by the knowledge of imminent death.”[45] Imminent death breaks open everyday existence through the presence of an end, literal and figural, individual and collective. The unseriousness of the “blighted life”[46] that features prominently in Betjeman’s work is cut by death’s presence, opening it to threads where historicality can come back in. From blighted to national life, re-emergence of a nation in the decay of its existing husk. Death opens this by undermining forever-presence and scheduled life (this the defining characteristic of modern nationhood in the wartime prayer).

Ginsberg achieves a similar exposure of the urban underbelly present in American capitalism, its golden age heyday of the 1950s a propaganda technique of postwar production quotas. The two-sided face of American capitalism, its underbelly of broken dreams and thoughtless thoughts and the overbearing Moloch, the latter a spectral field of skeletons and detritus. Here we see capital’s wastelands, the aftermath of Moloch’s feast. Broken bones and shattered dreams in a haze of unreality.

‘Howl’ is an exploration of this, both in its foreclosure and potentialities.

“to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human

prose and stand before you speechless and intel-

ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-

fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm

of thought in his naked and endless head”[47]

Away from the overbearing Moloch, the titular howl is revealed in a primitive linguisticality – speechless and intelligent, pre-linguistic and unsaid. This confessing from the soul out of this underbelly is a thread toward alterity, obviously different from Betjeman’s neo-Victorian irony and moralising but equally a recognition of historical enclosure and the traces it leaves behind. Neither world-constructing in a voluntaristic sense nor enclosed by an ontic forever-presence, this pulling on the threads returns us to contextuality, that linguistic weaving of the text and its present being. Exploring being and wording in their multiplicitous registers means dealing with the waste products of the existing context, the forms, pieces and partials that are discarded. There is no hope in a socio-political framing, that which solves our problems (Betjeman’s God as civil servant) and allows everyday existence to continue unabated. Hopelessness and a facing toward death are the strings for new weaving, new interactions within language, within cycles of discourse-intercourse and thinking-poesy.

Poeticization of being in the wastelands is this alterity, this capacity to see threads extending beyond parsimony of knowledge and the naming power of scripts. We will not be scripted, we will find expression in our naked and endless heads.

[1] https://jesseposner.github.io/on-language-as-such/

[2] David Michael Levin – The Opening of Vision

[3] David Michael Levin – The Opening of Vision

[4] https://jesseposner.github.io/on-language-as-such/

[5] https://jesseposner.github.io/on-language-as-such/

[6] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2026/05/20/an-unjust-society-textual-weight-and-the-law/

[7] https://criticaltheoryconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Benjamin-Critique-of-Violence-1.pdf

[8] Martin Heidegger – What Is Called Thinking?

[9] Martin Heidegger – Being and Time

[10] https://svial.uqam.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2018_vial_springer-a.pdf

[11] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01252549

[12] Martin Heidegger – Being and Time