Drawing Out a New Image of Thought: Anne Carson's Radical Ekphrasis

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Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson'sradical ekphrasisMonique TschofenPublished online: 11 Jul 2013.

To cite this article: Monique Tschofen (2013) Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carson's radical ekphrasis, Word &Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, 29:2, 233-243, DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2013.794916

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Drawing out a new image of thought: Anne Carsonsradical ekphrasisMONIQUE TSCHOFEN

To think is to create there is no other creation but to

create is first of all to engender thinking in thought.1

[A] poem, when it works, is an action of themind captured on a

page, and a reader, when he engages it repeats that action but it is a movement through a thought, through anactivity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end youre

different than you were at the beginning and you feel that

difference.2

In 1988, the artist Betty Goodwin was reading books about the

Stalinist purges alongside the poems of Carolyn Forch aboutLatin American dictatorships when she began a series of

drawings she titled the Seated Figures that addressed the

history of forced disappearances, torture, and other state-

perpetuated atrocities.3 Her images of interrogation hauntingly

conjure human degradation and suffering. What makes her

work important is that her treatment of interrogation is not

merely thematic. She develops a language of formal elements

such as lines, folds, and angles that, together, draw attention to a

visual technique perspective that pictures the world as an

objective structure to be represented with certainty through

rational methods. Perspective, it has been argued, creates

distance between the viewing subject and the object. In its

static frame, it crystallizes fluid processes. Goodwin thus links

her works thematic depiction of the dehumanizing practice of

political interrogation to the larger epistemology it relies upon

by drawing attention to a style of arts mediating role in the

subjectobject split, and then subverting its aesthetic regime.

In a poem titled Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty

Goodwin, Anne Carson responds to one of the drawings from

Goodwins Seated Figure series.4 Torture is not an overt theme in

Carsons poem but it remains central to the poems broader

exploration of interrogation as a mode by which Western cul-

ture has sought information through epistemological para-

digms founded on conceptions of knowledge, truth, and

certainty and expressed through representation based on resem-

blance.5 Like Goodwin, Carson evokes and then refuses the

grid-like structures of containment of syntax and sense. She

also refuses to subject her words visual other to an interrogation

by refusing to picture the picture; she will not frame, name, or

make the image speak by representing it. Referring to the writ-

ings of Antonin Artaud, Gilles Deleuze praises the capacity of art

to offer a new image of thought.6 This article shows how, in

refusing representation as its central operational mode, the

poem reaches to the edge of the thinkable to demonstrate

arts capacity to offer its own uncertain form of thinking that, in

its dynamism, provisionality, and conditionality, brings into

being that which does not yet exist.7 In so doing, her poem

draws on and draws out interrelationships that heal the subject

object split which Goodwins art evokes.

It is important first to consider Goodwins image separately

from Carsons thoughts about it. Produced after her well-known

Carbon and Swimmer series, the drawing Seated Figure with

Red Angle (1988) comes from a series of haunting seated figures

such as Figure with Chair, No. 1 (1988), Hooded Figure with Chair

(19881989), and Seated Figure with Chair and Pipe (1988). Together

with works such as How Long Does it Take for One Voice to Reach

Another (1988) and Bent Figure With Megaphone (1988), these draw-

ings reduce the scene of torture to basic elements: a darkened

figure, a chair, a light, and a room.8 If, as Elaine Scarry notes, a

room typically represents the most benign potential of human

life a miniaturization of civilization and its comforts the

interrogation rooms in this series represent its annihilation in the

form of a smudged white space emptied of the anchoring coor-

dinates of dimension and depth.9 Rather than being represented

in relation to their torturer, the figures are solitary and isolated.

Goodwins figures faces are either covered with hoods or are

smudged beyond recognition to reflect the extent of their degra-

dation and dehumanization. Many of the figures bodies are

hunched or bent over on themselves, and their limbs appear to

be twisted or disconnected from the bodies. The seated figures

are haunting images, pregnant with silence.

The particular image from the Seated Figure series Carson takes

up, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988), is a drawing. Its medium is

important because unlike painting, which in its dominant tradi-

tion in the West from the Renaissance through to the modernist

era has tended to appear bounded and finished, drawing is, to

put it in the vernacular, sketchy. The kinds of surfaces one draws

on are much less forgiving than canvas and retain traces of every

gesture. On canvas, the brush traces obliteratively, while on

paper, everything that is marked on the surface remains visi-

ble.10 A drawing is often also a study and offers a means of entry

into a problem. The knowledge that drawing seeks is thus

exploratory rather than final; as Susan Stoops writes, by its

own intrinsic nature, the process of drawing is one that acknowl-

edges the conditional.11

WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 29, NO. 2, APRILJUNE 2013 233http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2013.794916

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Goodwins drawing is a study of the abject. It is also a study of

the connections between certain conventions of picturing the

world and certain types of relationships fostered between subject

and other. The figure is crowded in the middle of the page,

surrounded by an overwhelming sea of white contaminated by

traces, lines, gashes, erasures, and folds. A long straight black

vertical line on the right side of the figure, extending from the

shoulders to below the feet, anchors the grid of the drawing and

gives the impression of a wall that presses in on the subject.

Another group of lighter horizontal lines, or perhaps folds,

intersect at roughly ninety degrees with the vertical and are

disturbingly inscribed right through the figures head at the

level where the eyes should be, obliterating the figures ability

to see and to be seen as a person. These rectilinear lines a

motif Goodwin uses throughout her work evoke the frame of

a perspectival grid that artists sketch out to orient the space their

image will inhabit.

Perspective is a device through which the world is projected

outward from the position of a spectator who is removed from

the action. Often associated with Decartess rationalism and his

search for ontological and epistemological certainty,12 the per-

spectival grid has been argued by writers like Martin Jay to

represent a technology of control, or, as Hubert Damisch puts

it, a regulatory structure.13 The perspectival grid offers a way of

mathematizing space so as to render objects realistically.

While the grid functions as an invisible mechanism to represent

the world objectively, it also objectifies that world. As Erwin

Panofsky puts it, perspective creates distance between human

beings and things.14 In the drawing, the presence of the grid

connects perspectives mathematizing modes of abstraction,

rationalist epistemologys purportedly objective knowledge,

and the subjectobject ontology we have inherited from

Descartes. The abstract grid thus links directly to the drawings

stated theme, since interrogation (as torture) is a practice that

materializes this epistemology.15

However, the strength of this image has to do with the ways in

which the grid is undermined and rendered impotent through a

more complex and fluid spatial operation. The figure appears to

occupy two separate planes at once, torqued around an invisible

central turning point in a way that produces a disconnect

between the upper and lower body. The figures legs do not

belong to the same geometric plane as the torso and seem to be

made of different matter; lighter and more translucent than the

upper body, the legs give the impression that they are floating

away. Via a delicate rupture of the fields of containment begot-

ten by the principles of perspectivalism, Goodwins drawing

transforms an abstracted static field into a dynamic unfolding.

The logic of this alternate way of depicting spatial relationships

is neither objective nor does it objectify.

The red angle of the title of Betty Goodwins drawing hangs as

an enigma. It is drawn forcefully and left unsmudged on the left

side of the drawing, hovering away from the figure. Its angles

teeter off the right angles of the grid, echoing instead the more

organic angles of the shoulder, arm, and legs of the figures bent

form. And yet, unlike the blood-like splotches of red on the hip

and between the legs of the figure, the red angle firmly belongs

to a different order than the human figure. It evokes, but is not, a

gash in the skin of the paper. Resembling the other distresses on

the surface of the work, the red angle transforms the flat and

static fields of drawing into something that inscribes the work of

arts dimensionality and unfolding in time. An abstract inscrip-

tion of the materiality of drawing, of the trace of the hand, of the

hidden depths art can make visible, the red angle is at once the

lure of the image, and the detail which, as Barthes puts it in

Camera Lucida, wounds and pierces.16

Anne Carsons Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty

Goodwin was written in 1999, when she was invited by Art

Forum to respond to a work that had special significance to her.

Carson, whose work has frequently addressed the relationships

between verbal and visual arts,17 described the way she chose to

represent her encounter [b]y using the most hesitant of

Figure 1. Betty Goodwin, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988). Oil pastel, oil and

graphite. 37 23 cm. Photo credit: Louis Lussier. Reproduced withpermission from Gatan Charbonneau.

234 MONIQUE TSCHOFEN

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syntaxes.18 Like Goodwins dynamic distortions of rectilinear

visual geometry, Carsons disturbances of the syntax of the

phrase, of genre, of person, of order, and of representation itself

are designed to expose techniques of control and to subvert

them by offering models of how new dynamic interrelationships

might be configured.

Towards the beginning of the poem, Carson notes that the

seated figure started out with an idea of interrogation and later

continues if you had the idea of interrogation.19 This careful

slippage, from an idea of interrogation to the idea of interrogation

delineates the way the poem moves from a consideration of

Goodwins art and her depiction of torture to an exploration

of a broad set of abstracted philosophical concerns, for at the

heart of Carsons response to Goodwins art rests the double

meaning of interrogation. The term refers to a technique

torture and, seemingly more benignly, to a method or a mode

of inquiry that forms an essential part of rationalist epistemol-

ogys quest for certainty and structure behind the flux of experi-

ence. The connection between these two meanings of the word

interrogation seems to hang on the fact that both involve pro-

cesses of questioning, but their imbrication runs deeper. As

Idelber Avelar writes, torture is a key chapter in the history of

truth.20 Anne Carsons scholarly and creative writing has sys-

tematically worked to retrieve concepts from classical antiquity

to show their strangeness and aliveness. There is little question

that her translation (L. translatus, to carry across) of Goodwins

treatment of torture, moving from an idea of interrogation to the

idea of interrogation itself, aims to draw out a history of its

meanings.21

In Athenian culture, the term basanos (o) referred to atouchstone used by bankers to distinguish gold from alloys. Over

time, the term came to be associated with judicial technique

whereby a slave or servant, as a proxy for an accused free

man, was physically tested by torture in order to extract the

truth. What is significant for this analysis of Carsons poem

based on Goodwins image is that, because of this association,

the term came to signify processes by which we come to test the

truth of a matter. Edward Peters notes how, in the work of

Thucydides, the term basanos evidently connoted a kind of

critical inquiry22 interrogation as critical method and

later, basanos comes to signify not just the process of distilling

truth from falsehood, but truth itself. 23 It is this last connection

that Page duBois considers in her work Torture and Truth. She

looks at the works of writers ranging from Theognis to Pindar to

Plato to show how the Athenian practice of basanos is what has

endowed philosophy with the core metaphor that organizes its

central concept of truth as alethia (). DuBois argues thatthis concept has been conceived of as a kind of aggressive

dragging, and bringing into light something hidden24 in a

way that leads almost inevitably to conceiving of the body of

the other as the site from which truth can be produced, and to

using violence if necessary to extract that truth.25

In the poem, Carsons retrieval of classical ideas about truth

(aleth ia) and interrogation (basanos) materializes when Carson

slyly raises the question of servant (or slave) and master. Art is

the servant of allure, she writes, but importantly in this poem,

there is no master of allure; no authenticating power submits

arts truths to its authority.26 With these words, she suggests that

the purpose of the art talk throughout the poem, with its refer-

ences to colors (red), printing methods (wiping in), writing and

videotaping, and the poems references to artists like Pascal,

Artaud, and Nabokov, is to show how art can intervene in the

legacy of this darker aspect of our epistemology, either in service

of it as the technique of perspective can be seen to be doing, or

independent from it.27

With this context, it is possible to examine how Carson uses

verbal form to engage the history of interrogation and truth.

Carsons Seated Figure is difficult to categorize as essay or poem,

as it resembles both and neither. It evokes the syllogism and

propositional logic, and then wounds and pierces the argumen-

tative with conditionality and non-sense. In broken lines where

the sequence doesnt matter and where nothing sticks, its

study of truth begins as a trickle, this thin slow falling of the

mind, and from there, leaks.28 And yet, very little here feels

poetic. There is no meter, no rhyme, no beautiful language. In

order to appreciate its radical work, what I am calling Carsons

poem needs to be understood as an ekphrasis, that is, as the

verbal representation of a graphic representation.29

Ekphrasis, from the Greek words ek (out) and phrasein (to

speak forth or tell) is a genre of poetry and, more broadly, a

mode of vivid writing that has been understood in relational

terms as it involves a meeting between two modes of representa-

tion one speaking and one silent; one temporal and one

spatial; one cognitive and one possessing embodiment.30

This act of meeting has traditionally been conceived of either

in confrontational terms as in DaVincis notion of the paragone,

or in sisterly or empathetic terms.31 Either way, as W. J. T.

Mitchell has argued, in the tradition of ekphrasis the textual

self projected as active, speaking, seeing speaks not

only about the visual other but also presumes to speak for it

insofar as the visual is projected as being passive, seen, and

(usually) silent.32 Precisely because ekphrasis enacts a relational

encounter, and precisely because this relational encounter has

been informed by a social structure that mimics the set of power

relationships enacted in the scene of interrogation, it is able to

offer Carson an appropriate platform from which to launch her

short-circuiting of the rational modes of thinking that can turn a

method of questioning back into a practice of interrogation.33

In her poem, the interrelations between the self of the written

word and the other of the art image are hard to discern. The

poems language offers no clear way of picturing the picture in

question.34 It does not apostrophize or engage in dialogue with

the picture. And it does not seek to put into words the pictures

virtual discourses.35 Moreover, the speaker does not seem to

be seeing (in the strict sense, with her eyes) or scanning for some

clear vision of an epiphany. The poems subject matter is scat-

tered, covering topics as diverse as aging, house pets, colors, the

weather, art, literature, objects, propositions, and thoughts

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themselves in no easily discernible logical sequence. The poem

thus mimics the movements of thinking as it paces rather than

journeys, moving tangentially rather than linearly. Achieving

the very opposite of what Krieger calls the still moment of

ekphrasis, that is stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence, the

poem is too unpatterned to be still or stilled.36 But for the title,

one would have great difficulty recognizing the connections to

Goodwins work or her theme. Yet Carsons refusal to picture

the picture represents a refusal to render the silent image know-

able and so extract its meanings literally to make it talk. If

one of the questions of the poem is how to put thoughts about a

complex work of visual art such as Betty Goodwins into words,

Carson wants to ensure that her aesthetic response to the image

of a human subject made into an object through the infliction of

torture does not subordinate or contain this visual image. Just as

Goodwin finds a way to have her work evoke the fields of

containment of the perspectival grid and the epistemology that

is associated with it, and yet transcend these through a fluid

spatial operation, so too does Carson find a way to evoke the

grid-like apparatus of genre and then, through the introduction

of dynamism, proliferate alternative ways of figuring interrela-

tionships between words and images and subjects and objects

more broadly.37

As Carsons ekphrasis about the picture hesitates to picture the

picture, it faces another challenge, because the ekphrasis still is

obliged to phrase that which is mute and apparently beyond

language.38 Through a series of challenges to phrasing, the

poem implies that structures of grammar and syntax are grid-

like mechanisms of containment akin to the perspective para-

digm in the visual arts.39 A sentence is a logical unit that works

towards resolution and closure. In Carsons poem, each line has

the outward appearance of a sentence because it is punctuated

with a period, but, because each consists only of a conditional

clause without the main clause or consequent, these incomplete

sentences make visible the frame of the very structure they

violate.40 The broken sentences in Seated Figure create a

space for thought that cannot be fixed or pinned down. But

they do so in a way that is specifically relevant to the fact that this

is a poem that relates to a picture. As the unfinished preludes to

an idea that cannot be uttered, the sentence fragments show a

way for language to point to or reach towards rather than

objectively represent. The poem seeks to verbalize something

about the visual arts ineffability, and so its approach is to remain

silent in matters that reside in the realm of the inarticulable.

Conditionals are of great interest to philosophers because,

J. L. Mackie explains, we do not know precisely how to con-

strue them or precisely what their truth conditions are.41

Carson declares in the second line of the poem that there are

two kinds of conditionals, factual and contrafactual, and it is

the contrafactual conditionals that have aroused the most

anxiety and dispute.42 Rather than offer a statement of what

is true if the antecedent is true as does the indicative conditional,

the counterfactual statement offers what would be the case if the

antecedent were true. Counterfactual reasoning is thus the

process of evaluating conditional claims about possibilities

rather than consequences, and so when Carson alludes to the

form she raises the prospect that language can work to evade the

burdensome literalness of facts. In the poem, however, the bulk

of the protases are in the present indicative tense and so likely

represent factual conditionals. With this sleight of hand, the

poem draws attention to a delimitation between two gramma-

tical and logical categories and thus to a way of using language to

generate statements of possibility, and then hides this boundary

from view so that we are left thinking about the poems own state

of possibility, that is, about what the poem might have been if it

had actually completed its thoughts. Her phrasing thus creates

the structural conditions under which it is impossible for our

thoughts to reach their consequences and there achieve a full

stop. By excising consequence, its fragmented sentences offer a

way to articulate potentiality.

Carson uses the poems incomplete conditionals to comment

self-reflexively on the conditional modes function as a connec-

tor of two parts. Scattered through the poem is a kind of

catalogue through a series of lines all beginning with the phrase

If conditionals are of two kinds, which seek to parse the notion

of the conditional, starting with the statement If conditionals

are of two kinds factual and contrafactual.43 This statement is

grounded in a recognizable process of logical reasoning that

seeks to categorize and establish the boundary edge between

different things. But the binary oppositions used to qualify the

noun conditional that follow keep shifting the terrains within

which their meaning resides. If the first statement is launched

from the idea of a binary related to fact and its opposite, the next

two iterations in the series move into dimensions that are prob-

abilistic (possible and impossible) and then ontological (real

and unreal).44 Then, the categories of conditionals the poem

names begin to break down. In the line If conditionals are of

two kinds now it is night and all cats are black, the binary terms

no longer relate to the mode of the conditional proper.45

Instead, they relate to each other impressionistically, dark

thing opposed to other dark thing. The next two iterations in

the series, If conditionals are of two kinds allure and awake,

and (with a variation in the syntax) If conditional comes

between condiment and condolence, offer up even more

abstract interrelations between the terms of the binary by

using assonance and the alphabetic order of the dictionary as

the point of connection.46 The final lines of the poem, If

conditionals are of two kinds graven and where is a place I can

write this conclude the poem metatextually, setting into a faulty

parallel syntax two notions about writing. One is passive,

abstract and depersonalized ([conditionals are] graven). The

other is localized (where is a place), and embodied and active

(I can write this).47 Staged through this series of protases is

thus an array of ways to configure interrelationships ranging

from binary oppositional to proximal, and its overall movement

in the poem from relationships of distance to relationships of

closeness is one way the poem tries to think through the problem

of interrogation as a relationship founded on a distancing of


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subject and object. In its place it offers a relationship based on

contiguity and sharing.48

If the idea of connectors is introduced with the poems con-

ditional syntax, it is developed in the poems core imagery

around the idea of the edge. The central lines of the poem

warrant repeating here because they demonstrate the complex

work of the poems staging of thoughts and thinking within the

encounter of visual and verbal arts:

If you want to know why you cannot reach your own beautiful

ideas.

If you reach instead to the edge of the thinkable, which leaks.

If you stop the leaks with conditionals.49

Here are three linked protases within which the categories keep

shifting so that, together, their instabilities work to create a

succinct verbal picture of different conceptions of thought.

Lying palimpsestically beneath these lines and the poem as a

whole is Aristotle, who pictured knowing as a form of reaching

in Metaphysics A: All men by their very nature reach out to

know.50 In the first line cited above, desire wanting to

know is separated from attainment reaching ones own

beautiful ideas, and while wanting is posited as possible, attain-

ing is not. So why could one not reach the end of ones beautiful

ideas? To answer this, it is first necessary to look at the circum-

stances under which one could reach the end of ones ideas. What

is being conjured here is an epistemological framework in which

ideas are conceived as objective entities that reside beyond some

kind of finish line, but which can be reached through a rational line

of questioning the interrogatory method at the heart of a

notion of aleth ia we can trace back to the practice of basanos.Now importantly, one small preposition offers the key to under-

standing the difference between the epistemological paradigm

alluded to in the first cited line, and the picture of thinking

offered in the second cited line, where knowing is understood

more in keeping with Aristotle as a reaching to rather than as

attaining. Reaching to can be infinite; as a model of knowledge,

it engages a dynamic movement that cannot be stilled or

contained.51

There are two hinges or turning points in the second quoted

line that relate to the edge of the thinkable that you are

reaching to. One concerns the figure of the edge, and the second

concerns the category of the thinkable. To begin with the figure

of the edge, it must be noted that edges are a recurring motif in

Carsons work.52 They are interesting because they are intrinsi-

cally paradoxical. Edges are figures of distance. They divide and

separate. They delineate boundaries between such categories as

self and other or subject and object which, once conceptualized,

create rigidities that affect all aspects of being. But at the same

time edges are figures of contiguity and contact. The categories

of self and other for example must touch at the place where they

each find their identity through difference. Edges mark the place

beyond which resides that which is not yet contained in the

categories of the known. Ontologically, edges also delimit

between what is and what is not but perhaps could be. And at

this edge is the thinkable, which itself is a categorical distinc-

tion that is unique in philosophy because one can only have

knowledge of what is thinkable. The line separating it from the

unthinkable is a line one can reach to, but never actually reach.

The edges of the thinkable here are edges that leak; the poem

thus uses a metaphor to make a picture of the limits of catego-

rical thinking as well as thinking about categories. In the next

line, you stop the leaks with conditionals. The humor in this

line relates to the radical paradox of the image of conditionals as

stopgaps because the poems experimentational form clearly

uses the conditional to set thought in motion rather than contain

it. If anything, it might be said that the poem stops the condi-

tionals with leaks.

Framed within hesitations around the constraints of ekphras-

tic form, and conveyed through hesitations in sentence form

and logic, the poem about Goodwins Seated Figure with Red Angle

offers hesitations around grammatical person. It is impossible

to reconstruct from the poem a unitary speaker because the

speakers voice in the poem constantly shifts identity

and address. For much of the poem the voice speaks in the

third-person impersonal in the voice of the scholar who stands

back from or above the text and names. Parsing the conditional

form, philosophizing about color, art, and experience, the scho-

lars voice moves towards precision. However, the speaker in

the poem also uses a second-person form of address to counter

this impersonal authoritative voice. The second person creates

an intricate dialogic structure that breaks open the fourth wall

of the poem and allows subjectivity to enter into the discourse.53

The epistemological implications are great; one cannot calcu-

late or be certain about another when one is engaged in

a dialogue with them. Dialogue is a dynamic process that

depends on a degree of intimate engagement between the speak-

ers. It requires curiosity, and often accommodation and com-

promise. Dialogue bridges distances and offers new points

of view.

Carson uses the second person to draw attention to the com-

plex work of pronouns in articulating relationships. From the

outset of the poem, the second person you becomes a moving

field rather than a stable ground. In other words, the pronoun

you delineates the edges of a category that leaks. At the

beginning of the poem, the second- person addressee appears

to be Goodwin herself and the poem an intimate letter to the one

who inspired it. However, on closer inspection, many of the lines

in which Carsons speaker seems to be addressing Betty

Goodwin as you are citations of Betty Goodwin herself speak-

ing in interviews where she frequently used the second-person

pronoun as a synonym for the third or first person subject one

or I. For example, in an interview with Robert Enright,

Goodwin said that her work is based in something you dont

even realize yourself until it gives you back information. Its like

youre pulling and pulling and trying to get something. And then

theres that magic time when it begins to pull you. If that doesnt

happen, you cant push it any more and it dies.54 In the poem,

Carson retains Goodwins idiosyncratic use of the second person

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in the phrase If youre pushing, pushing and then it begins to

pull you.55 This habit of speech is fascinating because it results

from a schism in self-identity, that is, from a projection of the

mental contents of a speaking I onto the pronoun you. This

schism paradoxically makes possible a unique kind of intimacy

between speaker and interlocutor. The speaking I who is

speaking as a you is in fact addressing an interlocutor,

you, who by virtue of being addressed in the second person

feels interpellated by and drawn into the world of the speaker.56

Two figures inhabit the same pronominal unit. What takes the

appearance of a dialogue (Carson the poet addressing Goodwin

the artist) turns out to be a kind of intertextual sampling (Carson

quoting Goodwin) within which what is presented as a dialogue

(Goodwin addressing her interviewer) is in part actually a mono-

logue (Goodwin is talking about herself). Even the metaphor of

Chinese boxes cannot capture the complexity of the multiple

frames in operation here.

Formuchof the poem, you cogitate. You have ideas, want

to know, remember, cannot remember, do not want to

remember, and are bewildered.57 Whether this you refers

to the reader of the poem, another viewer of Goodwins drawing,

Goodwin herself, or the seated figure in the picture is not at all

clear. What is clear is that when understood strictly in relation to

the seated figure, these activities of thinking serve to engage

cleverly with the thematic premise of interrogation in Goodwins

Seated Figure with Red Angle. Carson constructs a thought-full you

in order to juxtapose her to Goodwins image of a tortured you

being interrogated for what she knows. Carsons thinking you is

granted subjecthood and interiority. Goodwins interrogated

you would seem to be merely othered.

However, in an important twist, the poems catalogue of

thinking acts associated with the thought-full you avoids

merely reproducing rationalist epistemologys tendency to

objectify. Rather, it presents a sliding between two modes of

knowing from one that conceives of truth as certitude, correct-

ness, or correspondence, to one that conceives of truth as what is

unexperienced or unthought.58 Early in the poem, the thinking

you is involved in activities grounded in the quest for cer-

tainty. Later, the thinking you fore goes the prospect of a

knowledge with certainty and enters into a realm in which

nothing sticks.59 Taking up the poems central metaphor of

leaking through the image of rain, the final lines of the poem

place I, you, and we in a contradictory series of state-

ments about the weather:

If (for example) had you not destroyed the barometer it would

have forewarned us implies that we are now standing in a

storm of rain.

If as a matter of fact it is a clear night I would say almost

relentlessly clear.If the rain lashes your face like the manes of all the horses of this

century.60

The transformation of the you who thinks into the you who

experiences rain leads away from thought towards perceptual

and affective experience. And so, in the final line of the poem,

where is a place I can write this, the speaker I has learned to

anchor language, specifically written language, in the phenom-

enal world, in the here and now of experience, correcting

perhaps the mind/body split proposed by the cogito.

The subject/object you in the poem is related closely to the

third-person pronoun she. She appears to be the seated

figure (who in Goodwins drawing is not gendered). She is

represented in the poem as vulnerable, just as Goodwins seated

figure is in the picture. In the poem, however, her abjectness

appears to be related to senility, a process by which information

slips away. While the result of the annihilation of thought is the

same, Carson proposes senilitys emptying of the mind as the

antithesis of interrogations extraction of information.61 In the

poem, she sits the way a very old person sits, with no pants

on, confused.62 What is important about Carsons treatment of

she in the poem is that, unlike the seated figure in Goodwins

image, she is cared for by you: you lead her to water

and bring her a gift such as a thought from Pascal,

Nabokov, or Artaud.63 In other words, in lieu of picturing a

relationship that objectifies the other, Carson posits a relation-

ship between first and third person that is nourishing. These

pronominal games are highly significant for Carsons project of

reconfiguring Western epistemologys faulty logic of instrumen-

talizing ways of picturing and hence being in the world. The

poem thus traces what Martin Buber describes in Ich and Du as

the transformation from a relationship of IIt which reduces

the other to an object and subjects it to the blind will of the I,

towards mutual, reciprocal relationships Buber terms IYou

(IchDu) that are grounded in dialogue and based on the recog-

nition of the other. As Buber posits: I require a You to become;

becoming I, I say You.64

The poems hesitations around pronominal structures estab-

lish a space of interpersonal exchange. This space of exchange

extends to the text as a whole, since the poem does not delineate

sharp edges between itself and other texts.

Roland Barthes argues that intertextual dialogism brings a

text into a kind of social utopia, that is, a space where no one

language holds sway over any other, in which all languages

circulate freely.65 Yet Carsons poem might better be described

as what Michel Foucault calls a heterotopia. In the preface to The

Order of Things, Foucault uses the term to describe the marvel of a

passage from one of Borgess fictions in which the categories

listed in a certain Chinese encyclopedia entry reveal the stark

impossibility of a system of thought.66 Foucault wishes to under-

stand how a system, an order of things, which must by definition

have a grid or hidden network that determines how its elements

relate to one another, might at the same time offer no common

ground upon which its elements meeting is possible.

Heterotopias, he explains, like Carsons poem, secretly under-

mine language because they destroy syntax in advance, andnot only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also

that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to

and also opposite one another) to hold together.67 Utopias


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(from ou-topos, meaning no-place or nowhere) project an

image of idealized places that do not and cannot exist.

Heterotopias in contrast violate all grids of coherence.68

Carsons disorderly poem can be understood as a heterotopia

because, like Goodwins drawing, it offers up the skeleton of

order a logical grid or system that appears to function serially

and then brings that order to the edge past which it becomes

unthinkable.

The problem that was raised at the beginning of this

article about the way Carson refuses to picture the picture,

refuses to make it speak, must be addressed now, because

amidst the many destabilizing registers of the poems lan-

guage, the poem seems blind to the drawing. How is this

elision not ultimately to be understood as an exercise of the

words power to silence or dominate? I argue here that it

should not. In refusing to re-present something about

Goodwins drawing, Carson is offering a critique of repre-

sentation itself and its relationship to both literary language

and visual arts. Many philosophers have argued that repre-

sentation has for long been the fundamental category of

knowledge both the form and the content of what we

know.69 An order of things and a way of seeing, represen-

tation posits relationships between thoughts and things

based on resemblance or similitude. Its logic is that of the

copy, and its mode of engagement is recognition.

Recent philosophy has identified the problems inherent in

this conception of representation. In a consideration of the work

of Gilles Deleuze, Amy Hertzog argues that representation

contains and constrains the object it represents: representation

operates through immobilization, spatialization. It assertscorrespondences, analogies, and associations between elements

at the expense of their differences, their dynamisms, their move-

ments and changes.70 To put this in the poems words, repre-

sentation is a tactic that seeks to stop the leaks in an otherwise

dynamic and shifting field of knowledge.71 Ils Huygens elabo-

rates on what the implications of representations immobiliza-

tion and containments are for knowledge itself. The model of

representational thinking is deficient, Huygens writes,

because it can only re-present us what we already know. Itdoes not allow us to think the unthinkable, what has not been

thought, what falls outside what we already know. Simply put,

the representational image of thought cannot think qualitative

change or real difference.72

This is a serious deficiency, because it means that under a model

of representation it is not possible fully to pursue and realize

change, even when a disciplinary power is brought into view.

And it has implications for art and philosophy both, since under

a model of representation they are robbed of their powers to

break with doxa and create the new.

In order to describe the fundamental category of knowl-

edge that underlies any epistemology, Gilles Deleuze coins

the phrase image of thought. For Deleuze, an image of

thought does not refer to an actual image that could be seen

with our eyes or imagined as though seen with our eyes. Neither

does it to refer to the notion that we perceive our thoughts as

images. Nor does it refer to what the surrealists produced as they

strove for material images of our unconscious thoughts. Rather,

the phrase refers to the implicit invisible presuppositions about

thinking that make thought possible: It is in terms of this image,

he writes, that everybody knows and is presumed to know what

it means to think.73

The dominant or dogmatic image of thought that charac-

terizes our philosophical tradition is representational. It is based

on certitude: here, thought has an affinity with the true; it

formally possesses the true and materially wants the true.74

Certitude has limitations. By feigning objectivity, the represen-

tational image of thought objectifies. It also censors the impro-

visory and exploratory, and it ultimately limits what is knowable.

According to Deleuze, creative arts such as philosophy, litera-

ture, cinema, and even painting and drawing can liberate us

from the Image and its postulates by offering a new space of

possibility, movement, and becoming.75 Deleuze proclaims that

the new image of thought works by writers such as Nietzsche and

Proust make possible calls forth forces in thought which are not

the forces of recognition but the powers of a completely othermodel, from an unrecognised and unrecognizable terra

incognita.76

What makes any new image of thought so powerful is that,

much like Foucaults idea of the heterotopia, it exists in a state of

pure potentiality, for once it has coalesced into an order, once it

ceases to be a disorder, it produces a new homogeneity. The

perspectival grid in Goodwins drawing, and genre, syntax, and

grammar in Carsons poem represent orders. To set up a new

image of thought, Deleuze offers, one seeks:

a thinking that no longer opposes itself as from the outsideto the unthinkable or the unthought, but which would lodge

the unthinkable, the unthought within itself as thought, and

which would be in an essential relationship to it (desire is what

remains always unthought at the heart of thought); a thinking

that would of itself be in relation to the obscure, and which by

rights would be traversed by a sort of fissure, without which

thought could no longer operate. The fissure cannot be filled

in, because it is the highest object of thought.77

As an image of torture, Betty Goodwins drawing lodges unthink-

able human violence. But rather than merely oppose the atrocity

of a human subject made into an object, Goodwin draws these

issues in through the motif of the grid that surrounds and pene-

trates the seated figure, and then disrupts them through the

delicate torsion that disrupts the coordinates of the picture

space and the restrictions of representations certitude. This, I

argue, powerfully exposes and erodes both the foundations of an

entrenched system of thinking and the representational practices

that accompany this epistemology. Even more powerfully, on the

surface of Goodwins drawing erupts a fissure the enigmatic

red angle in which lodges the unthinkable, and this is the very

element that, because of its obscurity, permits a new mode of

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thought that reaches to but does not ever attain and contain, that

draws out, but does not ever fill in. The instability of the order of

image thus offers an opening into the central problems of philo-

sophy and their relationship to human subjects.

If Carsons ekphrasis were to undertake as its task the

re-presentation of some aspects of the visual image that is its

subject matter, and strive to make these aspects recognizable

in some way, it would objectify the image, assert its distance

from it, and make it speak. It would treat the image as

though it were something that could be reached, and

known rather than reached to and drawn out. Instead, Carson

responded to Goodwins drawing by refusing to treat it as a

representational image, and by refusing actually to represent

or contain it. Her poetic approach to the drawing is in the

spirit of drawing: exploratory, experimental, and, like her

grammatical form, conditional. Yet her poetic approach to

the drawing provides an image that is not an image as one

would see with ones eyes or even imagine. Through its

many formal strategies of hesitation, the poem protects the

drawing from merely replicating the dominant epistemology,

and from Carsons own practices of interrogation. Instead, it

enters into a relationship of reciprocity with the drawing to

offer a new image of thought, an image of that which cannot

be pictured, which it presents as gifts. In so doing, Carsons

poem generates a state of disorder that is vital, offers infinite

possibilities for the generation of nourishing relationships

based on reciprocity rather than domination. Deleuze

writes: We live with a particular image of thought, that is

to say, before we begin to think, we have a vague idea of

what it means to think, its means and ends. And then

someone comes along and proposes another idea, a whole

other image.78 And we feel, as Foucault did upon reading

Borgess encyclopedia, the marvel of the stark impossibility

of thinking that and the restoration of a sense of what the

powers of the arts can be.79

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Jonathan Rollins, Sarah Henstra, and

Victor Cirone for their engagement with the project along its

way.

NOTES

1 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1995), 147.

2 Will Aitken, The Art of Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson, The Paris Review

46 (Fall 2004): 190226, here p. 203.

3 Carolyn Forch, The Country Between Us (New York: Harper and Row,1981); Betty Goodwin, Betty Goodwin in Conversation with France

Morin, in Betty Goodwin: Steel Notes, ed. France Morin (Ottawa: National

Gallery of Canada, 1989), 108116, here 115.

4 Anne Carson, Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin, in

Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 96101.

This work was published in an earlier version under the title Betty Goodwin

Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988), Art Forum 38, no.1 (September 1999):

15657.

5 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97. For a discussion of the notions of

representation as likeness or resemblance, see Michel Foucault, The Order of

Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970);

Gilles Deleuze,Difference and Repetition; Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror

of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

6 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; Essays in Critical and Clinical

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Desert Islands and

Other Texts, 19531974 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

7 Gilles Deleuze, Difference, 147.

8 These images are all reproduced in Betty Goodwin, Steel Notes, Betty

Goodwin, ed. France Morin.

9 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38.

10 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1983), 92.

11 Susan L. Stoops, The Contemporary Drawing: Existence, Passage and the Dream,

exhibition catalog (Waltham,MA, Rose Art Gallery, Brandeis University, 17

March28 April 1991), 4.

12 Lyle Massey, Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone

Awry, Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1997): 114889, here p. 1148. See also

Hubert Damisch, who suggests that the use of fixed perspective in lgeclassique could be taken as an indicator of certain scientific and philosophical

positions: In this sense (and in this sense only), the cogito can be regarded as

the translation, itself in accordance with the Cartesian ideal of world mas-

tery, of a theme or methodical structure that recurs in all realms of knowl-

edge and that lends itself to all manner of translations (Hubert Damisch,The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge,MA:MIT Press, 2000), 48). In this article,

I am guilty of a gesture, echoed in the works of Heidegger and Deleuze,

Martin Jay, and Erwin Panofsky, among many other writers, of drawing a

relatively uncomplicated line between Greek thought, Cartesianism, and

modern scientific rationality. I believe this thread is drawn in Goodwins

work and Carsons as well, so to complicate the history of Western philoso-

phy would not advance an understanding of the poem or drawing I am

treating here.

13 SeeMartin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century

French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 323, and

Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (San

Francisco: Bay Press, 1988), 323. Hubert Damisch refers here to Erwin

Panofskys and Ernst Cassirers work when he describes perspective as a

regulating structure. He then in fact proceeds to debunk this conception. See

Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge,MA:MIT Press, 2000),

25. Also see my previous note.

14 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books,

1997), 67. Panofsky writes, thus the history of perspective may be under-

stood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense

of the real and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for

control. Perspective is as much a consolidation and systematization of theexternal world, as an extension of the domain of the self. [T]he claim ofthe object (to use a modern term) confronts the ambition of the subject. The

object intends to remain distanced from the spectator (precisely as something

objective). Ibid., 6768.15 I do not have the space to elaborate on the connections between

Cartesianism and the animalhuman split used to justify another sort of

violence but this is another topic woven through the poem. In 19841985,

Betty Goodwin developed a series of images titled So Certain I Was, I Was

a Horse which feature a bent over figure including one with a leash-like

cord around his neck. The title of the series is an allusion to epistemologies

based on certainty and links these with degradation. In Betty Goodwin,

Carson refers to Goodwins series tangentially when she substitutes the

poems her for horse: If you lead her to water. Continuing the

reference to the construction of animality as an extension of the subject

object split, the poem refers to the scientist Miroslav (Holub)s position that

experimental animals should not be too smart, and then offers other

rationalizations: If the horses were exhausted / If they dont feel pain the


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way we do; Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99100. For a very concise

discussion of the relationship between vivisection and Cartesian thought, see

John Rodman, The Dolphin Papers, North American Review 259, no. 1

(Spring, 1974): 1226.

16 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard

Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 17.

17 Carson has persistently used her creative and scholarly works to

investigate the relation between verbal and visual media. In Autobiography of

Red (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), for example, she constructs verbal

photographs that attempt to distill into words photographys ability to play

with perceptual relationships (65) in order to find a way of telling about

photographys ways of seeing. See E. L.McCallum, Toward a Photography

of Love: The Tain of the Photograph in Anne Carsons Autobiography of

Red, Postmodern Culture (PMC) 17, no. 3 (2007): 8, available online at http://

pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.507/17.3mccallum.txt. In Men in the

Off Hours (New York: Vintage, 2001), Carson offers ekphrases of both real

and imagined paintings, operas, and films. Jeff Hamilton argues that in

poems such as Life of Towns in Plainwater: Essays and Poetry (Toronto:

Vintage Canada, 1995), Carson constructs a verse equivalent to the vanish-

ing point in painting as she probes the relationships between three inter-

related conceptions of the line: the verse line, the painterly or writerly trace,

and the perspectival grid. Jeff Hamilton, This Cold Hectic Dawn and I,

Denver Quarterly 32, no. 12 (SummerFall 1997): 116.

18 Phoebe Pettingell, Shards of Meaning, review of Decreation: Poetry,

Essays, Opera by Anne Carson, The New Leader 88, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober

2005): 3638, here p. 37, emphasis added

19 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97 (emphasis added).

20 Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics and Politics

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 29.

21 For example, in Eros the Bittersweet, Carson retrieves the ancient notion of

eros (). Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey ArchivePress, 1998). In Economy of the Unlost (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1999) she draws from xenia (), logos (), and eikon ().22 Edward Peters, Torture: Expanded Edition (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

23 It is possible to trace the effects of the practice and metaphor of basanos

across time. In ancient Greece, writers ranging from Pindar (Pythian) to

Aristotle (Rhetoric) to Plato (Laches) refer to basanos bymeans such as whipping,

the rack, being buried under rocks, and even, in Aristophaness The Frogs,

putting vinegar under the nose. For connections between torture and truth

more broadly see Edward Peters, Torture, which examines tortures emer-

gence in Roman law through to today. Stephen Eisenman also gives a

thorough summary of the early articulations of basanos in Greek and Roman

culture in The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). The

endurance of the connection between torture, truth, and interrogation can

be traced forward from the Greeks to the Romans to early modern Europe.

See Jennifer A. Glancy, who offers an analysis of Pilates scourge of Jesus in

the Fourth Gospel in relation to Roman judicial interrogation (Torture:

Flesh, Truth, and the Fourth Gospel, Biblical Interpretation 13, no. 2 (2005):

10736). Lucy Grieg examines torture in hagiographic texts in relation to the

Roman quaestio per tormenta (interrogation by torture). Lucy Grieg, Torture

and Truth in Late Antique Martyrology, Early Medieval Europe 11, no. 4

(2002): 32136. For a discussion of early modern French concepts of truth as

being lodged in the body, requiring extraction just as tears and teeth are

drawn out, see also Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body

in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 118. Jody

Enders brilliantly analyzes the relationship between torture, rhetoric, and

spectacle. Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory and

Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). Elizabeth Hanson

argues that in the English discursive economy about torture the body gave

truth a basis in material reality susceptible to discovery, while through pain

made it inaccessible to all but the sufferer. Elizabeth Hanson, Torture and

Truth in Renaissance England, Representations 34 (1991): 5384, here, p. 56.

24 Page duBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York:

Routledge, 1991), 29. DuBois discusses Martin Heidegger, whose formula-

tion of aletheia has to a large extent defined current usage of the term. While

she searches for rhetorical traces of basanos in his language, noting for

example his description of truth as the constant wresting extortion of the

unhidden, it is more effective to note that there are two competing notions

of aleth ia in Greek thought (duBois, Torture, 132). Marcel Detienne describesthe earlier notion of aleth ia as mythical while the later conception of truthis positivist and abstract. The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (New York:

Zone Books, 1999). Heidegger observes this evolution within which an ear-

lier notion of aleth ia as an opening, or unconcealedness, becomes supplantedby a notion of correctness and certainty that hails from Plato and runs

through Descartes and dominates our epistemology today. Linking this to

both the subjectobject split and to representation, Heidegger writes:

Homoisis [likeness] has since become adaequatio [correctness] and thenagreement, and since Descartes, the relation between soul and beings has

become the subjectobject relation, mediated by a representation, the

degenerate descendant of Platos idea. Truth becomes correctness, and its

elbow-room [Spielraum], the open, is neglected. See Michael Inwood, A

Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 14.

25 Page duBois, Torture, 6.

26 Anne Carson Seated Figure, 101 (emphases added). The reference to

allure is to Husserl, who in the Analyses defines affection as the allure given

to consciousness, the particular pull that an object given to consciousness

exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns toward it

attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition.

Allure is thus that which draws the subject to the object, holding sway until

the ego is attentive. See Edmund Husserl, Analyses concerning Passive and Active

Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock

(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 196.

27 These three writers are known not only for the thoughts expressed in

their writings but also for their drawings. Antonin Artaud filled notebooks with

disturbing distorted figures surrounded and traversed by poems, rants, and

treatises. Nabokov illustrated books for his family with intricate drawings of

butterflies. Finally, one of the apocryphal stories about Blaise Pascal pictures

him as a child, drawing geometric figures on the floor of his home with

charcoal. These writers thus provide a model of a writing space that is open to

the traces of drawing, and of a drawing space open to the traces of writing.

28 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 99 101.

29 Ruth Webb offers a penetrating history of the changes in the use of the

term from ancient to contemporary times. One important contribution of

this article is that Webb reminds us that earlier understandings of ekphrasis

had little to do with the definition of ekphrasis that has the most currency

today, namely as the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art

or as a verbal representation of a visual representation. See Ruth Webb,

Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre,Word & Image

15, no. 1 (JanuaryMarch 1999): 718. For works that consolidated this

current meaning of ekphrasis see also Leo Spitzer, The Ode on a Grecian

Urn, or content vs. metagrammar, in Essays on English and American Literature

(Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962), 6797; and James A.

Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.)

30 John Hollander, The Gazers Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Gottfried Ephraim Lessing,

Laocoon: An Essay Upon The Limits of Painting and Poetry (Mineola, NY: Dover

Publications, 2005); Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick,

NJ: Rutgers University Press 1991); Norman Bryson, Intertextuality and

Visual Poetics, Style 22, no. 2 (June 1988): 18393. It is pertinent to the

poems thematic treatment of torture via a reworking of the terms of

wordimage relationships that Lessings Laocoon possibly the most

important articulation of the differences between the verbal and visual arts

refers to a sculpture that represents a scene of excruciating torment and

agony. Lessing asks why the sculptor did not depict his figure screaming, and

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responds that transitory actions have no place in static and permanent

modes of representation.

31 For a summary of paragonal models, see Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays

on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994);

and James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words. For a summary of the tradition of

sister-arts see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism

and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1958); and Richard Wendorf, Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to

Tennyson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For works that

extend beyond the sister-arts see Anne Keefe, The Ecstatic Embrace of

Verbal and Visual: Twenty-first Century Lyric Beyond the Ekphrastic

Paragone, Word & Image 27, no. 2 (June 2011): 13547; and Ayala Amir,

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum: Ekphrasis and Empathy in Three Encounters

between a Text and a Picture, Word & Image 25, no. 3 (JulySeptember

2009): 23242.

32 W. J. T.Mitchell, Picture Theory, 157. Mitchell draws attention to how the

social structure of ekphrasis is grounded in our ambivalence about other

people, regarded as subjects and objects in a field of verbal and visual

representation (Mitchell, Picture Theory, 163). Page duBois echoes this view:

If ekphrastic texts are about learning to see, to read visual texts, they also

concern domination and power, the privileging of some readers over others,

and our own tendencies to identify with elite and privileged readers in the

past, those educated and cultured few whom we see as like ourselves (Page

duBois, Reading the Writing on the Wall, Classical Philology 102, no. 1,

Special Issue on Ekphrasis (January 2007): 4556, here p. 46).

33 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du rel, 2002), 18.34 Not only does the poem not resemble ekphrasis defined in terms of its

subject matter the representation of an art object it does not resemble

ekphrasis in its early use of the term, as what RuthWebb describes as a form

of vivid evocation that may have as its subject-matter anything. Whatdistinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact on the

minds eye of the listener whomust, in Theons words, be almost made to see

the subject (Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, 13).

35 Jacques Derrida, The Spatial Arts: An Interview with Jacques

Derrida by Peter Brunette and David Wills, in Deconstruction and the Visual

Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, ed. Peter Brunette and David Wills (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993): 1232, here p. 13.

36 SeeMurrayKrieger, The Ekphrastic Principle and the StillMoment of

Poetry, or Laokoon Revisited, in The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967) and Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural

Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

37 In Seated Figure, Carson is working in the spirit of philosophers such as

Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Hubert Damisch, who challenge the connection

philosophy has made between the perspectival apparatus and perception.

Damisch writes that the problem with these ideas is how to distinguish that

which is perceived from that which is represented. Must descriptionnecessarily resort to mean that are those of representation, borrowing its

forms, its metaphors? (Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 34).

38 Gary Shapiro, The Absent Image: Ekphrasis and the Infinite Relation

of Translation, Journal of Visual Culture 6, n. 1 (2007): 1324, here p. 21.

39 A connection can be made between Goodwins interest in perspective

and Carsons interest in the sentence: The formal apparatus put in place by

the perspective paradigm is equivalent to that of a sentence, in that it assigns

the subject a place within a previously established network that gives it

meaning, while at the same time opening up the possibility of something like

a statement in painting (Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective 446).

40 In interview, Carson speaks about the way a poem break leads into a

thought that cant ever be apprehended, leaving the space where a

thought would be, but which you cant get hold of (Will Aitken, The Art of

Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson p. 214).

41 J. L. Mackie, Truth, Probability and Paradox: Studies in Philosophical Logic

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 64.

42 Ibid., 64.

43 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 7.

44 Ibid., 98, 99.

45 Ibid., 100.

46 Ibid., 101.

47 Ibid., 101.

48 It is possible that Carson is also thinking about Aristotles view about

knowledge in which the mind (nous) becomes one with the object of thought

rather than depicting it. See Charles Taylor, Overcoming Epistemology,

in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

49 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 96101, here 99.

50 Cited in Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive

Press, 1998), 70. Betty Goodwin also uses the metaphor of reaching when she

speaks about subsequent works in her series reaching more into the essence

of her earlier drawings. See Betty Goodwin, Betty Goodwin: Steel Notes, 113.

51 See Dennis Schmidt, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer

on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), chapter

3, for a discussion of Gadamers contribution to an understanding of art as a

continuation of movement and play as opposed to as an object of cognition.

52 See Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet. Here, Carson links the edge to

desire (3031), figures of speech like puns and paradox (35), the self (35), and

most importantly language itself. She argues that edges are what distinguish

oral from written words, as writing gives each word its own visible boundary

while heard words have varying edges. See also Anne Carson, Chez

LOxymoron,Grand Street 7, no. 4 Summer 1988): 6874. Here Carson writes:

Once I went to South America to look at the edges of shadows. It becamemy endeavour to stand on the very edge of shadow. I failed. There isshadow and there is no shadow and you can see the difference between them

you can stare at it, measure it, describe it, you can show it in a mirror, but

to stand on that edge no you cant do it. The edge where shadow andno shadow come together and lie side by side is a point without space. A

contradiction without terms. Anne Carson, Chez lOxymoron, 168. Another

place where the idea of an edge occurs is in pre-Socratic thinking. Detienne

juxtaposes the rationalist instrumentalizing notion of al theia that duBoisdescribes with an earlier conception of truth in which al theia borders on l the(oblivion or forgetting): Thus, Aletheia (+) does not stand on one side and

Lethe () on the other. Rather, an intermediate zone develops between the

poles, in which Aletheia approaches Lethe and vice versa. Negativity is not

isolated from Being. It borders the truth and forms its inseparable shadow.

The two antithetical powers are thus not contradictory but tend toward each

other. The positive tends toward the negative, which, in a way, denies it but

cannot maintain itself in its absence (Detienne, Masters, 82).

53 Hubert Damisch suggests that perspective involves a passing from the

point of view of the subject to that of the eye via the technique of the vanishing

point, and states that this passing is analogous to linguistic usages that allow us

to change person in a sentence, permitting us to pass from I to you or he,

and from the subject of a statement to that of the speaker (Hubert Damisch,

The Origin of Perspective, 51).

54 Betty Goodwin, A Bloodstream of Images: An Interview with Betty

Goodwin, interview by Robert Enright, Border Crossings 14, no. 4 (Fall 1995):

4253, here p. 48.

55 Anne Carson, Seated Figure, 97. The term pull also likely connects to

the notion of allure she presents later in the poem via Husserl. See my note

27 above.

56 In an essay on Aristotles Poetics, Anne Carson refers to the use of the

second person in Sappho: we are her. The second person singular verbs of

the poem locate us within some woman by calling her you Anne Carson,

Just for the Thrill: Sycophantizing Aristotles Poetics, Arion: A Journal of

Humanities and the Classics 1, no. 1 (Dec 2001): 14254, here 147.


58 Martin Heidegger, The Origin, 52.


60 Ibid., 101.

61 Carson seems to bemaking the connection between the abjectness of the

tortured and the senile via Elaine Scarry, inThe Body in Pain, after comparing

torture to pain inflicted in religious contexts, who explicitly distinguishes


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torture from the pain of aging, where the absence of the world from oneself

can be understood as an inversion of the eventual but unexperiencable

absence of oneself from the world, 34.


63 Ibid., 98, 99. Elsewhere, Carson offers an extensive theorization of the

gift. In Economy of the Unlost, Carson compares two modes of exchange:

commodification and gift-giving. Commodity form, she says, fragments

and dehumanizes human being, 19. A gift, in contrast, is an act of com-

munication that offers an extension of the interior of the giver, both in space

and in time, into the interior of the receiver, 18. A gift has both economic

and spiritual content, is personal and reciprocal, and depends on a rela-

tionship that endures over time, 12. To give thoughts, and specifically to

give thoughts as they are articulated in the works of writers, is to activate an

understanding of language as an intimate force.

64 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York:

Charles Scribners Sons, 1958), 43.

65 Roland Barthes, FromWork to Text, in Image Music Text, trans.

Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15564, here p. 164.

Jacqueline Plante has written an essay linking the idea of Utopia to Gilles

Deleuzes notion of becoming, arguing that Carsons Autobiography of Red is

utopian in order to extend the subversive activity of literature. See

Jacqueline Plante, In the Spirit of Process: A Braiding Together of New

Utopianism, Gilles Deleuze, and AnneCarson, inThe Influence of Imagination:

Essays on Science Fiction and Fantasy as Agents of Social Change, ed. Lee Easton and

Randy Schroeder ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2008), 17482. Below, I

too connect Carson to Deleuzes thought in relation to arts subversive

activity, but focus on what Deleuze says about the image as he describes how

literature can move us away from representationalism and correspondence

models of truth.

66 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

(New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xv. The Borges passage with which

Foucault opens his book is well known, but worth citing again: This passage

quotes a certain Chinese encyclopedia in which it is written that animals

are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d)

sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present

classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-

hair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a

long way off look like flies.

67 Ibid., xviii.

68 Ibid., xvii.

69 Ibid., 54.

70 Amy Hertzog, Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze,

Bergson, and the Question of Cinema, In[ ] Visible Culture: An Electronic

Journal of Visual Studies 3 (2000), http://www.rochester.edu/

in_visible_culture/issue3/herzog.htm (accessed July 25, 2011).


72 Ils Hugens, Deleuze and Cinema: Moving Images and Movements

of Thought, Image and Narrative 18 (2007), http://www.

imageandnarrative.be/thinking_pictures/huygens.htm (accessed

December 15, 2012). Hugens is echoing Michel Foucault, who in the The

Order of Things writes, by positing resemblance as the link between signs

and what they indicate sixteenth-century knowledge condemneditself to never knowing anything but the same thing. Michel Foucault,

The Order of Things, 30.

73 Gilles Deleuze, Difference, 131.

74 Ibid., 131.

75 Ibid., 132.

76 Ibid., 136.

77 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 19531974 (Los Angeles:

Semiotext(e): 2004), 92.

78 Ibid., 139.

79 Michel Foucault, Order, xv.

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Documents

Drawing Out a New Image of Thought: Anne Carson's Radical Ekphrasis