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“Acts of Exhaustion”: Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés read by Rancière and Kittler

Christopher Thomas Hoffman

Thesis Advisor: Christopher Bush

May 1st, 2014

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Stéphane Mallarmé, and in particular his 1897 poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira

le Hasard, have become one of the touch points of the French intellectual tradition. Across the

arts and letters, Mallarmé has incited fresh interpretations more than a century after his death.

Since his death, he has been recognized as a precursor of twentieth-century thought, influencing

people as diverse as the Modernist painters, composers John Cage and Pierre Boulez, and, of

particular interest to us, French philosophers in the 1960s like Jacques Derrida and Julia

Kristeva. The latter group saw in Mallarmé a pioneering effort in exploring, poetically, the

profound ways language shapes human experience. More recently, two other theorists, Jacques

Rancière and Friedrich Kittler, have elaborated their own theories in aesthetics and media studies

which draw and expand upon that French philosophical tradition. Read through Mallarmé’s

Coup de dés project, Rancière and Kittler align in a common problematic that asks how media,

sensory, and other categories rearrange our experiences.

Rancière and Kittler, by the looks of it, make an odd couple. Rancière has made a name

for himself as a political philosopher advocating for a renewed commitment to equality, while

Kittler’s forays into technological history have been interpreted as a radically media-oriented

outlook disavowing politics. Together, though, they attend to theories of how material practices

change the grounds of human action, and the moments of emergence of these changes. First, we

will consider Mallarmé, and particularly his poem Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard, a

lightning rod for creative inquiry, before putting it in conversation with Rancière and Kittler’s

principle responses. Having considered each in their turn, we will return to some of Mallarmé’s

prose writings as a neglected predecessor to the work launched by his inheritors. Together, these

three sources bring to light another, future-oriented facet of Mallarmé’s work.

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Mallarmé

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) occupies a key position in poetic history. Along with

fellow French poet Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, he is counted among the Symbolist

movement. Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century current in poetry that drew attention to

language’s hold on human life, despite its fantastic, liquid expression. Mallarmé’s corpus is slim:

he published four short volumes in the 1870s, including a translation of Poe’s The Raven, one in

the 1880s and two in the 1890s.1 However fitting the description “Symbolist” may be to

Mallarmé, his poetry offers an imaginative vocabulary and a difficult syntax, often readable in

many configurations in a single strophe. Although almost unknown during his lifetime, he hosted

a particularly influential salon in Paris during his later years, attended by writers like Rainer

Maria Rilke, William Butler Yeats, and Paul Valéry. These writers would come to play key roles

in the heady artistic moment following the First World War, though Mallarmé’s influence was

not confined to the literary arts. While Mallarmé only ballooned in popularity after his death, his

poetic experimentation prefigured how artistic modernism, in many domains, broke with its past

forms, and all the consequences (political, social, and technological) that accompanied it. Hence,

when Francophone writers started thinking about what defines modern life, artistic or otherwise,

many fixated on Mallarmé, whose work predated the most well-known icons of the twentieth

century like Salvador Dalí, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Proust, but undoubtedly left its mark on its

culture. Published in 1897 but unearthed only after the war by Paul Valéry, Un Coup de dés is

Mallarmé’s last and most archetypically modern work.

Published in the same year in the magazine Cosmopolis, the poem consists of twenty-one

pages divided into two-page panels, prefaced by a short, characteristically circular note: “I would

                                                                                                                         1  Gordon  Millan,  A  Throw  of  the  Dice:  The  Life  of  Stéphane  Mallarmé  (New  York:  Farrar  Strauss  Giroux,  1994).      

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like no one to read this note, or rather, having traversed it, they forgot it altogether…”2

Mallarmé’s poem follows an era of experimentation with poetry’s form, departing from the six-

foot alexandrine form that had characterized so much of earlier French poetry. His text “crise de

vers” published in the Divagations3 signaled his interest in a radically reimagined form of poetry,

one modeled, cryptically, on the musical form (a preoccupation signaled in the preface to coup,

which we will address in this essay’s coda). Coup’s difficulty follows from its polydirectional

verse form, its diction, and, least common of all, its representative typography. Mallarmé seeks

to tell a story with his poetry, not just semantically, with words, but pictorially: for example, one

panel is arranged to form a tall ship listing to the left, another, a falling feather. Representative

typography is this way of using blocks of lines on a page as its own image, regardless of the

words which compose it. While uncommon for most Western European poets and their ilk, this

bewildering form recalls a long tradition in Jewish and Islamic arts called micrography.

Moreover, this technique would be taken up by successive writers, such as Guillaume

Apollinaire in his Calligrammes.

Mallarmé throws the reading process itself into question, a move characteristic of artistic

modernity and a preoccupation of the theorists who have written about it. Mallarmé’s

differentiates lines and words by typeface, size, italicization, capitalizing, and their place on the

page. Each line is split dramatically across each two-page panel, and the words are scattered (or

“constellated”) across the page. Because of these gaps Mallarmé challenges, more deeply even

                                                                                                                         2  Stéphane  Mallarmé,  “Un  Coup  de  dés  jamais  n’abolira  le  hasard,”  available  online  in  various  editions  at  monoskop.org.  http://monoskop.org/log/?p=10519.  Accessed  3  April  2014.  Here  the  editions  consulted  are  the  first  French  1897  edition,  and  the  English  edition,  “A  Dice  Throw  at  any  time  will  never  abolish  chance”  in  Stéphane  Mallarmé,  Collected  Poems  and  Verses  trans.  E.  H.  and  A.  M.  Blackmore  (Oxford:  Oxford  University  Press,  2006).  I  have  translated  all  quotes  in  English  from  the  preface.  3  Stéphane  Mallarmé,  “Crisis  of  Verse,”  in  Divagations,  trans.  Barbara  Johnson  (Cambridge:  Harvard  University  Press,  2007),  pp.  201-­‐211.    

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than his earlier works, the assumption of a linear reading format. Instead of continuous lines on a

page, the reader confronts a collection of scattered words, which they must put back together.

The reading he demands, then, travels by different rhythms, speeds, and vectors across the page,

each of which play out differently with every reading. While the text is readable in a “linear,”

left-to-right and top-to-bottom format, the breaks and slides between words and lines do not let

this linearity go unobserved. The reader might take the cue from the poem’s evocation of a

“CONSTELLATION…on some vacant and higher surface,”4 to name just what Mallarmé has

done with the read surface of the poem. Such a constellation offers any number of directions that

might be taken through the text, with all the changes in poetic expression that entails. Because

readers must form their own path through the text, and reflect, too, on their own decision-

making, it marks a new arrangement of what it meant to read a poem.

Mallarmé did not only transform the process of reading. His work attests to a sculptural

attention to the phonetic, semantic, and rhythmical expressions that accompany his experiments

with language. For instance, his Sonnet en –yx puts into question its own phonetic reading, by

invoking in the first line ses purs ongles, “his/her pure nails,” or, with a little phonetic

reinterpretation, “her pure sounds [or angles].”5 But Mallarmé did not only have an ear for

ambiguities. Few lines have been quoted more often than Mallarmé’s statement that “[when] I

say: a flower! And, out of the oblivion into which my voice consigns any real shape…there rises,

harmoniously and gently, the ideal flower itself, the one that is absent from all earthly

bouquets.”6 This confirms Mallarmé’s concern for the logic which links the material world and

linguistic expression. Even if the said bouquet does not appear ex nihilo in Mallarmé’s hands, his

                                                                                                                         4  Mallarmé,  “A  Dice  throw  at  any  time  never  will  abolish  chance,”  pp.  181.  5  Stéphane  Mallarmé,  “Ses  purs  ongles  très  haut  dédiant  leur  onyx,”  online  at  Wikisource.  http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%AB_Ses_purs_ongles_tr%E8s_haut_d%E9diant_leur_onyx_%BB.  Accessed  3  April  2014.    6  “Biography  of  Stéphane  Mallarmé  at  poetryfoundation.org/bio/stephane-­‐mallarme.  Accessed  3  April  2014.  

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speech act has a sensory effect with material consequences. The bridge between language, sound,

and the worlds they express, remain one of Mallarmé’s first concerns. Coup is one of his most

imaginative efforts at building such a world, from the exotic tense used in the verbs “EXISTÂT-

IL…COMMENÇAT-IL ET CESSÂT-IL,” to the innumerable other flourishes the poem makes

use of.7 Mallarmé neglects none of the expressive possibilities involved in language. Where late

works like the sonnet en -yx scrambled the parts of speech (subject/object/verb) and confused

syntagmatic coherence, coup further intensified this by breaking up line and frame. Lines weave

into each or proceed simultaneously down the facing pages of the panel. And the result is that the

reader reimagines Mallarmé’s poetic world every time they read it, being obliged to put its pieces

together as they like.

One of the most well-known interpretations of Mallarmé today, the one from which

Rancière and Kittler begin, was launched by the writers Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and

Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. This trio, known by the label poststructuralism, constructed readings

of the poet from the perspective of the so-called “linguistic turn,” an attitude concerned with

language’s agency within human society, particularly philosophy. The poststructuralists fixated

on Mallarmé, among other reasons, because he signaled an early example of the reflexivity

characteristic of artistic modernity. Mallarmé lay nestled in the transitional period linking

nineteenth-century art with the twentieth century’s experimentation, with the coup poised

between them. Furthermore, Mallarmé seemed to preface the poststructuralists themselves.

Derrida and company emphasized the autonomy of language and the work over its

bibliographical interpretation. Derrida, in his seminal Dissemination, includes an extended essay

on Mallarmé, thematizing in his work how white space and its spoilage by ink betrayed

Mallarmé’s deep awareness of the workings of Derrida’s project, the “deconstruction of                                                                                                                          7  Mallarmé,  “Un  coup  de  dés…”  pp.  425.      

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metaphysics.”8 As for Roland Barthes, one of his most well-known theses proclaimed the “death

of the author,” and within this formulation Mallarmé articulated the “necessity to substitute

language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner.”9 Mallarmé

proved enormously exciting for this generation of French intellectuals, leading Kristeva to claim

that Mallarmé’s work has been more influential than the world wars. 10

Another group of theorists have offered a second broad category of interpretations in the

years since Derrida, Kristeva, and Barthes did their work. This interpretation, undertaken by

Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Quentin Meillassoux, is united by a metaphysical interest in the

poem, and in particular the themes expressed by its story. Coup’s storyline goes like this: we are

introduced to a tall ship, the Abyss, which threatens to shipwreck in a storm. “The Master”

pauses below decks, considering whether to throw (“emit”) his dice. The poetic narrator

contemplates the significance of such a throw, immobilized by his certainty that it is futile. These

theorists, who we will refer to as Badiouan for their debt to that philosopher, have commented on

imagistic elements like the siren, the “number that cannot be another,”11 the Abyss, the Master

and her ancient calculus, and indeed the “throw of the dice” that names the poem. These

concepts, and the general tone of Mallarmé’s late work, have led them into deep-hermeneutical

speculation on the poetics of the subject of art. For instance, one commentator explains the

difference between Zizek and Badiou’s approach to the poet as “substraction” and “purification”

                                                                                                                         8  See  Jacques  Derrida,  “The  Double  Session,”  in  Dissemination  (Chicago:  University  of  Chicago,  1981),  pp.  173-­‐285.  9  Roland  Barthes,  Image,  Music,  Text,  trans.  and  ed.  Stephen  Heath  (London:  Fontana  Press,  1977),  pp.  143.  10  Cited  in  Robert  Greer  Cohn,  “Mallarmé’s  Wake”  in  Mallarmé  in  the  Twentieth  Century,  ed.  Robert  Greer  Cohn  (London:  Associated  University  Press,  1998),  pp  277.  11  Meillassoux’s  The  Number  and  the  Siren,  trans.  Robin  Mackay  (New  York:  Sequence  Press,  2012)  purports  to  decrypt  the  entire  poem  through  a  sort  of  numerology.  Badiou  for  his  part  addresses  Mallarmé  referentially  throughout  Being  and  Event,  trans.  Oliver  Feltham  (London  ?  :  Bloomsbury  Academic,  2007),  while  Zizek  does  the  same  in  The  Fragile  Absolute:  Or,  Why  is  the  Christian  Legacy  Worth  Fighting  For?  (London:  Verso,  2009).    

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of the subject’s relation to the art object.12 This breed of heroic exegesis may be one of the

hallmarks of theory, and the inheritance of the long tradition of French philosophers who left

behind their own distinctive reading of the poet. Such interpretations certainly excite

commentators and contribute to Mallarmé’s image as a thoroughly philosophical poet, but

necessarily they neglect other elements of Un coup de dés. Rancière and Kittler, in contrast offer

two consonant interpretations focused on the expressive force of the poem, diverging from both

the interpretations of the poststructuralists and the Badiouans.

Beyond their theoretical resonance, what unites Rancière and Kittler? Their first

published works come after the advent of the above poststructuralist writers, but owe most to

Michel Foucault, who shares (however uneasily) that label. But both of our writers respond to

concerns quite irreducible to those motivating the poststructuralist and Badiouan readings of

Mallarmé. Furthermore, they follow lines of inquiry that mark a break from their predecessors:—

art and aesthetics for Rancière and media and technology for Kittler. Indeed, a transgressive face

shows itself in their writing: Rancière in tearing up the formalistic vision of artistic modernity

(which we will shortly consider), and Kittler in rebuking the hermeneutical outlook of German

literature departments and offering a materialist corrective to Foucault in his Gramophone, Film,

Typewriter.13 Rancière’s recent turn towards art, culminating in 2011’s Aisthesis,14 centers the

political and social stakes of what is given and identified as art, while Kittler’s media-discursive

                                                                                                                         12See  Daniel  Hourigan,  “Badiou  and  Zizek  on  Mallarmé:  The  Critique  of  Object-­‐Art,”  in  Minerva  –  An  Internet  Journal  of  Philosophy  16  (2012),  pp.  25-­‐35.  Available  at  http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie/vol16/Zizek.pdf.  Accessed  3  April  2014.  Also  online  are  commentaries  in  French  by  Pierre  Macherey,  “Le  Mallarmé  d’Alain  Badiou,”  at  http://stl.recherche.univ-­‐lille3.fr/sitespersonnels/macherey/machereybiblio86.html,  and  another  by  Elie  During,    “How  Much  Truth  Can  Art  Bear?  On  Badiou’s  ‘Inaesthetics’,”  at  http://www.ciepfc.fr/spip.php?article135.  Both  accessed  3  April  2014.    13  See  Geoffrey  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Translators’  Introduction:  Friedrich  Kittler  and  Media  Discourse  Analysis,”  in  Fredrick  A.  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter  trans.  Geoffrey  Winthrop-­‐Young  and  Michael  Wutz  (Stanford:  Stanford  University  Press,  1999).    14  Jacques  Rancière,  Aisthesis  :  Scènes  de  la  régime  esthétique  de  l’art  (Paris:  Éditions  Galilée,  2011),  translated  as  Aisthesis:  Scenes  from  the  Aesthetic  Regime  of  Art  trans.  Zakir  Paul  (London:  Verson,  2013)  

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analysis centers the material correlates of sensible experience.15 While Rancière claims a

humanist inheritance, and Kittler an antihumanist one, the present work will show how their own

work complements each other, with Mallarmé’s coup as a point of affinity. Rancière, for his part,

has returned again and again, perhaps more than with other writers, to Mallarmé, indeed writing

a book addressing the poet. I argue that Rancière’s work has been thoroughly influenced by the

poet, whose influence can be traced back to Rancière’s 1995 Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren.

Kittler, on the other hand, spares precious few paragraphs for the poet, without sacrificing any

fecundity of thought therein. Rancière’s Mallarmé reverberates vividly throughout his Aisthesis,

but Kittler’s Mallarmé benefits from its relative independence from Kittler’s broader framework.

Our winding trajectory through both of their work points to another facet of Mallarmé’s work.

Rancière

Rancière has engaged with Mallarmé in depth, but especially since he has devoted more

and more of his published work to developing an aesthetic theory. Against histories of art

focused on formal developments and periodization, he recasts artistic modernity as a time united

by what he calls the “aesthetic regime of art.” The aesthetic regime is, instead, the epistemic

condition of a sensible field of which art and politics are two elements. This section will unfold

this theory through Rancière’s most recent and ambitious volume, Aisthesis, before discussing

the outsized influence Mallarmé has exerted on how Rancière’s aesthetic turn has proceeded,

from 1995’s Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren on. Having established Rancière’s theoretical

concerns, Kittler too can enter the conversation.

                                                                                                                         15  See  Geoffrey  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Krautrock,  Heidegger,  Bogeyman:  Kittler  in  the  anglosphere”  (Thesis  Eleven,  107(1),  2011),  pp.  6-­‐20.    

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Rancière’s most exhaustive statements about the means and goals of his aesthetic project

are 2004’s Politics of Aesthetics and 2011’s Aisthesis. The former outlined most of the

theoretical rudiments on which the latter elaborated through certain works of art, staged as a

“scene” uniting the artwork with a commentator. Rancière takes equality as the guiding principle

of his theory, which, in the aesthetic domain, means understanding the meaning of an artwork

not from a preordained category (for instance, transcendence or the sublime) but from the

reactions of its contemporaries.16 Because of this, he rereads Mallarmé as an aesthetic visionary,

but one fundamentally concerned about his time and place. In this sense Mallarmé anticipates the

transformative and collective principles that underlie what Rancière calls aisthesis. While

aisthesis exists only from the modern period, the “representative regime” predates it. Under the

representative regime, the arts were seen as orderly, unchanging methods with corresponding

categories (theater, poetry, music, and so on). Artistic modernity subverts mimesis, or

representation, with its modern double, aisthesis. Aisthesis is defined as the characteristic mode

of the aesthetic regime in which “the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within

ways of doing and making, but is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to

artistic products.” 17 Aisthesis henceforth designates, somewhat tautologically, “the mode of

experience according to which, for two centuries, we perceive very diverse things…as all

belonging to art.”18 Because of Aisthesis, art threatens to irrupt within any domain of sensory

life, disturbing the orderliness that, Rancière reiterates, pose the truly political question: that of

                                                                                                                         16  This  insistence  on  equality  is  the  thread  of  Rancière’s  work  that,  more  than  anything  else,  unites  his  books,  starting  with  his  first  solo-­‐authored  work,  Althusser’s  Lesson,  trans.  Emiliano  Battista  (London,  New  York:  Continuum,  2011).    17  Jacques  Rancière,  Politics  of  Aesthetics:  The  Distribution  of  the  Sensible,  trans.  Gabriel  Rockhill  (London:  Continuum,  2004),  pp.  22.  18Rancière,  Aisthesis:  Scenes  from  the  Aesthetic  Regime  of  Art,  trans.  Zakir  Paul  (London:  Verso,  2013),  pp.  x.    

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nomos, “law,” or “division,” namely, the division of authority among human beings.19 Aisthesis

as faculty and art as object are the exceptional zones within sensory life where our regular modes

of doing business break down, revealing equality and humanity as the principles that unify us.

So, for Rancière, Mallarmé is not principally a depoliticized writer, but one of the pathfinders

who first staked out the aesthetic regime. He seeks the synesthetic confusion that nullifies

sensible divisions.

How did Rancière arrive at such a conception of the sensible? A short consideration of its

etymology can help answer this question. In both French and English, this etymological family

can be traced to the Latin sensus20 which refers both to an affective capacity (a feeling or

sentiment) and a reasonable one (a thought or signification). The French sensible designates in

the passive sense something’s receptiveness to being charged or excited by outside stimulation;

you may be sensible, or sensitive, to light, wine, or cold. The Anglophone reader may first have

difficulty parsing this distinction, because the English “sensible,” while amenable to the

“sensory” aspect of its root, refers first to what is logical or self-evident, not (necessarily)

anything about the senses. Because of its proximity to sens, “sense” or “direction,” the French

sensible take on overtones of logical predication. It unites two of sens’s entries, the “faculty of

judging well,” and the “faculty of knowing in an immediate and intuitive manner (like what the

sensations properly understood may manifest).”21 Rancière’s interest in aisthesis stems from how

it challenges the line leading from the first to the second definition. Because the received logic

about sensible experience reinforces unequal, transcendent rule, recognizing aesthetic experience

without this logical relationship returns the spectator to an immanent, egalitarian point of view.

                                                                                                                         19  See  “Ten  Theses  on  Politics,”  in  Dissensus:  On  Politics  and  Aesthetics,  trans.  Steven  Corcoran  (New  York:  Continuum,  2010).    20  Grand  Robert  Online,  entry  on  “sens”  Accessed  3  April  2014.  I  have  supplied  my  own  translations  from  the  French.  21  Ibid.  Accessed  3  April  2014.    

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Aisthesis bears the marks of Rancière’s earlier, more purely political texts. His short text,

“Ten Theses on Politics,” prefigures his interest in sensory experience by exploring the concept

of the “distribution of the sensible [partage du sensible] whose principle is the absence of void

and of supplement.”22 To distribute the sensible means drawing an unambiguous line between

shared human perceptions and their meaning, and policing the borders of the sensible to

determine “what is visible and what not, what can be heard and what cannot.” Political revolt,

indistinguishable from aesthetic revolt, comes when the excluded announce themselves in a

manner inconceivable within the existing distribution of the sensible, and so “break with all

forms of correspondence between a series of correlated capacities.”23 Revolutionary, democratic

action may be, for Rancière, artistic as much as insurrectionary. The goal toward which it

ceaselessly struggles contradicts the logic of a given distribution of the sensible. This condition,

once accomplished, would be more maddening than fulfilling, but as a political ideal it alone

promises what Rancière calls dissensus: a political community constituted by a shared aesthetic

experience that exposes common sense as politically charged, and breaks with it.24

A deep problem accompanies Rancière’s aisthesis: art, by marking itself as exceptional,

also opens itself up to irrelevance. Rancière defines this as the “rupture of all specific relations

between a sensible form and the expression of an exact meaning; but also the rupture of every

specific link between sensible presence and a public that would be its public, the sensible milieu

that would nourish it, or its natural addressee.”25 Aisthesis’s subversive attitude toward the

sensible is belied by the separation of art from the rest of the sensible field, which provides it its

                                                                                                                         22  Rancière,  “Ten  Theses,”  pp.  36.    23  Rancière,  “Ten  Theses,”  pp.  32.  24  Rancière’s  analysis  invites  an  avenue  of  comparison  with  Gilles  Deleuze  and  Félix  Guattari’s  work  on  the  “collective  assemblage  of  enunciation”  in  Kafka:  Toward  a  Minor  Literature,  trans.  Dana  Polan  (Minneapolis  and  London:  University  of  Minnesota  Press,  1986).  25Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pp.  18.  

13    

autonomy, but also ghettoizes it. Because it transforms the straightforward, “sensible” meaning

of things, it cannot speak the language of a wider public—the criterion for normalized politics.26

Later in this essay, we will point toward the way that Mallarmé anticipated this constitutive

frustration. For all that, one of Rancière’s first concerns lies in insisting that, despite its

problems, art remains a vital part of transformative politics. The goal toward which art moves

seeks to invest all aspects of sensory life with the same political claim Rancière sees in art. For

example, in Walt Whitman’s meticulous descriptions of daily life in his Leaves of Grass,

Rancière sees a “vast redemption of the empirical world” made possible by the “modernist

axiom” that “subtracts [common things] both from the logic of the economic and social order

and from the artificiality of poetic exception.”27 Art, described by Rancière as the uninhibited

play of sensible categories, refuses any simple equivalency between gesture and action that he

associates both with enunciative action and with the distribution of the sensible. While total

aesthetic liberation may never arrive, we should not foreclose art’s benefits.

This sketch of Rancière’s more programmatic statements should color our understanding

of his work on Mallarmé that came many years earlier. The study on Mallarmé dovetails with

Rancière’s analysis of aisthesis’s potential, which bears much in common with poetry, which, in

Paul Valéry’s words, forms a “prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.” 28 Rancière

considers such a deferral between sense and sensation as antagonistic to the settled political

order, the “distribution of the sensible.” Still, because of Mallarmé’s uncommon difficulty, he

was an eccentric choice for Rancière’s investigations. We might venture that Mallarmé’s

obscurity drew Rancière to him in the first place in order to show the operations of something

                                                                                                                         26  See  Rancière,  “Ten  Theses.”      27  Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pps.  69  and  72.  28  Quoted  in  Giorgio  Agamben,  “The  End  of  the  Poem,”  in  The  End  of  the  Poem:  Studies  in  Poetics,  trans.  Daniel  Heller-­‐Roazen  (Stanford:  Stanford  University  Press,  1996),  pp.  109.    

14    

like the politics of the sensible (before he coined that phrase) at work in even the most difficult

poet. Secondly, Rancière’s reading was a decisive challenge to the priorities that the

poststructuralists and Badiou alike identified in the poet. And, intriguingly, many of the

Rancière’s points in Mallarmé prefigure many of his wider arguments about art developed in

Aisthesis.

Rancière reads in Mallarmé a certain artistic subjectivity characterized by “dreaming,” a

“poetics of mystery” that nonetheless marks Mallarmé as a “difficult, not a hermetic,” writer. 29

Rancière argues that Mallarmé is not interested in any directly metaphorical or allegorical work;

rather, he conjures what Rancière calls the “ideality of the sensory,” language’s power to create a

sensible reality, which imbues even objects we would otherwise consider banal. To capture this,

the artist’s task becomes a certain form of vision, and the means to give voice to that vision:

‘Dream’…is the gap remarked by the attentive spectator in ‘what is,’ discerning in it the disappearing appearing of that which can or can not be…[against the “natural way of seeing”] the dreamer’s way of seeing, of electing aspects…and ordering them in mystery is ‘superior, and maybe even the true one’. Poetry is the pursuit of this truth, of this exact interruption.30

This account parallels how Rancière understands the artist’s vocation in Aisthesis, which in

effect sees “through” commonplace understandings of sensation (whether visible, auditory, or

otherwise). Rancière wraps these together in his latest reading of Mallarmé in Aisthesis,

considering Mallarmé’s nights out at the Folie Bergères, a famous cabaret, watching Loïe Fuller

do the serpentine dance: “What is not secondary is what the dancer does with the long dress she

projects around herself; with it she can draw the shape of a butterfly, a lily, a basket of flowers, a

swelling wave, or a wilting rose.”31 In this account Rancière extends the scope of Mallarméan

“dreaming” to a formative period for Parisian art. The serpentine dance breaks with an earlier

                                                                                                                         29Rancière,  Mallarmé:  The  Politics  of  the  Siren,  trans.  Steven  Corcoran  (London:  Continuum,  2011),  pp.  xiii-­‐xiv.  30  Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  13  and  15.  31  Rancière,  Aisthesis  pp.  95.    

15    

“mimetic” form of art which fretted about pomp and signification. Half of the serpentine dance’s

artistry, for Mallarmé, is in making such an austere performance “artistic” in the first place.

Ever-aware of its roots in the representative arts, aisthesis redoubles its “indifference,” the

principle that everything or nothing at all can bring art to life.

This formulation, again, can be brought back to Rancière’s earlier Mallarmé. There,

Rancière offers glowing praise in particular of the poet’s cryptic reflections in the “crise de

vers.” The “intellectual word,” Mallarmé writes, should recapture “with plenitude and

obviousness…the system otherwise known as Music.”32 Rancière responds that Mallarmé

anticipates “the reconquest by poetry of its own good, which is also ‘the procedure itself of the

human spirit.’”33 Rancière highlights again Mallarmé’s slippage between forms, his synesthesia

which takes him from the symphony or the stage to poetry, adding that Mallarmé’s words

describe what is characteristic of art as a universal human activity. This recalls Rancière’s later

elaborations of artistic modernity, which “ceaselessly redefined itself…blurring the specificities

that define the arts and the boundaries that separate them from the prosaic world.” Rancière

suggests that accessing the “procedure of the human spirit” involves an unceasing movement

between the arts, and beyond the hold of a sensible regime.

For the coup Rancière reserves several pages of discussion. Rancière writes that

Mallarmé has poeticized the gift of art to future generations, cast across the blank space of the

page, which the theorist reimagines as the “Ocean of the times,” the “chasm of vain hunger…apt

to consume that future in advance,” in a “hyperbolical affirmation of pure contingency” that

constitutes poetic action.34 Mallarmé’s typographical innovations, Rancière writes, have no

secret meaning. There is “no great difficulty in understanding what this poem ‘means.’”                                                                                                                          32  Mallarmé,  quoted  in  Rancière,  Mallarmé  pp.  40.    33  Rancière,  Mallarmé  pp.  42.  34Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  54-­‐55.  

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Mallarmé’s “constellations” of the written word “reproduce the topography of the theatre of the

spirit, in the authenticity which rivals it with the folio of the sky.”35 Part of Mallarmé’s great

influence came in opening up new opportunities of reading with his experimental typography, an

insight that may seem unremarkable in our age of marketing, but whose force can be seen by

Paul Valéry’s praise for Mallarmé’s “rais[ing] a page to the power of the starry sky.”36 For his

time, Mallarmé’s poem opened up a new avenue for poetic expression by reference to the sky.

For all that, Rancière he recognizes how art’s autonomy from normal sensory life, and its

constant demand for innovation may be as limiting as it is encouraging. The pessimist might be

tempted to level the same charge against Mallarmé’s difficulty and his retreat from public life.

In other words, Rancière’s praise of Mallarmé sounds sometimes hollow. Mallarmé’s

obtuseness does nothing to persuade the naïve reader that Mallarmé could be read politically, in a

commonplace understanding of the word. This does not, per se, contradict what Rancière seeks

to articulate about the micropolitics of the sensible field. But Mallarmé demonstrates Rancière’s

appetite for heroic acts of artistic vision and poiesis that can capture the attention of others and

prompt a break in the political regime. But if Mallarmé could capture the thoughts of a

substantial public in the late nineteenth century, the most typical response to his work today from

a naïve reader would probably be indifference. Rancière’s claims in Mallarmé can fall flat.

In order to avoid a half-hearted censure of Rancière’s tone, we might relate Rancière’s

work on Mallarmé more explicitly to a theoretical point that he draws out in Aisthesis. In the

closing pages of Aisthesis, Rancière levels a charge of fatalism at Clement Greenberg and other

“modernist” theorists who insist on the autonomy of art to the detriment of its political promise.37

Greenberg’s work solidified the idea of medium specificity, which purports that modernism                                                                                                                          35Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  54.  36  Quoted  in  Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  56.  37  Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pp.  261-­‐262.  

17    

involves art which engages self-consciously with its own limits as a medium. Vehemently

against this position, Rancière’s central contention in Aisthesis is that artistic action is never

reducible to a medium, because art’s address is immanent to the sensible field. The sensible field

could be considered political, social, or simply human. Regardless, art, because it does nothing

but address sense, the senses, can never be reduced to an object of disinterested contemplation

detached from human affairs. This is what allows Rancière (retroactively, we admit) to say that

Mallarmé’s poetry in fact retreats into solitude to await the “union of poet and crowd in ‘the

hymn of spiritual hearts.’”38 For all that, Rancière’s account lacks much discussion of the

faculties, probably to avoid the sort of difficulty of writers like Immanuel Kant who constructed

elaborate accounts of the faculties. Despite his outlook on technology modernism, Rancière’s

work surprisingly benefits from the work of an alleged staunch determinist when it comes to

technology and the faculties: Friedrich Kittler.

To the extent that Mallarmé anticipates (and indeed fulfills) the vision of artistry that

Rancière elaborates later on in Aisthesis, Rancière has constructed a solid conceptual basis for

thinking through the poet’s work. Rancière from his early to late work has emphasized how

Mallarmé’s work crosses boundaries. For Rancière, aesthetic transversality releases the spectator

from the grip of the sensible distribution. This release prompts the wild, speculative creation that

is the hallmark of the aesthetic regime. Further still, that sort of creation underlies the

interpretation that a rich work like the coup demands. Its “meaning” is never finished, in part

because aisthesis has no meaning besides opening our eyes to the sensible field that connects us.

In rethinking Rancière’s project, then, we need not fixate on where his polemic oversteps itself,

but rather think through the concept of aisthesis and how Mallarmé fits in as its exemplar. A

similar undertaking with Kittler puts his conceptual insights to work by way of their                                                                                                                          38  Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  33.    

18    

communicator, Mallarmé. While Rancière has constructed an otherwise sound vision of the

workings of art and the aesthetic regime, his account does not venture beyond the bounds of

sensation. Kittler, for his part, would sooner be accused of anti-humanism (another charge

leveled at the poststructuralists we have discussed), but his work on technology, specifically

media, resonates with Rancière’s Aisthesis. Both are intimately involved in the sensible field.

Kittler

Friedrich Kittler (1943-2011) is known as a central figure in what has been dubbed

“German Media Theory,” a “post-hermeneutical” inquiry into the history and significance of

media.39 In his best-known works in the English-speaking world, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter

and Discourse Network 1800/1900, Kittler draws on the big names of French Theory at the

time—Jacques Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, but also their German predecessor, Friedrich

Nietzsche. While Rancière emerged from the same philosophically-oriented, Parisian milieu as

the poststructuralists, Kittler was a professor of literature, working at several German and

American universities before his death in 2011. Because French Theory was not so gainfully

adopted in Germany as the U.S., Kittler’s borrowings from the so-called French anti-humanists

made for an outsider’s voice for the institutional context of German literary studies, which in

both the United States and Germany remained conservative in comparison to its neighboring

disciplines.40 Before comparing Rancière and Kittler, we should be cognizant of their distinct

institutional contexts. Where Rancière has been writing for a large international audience for

years, Kittler published the Discourse Network as his Habilitation, which qualified him for

teaching as a professor. Despite his contributions to the ballooning field of media studies,

                                                                                                                         39  Wellbery,  “Foreword,”  pp.  vii.    40  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Kittler  in  the  anglosphere,”  Thesis  Eleven.    

19    

Kittler’s voice has been widely interpreted as vulgar, media determinism,41 a judgment we will

question by putting his work in conversation with Rancière’s, whose theoretical DNA it shares.

Mallarmé finds his way, perhaps by osmosis, into Kittler’s most well-known tome in the

United States, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. This work continues Kittler’s inquiry, begun in

Discourse Network, into the effects of the titular storage media which emerged around the turn of

the twentieth century. Where this latter work argued for the media’s role in the social

arrangements of these two dates, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter intensified Kittler’s rhetorical

flourish, offering three sprawling chapters on the specificities of each medium. The work reflects

Kittler’s training as a literature professor, passing associatively from one artist or writer to

another in quick succession, though he integrates figures from outside the humanities like

scientists, inventors, and mathematicians. In this way he suggests part of the enormity of the

“discourse network” sketched in his previous work, elaborating as much on the psychoanalytical

meaning of each medium as the way war drives each of these epistemic shifts.

Kittler’s oft-quoted declaration “media determine our situation” frames an avowedly

Nietzschean inquiry into the material conditions for the “mental training programs” of subjects

and societies.42 On the surface, Kittler presents a bewildering textual edifice, in which Mallarmé

plays out one small story among many: the significance of poetry when its alleged cultural

functions have been usurped by other media. The handful of references to Mallarmé in

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter are a minor, indeed insignificant story within Kittler’s work, but

it reflects his style, with short reference to a multitude of protagonists, which usually occupy a

few lines and rarely stretch more than a few pages. Kittler’s text overflows with reference,

                                                                                                                         41  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Kittler  in  the  anglosphere,”  Thesis  Eleven.    42  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Translators’  Introduction,”  in  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  xxiv.  

20    

recalling Foucault’s evocative ways of reading his archive in texts like Discipline and Punish.43

Rather than dismissing Kittler’s references to Mallarmé as insignificant, then, we might treat

these passages as those threads that, much like Mallarmé within Rancière’s work, shed light on

the theoretical problematic of Kittler’s text. Because these references are, we argue, isomorphic

with the rest of Kittler’s argument, they provide good material for relating Rancière’s concerns

with those of Kittler.

Kittler discusses Mallarmé evocatively in an early passage in the “Gramophone” chapter.

The gramophone, he explains, usurped poetry as a storage medium, because poetry had lost its

efficacy as a memory aid (a “mnemotechnology”):

Texts stored by the medium of the book were still supposed to find their way back to the ears and hearts of their recipients in order to attain…the indestructibility of a desire. These necessities are obliterated by the possibility of technological sound storage…Technology triumphs over mnemotechnology. And the death bell tolls for poetry, which for so long had been the love of so many. Under these circumstances writers are left with few options. They can, like Mallarmé or Stefan George, exorcise the imaginary letters from between the lines and inaugurate a cult of and for letter fetishists, in which case poetry becomes a form of typographically optimized blackness on exorbitantly expensive white paper: un coup de dés or a throw of the dice.44

Mallarmé stands at a turning point in poetic history, when the gramophone has replaced it by

ensuring indexical recording without labor-intensive memorization. With this function, he

continues, Poetry is evacuated of its former cultural significance, leaving it a combinatory “dice

game” inscription of twenty-six letters. Kittler condenses this short narrative when he cites

Mallarmé’s “disparition élocutoire du poète.”45 The brevity of Kittler’s discussion of Mallarmé

and other writers reflects his wider argument that media have been excluded (by Foucault, for

instance) from the conversation launched by Foucault about the regimes of knowledge, the ways

                                                                                                                         43  Michel  Foucault,  Discipline  &  Punish  and  The  Birth  of  the  Prison,  trans.  Alan  Sheridan  (New  York:  Vintage  Books,  1995).    44  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  80.  45  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  228  

21    

humans have understood themselves at different times in history.46 Kittler’s concern does not lie

in a trans-historical meaning behind Mallarmé’s writing, but what role poetry might play in the

discourse network. His Discourse Network details poetry’s uses in the earlier Goethezeit,

between 1770 and 1830: a written index of Nature reflecting its metaphysical value, a means of

organizing gender through the male poet and the female addressee (or Nature herself), and a tool

for a bourgeois upbringing.47 Such social functions Kittler calls “cultural techniques,” which can

only be understood in concert with other forms of inscription (in the German original of

Discourse Network, Kittler calls them Aufschreibssysteme, literally, systems for how the human

is materially recorded outside of itself).48 Where writing could once center faith in the human

subject, the new media in Mallarmé’s time radically decenter and desexualize the poet, leaving

him in a stunted “mirror stage” grappling with the sterility of the white page.49 Kittler thus ties

Mallarmé, and more broadly, the authors of modern literature, to a state of “anonymity.”50

But poetry as a cultural technique is not merely a matter of use-value. Kittler makes clear,

in reference to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, the lost sexual valences of poetry. Mallarmé is a

“letter fetishist,” which relates to the psychoanalytic definition of fetishism: a way of coping

with a lost object of sexual attachment by displacing it onto something else (in this case, the

page). Charles Baudelaire, one of Mallarmé’s early influences, could still claim a popular

audience—like Goethe, who was one of Kittler’s favored poet. But with the development of new

storage media, writing lost its sexual valence—either because women are no longer the

                                                                                                                         46  See  Kittler’s  critique  in  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  5.    47  See  the  chapter  “Nietzsche:  Incipit  Tragoedia,”  in  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900,  pp.  177-­‐205.    48  For  more  on  the  concept  of  “cultural  techniques,”  which  does  not  figure  as  strongly  in  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900  or  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  see  Matthias  Bickenbach,  “Blindness  or  Insight?  Kittler  on  Culture,”  in  Thesis  Eleven  (107(1),  2011),  pp.  39-­‐46.    49  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  180.  50  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  226-­‐228.  

22    

inspiration and “mute feminine reader of [the man’s] love”51 in text, or because film has captured

the Imaginary order that text used to create.52 Whether or not the reader is convinced by Kittler’s

psychoanalytic phrasing, Mallarmé and his contemporaries faced the emotive end of poetry,

though its former prestige was still within memory. Kittler’s “media determinism,” when we

filter out the rhetoric, merely acknowledges that new media (phonograph and film as much as

television or computer) hold more attention than older forms.

Kittler considers Mallarmé’s “letter fetishism,” taken to its extreme in Un coup de dés, a

way of making up for that lost prestige. But despite accusations of media determinism, Kittler

does not throw away any of the agency of artists. Mallarmé responded to a rearrangement of the

media which made up his discourse network. He could have redirected his poetic energies into

other artistic pursuits, but he remained with poetry. Kittler mentions drily that, following the

invention of sound recording, “about 1880, poetry turned in literature. Standardized letters

were…to transmit…a new and elegant tautology of technicians.”53 He emphasizes how poetry

has been obsoleted from the vital functions of the discourse network and can pursue its own

purposeless ends. For Rancière, this would be the beginning, not the end, of a poetry of aisthesis,

which is a state of indifference to the division of the sensible field.54 In that sense all of the force

of Un coup de dés was made possible by the shifting discourse network that Kittler describes.

Mallarmé could take advantage of poetry’s mnemotechnological redundancy to contort his

syntax and release his work from former typographical constraints. There would be no need for

such an elusive preface, either, with its instructions for oral performance, without something like

a discourse network. For Mallarmé, orality remains as an artistic possibility even after the death

                                                                                                                         51  Kittler,  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900,  pp.  198.  52  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  180.  53  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  14.    54  Rancière  elaborates  the  concept  of  indifference  as  integral  to  aisthesis  with  regard  to  Johann  Joachim  Winckelmann’s  writings  on  the  Belvedere  Torso  in  the  first  chapter  of  Aisthesis,  “Divided  Beauty,”  pp.  1-­‐20.    

23    

of oral poetry as a dominant cultural technique. His artistry involves seizing that lost opportunity.

Kittler, predictably, names this l’art pour l’art, one way of phrasing the uncertainty and

possibility of older media as newer ones come to replace them.

But Kittler does not dismiss poetry altogether. “After the storage capacities for optics,

acoustics, and writing,” he writes, “had been separated…their distinct data flows could also be

reunited.”55 We can imagine several points when this happened: the introduction of inter-titles

and sound to film, or the development of the computer and the internet. This indicates one of the

subtleties of Kittler’s thought that often escapes notice. For Kittler, media are always over-

coding each other, both technologically and in psychoanalytic terms. Film was never just a

medium of visual movement, but functioned because of the absence or abundance of sound. This

interest in the confusion of experience because of technological novelty shows its face when he

remarks that Mallarmé “celebrated the view through a moving car as that of a camera on

wheels.”56 Mallarmé could capture some of the energy of new forms of movement through an

old medium like poetry. In other words, Kittler offers no telos for the use and development of

media. Rather, its turbulent history (we might say, following Mallarmé, how media were

scored57) is the real interest when investigating media. This material history parallels the

psychoanalytical history that forms such an important part of his argument. While media may

occupy an overriding role for Kittler, the other side of his work emphasizes its contingency58—a

subtler means of decentering the Human, because the dramatic changes in the discourse network

exhaust our strength to keep up.

                                                                                                                         55  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  170.  A  few  lines  down:  “Lacan’s  final  seminars  all  revolve  around  the  possibilities  of  connecting  and  coupling  the  real,  the  symbolic,  and  the  imaginary.”    56  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  152.      57  See  the  preface  to  Mallarmé,  “Un  Coup  de  dés  jamais  n’abolira  le  hasard.”  58  See  Winthrop-­‐Young,  “Translators’  Introduction,”  in  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  xxi-­‐xxii:  “Instead,  discourse  analysis  begins  by  simply  registering  [texts]  as  material  communicative  events  in  historically  contingent,  interdiscursive  networks  that  link  writers,  archivists,  addresses,  and  interpreters.”    

24    

Kittler portrays this part of his argument as a matter of translation, and the way each

medium must be translated into others. Translation, he says, exhausts the person who tries to

keep pace with every new change. Translation is “an encounter with the limits of media”, and it

“always involves reshaping [messages] to conform to new standards and materials… [it is]

accomplished serially, at discrete points.”59 From this point of view, Mallarmé skillfully

negotiated the changes in the discourse network, having the tenacity to take advantage of

poetry’s strength in weakness. Mallarmé’s work, too, can be considered an act of translation

within the poetic medium, responding in profound ways to its time while maintaining continuity

with its poetic tradition in its novelty. These elements draw Kittler to Mallarmé, however briefly,

and they parallel Rancière’s interest in the poet. The thematic of translation could be profitably

compared with Marshall McLuhan’s argument that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always

another medium.”60 Stretching Kittler’s argument, we can claim that media are “always already”

composed of other media, in both technological and cultural terms. This originary composition

does not, though, make them equivalent. Each medium, Kittler says, is “discrete,” demanding

translation from one medium to the next at any number of junctures.

Kittler is not so much a determinist as a theorist of media as it loops back into the

construction of human meaning. Because translation from person to person and medium to

medium are always imperfect, historical change tends to scramble the cultural forms of any

given moment, without, for all that, determining what rules will govern those translations. To

borrow Rancière’s term, for Kittler, the distribution of the sensible (namely, sensible media)

constantly rearranges itself. Kittler calls the effect of this on human subjects “exhaustion”: “the

                                                                                                                         59  Kittler,  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900,  pp.  265.  60  Marshall  McLuhan,  Understanding  Media:  The  Extensions  of  Man  (Cambridge:  MIT  Press,  1994),  pp.  8-­‐9.  

25    

elementary, unavoidable act of EXHAUSTION is an encounter with the limits of media.”61

Kittler suggests that even if we intensify through media our communication, it also drains us of

our strength. Both the genius and the difficulty of Mallarmé’s work emerge from these

conditions, because reckoning with any form of media (a reckoning taken to the extreme in the

coup) proves deeply taxing, but productive. Mallarmé sees how poetry ceaselessly decomposes

into other media, and grapples with the translations in media’s form, the vital artistic task in a

changing world. Because of this a work like Un Coup de Dés reads just as readily as an

affirmative celebration of and an encounter with the human’s limit. Having worked through

Kittler’s image of poetry, we can put him back into conversation with Rancière.

Synthesis: Kittler and Rancière

By rereading this pair through the lens of Mallarmé we have shown the common

elements of their work that feed into a renewed reading of Mallarmé. Kittler shows us an

exhausted Mallarmé, beset by an enthusiasm for his work that drives him out of poetry’s familiar

bounds and into that speculative terrain that encouraged so many later thinkers. Kittler

complicates Rancière’s affirmations of Mallarmé’s political potential—without basically

disagreeing with Rancière’s central thesis that art confuses the sensible field. Kittler locates a

similar confusion where one medium is translated into another. The arrangement of media within

a discourse network, and the corporeal force which colors them, is one important part of the

sensible field. Both “discourse network” and “aesthetic regime” name the changing form of

judgment by the spectator, one that grounds collective, political action. Rancière and Kittler’s

rhetorical orientations may draw them in different directions, the first advocating a humanistic

commitment to political struggle, and the second admonishing those who uncritically fight for a                                                                                                                          61  Kittler,  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900,  pp.  265.  

26    

human subject while neglecting its material, technological basis. But if we uncouple their

theoretical edifices from their personal preoccupations, their shared interest lies in theorizing the

sensible field. Mallarmé is political; he is also exhausted. The poet’s fecundity coincides with his

historical moment, a critical point for the aesthetic transformations that played themselves out

(dissonantly, no doubt) through the twentieth century. Mallarmé’s partition (a concept we will

explore later) is a symphony, at once cacophonous and generative.

Both writers agree on the novelty of Mallarmé’s work when it comes to grappling with

the sensible field, but the interpretation of Mallarmé’s affective dimension remains a point of

contention to be sewn up between them. When we read Kittler’s declaration that “media

determine our situation,” we see how, for him, media comes before and somehow determines

culture. The “culture” side of this dualism Kittler phrases in psychoanalytical terms.

Psychoanalysis offers for Kittler a way of understanding what binds the user to the medium,

namely, desire. From this point of view, media are more stable than the people who use them:

because media scramble each other, they confuse the psychoanalytical subject plugged into

them.62 This comes out in the narrative Kittler tells about Mallarmé, in which the attraction of

his medium, poetry, has passed to the gramophone, leaving Mallarmé with a transformed sort of

poetry. Rancière, for his part, trumpets the political significance of his work while neglecting any

psychoanalytical reading of the poet. Granted, we might read Rancière’s claim, about how

Mallarmé’s poetry is to be interpreted, to be normative, and Kittler’s descriptive. But the latter

argues that human culture is always imbricated in the technology it is plugged into. Kittler

observes quite simply that Mallarmé, before like today, does not have a captivating medium

when compared to film or other modern media. This goes to show that Kittler offers a broader

                                                                                                                         62  See  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  4.    

27    

view on actors’ decisions within a given historical window, without reference to a constitutive

purpose, like Rancière’s sensible field.

It is possible to draw a middle ground between their two approaches. Sianne Ngai’s

recent exposition of three new aesthetic categories: the cute, zany, and interesting. Ngai’s Our

Aesthetic Categories63, borrowing the idea of aesthetic categories from Immanuel Kant and other

aestheticians, explores in great detail the logic underlying each category and their political,

economic, and social import—more detail than Rancière is necessarily willing to give.64 In

particular, the category of the interesting resonates with Mallarmé’s coup, something it shares

with a good deal of avant-garde art from the twentieth-century. The interesting remains “merely

interesting” because it seems partly recognizable, but avoids full description. Because it occupies

that border zone, it tends to disrupt the easy distinctions in the matters it concerns (for Mallarmé,

for instance: picture or poetry, poetry or philosophy?). 65 Hence it resembles Rancière’s

aisthesis—but Ngai is quick to point out that “interest” remains “cool,” not very exciting, but

good at provoking speculation. However disruptive aisthesis may be, part of it can still be

assimilated to Ngai’s more or less stable category. Such a categorical distinction provides a

corrective to Rancière’s sometimes-overheated accounts of Mallarmé’s poetry, while it offers an

alternative to Kittler’s psychoanalytical framework (one more focused on affect than

unconscious desire). Ngai’s work sharpens the historical and contextual concerns that situate

Mallarmé in the development of our commonplace ideas about sensory experience. But it also

illuminates the problematic that unites Rancière, Kittler, and Mallarmé. The interesting, literally

inter-esse, “to be situated between,” grounds what is common between heterogeneous elements,

                                                                                                                         63  Sianne  Ngai,  Our  Aesthetic  Categories:  Zany,  Cute,  Interesting  (Cambridge  and  London:  Harvard  University  Press,  2012).    64  This  is  in  part  because,  as  Rancière  emphasizes  in  the  interview  in  Rancière  Now,  equality  as  an  intellectual  demand  demands  a  clarity  that  often  eludes  deep,  scholarly  treatments  of  a  subject.    65  See  Ngai,  “Merely  Interesting,”  in  Our  Aesthetic  Categories  pp.  110-­‐173.    

28    

whether sensory, medial, or otherwise.66 For each of these writers, what is interesting is how

diverse things can be confused and recombined, allowing something new to be created which

affirms the underlying unity of sensible life. As we have shown, this basic confusion, or

disorganization, unites Kittler and Rancière’s own work—and points toward a new way of

reading Mallarmé, too.

The question remains as to whether Kittler and Rancière may be speaking past one

another. To correct this, we may feel the urge to read Kittler and Rancière as adherents to the

linguistic turn, continental philosophy’s recognition of the importance of language. Rancière’s

theory rests deeply on the idea of a communicative citizen laid out in earlier works67, while the

focus in Kittler’s discourse network, is after all, discourse. But ultimately, their work shares an

under-emphasized face concerned with the use of material and bodies. Rancière insists on that

we cannot give up on a politics of aesthetics because the sensible determines the use of bodies,

the first political question. Aisthesis does name a “regime of perception,” and the “scene” may

refer to the assemblage of an artwork with its “interpretive network.”68 But the aesthetic regime

can invest anything at all with the artistic effect, “blurring the specificities that define the arts

and the boundaries that separate them from the prosaic world.”69 When Rancière characterizes

Mallarmé artwork as calling out a utopic rhythm that would challenge the industrial rhythm of

the day,70 his concern is as much the poet’s discursive action as its material consequences.

Rancière speaks literally when he describes the aesthetic regime as “like…a large fragmented

body, and…a multiplicity of unknown bodies born from [its] fragmentation.”71 Rancière argues

                                                                                                                         66  Ngai,  Our  Aesthetic  Categories,  pp.  113.  67  This  element  comes  out  most  clearly  in  Rancière’s  “Ten  Theses”  in  the  Politics  of  Aesthetics.    68  Rancière,  Aisthesis  pp.  xi.  69  Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pp.  xi.    70  Rancière,  Mallarmé,  pp.  33.    71  Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pp.  xiv.  

29    

that art frees the body from the regimented labor that would tie it to political elites, and it thereby

fails to “reintegrat[e] the strategic patterns of causes and effects, ends and means.”72

Kittler may reject humanism as a position, but cultural techniques, an important part of

his theory, change how the body experiences itself. Education, for instance, could be considered

an elaborate cultural technique that allows students to write and read, or, more recently, take

advantage of computers. Media operate for Kittler principally through and on time: the

gramophone took over from poetry for reciting speech because using it does not take the same

time as memorizing an epic. So the use of time is one of the motive forces for a changing

discourse network. Kittler connects the titular storage media to the storage of time, adding that

this “determines the limit of all art.”73 Time is itself a sort of null medium which every other

medium must translate in the first place. The media which compose the discourse network, in

this sense, work on time as such. And from media we arrive back at cultural techniques, which

work on the body. Kittler therefore quotes Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, insisting on the

corporeality of media: “If something is to stay in the memory of man it must be burned in: only

that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.”74 Kittler concludes that “the

signifier…becomes an inscription on the body.” For Kittler, only through repetition and

punishment can cultural knowledge take root in someone and shape how they act.

Hence, even if Kittler and Rancière talk most often about language, they also share a less

visible concern for the body and its technological prostheses, be they media, or the distribution

of the sensible (itself an elaborate technology for governing). They agree that the “motor” for

this history is a series of contingent, productive confusions arising from forms of translation and

the misunderstandings they entail. I have attempted to combine Rancière and Kittler’s work with                                                                                                                          72  Rancière,  Aisthesis,  pp.  xv.  73  Kittler,  Gramophone,  Film,  Typewriter,  pp.  3.  74  Kittler,  Discourse  Networks  1800/1900,  pp.  196.    

30    

respect to Mallarmé, elaborating an interpretation that diverges from both poststructuralist and

Badiouan interpretation. Bringing these two authors together means tempering some of their

rhetorical flourish but finding commonalities that would rejuvenate a political reading of

Mallarmé, one strengthened against the claim that its theorizers forget politics (in the case of

Kittler) or reduce politics to a politics of speech (in the case of Rancière). These theorists address

the other’s weakness. We circle back to Mallarmé, whose work concerns the complex web

connecting language, the body, aisthesis, and time. In this coda we will show that Mallarmé’s

insights address the problematic arising out of our reading of Rancière and Kittler.

Mallarmé, once more

Mallarmé’s Divagations, published, like Un coup de dés, in 1897, collects several prose

works that are themselves valuable sources for reflection, benefiting from a less fragmentary

style than his poetry. They speak to an awareness about the dangers of the aesthetic moment that

Rancière and Kittler describe. Mallarmé’s vignette, “The Phenomenon of the Future,” quoted in

the epigraph to this essay, describes a tent nestled within a forest filled with an “unhappy crowd”

come to see its spectacle, a nude Woman, for whom “[no] painter today [is] capable of rendering

even its sorrowful shadow.”75 Instead of celebrating this ubiquitous feminine object of artistic

contemplation, the crowd looks to each other in confusion, while the poet finds herself haunted

by an escaped, repressed “Rhythm.” The “Future” for Mallarmé’s poet, however beautiful it may

be, retreats into passing appearances, fissured by forgetfulness. Poetic work resembles more a

reflection on its own absconded purpose than a poetics of inheritance. Deep pessimism about the

future traverses this short reflection, suggesting that, for Mallarmé, the impossibility of a

complete artistic work inhabits his efforts at writing poetry. This fragment unfolds an awareness                                                                                                                          75  Mallarmé,  “The  Phenomenon  of  the  Future,”  in  Divagations,  pp.  11.      

31    

of the strictures of the dreamer-artist subjectivity that Rancière so enthusiastically eulogizes. In

light of the outlook evoked by this work, and Mallarmé’s obscured approach to politics, one face

of his work shows a deep reluctance to engage in the speculative, political acts that drive

Rancière’s reading in Mallarmé.

Mallarmé’s exhaustion is a thoroughly critical stance. It anticipates those critiques of

aesthetic modernity launched by twentieth-century theorists like Guy Debord and Fredric

Jameson, one sensitive to the difficulty of “imagination,” which Rancière says is the unifying

element of aisthesis.76 By characterizing his own time as one that has “outlived beauty,”

Mallarmé questions even the utopic kernel of the aesthetic regime, its prophetic moment.

Mallarmé, more than many poets, has been censured for a willful confusion with regard to his

readers, something that he no doubt deeply understood. By persistently creating such difficult

work, he captures the conundrum of modern writing: the author whose art is not yet

understandable by a public because their work transcends the quotidian. This ought not be

confused with an advocacy of l’art pour l’art, as he has so often been criticized. Rather, this

critical face of Mallarmé shows his search to intensify the “uselessness” of his artistic practice. If

this does not align with Rancière’s image of a coming, Mallarméan community,77 it still

constitutes the Mallarmé’s own literary micropolitics.

Mallarmé was not simply critical, though, and the interpretations to which it can give

birth is one of the exciting things about Coup. Read with enough enthusiasm, the poem is a

bombastic allegory for the “shipwreck” of Western civilization, or the poet’s Nietzschean

affirmation of chance and life. Less often interpreted is the preface to “Coup de dés,” which

yields conceptual resources for a more constructive, Mallarméan theory. The note is

                                                                                                                         76  See  Rancière’s  reading  of  Mallarmé  at  the  Folies  Bergères  in  “The  Dance  of  Light,”  Aisthesis  pp.  93-­‐109.      77  See  Rancière,  “The  Hymn  of  Spiritual  Hearts,”  in  Mallarmé,  pp.  27-­‐42.    

32    

characteristically elliptical, struggling with how to describe a way of reading the poem in light of

its innovations. These range from remarks on the arresting effect of the poem’s white spaces to

the interruptions produced by the mimetic typography. Mallarmé says the reading of the poem is

rhythmic and momentary, disrupted by the “intervention” of the imagistic aspects of the poem (a

sinking ship, a plume, and so on), strung out in succession. As he puts it, the poem “intervenes

each time as an image…[and] ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others,”78

offering not so much an integrated reading as one subdivided by the interruptions of the poem as

picture. However, Mallarmé emphasizes the rhythmic nature of the reading and how the breaks

in the page alternate between accelerating and slowing the text, as much as its narrative element,

which “flourishes and dissipates, quickly, according to the mobility of the written, around the

fragmentary jams of a capital sentence.”

What comes out in this note is how Mallarmé calls the reader’s attention to the flows and

breaks in the text and the spoken materiality of its words. Mallarmé’s message is as much the

poem’s oral performance as anything else. This is what allows him to claim that the poem

partakes in “the pursuit…of free verse and the prose poem,” and “leaves intact the older verse.”79

When spoken before an audience, the poem does not diverge from the ‘traditional’ form of

poetry. The bewilderment comes rather when the reader sets eyes on the page. Mallarmé

emphasizes the aural so much that he describes the poem as a “partition,” a score (as in music)

or partition:

In addition this use of the bare thought [cet emploi à nu de la pensée] with its retreats, prolongations, and flights, by reason of its very design, for anyone wishing to read it aloud, results in a score [partition]. The variation in printed characters between the dominant motif, a secondary one and those adjacent, mark its importance for oral

                                                                                                                         78  Mallarmé,  preface  to  “Un  coup  de  dés.”  79  Mallarmé,  preface.  

33    

utterance [émission orale] and the scale, mid-way, at top or bottom of the page will show how the intonation rises or falls.80

Here Mallarmé’s account of the poem’s rhythm is indistinguishable from its content. The French

partition means, like in English, a division. It also describes a musical score: the master

document in a composition which sets the instruction for each voice side by side (a long way

from Barthes’ dead author). The partition names the poem as an oral performance, a means of

reconciling its complications with its public performance. It has to stave off its breakdown into

independent poetic fragments set on a single page. Mallarmé acknowledges this note already as a

“counterpoint to this [poem’s] prosody,” that is, complementary, somehow mirrored, but also an

encroachment on the “lecteur habile” [deft reader].

Midway through, Mallarmé offers a curt, intriguing summary: “Everything passes,

through shortcut, by hypothesis; recitation [le récit] is avoided.” It is not through the lens of

ostentatious poetic re-creation that Mallarmé imagines his poem being read, but rather, bypassing

common sense through a shortcut, cast in the conditional. While the preface rehearses how the

poem might be performed, linking, for instance, the prominence of a word with how it should be

pronounced, Mallarmé questions the possibility of oration, “récit.” Any programmatic or

descriptive account of its reading finds itself isolated within its own web of contingencies and

determinations. Simple instructions for reading blow up to a larger reflection on artistic action

itself. Mallarmé recognizes within his poem the collapse of any sense of sameness between

performances, dismissing finally the centrality of the word [récit]. In his own formulation,

Mallarmé’s poem is subject to ceaseless translation and recombination, well aware that the

differences introduced by the aesthetic regime and media, among many other elements,

ceaselessly traverse his work. Mallarmé emphasizes the temporality and circularity of each

                                                                                                                         80  Mallarmé,  preface.    

34    

reading obligated by its particular structure. Mallarmé’s commentators have rightly pointed out

that each reading must be unrepeatable: the poem as partition, both a new performance and a

departure from the original, offers a new approach to reading and understanding the poem

isomorphic with its difficult elaborations of chance/hazard [le hasard] evoked in the poem.

Recognizing the poem’s essential discontinuities, its tendency to lose itself in grammatical and

semantic incoherency, the reader must coordinate these elements in each new performance.

Mallarmé’s partition [score], like a symphony, will be constantly recontextualized and worked

over by new elements, whether libidinal, aesthetic, or political. The partition can be considered a

statement on modern artistry. It combines the catastrophe Mallarmé evokes in “the Phenomenon

of the Future” with the embrace of free-play beyond its reappropriation into the sensible field.

The partition names the common problem to each of these three authors: the shifting

divisions in sensible experience and the body that responds to it. The trajectories of these

authors’ work are multiple, but they share this concern. In a distribution of the sensible

characterized by the facile demand for artists to continuously innovate, Mallarmé suggests that

his Coup follows its antecedents, free verse and the prose poem, but radicalizes them and makes

them unfamiliar by a sort of reading in which simple equivalencies are replaced with shortcut

and hypothesis. Mallarmé multiplies the synesthetic confusion that Rancière describes in

Aisthesis indefinitely. Mallarmé’s world, at any rate, is not limited to theorists. His work inspired

work across disciplinary and artistic dividing lines. It is the object of its own mistranslation.

Mallarmé forces an alliance between his poetry’s continuities, and its “shortcuts,” its unexpected

vectors of transmission. Mallarmé addresses language’s boundaries and finishes by recasting the

duality of language and body.

35    

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