I propose to model the beginning of my discussion on Georg Simmel’s short essay ‘How Is Society Possible?’ (itself a riff on Kant’s ‘How Is Nature Possible?’), before going on to think in terms of François Laruelle’s concept of nonphilosophy, adapted to nonpoetics. 

 

Can poetry be thought of in terms of texts that are structured like a society? Words, forms, technologies, tones, styles, conventions of production, are just some of the components of a poetic text, all of which must be taken into account by the writer (in a sense I am aligned with Foucault’s notion of the author function: i.e. in seeing the writer as just one of these, however significant).  

 

Thus establishing an initial basis for discussion, I will go on to outline a theory of nonpoetics, and make some gesture to what this implies or means in terms of composition, and reading, in the contemporary.

 

The position of nonphilosophy is that philosophy – regardless of type – assumes an a priori decision of some kind of splitting (eg between presence and difference, in Derrida), as a basis for further dialectical elucidation. Nonphilosophy is interested in avoiding this paradigm, and in creating philosophically uninterpretable theorems. 

 

My concept of nonpoetics, then, is not a rejection of a particular type, or types, of poetics (as considered by Carla Benedetti), but rather a rejection of the presumed relation between the poet and their poetic materials, and the metaphors associated with making (and crafting).  

 

Etymologically, it is a rejection of the Greek basis of the word poem: i.e. ‘poiesis’, as one meaning making, for other linguistic options, such as the Latin-derived ‘verse’, related to ‘turn’. It considers the human writer as a vector, or as a component in an assemblage, which produces (or directs) the poem as language speaking through the keyboard, and as reconstitutions of reading. That is, that poems are as much written by the technologies involved – not just keyboards and computer programs, but also books and other language sources. It gestures towards a posthuman theory of writing, but of one that has always been present in some sense: the historicised posthuman as writer of verse.