On the possibilities of poetic language to express extra-linguistic thought. Or, “Should I put a po-em in my P-h-D?”

The word rarefaction is drawn from the physics of sound waves. Put simply, a sound wave is a form of kinetic energy that travels in longitudinal or pressure waves, compressing and decompressing air particles in an oscillation that causes our eardrums to vibrate. The decompression part of this push-pull oscillation is known as rarefaction. I’m tickled by the fact that the word for something being made less dense also means esoteric or out of the ordinary (the literally rarified air at a mountaintop or the figuratively rarified language of poetry). A rarified space is both somewhere where the air is different, so far from the daily plane of life, that we might find it difficult to breathe and, paradoxically, a breathing space where we can deepen our engagement and refresh our understanding.

There is a plenty of precedent for a range of different registers at work in the language of artistic research theses. I have seen diaristic passages, short stories, fragments of correspondence and automatic writing exercises all included within the written part of practice-based PhDs, often by artists whose main medium is not text. But why does an artist writing in an academic context want or need to use this kind of indirect, or rarefied, language? How can coming at things from a more obscure angle, make an argument clearer?

One of the challenges of academic artistic research, especially when the work is concerned with non-linguistic forms of expression, is deciding how to write about it. How does one articulate a process that is often felt much more clearly than it is thought, especially if those feelings and thoughts that have generated the artwork contain contradictions and ambiguities that are part of the work? Will the work be misrepresented? Will future creative processes be harmed by too narrow a framing of present methods? Will the baby be thrown out with the bathwater?

Something happens when a thought makes the journey from the interiority of the individual out into communicable language. Language production involves omissions as much as creations. Speaking and writing about a subject involves editing. You cannot make all the possible utterances on a subject, you have to narrow things down. This reduction is essential if we are to communicate with others and not fill up all the notebooks in the world with a description of the softness of the pencil we are writing with. Something has to be ignored.

At the sentence level, each word must be selected from a range of possible words. Word choice and sentence-making can communicate a thought to others, but it also has a mysterious tendency to act retrospectively upon the thought itself. Once a thought has been delineated through language, it has been altered. In pinning down one meaning, many other possible meanings are inevitably excluded, so there is something precious perhaps about an unarticulated thought. The same is true when writing about art. Art is adept at carrying a level of contradiction, ambiguity and complexity - it doesn’t always need to (and arguably shouldn’t) make sense in a straightforward way, or at least in the same way that a linear written argument might be expected to. Therefore it cannot always be written about in a purely straightforward way either. Sometimes the non-sense, or the contradictions, of an artwork, and the untranslatability of its sensory charge, is the whole point.

What is most exciting for me about visual and sonic art - or any artwork that is not straightforwardly representational - is that it offers us an imaginative space, where things are not fixed, where multiple (and contradictory) meanings can co-exist and where new readings can always still emerge. This place of possibility exists within any text to a some extent since words are always semantically fugitive, but the goal of the written component of an artistic practice-based PhD can seem somewhat at odds with the openness of an artwork. The purpose of a written thesis - as I currently understand it - is to attempt to interpret, delineate and clarify what the artwork is doing, in order to demonstrate and share its original knowledge contribution.

The question of how exactly this should be done, varies from country to country, institution to institution and between individual artist-researchers. There is an obvious solipsistic danger in presenting yourself as sole interpreter of your own work’s significance, but conversely, collecting data from audience feedback using methodologies from social science could be equally risky, leading to a pretence of objectivity where none is possible or desirable. This is further complicated if the work is more concerned with raising questions, than finding answers. Could the posing of a question without an answer still constitute an original contribution to knowledge? Would that mean the formulation of the question should be original? Does an exploration or an enquiry count as research in itself if there is no conclusion? And if so, how could this be written about? For example, if the work were to contain an enquiry into the limitations of measurement, would it be meaningful to try to measure the impact of the work? If data is required to qualify audience responses, I find myself wondering if commissioning poetry or dance or another artwork in response to a work would count as a valid form of audience data collection?

I suspect I’ll be grappling with these and other similar thorny problems throughout my PhD period. Right now, as they say in academia - more research is needed,

For now, to get back to the subject of rarefaction, I’m experimenting with inserting my own poetic approaches to the subjects under discussion in-between the sections of more straightforward academic literature review or argument. Poetry, for me, probably comes as close to a written form of visual art that you can get, and as such I suspect it might be able to play a special role in a practice-based research thesis, with it’s ability to approach subject matter obliquely. Poetry has a capacity to provoke associations, stir affective memories and elicit a sensuous, embodied response in the reader. It is a type of language that can be precise and grounded in the particular, but at the same time resonates, leaving room for multiple affects and overlapping ideas to co-exist. By inserting rarefactions– passages that explore the same ideas as the more linear writing through creative, non-linear poetic language–perhaps I will be able to write about the work in the sense of writing around it.

Poet and travel writer Ruth Padel discusses the difference between what linear and non-linear written forms can do in her Guardian article on the connecting power of poetry. Her words strike me as applicable to art and poetry alike:

“The poet’s imagination “yokes” images that originally had no connection. The hook of a story snags your attention, you read on to discover what happens next. But the hook of a poem is more emotional, more secret. To discover what it’s about, you need to go back, not on. You find more in it on a second or thousandth reading because it fuses the world and the self, connecting not only outwardly, to something beyond, but inwardly to something deep inside. It communicates before you understand and can strike you, as Keats said, as the wording of your own thought, so readers need it like part of themselves.” *

By using what I think of as different pressures in the form and density of language, my intention is that these changes of register in the text might exert a push and pull on the minds ear of the reader. In this way, perhaps the themes sounded can resonate in a more-than-linear, more-than-singular fashion that speaks to the implicitly embodied and affective terrain of experience. In this way, I am suggesting that poetry’s associative non-linearity has a natural correspondence with the contradictions and ambiguities of the artistic artefact. Where precision, rigour and clarity are called for in addressing the ineffable, it may be that alternating between the prosaic and the lyrical (compression and rarefaction) will be a useful strategy to adopt.

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*https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/06/ruth-padel-poetry-connection-readings