| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
|
|
Like Eliot’s objective correlative, though from a different quarter, Polanyi’s description can be brought to bear on an associational reading response to give a sense of the quality peculiar to such a reading. Eliot and Polanyi differ in that the objective correlative, as its name suggests, does seem to propose a totality of realisation in the thing itself—in the phrase, in the image, in a sentence—which Polanyi’s distal/focal, proximal/subsidiary division denies. Eliot’s correlative assumes that a sense of completeness inhering in the image or linguistic turn can be true to the experience it represents, and is something to be aspired to. Polanyi, in sharp contrast, sees this sense of the fullness of the immediately present to consciousness as a kind of functionally necessary self-deception.
These significational systems have in common the idea that a surface presentation seems sufficient in itself, rendering overt and conscious pursuit of the ‘depths’ of meaning unnecessary. Fullness is implicit in the (tacit) knowledge which the reader is prompted unconsciously to confer upon the given line, image, or sequence of thoughts in the mere act of reception. There is no need to look beyond the given when the ready-to-hand is complete in itself.
Polanyi offers a way of understanding the ‘rightness’ of ‘effective’ poetry constructed on an associational pattern. When he is read in this way, the concept of tacit meaning renders illusory an experience of immediacy, since it is only by putting things together in a striking fashion and then half forgetting them that it seems, in the moment of their re-emergence, that they have always belonged together.