Poetics of Understanding: Language Arts and Artistic Research

Abstract

: What role does research play for the language arts? What is the significance of the language arts for research? This text attempts to sketch the outlines of this relation on the personal-general level and basis of selected poetics, based on statements by language artists. In essence, the thesis is that the potentials of the language arts can and should increasingly be integrated into the discourse of both research and artistic research for a better understanding. The question arises . . . as to whether the extent of these sectors on the plane assumed by us can be enlarged to any vital degree by the work of research. The achievements of the microscope, of the telescope, and of so many devices which increase the range of the senses upward and downward: do they not lie in another sphere altogether, since most of the increase thus achieved cannot be interpreted by the senses, cannot be ‘experienced’ in any real sense? It is, perhaps, not premature to sup-pose that the artist, who develops the five-fingered hand of his senses (if one may put it so) to ever more active and more spiritual capacity, contributes more decisively than anyone else to an extension of the several sense fields, only the achievement which gives proof of this does not permit of his entering his personal extension of territory in the general map before us, since it is only possible, in the last resort, by a miracle.1