Our seminar investigates the poiesis of language - its capacity to create, bring into existence, and shape worlds, selves, and our shared sense of reality. To better grasp this potential, we approach Buddhist textual engagement primarily as a series of experiments with the possibilities of language, rather than through pre-given textual categories, genre distinctions, or tropes, and examine how such experiments have helped shape both the form and content of Buddhism itself, as well as related traditions.
In the fifth and final year of the seminar, through brief paper presentations and open discussion, members of the steering committee together with past participants will reflect on the trajectory of our work thus far and consider future directions for integrating the analysis of the poiesis of language into the study of Buddhist texts.
In this presentation, I explore the potential of some Mahāyāna sūtras to illuminate and challenge our own conceptions of literature and “reading” practices, broadly construed. The normative vision of such sūtras places them squarely in a ritual-ethical arena where poetic language makes perfect worlds and immortal bodies. They take for granted what modern scholars so often overlook: the production of language and world is both a bodily act and a linguistic act that makes bodies legible as such. In this way, these sūtras offer a powerful challenge to contemporary assumptions both about the nature of language and narrative and about the kinds of practices deemed to be “ritual.” And given the relevance of the sūtras to contemporary conversations about performative language, normative practices, and their role in making lifeways and persons, they problematize the too often uncritical exclusion of religious texts from serious consideration in contemporary debates.
This paper revisits the notion of poiesis as a productive force of language in Buddhist texts. It proposes to view these texts as operating within a constitutive tension between the openness of meaning, its virtually infinite expressive potential, and its inevitable narrowing into determinate expression. Whereas some twentieth-century philosophers regarded such closure as veiling being as such, Buddhist authors, despite (or precisely through) their strong nominalist commitments, often treat this condition as an opportunity to deploy language in transformative ways. Drawing on a range of Indian Buddhist textual materials, the paper delineates moments of poiesis in which language turns back upon itself and generates new possibilities for meaning, understanding, and perception. Taking this feature to be a constitutive aspect of Buddhist textual production, the paper concludes by considering how it might best be studied and approached, through which disciplines and with what analytical tools, within the study of Buddhist texts.
The Language, Poesis, and Buddhist Experiments with the Possible Seminar concerned what is made possible in language variously used. Based on our conversations, I offer a constructive account of aesthetic experience. Engagements with works of art, I argue, are best understood as giving rise to aesthetic events: structured experiential episodes that occur under conditions of sustained aesthetic attention. Such aesthetic events are not reducible to interpretations of artworks or to semantic relations between texts and readers, being instead concrete experiential occurrences whose content, affective valence, and intelligibility are partly scaffolded by works of art and by broader aesthetic practices and institutions. We discussed how aesthetic events may be fruitfully compared to virtual experiential episodes, akin to events occurring in dreamscapes—which may call for a variety of aesthetic mindfulness on our part: a micro-phenomenology of aesthetic events through which artworks help us to contour and experiment with the possible.