Jack Underwood & Uncertainty as gunk

Prof. Jack Underwood has an article 'on poetry and uncertain subjects' here. No doubt, it is written for children or Y.As, not people his own age, and thus it is somewhat unfair of me to pick it apart.

However, I think this worth doing because there are a lot of grownups out there who forget, or never knew, the distinction between Risk and Uncertainty. The former has to do with possible states of the world which can be 'factorised' into independent probability distributions. This means a recorded outcome can still be ambiguous because the 'wrong' population may have been sampled. By contrast, Uncertainty arises where possible states of the world are not known. No probability distribution can be ascribed to them. Furthermore, such Uncertainty may be 'gunky' (to use a term from Mereology) in that all of its parts and the parts of its parts may be equally uncertain. Unlike, situations involving Risk- where there can be ambiguity but no uncertainty (e.g. did my horse or yours first cross the finishing line? Some special tool- e.g a camera making a 'photo finish' observation- may be needed to decide the outcome)- there is no ambiguity when it comes to 'gunky' uncertainty precisely because there is no Duck/Rabbit type or snake/rope dichotomy to be resolved. It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that 'gunky Uncertainty' must mean unknowability. A moment's thought would show that the condition for knowledge is precisely gunky Uncertainty. If there were only Risk, there would be no Knowledge, just a Popperian regress of conjecture and refutation till the Eschaton of Language bottoms out in atomic propositions.


Needless to say such a view would be fatal to Poetry as other than Socioproctology. Yet, it seems to me, this is the view Underwood adopts.

Consider Underwood's opening paragraph.

The game involved my brother or me climbing on top of something not too high, like a sofa, or a tree stump, and asking Dad to catch us. He would get into position and say “Go on! Jump! I’ll catch you” and every time we leapt, he’d back away and let us fall. We’d try it over and over, each time becoming more suspicious, demanding new assurances, squinting and giggling as we scrutinised his face. He’d be already laughing as he said it again, “Go on! Jump! I’ll catch you.” He never caught us, and never would catch us, and that, we understood, was the whole point.

This is pure Risk, not Uncertainty at all. Presumably, the kids are sampling different populations- viz. jumping from heights up to x as opposed to greater than x- so as to determine the 'safe limit x'. After all, this Dad could get done for child endangerment if that objective ceiling was breached and the kids broke their skulls.

What we loved about the game was precisely the feeling of being unsure: the naïve, delicious, uncertain tension before the jump: maybe, maybe, maybe this time; even Dad must have wondered if he could hold his nerve indefinitely.

This is the thrill of risk-taking. Uncertainty however affords no thrill. Not enough is known for a limit to be tested.

Nowadays I get my uncertain tension-feelings most tangibly as a writer, and specifically as a person who writes poems.

Underwood is a poet read by other poets or students of poetry. In other words his main concern is to deskill and reduce the cognitive demands of his discipline so that Credentials in it can be sold to the utterly gormless . Thus, he feels he is taking a risk. How far can he go without being called a lazy cretin?

With poems you have to risk all kinds of small, hopeful, doomed leaps; uncertainty is central to your business.

Utter shit! If you know your poem will be read by shitheads like yourself, you take a risk- how fucking cretinous can you be without being called a fucking cretin?

Uncertainty is not central to your business at all. Why? Precisely because it is a business. You get paid. You push the envelope of worthlessness as far as you dare. Go too far and you get the sack and are an ex-poet. Like anybody gives a fuck.

Genuine poetry creates a state of the world which can be unambiguously instantiated. I have drunk alone with the Moon of Li Po, as well as that Loneliness which Faiz drank with, precisely because windwheel samadhi is not the grey-eyed Revolution which at last mercifully relents and gives you a b.j as your own tumbril rolls.

By contrast, who could drink with this explosion of self-regarding diarrhea?

You not only have to acknowledge the innate inaccuracy of language as a system that cannot catch or hold onto anything securely, but also that it’s precisely this characteristic of inaccuracy that a poetic, empathetic transaction rests on.

Why do you have to acknowledge this shit? What would happen if you didn't? Would your head fall off?

Akriebia, in Aristotle and so on, denotes 'accuracy' or 'precision' in language. However, Aristotle warns- and this is common sense- that Akribeia is a fault in rhetoric if the subject matter does not permit such precision. Thus, a superior, 'equitable', notion is that of Economia. Poets are as welcome as anyone else to have their own Tarksian 'primitive terms' and build up an intensional language using them. In this sense, Poetry is an essentially 'economic' activity. It is the good housekeeping which links up households into neighborhoods- neo-Whiteheadian 'regions' of 'events' linked by an 'extension relation'- thus constituting a relation algebra and answering Nature's uncertainty with the co-evolved Uncertainty of Life and Thought and, in the case of Yusuf Ali, I.C.S, who died here, friendless, in Fulham ten years before I was born, that barzakh or metaxu between our impoverishment by Desire & that 'hidden treasure' which desires only to be known.

But shite like this too wants to be known-

Writing poems you don’t just look up from your computer screen every so often and remind yourself that endless reinterpretation threatens to destabilise each of the terms you are using, or that those terms are calibrated and reliant upon endless further terms, wobbling, drifting and stunning each other like a huge shoal of jellyfish. Instead, you deliberately build your poem as an open habitation; you have to learn to leave holes in the walls, because you won’t and can’t be around later on to clear up any ambiguities when the lakes of your readers’ lives come flooding up through the floor.

This isn't writing poems- it is conducting some sort of more or less fraudulent business.

Hacking passwords, you don't just look up from your computer screen every so often and remind yourself that endlessly running the same scam on the same bloke threatens to get you caught. Instead, you deliberately build proxy I.P addresses using stolen identities so some other guys' lives get fucked up.

If a poem works it’s because you’ve made it such that other people might participate in making it meaningful, and this participation will always rest on another person’s understanding of the poem and its relationship to a world that is not your own.

Methexis is a feature of cults and pyramid schemes. Those that are successful imbue their promoters with a sense of manifest destiny- till the paddy wagon comes for them.

Your own understanding of the poem will evolve over time too, as you reread it in light of your changing world, just as you will find the world altered in light of the poem you wrote to understand a small uncertain corner of it.

Boris must have written a poem about Brexit. That's why it happened.

With poems, you never get to settle on a final meaning for your work, just as you never get to feel settled, finally, as yourself.

Very true. My poem means so much to everybody! I'm sure all them Nobel Prize winning Scientists would testify that my poem anticipated their discoveries. Indeed, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and so forth would ve all like 'fuck me! That's what I wanted to say but could never find the words!'

Similarly, I never get to feel settled as myself coz like maybe I'm not just a super Ninja secret agent who finds the cure to Cancer but also a great dancer with a bum like a Kardashian and a voice like Beyonce.

So it seems entirely natural to me that poets, exploring and nudging such unstable material, foregrounding connotation and metaphor, and constantly dredging up the gunk of unconscious activity over which they have no control, might start to doubt the confidence, finality, the general big-bearded Victorian arrogance of certainty as it seems to appear in other forms of language: mathematical, religious, political, legal or financial. 

If, as David Lewis hoped, Mathematics is Megethology, then- okay- it has 'big-bearded Victorian certainty' but, we have reason to believe there are several Mathematics with different univocal foundations and we don't know which one we are in. In Religion, similarly, akrebia's narrowness and rigidity is a hindrance, collaborative 'economia' is required. Political language is wholly shite. Of that we can be certain. Legal language is defeasible because of uncertainty. That is why there are equitable remedies and things like cy-près doctrine permitting the Court to get as close as possible to the testator's intention to prevent a trust from failing. Ignoring Uncertainty, for e.g. by putting your faith in Arrow-Debreu securities could, as we all know, be catastrophic unless the State takes over the downside risk.


All language is about discovery- the creation or maintenance of knowability- but the precondition for it is radical Uncertainty. Otherwise there is only observation until every conjecture is refuted, all 'skandhas' are disaggregated, and the world bottoms out in atomic propositions or the intentions of a momentary, kshanikavada, Universe.

It may be that Underwood is using the word 'gunk', in the phrase “gunk of unconscious activity”, in the sense of David Lewis's mereological gunk. After all, he may have Googled the term before committing to it. He may also have looked up Uncertainty and seen that Economists think of 'uncertainty' as different from 'risk' because whereas any given risk can be factorised on the basis of probability distributions, Knightian Uncertainty decomposes into Uncertainty because possible states of the world, or even actual states, are unknown.

If 'unconscious activity' were 'gunky' then such processes were indeed a royal road to a pathless land- the satcitanandam of Advaita. The more reasonable view is that we are the product of Evolution and what is unconscious is 'capacitance diversity' while what is conscious is 'channelized'.

The latter view, to my mind, is more useful for writing or appreciating poetry. On the other hand, the poetic afflatus may certainly itself be gunky and every epiphany but gnostic. But, if so, Poetry- at least such as has currency- is Socioproctology merely.


Shite like this- which Underwood very quickly has to touch base with-

Elsewhere, feminist theory has exposed how the Western history of human knowledge has been dominated by white, male knowers, making our so-called ‘universal claims’ according to finalised, standardised terms, spoken from our supposedly ‘objective’ perspectives, as if somehow our minds pertained towards to a special clarity and coolness, like water fresh from the fridge.

Feminist theory exposed something all right but it looked so gross everybody asked it to cover it up again.  The 'Western history of human knowledge' does not exist. There may be some stupid Westerners, or Easterners or lunatics or academics in shite departments who pretend to possess some such thing but what's important is that they don't masturbate in class or fill their hands with their own poop and fling it around at Department meetings.

But it is poetry, not theory, that makes me want to see if the empathetic negotiation of meaning between poets and readers, which is innate to the effectiveness of poetry, is also a dynamic feature of other fields.

If the thing is a business, then, sure, though a poem is a contract of adhesion, still there is a sort of market research or virtual 'focus grouping' or Baconian negotiation behind it. But such poetry is merely Socioproctological. It sticks its finger up the anus of something which doesn't exist coz Epistemically speaking only a diarrhea obtains.