The Seer in the Seen

Abstract

This chapter explores our notion of “subjectivity” and its conceptual reliance upon objectivity as a mode of experience that is likewise never absolute. The chapter uses the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the often metaphorically rendered discourse of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to illustrate divergent origins of supposition that approach kindred conclusions about the limits of what we can know about the intersection between subjects and objects. Such poetry and prose is likewise put into contemporary social context in which the language of “subjectivity” participates in a social context of so-called post-truth. The friction between the rhetoric of radical constructivism and that of post-theoretical cultural criticism often goes unacknowledged in arguments that deploy categories of race, for instance, as both fundamentally unstable, fundamentally constructed, and yet capable of reification.