Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric

by Daniel Tiffany

What begins with an unlikely collection of unrelated phenomena--mechanical dolls, weather, atoms, lyric poetry--blossoms in the course of Toy Medium into a subtle and persuasive meditation on one of Western philosophy's biggest puzzles: the relation of mind and matter. What is the role of the imagination in defining material substance? In a dazzling study of the poetics of materialist philosophy and of the materialism of lyric poetry, Daniel Tiffany traces the historical conjunction of matter and metaphor through a remarkable range of topics: automata in classical antiquity and the eighteenth century; Kepler's treatise on snowflakes; animal magnetism; fireworks and cloud-chamber photographs; the origins of the microscope as a philosophical toy and its bearing on the figure of the virtuoso. At critical junctures in modern Western culture, Tiffany finds uncanny parallels between the metaphorics of science and visions of material substance rooted in popular culture and lyric poetry.

Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy

368 pages, Paperback

First published February 4, 2000

About the author

Daniel Tiffany is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including Privado (Action Books, 2010), Neptune Park (Omnidawn, 2013), and his most recent volume, Cry Baby Mystic, along with chapbooks from Oystercatcher Press and Noemi. In addition, Tiffany has been instrumental in the projects of BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP, including its celebrated first book, The Work-Shy, published in the Wesleyan Poetry Series in 2016. His poems have also appeared in journals such as Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, jubilat, Lana Turner, Fence, Bomb, Chicago Review, Brooklyn Rail, and many others. In addition, five volumes of his literary criticism—Toy Medium and Infidel Poetics, among them--have been published by presses including Harvard and Johns Hopkins, as well as the University of Chicago and the University of California. Tiffany is the author of the entry on “Lyric Poetry” in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literature. Apart from his own writing, he has published translations from French, Greek, and Italian writers. He is a recipient of the Berlin Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Berlin.

Reviews

[Lanny]

oddly enough, i found myself staring at a much better researched version of alot of ideas that i already had
for awhile. this is one of those books that allows the
intuitive mind to feel a little better knowing that one
doesn't always need to know all the details to get something
esssentially right.

One thing I found humorous and a bit uncanny was the closeness
in sound between Robert Grosseteste's last name and the word grotesque.

One of my favorite lines of the whole book, which in my system
is represented by the small letter a, as a spermatic (turbulent) vortical turning and cul d'sac is

"Turbulence is productive... it is the transmitter of simulacra.."

This is the same line more or less as Norman O. Brown's "Is, is the original mistake in every sentence.." maybe I shouldn't put quote around that.

anyway. It's a damn good piece of scholarship, either that
or i'm a larval-oxen-hydra mooing in the mirrored fibbyfom..

[shrugs]

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some elements of interest (particularly the chapters titled “The Lyrical Philosophy of Toys” and “The Lyric Automaton”) but the broader argument of metaphysical codependency has been issued in more compelling iterations.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delicious, if pedantic, stew of mechanical dolls, lyric poetry, Freud, mesmerism, meteorology, Kant, Duchamp, memetics, etc.

Includes irrefutable evidence of poetry's supremacy; I'm memorizing this for cocktail parties:

"Poetry dissembles nature, so that nature, disfigured, becomes the body of an invisible ("suprasensible")world. And this invisible material world is truer than the nature depicted by the other, more palpable arts (which produce "mere imitations") precisely because it is unconstrained by nature, because it is produced by a medium, poetry, that does not share the unambiguous physical presence of natural objects."

[Sylvia Flora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Materiality decomposed and reframed.