TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHETIC, MADE REAL A ...

tongue inside poetry that would pretend itself otherwise as clear public speech. What is of
concern is the way she values Pound's mother-tongue at the expense of his content. This
eventuates a misprision of those elements of Pound‘s rhetoric that are beholden to a
textual ―mother-tongue‖ that was as much scripted and silent as it was vocalized.
Blasing's phono-centric bias overlooks the broader palate from which Pound would have
acquired his authorial subjectivity and as such it misses how Pound's poetic-subjectivity
may not be ascribed, merely, to pre-conscious sound patterns.
In essence, Blasing uses Lacanian terms to give the socially-constructed, virtual
lyric-"I" a terrain through which it is thought to appear in its constitutive act of
metalepsis: "The lyric ‗I‘ is a metaleptic figure, an Apollonian illusion of an ‗individual‘
projected upon, to use Nietzsche's words, ‗a piece of fate‘ (1979, 54)" (5). Blasing goes
on to explain the "material" base from which the subject breaks into the symbolic order
and, presumably, acquires the rules for the paradigmatic and syntagmatic construction of
meaning:
But figural and "rational" languages alike depend on a prior
material language and a prior operation that gets us from the
material letters and sounds to words. And that operation cannot be
subsumed under the rubric of figuration because it has a history.
We did not come with language; we all had to learn it. To dismiss
the materiality of language is to dismiss the emotionally charged
history that made us who we are - subjects in language, which is
the subject of the lyric. (6)
Blasing goes on to argue that the individual subject is a deeply a-historic illusion
when it fails to include the material story of language acquisition. It especially fails to
explain the work that poets do if it makes this failure. She writes, "the historical
permutations of the concept and status of an ‗individual‘ are not of help in understanding
poetic subjectivity, which will elude methodologies that assume that concept as a given –
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