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

finding first what the prefix "im" predicates before asking how it does so. At first blush
we know that "im" directs us to consider what it is that goes 'into' the making of a
"person." We lose that sense of clear predication and can understand Cameron's sense of
urgency about impersonality as soon as we imaginatively contrast the first predicate with
the next prefix we find - "per." The predicate per also signals direction - now to a sense of
what it is that personhood moves through or by. Blasing, in fact, catches hold of the
complicated processual understanding of subjectivity that is signaled through
impersonality's predicates. Her attachment to the figure of metalepsis as a transumptive
or frame-breaking device, usefully considered as an heuristic to describe poetic self-
fashioning, brings her close to thinking about a processual or constructed subjectivity,
similar to Pound‘s and Benjamin‘s, rather than one that is expressive like Weil‘s.
Blasing's emphasis on the materiality of language extends her thought towards
reconsidering the givenness of the empirical subject authoring a text with referential
language for the authority of an artist's Symbolic self-fashioning through the asignifying
material properties of "voice, rhythm, and sound shape" necessary for the transmission of
the signified content of referential language:
The emphasis on an extralinguistic "individual" is a historically
specific form that the repression of the material and formal rhetoric
of poetic language takes. For the subject represented in or by or as
the poem's referential language, the subject that is its fiction, is
absolutely distinct from the subject, produced and heard in the
voice, rhythm, and sound shape of the poem. (Cameron 5)
Were the lyrical-subject to be thought through by way of the process of conjugal
predication of the impersonal that Blasing associates with referential language, rather
than by the way of its breaking across the disjunction between the referential and the
material components of language, then it becomes possible to see that the metaleptic
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