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

archive of experiences (represented synthetically to recall) but rather in the syntactic play
of sequential predication.
This willed determination of the body of a subject's memory in the hands of
modernist thinkers and poets like Ezra Pound is a more complicated matter than creating
an interpretive matrix that balances text and context, history and biography, for its
promise of a best understanding of the meaning of their work. Once the predicating work
of impersonality has been posited as the ground for the syntactic play of abstract subject
formation, what modernists like Pound and Benjamin discover is that the object of
generational production – the individual self or subject – is a delirium grounded in only
one of many possible linear abstractions that mask themselves in synthetic thought. If the
essence of selfhood is believed to have some preceding existential claim it would make
null the distinctions and differences that sequential predication produces. The notion of a
singular and discrete person, constructed by the sequencing of citations and abstractions
from both the empirical real and the subject's memory, is undermined if we posit an
essential subject at the outset of that process. The subject is, in point of fact, an
agglutinative syntax before becoming paradigmatically thematized and Symbolically
Ordered.
For Pound, that Odyssean oar of the virtual self that is arrived at in this process of
syntagmatic self-making instantiates how style cites the delirium that is the mix of
memory and matter we use to define identity. Through the exercise of choice-making,
identity makes new forms for modeling and remarking. The modernist theories and
aesthetics of Pound and Benjamin show us, though, the folly of the desire to leave behind
the guarantees of self-interested choice-making; there is no essential self to offer up for
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