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

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To define the dialectical terms of each, nature and history, then: nature has a positive, materialist pole. This pole is concrete and exists as that which is mortal and transitory, the substance upon which the material of labour and corporeal bodies is expended. It also has a negative pole. Nature, in this negative pole, is the world that has not yet been incorporated into history through the penetration of man‘s reason: ―In this sense, nature was ‗the mythical…that which is eternally there…as the fateful construction of pre-given being.‘ This was nature‘s static side, perpetuated by the unchanging rituals of the people who submitted to its domination‖ (Buck-Morss 54). History also has positive and negative values for Adorno. Positively, history can be known as the dialectic of social practices; it is the mode of transmitted social behaviours in which the qualitatively new can be recognized as emerging. Negatively, history has meant the long story of the same, clothed in circumstantial difference: ―it merely statically reproduced the conditions and relations of class rather than establishing a qualitatively new order‖ (Buck-Morss 54). Buck-Morss describes how Martin Heidegger‘s existentialism was that which Adorno‘s work on natural history was actually aimed at upsetting. Heidegger‘s positing of ―nature‖ and ―history‖ as terms within the ontological category of ―Dasein‖ erased the double character that Adorno‘s dialectical definitions were careful to find. With that loss of the dialectic in Heidegger‘s thought so went the opportunity for negative critique. The fallacy in Heidegger‘s thought that especially rankled for Adorno was that: Either social conditions were affirmed as ―natural‖ without regard for their historical becoming, or the actual historical process was affirmed as essential; hence the irrational material suffering of which history was composed was either dismissed as mere contingency (Hegel) or ontologized as essential in itself (Heidegger). (Buck-Morss 54) 167
Ontologies, such as those that belong to Heidegger and Hegel, result in ideological justification and affirmation. Adorno offers, as an alternative, the informative possibilities found in the ―concrete unity‖ of nature and history, alive and autonomously working in any analysis of reality. Taking his cue from Benjamin‘s introduction to the OGT, Adorno argues that the only way to maintain a critical perspective that guarantees this unity its location in thought is to analyze its empirical and phenomenological extremes. In extremes, we are able to see the acquired, sedimented, and retarding effects that useless tradition confronts us with as if it were natural and just. It is Lukacs‘ definition of second nature (Theory of the Novel), whereby the commoditized world is emptied of its meaning by conventions that no longer serve the interests of those who consume them that spurs Adorno to refine his understanding of natural history. ―Second nature,‖ Buck Morss explains, provides Adorno with a ―negating, critical concept which referred to the false, mythical appearance of given reality as ahistorical and absolute‖ (55). Adorno finds, then, ―second nature‖ amenable to Benjamin‘s sense of natural history. Natural history, with Lukacs language of critique and negation, gives Adorno that vent through which to advocate against convention, primitive fetish, and the submission of mind to fate. Ignoring the complexities of historical interpretation, Heidegger, after Adorno‘s rejection of his existential subjectivity, is argued to have lapsed into a false spiritualism. Ignoring the complexities incumbent upon interpretations of what appears as second nature, Heidegger, Adorno finds, retreats from the truth that inwardness is acquired. 168
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TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
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Christopher David Chapman practice.
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CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
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objectification, while titles are a
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
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taboo, as the following remark indi
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emind us too hastily only of Benjam
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e renewed in philosophical contempl
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the word “Title.” I do this out
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where fate - the agent of nature‟
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Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
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come into their meaning through the
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meaning in the words he appoints to
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―The Role of Language in Trauersp
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God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
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conceived of as a pantomime where t
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ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
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aspects of his linguistic theory th
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decision-making powers, we can demo
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him to transpose arguments about th
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Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
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eath of this world, and from it the
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magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
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elegated to the setting in which th
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Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
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every locution being, in essence, e
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CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
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dramatic monologue, a feat he would
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terms that this chapter wishes to c
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structural factitiousness that the
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is implicit to baroque criticisms o
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meaning of the poems it collects. P
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Pound's fragments as commentary on
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Few critics read these poems in the
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a diorama booth in which his hero a
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the genetic milieu into which it be
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In fact, two complaints can be hear
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while keeping lines that praise Bro
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Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
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Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
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George Steiner uncovers the ramific
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to register history differently to
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commitment to past modes of critica
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modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
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the case, is deliberately making ou
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Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
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delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
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presence of a continuous patina of
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described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
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10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
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obsessive desire most critics find
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passing from hand to hand, becomes
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Propertius as Propertius once had C
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saw no viable future for his own ex
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then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
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‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
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difference between his intention an
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itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
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subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
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his subjectivity as a blend of fact
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eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
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dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126: Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
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Page 143 and 144: The library of the dukes of Milan w
Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
Page 147 and 148: Bornstein, for example, is interest
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Page 151 and 152: Do come, do come. I can see us at B
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Page 155 and 156: the winners of its game (148). Beca
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Page 159 and 160: to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
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Page 163 and 164: which to describe the force of natu
Page 165 and 166: interrogation of that two-word theo
Page 167 and 168: elationships that they believed to
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Page 171 and 172: knowable “as a combination of ato
Page 173 and 174: new‖ emerges: ―it is a movement
Page 175: ejects any teleological argument fo
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Page 181 and 182: attention to the way names effect t
Page 183 and 184: Adorno acknowledges that Kant‘s w
Page 185 and 186: understanding how de-personalizatio
Page 187 and 188: Fate becomes a term that Benjamin i
Page 189 and 190: WORKS CITED Arkins, Bryan. ―Pound
Page 191: The New Age. 27.26, 1919. Ovid. The
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