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

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Adorno‘s adoption of Lukacs‘ belief in the acquired essence of subjectivity meant that he was risking a form of historical relativism; truth for Adorno could easily be construed as the apt apprehension of a thing‘s historicity. In order for his sense of natural history to not fall into this trap, Adorno was leery of it becoming another ―meaning-filled totality.‖ Buck-Morss informs us that it is here that Adorno borrows most accurately from Benjamin‘s trauerspiel study. Specifically Adorno makes use of Benjamin‘s decision to turn his Kant studies in one particular direction. In their study of Kant, Scholem introduced Benjamin to the language and rigors of Jewish mysticism. Benjamin turned that language away from religious mystery and applied it to aesthetic thought: ―Benjamin‘s religiosity was secular and mundane, at the same time that he approached profane objects with a religious reverence. His was thus an ―inverse‖ or ―negative‖ theology in which mysticism and materialism converged, and as a model for philosophical thinking it made no little impression on Adorno‖ (6). Benjamin‘s religion of the mundane was an extension of his reading of the substance of the allegorical citation-work implicit in the chronicle-structure of the baroque trauerspiel. Allegory, as we have noted, did not mean a story invested in drawing out communal values and ideas but: ―was instead the concrete expression of that idea‘s material foundation‖ (Buck-Morss 56). The allegorical could only present concrete particulars of either natural or historical ―extremity‖ if it made itself felt to its observer as belonging to a ruin or a fragment of an ephemeral cultural totality. It was the habit of holistic occlusion that drew Adorno to Benjamin‘s reading of allegory. The productive value of such an occlusion was that it guaranteed the mystery of historical material, that un-theorizable ―first nature‖ that Lukacs found embedded in the life-world of things. That 169
this mystery could only be experienced as the truth that history is essentially transitory suited Adorno‘s dialectical redefinition of fate within the environs of natural history all the better. Benjamin‘s approach to natural history implies an existential strain in its ontological roots. For Benjamin, allegory allows him to argue that trauerspiel undoes the classical schematic where nature held a symbolic value as an ahistorical and universalizing idea. For Adorno, history and nature, once they have been denuded of their invariants and dialectically re-defined and arranged, raises to view a degree of historical facticity that is able to release the truth that history and nature are essentially transitory objects: Nature itself is transitory. It thus contains within it the moment of history. Whenever the historical appears, it refers to the natural, which passes away within it. Conversely, where ―second nature‖ appears, whenever that world of convention confronts us, it is deciphered by the fact that its meaning becomes clear precisely in its transitoriness. (TW Adorno. ―The Idea of Natural History‖ 264) Adorno sees in history and nature the transitoriness that underlies their intra- compositional dialectic and tends to ignore the problem of the manifest symbol that distressed Benjamin. Buck-Morss explains that it was this freedom that was original in the method of argument Adorno would term the ―negative dialectic.‖ The truth that both nature (after it has been reified) and history contain each of the other‘s transitoriness is expressed through a critic‘s understanding that that transitoriness has been caused by the fact that reason and reality do not coincide, making symbolic thought, in its ability to manifest itself, a red-herring. Like Buck-Morss, Robert Hullot-Kentor also begins his appraisal of Adorno by affirming Adorno‘s indebtedness to Benjamin. Adorno and Benjamin, he notes, agree: 170
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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
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Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
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Page 145 and 146: Rainey‘s disdain for bourgeois hi
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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 and 176: ejects any teleological argument fo
Page 177: Ontologies, such as those that belo
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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