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

has produced the condition in which the modernist discussion of these terms has been
forgotten. The very virtuality of fate, being neither nature nor history, that Benjamin
understood it to be, and of which Pound‘s exercises in de-personalization are apt
examples, has been replaced by Adorno‘s assertion, made in his lecture on natural
history, that ―nature is illusory because we have lost reality‖ (267).
It should become apparent that what it is that has been forgotten is not the historic
moment in which modernism took hold. No discussion of its advent fails to mention the
end of collective faith in teleological explanations for the world and man‘s existence. It is
less difficult to recall the ensuing philosophical debate that consumed thought in the early
twentieth century, as it sought to reinvest the ciphers from those teleologies arriving like
messages in a bottle on the shore of a new era of doubt and skepticism than it is to
remember the terms through which modernism attempted to do so. Nature and history
could no longer pretend they were friendly cousins out for a walk, secure in their familial
restraint. What we have forgotten is the genealogy to this difficult climate and the various
ways these once separable categories became tempestuously embroiled once their genetic
coordinates were put into question.
For Pound and Benjamin, natural history gave to the terms name, title, fate, and
taboo a distinct set of meanings. Names and titles retained their nineteenth century
connections to legalistic questions of possession, guaranteed by the older Lockean
presumption of the self as a thing that one is entitled to possess, giving to the religious
accent on naming that Benjamin describes its real calculation in broader questions of
property and individual rights. At the same time fate and taboo became legitimate
problems to these early moderns, no longer defensible in their usual teleological context.
177