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

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Benjamin‟s theories imply that the aesthetic language that traffics in these mundane place-holders, deployed by baroque poets as willful “archaisms” and “verbal inventions,” attempt to express what man‟s titles render taboo. That which titles render taboo is the realization that natural history, as the formative matter of fate, is organized to produce the separation of man‟s will from the destruction that he would avoid and which is promised to him in allegorical images like “The Angel of History.” This conclusion, and the ambivalent relationship that exists between words and things, is implicitly the subject of that section of The Arcades Project entitled “The Collector.” There, Benjamin asserts that an Allegorical imagination favors the spectacle of material destruction in its celebration of immaterial, mutable, concepts: “Allegory views existence, as it does art, under the sign of fragmentation and ruin” (330); it dispels “the illusion of totality or of organic wholeness” (331). Baudelaire is an Allegorist precisely because he has no interest in universals but is insatiably drawn towards fate; like the flaneur, he is interested in what turns up on the street, whether a whore, a piece of junk, an object in a window, whatever catches his eye. He differs from the Collector because: “Every intimacy with things is alien to the allegorical intention” (p. 336). The Allegorist collects things for evidence that would assist him in his attempt to augur God‟s pure word for what it can tell us about fate. The “ur” word, and the divine order in which it participates, is perpetually under the revision of the Allegorist‟s own personal illuminations about its noumenal character. The Allegorist treats each thing under his attention with equipoise because its significance is always guaranteed by an ideal order – but an ideal order that is formed from that virtuality that is natural history, fate‟s avatar. It is the failure of things to meet their 15
meaning in the words he appoints to them that gives the Allegorist his winsome faith in a world beyond the titles that knowledge allows us to possess it through: As far as the collector is concerned, his collection is never complete; for let him discover just a single piece missing, and everything he‘s collected remains a patchwork, which is what things are for allegory from the beginning. On the other hand, the allegorist – for whom objects represent only keywords in a secret dictionary, which will make known their meanings to the initiated – precisely the allegorist can never have enough of things. With him, one thing is so little capable of taking the place of another that no possible reflection suffices to foresee what meaning his profundity might lay claim for each one of them. [H4a,1] (Arcades 211) Here, the two-word theory Benjamin described in ―The Role of Language‖ is re- named and re-purposed: the pure word is appropriated and takes on the force of a legal judgment over the identity of a thing, offered up for singular possession in the form of a title or keyword in a mutable Allegorical dictionary. It is the Collector‘s bane to provide some consonant explanation within and through the world of his or her collection for the underlying reality of the objects that he collects, unaffected by privative titles. By providing a title for what it is he is collecting, the Collector provides for himself the ability to possess and have an object in a tactile manner, inserting it into the physiognomy of his collection by touch. A title suggests that an object might be so possessed. A title forces objects to belong to an esoteric order that can be made available to ―initiates‖ of an allegory aware of its participation within the ruin and patchwork of human knowledge. That is, a title makes something taboo. Titles, in their legalistic ―primitive form of property,‖ turn objects into that which is untouchable: ―To appropriate to oneself an object is to render it sacred and redoubtable to others; it is to make it ‗participate‘ in oneself‖ (Arcades 207). The Collector, though, is unaffected by this, and does not possess 16
Page 1 and 2: TABOO: THE ACTUAL MODERNIST AESTHET
Page 3 and 4: Christopher David Chapman practice.
Page 5 and 6: CONTENTS PREFACE ..................
Page 7 and 8: objectification, while titles are a
Page 9 and 10: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to ack
Page 11 and 12: taboo, as the following remark indi
Page 13 and 14: emind us too hastily only of Benjam
Page 15 and 16: e renewed in philosophical contempl
Page 17 and 18: the word “Title.” I do this out
Page 19 and 20: where fate - the agent of nature‟
Page 21 and 22: Cantos with Nancy Cunard. The final
Page 23: come into their meaning through the
Page 27 and 28: ―The Role of Language in Trauersp
Page 29 and 30: God‘s genetic ―pure word,‖ re
Page 31 and 32: conceived of as a pantomime where t
Page 33 and 34: ensnared within post-lapsarian syst
Page 35 and 36: aspects of his linguistic theory th
Page 37 and 38: decision-making powers, we can demo
Page 39 and 40: him to transpose arguments about th
Page 41 and 42: Caesar‖ is an obvious case in poi
Page 43 and 44: eath of this world, and from it the
Page 45 and 46: magnanimity wins out in dire and pa
Page 47 and 48: elegated to the setting in which th
Page 49 and 50: Notes 1 In an early, unpublished, t
Page 51 and 52: every locution being, in essence, e
Page 53 and 54: CHAPTER TWO: LONG SERIES OF TRANSLA
Page 55 and 56: dramatic monologue, a feat he would
Page 57 and 58: terms that this chapter wishes to c
Page 59 and 60: structural factitiousness that the
Page 61 and 62: is implicit to baroque criticisms o
Page 63 and 64: meaning of the poems it collects. P
Page 65 and 66: Pound's fragments as commentary on
Page 67 and 68: Few critics read these poems in the
Page 69 and 70: a diorama booth in which his hero a
Page 71 and 72: the genetic milieu into which it be
Page 73 and 74: In fact, two complaints can be hear
Page 75 and 76:
while keeping lines that praise Bro
Page 77 and 78:
Cantos deliver a poetic condition i
Page 79 and 80:
Quia Pauper Amavi, and, after McGan
Page 81 and 82:
George Steiner uncovers the ramific
Page 83 and 84:
to register history differently to
Page 85 and 86:
commitment to past modes of critica
Page 87 and 88:
modern poet. Pound exhorted Barry t
Page 89 and 90:
the case, is deliberately making ou
Page 91 and 92:
Pound's genius was to see Propertiu
Page 93 and 94:
delineate Pound's portrayals as fai
Page 95 and 96:
presence of a continuous patina of
Page 97 and 98:
described by Christine Brooke-Rose.
Page 99 and 100:
10) of their rows over fidelity. Fo
Page 101 and 102:
obsessive desire most critics find
Page 103 and 104:
passing from hand to hand, becomes
Page 105 and 106:
Propertius as Propertius once had C
Page 107 and 108:
saw no viable future for his own ex
Page 109 and 110:
then, these imaginary aesthetes wer
Page 111 and 112:
‗persona,‘ an impersonation of
Page 113 and 114:
difference between his intention an
Page 115 and 116:
itself a Western bourgeois assumpti
Page 117 and 118:
subject. Deleuze's 1977 discussion
Page 119 and 120:
his subjectivity as a blend of fact
Page 121 and 122:
eak occurs in the poet's mind as th
Page 123 and 124:
dogmatic binding and over which to
Page 125 and 126:
Pound‘s impersonality, to use the
Page 127 and 128:
Mill, Jackson notes, finds the conc
Page 129 and 130:
apostrophe to ‗Misery‘ performa
Page 131 and 132:
―Mauberley,‖ the poem‘s narra
Page 133 and 134:
to posit a fictional author being n
Page 135 and 136:
neither Rainey‘s Institutions of
Page 137 and 138:
y Piero della Francesca. Pound was
Page 139 and 140:
E gradment li antichi cavaler roman
Page 141 and 142:
that have not traditionally been co
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
Page 149 and 150:
the meaning of Pound‘s text by co
Page 151 and 152:
Do come, do come. I can see us at B
Page 153 and 154:
the political implications of that
Page 155 and 156:
the winners of its game (148). Beca
Page 157 and 158:
iography and how he can be seen to
Page 159 and 160:
to him is plain: ―News of Nancy?
Page 161 and 162:
view of Pound‘s political beliefs
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
Page 169 and 170:
commemoration is to writing (Derrid
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 and 178:
Ontologies, such as those that belo
Page 179 and 180:
this mystery could only be experien
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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