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Modern poetry is difficult; that’s perhaps the most familiar
characterization of those modernist and postmodernist poetries committed
to thematic and—especially—formal experiment. But if this
judgment seems like old news (and it is), try the following experiment
of your own, if you haven’t previously done so: In your next encounter
with people whose primary work doesn’t involve literature or the arts,
and who ask with genuine interest what period or area of literature
you "specialize in," tell them, whether it’s true or not,
"modernist poetry." To be sure, various periods and genres
in literary history seem foreign or obscure to many intelligent and/or
educated people in the culture at large. Nonetheless, admittedly unscientific
but not entirely random surveys indicate that almost any period-and-genre
answer other than modernist poetry (Renaissance drama or poetry; the
novel since the early eighteenth century; romantic or Victorian literature
in general; etc.) results in far more interested or at least polite
questions than does the response "modernist poetry." For
"modernist poetry" still tends for many common readers to
represent prior frustrated or pointless experiences with what appeared
to them as a willful aesthetic obscurantism, an unjustifiable foregrounding
of difficulty that turned the perhaps already-intimidating enigma
called poetry into a downright hostile wasteland of entirely impenetrable
meanings.
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There’s lots to say about such perceptions, and lots of poetry and
criticism has tried to say it. Consideration of how the questions
at issue relate on one hand to romanticism and on the other to modern
American poetry usefully delimits what could become an overwhelmingly
large subject. And even this narrowed scope will require still-tighter
focus, not to mention some necessarily brutal compression, in order
to avoid book-length treatment. By way of beginning: it’s of course
the case that to those accustomed to reading and working with romantic
literature, difficulty does not seem a quality or characteristic specific
to modernism. Yet it remains true that much modernist and postmodernist
poetry takes as its point of departure an image or caricature of high
romantic poetics that stresses the latter’s apparent emotional immediacy,
over-earnest sincerity, authenticity, and gushy, melodious feelingfulness;
that stresses, in a phrase, the risks inherent in lyric address,
which for countless twentieth-century poets and critics is simply
and balefully synonymous with romanticism and its presumably transparent
"I." But an alternate view has always been present within
experimental modernism and its aftermaths, a view that difficulty
and complexity are actually the raisons d’être of romantic
lyric, and that the real complexities of romantic lyric explicitly
or by default underwrite modernist experimentation (an experimentation
that in its turn honors romanticism’s unprecedented insurgencies precisely
by avoiding the temptations of an easy, conventional neoromanticism).
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To put things this way is already to distinguish between key strains
in contemporary American poetry. And within the poetries most often
treated under the rubric of experimentalism (as opposed to
what is usually discussed as, for lack of a better term, mainstream
poetry), there has for the last two or three decades been a rough
division between "Language" poetry’s critique of the allegedly
"bourgeois-aestheticist" character of romantic and postromantic
subjectivity, and, on the other hand, the practice of an exploratory
poetics for which experiment is virtually synonymous with the stretching
(rather than the abjuration) of lyric subjectivity. For this latter
grouping—and for reasons to be addressed below—lyric practice,
far from eschewing difficulty and complexity, is instead a militant
commitment to them. The governing notion here (invented for modern
purposes precisely in romanticism) is that lyric undertakes literary
art’s go-for-broke artistic and aesthetic effort. On this view (whose
progressive and radical adherents include but are hardly limited to
Kant, Marx, Engels, and the Frankfurt School), lyric attempts simultaneously
to make song think and to make thought sing, in such a way that the
boundaries of extant conceptuality are formally extended through the
critical experience of this emotional-intellectual complex; the formal
process of the experience itself enables the emergence into view of
materials for what can become the post-aesthetic construction of new
concepts (and for the construction of new social dispensations that
might correspond to them).
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The best, most critically responsible way to develop these ideas
would be patiently to survey the romantic and anti-romantic, lyric
and anti-lyric poetics at work inside a representative number of contemporary
American poems. This essay will shirk that more immanent, aesthetically
committed, and systematic manner of proceeding (though it will finally
engage in the close reading of some important poems), because I want
to take up a related matter that has profoundly informed these debates
within poetic experimentalism (and which has also informed the debates
between experimentalism tout court and mainstream poetry):
namely, the place of difficult "theoretical" concepts and
discourse in contemporary poetry and the arts. Controversies about
the difficulties of the last few decades’ theoretical discourse—controversies
over how much, if any, of the difficulty in theoretical writing is
necessary or justifiable or is, on the contrary, merely evidence of
bad prose—have migrated with force into the poetry world. One
can say somewhat schematically that experimental poetry has, from
its own perspectives and for its own needs, been attracted to a good
deal of the philosophy and critical theory so popular in academic
circles. This has frequently led to mainstream charges that contemporary
experimentalism has simply made difficult theory into regrettable
poetry; and it has more perversely seemed to mean—so the mainstream
arguments go—that even good theory causes indifferent or bad poems
(with most twisted honors perhaps being won by the bad theoretical
writing that engenders exponentially bad poetry). As for the discussions
within experimentalism itself, one finds a reprise of the same old
back-and-forth about romanticism (though keyed to standards of sophistication
now often taken from recent theoretical discourse rather than—as
was once the case—from modernist poetry): Is the lyric-romantic
legacy simplistic or complex? Is lyric hopelessly naive, escapist,
and self-deluding, or an inherently difficult enactment of a theoretically
articulated dance-tension between intellection and sense-experience?
Is it more difficult or valuable to transform theoretical precepts
into richly-textured poetic form, or to forego such comforting "aestheticist"
pleasure and baldly "bare the device" by having the poem
use theoretical language and ideas in a relatively direct, undigested—and
thus, aesthetically subversive—manner?
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At all events, the task of this essay will be provisionally to reroute
both paths that these debates have lately tended to take. Rather than
examining how the difficulties of theory may have nurtured or contaminated
recent poetry, or how language or style that might be appropriate
for experimental poetry has liberated or gummed up critical and theoretical
prose, I’d like instead to think about how modern and contemporary
poetry may offer invaluable means for distinguishing between necessary
and spurious difficulty—not only and most obviously in art, but in
theoretical and critical writing themselves. As will continue to be
evident, the modern controversy over kinds of difficulty in art, and
over how we experience and judge them, is a genuinely romantic legacy,
and—inseparably from the ongoing question of lyric—it is perhaps the
mode in which romanticism most powerfully continues to inflect today's
American poetry, aesthetics, and criticism.
* * *
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But it probably needs to be said again, if a bit differently: That
the notorious difficulty of modernist poetry could provide a critical
purchase on recent debates over difficult academic prose seems pretty
dubious. Or worse; the suggested relationship to poetry might prove
congenial to those who overhastily assert that much of contemporary
theoretical discourse in the humanities, pretending to describe sociohistorical
reality, actually commits egregious crimes of genre with every line
it writes: Texts that would otherwise be recognized as impressively
bad prose-poems instead pass for something called theory (or theoretically-informed
analysis). That is, when liberal and Left commentators have criticized
the fashion for what is seen as needless obscurity or difficulty,
the charge of inappropriate or adolescent literariness is often implicitly
or explicitly in play. (I’ll leave aside the somewhat different lines
of critique found in conservative and Right attacks on today’s academic
discourse.) And at least among liberal and Left critics, such charges
are generally not made from a Socratic-Platonic stance of hostility
to the idea that mimesis (artistic representation) might have a right
to participate in, or might have a real contribution to make towards,
knowledge claims. Rather, what is expressed is an essentially Enlightenment
and progressive notion that useful presentations of social, political,
historical, and cultural reality should be offered in as clear and
communicable a manner as possible—so that the greatest possible
number of people can share in such knowledge (and so that they can,
should they so decide, attempt to use that knowledge to change the
world).
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Poetry may be inspirational, but it’s usually not been thought to
provide objective, empirically verifiable facts that can be shared
or transparently communicated. And ever since romanticism, the communicability
even of poetry’s inspiration has been questioned, precisely on the
grounds of whether self-consciously difficult modern art can convey
anything of consequence to a broad (and hence potentially world-changing)
audience. That was already the crux of a century-long Left debate
before anyone had ever heard the names Althusser, Lacan, Derrida,
Irigaray, Foucault, Kristeva, Benjamin, Adorno, Zizek, et al. It might
thus prove useful, in revisiting that debate and examining its relevance
to discussions of contemporary academic prose, to consider a telling
literary instance that arises in a decidedly unacademic setting. Though
the issue scarcely appears in the film’s reception history, Martin
Ritt’s Norma Rae (1979) meditates on, and in subtle ways highlights,
the meanings of poetry’s difficulty, and it does so while trying to
communicate broadly about socioeconomic, political, and cultural struggles.
You may recall that Norma Rae is a fictionalized account of
the effort by the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU)
to organize the then-largest textile manufacturer in the South, the
J.P. Stevens Company. (Years after the film’s release, the ACTWU merged
with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union to form UNITE,
the Union of Needletrade and Industrial Textile Employees). The film’s
fictional protagonist, Norma Rae Webster, is a composite of several
women workers who had participated in attempts to organize J.P. Stevens,
most notably, Crystal Lee Sutton.[1]
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One night, after she’s thrown in her lot with the union and is working
round the clock for its cause, Norma Rae browses through union organizer
Reuben Warshowsky’s volume of Dylan Thomas’s poetry. She asks if Dylan
Thomas is "hard to read," and—finding that Thomas does
seem difficult to understand—asks, "Why should I bother?"
Reuben casually but pointedly responds, "Maybe he has something
to say to you." Their repartee furthers not only the film’s leitmotif
of the social import of advanced levels of literacy, of opportunities
for education that for the working class have tended to go hand in
hand with the conquest of some measure of industrial democracy and
economic justice; the conversation also reiterates the film’s earlier,
insistent focus on the difficulty of understanding words (and,
in turn, the difficulty of finding words that will communicate ideas
that unquestionably need to be communicated): Standing outside the
plant and passing out union literature early in the action, Reuben
had heard a then-uncommitted Norma Rae call out to him, after she
had glanced at his proffered leaflet, "Hey, there’s too many
big words; if I don’t understand it, they [her fellow workers] ain’t
gonna understand it." The next time Reuben had given the still-undecided
Norma Rae a leaflet, he’d furthered the same banter and theme: "I
took your advice; I think I got it down to two syllables." "One’s
better," she had parried. Yet finally it will be the two syllables
of one word, which she’s defiantly written on pasteboard and held
high for all inside the plant to see —UNION—that
causes the workers to stop their machines and that gets Norma Rae
accosted, fired, arrested, booked, and jailed. Terminated and therefore
technically no longer an employee eligible to vote for the union,
Norma Rae concludes the film standing outside the factory gates with
Reuben, overhearing the jubilant shouts that tell of the union’s election
victory by vocalizing— by chanting—that two-syllable
word, union. The film then ends with Reuben’s promising, at
their parting, to send Norma Rae the volume of Dylan Thomas; she tells
him not to bother—because she’s already gone out and bought her
own.
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Now, Dylan Thomas is hardly an exemplar of modernist esotericism.
On the contrary, precisely the combination of his perceived accessibility
even amid moments of alluring obscurity, his able reconjurations of
traditional notions of bardic romantic oracularism and lyric mellifluousness,
his progressive sociopolitical stances, and, of course, his hard-drinking
image, led to Thomas’s popularity in activist trade union, Left, and
Marxian circles in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S.[2]
That’s why it’s so intriguing that Ritt and the film’s screenwriters
(Harriet Frank, Jr., and Irving Ravetch), well aware of this tradition
of Left Thomas-reception, nonetheless make Thomas into a sign of difficulty.
As Norma Rae retells a classic Left-Enlightenment scenario
(in this case, via an encounter with Thomas’ poetry), hard-won literary
education or aesthetically-articulated insight parallels, or somehow
even contributes to, hard-won victory in social struggle. But, significantly,
the film’s conclusion doesn’t erase or resolve the question of why
either contest (aesthetic or social) has been hard-won, which is to
say that it doesn’t erase the question of difficulty. For what ultimately
persists is the difficulty—indeed, the seeming impossibility—of
the neat integration of realms or levels of experience, thought, and
action.
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Having given almost everything to the organizing struggle, having
been the key activist in that struggle, Norma Rae finally finds
herself standing literally outside the struggle’s central physical
and material location. As the film closes, she’s outside the factory
grounds, banished not by a defection from class struggle to literary
delectation but by the company’s retaliatory action for her having
voiced, written, and inspirationally communicated the union’s message;
and as she ever more definitively links herself to Dylan Thomas and
poetry, she now—in a charged inversion of the old J.S. Mill formulation—can
only "overhear" the triumphant public celebration of her
fellow workers back inside the plant. It would be exactly wrong to
see this emphatically literary and aesthetic "overhearing" as what
is today typically (and, far too often, facilely) stigmatized as "bourgeois,
self-cultivated transcendence," wherein a literary or aesthetic "ideology"
of autonomous separation supposedly trumps committed engagement with
material, sociopolitical reality. Because in the most rigorous, tightly-constructed
manner, the film has ensured from the start that the literary and
the sociopolitical constantly articulate, without ever determining,
each other. Neither causes the other; neither demands an escape from,
or triumph over, the other. Instead, the film manages to do what critical
aesthetic semblance—critical mimesis, critical artistic representation—does
when it’s really working: It makes the audience feel, as an
apparent intellectual-emotional insight (parallel, here, to Norma
Rae’s own insight), that the aesthetic and the social necessarily
comprehend, translate, or, on some ultimate level of the characters’
own experience, voice one another. In that sense, aesthetic experience
undertakes the difficult task of making or fortifying subjects’ felt
capacity for transformative relationships with, and to, conceptual
knowledge (and to the empirical world to which conceptual knowledge
corresponds). It is among Norma Rae's most remarkable decisions
that the film chooses at once to allegorize and enact just such artistic-aesthetic
ambition—this film's own ambition—through a subtle yet profound
cinematic conjuring of the theme, image, sound, and felt presence
of lyric poetry.
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As usual, the issues are more than academic. I first saw Norma
Rae at the time of its initial release, at a moment of embarking
upon what I’d assumed would be a permanently postliterary trajectory,
one that, as it turned out, did occupy the better part of a
decade spent in law school and as a fledgling labor lawyer. The fervent
debates over Norma Rae (its basic authenticity; its decisions
about addressing "ultimate" matters of sociopolitical causation;
its chosen modalities for representing workers’ at-the-machine, in-the-meeting-hall,
and at-home experience, not to mention issues of race, gender, and
regionalism; its overall approach to the cinematic means and relations
of artistic production; etc.) that I’d avidly followed in film, art,
and political journals in some ways paralleled, and in some ways split
off entirely from, the astonishing reception the film enjoyed (immediately
and for an impressively long time thereafter) across wide sectors
of labor and in the labor movement itself. One could point to various
American films that, at least as courageously and perhaps even more
militantly, narrate labor’s story (Salt of the Earth and Harlan
County, USA come immediately to mind, though their genre and historical
differences from Norma Rae—their respectively semi-documentary
and documentary character, along with the McCarthyite context informing
Salt of the Earth’s production and distribution battles—distinguish
them from Norma Rae). But quite simply, virtually no other
American post-McCarthy labor film seems so effectively to have reached
its intended potential audiences: namely, people currently experiencing,
or likely to experience, organizing drives in their own workplaces.
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The rapidity with which Norma Rae became a touchstone, and
then the ways it sustained that status, not only within the labor
movement but also for unorganized workers, was little short of remarkable.
An extraordinary number of those who have worked in the labor movement,
or in government agencies or independent organizations involved with
labor, or in occupational safety and health and related areas, have
testified to this phenomenon. Within a year of the film’s release,
the number of workers who began explicitly referring to or riffing
off the film’s story and dialogue (during union campaigns, all the
way to the sort of National-Labor-Relations-Board election portrayed
in Norma Rae’s penultimate scene), was unprecedented—as,
again, countless participating workers, as well as union, management,
and Labor Board representatives, have noted. (I vividly recall experiencing
this personally, and recall hearing scores of labor-movement and Labor
Board colleagues from around the country report—in a process
that spanned years—about having witnessed near-identical instances
of Norma-Rae invocation, allusion, and applied interpretation,
quite frequently on or near the shop floor.) Perhaps more remarkable
is the fact that by all accounts this phenomenon continues today,
twenty-three years after the film’s release. And although Crystal
Lee Sutton had vigorous disagreements with the film’s portrayal of
the character that was based in large part on her, it is also the
case that Norma Rae’s long afterlife has created successive
waves of interest in Sutton’s biography and activism; in response,
Sutton has continued as a notable presence in labor struggles around
the country. She was, for example, one of the keynote speakers at
a June 2001 march-and-rally in Columbia, South Carolina that was called
to defend the Charleston Five. (The Charleston Five are activist members
of a largely African-American local union in the International Longshoremen’s
Association, against whom an extremely conservative South Carolina
state attorney general brought Riot-Act charges after a Charleston
judge had refused to enjoin or otherwise curtail their picketing activities
in a 1999 labor dispute.) Meanwhile, in a striking number of cases,
the Norma Rae references made by workers (and by union representatives)
have involved the question of the character Norma Rae’s reading,
of the way that her burgeoning literary interest functions as a dynamic
sign, so to speak, of her participation in the fight to secure some
measure of a simultaneously collective and personal autonomy.
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One could say that the powerfully-felt significance of Norma Rae’s
poetry-reading is a palpable, yet difficult or complicated thing for
working people to explain; but the truth is that it’s an inherently
difficult thing for anyone to explain. It bears emphasizing that it’s
not the matter of seeking to attain factual knowledge in relation
to sociopolitical struggles that’s so complicated; however hard certain
facts may be to come by, and however complicated are the particular
facts themselves, the necessity of getting them, and the problems
caused when they’re unavailable, are pretty obvious. What’s more difficult
to express is why people’s own aesthetic experience can seem
so dramatically to be at stake in social, political, and historical
matters. Indeed, this difficulty of stating (let alone in a descriptive
and accessible vocabulary and form) just how and why such things can
feel like they are so inextricably related is one of the oldest conundrums
of literary and aesthetic theory. The enigma is so persistent—and
has been so central to politically-intended art and criticism—that
one begins to understand the paradox of the orthodox Marxian critic
Ernst Fischer inaugurating his most important literary-aesthetic work
by quoting, with surprising and disarming approval, the emphatically
uncommitted artist Jean Cocteau: "Poetry is indispensable—if
I only knew what for" (qtd. in Fischer 7). Well before asking
the question of whether difficult writing might best present
the difficulty of this difficult subject matter, one might observe
that there has often enough been a rough consensus about the difficulty
of the subject matter: the difficulty, that is, of understanding
and articulating the aesthetic’s status—as individuals and collectivities
experience it—vis-à-vis the sociopolitical and the historical.
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Precisely such difficulty has been theorized (from the romantic era
of Kant’s third Critique, to the modernist period of Benjamin,
Adorno, and the Frankfurt School—and beyond) as the central problem
of modern art and aesthetic theory. Generally speaking, in these theorizations
of what Kant had initially understood as a "reflective aesthetic
judgment" paradoxically synonymous with estrangement and defamiliarization,
the aesthetic has been grasped as the felt-as-necessary (but notoriously
difficult to account for) "bridge" between nature and freedom,
cognition and morality, theoretical and practical reason, fact and
value. In short, the aesthetic wants to bridge objective-conceptual
knowledge (or the objective world to which conceptual knowledge is
meant to correspond) and the subjective human capacity for a critical
agency that would be more than arbitrary in relation to objective
knowledge of existing reality. The key notion is that aesthetic thought-experience,
while feeling itself to be cast in or aiming for conceptual ("objective"
or objectively-oriented) thought, is not yet substantively-objectively
conceptual. In proceeding via the feeling that it is objective
(that it is keyed to judgments that could be universally shared),
aesthetic thought-experience maintains the form—but only the
form—of conceptual thought; this formality in relation to substantive
conceptuality makes the aesthetic effectively quasiconceptual. The
inherently experimental exercise of that "formal" experience
can produce, to paraphrase Kant, a wealth of thought-emotion that
cannot be reduced to any determinate, presently-existing substantive
concept, and that thus can allow for the emergence or reconfiguration
of the materials for a subsequent, postaesthetic construction of new
concepts and the sociopolitical dispensations that would correspond
to them.[3]
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It may be ironic that some recent defenses of apparent difficulty
in academic writing have turned for support to Frankfurt School texts,
because Frankfurt briefs for the necessary difficulties in postromantic
and modernist art, and in critical theory, actually tend to apply
or extend all those initial Kantian-romantic concerns about truth,
objectivity, and universality in ways largely inimical to most Left
postmodernist discourse. But this in turn leads us to inquire anew
about why Benjamin’s and Adorno’s modern-Marxian restatements of indubitably
romantic ideas so often make poetry—lyric poetry in particular—a
special case within a Marxified Kantian view or theory of how art
and aesthetic experience attempt the difficult task of bridging,
and the task of stretching (or stretching past), the bounds of extant
concepts (of gesturing toward the construction of new concepts that
would be more than instrumental but also more than arbitrary). (Here
I can only assert something that will receive full elaboration elsewhere:
Contrary to so much of contemporary Marxian and Marxian-inflected
theory’s "anti-aestheticist" hostility to aesthetic experience
and aesthetic judgment, Marx himself intentionally marshals the aporetic
but by no means paralyzing structure of Kantian reflective aesthetic
judgment precisely for the "theory of praxis" announced
in his Theses on Feuerbach.) For the romantic and postromantic
traditions of poetics in which Benjamin and Adorno participate, modern
lyric ambition stands as a, or even the, high-risk enterprise,
the "go-for-broke-game" ["va-banque-Spiel"],
of literary art: The lyric poem must work coherently in and with the
medium—language—that human beings use to articulate objective
concepts, even while the lyric explores the most subjective, nonconceptual,
and ephemeral phenomena. This theoretical or philosophical difficulty,
concerning how simultaneously to think objectivity and subjectivity,
also arises practically as lyric’s great problem of form-construction:
How—with language alone as medium—to build a solid, convincing
artistic structure out of something as evanescent as subjective song
and how, in the bargain, to delineate or objectivate the impressively
fluid contents of capitalist modernity? How, spontaneously yet rigorously,
to make thought sing and to make song think? For the Frankfurt School
critics, romantic and postromantic lyric dramatizes with special intensity
modern aesthetic quasiconceptuality’s more general attempt to stretch
conceptual thought proper; this special intensity arises from lyric’s
constitutive need musically to stretch "objective" conceptual thought’s
very medium, language—to stretch it quasiconceptually all the way
towards affect and song, but without relinquishing any of the rigor
of conceptual intellection.[4]
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Benjamin and Adorno go on to argue that high capitalist modernity
and its unprecedented acceleration of the abstracting processes of
commodification (the "reification" not only of objects,
products, and people, but of thought and language themselves), along
with the concomitant "loss of aura" (the collapse into immediacy
of a previously charged, critically enabling, auratic-aesthetic distance)
require that Kantian-romantic aesthetic difficulty—the difficulty
of grasping and negotiating the transition between types of knowledge
and realms of experience—be supplemented. What, in a later, faster,
and technologically more complex modernity, is Kantian-romantic difficulty
to be supplemented with? Apparently, with a lot more difficulty:
more difficulty within art, and within the judgment, interpretation,
and criticism that art calls forth; and all this for the purpose of
accurately conveying the problems bedeviling the attempt critically
to cognize an increasingly opaque modernity. And as far as Benjamin
and Adorno are concerned, a crucial chapter in this modern aesthetic-social
history involves Charles Baudelaire’s barely postromantic lyric poetry,
where romantic lyric’s presumed condition of possibility—the
availability of an auratic, reflective experience that in its turn
makes possible a noninstrumental, potentially emancipatory capacity
for constructing new conceptual-objective knowledge—seems to
have disappeared. Hence the Frankfurt focus on Baudelaire: Baudelaire,
who for his subject "ch[ooses] the modern itself"; who abjures
or scorns an already-known socio-literary language, so that his "lyric
poetry is a slap in the face not only to the juste milieu but
also to all bourgeois social sentiment," yet whose "tragic,
arrogant mask" of advanced technique is nonetheless—indeed,
is in consequence—"truer to the masses" than conventional
"'poor people’s poetry'" (and this because Baudelaire’s
experimentalism proves capable of bringing into aesthetic experience
the new historical reality unavailable to a conventional poetics,
a conventional poetics effectively if unwittingly determined by reigning
concepts of what social conditions are or have been) ("On Lyric
Poetry and Society" 44, 45-46; "Rede Über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft" 87, 89-90).[5]
The much-vaunted Frankfurt preference for modernist artworks of great
complexity is the preference for a Baudelairean art still intent on
risking experimental enactments of romantic aura together with mimetic
reflections on postromantic modernity’s most anti-auratic, advanced
technical-productive developments. This is a preference for an art
that, while refusing to give up romantic aura’s ghost (which is to
say, while continuing its attempts to differentiate itself from reification
and the reified communicative discourse that have tended to vitiate
aura), also views productive and technological modernity as having
become part of art’s very materials.[6]
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To say this much is to say that the Frankfurt School’s reputation
for difficulty (a reputation that is not the only source, but is certainly
a crucial source and touchstone in today’s debates about academic
prose) is best understood in relation to the Frankfurters’ romanticism-derived
emphasis on the aesthetic. And while this clearly involves the taking
up and foregrounding of self-consciously difficult artworks of the
Baudelairean line —and of a properly aesthetic critical prose
aiming stylistically to dramatize the defamiliarizing experience of
the artworks at issue—it is not only artworks themselves that
constitute the aesthetic sphere. Benjamin’s and Adorno’s attempts
to contribute to Marxian-derived projects that seek historically,
sociologically, economically, and politically to grasp capitalist
modernity are always to some extent broached through an aesthetic
insight that is prior to, or broader than, their experience of individual
artworks or of artistic tradition more broadly. This ur-aesthetic
and romantic inflection informs their criticism not merely because
Benjamin and Adorno are from virtually their earliest years profoundly
and preternaturally aesthetic thinkers and writers; nor does it occur
because of some belief they hold in the sheer superiority of aesthetic
modes of thought and presentation.
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Rather, the crucial point is that Frankfurt analyses of sociohistorical
phenomena tend to concern themselves with human subjects’ abilities
critically to take in and respond not only to the local but especially
to the larger systemic situations that confront them. This capacity
for reflective and potentially activating response is conceived as
the possibility of an act of understanding that would proceed in a
more than merely instrumental, and in a more than merely arbitrary
manner; that would proceed, in other words, in a manner directed toward
meeting at least the minimal requirements for critical agency. In
the quite Kantian-romantic tradition that those in and around the
Frankfurt School generally share, the precise designation for such
thought-experience (where subjectivity itself tries critically to
understand its animating, quasiconceptual relationship to concepts
and objective entities like capitalist society) is aesthetic.
An aesthetically-generated or informed approach is by no means the
only valid path that one could or should take when examining and writing
about social phenomena. But for the Frankfurt School’s modernist extensions
of romantic theory, the aesthetic is by definition the key
modality for the investigation and enabling of subjective,
critical human capacities to process intellectually and emotionally
(and to work transformatively with) the overarching objective
structural realities of modern society.
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A number of conclusions would seem to follow. First, Frankfurt-School
commitments to difficulty do not imply that economics, history, sociology,
political science, and the theories attendant on them (and on adjacent
disciplines) should be characterized willy-nilly by difficult and/or
aesthetically-inflected writing. For the Frankfurt School, the aesthetic’s
difficult modalities can challenge one-sidedly positivist analyses
in which a crucial subjective element may have essentially been ignored
or banished; Frankfurt studies in fact often dedicated themselves
to correcting such positivist one-sidedness. But this means that there
is no warrant for believing that difficult academic or theoretical
writing is inherently required, advisable, or even justifiable, much
less inherently progressive or revolutionary. In short, the justification
for difficult writing depends on the materials the writing seeks to
present, and on judgments about one’s intended audience for the presentation.
(In that light, perhaps too little attention has been paid in the
United States to the ways in which members of the Frankfurt School—even
those most identified with "Mandarinism"—while trying
to remain faithful to the complicated concepts and theories they were
developing, nonetheless attempted regularly to modulate their discursive
registers and to pursue opportunities to address non-academic audiences
via the mass media, most notably, radio and newsmagazines.)[7]
-
Even where complex modern artworks are not the central concern, if
the materials under study nonetheless contain an important aesthetic
element—if the materials are in significant part composed of
or oriented towards human beings’ attempts subjectively to imagine
their way into the assimilation and potential re-formation of concepts
that correspond to objectively-existing social phenomena—then
modalities of aesthetic difficulty may well be called for. And if
one traces the course of various Frankfurt disputes—even or especially
those between Benjamin and Adorno, over technical-mechanical reproducibility
and over the need simultaneously to engage the questions of aura,
economic structure, and the aesthetically-stimulated reconfiguration
of materials for the construction of new concepts—it turns out
that all those difficult dances with aesthetic subjectivity, quasiconceptuality,
and the not-yet-formed concept are meant to serve an expanded, noninstrumental
notion of "objective" conceptuality and reason. This is,
in effect, the project quietly hinted at in Dialectic of Enlightenment
and more explicitly articulated in Negative Dialectics: an
imagining of the ways in which Enlightenment conceptuality or reason
might examine and critique itself and its own tendencies towards sheerly
instrumentalist and identitarian thought; an imagining of the ways
in which conceptuality might cease to repress those areas of experience
and reality left behind after they’ve been conceptualized; in sum,
an imagining of how scientific (or scientistic-objectivist) conceptuality
might remain in dialogue with aesthetic quasiconceptuality, with the
thought-mode that stands formally for the materials or areas of experience
that conceptuality tends to leave behind after having intellectually
"dominated" them. As I’ve shown at length elsewhere, Adorno’s
and Benjamin’s debate over the latter’s essay "The Paris of the
Second Empire in Baudelaire"—their debate over competing
versions and approaches to lyric aura—is actually a debate over
the possibility of continuing to expand conceptuality beyond determinist
parameters. Significantly, that debate leads Benjamin not only to
write his brilliant "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (with
its animating and fruitful tension between the disappearance of romantic
lyric aura and an artistic-critical re-posing of aura precisely in
aura’s wake). It also—on his own account—directly leads
Benjamin to think and write a romantic-messianic critique of linear,
deterministic "progress" and its presumably unbroken "continuum
of concepts," a critique that will be known as the "Theses
on the Philosophy of History" ["Über den Begriff der
Geschichte"] and that will become a key source-text for later
Frankfurt efforts to understand, critique, and transform Enlightenment
conceptuality and reason (from Dialectic of Enlightenment all
the way to Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, and The
Aesthetic Dimension).[8]
-
As far as Benjamin, Adorno, and their cohort are concerned, all these
ideas depend in part on a criticism that takes care to write some
very precise, concrete, crackling prose. The desideratum stems at
least in part from Benjamin’s theorization (which Benjamin often repeats
and which Adorno constantly echoes) of the constellation and
force-field. Contemporary theoretical discourse rightly understands
the theory and practice of the constellation as an intellectual attempt
nondeterministically to identify and dynamically connect elements
(historical, socioeconomic, cultural) that are not initially given
as relational, but that, when animated—constellated—into
conjunction create or reveal a signifying force-field. That force-field
for its part illuminates the larger social reality whose elements
have been brought together in affinity and tension (rather than in
a misleadingly integrative totalization) to make the force-field visible
in the first place. After our previous discussion, it may not be surprising
to recall that one of the Frankfurters’ key models for understanding
how concept-expanding constellations of critical thought are
made, and for how force-fields are created, is art: not least, the
"go-for-broke" art of lyric poetry, with its special relationship
to conceptuality’s basic medium, language. And while Benjamin and
Adorno emphasize the need for criticism to learn aesthetic
lessons from lyric’s manner of constructing constellations, they nonetheless
inveigh against an aestheticist identification between criticism
and lyric; they caution against self-deluding modalities in which
the critic tries to write as if he or she were a poet working (even
if dialectically-critically) with aesthetic semblance [Schein].
From a Frankfurt perspective, critical writing that invokes the concepts
of the constellation and force-field asks to be judged by standards
as rigorous as those that Benjamin and Adorno apply to lyric poetry
and other forms and genres of art.
-
In Benjamin’s and Adorno’s view, artworks are to be judged by how
well they accomplish their difficult constellative task of formally
enacting art’s determinate indeterminacy, art’s exact but capacious—and
sociopolitically enabling—ambiguity (a "precise ambiguity"
that must be, à la Coleridge, spontaneously enacted
or forged anew with each work, yet that also springs in some general
way from the fact that art pushes toward an expanded conceptuality
while itself remaining quasiconceptual). Criticism likewise seeks,
with a matching recourse to experiment and precision, to construct
constellations of critical thought; but unlike art, criticism seeks
to do this essentially without semblance. Criticism conceptually
articulates the contributions toward an expanded conceptuality
that art has generated mimetically, nondiscursively. Criticism
thus follows art in open-endedly and nondeterministically constructing
constellations that are in no way pregiven; but criticism’s precisions
finally seek to enunciate conceptually what art has, in accord with
its own character, quite precisely constructed as quasiconceptual.[9]
-
At any rate, criticism’s profoundly aesthetic dimension, which stems
from its affinities with artistic practice and aesthetic theory, becomes
ever more evident when one considers Benjamin’s often-stated specification
of what, within criticism, constellative form requires, of how and
why it creates a force-field (and this is a specification Adorno will
time and again make his own): in writing that seeks to present constellative
critical thought, each sentence should point back—formally and
substantively—to a constantly-moving center from which that sentence
has all along radiated. That’s no small task; in fact, it’s pretty
damn near impossible, as it perhaps would figure to be, given that
Benjamin develops this ideal of exact, imaginative, in-motion form
largely through his formidable engagements with the formidable artists
of the Baudelairean lyric counter-tradition. Benjamin’s formulation
also stands as one of the great modernist, constructivist reimaginings
of that familiar old lyric-aesthetic friend whom it thereby radically
reinvents: romantic organic form. In Adorno’s musical formulation,
such constructivist reimagining of what is still really organic form
appears, in advanced modernity, as the simultaneously dissociative
and structural principle of dissonant composition.[10]
-
This would be the moment to turn, from the sketching of overviews
and principles of romantic and modern poetics, towards treatment of
concrete examples from Benjamin and Adorno: towards a detailed engagement
with their discussions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry
and the other arts; and then, towards coordination of such a treatment
with fuller consideration of contemporary academic theory’s attempts
to apply or enact these Frankfurt notions of difficulty that owe so
much to romantic and modern poetic history. Limitations of space unfortunately
make it impossible to do all that here; and they likewise prevent
me in this essay from satisfactorily taking up one of the most significant
challenges that Benjamin and Adorno set for themselves and others:
that criticism about aesthetic or aesthetically-informed matters should
immerse itself in the problems of contemporary art, including the
art of poetry. For now, the most minimal gestures in that last direction
will have to suffice, and to serve as a provisional conclusion about
the historical connections between romantic and twentieth-century
approaches to poetic, aesthetic, and sociopolitical difficulty.
-
"Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry
would present difficulties" ["Baudelaire hat mit Lesern
gerchnet, die die Lektüre von Lyrik vor Schwierigkeiten stellt"]
("On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" 155; "Über einige
Motive bei Baudelaire" 607). Benjamin took his life within two
years after writing that well-known first sentence of "On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire"; Adorno for his part spent a good portion
of the next three decades trying to unpack and trace the meanings
of those difficulties for—and in—the modern art that
succeeded romanticism and postromanticism. The two short texts presented
immediately below come from later moments of the history Benjamin
and Adorno had been investigating; these texts are separated by almost
thirty years, and are authored by two of the United States’ most important
contemporary poets, both of whom, though they belong to different
generations, are known for their filiations with the longue durée
experimental traditions of romantic and modern lyric (and for their
more-than-passing interest in what Frankfurt School aesthetics has
itself meant for post-1945 poetry). Indeed, it cannot be gainsaid
that these texts are by artists who are known for both the musicality
and difficulty of their work, and who have always taken pains to underscore
their poetry’s links to romanticism and romantic difficulty. If the
following texts seem far from mainstream or direct styles of lyric
address, they nevertheless take up the same romantic problem (albeit
very much further along the continuum) that Norma Rae discovers and
voices in her fraught initial encounter with the nontransparency of
even a Dylan Thomas lyric. First, a passage from Barbara Guest’s book-length
poem Symbiosis (2000), a work made in collaboration with the
painter Laurie Reed:
The difficult! aathe difficult!
  loosen
the ropes that entangle it,
aaatear them down from the mast!
The
schooner off its route,
adios to the bird of prey,
aaflies
in another direction, the nineteenth
century
aawears
a plaid cap.[11]
-
Guest—now in her 80s—is one of the original members of
the "New York School" of poets; the New York School has,
of course, been made almost synonymous with the advent of postmodernism
in American poetry (though it is significant that Guest, often deemed
the School’s most aesthetically fearless and formally uncompromising
artist, is also thought of as its most relentless modernist,
and hence as its best candidate for matching, phrase by phrase and
layering by layering, the formidable complexity and difficulty in
the earlier modernisms of a Pound or Olson). Here, characteristically,
she swings with such grace of musical phrase and gentle backbeat that
the gravity of her subject seems to register only recursively. Playfully
and exclamatorily turning "difficult" from adjectival description
into a substantive that is then itself made to signify a quality or
state of being, Guest uses both sound values and the suspended pause
of the page’s blank space to make "difficult!" virtually
chime with "entangle it." She sets the pleasing suggestions
of sonic and visual affinity in intriguing tension with the perhaps
paradoxical command to loosen the bonds that entangle "the difficult"
(disentangled, will Difficulty Unbound prove more—or less—difficult?
Will it move farther from, or closer to us? What of the fact that
the ropes entangling it seem to be made of these verse-lines themselves?).
Meanwhile, the increasingly complicated—yet increasingly mellifluous,
sensually serpentine—commingling of pleasure and problem seems
to suggest a triangulation of the present moment (the contemporary
perils and beckonings of song and thought) with two crucial earlier
moments of history (and of literary history): Homer singing about
Odysseus’ self-torturing attempt to know the sirens’ song without
being fatally dashed against the rocks; and the deathships' mascot-albatrosses
in the flights of Coleridgean and Baudelairean song.
-
If Guest implicitly shades in the Homeric instance as the ancient
or archaic foundation-stone in this structure of music-and-dilemma
(a structure which yields, among other things, musical dilemma
as both artistic and social problem), her more charged historical
gesture casts the Coleridgean and, especially, the Baudelairean instance
not just as absurdly outdated ("the nineteenth/ century/ wears
a plaid cap") but as positively archaic in their turn. Indeed,
for the nineteenth-century or Baudelairean flaneur-figure,
with all its cool-culture cachet (not least in its repeated rediscovery
and celebration during the last three decades of poetics and criticism),
to be pictured now in a plaid cap is playfully but insistently
to have the "fli[ght] in another direction" operate to make
"the nineteenth/ century" (whose very enjambment conveys
its being reduced to pieces of itself) more archaic than the
Odyssey. Or, perhaps more devastatingly, it is (in line with
Benjamin’s analysis of what had once made Baudelaire so modern) our
moment that is archaic and the Homeric which is modern, while the
presumably modernist-archaic epoch of flaneurisme (so imbricated,
in Benjamin’s thinking, with the emergence of both modernism and Marxism)
has become that trivial thing, the simply quaint or comically outdated:
"a plaid cap." The exacting construction of syntactical
indeterminacies drives home the poem’s exploration of the ambiguous
cross-directionality of the phenomena at issue, quite pointedly on
the model of ships crossing in the night (is it that "schooner"
or "the bird of prey" that actually "flies in another
direction" and gives us to understand the plaid-cap nature of
a nineteenth century that will apparently last just as long as postmodern
celebrations of it—celebrations, that is, of a certain aesthetic-political
flaneurisme?). In any case, Guest’s stripped-down but sinuous
lyric, re-accessing the oldest and most troubling riddles in both
poetic and sociocultural history, works from a longstanding and recognizably
romantic nexus of music, meditation, and difficulty to ask again about
what has changed and what is new—and about how to ask that question
itself.[12]
-
And here is the poem "for," from "The Brown Book"
section of Michael Palmer's 1974 volume The Circular Gates:
for . . .
This is difficult but not impossible: coffee
childhood; in the woods there’s a bird;
its song stops you and makes you blush
and so on; it's her
small and dead behind the roses
better left alone; we wander around the park
and out of our mouths come blood and smoke
and sounds; small children and giants
young mothers and big sisters
will be walking in circles next to the water
Palmer—one of the most-admired poets writing today in English (a status
recently codified by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass' poem "The
Palmer Method"), and a member of the Chancellors’ Board of the Academy
of American Poets—began to come to prominence in the early 1970s, as
a new voice extending aspects of the experimental lyric practice of
the "San Francisco Renaissance" (most associated with the great later-modernist
yet unabashedly romantic Robert Duncan, to whom Palmer was extraordinarily
close until Duncan’s 1988 death). The Circular Gates, with its
epigraph from one of the volume’s abiding presences, the great Left,
modernist poet César Vallejo ("Toda la canción/cuadrada
en tres silencios" ["All the song/quartered in three silences"]),
was one of Palmer’s first books.
-
"Coffee/ childhood" is indeed "difficult but not impossible"
to wrap one’s mind around; the two don’t tend logically or sequentially
to go together. Except that they do, retrospectively: in the aftermath
of thought-provoking, madeleine-spiked cups of coffee that fuel the
view back towards the past. Such retrospection here moves somewhat
eerily, if not surprisingly, into nostalgia for lyric’s own vulgar-modern
roots; it moves, that is, to echoes of Dante’s "wood" and
haunted-forest birdsong and common tongue. Yet poetry’s historical
lyricizations of birdsong also appear here as the object of critique,
a self-mockery at once gentle and unsettling, as the straightforwardness
of Palmer’s language not only undercuts any possible divineness in
this comedy but also shifts quite explicitly to the language of parody
and cliché: "makes you blush/ and so on"; and then,
disturbingly, we pass from parody to something noirish, violent, troublingly
ambiguous (is the "her" of "her/small and dead behind
the roses" a girl, a woman, the bird, overly-romanticized birdsong
in modernity, institutional-cliché birdsong?). In its direct
and slightly clipped and then periodically more expansive rhythms
and diction, the poem moves from enunciations of imagistic strangeness
towards full-blooded Surrealism: towards "mouths" "out
of" which emerge "blood and smoke" (and, only at that
point, out of which also emerge audible articulations—"sounds");
towards a pairing of "children and giants" that turns what
otherwise might merely be a slightly asymmetrical coupling ("young
mothers and big sisters") into a jointure that helps unfold an
arresting other-logic.
-
Progressing through vocabularies of estrangement and parody and dissonant
critique, and with a start-and-stop irregular metrics that nonetheless
makes felt a coherent rhythmic expansion and contraction of thought,
Palmer’s almost-deadpan delivery yields weavings and phrasings that
stretch from a classic Surrealism to his own, remade-again language:
of fable, Grimms fairy-tale, philosophical meditation, singsong nursery
rhyme, Webernesque condensation. With the final line’s return to an
expanded length we catch up to find we’ve all along been treading
a homeopathically artificial path, a classically romantic process
that has, paradoxically, had us traveling backwards-forwards towards
breath-song’s circulations around nature’s life-source: ". .
. small children and giants/young mothers and big sisters/will be
walking in circles next to the water."
-
Much more is at work in these ten lines, and those additional elements
could be felt without specialized knowledge of poetic history. But
such knowledge would help one better describe the virtuosic
formal layerings that contribute decisively to the reader’s sensing
of a charged and ghostly echolalia. For Palmer has pillaged and translated
the majority of these lines from Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations,
adding crucial components to them, torquing them differently, and—perhaps
most ambitiously—imagining and working out the sedimented form-
and content-effects that will carry over or be created when he re-places
Rimbaud’s already modernist prose-poem passages into still-more-modern
verse lines (in ways suggesting that, at however subterranean
a level, the formal transposition or retranslation is itself crucial
in order to convey not only estrangement, but also—and equally
a reimagining of romantic vocation— song’s self-renewal, melody’s
altered, stagger-step yet weirdly elegant re-emergence from song’s
wake and its own self-critique). If experimental lyric’s re-posing
and exercising of such formal aesthetic dynamics and capacities can
indeed prove "difficult but not impossible," it may also,
through its work, help demonstrate—or stimulate—a critical
subjectivity that asks about how to know the coordinates of a much-changed
world, and about how to refashion knowledge-processes themselves.[13]
With such necessary, and necessarily complex explorations, contemporary
poetry rededicates itself to what an earlier stage of modernism had
likewise taken from romanticism: a commitment to the challenge—at
once aesthetic and sociopolitical—of what is difficult.
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