Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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СКАЧАТЬ the external world, the poem was the site of a distinct experience, wholly determined by the inner dialectic of its elements. Poetry, then, was similar to painting as “a pattern of resolved stresses,” that is, as an ever-evolving matrix of “resolutions and balances and harmonizations” that submitted to no extrinsic standard or preconceived system (203).

      Cleanth Brooks’s reference to modernist painting marked the similarity between the formalism of the New Critics and the defense of abstract art offered by high modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg.⁴⁵ Modernism, for both Greenberg and Brooks, meant purity, self-definition, and self-criticism, that is, the willingness “to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art.”⁴⁶ In an endless series of reviews throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the famed New York art critic famously outlined the basics of abstract painting—its all-over composition, its flatness, and its optical effect—that marked its autonomy. Equally worried about the gross assimilation of art for political or entertainment purposes, Greenberg outlined the means by which modern artists assured “that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.” This involved a “radical reduction” of the medium itself.⁴⁷ Most important, abstract artists, according to Greenberg, had correctly jettisoned the imperative to represent external reality, an imperative that had once forced them to create “the illusion of a boxlike cavity” on their canvas to maintain the sense of three-dimensional space. But by preserving the “integrity of the picture plane,” modern painters gradually sacrificed “verisimilitude” for the relentless experimentation with the effects of paint on the canvas. By abandoning representation and turning to abstraction as a guiding principle, modern artists now treated “every part of the canvas equivalent,” creating all-over compositions woven “into a tight mesh whose principle of formal unity is contained and recapitulated in each thread, so that we find the essence of the whole work in every one of its parts.”⁴⁸ Consequently, the aesthetic effect was “optical rather than pictorial,” created through the “relations of color, shape, and line largely divorced from descriptive connotations.”⁴⁹ Through the flatness and impenetrability of the picture plane, the abstract painting was a solid object, no longer a vehicle for transcendence nor a mirror for the outside world.

      By clinging to a discussion of formal properties, high modernists placed the aesthetic object outside any discussion of artistic intention or audience reception. In his 1933 work The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, T. S. Eliot laid the framework for such modernist reading practices by arguing that the enjoyment of poetry was contingent upon acceptance of the poem’s fundamental separation from both the author and the reader. Eliot claimed that the “mature stage” of critical reading occurred “when we cease to identify ourselves with the poet we happen to be reading” and recognize that “the poem has its own existence, apart from us.”⁵⁰ Critiquing most literary theories for reducing the aesthetic experience to merely a psychological or emotive state, John Crowe Ransom followed Eliot in defending the poetic object as “nothing short of a desperate ontological or metaphysical manoeuvre.”⁵¹ Consequently, Ransom directly challenged the “Humanists,” who were using literary criticism to promote the “Aristotelian moral canon,” and the “Proletarians,” who appropriated literature for “the cause of loving-comradeship.”⁵² All attempts at mimetic representation, despite even the most politically progressive intentions, ushered in, as Theodor Adorno explained, an immediate accommodation to the world. Echoing Adorno’s rejection of social realism, Ransom praised the German critic’s willingness to provide a “special asylum of art” and to “[award] to it an imperium in imperio,” thereby helping to move aesthetics away from the politics of “collectivism.”⁵³

      In railing against any extra-aesthetic uses of art, whether for consumer gratification, for politics, or for profit, high modernists appropriated the aesthetic theory of Immanuel Kant to defend the passive, disinterested reception of art and the noncognitive dimension of the aesthetic experience. As John Ransom explained, modern criticism “leans again upon ontological analysis as it was meant to do by Kant.”⁵⁴ Having set the agenda for modernity by distinguishing between the three spheres of intellectual and cultural development (science, morality, and art) and having, in his third critique on the nature of judgment, separated aesthetics from other realms of knowledge, the German philosopher had done “everything possible to prevent the confusion” between art and science.⁵⁵ Consequently, Clement Greenberg affectionately acknowledged Kant as “the first real Modernist” and argued that the philosopher’s aesthetic ideas remained misunderstood by most critics.⁵⁶ The revolution in epistemology that Kant famously initiated in his first critique overthrew most forms of empiricism by showing that knowledge claims stemmed not from the character of the objects themselves but instead from the thinking subject. Noting that all experience was predicated on the ability of the knowing subject to subsume the perceptions it received under particular categories, Kant argued that the faculty of understanding contained those concepts necessary for categorizing perceptions and thereby making them meaningful. Similarly, the faculty of judgment was the capacity for subsuming perceptions under the rules provided by the concepts themselves. But Kant famously revised the role of judgment when he addressed the problem of aesthetics. In the case of particulars for which there was no corresponding universal given, judgment was forced to develop its own universal. Such reflective judgments, “obliged to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal,” were not successful at locating a proper concept for the given material; consequently the act of judgment occurring in the absence of a given concept left the subject with only a nonconceptual awareness of order.⁵⁷ The elements of the individual aesthetic object might exhibit a coherence and unity, but the concept with which to judge such order was not given in advance. For Kant, there were no a priori rules or principles for making a judgment about a particular artistic object. Consequently, since such an object was not understandable by reference to any prior concepts, it existed for no predetermined purpose. Asserting its autonomy by virtue of the fact that there existed no predetermined concept with which to consume it, the object retained its beauty simply through its particular form. As Kant explained, “beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose” (73). Aesthetics as such was now separate from the governing hand of science or morality. John Crowe Ransom noted that Kant had “carefully disengaged the artistic motive from ‘pleasure’ in the common sense; then from ‘usefulness,’ which would involve it in a labor for the sake of pleasure; then from the pursuit of the ethical good.”⁵⁸ In a world governed by the exchange principle, the sheer uselessness of the modernist work revealed its contradictory position in society.

      High modernists appropriated Kant’s defense of the aesthetic work as a cognitively nonsubsumable object as a way to challenge the perceived encroachment of scientific discourse into everyday life. To counteract the ruthless domination of the particulars of life by the categorical claims of science, high modernists promoted the disinterested, purposeless, and humble reception of art. “The world of art,” John Crowe Ransom asserted, “is the actual world which does not bear restriction; or at least defies the restrictiveness of science and offers enough fullness of content to give us the sense of the actual object.”⁵⁹ For this reason, the New Critics waged their famous war against paraphrase. Arguing that the truth of the poem was the unique way in which the poet had worked out the various tensions—rhetorical, semantic, and philosophical—within it, the New Critics claimed that the meaning of the poem was not reducible to a series of propositions. Indeed, the “heresy of paraphrase” was the “violence” done to “the internal order of the poem itself” by believing the poem to be a verifiable, “logical conclusion.”⁶⁰ Such Kantian residues appeared in the aesthetic modernism of Theodor Adorno as well. Arguing that modernist works were a special form of “knowledge” as “nonconceptual objects,” Adorno claimed that the “total purposelessness” of the work “gives the lie to the totality of purposefulness in the world of domination, and only by virtue of this negation … has existing society up to now become aware of another that is possible.”⁶¹ High modernists, in СКАЧАТЬ