Fables of Representation

[The photo of Adorno with headphones was found online]

My book of essays, Fables of Representation, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. The title essay on the New York School was made possible by series editor David Lehman, who, on seeing that the manuscript had only a few short newspaper reviews of Kenneth Koch and others, suggested I write an essay on the entire group. His own critical study and history of the NY School, The Last Avant-Garde, is of course definite. After I wrote the 50-page essay, it became the major feature of the manuscript and we lent its title to the entire volume. I don't recall if the following exam from the book has been published online, but here it is anyway.

The Postmodern Era: A Final Exam
True or False / Multiple Choice (two points each):

1. Art of the postmodern period is:
a. minimal
b. mystical
c. mannerist
d. post-literate
e. all of the above

2. The filmscript operates at the speed of attention, novels at the speed of history, poetry at the speed of myth, and myth at the speed of time.

3. The past is conditional, the future absolute, the present open to negotiation.

4. The past is ungendered, the future impotent, the present having an operation.

5. Transgression is sentimental.

6. The closer writing comes to theory, the more narrative it becomes.

7. Without language, the world would vanish.

8. Nature is bored with the truth.

9. Photography relies on the unfamiliar.

10. Polaroid photos of snow are more poetic than snow itself.

11. Poetry tells fewer lies.

12. Irony is the best disguise.

13. Apples can no longer be understood.

14. Music at its most social resembles literature; literature at its most hermetic resembles music.

15. There is no difference between a censorate and an aesthetic.

16. Bad art is central to the concept of pleasure.

17. There is no tyranny like that of "the new."

18. The best poets of the avant-garde are those who most betray its mission.

19. Poetry is the science of the irrational.

20. "The inarticulate voice makes a real place disappear" (Greil Marcus).

21. "The brand-new arrives already worn out" (Vincent Canby).

22. The answer to America's problems is:
a. corporate enrichment poverty programs
b. corporate diversity whitewash spokesmen
c. holistic cappuccino overdose remedies

23. Obsessional repetition assumes classical proportions--the music, for example, of Philip Glass.

24. Mothers are transparent, fathers opaque.

25. The future is bright for dead white men.

26. The moon's authority is on the wane.

27. Which is true?
a. "The source of all writing is boredom" (Marguerite Duras).
b. The source of all boredom is writing.

28. Imagination is voyeuristic.

29. Nothing is less mimetic than a mirror.

30. Equality of mediocrity has been achieved.

31. Choose one:
a. "An image is a stop the mind makes between two uncertainties" (Djuna Barnes).
b. A photograph is a pause between two eternities.

32. The deepest point of postmodern attention is the pause button on a VCR.

33. Watching television is a pastoral experience.

34. The beauty of trompe l'oeil, like life, is when it starts to decay.

35. Pomposity is necessary to any aesthetic.

36. "There is no great idea that stupidity cannot put to its own uses" (Robert Musil).

37. The greatest writers have the worst characters.

38. The future isn't what it used to be.

39. America lacks a folk culture.

40. Things are useless without their metaphors.

41. Theory has completed its mission.

42. Scientists and engineers are the poets of our time, the poets its cultural technicians.

43. The speed of attention is altered by language.

44. Everything "new" in literature had its exact precedent in 1898.

45. Banality was once an original concept.

46. The only way of "proving" a poem is to test it on one's nerves; in this, it resembles sex.

47. Only the poor have gods; only the rich achieve redemption.

48. Multiculturalism is the white woman's burden.

49. Every force restrains a form.

50. Disjunction heals all wounds.

Inner Time (Adorno 126)

Adorno (page 126): What appears in the work of art is its inner time . . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads.

This is beautiful thinking. But does time really pass in a work of art, even in works of duration like music and literature? Can a work of art refuse to be a unity and still be structured like a monad? Answer: It can only be a monad by refusing unison. Is a monad’s sense of time eternity? Yes. The monad in art has nothing to do with history and sociology; it is prophetic and hard to comprehend, like prime numbers. Which is more monadic, the nomad or the townsman; the boulder or the butterfly that lands on it?

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 23

Adorno (23): "Schonberg noted what an easy time Chopin had composing something beautiful because all he needed to do was choose the then little used key of F-sharp major."

PH response: Our definition of beauty changes along with the culture’s tolerance for off-notes and dissonance. In our time, agreement of figure and ground is considered corny. We desire groundless figures and figureless ground. A contemporary guitar site refers to the Hendrix chord, the “7 sharp 9,” to be found on the song “Purple Haze” (E7#9). When struck, it jangled and satisfied the ears of its time. The dissonance in language poetry comes from the long-established device of parataxis, in which images or fragments, often dissimilar, are placed together without a clear purpose. The dissonance to be tolerated in Flarf is the less-than-heroic choice of the Google search engine as a compositional device; with Newlipo, dissonance appears in attention to formal play over seriousness and lyricism. No gravitas, no beauty? But Kenneth Koch's playfulness wasn't without weight. For example:

THE GREEN MEDDLER

Aged in the fire.

Every age has its note. Grunge's blend of dissonant chords and "sludge" with Nirvana's "soft verse, hard chorus," supposedly borrowed from the Pixies, expressed the 90s prescient anxiety about a lost future. In the movie Hype! (1996), a Seattle musician explains that the plaintive Seattle sound resulted from a specific chord structure, but I don't know enough about music to recall how it worked.

Expressing, among other things, the comedy/pathos of the instrument's limitations, John Cage’s Composition for Toy Piano is a dignified and lovely work of art, but initially it may have seemed silly. Because Flarf and Newlipo present their carnivalesque and conceptual qualities first, their dissonance lies in a seeming lack of dignity. But poetry is capable of maintaining carnival and gravitas at the same time: the Beckett in Keaton and the Keaton in Beckett. The clown that never smiles (Keaton), the one that never speaks (Harpo Marx), and the reeling drunk who breaks into gorgeous song are stock types of pathos, just as pathos is a stock mode of comedy, and the ridiculous readily fledges with the sublime. Someone quite late to a performance of Hamlet might suppose, upon seeing the bodies lying all about, that the presentation had been farce.

The return to lyricism in our period arrives just in time for the greatest financial crisis in U.S. history. But that doesn't mean that irony is out of a job, with all the cognitive dissonance in need of words.

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 156

Adorno (156): "As long as art takes the form of works, it is essentially things, objectified in accordance with a law of form." Art work by Robert Smithson.

Response of PH:

Some laws of form are:
(1) To abide by one form only, remaining consistent throughout: monostich, haiku, imagist poem, blank verse.
(2) To marry several forms in one object: sonnet, masque.
(3) To seek the form of dissolution, from fragment to smaller fragment to photon.
(4) To establish duration: granite and epic rather than paper and lyric.
(5) To shift from one form to another (masque, modernist long poem).
(6) To seek intensity through volume (slam poetry, D.H. Lawrence) or lack of volume (Aram Saroyan, John Cage).
(7) New forms through new technologies (poetry machines, Flarf, Oulipo).
(8) New forms through new ideologies (Marxism : Constructivism = Freud : Surrealist collage).
(9) To express sincerity and belief (Romanticism).
(10) To express insincerity, disbelief, and even scorn (Swift and Nietzsche).
(11) To express lyrically by means of disbelief and a series of valuable emptinesses(Beckett).
(12) To seek form through formlessness (Mallarmé, free verse).
(13) To be monadic and nomadic (Mallarmé, Postmodernism).
(14) To be a solid, sensual fact, thus monumental (Rodin, Whitman, Milton).
(15) To be a chip off the old shard (early Clark Coolidge, appropriation and collage, minimalism)
(16) To contract what was large (bathos, parody, satire)
(17) To greatly enhance what was small (Niedecker, Williams, Moore)
(16) To seek unison and find difference (bad poetry, bad singing).
(17) To seek difference and find unison (good poetry, jazz).
(18) To suggest that it's all just a game (Oulipo, high artifice, collage).
(19) To repeat yourself endlessly (Gertrude Stein)
(20) Never to repeat yourself endlessly (Gertude Stein)