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“Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.” —William Blake
Mina Loy once appealed to “Imagine a tennis champion who became inspired to write poetry . . . . Would not his meter depend on his way of life, would it not form itself, without having recourse to traditional, remembered, or excepted forms?” (270). Loy’s ideal of poetic form as organically, spontaneously embodying the rhythm of lived experience has Wordsworthian echoes. But why is it that an athletic champion should epitomize her ideal? The athletic contest’s intense focus on the temporal spectacle seems more typical of the “savage torpor” of modern consumerism that Wordsworth set out to counteract than the interior rhythms of tranquil recollection that he pursued. Moreover Loy’s emphasis upon ranking, the suggestion that the champion, precisely by virtue of being champion, would best embody organic poetic form seems in jeopardy of giving way to an Ayn Randian or worse aestheticizing of market ethics. By contrast, a familiar romantic trope associates mere countability with social breakdown, such as the impasse that concludes Wordsworth’s “We are Seven” and the mystical clockwork barking of Christabel’s mastiff. In
But another (and importantly not unrelated) romantic trope emphasizes that what we have to fear in modern capitalism’s arbitrarily abstract quantities is not the form itself of competitive ranking but the ideological baggage this so often carries, baggage that diverts attention from the aesthetic spectacle of competition as what Loy terms an on-going “way of life.” Two interrelated, key ideological constructs of capitalist culture—the idolization of winners on the one hand, and the presumption to know, to have an understanding of the causal mechanism behind what makes winners win—constitute two sides of the same literal coin, money or capital itself, whose “riddle,” Marx said, is “but the riddle presented by commodities; only it now strikes us in its most glaring form” (105f). It is such fetishism that makes horserace coverage politics so politically numbing and paralyzing, and why, on the contrary, the spectacle of a boxing match, as Hazlitt showed, can make the horserace concern for who won and why quite beside the point.
A if not the seminal motif of Romanticism’s critique of capitalism is sympathy for losers. Before Wordsworth gave such sympathy its iconic lyrical expression Adam Smith theorized it as a remediating, complementary currency to capital. Smith assumed that the two currencies were mutually correcting, that sympathy modulated capitalist self-interest to the benefit of all rather than a few. In Smith’s famous example, sympathizing with a lunatic in the street is essentially a matter of a viable consumer sympathizing with an unviable or failed one:
The anguish which humanity feels . . . at the sight of such an object cannot be the reflection of any sentiment of the sufferer. The compassion of the spectator must arise altogether from the consideration of what he himself would feel if he was reduced to the same unhappy situation, and, what perhaps is impossible, was at the same time able to regard it with his present reason and judgment (8).
The consumerist model of individuality isn’t troubled but fortified by this ability to rehabilitate what it constitutively excludes, to define itself not just in contrast to failed consumers but
Yet this radical formalization of social experience exclusively in terms of iterations of consumption is also eminently unstable. The pathos of one of Keats’s best-known letters hinges on this precariousness. Keats does not pretend to renounce or escape Smith’s basic formal model and yet nonetheless demolishes any ground for optimism about sympathy’s redemptive power. Keats describes the experience of being at a party and sympathetically inhabiting other people in a compulsive, serial way, moving insatiably from one individual to the next: “the identity of everyone in the room begins so to press upon me,” Keats writes, “that I am in a very little time annihilated” (To Richard Woodhouse, October 27th, 1818). Keats anticipates Baudelaire’s great portraits of the self-dissolving erotic life of urban crowds, and in both cases the critique of consumerist imagination is doubled-edged: on the one hand the poets deny that the sympathetic imagination stands to repair social disunity (on the contrary, the sympathetic imagination that was supposed to connect the poet with others ends up alienating him from himself); on the other hand though, Keats and Baudelaire alike recognize this defeat as inescapable: it is the structural condition upon which their respective poetic efforts build. Individualist consumerism is the condition of its own critique.
Thus there’s a partial truth to Smith’s account that haunts subsequent modernity both in spite and in virtue of its partialness. Like his poetic successors Smith has the implicit good faith to acknowledge that the commodity form is total and consequently that the critique of consumerism must be immanent, must follow a consumerist logic of its own. The difficulty of such acknowledgement is that it makes critique difficult to distinguish from complacency. Whatever alternative Keatsian and Baudelairian sympathy offers to capital, this alternative cannot be simply an alternative but must instead somehow constitute a second-order alternative, an alternative to the consumerist way of experiencing alternatives. Even stating the problem this way just reposes it, since the commodity’s constitutive “magic” is to promise the consumer escape from the limitations of actual, consumerist social life. But Keats and Baudelaire introduce a formally more intricate arithmetic to this problematic that might be termed “romantic ranking.” Rather than either reifying capitalism’s losers, or impossibly pretending to escape such reification only in order to reify failure as such, such ranking entails a second-order standard of comparison. Beyond the question of mere winning or losing it hinges on the subversively distinct question of the relative effectiveness of several instances of failure, subversive because this latter question stands to crystalize norms of value anchored not in commodities’ magic itself but its underlying condition of necessary impossibility. Comparative ranking stands to make this condition vivid because it is inherently open-ended and cannot pretend to capture this condition definitively.
At the conclusion of Wordsworth’s
Lyric that communicates by way of reiterating more or less referentially opaque formal patterns stands vividly to model the kind of extreme egalitarianism theorized by many contemporary political theorists of radical democracy. Jacques Ranciere for instance characterizes the latter as “a new stage of equality”—the pun on stage significantly deflecting the
For instance, if Wordsworth’s Ode insists on the material provisionality of its own attempt to figure immortality by casting it as “another palm” in “another race,” his ballad “Simon Lee” does not directly praise the athletic heroics of the old huntsman’s past so much as posit the present inaccessibility of that past grandeur as a new normative poetic challenge. Rather than an elegy for the loss of the feudal cultural integrity emblematized by the young Simon’s athletic triumphs, Wordsworth casts his ballad as formally continuous with those old ritual contests. Thus the very act of mourning the loss of those contests is made into the basis for renewing them, although now on admittedly much more complex, tenuous terms, since competition now is less a matter of relative physical and aesthetic power than a matter of paradoxically acknowledging that modern skepticism can no longer abide the ideologically normative conceptualizations of such power.
Percy Shelley’s
This is to suggest that Shelley’s defense of poetry hinges crucially on a defense of the imaginative capacity specifically for
Devotion to such an uncompromising irony, that allows resolution to figure only as a dim shadow of an unconceivable future, anticipates the rigorously negative aesthetics of art that, in Adorno’s words, “renounces happiness for the sake of happiness, thus enabling desire to survive in art” (15). It arguably also motivates Samuel Beckett’s famous directive, “Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Beckett’s injunction is instructive because it underscores that failure and hierarchical normativity are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, Keats suggests that they are even mutually implicating—that the force of failure cannot be registered unless situated in framework of normative comparison—in his rehearsals of the mortal poet’s impossible desire to seduce gods. The infinite coldness and impassivity of the urn and of Autumn, whose perpetual resistance of determinate meaning and purpose allows the poet to explore infinite performative variations on his inevitable failure. Likewise both
This series hangs together as such by virtue of turning failure into a kind of norm without thereby mitigating the specificity of particular instances of failure, each of Keats’s distinct poetic enactments of insufficient submission. Deleuze has emphasized a subversive potential in masochistic aesthetics that hinges upon a repetition of punishment by implied contract. The masochistic contract transforms punishment from an always somewhat contingent consequence of transgression that is to be
Perhaps Keats’s most vivid exploration of masochistic erotics is the following passage from the romance
Lamia is enraptured by Lyscius’s finely mitigated fury, his lack of swelling veins and so on, and she elaborates this rapture by drawing the comparison to Apollo in act to strike the serpent. The eroticism of the scene depends utterly upon the actor’s double consciousness, a consciousness that reaps pleasure from tormentHis passion, cruel grown, took on a hue Fierce and sanguineous as ‘twas possible In one whose brow had no dark veins to swell. Fine was the mitigated fury, like Apollo’s presence when in act to strike The serpent—Ha, the serpent! Certes, she Was none. She burnt, she loved the tyranny (II, ll. 75-81)
The “Ode on Melancholy” effects an analogous inversion of what it means to vanquish rivals and win the “trophy” without pretending to dispense with structural hierarchy. The poem issues an argument that relishing despair is the condition of relishing joy, but the poem ultimately enacts despair by way of its very failure to contain despair in such an argument. The poem concludes:
The overt message here is that an economic exchange is to be struck: that one may purchase bursting-rights to joy’s grape only by giving one’s soul as a trophy to melancholy. But such an exchange is implicitly shown to be frustrated by the fact that the two sides of the equation here are dialectically inextricable: just as Lamia’s burning passion depends upon her fantasy of Apollo in act to strike the serpent, the Sovran shrine is not sovereignty itself but a fantasy of sovereignty’s cold cruelty. Like Lyscius’s bloodless mitigated fury, Moneta’s blank face and the cold pastoral, the shrine is pallid in its emphatic idealization: its trophies are cloudy and, tellingly, its might has taste only for the soul. All this Apollonian abstraction serves to throw into relief the sensuousness of the tongue’s strenuous effort to burst the grape. But it also serves to explode the poem’s whole ostensible argument that sacrifice can be economized: that I could sacrifice myself to beauty and still retain the form of an autonomous, rationally choosing, individual consumer.
This reading applies especially well to the image of the tongue strenuously working to burst the grape, since that image, as evocative as it is, can be difficult to conjure since a grape might seem too dense and rubbery to easily imagine bursting, whereas, although the tongue is powerfully muscular, its power is diffuse rather than penetrating. A remarkable thing about the image of the tongue however is that in addition to being the emblem of receptive taste on the one hand and poetic voice on the other, the tongue is also a preeminent image of corporal compulsion: its muscle is naked and free-floating, unhinged from the skeletal mechanism. The tongue represents aesthetic purposiveness without purpose in terms both of aesthetic receptivity and of autonomous poetic agency, but also precisely the opposite of this; i.e., insatiable exertion, wild convulsions in the void, a terrifying rather than edifying, monstrous rather than beautiful, disconnection from use, purpose or effect. What the two aspects of Keats’s image finally do then is point out the dialectical inextricability of beauty and monstrosity. Keats’s images of the tongue's unhinged muscle and of the snake's mere animality revel in a kind of phallic humiliation, flaunt it like a trophy.
Reading the image this way also makes it, as an image,
Democracy’s historical symbiosis with capitalism makes it easy to underappreciate its revolutionary normative investment in failure: in defeat, not as something coercively compelled but freely conceded, the willingness of leaders voluntarily to cede power in consequence of popular opinion. Blake’s “The Lamb” evokes this by casting democratic equality as the shadow of authoritarian hierarchy. Its counterpart song, "The Tyger," is an iconically romantic example of form assimilating content as the poem’s compulsive rhythm provides an answer of sorts to its queries about the origin of power. But this answer works as a answer only by virtue of to some degree deflecting these queries; Blake evokes sublimity by demonstrating a failure to representationally contain it, inviting readers to give up the attempt to transmit a certain knowledge or meaningful content in favor of perpetuating a certain formal pattern. But it seems crucial that this pattern does not altogether displace the concern for representational content; rather it is a pattern precisely
It’s tempting to view the Lamb as a relatively facile, utopian dissolution of hierarchy; not just the pedagogical hierarchy separating teacher and pupil, adult and child, but also those distinguishing between human and animal and god and human. But hierarchy is unequivocally affirmed in the form of an abstracted, impersonal imperative—“little lamb, god bless thee”—a command that is addressed to neither a first personal
In conclusion it seems worth noting that ranking is arguably the characteristic bane of the contemporary humanities academy. On the one hand, to the extent that one is at all beholden to a Marxian framework of analysis, one is committed to rooting out homogenization of value. On the other hand however, due to increasing commercialization of the academy and more broad-scale socioeconomic pressures, actual academic praxis is ever more implicated in just such homogenization, whether in the form of grading coursework, making admissions and hiring decisions, appraising the teaching and research of subordinates and peers, and evaluating grant proposals, departments and institutions, not to mention being on the receiving end of evaluation by peers, superiors and, now more insistently and consequentially than ever, students.
But the lesson of the above, and of so much humanistic critique, is one that bears repeating: the only way out is deeper in. To return to “The Fly:” if Cartesian conceptualism reduces life to a game of badminton, then the lesson is not to replace this violence with equally conceptual espousal of nonviolence. The lesson is instead to try to tarry with the negative side of Blake’s analogy, to accept as such the game we’ve been unwittingly playing all along, to inhabit its rhythms and form, and thereby—“spontaneously” as it were—find ourselves embodying a less violent, more lyrical “way of life.”
Adorno, Theodor.
Beckett, Samuel.
Bersani, Leo. “Sociability and Cruising.”
Blake, William.
Deleuze, Gilles. “Coldness and Cruelty.”
Ferguson, Frances.
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Kaufman, Robert. “Legislators of the Post-Everything World: Shelley’s ‘Defense of Adorno.’”
Keats, John.
Loy, Mina. “Modern Poetry.”
Marx, Karl.
Ranciere, Jacques.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “The Defence of Poetry.”
Smith, Adam.