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Solid Objects

Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, Doug Mao

Intro

• Responding to the common belief that: “we live in an age of Goods amid which, and against which, the enlightened or the sensitive will struggle to secure their loftier Gods” 4 w/their “reflexive antipathy to the commodity”
• Still modernism has a fascination with the “object” itself, between the notion of commodity and god “where any or all of the resonances of this complexly polysemous word might apply”
  • esp b/c they feel for goods something like love, for modernists acknowledge the object as “fragment of Being, as solidity, as otherness in its most resilient opacity:” that is “peculiarly twentieth-century”
  • “wonder and terror at thingness exerts the ultimate moral claim here” is modern 5
• Benjamin: most thorough investigator of the object
  • on his books: “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness—but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate”
  • and “most profound enchantment for the collector is the locking of individual items within a magic circle in which they are fixed as the final thrill, the thrill of acquisition, passes over them”
  • and some of best memories of collector “he rescued a book…found it lonely and abandoned on the market place and bought it to give it freedom…true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves” 5
  • Mao notes there’s a tension here when you read this b/c “capture” is inseparable form the “liberation” ... but he says no matter what it’s exceeded the commercial
    • why? b/c doesn’t care about functionality, thus connex w/the “kantian aesthetic of disinterestedness”
      • however, I’d like to note that Marx made it quite clear that no economist is ever interested in use value; that economics begins where exchange value begins
  • Mao notes that Benjamin is thus “positioned within and tensely posed against, a larger effort to read through objects to the truth of the social totality that produced them” 6 (like Simmel, he says B is doing “archaelogical sociology” – making these two the age of “birth and flowering of hte social analysis of material culture”)
    • yes!
• So in modernism we find that the object all of the sudden gives us access to the immediate past and sometimes perhaps the future
  • “the predicament of the object, a vision of the modern age as one in which the particular, the concrete, and the auratic were threatened as never before by habits of generalization and abstraction serving a newly triumphant science” 6-7
    • says that one of the key agendas of Romanticism and modernism is understanding the dangers of subordinating individuals to systems, which for him sees modernists teetering from interpretation and then away from it again
    • best ex. of particular v system argument is in Adorno: as part of the “reasoning subject’s inevitable, and inevitably violent, move to reduce every thing in the world to a concept,” which he replaces w/”a dialectic of nonidentity” where you are open to experience the object and be aware of your own distortion as a subject
      • “to yield to the object means to do justice to the object’s qualitative moments. Scientific objectification, in line with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, tends to eliminate qualities and to transform them into measurable definitions.” 7
      • more from Negative Dialectics: “matters of true philosophical interest at this point of history” are “nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity” (unlike Plato and Hegel b/c Hegel kept spirit over object, Adorno notes)
      • he sees this kind of reasoning in Lewis, Pound, Williams in their defense of art, which “preserves the imperilled particular”
      • another example is John Crowe Ransom, 1945: “the unhappy human condition that has risen under the modern economy” 8 and he says representing the object can enact Schopenhauer’s “knowledge without desire” and so artists need to “defend his object’s existence against its enemies” (whereas art “cherishes” object for object’s own sake, whereas science “devours” for science’s satisfaction); Ransom: Hegel is “benign yet extremely aggressive” and whose universal will enact “reformation of nature” (which agrarian Ransom’d like to keep)
• Hence, “certain readings of modernity” don’t like the object b/c they are “an affair of consciousness gone awry, a phenomenon of subjectivity grown rapacious and fantastically powerful” and aligned w/science and capitalism 8, so that object is “ultimate victim”
• For the modernism Mao cares about, objects are most “compelling when it seemed most marked by impenetrability to mind, most radically removed from a subjectivity hopelessly infected by immoral being and impure thoughts.” 9
  • b/c objects have “profounder innocence of an immunity to thinking and knowing”
  • object world can be destroyed by people: so while it’s outside of ideology, it is still endangered by its manifestations
    • object “last terrain of the utopian (or the prelapsarian)”
• It shows “the point at which modernists…begin to lose patience with subjectivity itself…as mere thought, mere words”
• In this way modernists are seen to be fascinated by a type of difference, otherness, and are concerned by the “extensiveness of human power” rather than its poverty
• Connex to Art
  • “hard to think of the work of art as anything but the product of a subjectivity’s action on the object world” 11
  • “one of the oldest stories about modernism is that of its struggle against the mass-produced commodity on behalf of the handcrafted thing…an active effort on behalf of…utopia”
    • why doesn’t that work? “the work of art, even more than the commodity generated by market forces, must appear at last as a spot or stain of consciousness on the world beyond ideology, a subject-object hybrid…that infiltrates and compromises the last preserve of radical alterity” (ie you can’t escape consciousness in art b/c your art will always have a trace of consciousness)
      • This is odd for me b/c Marx says problems w/commodities is that you can’t see consciousness in it (that is the human element) and odd b/c of the arguments about the Omega workshop making objects that specifically have human traces on them and seeing that celebrated by the artists
      • that is, do modernists really see their consciousness as a stain?
• Thesis: “not only placed an extraordinary emphasis on the production of the individual object, but also vigorously embraces production qua production in responding to a wide range of philosophical and practical crises” 11
  • “Anglo-American modernism is centrally animated by a tension between an urgent validation of production and an admiration for an object world beyond the manipulation of consciousness” which leads to “vital hesitation or ironic idealism” and gets them at an “impasse in which all doing seems undoing”
    • Neat!

Random

• Modernist Examples
  • Woolf: descriptions of world w/out humans
  • Lewis: defends solid objects
  • Stevens: “discrete things” poems
  • Pound: Pisan Cantos’ indifferent nature
• Lady Bruton had become “Emigration” which had become her which reminds me of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House (emigration too)
• Order of Things: “great epistemic rupture of modernity is to be found in the late eighteenth-century shift from cosmological taxonomies of objects to ‘the espistemological consciousness of man as such’ and the birth of the ‘human sciences’” 6
• Me: it’s funny that everyone assumes that something that’s been mass-produced somehow no longer has particularity, that it no longer has a history of its own. How about instead of seeing in the commodity the end of meaning, but instead the provocation of meaning, a gun going off at the beginning of a race, a challenge?
  • maybe modernism’s reaction against the mass produced object was key to its own constitution of itself… it needed the object to reaction against to become what it was
• Nicholls: “the recurring problem of the later modernisms…the grounding of the aesthetic in an objectification of the other” 10 so that as writer feels superior to the other, feels better but is barred from “social transformation” powers of art qtd 10
  • so that a classic modernist gesture is affirming subject/object DISTANCE
  • and how male modernist, feeling the challenge of the other (feminine, natural, the past), denounce the “decadent language” that was marked as feminine b/c somehow now “bodily” and will justify their “ironically anti-social position”
  • Mao is reading against Nicholls: modernism is “attempt to ensure the object’s extrasubjective integrity….without, as it were, resubordinating it to consciousness”
  • note: Nicholls on women modernists: “another kind of modernism…but rather a deliberate and often polemic disturbance within the canonical vision” (ouch, that’s really narrow: I would say it’s within canonical vision insofaras it CREATES canonical vision)
  • Nicholls bases his book on a “gynophobic mistrust of otherness” says Mao 10 and says modernism worries about “the limitations upon their abilities to initiate social change”
• Me: what’s great about D & G is they give us a vision of the capitalist world that makes its Freudian implications so exquisitely clear: of flows, blocked flows (repressions), of health being circulation; and what about stream of consciousness if not an investigation of the breaks and flows?

Method/Context

• Must understand modernist stuff about object and production together
  • Putting together socioeconomic readings and philosophical readings of modernism requires that you understand this fact
  • He says he’s taking seriously Jameson’s Postmodernism call for “reintegration of psychology and the economic through a basic attention to ‘the psychological concomitants of production itself’ (316)” 12
• His understanding of zeitgeist: “the mediated common denominator of a broad range of psychologies and not some free-floating existent”
  • why care? “some scholars have been tempted to read the early twentieth century as uniformly governed by the turn toward ‘consumption’ that occurs in some of the economic theory of the period” ie Mao: consumption NOT “single terminus”
• Production: “above all, the individual maker crafting the individual object” 12
• We need “a more adequate theorization of such mediation…between the causal inclinations of materialist reading and the difficult plenitude of cultural forms themselves”
  • YES WE DO, and you know what, Mao? What you’re not getting is that production itself had “difficult plenitude!” I’m really tired of people thinking they already know what production means.
• He wants to replace the modernist critical catchword “objectivity” with “object” – although here are his “good” examples of recent work on it:
  • Levenson: Pound’s objectivity isn’t a non-subjectivity but rather a precision. Thus it’s a moment of subjectivity, “where the subject discreetly withdraws, leaving the immediate, uncorrected impression” (119) (qtd on 13)
  • Daniel Tiffany: Pound’s objectivity “neglects the ‘real’” and TRIES to be separated from objects 14
• Omega 1913 prospectus
  • “are willing to make use of [modern production] so far as it allows the expression of their ideas” and having “wherever possible the direct expressive quality of the artist’s handling for the deadness of mechanical reproduction”
  • “until the 19th century…men used for daily life objects which expressed the joy of the creator and the craftsman and conveyed a corresponding delight to the user” but “modern industrialism has changed all this”
    • me: this is more Ruskin than Marx
• Maynard Keynes and C. H. Douglas: “advocated an increase in consumption as the remedy for economic ills, imperialism, and war” 19
  • perhaps look at Michael Tratner’s “Sex and Credit” (on Ulysses): “modernism’s declared liberation from Victorian constrains owed much both to political economy and to sexology” 19
• Marx: 1844 MSS: “can only express his life in real, sensuous objects” (181; 1964 ed of Milligan translation)
  • Woolf, Lewis, Pound, Stevens “experienced a transformation of Marx from philosophical specter to vigorous political engine between the 1910s and the 1930s (Lewis, Pound, and Stevens all addressing Marxism in one or both of these aspects quite directly)” (20)
• Jameson on modern to postmodern shift
  • “modernization triumphs and wipes the old completely out: nature is abolished along with the traditional countryside and traditional agriculture; even the surviving historical monuments, now all cleaned up, become glittering simulacra of the past, and not its survival” Postmodernism 311)
  • I like this quote b/c it can be my easy weapon to say what I don’t think is valid in some people’s understanding of modernity! Where they assume too much and take the writers’ rhetoric for representation (and geez whenEVER did we critics decide we would forget modernisms’ anti-representational stance)
  • And then Jameson actually kind of ruins my idea which … sigh … now I’m seeing that I’m echoing: “the keen sense of the New in the modern period was only possible because of the mixed, uneven, transitional nature of that period, in which the old coexisted with what was then coming into being” while po-mo “what you have when modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good” ix

Specifics: poets

• Anglo-American 1910-50s
• Imagism: though there’s ambiguity about what the “thing” meant for Pound when he advocated “direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective” nonetheless from that time on modernism was associated with “the precisely rendered object” 14
• Eliot’s “objective correlative”
  • 1919 “Hamlet:” “the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative;’ in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” qtd 15
  • also Eliot’s “general preference” for solid objects referred to in poems instead of abstractions
• Hulme
  • supporting classical instead of the fluidity of Bergsonian art
  • “Bergson’s campaign against the logic of the solid might threaten the antisentimental political conservativism to which he was drawn”
  • the object helps him articulate and find antihumanism: “Dead things not men as the material of art” he writes in 1907 in notebook to make words “a thing of terror beyond us, and not of us” b/c for him “Absolute values” are to be found not in “delight in life” or “vital things”
• Politics? Solid object modernism has seen to be part of all types of political sways: Hulme’s conservativism, “Eliot’s somewhat more moderate conservativism,” Lewis’ anti-all-positions individualism, Pound’s Confucian Fascism, Williams’ “left localism” 16

Fiction

• At first glance, prose fiction doesn’t seem immediately available for such considerations: Woolf totally Bergsonian for example
  • against Edwardian “whose avalanches of furniture threatened to crush the richness and freshness out of perception itself” 16
• YET just cuz you like subject don’t mean you don’t like object, Mao notes, as the writers of subjective life are interested in its exchanges w/the other, incl. the external and just be “precise” about objects, not neglect it
  • cf Stephen Dedalus’ meditating on quidditas (the whatness of a thing”
• Woolf he says is his central figure esp b/c illuminates stuff about Lewis, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Bowen, Williams, etc
  • Woolf shows the “existential crisis” he sees in modernists: “how the discrete object, as the particular representative or crystallization of a non-human Being, could exert a powerful hold on the imagination at a time when questions about the meaning of existence seemed unusually pressing” 17
    • “only with modernism that the possibility of the utter contingency of everything (and every thing) became a major preoccupation of imaginative writing”
    • and they were asking same questions as their philosopher contemporaries
    • Woolf: “fascination with the delightful and harrowing processes of consumption”
      • and b/c recent scholarship on her and shopping shows her as “poised” to comment on the commonplace assumption that modernists are anti-commodity (Mao: most modernists liked some commodity stuff and were worried about it at the same time; same as the ambivalence of the 19th c aesthetes) (“horror and surrender [towards commodity] were not only compounded but, at times, scarcely distinguishable from one another”)

Production

• However aesthetes and modernists diff in that modernists “rejecting aestheticism’s foundational claim that a life well lived can be oriented primarily toward consumption” 18
  • Although I must note that he clearly doesn’t have Wilde’s socialism in his mind here….
  • and he notes that some modernists wanted to get away from aestheticism’s relash w/effeminacy, degeneracy, homosexuality
• “new exposes of poverty” at turn of century makes conspicuous consumption and wealth “suspicious” again: Leonard Woolf: “capitalist system…sacred rights of property…no longer compatible with liberty and equality” 1939 (127-9)
  • Must follow this up. This is neat.
• “as difficult for moderns to accept the ethic of relaxation, pleasure and consumption promoted by late Victorian and Edwardian reformers as it was for them to stomach the work ethic of their mid-Victorian grandparents” 19
  • Awesome!
  • said they reject all 19th c concepts of labor except sometimes Ruskin/Morris handicrafts
  • So they keep aesthete’s life as devotion to art mentality but not their attitude towards consumption
  • And they take “vexed, tentative, and in varying degrees metaphorical turn to production (which appears as consumptin’s radical other in spite of the interdependence of hte two in practice)”
    • You see this when “modernists reverse aestheticism’s tropes” so you make not absorb, record not experience, etc
      • So, modernism and solidity, Mao is gonna say, is production rather than consumption….
• Title from Wilde essay: “It is only a Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than do something.” qtd 20
  • Instead, says Mao, “for many modernists, by contrast, the test of production—and especially of artistic production—implicitly figured as the test of an individual life’s meaning in a world that seemed to furnish subjectivity no other secure source of significance” 20
    • and here, he notes Goods and Gods are back together (cf epigraph, freud and h d), and putting back philosophy and socioeconomics.
      • Nice! So elegantly done.
      • ie meaning in a “material trace” left upon world (the philosophical timeline: Hegel about “self-objectification of labor” in master and slave dialectic, Marx in 1844 Mss, James, and Sartre
      • it’s reciprocal: in production, object gives subject meaning, subject gives object meaning (by changing it)
• Bergson and Production
  • Matter and Memory: “human organism (except, crucially, where memory intervenes) functions as something like a stimulus-response channel in which entering stimuli exit in the form of material action”
  • Creative Evolution: “the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids, where our action finds its fulcrum and our industry its tools” qtd 21
    • tho’ of course for Bergson objects can’t have the full truth of life b/c not fluid (BUT I say what about Simmel who notes that even the appearance of solidity of objects is wrong? in Philosophy of Money)
    • for Mao, Creative Ev is more supportive of Nineties aesthetics than modernism
• All modernists “finding the imperative of production as profoundly suspect as seductive” 21
  b/c they’re doubting humans’ changing the world (ie Ransom as contra Hegel)
  • (culminating in Williams b/c his “no ideas but in things” prescription, efface “the ego before reality,” stop “the will of power over things” (some of these are Williams’ words, some are quoted from criticism of Williams, qtd 21)
  • (for example Woolf’s representations of nature’s violence in their capacity to give a critique of humans doing so)
  • (for example Lewis “the disastrous results of Western science are deeply enmeshed with subjectivity’s inconsistent attempts both to maintain and to negate the distances between itself and the object”) 21
  • Pound: “redeem accumulations of literary and material clutter”
• The Pattern
  • “Modernists often began by embracing production as a test of meaning, they frequently ended by testing production itself and finding it wanting”
  • This echoes Heidegger (b/c against “relentlessly expanding industrial production” and wants to protect object against instrumental-mentality of the West – just as Adorno does), Baudrillard (who drew from Mauss and Bataille) w/his “critiques of production” which means he wants “festive and wasteful consumption” instead of production as investment and w/his System of Objects’ “attack on the systems and codes (collecting, advertising, marketing, design) that in his view deprive the individual object of its original auratic force” 22
    • So he sees Baudrillard as “the final movement of decisively modernist thinking”
      • although I would say that Baudrillard is a little too late honey b/c Baudrillard might be reacting against IMAGE CULTURE (where products of production are increasingly hard to TOUCH) which isn’t quite appropriate for modernism