The molecularization of the aesthetic

     Formal "autonomy" as radical social critique: where a divide is erected between art and society so that art can imagine an alternative to that society? Yet, we can say from this that both romantic activism and romantic aestheticism therefore share the same goal of social transformation, albeit by splitting the
process into two steps. Autonomy legitimizes the art form as a palpable and systematically rigorous discourse existing as a mode of privileged language, a discursive prestige that romantic activism depends on for its accrued surplus value over ordinary language. Thus, the negative space of formalist art carves out a dialectical possibility for historical practice, whose signatures as art appear to be assumed as self-evident givens. Part of this "negative dialectic" is its capacity for self-reflexivity, so much so that the very contours of that discourse have been subjected to a displacement toward a more radical form of the political. 

     Beyond the ontology of objects upon which both formalist and activist proponents take their cue, this radical politics builds from a cultural avant-garde that raises the everyday into an artistic practice of creative resistances, to use M. de Certeau’s term (and to recall M. Duchamp’s “Urinal” violating the sacred space of the Art gallery). The molecularization of the aesthetic designates a micropolitical plane that displaces the elitist hierarchy between artists and non-artists, political and non-political agents, or artistic and non-artistic objects. The status of the artist, like that of a professor or a doctor, is a titular honorific granted by a social reward system guided by the complex discursive interplay of institutional, social, and material networks. The molecularization of aesthetic practice must coincide with the reorientation of the hierarchical stratification of critical and representational apparatuses that mark the territorial practices of discursive stakeholders. It is primarily the recognition of the complete saturation of everyday life by the aesthetic and the political up to the capillary level, from modern architecture to fashion to advertising to cuisine and so on that spurs the manic fortification of elitist cultural distinctions and identities. The age of mechanical and electronic reproduction has enforced the democratization of Taste on everyone whether consciously or not, and only economic and discursive prestige divides the uses of cultural and technological objects from one sociopolitical cluster to another.

     The uses of the narrative/novel would be its ability to explore the microscopic dimensions of the quotidian and its relationship to the general arc of myth, history, or philosophy in which it can be embedded. Its polyphonic space can incorporate or deploy the poetic function by shifting and focusing on the arrangement of signifiers qua signifiers (and not as the metonymic functions of the syuzhet) if it finds the need to do so. In this sense, we can speak of the distinction between poetic and narrative discourse as the presence of a requirement for the former to find for its signifiers a logic of combination beyond the metonymic. It must provide an allegorical dimension which would allow the arrangement of its signifiers to obtain a cyclical structure of returns, a generic refrain deploying various figures of repetition and duplication. 

     Such refrains are no longer obligatory after free verse and the avant-garde that has dropped the binding forces of allegorical frames. From now on, it must discover its own governing moment, must decide for each point of its motion to which obligatory force it must partially surrender itself to continue moving on (projective verse arrives as a last-ditch support). Because of this, writing after free verse would seem to meander along, limited to flirting with various prosodic primes by invoking them as distant allegories. A free verse instance can brush or graze against projected prosodic primes without affirming their full presence. It is the motion of seduction or dissimulation, as if to proffer a much desired objet petit a by pretending to hide it in the guise of a Secret or Loss, yet whose real presence or absence can neither be fully affirmed nor denied.

Why a text needs an "I"

     The I is a privileged site, symbol, or avatar of unity, and it is around such a unity that the surrounding elements are placed in a hierarchy of events, movement, idea, impression etc.  When Nature is called upon, it is to corroborate such a unity that the I either already possesses or it attains by a renewed encounter with Nature. The artistic form that arises carries that same innate scaffolding, a miniature replica of higher principles, the way infinity is reflected by a grain of sand (in William Blake and other Nineteenth century Romantic poets). As nature is, so should the poem and the I be. This resolves the mystery of the origin of order surrounding poetic language or discourse. This is the organicist Rhythm that flexes itself within and without; as sound echoes the sense, so shall the form also mimic or extend a fundamental order from which both the I and Nature, as subject and object, find their true purpose and meaning. This is why they need to be thrown into the rhetorical and textual mix, as the center around which the whole revolves. 

That is, more often than not, they must be made obvious, stated, mentioned, directly or indirectly, as either presence or loss presence, or as a hidden dimension recovered partially or incompletely through some special process that still requires closer analytical inspection. A key ingredient deployed is displacement: a journey is then made and told, often to the countryside, in a moment of solitude and contemplation, where the noise of the world no longer imposed itself, from a vantage point where the I could survey a measure of the whole (as sea or sky, for instance), and then return with an intimation of the invisible order that confers unity to the I’s vision and understanding of itself and its world.

The Romantic lyrical poem, thus, arises from a dislocation or separation that triggers the contemplation and imagination of otherness. It is akin to what Philip Dickinson (2018) called "the protocol of the ‘negative way’ that defines Wordsworthian Bildung." He writes:

"In slightly different terms, the creative nature of perception relies upon the negation of ‘customary sense’, of pre-existing conventions of mediation. In his later study Wordsworth’s Poetry, Hartman suggests that this negative, extinguishing power is named by Wordsworth in Book VI of The Prelude as Imagination, whose effects are always the same: ‘a moment of arrest, the ordinary vital continuum being interrupted; a separation of the traveler-poet from familiar nature; a thought of death or judgment or the reversal of what is taken to be the order of nature; a feeling of solitude or loss or separation’. This is not imagination as some- thing straightforwardly vitalizing: it is instead ‘apocalyptic’—destructive and revelatory—the most important consequence of which is ‘the poem itself, whose developing structure is an expressive reaction to this consciousness.’"