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.
