Everybody Hates Kant: Blakean Formalism and the Symmetries of Laura Moriarty

Everybody Hates Kant would do pretty good service as a title under which to organize diverse literary-critical controversies of the last few decades. At issue are canonical practices and doctrines that since Romanticism have regularly been associated with Kant, Kantianism, and, especially, the Kantian aesthetic. When insurgent critique--whether focusing on art, criticism, or theory--has approached nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts and contexts, "Kantian aesthetics" has been mapped onto, been seen to generate, or simply been made coterminous with that baleful phenomenon, formalism. In more explicitly political terminology, the phenomenon has also been well known as bourgeois formalism, a term whose presumed internal redundancy has been mobilized to stress formalism's ostensible allegiance. Beginning in the 1970s, versions of this last usage have been powerfully adumbrated as the now familiar "critique of aesthetic [or Romantic, or modernist] ideology," a critique whose vocabulary and syntax stem from Marxism, although the critique also appears in a cluster of methodologies increasingly classified as post-Marxist. Schematically, the critique goes something like this:

At a foundational moment for modern-bourgeois, desocialized "representationalist" ideologies of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, Kant's third Critique and the art contemporaneous with it establish an essentialist or transcendental theory of cultural value, a theory based in literary or aesthetic form. This theory's other, from Romanticism through the twentieth century, is the material, the social, and the historical, all of which are erased by or made subservient to artistic-philosophical form. Thus emergent aesthetic formalism ideologically deforms material, sociohistorical reality, turning it first into art and then into art theory.

For reasons that flow in significant part from developments within Marxian-derived criticism, the critique--having long if glancingly made references to Frankfurt School "Critical Theory"--has recently accentuated its relationship to Frankfurt School figures, and to Theodor Adorno in particular. These more recent attempts to marshal "negative dialectics" for literary ideology-critique coincide with an overlapping but probably distinct event: the arrival of still another wave of interest, across the humanities, in the Frankfurt School and Adorno, generated by new and deeply erudite contributions to the scholarly literature on Critical Theory itself, as well as by the appearance of fresh, much-needed translations (not least Shierry Weber Nicholsen's invaluable rendering of Adorno's Noten zur Literatur and Robert Hullot-Kentor's luminous new translation of Ästhetische Theorie). ¹

But revived, across-the-board attention to Adorno and the Frankfurt School is not without irony for those ideology-critique analyses of literary-aesthetic "formalism" that hastily draft Critical Theory to their projects. Frankfurt-centered studies and translations have begun to clarify the ways in which Adorno, for one, makes Kant's third Critique virtually a cornerstone of his negatively dialectical final statement, Aesthetic Theory, if not of Frankfurt Critical Theory tout court. Meanwhile, the critique of Aesthetic Ideology and other marxisant treatments of Kantian-identified traditions in poetics and theory--having subjected Kantian-Coleridgean "essentialist organicism" to withering historical deconstruction--have proceeded to pose their own alternative accounts of aesthetic and cultural history. These alternatives often involve an "anti-aestheticist" constructionism, a principle instigative of or allied with those social-construction analyses that bare the device of cultural-historical fabrication, revealing the constructedness of ideological and social contracts. But the irony only deepens when one attends carefully to Adorno's numerous, decidedly modernist suggestions that "formal" Kantian aesthetics is nothing but the anti-essentialist, active process of "construction." Adorno's position all along, it emerges, was that the anti-organicism of Benjaminian-modernist constructivism stands as a realization rather than refutation of Kantian aesthetics (and of Romantic and nineteenth-century poetics). ²

All of which brings us, surprisingly or appropriately, to William Blake. The ways that Blake has been drawn into discussions about form and formalism may be readily imagined. Suffice it to say that important Marxist and post-Marxist treatments have kept faith with...