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53 2. The Visionary State Uniting Past, Present, and Future The visionary moment is a celebrated occurrence in the Beat canon.1 The desire to transcend defines the Beats—their work searches for means to escape space, time, the body, and the material world. This “atemporal” moment, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term it, creates a breakdown in the subject that exposes the Beats to new levels of experience. Despite this fleeting transcendence, however, the visionary moment necessarily ends. As champions of heightened states of awareness, the Beats are left with the difficult question of what to do with the atemporal once these moments recede. The vision must have a use if it is to avoid slipping into obscurity, and the ways in which Beat writers attempt to deploy their visionary experience into their daily practices reveals how they construct their early-postmodern subjectivity. The vision is an encounter with the “new”—the concept of transcendence is predicated on the assumption that one leaves the familiar behind. The question that the Beats face is what to do with the novel experience that the vision creates. To employ current knowledge as a means of understanding the new risks denuding it of its transformative power. To embrace it entirely, on the other hand, leads to the relativity of each new vision usurping the old. As early postmodernists, the Beats straddle this divide. What the Beats offer is a means of rethinking the subject. The Beats attempt to craft a subjectivity that can incorporate the changes that visions produce while retaining a stable sense of self across space and time. Early Postmodernism and the New The problem that both modernity and postmodernity face is how to deal with the new. In The Politics of Time, Peter Osborne claims that the periodizing concept of modernity registers “a break not only from one chronologically defined period to another, but in the quality of historical time itself” (16). The modern is not just another historical period. Rather, it involves a new type of temporality that “must constantly re-establish itself Mortenson Ch2.indd 53 9/9/10 2:32 PM T H E V I S I O N A R Y S TAT E 54 in relation to an ever expanding past” (20). This leaves the very notion of modernity filled with anxiety—each new present threatens all that has come before it. For commentators such as Matei Calinescu, literature is one of the sites where conceptions of the past are continually reshaped in the struggle to make sense of ever-changing conditions. In Five Faces of Modernity, Calinescu breaks modernity up into two sets of values, “[t]he objectified, socially measurable time of capitalist civilization” and “the personal, subjective, imaginative dúree” (5). As previously discussed, the temporality of capitalist civilization has a discomforting effect on the personal time of the subject. Modernist texts attempt to navigate this alienation , but since social activity lacks “any compelling moral or metaphysical justification,” modernist texts remain mired in “unbounded relativism” (5). The problem that both Osborne and Calinescu highlight is that the modern subject lacks an uncontested vantage point from which to survey change. Modernist texts address this crisis of the ever-new that defines modernity by seeking totality in a continually changing world. Unfortunately, they cannot achieve such an end because there is no overarching perspective that can adequately include a complete range of experience. The lack of stability that modernity creates leaves the subject in a difficult position. Living in the modern world means having the way one views that world constantly threatened. This does not mean, however, that various thinkers of the modern decide to opt out of taking sides altogether—quite the contrary. In The Concept of Modernism, Astradur Eysteinsson explains that modernism invokes the bourgeois subject, but it does so more through negation than affirmation. . . . Modernism can be seen as the negative other of capitalist-bourgeois ideology and of the ideological space of social harmony demarcated for the bourgeois subject. This appears to cohere with the historical theory of what Matei Calinescu has termed “the two modernities,” according to which modernism is judged in the light of its opposition to the “progress” of social modernity. (37) Capitalist-bourgeois ideology is not content to cede subjectivity to the relativism produced by the modern condition. It is more than happy to provide subject positions for its citizens. The problem is that these containment narratives are in the business of reinforcing a capitalist regime...

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