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The Aesthetic Anxiety
- The University of Akron Press
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40 The Aesthetic Anxiety Avant-Garde Poetics and the Idea of Politics if you are personally acquainted with any significant number of poets, you will perhaps not be surprised to find that the thesis of this essay is as follows: poets want to have their cake and eat it too. The particulars of the argument, though, go beyond the intuitive and the obvious, or so I hope. What I want to say is this: since the nineteenth century, poets have faced a dilemma. On the one hand, many poets have felt the allure of the radical freedoms of an entirely autonomous art, an art not in the heteronomous service of any religious function, ideological formation, moral system, any cause, or any institution—an art that exists for art’s sake alone. On the other hand, poets have faced the anxieties that such autonomy seems, inevitably, to create: fears of losing their readerships, their social roles, and their political utility. Many poets of the twentieth century, especially those affiliated with avant-garde movements, have been haunted by such anxieties, and have sought to assuage them by claiming that a commitment to aesthetic autonomy can, in and of itself, be a form of political action. Such an identification does not bridge the chasm between a belief in autonomous art and a belief in the kind of heteronomous art that serves a cause. Rather, it denies the existence of such a gap, and asserts that the disinterested pursuit of art for its own sake is also, by its very nature, politically efficacious . 41 Poetry in a Difficult World Positions of this kind are by their nature fraught with contradictions, and raise many a question. Can withdrawal from political engagement be anything other than quietism? What are the politics of audience, when the art speaks neither to the disempowered classes nor to a significant element of the power elite? Can a political art still be autonomous , or does it bend its craft to a political end? Indeed, the attempt to work through such questions has been the driving force behind many an avant-garde polemic. Despite the difficulty of maintaining the identity of aesthetic autonomy and political utility, though, this dream of the poets has endured for the better part of a century. Two groups of poets who attempt to identify aesthetic autonomy with the political—the surrealists and the language poets—are of particular interest because of the different forms of politics to which they link autonomous aesthetics. Starting in the 1920s, the surrealists, under the general guidance of André Breton, sought a link between the radical imaginative freedom of their movement and the project of Communist revolution. Later, beginning in the 1970s, the American language poets sought to identify aesthetic freedom with a kind of negative politics—a politics of critique and resistance, rather than one conducted with a specific revolutionary utopia in mind. Whatever the form of politics, though, the enduring nature of the poet’s anxiety about reconciling aesthetic autonomy and political efficacy indicates that we may have reached a point in the history of poetics in which what I am calling the aesthetic anxiety (that is, the anxiety about the apparent political and social inutility of autonomous art) isn’t so much a passing crisis as it is a lasting condition of poetic production. Whether the solution to this anxiety proposed by the avant-garde poets can survive is, of course, another question, and one to which the answer, increasingly, seems to be “no.” To understand the aesthetic anxiety, we need to look briefly at certain conditions of the creation of aestheticism, which was born of a rejection of utility. Aestheticism, at least in part, grew out of the alienation of those committed to imaginative expression from the powerful classes. The alienation was palpable enough for the Goncourt brothers to note that the social world of the writer had become “curious when you compare [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:24 GMT) 42 The Poet Resigns it to the society life of littérateurs of the eighteenth century, from Diderot to Marmontel; today’s bourgeois scarcely seeks out a man of letters except when he is inclined to play the role of mysterious creature, buffoon, or guide to the outside world” (Cassagne 342). Animosity ran in both directions between bourgeois and littérateur, but the fundamental conditions for this situation lay in the newly powerful bourgeoisie’s rejection of literary means of expression. As Pierre...