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Cultural Critique 60 (2005) 197-216



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Lyric's Expression:

Musicality,conceptuality, Critical Agency

What today could be more bourgeois, more aestheticist, than a poetry and poetics of lyric expressivity? Not much; or at least, that's periodically been the response, across the last century, of key progressive and Left strains in poetry and criticism. Everybody knows that, starting essentially with Romanticism, individualist bourgeois subjectivity sidles up to the social jukebox and pushes the button marked lyric expression whenever it's time to hear a songful meditation of and about poignant longing, mild dissatisfaction, or carefully delimited negativity. That lyric is the mode or genre at issue surprises no one, nor should it, because lyricism, musicality, and expression have been formally and historically bound together since well before the advent of Romantic poetry, a binding that has continued through the most modern poetic and musical experiments in and after atonality, dissonance, and serialism. During the past few decades of Left artistic and critical activity, the critique of lyricexpressivism has often turned to Marxian and, more specifically,to Frankfurt School figures—Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno above all—to underwrite renewed attempts to imagine a poetry that could leave expression behind; whether in Language Poetry in the United States or in kindred neo-avant-gardist groupings, and with a host of citations in particular to the translated texts of Benjamin's Passagenwerk and Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie, this has often seemed like a call to abolish lyric musicality tout court, though experiments have also toyed with notions of a nonexpressive or antiexpressive musicality, even an antiexpressive lyric.

For all the real interest thereby generated, such critical and artistic [End Page 197] work has tended to misconstrue Frankfurt approaches to lyric expressivism, as if zeroing in, without context, on Benjamin's quip—often ratified by Adorno—that for all he cared, innerness [Innerlichkeit] could go fly a kite.1 In Benjamin and Adorno's more sustained engagements with Romantic, later-nineteenth-, and twentieth-century poetry, an exploratory or experimental poetics is virtually at one with the stretching rather than the abjuration of lyric subjectivity and practice. The Frankfurters and the artists historically closest to them tend to regard lyric as literary art's "go-for-broke-game" ["Va-banque-Spiel"], for the lyric must work coherently in and with the medium—language—that human beings use to articulate presumably objective concepts, even while the lyric explores in semblance-character the most subjective, nonconceptual, and ephemeral phenomena. This theoretical or philosophical difficulty, concerning how simultaneously to think objectivity and subjectivity, also arises practically as lyric's great problem of form-construction: How—withlanguage alone as medium—to build a solid, convincing artistic structure out of something as evanescent as subjective song and how, in the bargain, to delineate or objectivate the impressively fluid contents of capitalist modernity? How, spontaneously yet rigorously, and with the utmost concision, to make thought sing and to make song think? For the Frankfurters, lyric dramatizes with special intensity modern aesthetic quasi-conceptuality's more general attemptin semblance to stretch conceptual thought proper, precisely in the aesthetic's enactment of a thought-experience that maintains theform of conceptual thought without being beholden to extant, status-quo concepts and their contents. Lyric's special formal intensity within this larger field of quasi-conceptual aesthetic experience arises from lyric's historically constitutive need to stretch music-ally in semblance the very medium of "objective" conceptual thought, language—to stretch language quasi-conceptually, mimetically, all the way toward affect and song but without relinquishing any ofthe rigor and complexity of conceptual intellection, so that in asemblance-character vital to the possibility of critical agency, speech can appear as song and song can legitimately seem to be logical, purposeful speech-act.2

All this is perhaps a long way of saying that Benjamin's and Adorno's much-celebrated theory and practice of the constellation, [End Page 198] far from being an antidote to immersion in the literary and aesthetic, just might for them be the most profound work of the aesthetic, the literary...

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