On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly (review)

This collection of eight previously published essays prefaced by a new introduction establishes Gerald Bruns not only as one of our most astute and learned critics of modernism but in fact a modernist critic of modernism. The individual chapters must be called essays in the strict sense: assays, thought experiments. They are less arguments than speculations, offering more possibilities than conclusions. Their coherence depends as much on Bruns' power of association as the unity of subject matter ("Here thoughts fly to Habermas's antimodernist theory . . ."). Questions—the most frequent being "What is art?"—usurp the place traditionally accorded to statements and propositions. Bruns' imperatives—"Think of noise as an instance of exteriority"—might be read as challenges, invitations, demands addressed to the reader or just notes to himself.

Pastiche dominates the book. On any given page (the example here happens to be page 82), the reader will find magpie nests of snippets compiled from Havelock, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Blanchot, Plato, Bataille, Benjamin, and on the next page Aristotle, Gadamer, Longinus, and Curtius. Of Bruns' disposition to collage, we may say (as he did of Foucault) that the genre of his "essays is that of the arcane review that reworks the ideas of others in a baroque prose of paradox and indirection (thus emulating . . . the 'extreme forms of language in which Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Klossowski have made their home'"(70).

Bruns' style mimics the modernist affection for pastiche, then, but no less does it evoke the ancient and venerable tradition of the copybook, where students inscribed memorable passages from the classics. Though "re-working" may remind Foucault of the French modernists, it characterizes the art of the "renaissance" as well. In either case, whether more ancient or modern, Bruns' style reveals the habits of a voracious reader whose learning demands respect.

The difficulty of characterizing this habit of mind suggests a larger problem about the defining character of modernism with which Bruns grapples throughout the book. First, modernism is best understood negatively. As Bruns describes it, modernism is an- (anarchic), non- (nonconceptual), and un- (unruly). But if that is what it is not, the task still remains to define what it is. Any characteristic repeated in various cases of modernism would thereby become a rule, but insofar as modernism is "unruly," it must abjure any such rules. In the absence of such rule-governed behavior, however, it lacks defining characteristics. In sum, modernism, defined as anarchic (searching for but not finding alternatives to principles and rules), is not anything in particular at all.

Assuming that we could circumvent this problem (by deploying Wittgenstein's conception of "family resemblance," for example), there remains the problem that every artistic movement, like every great poet, creates its predecessors. No poet is less modernist in form or sentiment than Alexander Pope. Recall his couplet: "those rules of old, discovered not devised, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodized." Yet considered as a precursor created by modernism, no poem is more a collage, a pastiche, a conglomeration of quotations than his Essay on Criticism. T.S. Eliot's paean to modernism, He Do the Police in Different Voices, offered the sincerest form of praise to il miglior fabbro , Alexander Pope. Is Pope a closet modernist then?

On the other hand, we might expect that Bruns would give more explicit acknowledgement to Kant as a precursor of modernism, since no one did more to redefine the aesthetic as non-conceptual and unruly. In fact, if we subtract Kantian Romanticism from modernism so defined, it's not entirely clear what is left. Kant, of course, never calls the distinction between art and non-art into question, as is so typical of modernism. Quite the contrary, he spent so much effort in differentiating the two that Gadamer argued that Kant's great disservice to art derives from aesthetic differentiation, the endeavor to understand art as art and nothing...