Doll/bat/baby face

 A generic template is a template that is migrating somewhere else.
— Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies (127)

Poetry, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. As Jed Rasula in Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth makes clear, poetry is an archaic technology that emerges the moment the Muses “dictate directly into the inner ear or mind” (98). Rasula presents this primal “voice-over” as not “a beginning of” but “a split from,” where all subsequent “episodes retain a sense of incommensurability between voice and voice-over” (100). Such rifts are as unsettling as they are rich. Aesthetic myths underwrite modernist aesthetics to the exact extent modernism obscures this. Rasula does not mean to change this, but, like one acquainted with the facilities, to give us the password for wifi. This then is a welcome addition to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ excellent Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics series.

For reasons that will become clear, Rasula’s text is a tissue of quotations. Since his argument proceeds by modulating these voices, I could not discuss it without incorporating many of these quotations. However, through my own fault, I fear that this becomes overwhelming at times. So it will be helpful to grasp Rasula’s poetics of the quotation. He successfully conceptualizes his quotations as necessary irruptions which function seamlessly in the argument. But how can irruptions function seamlessly? Rather than efface the quotation’s necessarily jagged and obtrusive manner, Rasula details how poetry has always relied on this technology of the interrupting voice-over, even when poetry denied this. Thus poetry has two choices: affirm the presence of these alien voices or sacrifice its technological heritage. All quotes here from other authors, unless otherwise noted, are in Rasula’s text.

Like most media, poetry preserves itself by promising to heal the rifts it perpetuates. Its claim on the human subject is as absolute as it is unfulfilled. Adorno noted a similar tendency in the artwork itself: “For if the Idea of Beauty appears only in dispersed form among many works, each one nevertheless aims uncompromisingly to express the whole of beauty, claims it in its singularity and can never admit its dispersal without annulling itself.”[1] As techne, poiesis persists as an index to its own failed apotheosis, as well as the as yet unfulfilled apotheoses of other media that would exclude it.

But poetry differs from other technologies in that it preserves its deficiencies as its essence, that is, it reproduces itself through malfunction. In all of its appearances, Rasula argues, poetry “precipitates ambiguity and duplicity, and it is implicit that those who throw in their lot with the Muses may be intent on dissimulation” (101). Or, as the Muses put it in their encounter with Hesiod on Mount Helikon: “we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we want to, how to tell the truth” (100). Rasula maps not only the mutations of this primal antimony but the subsequent splits in either side. Poetic inspiration becomes “a tautology that challenges, even as it perpetuates, the foundations of poetry” (120). If every signifying act emits static (or noise), and if “circuit” replaces tautology, it is easy to conceptualize poetry as a sort of perpetual machine, one that generates more energy than it consumes.

Rasula structures his third chapter, “Poetry’s Voice-Over,” in response to a familiar poetic ideology: “Because so much contemporary verse practice presumes the equivalence of subjectivity and authenticity, we’ve become paradoxically estranged from what Viktor Shklovsky dubbed ‘defamiliarization,’ forwarding or baring the aesthetic/technical device” (138). But Rasula does not merely condemn authenticity; rather, in indicating the artificiality of its resources, it emerges as, paradoxically, the defamiliarized of the defamiliarized. When “interiority” detaches itself from its ideological veil it floats into in a jeweled miasma presided over by Mallarmé, and once there, it realizes itself in his unrealized desire to leave behind nothing but an empty book. Subjectivity emerges as “that process by which we’re ideologically enjoined to cultivate our own lives by sorting, packaging, and shaping raw sociocultural material” (127). Again, myth anticipates the results of Continental modernism’s investigations: Rasula notes, “Hesiod’s legacy suggests that poetic interiority is mesmerizing because of its alterity” (110).

Long before Rimbaud’s je est un autre and Spicer’s poet-as-radio, the poetic voice appeared sufficiently “other” to affix itself to an array of alien forces. Rasula, quoting Blanchot, notes that poetry’s “lowest sanctum harbors a vertigo of attestation, a dizzying reversal in which one encounters ‘not another world, but the other of all worlds’” (190). It follows that since “the poetic voice is not strictly human … poetry may not be humanizing but dehumanizing” (110). The Muses possess the poet, speaking in a voice beyond the simple axis of verifiability and nonsense. This “situates poetic inspiration among prosthetic technologies, or elaborations of human propensity in alien material. Inspiration is alienation, as in alieniloquiam, speaking otherwise. Hesiod’s initiation into poetry is at once an affirmation of voice and a disturbance of identity” (111). Rasula wishes to retain inspiration’s physicality, its literal in-breathing. Such breathing carries with it the notion of a turn, which, once undertaken, never ends. Extending language, itself alien, into alien territory does not anthropomorphize the new territory so much as alienate the speaking subject. Thus, in one of the text’s many reversals, Rasula affirms alienation, confronting the visceral aversion to alienation with a restored visceral poetics of alienloquiam. This encapsulates Rasula’s method, which is as follows: he assumes that since visceral aversion, negativity, and disgust are theoretically determined, they are theoretically amendable. This implies one of two things: either the “aversive qualities” are culturally determined, hence not in the phenomenon itself, or the aversive qualities are the phenomenon itself. If, for the former, an epistemological method redresses the misperception, only a revised ontology can answer the aversive phenomenon’s interrogation. Rasula’s method is an ontological method, that is, he effects a theoretical reversal whereby the phenomenon’s lacking, disgusting, negative content is affirmed as that phenomenon’s positive content. Slavoj Zizek uses this method extensively, conceptualizing it as a “Hegelian” reversal. Most pertinently for this context, Zizek finds that Louis Althusser’s “work embodies a certain radical ethical attitude which we might call the heroism of alienation or of subjective destitution.”[2] Yet Rasula’s poetics is much more radical: poetry, as a murmur issuing along lines of displacement, abandons even this “ethical” site of heroic abasement, demanding instead 3D movies.

Poetic voice and political subject are irreconcilable. The voice alienates the subject from its supposed ground not to humiliate it but to free it from the subjection inherent in the process of subjectivization. But to the extent that this escape becomes another desire, there forms a ground to restage the original problem. If this is so, poetry’s political problem is not just figuring out what to say or how to say it, but, as Rasula says, quoting Foucault, to see that “modern modes of subjectivization are not modes of subjugation and repression; power is less likely to circulate now (at least in democratic societies) as repressive constraint. ‘What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse’”: poetry must see itself in this description of power (127). Rasula’s historiography accomplishes this by casting poetry as a technocracy, that is, a ruling order like any other. Thus Rasula clarifies poetry’s relation to power: poetry counters power, but only by reasserting its own form of technocratic rule. To engage in political critique, poetry must become formally identical with its object of critique. But, again, this is not shameful; rather, it is the only way poetry can draw upon its historical resources as a technocracy with political economy. Rasula details how, to the extent it critiques political agency, “poetry becomes complicitous with the regulative endeavors of selfhood” (127). But poetry fails to regulate the self to the same extent that it perpetuates the possibility of desubjectivization. Its failure to fulfill its technological telos resides in this defect. Thus its persistence is inseparable from its marginalization.

But when did this technocracy establish itself? How did it legitimate its rule? Rasula’s historiography has the answer. It shows us how poetry’s technocratic rule is not a result of modernist innovation, but something that precedes poetry: like Borges’s library, the technocracy has always existed, but only recently actualized certain potencies within itself to create a new department: poetics. Rasula invokes the Orphic myths to substantiate this claim, for it is Orpheus who “signifies the emergence of a human language from a world of expressive sentience, but this emergence is always partial and conditional” (117). This clarifies modernism’s innovation: modernism does not introduce technology into poetry, for poetry has always been one technology within a vast technocracy, but stages an Orphic “descent into the body” to retrieve its voice, which, like the beloved, continually slips back into the bodily underworld (118). For as poetry extends language into an other, so the other extends itself into poetry. These extensions can be ascents or descents, as “the Orphic perspective signifies a reversal” (117). This reversal extends to gender as well, for “to experience voice as inner — that is, as unvoiced — is to be initiated in the emergence of gender” (143).

As we will see, such displacements inform the modernist poetics cited extensively by this book, which Rasula traces back to Mallarmé. Eugene Jolas, another exemplary modernist, developed a poetics of reversal in the poetics manifestos he published alongside Joyce’s Work in Progress in his journal transition. Rasula summarizes one such manifesto thus: “vertical finally blends with integral in [Jolas’s] 1936 manifesto ‘Vertigralism,’ drawing on a rich vein of prepositional inversions: to go in is to go out, as above so below” (187). Articulating the importance of Mallarmé’s Un coup de des for his own text, Rasula writes, “the synaesthetic aura of the preface suggests that the poem is not so much the material manifestation of a cognitive event, but a switchyard transposing various materials into and through one another, an ensemble of what appears in one light to be abstract and in another light concrete” (50). As this notion of the subjective switchyard defines modernism’s relation with the poetic technocracy, I will return to it in another context.

Even though Mina Loy’s declaration “I am knowing / All about / Unfolding”[3] dominates every part of this book, I want to return to the question implied in this review’s first sentence: how does poetry live on precisely because the moment to realize it was missed? The senses, persisting only as “witnesses to their own nomadic dispersal, industrial byproducts of parasensory competition,” are unhelpful in contemplating their transformation under technocritization, since contemplation requires distance (134). Fortunately poetry, as one of the earliest engineers of subjectivity, presents to us a historicized continuum Rasula describes as “a technical support in a random-access memory device— a hard drive, as it were, for activating the serial components of an identity that can no longer identify itself in the reflective screen of a monitor” (128). As the only technology capable of contemplating the subject it displaces, poetry lays claim to one of its functions: against the more aggressively absorptive technologies, poetry persists “as a means of holding sensory provocation at bay” (134). Or in Odysseus Elytis’s words, quoted by Rasula, “poetry is a mechanism that demechanizes man and his relation with things” (12).

Disvocative poetry, whose principle mechanism is the dislocation that distances, does not find its opposite in absorptive poetry. For far from fulfilling its own claims, absorptive poetry merely distorts its distance into a simulacrum of intimacy more frigid than an SAT test center. If both disvocative poetics and univocal poetics maintain this irreducible linguistic distance, only univocal poetics work to obscure distance in favor of “the masculinist dream of pure thought, calculation without expenditure, noise free channels: a regained paradise of unity without strife or division” (132).[4] In contrast to this bureaucratic paradise of unity, disvocative poetry cultivates an uninhabitable paradise of noise and contamination, in the end overwhelming even these categories. Similarly, the distance following poetic displacement does not end in contemplation but in an unstable zone of perceptual slippage, an unmarked place of reversal alike the house in Stalker. For, in Benjamin’s words, quoted by Rasula, “the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation” (161). Habitually feeding an altered perceptual life, contemplation gives way to the synaesthetic state which lies at the beginning and the end of poetry.

Poetry absorbs into a distance that perpetuates “an Atemwende,” a word Rasula adopts from Paul Celan, which translates as “a turning of our breath” (181). This is as artificial (as much a “special effect,” in Rasula’s terms) as any technological simulation. Rasula links this distance-effect to “the image,” using quotes from Djuna Barnes and Pierre Reverdy. Before Barnes proclaimed that “an image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties,” Pierre Reverdy celebrated the image in the Surrealist journal Nord-Sud as that which “cannot be born from a comparison but by bringing together two more or less distant realities. Insofar as the relationship between the two realities is distant and exact — the greater will be its emotional power and poetic reality” (161, 162). Mediation and reconciliation are not possible in this reality; rather, its reality is a poetic reality because irreconcilable distance adheres within it. The Surrealist image enforces this because it “absconds with thought, plunging into the primitive core from which imaging and thinking are coiled up together in a primary spasm, their serpentine energies ratified in the form of Laokoon, and under threat of being petrified by Medusa” (183). In abandoning mediation and reconciliation, poetry becomes radically incomplete, but through no deficiency of its own. Rather, deficiency and incompleteness become the positive features of poetic reality. Thus poetry makes positive use of its own deficiencies, for “the poem is tethered to reality by its incompleteness; its disappointments and inertia force a way out” (163). Poetry’s escape affirms the legitimacy of its technocratic rule, for this rule has not fulfilled its mandate.

Incompleteness and uninhabitability originate not in poetry but in language. To support this claim, Rasula relies on Nathaniel Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement, returning often to Mackey’s notion that “‘poetic language is language owning up to being an orphan’” (124). Poetry is orphanic, embracing the orphic task of “enact[ing] the exile of language, which is not so much banishment as it is the constant displacement of the word into other media,” which contrasts with deploying language for instrumental purposes (124). Rasula quotes Georges Bataille to specify the inadequacies of instrumental language: “‘we would in no way have anything of the human about us if language had to be entirely servile within us. Neither can we do without the efficacious relations words introduce between men and things. But we tear words from these links in a delirium’” (189). But it does not follow from this that language is an end in itself. This is impossible, because that which does not stabilize cannot exist “as such” or “in itself.” Like Hume’s “self,” language exists only as a prejudice imposed upon a succession of phantasmal after-images. Indeterminacy cultivates the utopic desire for the uninhabitable. Poetry’s voiceover complicates this further, as “the interweaving of voice with language is thus much more complex than anything that can be generated out of Saussure’s binary, langue/parole” (135). Voice embraces the linguistic zone of excess and nonsense that persists beyond the institutional thresholds of language.

An uninhabitable utopia has its advantages, as music and sound poetry indicate. Quoting Heidegger, Rasula notes that “we do not possess or subsume language, but are always ‘on the way to language.’ The sound poetry expectorations of Raoul Hausmann, Hugo Ball, Antonin Artaud, and others are neither pre- nor post-linguistic, but vocalizations at a tempo different from that generally permitted by the semantic assignments of the speaking subject. Kurt Schwitters’s grand Ur-Sonata is not preparatory to linguistic function, but a kind of counter-love, a reciprocal comportment of voice on the way to language but without any particular incentive to arrive” (136). Jack Spicer’s critique of Robert Duncan, Jess, and Wallace Berman’s contextual aesthetic are critiques of the desire for a habitable utopia.[5] Berman’s contextual aesthetic, for example, involves two moves: a decontextualization of some cultural fragment and a recontextualization of it in an assemblage. This assemblage then forces one to imagine a new context, thereby cultivating an alternative utopic desire. But such an anticipatory aesthetics relies too much on projection,[6] which undoes the utopic desire it supposedly cultivates, as Jack Spicer noted. Against this, Spicer’s radio welcomes interference, thereby foregrounding the displacement of the poet’s subjective frequency by a multitude of other frequencies. His technological economy modifies itself to keep pace with newer forms of media. Spicer’s poetics invokes the specter haunting every act of signification: noise.

For Rasula, how a poem relates to noise defines its fitness for transmission. Does the poem suppress the noise of its transmission, or does it elevate noise to the center? Does the poem deny its own static, otherly ground, or does it broadcast its dependence on this alien ground by foregrounding the otherly voices? Does the poem insist on its univocity, or does it propose a frame for the aleatoric interference attending its polyvocity? Poet, critic, and archivist Craig Dworkin addresses this problematic in Reading the Illegible. Quoting Jacques Attali, Dworkin argues that “sound arranged into music ‘simulates the social order, and its dissonances express marginalities,’” that “‘Noise has always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages:’ [this] allows one to read music as an anticipation of social change.”[7] Rasula summarizes Nathaniel Mackey’s work on noise, which defines poetry’s relation to noise as “discrepant engagement, [which] rather than suppressing or seeking to silence that noise, acknowledges it. In its anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding noise, discrepant engagement sings ‘base,’ voicing reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend” (124). A withered, politicized hand crawls out from under such a door, gathering holiday snacks for itself. I don’t know whether to welcome it, make a wish on one of its fingers, or drive a nail through it. Mackey nicely reasserts the abasement inherent in any “founding noise,” where the privative “a” at once disrupts the base and reasserts it. Such a paradox haunts every antifoundational, antimetaphysical, and antiuniversalist gesture, in that every such gesture becomes precisely what it disavows.

Rasula’s text is an echoing text. He approvingly quotes Thoreau’s “estimation of Echo [as] … ‘to some extent, an original sound …. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood’” (103). Far from a distorted copy of a pristine original, an echo heralds other voices and other languages. Rasula’s mode of representation organizes itself around this conception. Surprisingly, he takes his cue from those “bats with baby faces [in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land], finding the measure by echolocation” (184). As an alternative to discursive linearity or Romantic self-projection, the echo orients one “constrained by historical dynamics too hard to make out, when neither mirror nor lamp will do” (184). One exemplary instance occurs early in the book, in which Creeley’s “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT” appears in its proper context, that is, as an impoverished echo of Kandinsky and Russian Futurist Alexei Kruchenykh. Here, the historicizing echo rewrites a primal scene of the New American Poetry, all but dissolving the latter’s ground in the continental avant-garde.

Rasula’s transposition of Echo into method mimics Echo’s role in myth, where she “dispels the aura of speakerly control in ways that parallel Hesiod’s mimicry of the Muses”; this is “the turf of that subterranean darkbook Finnegans Wake — an echolalia of prolific sentience that stirs tongues as well as leaves on trees” (103). Echo unsettles Rasula’s own critical voice. This is necessary if his book is to satisfy its own criterion, which he discusses in the preface: “as with a previous book, This Compost, this one tilts the application toward poetics. That’s to say, the writing itself is not an instrumental expedience; it vibrates to the sound waves of its subjects” (x). This invokes the outrageous specter of German Romanticism, whose “venerable provocation [was] a poetry indistinguishable from its poetics” (11).[8] Rasula meets this challenge with his use of echo, which, never merely repetition, affects what it perceives. Or as Michael Taussig puts it, quoted by Rasula, it is “the power of the copy to influence what it is a copy of” (125).

Referring to Imagining Language, which he coedited with Steve McCaffery, Rasula says in an interview in Fascicle: “when I started thinking of Imagining Language as an anthology — around 1985 — I characterized it in conversation as ‘a project in which Finnegans Wake would be normative and central rather than eccentric and peripheral.’” If Modernism and Poetic Inspiration has a work at its center, it is undoubtedly Mallarmé’s Un coup de des. In Malcolm Bowie’s estimation, quoted by Rasula, Un coup de des “‘has brought off that supreme outrage against art, a work that means less as we read it more.’ But this is not necessarily a loss,” Rasula continues, as “‘here is an exercise in reading which requires of us that we unlearn to read’” (21–22). This poetics of erasure leads to Blanchot’s insight, quoted by Rasula, that “Orpheus ‘links poetry with an outrageous urge to vanish’” (121). Aside from aligning itself with the venerable practice of erasure, Mallarmé’s work anticipates modernism’s preoccupation with genre and synaesthesia. Quoting Valery’s description of Un coup de des’s “palpable emptiness,” Rasula adds that “within the scope of synaesthetic suggestibility, this kind of silence could also evoke music” (23). As Mallarmé figured modernism, so poetry’s originary myths figured Mallarmé.

In seeking to renew perception through an estrangement of the senses, modernist poetics attacks genre. Genre stabilizes perception within a horizon of expectation. It reassures, folding desire into pre-worn perceptual tracks. For modernist poetics, such reassurance is death. Benjamin’s dictum that “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one” is thus also a statement about decay.[9] This conception persists in contemporary practice. In an April 26, 2008, radio interview on WRVU Nashville, Bruce Andrews assesses language writing’s “failure” in terms of its inability to create a support system durable enough to resist the inevitable institutional containment of it under the generic designation of poetry. “Far from being a category that unifies genres and canonizes authors, literature consists of those writings having in common only the noncompliance that animates them one by one,” Rasula writes (20). To support this, Rasula cites several acts of Mallarmé’s generic disruption: “Mallarmé intimates that … ‘for whoever would read it aloud,’ the typography approximates a musical score. Addressing the conspicuous scatter of typographic elements across the span of facing pages, he goes so far as to identify the white space (‘les “blancs”’) with silence” (50). Rasula reads any generic elision as allegiance to poetry’s technocratic resources.

Again, the Greeks appear to have rehearsed this modernist dilemma in its entirety: “Just as we recognize visionary experience that is not contingent on eyesight, the Pythagorean worldview stipulates a ‘visionary’ experience in the auditory mode, in which we have proprioceptive assurances of harmonies we cannot hear” (116). Here then is a species of synaesthetic proof, which pushes thought beyond its sensual thresholds. If “poetry is a manifestation of such thresholds,” it imposes them on the self it cultivates (110). Rasula cites Deleuze and Guattari as the source for this insight, quoting their belief that “the self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (104). If poetry disrupts the generic boundaries that secure the senses, it does so in the service of thought: “There are limits of ratio, naturally, and the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers were intent on estimating where sensation vanished, giving way to cogitation- and cogito to agitation” (197). This argument echoes Rasula’s earlier echo of Ranciere, who thinks “that lyricism is ‘a political experiment of the sensory’” (177). Thus modernist exploration returns to an archaic site, if only because poetry, reminded of its resources by newer technologies like film, recalled the resources available to it from its beginnings.

Forsaking the heights of sublime calm, modernism seeks the faults of synaesthetic slippage. In Rasula’s estimation, poetics with an ethic of contamination sides with the senses against the “bad” rationalization in the service of iteration, as “the senses are always on the alert for an other, a countertrend, a world apart” (184). Literature sees this not as its end but at its beginning. For, “implicitly following Blanchot, Foucault retains ‘literature’ as a field of exceptions to any law, a field known only by the ludic undertow language exerts on discourse” (14). Poetic resources return the subject to this tide so as to disrupt the subject’s appropriation of language as instrument: “Literature attends to what the murmur emits, not what the subject reports” (14).

Tending its patent on the self, poetry watches emergent technologies with an eye to salvage their newly manipulative techniques. Rasula quotes Maya Deren, who wrote in the middle of the last century that “‘the reality which we must today extend … is the relativism which the airplane, the radio and the new physics has made a reality of our lives;’ and such an extension, Deren insists, involves a ‘depersonalization’ by way of ‘ritualistic form’” (66). Rob Fitterman’s Metropolis “16” reveals the liberating variety latent in this vision of a personalized relativism of choice: “Taco Bell / Staples / Gap / Dunkin’ Donuts / Wal*Mart / KFC / J. Crew / Kmart / Starbucks / Sunglass Hut / McDonald’s.”[10] Poetry extends these realities with technical assistance from agencies other than the muse. For example, the “ritualistic form” of the Medusa leaves the subject with two options: one, meet the gaze that precludes the possibility of misprision; two, turn away. But as Celan’s Atemwende indicates, this “turn” is as fragile as it is perilous, consigning the subject to an endless, nomadic circuit which dissolves its subjective consistency. Such an encounter estranges the poet from language. Since such a rift cannot be healed, one must submit to language’s orphanic charge, which can only happen in poetry. Rasula writes: “Faced with the fragile integuments of the I-less poem forever on the way to language …, Celan practiced what he called ‘polysemy without mask’” (182). There emerges “the volatile utopia unexpectedly opened under the frightful gaze of the Medusa” (181). But this is not the end for the poet. One paradox awaits her in her exile: by turning from the Medusa the poet becomes the Medusa, at least from the perspective of the reader; that is, in confronting the poetry constructed of this exile, the reader inherits the fate of the poet, for she too must respond by turning. Celan’s notion of the poem as breath-turn unexpectedly illuminates Novalis’s demand for a criticism indistinguishable from its object. If in its deflection criticism absorbs the frightful gaze the poet absorbed in her deflection, criticism passes the “breath-turn” on to the reader.

I want to close with Bob Perelman’s lineated quote from Derrida’s Glas in his poem “The Marginalization of Poetry”:[11]

One has to understand that
he is not himself before being

Medusa to himself…. To be oneself
is to-be-Medusa’d.

Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed, and to be transformed into poetry.

1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005), 81.

2.  Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), xxv.

3. Mina Loy, “Parturition,” in The Lost Lunar Baedeker (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996), 7, also quoted in Rasula, 156.

4. This opposes the artwork as such, as Adorno notes, praising “the ancients … [who] obliged art to enter the agon, each the mortal enemy of each” (Minima Moralia, 81).

5. For a discussion of this, see Stephen Fredman, Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

6. Such projection is not “too subjective” but not subjective enough.

7. Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Northwestern University Press, 2003), 39.

8. Walter Benjamin, in his analysis of Schlegel: “the critique is not meant to do anything other than discover the secret tendencies of the work itself, fulfill its hidden intentions. It belongs to the meaning of the work itself … [C]riticism is far less the judgment of a work than the method of its consummation.” Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 153.

9. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 237.

10. Rob Fitterman, Metropolis 16–29 (Toronto: Coach House, 2002), 9.

11. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 10.