The “Negative Dialectics” of Louis Zukofsky’s “A”

Abstract

Zukofsky’s “A” always demonstrates a reflexive imagination in its attempt to grasp the way subjects actively constitute the world: the way humans are agents in creating ideologies and what is known and not merely passive recipients of “reality” and impersonal verities. Such a reflexive imagination subverts a recurrent feature of our civilization—the assumption that human beings have access to an absolute objective viewpoint. Constantly revealing the relevance of our physical nature and historicity to the kinds of knowledge we can attain, the reflexive imagination discloses the processes by which authority is constructed, its grounds in individual and social consciousness and practice. Zukofsky shares this position with Theodor Adorno. Like Adorno’s, Zukofsky’s writing tries to make the speaker’s presence visible, so that what is called the “world” is seen to be statements that are made and speeches that are uttered. The world’s structures as attributes not “properties,” is thus clarified, with all the chancy contingency and problematicity of any “subjective” statement. Objectivist poetics have at times wrongly been described and interpreted as a form of “objectivism,” despite Zukofsky’s denial of this position.¹

…dialectics means intransigence towards all forms of reification.

—Theodor Adorno, Prisms