Abstract
The epigraphs above offer seemingly divergent accounts of the term activity, both of which are relevant to the theory of impersonality T. S. Eliot articulates in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where he suggests that we dispense with “what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of man” in exchange for the common medium of aesthetic emotion.3 The brand of activity Lewis advocates in this particular 1919 essay from The Caliph’s Design, “The Physiognomy of Our Time”—ostensibly an evaluation of Marinetti’s futurism and a treatise on the ideal “act of creation in art”—is impersonal in this sense: it attempts to proliferate human subjectivity into the external world to exceed “the scope of … personal existence,” such that human consciousness permeates “all forms of life” (CD 78, 77). Yet this “substitution and remounting” is not purely an act of domination, as it may appear in Lewis’s description (CD 77). Rather, such intrusion is also an “act of creation” that renders its architect vulnerable to impersonal diffusion, in “danger” of losing himself to the power of his creation. While the “activity” Lewis advocates does threaten to discount relationality altogether, trading respect toward discrete existence for “a death-like stillness” or “life-defeating fusion,” he also stresses the need for some form of structure or “frictions” to preserve the fundamental differences that distinguish subject from object, suggesting that the expansion of human consciousness should never be “indiscriminate, mechanical and unprogressive” (CD 77; Arts 144).
Life, simply, however vivid and tangible, is too material to be anything but a mechanism, and the seagull is not far removed from the hydroplane. Whether a stone flies and copulates … is little matter … What I am proposing is activity, more deliberate and more intense, on the material we know and on our present very fallible stock … Let us substitute ourselves everywhere for the animal world; replace the tiger and the cormorant with some invention of our mind, so that we can intimately control this new Creation. The danger, as it would appear at present, and in our first flight of substitution and remounting, is evidently that we should become overpowered by our creation, and become as mechanical as a tremendous insect world, all our awakened reason entirely disappeared.
—Wyndham Lewis1
The activity of relationality must be distinguished from the unbounded sameness that in Nietzchean terms, could be seen as the goal (and origin) of all correspondences. Distinguished and protected: the peace of the undifferentiated is also a deathlike stillness, and what we have perhaps too hastily called the superstition of difference could be reformulated as a wish to preserve those frictions that preserve all relations from life-defeating fusions.
—Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Wyndham Lewis, “The Physiognomy of Our Time,” in The Caliph’s Design, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1986), 73–74, hereafter abbreviated as CD. Subtitled Architects Where Is Your Vortex, the collection of articles and notes, as Lewis suggests in the preface, ostensibly critiques the state of modern art and architecture, particularly its relation to the public.
See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993), 144, hereafter referred to as Arts. Here Bersani and Dutoit address the question of Rothko’s art, asking “[c]an seeing survive the erasure of difference?” (142). This sort of question underscores the conceptual problem of impersonality I elaborate in this book. As Bersani and Dutoit remark of Rothko’s work, the erasure of boundaries is also an effacement of form, of the aesthetic itself. However, Bersani and Dutoit resolve this problem by arguing that form sustains itself in the “marks” of its very “erasure” (144).
Regarding Lewis, these issues receive more comprehensive attention in Douglas Mao, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998), hereafter referred to as Solid. Attending in detail to Lewis’s vast corpus of critical work, Mao’s chapter on the frequently disgruntled artist traces distinct phases in Lewis’s thinking about objects and their relation to the external world; he sees Lewis as having altered his priorities in 1916, where his initial critique of empiricism in Blast I shifted into an attack on the “imperialism of subjectivity” and its domination of objects (101). Arguing of Time and Western Man that Lewis’s attacks on subjectivity in “defense of the object’s integrity” could only go so far, Mao suggests that despite the similarities Lewis shares with figures such as Woolf regarding this matter, he still “maintains his allegiance to forceful subjectivity, which he views as imperiled rather than imperial under modernity” (98, 99). Regardless, Mao claims that Lewis “does align with a number of other modernists in insisting that the division between subject and object must be preserved for the sake of both, and that any putative reconciliations between the two would merely disguise some further domination” (101). This position later became “entangled” in Men Without Art (1934), when Lewis accused writers such as Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde of too closely attending in their fiction to the operations of consciousness, thereby neglecting the external world (105). Tyrus Miller argues similarly that the Great War divided Lewis’s career as he remade himself into an “aggressive polemicist-critic” whose work was increasingly tied to a “logic of publicity, ideological conflict, and struggle over canonizing authority in literary criticism.” See
Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: U of California P, 1999) 69, hereafter referred to as Late.
See Bruce Hainley, “Quite Contrary: Mary Butt’s Wild Queendom,” Village Voice Literary Supplement May 1994: 21, hereafter referred to as “Quite Contrary.” Other articles of interest include
Jascha Kessler, “Mary Butts: Lost … and Found,” The Kenyon Review 17.3 (Summer/Fall 1995): 206–18; and
Lawrence Rainey, “Good Things: Pederasty and Jazz and Opium and Research,” London Review of Books 20.14 (July 16, 1998): 14–16. See also Jane Garrity’s chapter on Butts in Step-Daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary (New York: Manchester UP, 2003), hereafter referred to as Step-Daughters, which argues that Butts endows women with “racialized status” as she positions them as “generative saviors of a dying nation” (195, 189).
Quoted in Nathalie Blondel’s biography Mary Butts: Scenes from a Life (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1998), 186, hereafter abbreviated at MBSL.
Butts’s interest in homosexuality has lead critics such as Bruce Hainley to deem her “an ecologist of the queer” where the term“[f]ag-hag” denotes not only a woman but also “a style of writing” (“Quite Contrary” 21). Indeed, in her 1928 epistolary novella Imaginary Letters (Vancouver: Talon, 1994),
illustrated by Jean Cocteau, Butts pronounced herself most interested in exploring the “sensual passions of men for men” (“Quite Contrary” 11). My own article, “A Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: Mary Butts’s ‘Fag-Hag’ and the Modernist Group,” in Modernist Group Dynamics: The Politics and Poetics of Friendship, ed. Fabio A. Durão and Dominic Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008), 95–118, argues that Butts’s criticism of Bloomsbury’s “personalized” cultural affiliations reflects the importance of effeminate men as consumers and audiences of modernist culture.
For a similar argument, see Andrew Radford, “Excavating a Secret History: Mary Butts and the Return of the Nativist,” Connotations 17.1 (2007/2008): 83, 80.
Jane Garrity, in “Mary Butts’s ‘Fanatical Pédérastie’: Queer Urban Life in 1920s London and Paris,” in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 233–251, argues that Butts both “yokes mystical experience with homosexuality and claims the city as queer domain” (235). While Garrity observes that for Butts gay men can function “variously as signs of degeneracy, embodiments of feminine artifice and excess, symptoms of national distress, sources of poetic inspiration, and divine conduits for primitive ritual,” I would also add that, even at their most degenerate, they act as correctives to an overly personalized literary and aesthetic culture that Butts links to urban life and space (237).
See Mary Butts, “Bloomsbury,” Modernism/Modernity 5.2 (April 1998): 37, hereafter referred to as “Bloomsbury.”
Unlike Eliot, Pound, H.D., or even Lawrence, Butts does not often explicitly mention “impersonality,” though her work, as I argue here, intervenes in the discourse of impersonality I elaborate in this book, particularly as it seeks to disentangle being from personality and identity. For example, her attention to the organization of space attends her interest in classical literature as an antireflective “world” of fluid boundaries. In a 1932 journal entry, Butts wrote that “[o]nly in Homer have I found impersonal consolation—a life where I am unsexed or bisexed, or completely myself—or a mere pair of ears” (qtd. in MBSL 22). Here, Butts characterizes the classical world of Greek literature as a stage for impersonal escape. As with Woolf ’s “Street Haunting,” which occasions the pleasure of leaving the “straight lines of personality,” the world of Homer also facilitates the “consolation” of transcending the rigid parameters of personality, especially as defined by sex. Becoming “unsexed” or “bisexed” enables Butts the freedom to access a more essential form of being. See Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in Collected Essays: Volume IV (London: Chatto and Windus, 1967), 165, hereafter referred to as Collected IV.
See Christopher Reed, introduction to Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 9.
See Ann Banfield, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 110.
See Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 218, hereafter referred to as Art.
See Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 54, hereafter abbreviated as DAT.
See Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of the development of phenomenology in relation to Husserl’s critique of psychology in Logical Investigations, in Basic Writings, ed. Stephen Priest (London: Routledge, 2001), 64–65, hereafter abbreviated as BW.
See M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), viii, hereafter referred to as Phenomenology.
Douglas Mao is correct in his assertion that modernism’s well-known “antipathy to the commodity” has too frequently driven most critical treatments of the modernist object, especially since the publication of Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) (Solid 4). Other studies that focus on the subject of modernist literature in relation to market forces include the 1996 collection edited by Kevin Watt and Stephen Dettmar, Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Re-reading (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996), hereafter referred to as Modernisms; along with
Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), which takes the connection Huyssen draws between fear of femininity, mass culture, and the loss of a stable ego as a point of departure for her analysis of the aesthetics and erotics of consumption. My aim here is not to fault these studies, but to develop an alternative idiom for speaking of objects that extends beyond their consumption.
See Colin Smith, “The Notion of Object in the Phenomenology of Merleau- Ponty,” Philosophy 39.148 (1964): 111, hereafter referred to as “Notion.”
See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 3, hereafter referred to as Literary.
See Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP, 2006), 65. Ahmed also argues that “tending towards certain objects and not others … produces what we would call ‘straight tendencies’—that is, a way of acting that presumes the heterosexual couple as a social gift” (91). I would argue that the impersonal perspectives I discuss in this book tend toward objects in ways that “unstraighten” space.
See also Wyndham Lewis, “Relativism and Picasso’s Latest Work,” in Blast (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), where Lewis connects excessive detachment to a hypermaterialization that detracts from the work’s potency as an aesthetic object. The problem for Lewis lies in Picasso’s attempt to “reproduce the surface and texture of objects … so directly so,” without attending to the formal demands of their real concreteness (139). These sculptures are overly bounded and consequently lack proper form. My reading of these essays from Blast differs somewhat from that of Douglas Mao. Arguing that Lewis’s critique of Picasso represents a particularly early phase of Lewis’s thinking about objects in which pure empiricism and detachment is “insufficiently virile,” Mao suggests that Lewis struggled with the difficulty of how to recast this “externalism” without authorizing the “domination of the object world” (Solid 93, 96, 99).
For Gaudier-Brzeska’s comments, see the retrospective piece, written and edited by Quentin Bell and Stephen Chaplin, in the October, 1964, issue of the art journal Apollo (October 1964), 287, hereafter referred to as “Ideal,” which reprints the series of letters exchanged in “The Ideal Home Rumpus.” Having secured the “Post-Impressionist” room at the 1913 Ideal Home Exhibition, Fry aroused the ire of his former compatriot, Lewis, who—in a letter additionally signed by Frederick Etchells, C Hamilton, and E. Wadsworth—classified himself as one of a group of “Dissenting Aesthetes” compelled to call in as much “modern talent” as possible “to do the rough and masculine work without which … their efforts would not rise above the level of a pleasant tea-party” (“Ideal” 287). Christopher Reed’s essay “‘A Room of One’s Own’: The Bloomsbury Group’s Creation of Modernist Domesticity,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), offers a more detailed account of this incident than I am able to offer here. The letter, also quoted in Solid Objects, 104, appears as well in The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk: New Directions, 1963), 49.
See Roger Fry, “The Artist as Decorator,” Colour April 1917, 92. A “life-style” magazine, which addresses women with the money to practice the prestigious art of home decorating, Colour could hardly be considered a paean to heady modernist aesthetic theory. Despite the ultimate failure of the Omega Workshops, Fry’s appearances in periodicals help explain what Jennifer Wicke has termed “the rapturous survival of Bloomsbury as an artistic and social movement, a fashion, a deeply desirable lifestyle.” See Jennifer Wicke, “Coterie Consumption: Bloomsbury, Keynes, Modernism and Marketing,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Re-reading (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996), 110.
See Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (Chicago: Elephant, 2007), 15, hereafter referred to as Abstraction.
See Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (New York: New Directions, 1968), 3, hereafter referred to as Literary.
See Janet Flanner, Men and Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Malraux (New York: Da Capo, 1957), 96, hereafter referred to as Men.
Matei Calinescu devotes a chapter of his Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke UP, 1987) to defining kitsch in relation to modernity’s other aesthetic movements. According to Calinescu, the fact that the avant-garde actually employed kitsch and that, conversely, kitsch appropriates avant-garde “devices” testifies to the complexity of kitsch as an aesthetic. Calinescu further declares that kitsch “cannot be defined from a single vantage point,” not even through a “negative definition, because it simply has no compelling, distinct counterconcept” (232).
See Jane Garrity, “Selling Culture to the ‘Civilized’: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity,” Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 29, hereafter referred to as “Selling.” Garrity illustrates how Bloomsbury, despite its permissive attitude towards homosexuality and bisexuality, collaborated with Vogue “in the promotion of a heteronormative agenda. Whenever members of the Group are represented, their captions carry the words ‘wife’ or ‘husband of’ to ensure readers of their heterosexuality” (35).
See Christopher Reed, “Bloomsbury Bashing: Homophobia and the Politics of Criticism in the Eighties,” Genders 11 (Fall 1991): 59–60. Reed argues that Bloomsbury’s relation to the “feminized man” leads to its critical dismissal in favor of those such as Wyndham Lewis and the Vorticists, who, for critics such as Charles Harrison in his English Art and Modernism, represented “the highroad of masculine accomplishment” (“Bloomsbury Bashing” 63).
See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard, 1992), 91, hereafter referred to as Reading.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon, 1958) will become more prominent in Chapter 5. Devoting a chapter of his study to “corners,” he states that those who are “prepared to go beyond the spider, the lady-bug and the mouse,” to a point of identification with things “forgotten in a corner,” meditate on the neglected, the abandoned, the “poor little dead things” that create a past (142).
See Janet Lyon, “Josephine Baker’s Hothouse,” in Modernism, Inc: Body, Memory, Capital, ed. Jani Scandura and Michael Thurston (New York: NYU Press, 2001), 34–35, hereafter referred to as “JBH.”
According to Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1986), Stein was “less restrictive” socially though equally “demanding of loyalty” as she had been before her career was established. Butts’s story, “From Altar to Chimney-Piece” registers this change, and is especially relevant to Benstock’s claim that Stein was “particularly open to the young, to those whom she might influence, to those who could carry her cause to the younger generation” (170).
See Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990).
See the memoir Robert McAlmon first published in 1938, Being Geniuses Together: 1920–1930 (London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), 204, which contains supplementary chapters and an afterword by Kay Boyle. If McAlmon’s chapters tell a story of modernist “security,” Kay Boyle’s chapters, which narrate her own struggles to become “established,” reflect a much different life of constant penury and displacement.
In Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), Bourdieu writes that “personality, i.e., the quality of the person … is affirmed in the capacity to appropriate an object of quality.” For Bourdieu, collecting itself most evidently supports this relation, since it requires a lengthy “investment of time” that affirms the “quality of the person” (281). Furthermore, the appropriation and acquisition of objects enables a “sense of belonging to a more polished, more polite, better policed world” (77). These assertions are certainly true in specific situations, but I am arguing here that modernist texts allow us to think about objects beyond the fact of their consumption, particularly as they theorize a form of relating to objects that does not magnify the personality of the owner.
Copyright information
© 2012 Rochelle Rives
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rives, R. (2012). Problem Space. In: Modernist Impersonalities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021885_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021885_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43773-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02188-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)