Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman 9781474461672

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Series Editors’ Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I
1 The missing keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul Valéry
2 The force of abstraction: Marx and Marxism
3 Abstract, ‘abstract’: modernist visual art
Part II
4 ‘If it can be done why do it’: Gertrude Stein
5 ‘Resist the intelligence almost successfully’: Wallace Stevens
6 ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’: Samuel Beckett
Part III
7 Writing lived abstraction: James, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze
8 Staging modernist abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall
Conclusion: Herbert Read and aesthetic education
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture Series Editors: Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley Available Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult Leigh Wilson Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts Sam Halliday Modernism and the Frankfurt School Tyrus Miller Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction Elizabeth English Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British Print Culture, 1890–1930s Patrick Collier Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde Lise Jaillant Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light Emily Ridge Hieroglyphic Modernisms: Writing and New Media in the Twentieth Century Jesse Schotter Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics Nina Engelhardt Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman Daniel Aureliano Newman Modernism, Space and the City: Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and London Andrew Thacker Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine Victoria Bazin Modernism and Time Machines Charles Tung Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, Transition (1927–1938) Cathryn Setz Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers Claudia Tobin The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form Rachel Murray Novel Sensations: Modernist Fiction and the Problem of Qualia Jon Day Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film Robbie Moore The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes Peter Adkins Asbestos – The Last Modernist Object Arthur Rose Visionary Company: Hart Crane and Modernist Periodicals Francesca Bratton Modernist War Poetry: Combat Gnosticism and the Sympathetic Imagination, 1914–19 Jamie Wood Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity: Human and Inhuman Jeff Wallace Forthcoming Modernism and the Idea of Everyday Life Leena Kore-Schröder Modernism and Religion: Poetry and the Rise of Mysticism Jamie Callison Sexological Modernism: Queer Feminism and Sexual Science Jana Funke Modernism, Material Culture and the First World War Cedric Van Dijck www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ecsmc

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Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity Human and Inhuman

Jeff Wallace

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Jeff Wallace 2023 Cover image: Paul Cézanne, Le Mont Sainte-Victoire vu des Lauves, 1904/1906, Kunstmuseum Basel, Sammlung Online Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/12.5 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 6165 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 6167 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 6168 9 (epub)

The right of Jeff Wallace to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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CONTENTS

List of Figures vi Acknowledgementsviii Series Editors’ Preface x Abbreviationsxi Introduction1 Part I 1 The missing keyword: Raymond Williams, Paul Valéry 2 The force of abstraction: Marx and Marxism 3 Abstract, ‘abstract’: modernist visual art

17 31 69

Part II 4 ‘If it can be done why do it’: Gertrude Stein 5 ‘Resist the intelligence almost successfully’: Wallace Stevens 6 ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’: Samuel Beckett

105 132 158

Part III 7 Writing lived abstraction: James, Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze 8 Staging modernist abstraction: Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall 

181 206

Conclusion: Herbert Read and aesthetic education

229

Bibliography236 Index248

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FIGURES

I.1 Barnett Newman (1905–70), Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 113 8 in. × 17 ft 9¼ in. (242.2 × 541.7 cm). Gift of Mr and Mrs Ben Heller. Acc. n.: 240. 1969. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/DACS, London 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

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2.1 From Robert Tressell [1914] (2004), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Tristram Hunt, London: Penguin, pp. 175, 337.

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3.1 Paul Cézanne, Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque, c. 1883. Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: overall 65 × 81.3 cm (259 16 × 32 in); framed 84.4 × 100.3 × 5.7 cm (33¼ × 39½ × 2¼ in.). Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. © 2022. Digital image, Album/Scala, Florence. 

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3.2 Paul Cézanne, A Turn in the Road at La Roche-Guyon, c. 1885. Oil on canvas, 25¼ × 31½ in (64 × 80 cm). Purchased with the Tryon Fund, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. SC 1932.2.

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7.1 Francis Bacon, Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959. Oil on canvas, 74 × 67.5 cm (291 8 × 26½ in). © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

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FIGURES

8.1 Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell in ‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza at London’s Old Vic Theatre. Tristram Kenton/The Guardian. Photograph © Tristram Kenton. 211 8.2 Jonathan Groff, left, and Alfred Molina star in Red by John Logan, taken by Gina Ferazzi, published online 14 August 2012. Reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Times.216 8.3 The Live Theatre Newcastle and National Theatre co-production of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, presented in the West End by Bill Kenwright at the Duchess Theatre (2011–12). Photograph by Keith Pattison.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been long in the making. A preliminary sketch of its concerns and some of its materials can be found in the essay ‘“An inorganic life of things”: notes on abstraction and nature’, in Christopher Meredith, ed., Moment of Earth: Poems and Essays in Honour of Jeremy Hooker (2007). Before that, in the ‘Postscript: On abstraction’ to my 2005 book D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, I wrote about the meaning of abstraction in Lawrence, and outlined the reflections on Alfred Sohn-Rethel that are extended in the discussion of ‘real abstraction’ in Chapter 2 here. The Lawrence reflections were further taken up in ‘51/49: democracy, abstraction and the machine in Lawrence, Deleuze and their readings of Whitman’, in Howard Booth, ed., New D. H. Lawrence (2009). I have been thinking about abstraction in Raymond Williams for even longer – see the essays from 1993 and 1999, and ‘“An inorganic life of things”’. Chapter 1 builds on this work, by looking more closely at what modernist abstraction meant for Williams. Some of the material on Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in Chapter 2 was trialled both in the essays ‘51/49’ and in ‘“An inorganic life of things”’, and in papers given at Oxford and Liverpool John Moores universities. I am grateful for discussions of other aspects of the book after presentations to Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design, to MOMA Machynlleth and to the London Modernism Seminar. Instead of considering the subject in a freer, more wide-ranging and less period-defined way, in a book that would have taken several centuries to write, viii

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acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors of this series, Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley, for persuading me of how far this is really a story about abstraction in modernism and modernity. I am much indebted to Susannah Butler and Ersev Ersoy at Edinburgh University Press for their thoughtful, patient and encouraging editorship, and to Wendy Lee, an exemplary copy-editor. I’m also indebted to the invaluable and good-humoured assistance of Carol James in the Document Delivery section at Cardiff Metropolitan University library, throughout pandemic and lockdown. I am extremely grateful to Penguin Random House and to Faber and Faber for their permission to quote from the works of Wallace Stevens, and to the Barnett Newman Foundation for permission to quote from Newman’s writings (© The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York / DACS, London, 2022). Thanks are also due to individuals within institutions and agencies who have helped with copyright and permissions for the images – these include Cristina Seghi, Sara Toso, Ralph Drew and Lawrence Wong – and to the photographers who kindly gave permission for their work to be used: Tristram Kenton, Gina Ferazzi and Keith Pattison. For everything from conversations to meticulous feedback beyond the call of duty, heartfelt thanks go to the following friends and colleagues: Dan Anthony, Peter Burgess, Brendan Burns, Robert Caserio Jr, Clive Cazeaux, Hywel Dix, Elizabeth English, Gareth Evans, Benjamin D. Hagen, Sue Holdway, Jeremy Hooker, Jan Huyton, Rod Jones, Andy Mousley, Kate North, Sam Rose, Johanna Skibsrud, Alex Thomson and Eva Trier. Finally, I would like to thank Fran, Nina and Rob, as ever, for the love and support they have given throughout.

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SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also re-consider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to inter-disciplinary possibilities within modernism, including performance and the visual and plastic arts. Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

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ABBREVIATIONS

Reza, Yasmina (1996), ‘Art’, trans. Christopher Hampton, London: Faber. AM Negri, Antonio (2011), Art and Multitude, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity. AT Adorno, Theodor (1997), Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert HullotKentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, London: The Athlone Press. BNSW Newman, Barnett (1992), Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill, text notes and commentary by Mollie McNickle, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. C Marx, Karl [1867] (1909) Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, vol. I, 3rd edn, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, London: William Glaisher. CPWS Stevens, Wallace [1954] (1984), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, London and Boston: Faber. EW Marx, Karl (1975), Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth and London: Penguin in association with New Left Review. G Marx, Karl (1977), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth and London: Penguin in association with New Left Review. A

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Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds (2003), Art in Theory 1900– 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, New Edition, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. LPC Danchev, Alex, trans. and ed. (2013), The Letters of Paul Cézanne, London: Thames and Hudson. LWS Stevens, Holly, ed. (1996), Letters of Wallace Stevens, Berkeley: University of California Press. PMCW Mondrian, Piet (1987), The New Art – The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, trans. and ed. Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James, London: Thames and Hudson. PTD Beckett, Samuel, and Georges Duthuit (1965), Proust and Three Dialogues, London: John Calder. R Logan, John (2009), Red, London: Oberon. RTP Tressell, Robert [1914] (2004), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Tristram Hunt, London, Penguin. TPP Hall, Lee (2008), The Pitmen Painters, London: Faber. HW

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In memory of my parents, Lily Wallace and Stan Wallace

Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity. 

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man Kant covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it.



Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensuous everyday life?



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Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’

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INTRODUCTION

What is it that we want from abstraction? This book explores the work performed by abstraction as a keyword in modernist literary and visual cultures, and in the critical thought of modernity. It is a confluence of three preoccupations: first, a sustained curiosity about the work of the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ in literary, critical and philosophical writing; second, an equally sustained attachment to abstract art, along with a desire to know what this attachment means; and finally, an effort to extend a critical posthumanism through the rethinking and revaluation of the inhuman – what Reza Negorestani refers to as a cross-disciplinary ‘labor of the inhuman’ (Negorestani 2014) – in modernism. In his work The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard connected Guillaume Apollinaire’s statement ‘More than anything, artists are men who want to become inhuman’ (1913) with Theodor Adorno’s ‘Art remains loyal to humankind uniquely through its inhumanity in regard to it’ (1969) as keynotes of a modernist avant-garde (Lyotard 1991: 2). This book places what abstraction means to us, and what is at stake in it, at the heart of these concerns. Where abstraction is at work so too, I suggest, is a scrutiny of the relation between the human and the inhuman. The book takes a new approach to the dichotomy through which abstraction is generally understood: as a mode of thought and as a mode of art. I hope I can justify my sense that abstraction gets really interesting, its work more intense and intriguing, when we erase the barriers that normally separate abstraction in these two modes, freeing up our thinking about the work 1

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Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

of abstraction in order to make it newly and critically visible. Abstraction in and since modernism has been instrumental in interlinking our various understandings of what it is to think, of what art is and does, and of what it might be to be human or inhuman. Yet, at the same time, this conceptual work is in key respects invisible, often contradictory, certainly unstable. The story told in what follows, and especially in Part I, is of how abstraction may escape our view or disappear in plain sight, whether within the boundaries of a single text, or across the different disciplinary fields in which it is used. How do we understand abstraction? Let us reflect briefly upon its two domains, in thought and in art. In the first, we know abstraction as an operation involving ex-traction or generalisation, an act of selection or withdrawal from the hurly-burly of concrete particularity in order to get at the essence that composes but lies beyond it. The first four Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (2002) definitions offer abstraction as an ‘action’ of withdrawals, including that of ‘turning one’s mind away’ in spirituality or solitude, and even (from the early nineteenth century) as an act of the withdrawal of property via theft. In its fifth OED definition, abstraction modulates from verb to noun, and a suggestion of inherent inadequacy appears: abstraction is ‘something which exists only as an idea or in theory’. In its other main sense, abstraction of course refers to non-representational art, ‘freedom from or absence of representational qualities’ (OED), whether visual or literary, and is intimately associated with the modernism of the early twentieth century. This time the withdrawal is of recognisable subjects and objects from the artwork, and therefore, by implication, from a world and a mode of perception that is recognisably human. The origin of painterly abstraction is sometimes (although the debate is complex, as we shall see) located in the rise of Cubism; there are views as to whether Wassily Kandinsky (1912) or Kazimir Malevich (1915) created the first truly abstract painting; abstraction is seen to develop in movements such as Suprematism, De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, in the St Ives group in the UK, and, after the Second World War, in the emergence of Abstract Expressionism and ‘post-painterly’ abstraction. Questions not just of the meaning, but also of the value of abstraction are always immanent in each of these domains. Is not abstraction, for example, a perpetual threat on the horizon of our thought processes? Are we not forever wary of becoming ‘too’ or ‘merely’ abstract, and of thereby straying, if we are not careful, into some cold, bloodless realm of pure thought at the expense of the warm here-and-now? If we abstract, do we risk straying beyond nature and into the inhuman? An Ur-text in my own intellectual journey was a wellknown primer on existentialism, Irrational Man (1958), by the American writer William Barrett, which I read as a sixteen-year-old in the summer after my ‘O’ levels. Revisiting this book recently, I discovered that its opening sentence reads: ‘The story is told (by Kierkegaard) of the absent-minded man so abstracted 2

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introduction

from his own life that he hardly knows he exists until, one fine morning, he wakes up to find himself dead’ (Barrett 1962: 3). Abstraction as the antithesis of existential authenticity is everywhere assumed in Barrett’s narrative on modernity: for example, in the explanations that Henri Bergson ‘was the first to insist on the insufficiency of the abstract intelligence to grasp the richness of experience’ or that the triumph of Ernest Hemingway’s modernist style was its ability to ‘break through empty abstractions of whatever kind’ to see ‘what it is one really senses and feels’ (15, 45). Whatever abstraction was, to my teenage mind, it was clearly something to be avoided if one wished to be fully alive and human. As Peter Osborne has put it, and as we glimpse in the OED definitions, this is the highly familiar construct of abstraction as ‘reproach’, tending to be accompanied ‘by both a certain melancholy (loss of the real object) and a certain shame (complicity in the domination of the concept and hence repression of other, more vibrant, more creative aspects of existence)’ (Osborne 2004: 21). For Roland Barthes, a political allegory attaches to this abstraction: ‘the old reactionary myth of heart against head, sensation against reasoning, (warm) “life” against (cold) “abstraction”’ is a political division of labour; the right enjoys its association with pleasure, leaving intellectuality to the joyless left (Barthes 1990: 22). Real ambivalences, however, surround what we mean when we refer to the mental process of abstraction. The relation between simplicity and complexity is perhaps the most pressing example of this. For Aldous Huxley in 1927, abstraction, in selecting from reality certain aspects that are deemed to be significant, ‘provides us with a series of humanly significant and comprehensible simplifications’: the ‘very incompleteness’ or simplification of abstraction is what enables us to ‘return to the reality with a better chance of understanding it as a whole’ (Huxley 1927: 34). Simplification by abstraction is, then, the pre-condition of a complex understanding, or an understanding of a complexity. To the extent that such simplification might also be labelled ‘reductive’, Huxley’s illustrious grandfather, the evolutionary thinker T. H. Huxley, made reduction, and hence abstraction, the essential cornerstone of scientific analysis. Yet only a brief consideration of our everyday construal of abstraction reveals that, in its production of generalisations, for example, abstract thought is synonymous with complex thought and – as in the familiar terms of reproach – over-complex thought at that. The story about abstraction in artistic modernism is, as we surely know, a story about difficulty. Is abstraction, then, the over-simplification of a complex reality, or the excessive complication of a simpler reality? Conversely, however, abstraction can be, and is often, represented as the essential condition of thought per se – one of the things, not that portends the inhuman, but that precisely defines us as human. For aesthetic theorist Suzanne K. Langer, ‘if abstraction were really unnatural, no one could have invented it’; human beings must be possessed of ‘a spontaneous intellectual 3

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practice’ from which more ‘cultivated’ varieties of abstraction arise (Langer 1957: 167). ‘You cannot think without abstractions,’ declared the philosopher A. N. Whitehead. Whitehead identifies the paradox, exemplified by mathematics, that ‘the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact’. Yet weapons are dangerous things, if misused or in the wrong hands: the reproach of abstraction reasserts itself in Whitehead’s warning that, precisely because we cannot think without abstractions, ‘it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your modes of abstraction’ (Whitehead 1927: 73, 41). Abstraction emerges in early twentieth-century visual art as a defining feature of modernism, and in this sense as an agent, it was often claimed, in a process of artistic evolution, as, for example, in Alfred H. Barr’s dual chronology for the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1936. Barr identified two ‘main currents’ of abstract art between the years 1890 and 1935, one geometrical in form and intellectual in orientation, the other biomorphic and ‘intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual’ (Barr 1974: 19). Yet, just as Ezra Pound’s founding statements of a modernist literary aesthetic cautioned poets to ‘Go in fear of abstractions’ (Pound 1960: 5), so the development of abstract painting is haunted by a discourse of reproach defined in terms of lack or deficit – a negative theology, as if the painting’s abstraction were defined by non-presence, absence or exclusion. Art historian Leah Dickerman poses the question, with reference to the boundaries between abstract and representational that seemed to be dissolving in early modernism: ‘If abstraction no longer eclipses figuration, what is it seeking to evacuate?’ (Dickerman 2013: 4). On a spectrum of reproach for such an assumed process of ‘evacuation’, the outer limit is perhaps Paul Virilio’s Christian-humanist critique of an ‘aesthetics of disappearance’ in modernism, where the apparent erasure of the human subject from representation rehearses and prefigures the systematic dissolution of human beings through genocide (Virilio 2003). However, to turn the tables again, visual abstraction can be seen as a form of ‘freedom’ (OED) or emancipation of the painterly. Abstract painting is a liberation from the burden of representation and the cliché of realist illusionism, inviting a corresponding openness of interpretation on the part of the viewer, and allowing the work a plenitude of meaning corresponding with the very materiality of its presence. Rejecting as ‘simplistic and unsupple’ the conventional identification of abstract art with the ‘inhuman’, Peter de Bolla takes Barnett Newman’s 1948 canvas Vir Heroicus Sublimis as the occasion for extended reflection on the possibility of a language that might be able to express the ‘wonder’ of the encounter with this painting. The serenity de Bolla finds in Newman’s painting is one that ‘allows thought to breathe’ (de Bolla 2001: 52–3). Newman himself saw in the new ‘art of the abstract’ a restoration of painting’s intellectual and metaphysical motivations, and hence a re-engagement with art’s ultimate subject 4

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introduction

Figure I.1  Barnett Newman (1905–70), Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 1950–1. Oil on canvas, 7 ft 113 8 in × 17 ft 9¼ in (242.2 × 541.7 cm). Gift of Mr and Mrs Ben Heller. Acc. n.: 240. 1969. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). © The Barnett Newman Foundation, New York/DACS, London 2022. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence. matter, ‘the defence of human dignity’ (Newman 1992: 97, 105). From the same period of Abstract Expressionism in American art, the break with the idea of the canvas as a space of representation or illusion – for example, in Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko – could be said to enhance and intensify the sense of painting as a uniquely human act. I do not claim to offer here a comprehensive cultural and intellectual history of abstraction in modernism and modernity. Instead, my approach is selective and juxtapositional, using the logic of the case study rather than the survey, by way of asking what abstraction does, and how it gets written, once we dislodge its disciplinary frameworks. There are at least two key areas that are outside of the book’s ambit. I do not engage with a premodernist history of philosophical aesthetics as this is often identified in German Idealism and early Romanticism, where, as Andrew Bowie explains, a foundational ‘scepticism about abstraction, in the sense of the failure to see beyond the Understanding’s production of general rules to what they might mean to individual human subjects in a life-world’, can be found (Bowie 1990: 48). While this history undoubtedly informs the debates in Chapter 2 around Marx and Marxism, my discussion begins with the way abstraction is written in Marx. Neither do I engage with the more specialist senses in which abstraction figures within modern mathematics, even though the thinking of abstraction in the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead, a significant figure in my narrative throughout, draws from dual origins in aesthetics and mathematics. 5

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Abstraction in Modernism and Modernity

After such disclaimers, the book might be better characterised as a new enquiry into the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ in modernism and modernity. I linger often on the textual presence and behaviour of these words – not always a comfortable experience, and one that might risk trying the reader’s patience. In a sense I seek out at the level of writing what Timothy Bewes has referred to, in his analysis of abstraction’s contradictory or ‘reversible’ work within the Marxist tradition, as abstraction’s liability ‘to induce a sense of vertigo’ (Bewes 2014: 1200–1). Something about the textual appearance of abstraction can be dizzying, an ‘endlessly recursive quality’ captured in Bewes’s proposition that ‘abstraction’ has itself become ‘one of the great abstractions of modern critical thought’ (1201). I will return to Bewes’s essay in due course. But my emphasis on abstraction as language requires, in turn, further qualification. ‘Terminological arguments in the literature on historical abstraction are manifold,’ writes Frances Colpitt of the visual arts since modernism, invoking a history of tensions between the definition and the deployment of the concept (Colpitt 2002: 156). In Colpitt’s citation of another key study, Briony Fer’s On Abstract Art (1997), we are reminded that Fer’s very title partakes of pragmatism and compromise: as a ‘label’, Fer suggested at the outset of her book, abstract will ‘have to do’ because it is ‘a current term in common use, with its own vicissitudes and history’ (Fer 1997: 5). In returning to this subject in 2015, however, for the purposes of a major retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’, Fer made a significant modification of emphasis. Abstraction, she now ventured, might need to be ‘saved from itself’: that is, from the clichés which tell us that abstract art is, for example, about pure formalism (‘art for art’s sake’) or the language of machine production. ‘Despite being over one hundred years old,’ writes Fer, ‘it is surprising, to say the least, that the vocabulary for discussing abstraction is so limited’ (Fer 2015: 225). This book certainly aspires, along the lines Fer indicates, to contribute to an expanded vocabulary for abstraction. I am less interested, however, in the search for definition that ‘terminological arguments’ implies than in the more open process of what happens to abstraction in the process of writing it. A more appropriate model for this approach to abstraction’s ‘vicissitudes and history’ would be Raymond Williams’s project of historical semantics in successive editions of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976 and 1983). It is ironic, therefore, that the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ do not appear in either iteration of Williams’s Keywords; nor, for that matter, in the Williams-inspired New Keywords project compiled by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris in 2005; nor even in the more specialised study of modernist keywords published in 2014 by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond and Alexandra Peat. Given Williams’s extensive reliance on 6

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the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ for his own critical thinking, as I explain further in Chapter 1, how can we account for such theoretical invisibility, such hiddenness in plain sight? Alongside the case of Williams, I juxtapose Paul Valéry’s 1939 lecture ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’, a meditation that clearly signals its intent to foreground abstraction as the named antithesis of a conception of poetic form deriving from aesthetic modernism. Yet how is it, I ask, that Valéry’s essay equally, though differently, contrives to render abstraction less than visible? What do these paradoxical absences tell us about the kind of investments we make, or avoid, in abstraction? Following this discussion of the ‘missing keyword’ in Part I are two further and foundational chapters. Chapter 2 examines the work of abstraction in radical critical thought, from the point at which Karl Marx began to identify abstraction as the characteristic thought-form of capitalist political economy and modernity. In this tradition, which clearly informs the writing of Raymond Williams, abstraction in its familiar guise comes to represent forms of ‘alienation’ and even of ‘violence’. Yet in the process of Marx’s writing, from the exploratory forms of the Paris Manuscripts and the Grundrisse notebooks through to the publication of Volume I of Capital, we see a fundamental instability around abstraction. Where conventional historiography or an idealist intellectual history might stress the developmental aspect of this process in Marx, a gradual evolution in his understanding or deployment of abstraction, I seek to explore the continued co-existence of meanings in the struggle of Marx’s writing, the persistence or elaboration of what Timothy Bewes terms a ‘reversible’ abstraction (Bewes 2014: 1201). This allows abstraction to figure in Marx both as the supreme thought form of capitalist culture, its tenacity extending even into its effective disappearance into what Sohn-Rethel was to call ‘real abstraction’, and simultaneously as a prerequisite in consciousness for resistance, revolutionary transformation and intellectual emancipation. We go in fear of abstraction, as in Ezra Pound’s famous advice to modernist poets, even as we devoutly pursue it. In the work of Louis Althusser and associated critical thinkers on the left, abstraction’s multi-valency in Marx is bound up in extensive debates around Marxism’s relationship to humanism. These debates, I argue, are not simply about the semantics of abstraction, but about questions of access to it. Marx hoped for readers of Capital who would want to learn something new and think for themselves, but he also knew about the structural and educational implications of this. If Marxist analysis is abstract, does this abstraction help or hinder the people it is designed to emancipate? Is it education that is at stake in this context? As a term for advanced analysis and reasoning, abstraction matters for the left in the broader context of what Jacques Rancière was to call the distribution of the sensible (see Rancière 2004). So, for example, in A Fortunate Man (1967), John Berger remarks upon a condition of ‘extreme 7

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cultural deprivation’ in the Forest of Dean of the 1960s, which he explains in terms of a failure of education and the removal of the right to ‘be theoretical and to be concerned with generalizations’: ‘nobody in the Forest has either the power or the means to theorize’ (Berger and Mohr 1967: 100, 103). As this was framed by Frank Owen, the socialist–artist protagonist of Robert Tressell’s classic novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914), reflecting on workmates whose adherence to common sense and ‘’eart knowledge’ stemmed from a systematically inculcated distrust of their own intelligence, ‘now most of them were incapable of thinking of any abstract subject whatsoever’ (Tressell 2004: 203). Tressell’s novel, I suggest, presents prototypes of modernist form that forge links between intellectual emancipation and the potential of experimental art to move from ‘heart’ knowledge to art knowledge. After Marx, after Tressell, critical theorists were also drawn to the emancipatory potential of abstraction as a mode of art knowledge. Chapter 2 concludes by exploring the encounter between radical critical thought and abstract art – moments, that is, at which thinkers armed with a Marxist conception of abstraction as a mode of thought are obliged to confront a non-representational art that also calls itself abstract. Well-known earlier twentieth-century debates in Marxist aesthetics are revisited here from the perspective of abstraction, notably in the writings of Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno. In comparing these, however, to the millennial reflections of Antonio Negri on the connections between abstraction and immaterial labour in a post-industrial age, we find in Negri an arresting transformation of the discourse he inherits, albeit hitched to a relatively orthodox account of the rise of visual abstraction in modernism. The affective charge of abstraction for Negri evokes what I go on to characterise, in Chapter 7, as a dramatic inversion of the sense and value of abstraction in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thought – a shift which was, nevertheless, latent in modernism. This discussion of Marxist aesthetics builds a bridge to Chapter 3, which explores the writing of abstraction in the discourses on visual art from early modernism onwards. Dickerman suggests that the very nature of modernist visual abstraction was to be accompanied by ‘a torrent of words’, and in his book on Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze insisted that ‘we do not listen closely enough to what painters have to say’ (Dickerman 2013: 4; Deleuze 2004: 99). Together these suggest that it was as a new model of intellectual work for practitioners, combining the writing of abstraction with abstract technique in art, that abstraction began to emerge as a modernist phenomenon. For Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, who I characterise as writer–artists of abstraction, a utopian revaluation of the human is embodied in a symbiotic relation between writing and painting. Nevertheless the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ became so troublesome and untrustworthy, even in the work of a theoretical champion such as Clement Greenberg, as to be very often inseparable from 8

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their scare-quotation marks; abstraction was often deemed to be ‘so-called’. To listen closely to what painters had to say was often to hear them say that, about abstraction, they had nothing to say: abstract art speaks for itself, or is capable of being traduced by its own name. Pablo Picasso declared that there was no such thing as abstract art. As abstraction crowds into modernist discourse, so too it disappears. One way of delineating this important paradox is to compare, as Chapter 3 does in its concluding section, two key figures, Paul Cézanne and Barnett Newman, as writers of abstraction from very different moments of visual modernism. Each painter was also a writer, albeit highly contrastive in scale and manner; each combined language and image, words and paint, in a mode of aesthetic–intellectual work which had the question of abstraction at its heart. Cézanne’s letters, though hesitant and cryptic in their content, are routinely seen as a philosophical counterpart to his painting and hence have been extensively mined to help construct theories of his revolutionary art and its role in the emergence of Cubism. Abstraction emerges in these letters very tentatively, yet with a profound prescience of the debates in modernist art to come. By contrast, the professional contexts of post-1945 American art led Barnett Newman to pursue a much more public and activist approach to the writing of abstraction, both in recognition of the fact that ‘artists have had to struggle for the status of men [sic] of thought, amidst constant pressure to reduce them to a position of inferior thinking’, and to make quite precise interventions in debates around the nature of abstract art (Newman 1992: 72–3). Each artist’s indexical significance for visual abstraction is, of course, embodied in a proliferation of critical commentary. My emphasis in this field is on the way abstraction in Cézanne and Newman necessitated a challenge to humanist orthodoxies in aesthetics and a revaluing of abstraction’s always-inhuman charge. From the writer–artists of modernist abstraction, Part II turns to the question of what it means to talk about abstraction in literary modernism. It presents case studies of three literary modernists whose work has been strongly associated with abstraction as a mode of writerly autonomy: Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett. I do not ask whether and how far the writing of Stein, Stevens and Beckett is abstract, given that this would depend entirely on what version or versions of abstraction might be in the critical room at the time. Instead, what does it mean to associate these major modernists with abstraction? In the critical literature that surrounds them, I trace abstraction’s tendency to elude critical fixity, to refuse to be taken for granted. Yet each writer is far from a victim of abstraction’s contradictory work. Stein, Stevens and Beckett are also, I suggest, actively engaged in taking modernist abstraction somewhere else. Each writer’s construal of abstraction places distinct pressures on our literary-critical methods and protocols, which I seek to highlight. ‘If it can be done why do it,’ wrote Gertrude Stein in 1934. From 9

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a highly eclectic intellectual and disciplinary formation, Stein could in this way appear to be summarily dismissive of achieved thought and art. The singularity of Stein’s notion of striving for the impossible in the form of the artistic ‘masterpiece’ is bound up, I suggest, in the developing sense of a necessary relation between abstraction and difficulty, an important word for Stein, in modernism. This relation, however, contests the caricature of artistic modernism as a form of elitism or exclusivity defined by the cultivation of difficulty for its own sake. Stein may not, notoriously, have written for her readers, but she certainly aspired to an abstract art that would be universally readable. This would require a transvaluation of abstraction itself, and of certain norms – conscious memory, or the time to think, or the notion of what reading is, for example – that define the human; but only, Stein might say, as the human is known. Something like these aspirations is at work in Wallace Stevens’s notion that poetry aims to ‘resist the intelligence almost successfully’ (CPWS 350; Stevens 1990: 197). In many ways the epitome of the ‘philosophical poet’, Stevens made the words ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ so visible as to become intriguingly talismanic in his writing. Yet, whilst inevitably drawing on a semantic history as keywords, ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ are unique to Stevens’s poetry insofar as they become words in that poetry. As in Gertrude Stein, then, although through a radically different literary practice that places different demands on the critic, Stevens associated abstraction with a principle of artistic autonomy that could ‘defend’ humans, in their thought and their art, against themselves as thinking beings (‘The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself’ – Stevens 1990: 199). More overtly than Stein, Stevens worried about what this might mean for the humanist values he otherwise seemed to be identified with – for example, the belief that poetry should help people to live their lives. As modernists quickly realised, it was one thing to define the abstract as the non-representational organisation of materials on a canvas and within a frame, and quite another to embody its enrichment of lived experience. Famously articulated by Gertrude Stein as the inevitability of sooner or later making sense in language despite our best efforts, a perceived imprisonment in language has helped to shape our understanding of Samuel Beckett’s literary art. Early on, Beckett declared his intention to confront this imprisonment by bringing language into disrepute by any available means. The fact that this was done in the name of resistance to an English language that was, in its ‘sophistication’, ‘abstracted to death’ only further underlines modernist abstraction’s contradictory work, and it has not obstructed a critical consensus that sees Beckett’s art as moving inexorably towards an abstraction defined as the approach or reduction of language to silence. In the light of such paradoxes, and of Beckett’s passionate but ambivalent interest in abstract visual art, my focus in Chapter 6 is on Beckett’s own critical thinking, and on the significance for him of a formula for the operation of 10

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involuntary memory drawn from Marcel Proust and highlighted in the long, early (1931) critical essay on Proust: ‘real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract’ (in Beckett and Duthuit 1965: 75). This is the formula (let us say, the abstract formula) for the now-legendary Proustian epiphany, the moment of sensation that triggers experiential bodily memory quite apart from conscious recollection. What Bergsonian involuntary memory meant for Beckett, as explored in the Proust essay, was a way out of ‘the grotesque fallacy of a realistic art’ and an approach, as he found it in the paintings of Cézanne, to an art liberated from ‘all human expressions whatever’ (PTD 76; Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 222). It became, that is, the sign itself of a new abstraction of the inhuman. This has led to the description of Beckett’s uncategorisable writing in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘abstract machine’, as I locate and explore this in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1949). It is no coincidence that this text emanates from Beckett’s love of abstract painting. Part III reflects, in two chapters, on the legacies of modernist abstraction for the early twenty-first century. Chapter 7 begins this by resuming the story of the Proustian formula after Beckett in order to ask: how do we explain the curious semantic reversal, the latest episode in the history of a keyword, by which abstraction is now transformed into a sign for lived and bodily experience? Nothing underlines the curiously unstable and contradictory tendencies of abstraction more than its recent journey through, as John Rajchman puts it, ‘other, lighter, less morbid ways of thinking’ (Rajchman 1995: 16) to arrive at the seeming antithesis of abstraction-as-reproach, the obverse of cold intellectual detachment or aesthetic purity. My explanation, following Beckett’s warning that ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’ (in Beckett and Duthuit 1965: 11), is that ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ undergoes a complex process of rewriting to emerge in a Deleuzian philosophy of the inhuman. No longer a subordinate term in the Proustian formula, this abstraction is what the formula itself now denotes, in association with an important new keyword: the virtual. But the lived-ness of this abstraction is, we might say, no return to the garden. In the Deleuzian field, abstraction plays a key role in the transvaluation of humanist vocabulary as this tends to be organised around binary distinctions such as organic and inorganic, organism and machine, living and non-living, real and virtual. In Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the abstract machine, neither word reproduces the earlier terms of reproach by which intellectual abstraction might be associated with, for example, deathly mechanism. The new manifestation is able to inform an ‘activist’ philosophy of life in which it becomes possible to speak of ‘technologies of lived abstraction’ (Massumi 2011). Except that the story is not entirely new. The transformation of abstraction has been latent in modernism, where in the aesthetics and the writing 11

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of Beckett, Stein and Stevens, abstraction is always-already somewhere else, not always where it is expected to be found. Equally, the transformation has been under way in the interconnected philosophies – intuitional metaphysics, radical empiricism, an aesthetics of process – of Henri Bergson, William James and A. N. Whitehead. This chapter is therefore an a-chronological way of acknowledging the crucial roles of Bergson, James and Whitehead in modernist abstraction, by considering them at the moment of their re-invention for a future-oriented philosophy of lived abstraction – in ‘New Bergsonism’, in activist philosophy, or in the revival of, as Isabelle Stengers has it, Whitehead’s ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Stengers 2011). As we would only expect, the work of these thinkers in the preparation of a new abstraction took place through a fierce critique of abstraction itself as a mode of ‘intellectualism’. To conclude with an example of what this abstraction might mean for art in practice, I end with a discussion of the work of that ‘Cézannean’ (Deleuze) painter, Francis Bacon. Raymond Williams’s Keywords demonstrated the capacity for words to change, to become contradictory, and even for historical reversals of meaning. Such rationalisations aside, I am still left wondering at abstraction’s persistence, its sheer staying power. Yes, abstraction can undergo radical transformation. But why is it still abstraction that does this work, to become its own seeming antithesis? What does abstraction mean to us, that it can live on, beyond the critique of itself? In Chapter 8, I examine three plays from the last twenty-five years that symbolise the enduring enigma of modernist abstraction in a key scenario: the viewer’s encounter with the abstract canvas. This scenario, I suggest, had, in fact, been a commonplace of modernist art criticism, when the emergence of painterly abstraction had thrown into sharp focus the question of what happens when an ‘ordinary’ person or citizen enters an art gallery. Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’ (1996) considers the role of abstract painting within commodity culture and the bourgeois domestic space. John Logan’s two-hander Red (2009) dramatises painterly abstraction in terms of the personal and heroic struggle of the individual artist, and of the dialogue between the artist as expert/master and the relatively uninitiated acolyte/assistant. Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters (2008) gives an account of the Ashington group of the 1930s and 1940s, exploring the micropolitics of debates around representation and abstraction, framed within the broader context of questions of educational access to art knowledge, both theory and practice, in modernity. I do not suggest that any of these works has a didactic function. Yet the staging of the act or action of the gaze upon the abstract canvas invites us to look at ourselves looking at and thinking about what abstraction means to us, and what it might mean in any possible future. What role might abstraction after modernism perform within a renewed model of aesthetic education, the case for which, as Gayatri Spivak suggests, 12

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is increasingly compelling in an era of digitised globalisation? What kinds of response to the abstract canvas are available to us, what languages (as de Bolla asks) do we have, or lack, to enable these responses, and what do such questions tell us about the position of abstraction, as thought or as art, within late modernity? Abstraction constitutes a kind of limit- or test-case for the reach and aspiration of a system of aesthetic education – but perhaps of education in general, if abstraction may also represent the ‘force’ (Marx) of analytical thinking restricted by the division of labour. While Chapter 7 works to communicate a sense of the exhilaration and potentiality surrounding a certain transformation of the concept of abstraction, Chapter 8 and my Conclusion wonder if educational deficit continues to frame the reception and understanding of abstract visual art, restricting in turn the promise of an engagement with abstraction’s work in rethinking the human and the inhuman. The question posed by Marx in reflecting on his readership is revisited in modernist aesthetics: what would an extended literacy around abstraction look like, and what would this mean for human societies in modernity? Finally I reapproach these issues through the case of the English critic, public intellectual and anarchist Herbert Read (1893–1968), an exemplary figure for this study insofar as much of Read’s work was dedicated to the explication of visual abstraction for the general reader or layperson. Read’s work channels many of the painters and thinkers discussed in this book, and beneath the humane and humanistic politics of his work it is possible to glimpse, in his accounts of abstraction, the insistent presence of an ensemble of organic and inorganic forces, a ‘buzzing world’ (A. N. Whitehead) that connects the human with the inhuman. One of the main tasks of this book will be to suggest the extent of modernism’s investment in a revaluation of inhuman abstraction and its difficulty. In the aspiration at least of Read’s educative mission, this abstraction might just happen to be owned and loved by those not expected to have such an acquaintance with it.

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Part I

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1

THE MISSING KEYWORD: RAYMOND WILLIAMS, PAUL VALÉRY

To dismiss an individual because of his class, or to judge a relationship with him solely in class terms, is to reduce humanity to an abstraction. But, also, to pretend that there are no collective modes is to deny the plain facts. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958: 327) In the Conclusion to Culture and Society (1958), Raymond Williams reflected on potential misunderstandings of the nature of class and class consciousness. I pause these reflections here on a phrase: ‘reduce humanity to an abstraction’ (Williams 1958: 327). Williams has been arguing that class is ‘a collective mode and not a person’ and, accordingly, that it would be foolish to interpret individuals ‘in rigid class terms’. The phrase, ‘reduce humanity to an abstraction’, seems to have a familiar currency as a means of springing to the defence of the human. Surely we would all agree that humans are more than abstractions? There is, of course, a faultline, in that ‘humanity’ is itself already an abstraction, insofar as it is a generalisation; I would be tempted to say that we will let this pass, except that Williams’s not-noticing of it matters. Williams clearly wants ‘humanity’ to signify individual human beings. Yet as his own consistent emphasis upon language as a historical entity was to demonstrate, we cannot simply make a word do what we would like it to do. In any case, Williams argues something supplementary: in signifying a collective mode such as ‘class’ or ‘humanity’, abstractions are just as plainly real things as are individual human beings. If those abstractions 17

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are at the same time reductive, does this mean – as Williams’s seeming lack of self-consciousness about it might evidence – that it is part of our fate as human beings to abstract? ‘Culture’ was the keyword of Culture and Society’s keywords (alongside class, industry, democracy and art), a term whose ownership was also fiercely at issue, and which was also, Williams felt, in danger of abstraction. As a means of signifying a ‘whole way of life’, culture had newly emerged in industrial society ‘as an abstraction and an absolute’ (we assume here that ‘abstraction’ and ‘absolute’ are not necessarily synonyms but are nevertheless semantically related) (Williams 1958: xviii). Williams set out to examine culture, however, not as ‘a series of abstracted problems’, but as ‘a series of statements by individuals’, this methodology justified not only by his emphasis upon actual uses of language, but because ‘by temperament and training, I find more meaning in this kind of personally verified statement than in a system of significant abstractions’ (xix). An abstraction is to be examined, therefore, but only in its use by individuals, and we cannot be abstract in examining it. ‘We need a common culture’, Williams was to conclude, ‘not for the sake of an abstraction, but because we shall not survive without it’ (317). To open up the case of Williams and abstraction is, in a sense, to re-open it. In 1976, Terry Eagleton’s arresting critique highlighted an ‘abstractive habit’ in the style of Williams’s writing (Eagleton 1978: 22). Eagleton was later to apologise for the ‘unacceptably acerbic and ungenerous’ tone of his critique (Eagleton 1989: 11). I too have, twice, explored the problematic nature of abstraction for Williams. First, I argued that, in seeking a materialist ‘language of nature’, Williams saw abstraction as a prevailing feature of the dominant theories of linguistic idealism he critiqued in the 1970s and 1980s (Wallace 1993), while later I suggested that, in his fiction as well as in his critical writing, ‘the road’ is a figure for abstraction in modernity about which Williams felt intense ambivalence (Wallace 1999) – a road, that is, along which he himself had driven and was driven, despite sustained resistance. Should we free ourselves from abstraction or empower ourselves with it? This question is a simple way of framing what often emerges in Williams as a profound ambivalence. The answer of the tradition of Marxist critical thought that he imbibed – a complex ‘both’ – forms the subject of my next chapter. In this chapter, however, I want to re-open the case on Williams and abstraction in the spirit of that concentrated attention to the politics of language that first led me to his work – that is, to the insight that abstract words such as abstraction have a history of use which is also a history of access and ownership. Williams’s body of work was remarkable for the consistency and originality with which it kept in its sights the limited availability of the power of words, and of subsequent intellectual attainment and cultural contribution, within a class society. Who was entitled to shape and draw on the power of these words, 18

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and how? If, accordingly, abstraction was a blind spot for Williams, he would have been the first to want to know why. And although abstraction was such a blind spot, my argument in this chapter, and throughout the book, is that this tells us as much about abstraction in modernism and modernity as it does about Williams. Williams was not the only writer for whom abstraction could disappear in plain sight; it could gently slide out even from under the fierce gaze of Paul Valéry in an essay, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’, whose precise aim is to keep it in view. In fact, it is the central role of modernism in abstraction’s disappearance from the plain view of Williams’s work that I wish to argue for here. Modernism accompanied Williams’s formation and constantly demanded his critical attention. While he is acknowledged now as a key interpreter of modernism’s historical cultures, abstraction, I suggest, posed a specifically modernist kind of intractable challenge to Williams. My main platform for this argument is the late and summative, virtually retirement lecture/essay, ‘Beyond Cambridge English’ (in Williams 1983). Yet, to repeat the disclaimer, my motivation is not to reopen a wound, to impugn or diminish the value of Williams’s theorising of modernism; rather, it is to understand how a certain blindness in it might be more broadly understood. Williams’s problem with abstraction is, in a sense, everyone’s problem with abstraction – or, let us say, modernism’s problem. It is, or might be, a problem with abstraction itself. Williams Writing Abstraction There is something still to be said about the way the words abstract and abstraction turn up in Williams’s writing, and this is where things get less than comfortable: An essential abstraction of the ‘personal’ and ‘immediate’ is carried so far that, within this highly developed form of thought, the whole process of abstraction has been dissolved. None of its steps can be retraced, and the abstraction of the ‘concrete’ is a perfect and virtually unbreakable circle. Arguments from theory or from history are simply evidence of the incurable abstraction and generality of those who are putting them forward. They can then be contemptuously rejected, often without specific reply, which would be only to fall to their level. (Williams 1977: 45) The movement from abstract objectivism to this sense of objectified process was decisive. But the sense of objectified process can be almost at once rendered back to its original abstract and objectivist condition, by a definition of the already known (scientifically discovered and attested) ‘laws’ of this process. Art can then be defined as ‘reflecting’ these laws. (Williams 1977: 97) 19

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Both of these quotations are taken from Marxism and Literature (1977), and have, I suggest, to echo Timothy Bewes, a certain ‘vertiginous’ quality. In the first, Williams offers a critical paraphrase of the conception of literature belonging to the influential Cambridge or ‘Scrutiny’ school of criticism associated with the work of F. R. Leavis from the 1930s onwards (the fact that Williams does not name this interlocutor at any point in the argument is something I will return to). The second forms part of a discussion of the competing claims of realism and naturalism to ‘reflect’ the real world in art and thought, as these were developed within Marxist theory. Let us offer a paraphrase of Williams’s first paraphrase. It is difficult to see literature as a concept because the dominant critical school has succeeded in presenting it only as the collection of actual individual instances of great works, which are themselves defined in terms of the ‘minute particulars’ deriving from human experience (Williams 1977: 45). However, that literature is empirical rather than conceptual is also a concept; its power lies precisely in its claim to be non-conceptual, becoming a ‘powerful and often forbidding system of abstraction, in which the concept of “literature” becomes actively ideological’ (45). We see in this dizzying passage the proximity of Williams’s understanding of ‘concept’, as a collective or general term, to that of abstraction. Steadying ourselves to look again, it seems the vertigo is located in the unsteadiness of abstraction in Williams’s hands. Abstraction first appears as a process that can lead to the ‘dissolving’ of abstraction: we abstract so much that abstraction becomes invisible. In reproaching those who abstract in this way, ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’, those familiar antitheses, then become identical or circular – there is the abstraction ‘of’ the concrete, the concrete that becomes abstract by virtue of its being itself. Then, abstraction becomes the rhetorical tool of the opponent as well as of Williams, to indicate that the term can be one of mutual reproach. While the powerful implication is that no one should either desire abstraction or be caught in the act of abstracting, it is also obvious that the passage itself could barely do without the concept of abstraction as a critical tool. The meaning or function of the tool is assumed to be self-evident to the reader, whilst remaining distinctly unstable. Eagleton and others have identified ‘Left-Leavisism’ as a crucial construct in Williams’s formation, and in this discussion of Leavisite criticism within Marxism and Literature we are indeed in touch with two key sources of Williams’s critique of abstraction – Leavis and Marx. The chapter on literature is particularly concerned, however, with an Oedipal extraction of Williams’s own materialist conception of literature from the influence of F. R. Leavis. In declining to name Leavis or any other concrete agents, human or textual, in the debate, Williams assumed a complicity with his 1970s readers. Fewer readers in the twenty-first century are likely to recognise that the specific reference point of his remarks is almost certainly Leavis’s 20

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essay ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’ (in Leavis 1962), first published in Scrutiny in 1937. I pause briefly on this essay because it, in turn, has its own specific meditation on the relation between literature and abstraction. In the essay, Leavis responded to René Wellek’s invitation to articulate and defend his definition of literary value more explicitly and systematically than he had previously been prepared to do. Wellek has, in fact, as Leavis notes, challenged Leavis to defend his position ‘abstractly’. For Leavis this requires the denial that he is a ‘philosopher’ and the insistence that literary criticism and philosophy are ‘quite distinct and different kinds of discipline’ (Leavis 1962: 212). Wellek, he protests, understands this as well as he does: Philosophy, we say, is ‘abstract’ (thus Dr Wellek asks me to defend my position ‘more abstractly’), and poetry ‘concrete.’ Words in poetry invite us, not to ‘think about’ and judge but to ‘feel into’ or ‘become’ – to realize a complex experience that is given in the words. (212) Leavis suggests through scare-quotations and ‘we say’ a distancing from the ‘abstract/concrete’ antithesis as a familiar convention, yet then goes on to adhere to it: as the literary critic matures, ‘he’ gets better in his reading at placing the literary utterance in relation to others of its kind, and not into ‘a theoretical system or a system determined by abstract considerations’ (213). While abstraction thus implies for Leavis the mistaken designation of standards against which literature might be evaluated, for Williams it is precisely the designation of literary criticism as a purely empirical mode of reading governed by – non-abstract? - experience and feeling that constitutes abstraction itself. Leavis argues that for a literary critic to have the benefit of a philosophical training would only help them to be more sure of the fact that ‘literary criticism is not philosophy’ (212). While Leavis resisted the theorisation of literature, Williams was keen to embrace it, as a measure of the critical thought he had developed through Marxism and that led to the important intervention of Marxism and Literature itself. Yet, as we have seen, Williams’s theorising was driven by its own resistance to the concept of abstraction, even though it betrayed at the same time its reliance on abstraction as a critical tool, or as a powerful keyword. Here it may be time to re-invoke Terry Eagleton’s assessment of the impact of such a double bind on Williams’s writing: Williams’s was an ‘elaborately formal, resoundingly public discourse’, whose abstractive habit was ‘a conjuring of weight out of emptiness which lacks all edge and abrasiveness’: Concrete particulars are offered in such modified, mediated and magisterial a guise as to be only dimly intelligible through the mesh of generalities. Yet at the same time his ponderous pauses and stiffly rhetorical 21

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inflections, his ritualising of a cluster of key terms to the point where they seem less public concepts than private inventions, suggest the movement of an unmistakably individual voice. (Eagleton 1978: 22–3) Williams’s ‘authoritative abstractions’ were, Eagleton continued, a form of ‘complex, guarded self-display’, at once public and idiosyncratically private, ‘Olympian’ yet ‘edgily defensive’: ‘the style of a thinker intellectually isolated to the point of eccentricity, driven consequently to certain sophisticated gambits of self-defence and self-justification’ (23). Given that we are at the point of suggesting that the deep abstraction of Williams’s writing is precisely the effect of his fear of abstraction, we must engage again with the question of what abstraction in prose means in this context. What, for example, could have led Williams to write this of the value of the particular over the timeless in Thomas Hardy: ‘immediate and actual relationships between people, which occurred within existing contemporary pressures and were at most modulated and interpreted by the available continuities’ (Williams 1975: 253)? What is it to say that a relationship occurs within a pressure? Can a continuity modulate or interpret something? Or again, on the problem of reflectionism in literary criticism: The movement from abstract objectivism to this sense of objectified process was decisive. But the sense of objectified process can be almost at once rendered back to its original abstract and objectivist condition, by a definition of the already known (scientifically discovered and attested) ‘laws’ of this process. Art can then be defined as ‘reflecting’ these laws. (Williams 1977: 97) Who moves, renders back and defines? When, and in what circumstances? Williams’s ‘can be’ gives the impression that certain operations will logically follow once others are in place, hinting that this is a mode of conscious opportunism on the part of the invisible agents/others. But we are subsequently told only that these developments occur somewhere between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to ‘at once a cultural programme and a critical school’. To denude prose of specific context, detail and agency can certainly be defined as a repudiation of the ‘concrete’ and thus as a recognisable manifestation of ‘abstraction’. The fear of committing abstraction (in the sense of an expanded vocabulary and a set of references to other writers and thinkers) seemed to imprison Williams in a guarded prose of its own abstraction (in an alternative sense of vagueness and generality). In Marxism and Literature, the refusal to name and deal openly with other thinkers was so stark as to deliver only two textual references to Louis Althusser, both in parenthesis, in a chapter 22

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devoted to the history of ideology as a basic concept in understanding the relation between its two central terms. The omission is extraordinary, and at some level surely antithetical to the intended orientation of Williams’s work towards the kind of reader making her way, as Williams’s readership always implicitly is, into the world of education. We are reminded of Williams’s reference to D. H. Lawrence’s dismissal of the ‘rule and measure mathematical folk’ of a modernist drama of ‘abstract ideas and representative problems’: ‘a middle class critique of a middle-class view of the world’ (Williams 1981: 11). Abstraction became both invisible and unmanageable for Williams, I suggest, because he mistook an open immersion in contemporary theoretical debate for collusion with this middle-class game, or at least with the perception of it. Expressed here is the tortured awareness of the border line that fissures his theory of a long revolution in Britain, the sense that education and intellectual achievement had taken Williams out of the world he wished to speak for. Williams assumed that his readers – always implicitly, as he originally was, making the move into the ‘opening worlds’ of art and education – would be better served by summaries of general tendencies and movements in what he saw as a common language. This, however, as Eagleton had ventured to suggest, could be said to represent an exactly antithetical textual politics, giving Williams’s writing an air of Olympian distance and indulgence, neglecting the possibility that an open engagement with other thinkers and their specific vocabularies might constitute the very ground of an inclusive and democratic educational field. It affected, then, his own creativity with language. When Williams thus came to invent new concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’, we hear the necessity of apologising for his own abstraction, as if importing, into the stodgy but trustworthy fare of the English language, some more exotic and dangerously precise flavour: ‘I found in my own work that I had to develop the idea of a structure of feeling’ (Williams 1997: 22). This, I will go on to suggest, was a very specific response on Williams’s part to a modernist abstraction that included ‘those strangers’, Marxism and structuralism (Williams 1983: 194). But here I want to pause the argument to ask a different kind of question. What if this particular version of a ‘fear of abstractions’ can be attributed, not only to one critic’s trajectory and preoccupations, but also to the contradictory work of abstraction itself? Is there something in the nature of abstraction to be hidden in plain sight? Paul Valéry: Poetry and Abstract Thought Paul Valéry’s ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ is an influential essay first given as the Zaharoff lecture at Oxford University in 1939. While the contexts of Valéry and Williams are widely different, the common ground I delineate here is that of aesthetic modernism. Valéry (1871–1945) emerged as a Symboliste poet in the 1890s and as a member of Stéphane Mallarmé’s circle; the later phase of 23

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his work from the 1920s onwards saw his development as an advocate and theorist of modernist aesthetics and poetics. The depth of Williams’s interest in modernist form, especially film and drama, in and after his time at Cambridge, is well established, although it took Tony Pinkney’s invaluable editorial work in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Williams 1989) finally to gather together Williams’s work on modernism and help confirm his importance as a theorist of modernism. Valéry’s ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ sets out, ironically enough, as an exercise highly comparable to what was to become Williams’s Keywords project. It begins with the assertion that it is a frequent habit of mind to contrast ‘poetry’ with ‘abstract thought’, ‘most people’ feeling that the antithesis is simply self-evident. For Valéry, however, this seems too ‘abrupt’ and ‘facile’, adopted ‘without reflection’. Does the ‘alleged antithesis’ really exist? The answer must be found in linguistic analysis, ‘beginning at the beginning’ through the meaning of the words themselves, though, in terms redolent of Ezra Pound’s Imagist brand of high modernism, as a strictly ‘surgical’ exercise of purification and sterilisation: ‘cleaning up the verbal situation’ (Valéry 2007: 61). Valéry’s first implication is that abstract thought is ‘the analytical work of the intellect’, associated with the activities of a ‘philosopher or a scientist’ and of a ‘logician’. This proposes the dialectical undermining of the antithesis itself: the poet could not be a poet without the ability to ‘reason abstractly’, while the ‘logician’ could not be a logician if he ‘could never be other than a logician’. We note here, however, that abstraction is associated with three different intellectual roles – philosopher, scientist, logician – without any declared necessity to distinguish between these, while ‘poet’ and ‘poetry’ retain a more singular identity or connotation. Valéry then claims that any self can ‘become’ an abstract thinker or a poet ‘by successive specialisations’; yet there remains no attempt to explain how the analytical work of the intellect can be at once so ‘specialised’ and yet at the same time characteristic of three distinct activities. This emphasis is indicative of the course Valéry’s essay is about to take. Abstraction is next re-approached through an association with the composition of poetry itself; Valéry has been reflecting on the state of poetic inspiration and the distinction of this from the ‘artificial synthesis’ by which the poet has to translate this into language. Here, he writes, we ‘see emerging through my explanations the famous ABSTRACT THOUGHT which custom opposes to POETRY’ (62). The promise is to return to this subject ‘in a moment’ – ominously, however, because it marks the point at which the anticipated verbal analysis and comparison grows less evident, and abstraction begins to dissolve into the essay’s texture as a subject of inference only. A sonorous, Mallarméanformalist justification of poetic impersonality – a poetry made of words rather than of ideas – takes over. In its course the essay proposes memorable tropes for the distinction between prose and poetry: that prosaic language ‘vanishes’ 24

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or ‘evaporates’ from our minds once its meaning or reference is clear, while the language of poetry remains, phoenix-like, to ‘become endlessly what it has just been’ or to ‘stimulate us to reconstruct it identically’ (64); that the distinction between prose and poetry is like that between walking and dancing. In these cases, abstraction is aligned with prose, albeit surrounded by a further ambiguity: poetry is held to differ from ‘practical or abstract uses of language’, from ‘the habits of practical language as from the needs of abstract language’ (63, 65). Are practical and abstract the same thing here, or variations within a mode? How does abstract relate to practical, given that they both partake of this linguistic distinction from poetry? Should we simply know, or does this relation not also require the close linguistic analysis Valéry has promised? My point is that abstraction is fading fast from the optic of Valéry’s essay, encountered now in occasional passing references – such as the ‘abstract possibilities’ that ‘exist in music’ (63) – until, in its final stages, Valéry wants to return to the necessary presence of abstract thought within the poetic act. The poet ‘has his abstract thought’ and is ‘much more capable than is generally known of right reasoning and abstract thought’ (65); by this point, gradually and, as it were, imperceptibly, the reader of Valéry’s essay is required to take abstraction as legible and understood, despite and across its contradictions. Here too, abstraction becomes allied again, by inference, with the ‘philosophy’ of a poet. Such philosophy, Valéry infers, should be seen as embodied in the poetry itself, rather than in the poet’s ‘philosophical utterances’, or in the communication of ‘“abstract” ideas’ – clamped in scare-quotes for the first time, to indicate that we normally believe such ideas to be ‘independent of their form’; but this is to anticipate a tendency that I will take up as of much wider significance in Chapter 3. Some great poets, Valéry continues, have succeeded in combining these two, but readers, it seems, cannot be relied upon to see it, Valéry insisting instead upon the difference between the ‘song’ and the ‘ideas’ it is said to contain. Such readers are not, generally, readers of ‘pure thought’; in a different analogy, ‘The state of mind of a man dancing is not that of a man advancing through difficult country of which he is making a topographical survey or a geological prospectus’ (65). But by this point, the explication of abstract thought in relation to poetry has expired. I have wanted to be forensic about Valéry’s essay, just as I have been about Williams, in order to track as closely as possible the precise way in which abstraction can become imprecise, the nature of its disappearance, in this sense, even in the close confines of an essay. As a poet, Valéry registers the profound ambivalence of abstraction for creative modernism. For Ezra Pound, abstraction was the old infirmity of the pre-Imagist aesthetic, by which a general concept – ‘dim lands of peace’ – modifies and fatally dulls the image: ‘the natural object is always the adequate symbol’ (Pound 1960: 5). The same principle of poetic self-sufficiency lies behind Valéry’s analogy between poetry and dance, 25

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emphasising an autonomy never to be translated into any utilitarian other. Yet Pound’s theory of the image – ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, ‘freedom from time limits and space limits’ – is surely a new and alternative model of abstraction, strongly generative within modernism; abstraction comes to represent detachment or disentanglement, this time from the ‘emotional slither’ of human sentiment, in Poundian terms, and is expressed as a sense of liberation from the time- and space-bound condition of the previously human (Pound 1960: 4, 12). It is unsurprising, therefore, that Valéry should seek to save abstraction for his conception of a modernist poetic by deconstructing the reductive dualism between poetry and abstract thought. Yet abstraction’s evasion of his effort reveals more about its endurance and its potentiality within modernism. The Eyes of Strangers If there is a fear of abstraction in Raymond Williams, then, it is closely entwined with the contradictory work of abstraction as a characteristic of modernism. I now want to focus on the retrospective, even confessional, essay ‘Beyond Cambridge English’ (1983) as perhaps the clearest acknowledgement of this close relation. Near its outset, Williams makes a striking declaration, even if it is a revisiting of the familiar border territory; he calls it an ‘awkward stand’: ‘By my educational history I belong with the literate and the literary. But by inheritance and still by affiliation I belong with an illiterate and relatively illiterate majority’ (Williams 1983: 212). Modernism, the essay suggests, has played its part in the division and the inequality that is described here. Williams defines modernism as a confluence of four structuralist formations that are together responsible for an ‘unevenness of literacy and learning’: theoretical linguistics, structuralist Marxism, psychoanalysis and literary formalism. Each of these ‘offers the terms of its own interpretation’ and thus, in conjunction with ‘the increasing dominance of metropolitan civilization’ and Leavis’s influential embrace of a literary aesthetic of minority-cultural ‘Englishness’, made it easy for modernism to become a highly selective ‘establishment’ (220–3). Williams’s analysis continues: The common factor in the different theories and practices that are grouped as modernism is an estrangement – a sense of both distance and novelty – which is related in its own terms to some large characterization of the ‘modern world’ but is in reality the response of a disturbed and exposed formation – writers, artists and intellectuals – to conditions which were blocking their own most significant kinds of work. (221–2) Let us think about this ‘estrangement’, given that, as I will emphasise in Chapter 2, ‘estrangement’ clusters with ‘alienation’ and with abstraction in 26

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the Marxian critique of capitalism that Williams would have drawn from. Drawing on recollections of Williams’s two undergraduate years in Cambridge before wartime military service in 1941, Tony Pinkney has highlighted the radical appeal of modernist form as a socialist subculture in this period, focused in particular in experimental film and in Expressionist drama, and exemplified for Pinkney in the 1954 book Preface to Film, which Williams co-authored with Michael Orrom. However, Pinkney argues, while this book endorsed ‘abstraction’ along with ‘stylization’ and ‘formalization’ as ‘buzz-words’, it remained ‘in the grip of a tenacious residual organicism’; ‘integration’ was equally favoured, and filmic ‘flow’ privileged over the technique of montage (Williams 1989: 10). To Pinkney’s ‘organicism’ belongs also, I suggest, the continuing humanism of Williams’s position. Williams’s sheer excitement at the emancipatory charge of modernist experimentalism was held in check by the notion of an estrangement through which aesthetic distance became conflated with a detachment from ordinary human beings. While modernisms held ‘great explanatory power’, he explains in the 1983 essay, the ‘form and language of their explanations are at a quite exceptional distance from the lives and relationships they address, so that what is reaching furthest into our common life has the mode of a stranger, even the profession of a stranger’ (Williams 1983: 224). Strangers are cautionary figures in Williams’s work, though in an uncanny twist, the stranger is also Williams himself. Acknowledging that though he ‘belongs’ through education to all of those structural modernisms, his personal history meant, he explains, that he in turn looked at them ‘with the eyes of a stranger’. Guard down, perhaps, for a brief moment, Williams ventures an extraordinary characterisation of those ‘developments’ of structural modernism, whose function was, in effect, to erase ‘recognizable everyday agents’: What I then see is not only what they have achieved but their own deep forms. I can feel the bracing cold of their inherent distances and impersonalities and yet have to go on saying that they are indeed ice-cold. I see, practically and theoretically, the estranging consequences of the general assumption – as active in modernist literature as in theoretical linguistics and structuralist Marxism – that the systems of human signs are generated within the systems themselves and that to think otherwise is a humanist error. (223) As often in what I am characterising as the abstraction of Williams’s writing, there is a certain erasing of specific agency. Writing in The Guardian at the time of his 2005 Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, John Mullan found Williams in this passage speaking directly against ‘theory and theoreticians’; ‘his best 27

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work’, Mullan muses, ‘does seem to me humanist and humane’ (Mullan 2005). Strictly, Mullan is wrong: ‘they’ in Williams’s argument can be traced back to ‘developments’, not people, as another instance of Williams’s own abstractstructural tendency. Yet the language of the senses – what Williams sees and feels – and the personification of the bracingly ‘ice-cold’ make Mullan’s error comprehensible; Williams facilitates a kind of category error, the mistaking of the people who made the developments for the developments themselves, the structuralists for the structuralism. Williams has used a familiar figure by which abstraction – and, by implication, the people who use it – are reproached for their icy coldness. Is it not better to stay warm, and is that warmth not a condition of being human? Williams’s own awareness of a potential accusation of humanism is revealing. Yet if we are to speak of humanist error, perhaps it is located not in the insistence on human agency within systems (Williams consistently found theoretical support for this position in Vološinov’s and the Bakhtin School’s social psychology of language and critique of Saussure), but in the kind of category error that the fear of modernism’s estranging abstract power led Williams towards. A broader unease and distance in the handling of modernist aesthetics in Williams’s criticism are also suggested here. Tony Pinkney has noted a structure of ‘rise and fall’ that characterises Williams’s method when he turns, in The Country and the City, from nineteenth-century literature to modernism; where the social formation of Blake, Wordsworth and Dickens was integral to his literary analysis, ‘passages from Eliot, Woolf and Joyce are simply thrust at us as practical-critical “words on the page”’, making of modernism a contrastingly ‘immanent’ textual construct (Williams 1989: 13). Williams indeed tends to wave at literary modernism from a distance – ‘I must resist the temptation’, he states, ‘to give detailed examples of the different readings of Kafka’ that came out of post-Lukácsian mediation theory within Marxism (Williams 1983: 200) – because, I suggest, his method could not dissociate itself from a moralised interpretation of that modernism’s estrangement techniques. So, in the essay ‘Notes on English Prose’ (whose method is to quote extended passages from all periods, not simply modernist), long extracts from To the Lighthouse and Finnegans Wake are used to illustrate an ‘isolation’ from ‘general natural and human processes’ (‘I do not say this is an unfruitful situation,’ writes Williams in double negative), while in the ‘Afterword’ to Modern Tragedy, Williams reads the later work of Samuel Beckett as an ‘icy peak of drama in our period’, setting out to ‘kill hope’ and registering a consistent ‘reduction and degradation of all forms of human life’ (Williams 1983: 115–17; 1989: 100–1). Williams differentiates Beckett from what he sees as the dominant, post-Chekhovian tragedy of the ‘inability to communicate’, yet this inability is at the core of his critique of modernism, his estrangement from its estrangement. Williams’s reading is in this sense, as we shall see later, consistent with 28

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Georg Lukács’s more strident condemnation of the inhuman alienation of Beckett’s art within a modernism of abstraction. Williams saw it as a fatal paradox that the very languages of modernist literature and structural theory, which promised wholly new ways of understanding identity and everyday life, were at a ‘quite exceptional distance’ from ‘our common life’ (Williams 1983: 224). However, language is only contingently, not inherently, bounded by class, and it is a strategic error to assume that the role of the radical thinker is to reduce this distance by withholding the language of abstraction and translating it instead into one that is (in intention) less strange to the relatively illiterate reader. What if an inclusive version of culture or ‘our common life’ were to reconceive abstraction as something to be fought for rather than fought against? What if, in fact, Williams himself was involved in a version of this same struggle? On a different, more plural and mobile model of identity, perhaps, languages, including the languages of abstraction, are learnt, taken up and used, and become free and un-self-conscious forms of empowerment, without any necessity of collusion with privileged groupings. On this model too, class ownership of language is simply rendered irrelevant from the outset, language is assumed to be the common property of all, and class positions are seen as mobile markers which might be performed strategically or occupied on the grounds of access and inclusivity, without fear of inauthenticity or betrayal. This model of class, complicated by play, performance, and even the strategic assumption of classlessness, was not one that Williams could easily subscribe to. References to the early years at Cambridge suggest a hostility to Bloomsbury culture and its associated metropolitanism rooted in social encounters which had a lasting effect: reflecting on the irony of being categorised as an ‘Aesthete’ within the Socialist Club, Williams noted the ‘London upper-class literary lifestyle’ of Communist parties – ‘The makings of a neo-Bloomsbury atmosphere were certainly there, and the criticism of them was absolutely justified’ (Williams 1979: 46). He confessed in the 1983 essay that he did not believe a contradictory belonging to the literate and the illiterate could be resolved through time. This led, however, through words like ‘common’ and ‘customary’, to an association of working-class life with the ground of authenticity, and an assumption that otherness was always likely to become a problematic concept. The shared ‘sense of strangeness’ that activated metropolitan aesthetic modernism was founded, Williams found it necessary to emphasise, on many practitioners who were ‘not so much exiles and emigrés, though that was how they started’, but ‘immigrants’ (Williams 1983: 222). There is not enough evidence of the celebration of difference in Williams to prevent this emphasis from looking like a preference for the security of, or the retreat into, what we think we all know and share. The problem or the value of abstraction in modernity, whether aesthetic or intellectual, is, however, that it 29

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seems to demonstrate the human necessity of the alternative: that is, of becoming strange or other to ourselves, of identifying the inhuman in the human. If the strange and the inhuman are ‘cold’, they are nevertheless only ever produced by warm, living human beings. The contradictory conceptual work of abstraction in modernism and modernity begins to look like a means of exploring how and why this should be.

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2

THE FORCE OF ABSTRACTION: MARX AND MARXISM

In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. . . . I pre-suppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore think for himself. Karl Marx, Preface to Capital, Volume I, 1st Edition (1909: xvi) I love art from the moment when it became abstract – from the moment when, in abstraction, it revealed a new quality of being: the participation of the singularities of labour in a single whole, which is, precisely, abstract. Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude (2011: 3–4) What is the role of abstraction in the emancipation of human beings from capitalism that Karl Marx’s work pursued? ‘Time and again’, writes Derek Sayer, ‘Marx uses the term “abstract” in connection with the modern world,’ while Alberto Toscano notes that ‘much of the force of the Marxian theoretical matrix is founded on its depiction of capitalism as the culture of abstraction par excellence’ (Sayer 1991: 87; Toscano 2008: 67). Yet, prefacing volume I of Capital (1867), his major published work and the culmination of a remarkable body of research and exploratory writing, Marx insisted that this culture of 31

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abstraction could be analysed and resisted only through the ‘force’ of abstraction. Marx indeed ‘repeatedly emphasised that the most powerful weapons for rebellion are provided by capitalist development itself’ (Hardt and Negri 2019: 79). Perhaps this paradox reaches its most intense expression in the early twenty-first-century Marxism of Antonio Negri, where abstract art is ‘loved’ from the moment at which the capitalist condition of abstract labour is transformed into a newly affirmative ‘quality of being’ embodied in that art. This chapter will be a way of tracing a path between these two endorsements, the ‘force’ and the ‘love’ of abstraction, in Marxist critical thought. Theorists such as Sayer (1979, 1987, 1991) and Toscano (2008, 2014) have made important contributions to a wide, existing field of study of the development of Marx’s thinking about abstraction, and the nature of my intervention needs to be clear from the outset. In the first part of the chapter, I explore and compare the writing of abstraction in three texts by Marx, the Economic and Philosophical or ‘Paris’ Manuscripts (hereafter Manuscripts) of 1844, the Grundrisse of 1857 and volume I of Capital (1867). In the second part of the chapter, I ask what happens when Marxist critical thought encounters, from the early twentieth century through to Negri, the abstraction announced by modernist art. Connecting these are longstanding debates around Marxism’s relationship to humanism, with particular reference to the supposed antihumanism of a structuralist Marxism, principally associated with the work of Louis Althusser from the early 1960s. We have already seen, in his anticipation of the charge of ‘humanist error’, Raymond Williams’s unease with this structuralism’s influence within modernism. My account will inevitably differ from histories (or histories-of-ideas) of Marx that seek to trace the linear development of abstraction in his thought across time. Without denying that Marx was involved in such an effort, or the value of such histories, to see abstraction as a word or keyword in Marx is also to see a co-existence of meanings within and across textual spaces. Abstraction will not become or stay resolved, but demonstrates a contradictory or reversible effect within Marx’s project of human emancipation. We return, in other words, to vertigo; the dizzying and discomfiting appearances of abstraction in the writing of Raymond Williams are certainly prefigured in Marx too, making demands on the reader who, for Marx, must be willing to learn something new and think for themselves. Abstraction in Marx and Marxism is vertiginous, I suggest, because of the work it does on our understanding of the relation between the human and the inhuman. The epistemological break of Marx’s thought, identified by Williams and many others, is invariably traced to the analysis of the commodity form, and its relation to abstraction, undertaken in the first chapter of Capital. This has come to be seen not simply as the analysis of an economic form, but as a proposition about how we read, a hermeneutical proposition that ‘break(s) 32

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with the religious myth of reading’ by questioning the very act of reading itself (Althusser et al. 2015: 15). Marx wished his reader to deploy abstraction’s force, yet abstraction’s presence in the commodity form brought into question the very possibility of what it might mean to think and read for ourselves. ‘What is it to read?’ asked Louis Althusser in the late 1960s, in a series of seminars and a landmark publication by leading French Marxist thinkers around the subject of reading Capital (13). Let us say that in the ‘symptomatic’ heremeneutic Althusser derives from Marx, the reader no longer reads for what is manifest, in a model that assumes textual depth, but is more interested in what the text does not or cannot declare. Yet if this is about abstraction’s invisibility in the commodity form, it is not at the same time simply something hidden. As Slavoj Žižek notes of the parallel between Marxian and Freudian analysis, or between the commodity and dreams, the secret is not some latent content awaiting excavation, but that of why the secret should take the form that it does, a secret which may be much closer to the surface of things, as if hidden in plain sight (Žižek 1994: 296–300). The commodity form as discerned by Marx concerns what we will see as the enigma of abstraction’s simultaneous presence–absence. When this enigma became configured by Alfred Sohn-Rethel as the ‘real abstraction’ of capital, it threatened to dismantle the very premise that abstraction is an intellectual faculty we can possess, placing it instead entirely outside of human consciousness, effectively inhuman in this sense. The self then becomes an effect or illusion of the commodity form: ‘in the structure of the commodity-form’, summarises Žižek, ‘it is possible to find the transcendental subject’ (301). This questioning of human agency and subjectivity, the sense that readers may be as little present to themselves as texts are to readers, posed a deconstructive threat to the consciously humanistic values that are otherwise very visible in Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marxism’s movement into a territory that might be called anti-humanist was hence dialectical. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously impugned Enlightenment humanism’s effect of behaving towards things ‘as a dictator towards men’. Abstraction, the principal ‘tool’ of this humanism, treats its objects as did fate, the notion of which it rejects: it liquidates them. Under the levelling domination of abstraction (which makes everything in nature repeatable), and of industry (for which abstraction ordains repetition), the freed themselves finally come to form that ‘herd’ which Hegel has declared to be the result of the Enlightenment. (Adorno and Horkheimer 1995: 13) In its origin as human enlightenment, then, it is precisely the human that this levelling and liquidating abstraction conspires against. Yet Adorno and Horkheimer 33

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wished to discover ‘why mankind, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’; twenty-five years later, prefacing a new edition of their text, they note that ‘today critical thought . . . demands support for the residues of freedom, and for tendencies towards true humanism, even if these seem powerless in regard to the main course of history’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1995: xi, ix–x). Theirs is an emphatic humanism, but an antiEnlightenment humanism humanism. Their use of ‘true’ implies that what constitutes this humanism is the full achievement of the human condition itself, an aspiration that is easily located in early Marx. Yet an element of tautology clings to it. How can the ‘truly human’ be other than the human as it is? Is human the purely neutral descriptive term for a species, or a term of value, such that any human phenomenon might be truly or less truly human? As Marxist critical thought wrestled with these ambivalences around abstraction in the twentieth century, it began, I will suggest, to alight on the potential of art to operate in its own way as a critical concept or domain, in a way that called into question the distinction between abstraction as thought and as art. Louis Althusser was eventually able to read the new hermeneutic of abstraction at work in the art of the Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini, who ‘never “painted” anything but the absences in [the] presences’ in his subjects, a vegetable or bird or animal (Althusser 1971: 230). Cremonini was, Althusser argued, ‘a painter of abstraction’ insofar as he painted not things but relations, ‘the real relations (as relations they are necessarily abstract) between “men” and their “things”’, and because ‘a determining structure can never be depicted as presence, but only as absence’ (230, 237). This was a relatively rare excursion into aesthetics for Althusser, and later in this chapter I will consider the more sustained engagements of Marxism with the art of abstraction. First, we need to explore abstraction’s oscillating presence and absence in the writing of Marx. ‘Give up your abstraction’: Marx’s Manuscripts Manuscripts and Grundrisse, first published only in the later twentieth century, are extended works in progress, marking significant stages in the development of Marx’s critical thought. Where the one is animated by a sense of revolutionary realisation, the other begins more patiently to forge the theoretical explanation of the discovery that Marx brought to fruition in Capital. I want to stress the exploratory nature of these texts, as part of a broader sense in this book that abstraction is often to be found in contexts of praxis and provisionality – and that this is highlighted in the experimental literary forms discussed in Part II. Manuscripts is driven by the discovery that the fundamental modern struggle is between capital and labour, and that the hegemony of the capitalist order in this struggle is encoded in the writings of political economy. Marx’s rhetoric is often fresh and polemical, a thing of agencies and polarities: ‘The devaluation 34

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of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things’ (EW 323–4). Étienne Balibar contends that the ‘characteristic humanism’ of Manuscripts is expressed as an impassioned recognition of the need for emancipation from an abstraction-orientated capitalism, while David McLellan argues that ‘abstraction as thought’ is seen in the text as ‘something to be avoided as not grasping the real world or at least only in a one-sided manner’ (Balibar 1995: 14; McLellan 1989: 154). Let us look at two instances, the first concerning the plight of the industrial worker: Just as he is depressed, therefore, both intellectually and physically to the level of a machine, and from being a man becomes an abstract activity and a stomach, so he also becomes more and more dependent on every fluctuation in the market price, in the investment of capital and in the whims of the wealthy. (EW 285) How can a human being ‘become’ an ‘abstract activity’? And how is it that this abstraction elides the difference between machines and stomachs? Again: Estranged labour not only (1) estranges nature from man and (2) estranges man from himself, from his own active function, from his vital activity; because of this it also estranges man from his species. It turns his species-life into a means for his individual life. Firstly it estranges species-life and individual life, and secondly it turns the latter, in its abstract form, into the purpose of the former, also in its abstract and estranged state. (EW 328) Throughout Manuscripts ‘estrangement’ is a key term of Marx’s critique of a condition of modern labour that denatures and dehumanises. In the English translated text it often works in conjunction with ‘alienated’ to signify injurious distance, ‘alienation’ henceforth becoming a critical term more broadly associated with the travails of the human condition in modernity. Abstraction comes to accompany these more heavily foregrounded terms – ‘abstract form’, ‘abstract and estranged state’ – but without the definition that its counterparts share. The attentive reader of Marx may wonder if abstraction and estrangement are synonymous, or sequentially or causally linked, or if estrangement, the process by which labour is objectified and becomes alien to the worker, transforms both human species-life and individual human life into abstractions, or if these are already, as it were, abstractions. Some reflection on the concept of ‘species-life’ or ‘species-being’ in Manuscripts helps to re-approach such questions. In part, species-being for Marx is a condition of dependence upon an inorganic nature that humans share with animals: ‘To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature’, he writes, 35

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‘simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature’ (EW 328). Human species-life is, however, singular in possessing the consciousness to think ‘species’ and hence to ‘make’ the human species intellectually as well as practically, implying a condition of universal freedom (EW 327). Under capitalism, Marx claims, this prior truth of a complex condition of connectedness with society and organic nature is degraded to a ‘means’ for the maintenance of individual life only; in Grundrisse, he was to locate this in the isolated figure Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), an ‘unimaginative conceit’ that helped to found the ideology of bourgeois economics (G 83–4). It may seem surprising, therefore, to find in Manuscripts that the ‘abstract’ nature of this individual life is its quality of being visceral and bodily. Marx notes the ‘bestial degeneration’ of ‘a complete, crude and abstract simplicity of need’ under capitalism; the capitalist process configures the ‘needs’ of the industrial worker in terms of the barest minimum requirements to be covered by wages – eating, drinking, breathing fresh air, procreation – and then re-presents these as the horizon of human life itself. Internalising this view, the worker ‘feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions’ – not, Marx explains, that eating and drinking and so on are not human functions too, but that they are animal ‘when abstracted from other aspects of human activity’ (EW 359–60; 327). Abstraction thereby comes to be associated with basic bodily needs, insofar as it is defined as an act of simplification that ex-tracts and isolates those needs. Luxury, for example, Marx explains, is the opposite of ‘abstract need’, in the sense that the capitalist demonises anything that goes beyond the basic bodily needs of the worker as luxurious. On this definition of abstraction-as-simplification, species-life is also made to look simplistic, if it becomes reduced to the fulfilment of individual needs alone. From here the conjunction between machines, stomachs and ‘abstract activity’ in my first example might also be re-approached. Manuscripts lays the firm basis of a conjunction between abstraction and machine, a refrain now deeply familiar as the humanistic critique of industrial modernity: capitalist industry reduces humans to machines. ‘Abstract labour’, to which, Marx argues, the ‘greater part of mankind’ is ‘reduced’, is ‘very one-sided and machine-like’; it is ‘the most abstract mechanical movement’ (EW 289, 360). Yet abstraction shifts uneasily beneath the seeming self-evidence of these propositions. It here describes the actual, numbing and repetitive activities which industrial labour imposed upon human bodies, but it also describes a way of thinking the human as a thing of such simple functions, which might be machine-like or stomach-like. Such thinking disavows the depth and ‘wealth’ of human being and human potential for Marx, as these are signalled in the affirmative and visionary emphasis of the Communism that would realise it: ‘A fresh confirmation of human powers and a fresh enrichment of human nature’ (EW 358). 36

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Yet abstraction remains, on Marx’s own terms, a defining characteristic of this human species-nature, an intellectualism that can complexify as much as it simplifies. One of the key discoveries registered in Manuscripts is of the way in which the would-be science of political economy crystallises a danger residing in abstraction’s contradictory work. Political economy in the founding works of, for example, Adam Smith and David Ricardo had given Marx his language of analysis: he ‘starts out’ from the premises of political economy, its ‘language and laws’, insofar as it grasps, for example, private property ‘in general and abstract formulae’ and ‘regards labour abstractly as a thing’ (EW 322, 293). Marx in this early writing gratefully accepts these as in part the very tools of a critique of capitalism, effectively revealing the dehumanisation of commodity culture. The problem is that political economy also colludes in the same dehumanisation through an illicit yet deeply embedded move: as Marx puts it, the abstract formulae generated by political economists are what they ‘then take as laws’ (EW 322). Marx here figures a specific and recurrent reproach of abstraction in modernism and modernity: that it consistently stages the trick of encouraging us to displace the real world with the thought world, taking our ideas as the actual state of affairs and conveniently forgetting that this is what we have done. For A. N. Whitehead in the Lowell Lectures of 1925, characterising the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, this became the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’; for N. Katherine Hayles in 1999, seeing the aspiration to disembodied information as a late modern manifestation of a philosophy of idealism, it was ‘the Platonic backhand and forehand’ (Whitehead 1927: 64–70; Hayles 1999: 12–13). We will return to this trick, but specifically as an effect of language, in Chapter 7. Marx had drawn the principle from Feuerbach’s critique of religion: in ‘God’ we externalise, and alienate ourselves from, a product of our own consciousness. In another distinctive passage in Manuscripts, however, Marx extends this critique to the antithesis of the supernatural – that is, to the logic of scientific causality. Marx at this point has been arguing for a parallel between the recent discoveries of earth science, revealing a ‘process of self-generation’ rather than divine creation, and the concept of ‘self-mediated’ human being – the Communist–humanist idea that life is a process of self-creation in sensuous and intellectual terms. But, he argues, the principle of external creation is ‘very hard to exorcize from the popular consciousness’ because of our habits of genealogical thought: ‘“Who begot my father, his grandfather, etc.?”’ (EW 356–7). Granting the reality of this infinite ‘progression’, Marx insists that we also see a circularity because ‘man reproduces himself in the act of begetting and thus always remains the subject’. To help explain this testing proposition, Marx tries out a dialogue with the ‘popular consciousness’: 37

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But you will reply: I grant you this circular movement, but you must also grant me the right to progress back to the question: Who begot the first man, and nature in general? I can only answer: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question does not arise from a standpoint to which I cannot reply because it is a perverse one. Ask yourself whether that progression exists as such for rational thought. If you ask about the creation of nature and of man, then you are abstracting from nature and from man. You assume them as non-existent and want me to prove to you that they exist. My answer is: Give up your abstraction and you will then give up your question. But if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then do so consistently, and if you assume the non-existence of man and nature, then assume also your own non-existence, for you are also nature and man. Do not think and do not ask me questions, for as soon as you think and ask questions, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you assume everything as non-existent and still want to exist yourself? (EW 357) Let us imagine Marx’s reader–worker innocently enquiring into her origins, only to stand accused of perversity and irrationality of thought: ‘Give up your abstraction’. Marx has already previously granted that it is entirely rational to assume the real existence of external causes – ‘all the palpable evidence of practical life’ points towards them (EW 356) – yet at the same time, he must note, this is an instance of mistaken or misplaced abstraction. A higher or more rigorous rationality, it is implied, enables us to see what seems initially irrational: that as humans, in our species-being, we create ourselves. Yet would this conclusion itself not constitute an advanced act of abstraction, if the latter is defined, as we have seen, as the activity of thought that characterises our species-being? It would seem not. Through the interlocutor’s reproach – ‘Your question itself is a product of abstraction’ – abstraction is what happens when, in fact, we are not thinking carefully enough. In the face of Marx’s theory of immanent selfcreation, seeming to flout common sense even as it claims to be grounded in sensuous immediacy, abstraction is the too-easy option, locating our reality in habits of causal thinking whose ultimate terminus is metaphysics or superstition, and at the same time unwittingly assuming our own non-existence. In such ways, Manuscripts polemically establishes abstraction as a reproach. Abstraction is an effect of capitalism, though with the precise nature of this relation unelaborated except in abstraction’s association with the fatal distancing of estranged or alienated work. It is a simplistic thought-process that we are too easily lured into, characterised by hasty causal explanations and a failure to acknowledge the hierarchy of difference between humans and animals. At the same time as the Marx of 1844 is trying to work with abstraction as an analytical concept, 38

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and one that signifies human intellect per se, he is establishing as self-evident its reproachful status and threat to the human. The rhetoric of the latter could intensify such that, in The Poverty of Philosophy of 1847, writing on the ‘metaphysics’ of political economy and heavily satirising Proudhon’s well-meaning critique of capital, abstraction could become the very obverse of life on earth: If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents, animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction, the only substance left is the logical categories. . . . If all that exists, all that lives on land and under water can be reduced by abstraction to a logical category – if the whole real world can be drowned thus in a world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories – who need be astonished at it? (Marx 1966: 92–3) Such passages, allied to the visionary language of Manuscripts, show how it has been possible to align Marx with a ‘Romantic’ literary humanism, the appeal surely reminiscent of William Blake’s defence of the imagination or D. H. Lawrence’s of wonder, against a cold scientific rationality, the real world finally ‘drowned’ in abstractions. In their account of such Romantic humanism in Marx, Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley cite the capacity for emotion in Marx’s writing as evidence of what is itself a rational response to the abstract inhumanism of capitalist modernity: ‘The solid immediacy of emotions thus counters the abstract principle of exchange built into the capitalist system’ (Halliwell and Mousley 2003: 32). Taking as unquestioned a pejorative association of abstraction with the anti-human, Halliwell and Mousley do nevertheless identify in Marx a version of the contradictory or reversible: he ‘criticizes as much as he practises abstraction’, works ‘both with and against’ it; yet he is ultimately limited in their account by the paradox of countering one abstraction with another, ‘privileg(ing) impersonal systems and historical forces over human beings who are seen merely as their effects’ (30, 28). The alignment of this position with Raymond Williams’s critique of structuralist Marxism will be clear. In such a context, for Halliwell and Mousley, Marx tries (but then always ultimately fails) to escape the perils of abstraction only when his emotions show: for example, in reports of the lives of young children labouring in factories and potteries. As in Raymond Williams, it is assumed that a structural analysis cannot be human or humanist. However, when we track the fortunes of abstraction into the seven notebooks that make up the Grundrisse of 1857, we find the possibility of this Romantic humanist reading to be receding. Grasping Abstraction Across the seven notebooks that make up Grundrisse (1857), the rhetoric of anti-abstraction intermittently persists. Abstraction occurs ‘in the head’, it 39

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is ‘arbitrary’ or even, in the case of the political economist Frédéric Bastiat, ‘infantile’ (G 143, 303, 249). Yet in this very different text, where a more sustained re-assessment of abstraction’s meaning as a critical tool is under way, accusations of abstraction’s inadequacy tend to coalesce into a more prosaic and familiar form: that of the ‘mere’ abstraction to which human thought processes can be reduced. Commodities are fixed ‘as mere exchange values’, proceeding ‘by means of mere abstraction’; the industrial worker’s activity is ‘reduced to a mere abstraction of activity’ (G 142, 693). Where abstraction’s universally human quality was previously located in ‘the activity of thought’, Grundrisse gives this a more specific historical inflection by associating it with the ‘idea’; that is, while the production of ideas in general might be universal, specific ideas have a historical contingency. This is at the root of Grundrisse’s much-quoted condemnation of the human cost of abstraction in modernity: that under capitalism, ‘individuals are now ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on one another’ (G 164). Ideas are inevitably embedded in the social relations of capital. Where in the feudal era social relations meant direct ties between actual people – lord and vassal, landlord and serf – in capitalism such ties are ‘exploded, ripped up’, and individuals attain the appearance or feeling of independence, whilst actually remaining equally imprisoned within the ‘material’ ideas, or abstractions, of capital. Thus, in another version of ‘mere’ abstraction, ‘The abstraction, or idea, . . . is nothing more than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master’ (G 164). Marx is on his way in Grundrisse to proposing that the human thoughtform of abstraction is entwined with, perhaps ‘nothing more than’, the material form of money-as-idea. Manuscripts had lightly yet distinctly prefigured the specific role of money in ‘reduc(ing) everything to its own form of abstraction’ (EW 358); Grundrisse grapples more intensely with how to illustrate and elaborate this abstraction. There is, Marx argues, a ‘special difficulty in grasping money in its fully developed character as money’ because money’s identity as a social relation between people is obscured and overridden by the appearance of its inherent physical value – with gold as the paradigmatic example of this (G 239). Why does gold matter so much? The ‘fixed insistence’ on gold’s physicality as ‘one of its aspects, in the abstract’, and the ‘blindness towards the contradictions contained within it’, give gold a ‘really magical significance behind the back of individuals’; in fact, Marx argues, ‘it is because of this self-contradictory and hence illusory aspect, because of this abstraction, that it becomes such an enormous instrument in the real development of the forces of social production’ (G 225). Where, then, does abstraction lie, according to Marx? Is it in the mental act of isolating gold’s physical value, or in the ‘self-contradictory’ nature of gold itself (we will return to this ‘itself’) as both thing and social relation? In the first 40

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case abstraction is something that is done, while in the second it is closer to a descriptive noun – gold is an abstraction. Re-approaching this, Marx argues that money’s ‘final, completed character’ is as ‘a contradiction which . . . drives towards its own dissolution’; as ‘the general form of wealth, the whole world of real riches stands opposite it. It is their pure abstraction – hence, fixated as such, a mere conceit’ (G 233). Seeing and touching our gold, our jewellery, our property, we feel that our wealth is an ‘entirely material, tangible’ thing; but this feeling is ‘only in my head, it is a pure fantasy’, because value is created in the relational system of exchange that allows us to compare dissimilar things. Value is ‘purely’ (but also again ‘merely’, as in the reference to a conceit) ‘abstract’, the ‘most abstract expression of capital itself’ (G 776). There is, then, in Marx’s meditations, no either/or answer to the question of whether abstraction is the mistake we make in thinking value lies in things rather than in relations, or whether it lies in the thing/relation contradiction itself. If the former feels like a human thing to do, the construction of the latter can also be seen as human: value’s ‘pure abstraction’ has an entirely ‘historic foundation’ (G 776). We are reminded that human, in relation to the operation of abstraction, might refer either to a quality of the universal – something like human nature – or to the production of ideas which are never universal but only ever historically specific. There is at any rate, it seems, in Marx’s terms, no access to gold in-‘itself’: it ‘is’, instead, a contradiction that humans under capitalism are responsible for creating as such. In the Introduction to Grundrisse Marx was at the same time working on a new and more prosaic account of abstraction’s analytical value, by re-appraising the abstract/concrete antithesis, and through the concept of ‘determinate abstraction’. ‘It seems to be correct’, Marx writes, that any analysis must start from the given facts or ‘the real and the concrete’: he takes the example of the politicoeconomic analysis of a country, with its population as the starting point (G 100). This, however, is ‘false’; population is an ‘abstraction’ if the classes of which it composed are left out of consideration. Classes, in turn, are an ‘empty phrase’, associating abstraction with linguistic inadequacy, if their constituent elements of wage labour, capital and the like are not in turn taken into account. The assumption that we habitually start from the concrete and work up to the abstract is therefore contested: we start from ‘an imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions’ until arriving at ‘the simplest determinations’. In fact, Marx insists, we must ‘retrace’ this process to get back to population, not this time as a ‘chaotic’ whole but as ‘a rich totality of many determinations and relations’. The usual understanding of the abstract–concrete antithesis is thus inverted: we ‘rise’ from ‘abstract determinations’ to ‘a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought’; ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind’ (G 101). 41

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Marx here turns the relation of abstract to concrete upside down by having each of the conventional qualities assume the condition of the other. There is something, he infers, too simple and elementary about the abstract, while ‘the concrete is concrete’ insofar as it is ‘the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ (G 101). The consistent reproach of abstraction we have so far seen in Marx inevitably suggests that the concrete, as its virtually automatic antithesis, must be highly valued by comparison. Yet Jacques Rancière argues that ‘most of the distortions of Marxist theory have in common that they are based on a certain ideology of the concrete’, while Roberto Nigro finds that in the Introduction to Grundrisse Marx ‘destroys every sort of fetishism of the concrete’ (Althusser et al. 2015: 97; Nigro n.d.: 5). In each case it may not be too far-fetched to claim that the remaking of the concrete is done in the image of abstraction, which for Marx, Nigro claims, becomes the thought process that enables us to grasp antagonisms and contradictions in reality. ‘Determinate abstractions’ and their dialectical relation to the concrete thus form part of a general effort in Grundrisse to discriminate what it is about abstraction that we should value. Marx had also tried to deal with this when setting out to clarify what we mean when we say that it is the nature of human beings to make things. We could refer to this as ‘material production’, he notes, but only if we realise at the same time that this phrase is an abstraction, in the sense of implying that we can ex-tract certain traits or characteristics that are common to production universally, everywhere and at all times. We need to be wary of abstraction; but in what sense? ‘Production in general’, Marx writes, ‘is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition’ (G 85). Some abstractions, then, are simply useful, and ‘no production will be thinkable without them’ – but only if we remember to supplement ‘production in general’ with all the ‘different determinations’ that distinguish specific forms of production in different historical circumstances. Roberto Nigro argues that, with this new inflection of ‘determinate abstractions’, Marx was able to demonstrate how abstraction itself had been ‘distorted and mystified by philosophes and classical political economists’ (Nigro n.d.: 4). Political economists, Marx insists, ‘quietly smuggle in’ the particular determinations of capitalism under the guise of abstractions as ‘inviolable natural laws’ – the trick or flip of abstraction referenced earlier (G 87). Yet abstractions are, he suggests, where we start from, if we are to use concepts at all to understand the world through generalising about it (and, on the common definition of abstraction itself as generalisation, the tendency of this statement towards circularity will not go unnoticed). These will be ‘segmented’ and ‘split’, as particularities insist on recognition, but no doubt in order to lead to further useful abstractions, in a continual movement between abstract and particular. 42

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Grundrisse is a testing ground for the meaning and capacity of abstraction. A quality of vertigo emerges again, in which abstract is or is not concrete, or in which abstraction as money oscillates between ideal and material. The problematic, as Martin Nicolaus has it, is one that Marx inherits from Hegel: what it is to ‘grasp’ something in thought, abstractly, when the terms of that thought are always in motion. Capital is a paradigmatic example: bourgeois economics wants to persuade us that ‘Capital is conceived as a thing, not as a relation’, whereas for Marx capital is not even a simple relation but ‘a process, in whose various moments it is always capital’ (G 258). Explaining why abstraction is locally or strategically necessary, Marx notes: ‘The fixed presuppositions themselves become fluid in the further course of development. But only by holding them fast at the beginning is their development possible without confounding everything’ (G 817). This is an ambivalence around language that haunts but also energises modernism: the lament of its inadequacy, yet the realisation of its world-making potential. For T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney, ‘I’ve gotta use words when I talk to you’ (Eliot n.d.: 135). Marx’s spatial metaphor is of the interruption of a perpetual flux or stream, where thought can occur only through the ability of words to ‘fix’ meanings temporarily in place. As Nigro puts it, echoing the presence– absences that Althusser found in Cremonini’s paintings, ‘Marx is the thinker of the relation, of the cooperation, of what happens “among”’ (Nigro n.d.: 8). Ideally, it seems, thought-language would exactly mirror the constant fluidity of things – the desire, as Timothy Bewes identifies it, to ‘think beyond abstraction’ (Bewes 2014). Language’s naming of ‘capital’ is useful, and indeed necessary, yet its usefulness in ‘fixing’ is also its infirmity if it persists long enough to obstruct the process of thought. In Marx, ‘mere’ abstraction is often found in close association with the idea of language’s inadequacy: for example, with the figure of the ‘empty phrase’ or the ‘conceit’. In the contexts of modernism and modernity, it becomes common to see abstraction posited as virtually synonymous with the faculty of language: I gotta use abstractions when I talk to you. Yet the potential for category error is apparent: why should language – or how can it – mirror the actual state of things? What would a thought that is not abstract look like? Capital This dilemma may help to explain the fate of abstraction when we turn to Volume I of Capital – because, despite Marx’s announcement of abstraction as its driving ‘force’, the word largely retreats from his major text once its early work in accounting for the commodity form is done. A residual role for the polemic of reproach abides within Capital: the ‘boundless greed’ and ‘neverending process of profit-making’ of the capitalist as ‘the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract’; or the fate of the modern labourer in 43

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having the surplus of their labour ‘embezzled, because abstracted’ as capital (C 130–1, 624). Occasionally, abstraction appears en passant as the neutral description of Marx’s own methodology: thus, ‘If we abstract from the material substance of the circulation of commodities, . . . we find its final result to be money’; or, ‘Abstractly considered, that is’, or, ‘In considering the labourprocess, we began . . . by treating it in the abstract . . .’ (C 123, 135, 516). But these are relatively incidental appearances. Abstraction’s retreat from visibility in Capital may, however, be related to the question of invisibility itself – in language, in representation, and in the definition of abstraction’s function within commodity culture. In the crucial opening chapter, Marx uses familiar metaphors of cognition as vision in introducing the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Any useful thing such as iron or paper ‘may be looked at from the two points of view’ of quality and quantity; exchange value ‘at first sight . . . appears to be something accidental and purely relative’ (C 2–3). As well as the ‘use-value’ that addresses specific human wants, such as slaking our thirst or keeping us warm, commodities also possess this ‘exchange-value’, by which their worth is defined in terms of the proportions in which they can be exchanged with each other via money. One quarter of corn can exchange for x amount of iron; £100-worth of gold is declared as ‘equal’ to, and exchangeable for, £100-worth of iron, even if the actual physical amounts in question are very different. Exchange-value is therefore a third thing that any two different commodities have in common and to which, Marx notes, they are ‘reducible’. Abstraction makes its first appearance in Capital thus: ‘But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use-value’ (C 4). In ‘total’ we hear the virtual self-evidence of abstraction as reproach – in this specific context its tendency, in exchange-value, to override and obscure a thing’s use-value. A strong visual metaphor identifies a further common property that is obscured under exchange-value: the kind and the amount of human work that goes into manufacturing a commodity. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use-value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. (C 4–5) Thus, Marx writes, commodities are ‘reduced’ to one thing, ‘human labour in the abstract’; ‘(A) use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it’ (C 5). 44

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Taking the relationship between the cost of 10 yards of linen and the doubled cost of the coat that it makes up, Marx argues that ‘abstraction is made from’ the distinctively different skilled activities of weaving and tailoring by way of presenting their value as that of ‘human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general’, effectively reducing these skills to the status of an identical ‘unskilled, simple labour’ (C 11–12). While this reinforces our sense of abstraction as the reductive simplification of a complex reality, the emphasis upon rendering things invisible introduces a new sense of complexity in seeing and understanding. As if in response, the chapter later shifts into a stylised and self-conscious register that virtually acknowledges its own paradigm-breaking status. Here, as an extension of the kind of mental trick performed by money, Marx identifies a generalised ‘Fetishism of commodities’, where money itself is designated as the ‘circulation of commodities’. Far from being ‘a very trivial thing, and easily understood’, Marx writes, a commodity is ‘a very queer thing’, with a ‘mystical’ and ‘mysterious’ character, ‘abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (C 41–3). In this queering of the commodity, Marx insists that the commodity’s obviousness – we all know what a coat is – constitutes the very ground of its mystery and inexplicability, or of its resistance to thought. Capitalism’s colonisation of the human mind rests on the wager that things, and products-asthings, would be seen self-evidently as what they are, rather than as what they are not. How could common sense suggest otherwise? Yet to see the thing-initself already amounts to a trick because of the training of minds that naturalises commodities as things. When we see a thing, we do not realise that we see its very thingness as a commodity. We need, instead, to see how we do not see the commodity, or that the obviousness of what we see is the guarantee of failing to see what is really there; we also need to see that these invisibilities are what capitalism needs in order to do its work on us. Needless to say, not every ‘thing’ is fashioned by the industrial system as a commodity. Yet in the general condition of capitalist modernity as a theatre of illusion subsequently characterised in the 1960s situationism of Guy Debord as ‘spectacle’ (‘another facet of money, which is the abstract general equivalent of all commodities’), or the ‘simulacrum’ of Jean Baudrillard’s 1980s postmodernism (capital ‘practises’ abstraction as a regime of images following from ‘a radical law of equivalence and exchange’), commodification has itself become a mode of vision, a way of seeing the world (Debord 1995: 32; Baudrillard 1993: 199). Marx’s announcement of the fetishism of commodities, and of the mysteries and subtleties of the commodity, are further rhetorical warnings to the reader. Are his own powers of analysis (having developed these in Manuscripts and Grundrisse) fit for the task of explicating the difficulty of abstraction’s role in capitalist modernity? How far does the abstraction of modernity extend? Is 45

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the theory that abstraction makes things both invisible (obscuring their uses and material relations of production) and visible (making commodities appear precisely as things) itself a product of abstraction? Real Abstraction These issues, and the problematics of reading that they entail, reach a level of intensity in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s later development of the concept of real abstraction in his 1978 work Intellectual and Manual Labour. Sohn-Rethel proposed that our model of scientific thought proceeds from the invention of physical money in Greek antiquity: ‘the use of coinage heralds the epoch of the social form of thinking as separate pure intellect’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 86). This establishes what seems like an ultimate paradox in abstraction’s long history as a term for human thought: that ‘real abstraction’ occurs, or has already happened, outside of human consciousness. In the words of Slavoj Žižek, ‘Before thought could arrive at pure abstraction, the abstraction was already at work in the social effectivity of the market’ (Žižek 1994: 301). Money is ‘an abstract thing which, strictly speaking, is a contradiction in terms’ – the contradiction we saw Marx striving to express in the extended reflections on gold in Grundrisse. As Alberto Toscano summarises the debates around this theory of abstraction, Sohn-Rethel’s proposal is more radical than that a thought (for example, the value represented by a coin) becomes a thing; it is that ‘a relation, or even a thing, . . . then becomes a thought’ (Toscano 2008: 71). Sohn-Rethel must explain how an abstraction that is ‘the action of exchange, and action alone’ (Sohn-Rethel 1978: 26) can be ‘converted’ into an internal operation of the mind: that is, how something which ‘does not spring from the mind’ can come to have ‘no existence other than in’ the mind (57). As Toscano again explains, in a profound example of abstraction’s reversibility, abstraction in the form of money seems to stand for concrete reality, in comparison to which ‘use-value becomes a matter of ideal representation, and thus turns out to be abstract’ (Toscano 2014: 1228). ‘Abstract’ in this ideal sense, however, misaligns with the spirit of Sohn-Rethel’s proposition, which is that our ability to see things as concrete, and as belonging to an object-world which is the prerequisite of scientific method, is itself abstraction. Significantly, Intellectual and Manual Labour registers its own struggle with abstraction in Marx and in Capital. ‘Not everybody may feel convinced of the identity of abstraction in its real and its ideal shape, and be prepared to accept the fact of the conversion, or rather the ascertainment of it as a foregone conclusion,’ Sohn-Rethel ruefully reflects; to demonstrate this is ‘no easy task’ (61–2). At times, just as in Marx and in Williams, abstraction leads seemingly inevitably to the vertiginous moment, as in this reflection (with Sohn-Rethel’s italicised emphasis) on the assumption that in the act of exchange the commodity remains identical and unaffected by movement in time and space: 46

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(A)bstract movement through abstract (homogeneous, continuous and empty) space and time of abstract substances (materially real but bare of sense-qualities) which thereby suffer no material change and which allow for none but quantitative differentiation (differentiation in abstract, non-dimensional quantity). (53) Elsewhere, and more in keeping with his homely address to the actual, if troubled reader, Sohn-Rethel offers two imaginings of money’s abstraction. In the first, often quoted by commentators, a dog watches its owner buying meat in a butcher’s shop, comprehending all of the physical signs except the one in which coins change hands. In the other, a man on his way to market has been sifting through all arguments about money’s contradictory state as both Platonic idea and physical matter, when he sees Plato himself in ‘philosophical converse’ with his friends not far from the butcher’s stand. Should he simply use his coins for his purchases, assuming without question the ‘indestructible’ value of the commodity the actual silver represents, or should he ask Plato to enlighten him on money’s conceptual contradictions and mysteries? If the latter, would he ever ‘return to the economic necessities of life’ (64)? Sohn-Rethel evokes the ‘mountains of paper’ notes that eventually led his researches to the heart of the commodity structure: ‘the transcendental subject’, that model of the self-conscious and free-thinking human integral to Kant’s notion of ‘pure understanding’ as ‘the cognitive source of scientific knowledge’, and therefore to the commodity’s appearance of self-evidence. To his reader, assumed to self-identify with this model of the rational subject, Sohn-Rethel appealed that being in modernity required an understanding of the inhuman operation of abstraction in the human construct of capitalism. What is human is precisely this inhuman operation of abstraction, with regard to which the rational or transcendental subject is simultaneously outside and inside. What Is It to Read? We have seen how abstraction presents the reader of Capital with interrelated quandaries. The challenge posed is to learn to use abstraction’s ‘force’ to understand how capital, via money and the commodity form, does its work on human consciousness. This work is itself, however, abstraction; and while abstraction really happens, through the system of exchange-value, its operation is also, as Marx warns, mystical and mysterious – a way of suggesting that abstraction must precisely elude or escape us for its work to be effective. Can abstraction read and understand abstraction? Can it be a possession of rational, critical and conscious minds, grasping the abstraction that at the same time works only through our un-consciousness of it? Is there a vantage point from which abstraction can see for what it is abstraction’s work on or in the unconscious? 47

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A number of senses of abstraction in Marx are, then, simultaneously in play: abstraction as thought itself; abstraction as a methodology dialectically poised in its relation with the concrete; abstraction as the reductively dehumanising tendency of capitalism; abstraction as a mental operation specific to capitalism. Timothy Bewes’s thoughtful 2014 intervention highlights specific contradictions across which abstraction does its work in the Marxist critical tradition: it designates both dematerialisation and concretisation, intellectual labour and manual labour; intelligibility or comprehension and unintelligibility or incomprehension (Bewes 2014). In the first case, Bewes summarises, reading Adorno on Hegel’s Aesthetics, abstraction designates the liberation of thought from ‘“its entanglement in matter”’, while Georg Lukács captured in the concept of ‘reification’ the process by which capitalist social relations actively produce the objectivity and autonomy of people and things, such that ‘abstraction is a mode of concretisation’ (Bewes 2014: 1200). Abstraction can mean thought floating off into the ether or our actual emergence as separate, concrete beings. In the second and third cases, however, Bewes directly confronts abstraction’s instrumental role in the division of labour necessary to industrial capitalism: that is, between those who do thought work and those who do physical work. Risking a further attack of vertigo: what if, as Timothy Bewes suggests, the problem with abstraction is its tendency to succumb to abstraction, to become ‘one of the greatest abstractions of modern critical thought’ (1200)? Marx himself first made the proposition of difficulty that has continued to shape the popular image of Capital, binding the question of abstraction in his writing closely to what Raymond Williams was to call the unevenness of literacy in an unequal society. ‘To understand the first chapter’ and its analysis of the commodity form would, he wrote in the Preface to Volume I, ‘present the greatest difficulty’; hence he had, ‘as much as it was possible’, ‘popularised’ the analysis. Writing on 18 March 1872 to thank Maurice La Châtre for serialising Volume I in French, Marx noted that this would make the book ‘more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else’ (quoted in Althusser et al. 2015: 9). The reading of the first chapters would be ‘rather arduous’ because his mode of analysis ‘had not previously been applied to economic subjects’; yet, he insisted, there is ‘no royal road to science’, and ‘only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths’ would succeed. Abstraction could, we remember, denote at one and the same time a means of empowering readers, the obstruction by which readers are prevented from gaining access to their empowerment, and the means by which capitalism disempowers subjects. Marx was therefore fully aware of a tension between his strategically constructed ideal or implicit reader, open to the new and thinking for ‘himself’, and the material reality of the difficulties faced by actual readers whose empowerment was Capital’s motivation: 48

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The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class, which by education, training, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of nature. The organization of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. (C 761) In an industrial society, the question of critical literacy could not be one of merely personal aptitude. Jonathan Rose’s historical account of the intellectual lives of the working class in early twentieth-century Britain presents a mildly amused satire on the ‘great difficulty’ most left-leaning workers and Labour Party activists and MPs had in reading ‘Marx and Marxists’ (Rose 2002: 305). ‘Jargon’ is the term through which this difficulty is presented: Ewan MacColl recalls the conflict between his Communist ideals and the effort to date women because ‘“You were talking such fucking jargon!”’, prompting Rose’s authorial proposition that ‘Few common readers could penetrate the smokescreen of jargon’ (306). The development of a specialised new vocabulary is cited by Rose as a means for Marxists to secure defensive exclusivity: a memoir by Margaret McCarthy cites locutions such as ‘dialectical’, ‘empiric’, ‘formalistic’ and ‘materialist conception’, which, Rose summarises, were realised to be ‘an encryption device to exclude newcomers like herself from Party discussions’. MacColl again: ‘“the jargon meant something to you – it was a code that you’d cracked”’. In ventriloquising such views, Rose’s account transmits two overarching assumptions: first, that in failing to produce ‘accessible’ writing, Marx and Marxists reinforced the division between educated and labouring classes, cutting them off from the very class ‘they were supposed to be mobilizing’; and second, citing T. A. Jackson’s assertion that he wrote his autobiography to prove ‘“that a man can be Communist and still remain human”’, that the relationship between Marxism and the human is fraught and potentially irreconcilable (306, 317). However, Rose’s account brackets out the way in which Marx’s project is imbued with a self-consciousness about textuality and its problematics. Marx’s orientation towards texts was that none could be taken for granted, including his own. To read Manuscripts and Grundrisse is to encounter what we might expect from voluminous nineteenth-century notebooks of work-in-progress, research-gathering and critique: extensive, laboriously copied quotations from other texts. But even in the published summation of Capital, we encounter Marx, according to Louis Althusser, as ‘a reader who reads to us, and out loud’ (Althusser et al. 2015: 16). Marx’s reader must refuse to take the foundational terms of political economy as read; it was necessary, as we have seen, to call into crisis the tendency of political economy to translate its historically specific bourgeois concepts into universal, trans-historical ‘laws’. ‘Learning something new’ for Marx’s implicit reader meant not simply assimilating new reading 49

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material or learning a new ‘jargon’, but learning to read that material in a new way. This transcends any reduction of difficulty to the unexamined category of ‘jargon’, even if Jonathan Rose is right to point out how this term was indeed used by actual readers in their plight. It is significant therefore that Louis Althusser should recommend an ‘apprenticeship’ in abstraction for the reader of Capital, in his Preface to a new French translation of Volume I published in 1969. The Preface is direct and practical: it proposes that the reader should read Part Two, ‘The Transformation of Money into Capital’, before tackling the analysis of the commodity in Part One, explaining that it is possible to understand the latter only by reading it ‘four or five times in succession’ – ‘Do not hurry, go back carefully and slowly and do not proceed until you have understood’ (Althusser 1971: 78). The major difficulty of Marx’s theory of history is ‘to get used to the practice of abstraction’, abstraction here defined as the condition of the conceptual (concepts are ‘abstract notions’ [75]), because ‘in our education system’ an apprenticeship in such is offered only by mathematics and physics. The required apprenticeship in reading Marx’s abstraction is, moreover, ‘not quickly completed’ (78). Abstraction belongs to an educated class, and the reader is taking on more than a single text in seeking to acquire it. Yet Althusser also offers a paradox that dismantles this assumed division of labour. Proletarians or wage-earners and activists from workers’ movements will and do in fact understand Capital, Althusser argues, because it refers to the conditions of labour and exploitation that they experience: it is ‘a straightforward discussion of their concrete lives’ (74). In this ‘ideologico-political’ sense, workers are predisposed from the outset to understand Capital and its abstraction without needing the mediation of education. Theorists and intellectuals, by contrast, will have greater difficulty in understanding Capital, and in fact have consistently misread it, because they are less likely to have been subjected to this experience of work in the capitalist system. Althusser does not seek to minimise the difficulties for the worker of a practice of the theorising that scientists and intellectuals are accustomed to. But as an ideologico-political category, Althusser makes abstraction, as it were, immanent and available – not owned or captured by an educated class in ‘uneven’ conditions, but a faculty potentialised precisely by the absence of this privilege. Where does abstraction stand in the wake of this proposition? If there is an element of romantic wish-fulfilment on Althusser’s part – common readers somehow inherently attuned to Marx – there is also a gesture of strategic importance. It must be possible, if it cannot realistically be expected, that abstraction can be practised – belong to? – everyone. Abstraction becomes a mode of thought, or a quality of texts and the attentive reading required by them, rather than, or as well as, an apparatus acquired through the uneven system of educational discipline. Bertolt Brecht’s anticipation of this in 1938 had been to stress 50

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abstraction’s complexity as both a critical tool and a condition of modernity to be inhabited. Like Althusser, Brecht’s clear and direct mode of address was for a ‘people’ inherently predisposed to the highest abstraction. ‘If you want to speak to the people, you must be understood by the people’, he wrote in ‘The Expressionism Debate’ (1938). But ‘the people don’t just understand the old forms’; Marx, like Engels and Lenin, ‘resorted to very new forms’ (Brecht 2003: 214). ‘Heart’ Knowledge in Tressell The idea of these new forms, and the artistic expression with which Brecht associated them, infiltrate the much earlier, pioneering novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) by Robert Tressell (Noonan). The novel directly takes up the challenge of making Marxism accessible to the working class; problems of what it is to read and of how to distribute the tools of critical thought are present both in the novel’s form and in its subject matter. Frank Owen, the key socialist protagonist, is an artisanal painter and decorator working in the south of England on the refurbishment of a large detached house, The Cave, owned by the local capitalist, Mr Sweater. Owen and his workmates are subject to constant surveillance, pressure to skimp or cut corners on the work, and the constant threat of being laid off. Owen is appalled by the way the men, as ‘philanthropists’, sustain the very system that impoverishes them, cheaply donating their lives and labour to their employers, and he undertakes the task of raising their political consciousness through condensed lectures on Marxist theory and its critique of the ‘Great Money Trick’. He is perpetually frustrated, however, by the difficulties of being heard and understood by people whose collective habitus seems to militate, not only against any challenge to ‘the system’, but against the possibility of thought itself. The reader is invited to consider a brutal assessment: the men themselves ‘were the enemy’, they ‘deserve to suffer’ (RTP 41, 92). At two moments, this is presented as a matter relating to abstraction. The first ventriloquises Owen’s own reflections on his fellow workers, while the second is voiced by an educated socialist who, in his frustration, has been campaigning in a local election for the Liberal Party: From their infancy they had been trained to distrust their own intelligence, and to leave the management of the affairs of the world – and for that matter of the next world too – to their betters; and now most of them were incapable of thinking of any abstract subject whatsoever. (RTP 247) ‘Look here: you’re a Socialist; well, I’m a Socialist too: that is, I have sense enough to believe that Socialism is practical and inevitable and right; it will come when the majority of the people are sufficiently 51

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enlightened to demand it, but that enlightenment will never be brought about by reasoning or arguing with them, for these people are simply not intellectually capable of abstract reasoning – they can’t grasp theories.’ (RTP 687) ‘Abstract’ is unsteady here: it refers first to the nature of an idea, second to a thought process. Together, these allude to an acquired aversion to education as a threat to the order of things: as old Linden puts it in the opening pages, ‘In my opinion ther’s too much of this ’ere eddication, nowadays . . . Wot the ’ell’s the good of eddication to the likes of us?’ (RTP 18). The workers, Owen reflects, had ‘accepted the present system in the same way as they accepted the alternating seasons’, a system incorporating the division of labour of ‘Hands and Brains’ (RTP 247, 136). Tressell’s novel, however, further complicates its relation to abstraction by presenting two models of an emancipatory abstraction – as critical thought and as ‘art knowledge’. The latter, both pun and paradox, appears in a discussion between the men about the mysterious beginning of the universe, in which the Christian convert Slyme asserts: ‘“I don’t pretend to ’ave no ’ead knowledge, . . . but ’ead knowledge won’t save a man’s soul; it’s ’eart knowledge as does that’ (RTP 167). In Slyme’s head/heart division of labour, ’eart knowledge is the ideologically charged repudiation of intellectual abstraction that keeps the men in their place. As art knowledge, however, it invokes Tressell’s novel’s more oblique claim to an alternative value grounded in aesthetic abstraction. Owen is Tressell’s means of demonstrating what art knowledge might mean and do. Coinciding with early Cubism and the turn towards non-representational painting, Owen’s impromptu lectures (their instructional value often seen as the novel’s rationale, thinly veiled by fictional form) communicate intellectual abstraction through visual images – geometrical shapes representing the ownership of the means of production or the distribution of wealth and land in Britain. The shapes have a plainly didactic intent and function, as in the ‘oblong’ as a series of frames containing written explanation; but the oblong is accompanied by other, black rectangular shapes, whose explanatory function is initially less clear. Owen’s first presentation of such shapes, two black squares contained by a circle, is drawn on the floor of The Cave with a piece of charred wood. He remains ‘for a few minutes awkwardly silent, oppressed by the anticipation of ridicule and a sense of his inability to put his thoughts into plain language’ (RTP 17). Later, when the oblong has been completed, ‘For some moments an oppressive silence prevailed. The men stared with puzzled, uncomfortable looks alternately at each other and at the drawings on the wall’ (RTP 345). These silences create a space around Owen’s abstract shapes, in which the 52

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1

2

3

4

Tramps, Beggars, Society People the ‘Aristocracy,’ Great Landowners, All those possessed of hereditary Wealth.

Exploiters of Labour, Thieves, Swindlers, Pickpockets, Burglars, Bishops, Financiers, Capitalists, Shareholders, ‘Ministers’ of Religion.

All those engaged in unnecessary work.

All those engaged in necessary work – the production of the benefits of civilization.

UNEMPLOYED

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How the things produced by the people in division 4 are ‘shared out’ amongst the different classes of the population.

Figure 2.1  From Robert Tressell [1914] (2004), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, ed. Tristram Hunt, London: Penguin, pp. 175, 337. shock value of a non-verbal aesthetic effect, a momentary refusal to signify at odds with their didactic function, can be felt. The shapes therefore combine two modes of abstract value. On the one hand, they are representational, the results of statistical calculation, and therefore of the ability to abstract, as in generalise out from concrete circumstances to broader patterns. They stand for other things, and as such are open to the satire of Owen’s workmates when faced with the seeming inversion of common-sense experience (money is the cause of poverty, for example) staged by a Marxian-shaped abstraction: to his proposal that the squares inside the circle represent England, ‘“Well I never knowed it was round before . . . I thought we’d very soon begin supposin’”’ (RTP 176). On the other hand, the shapes have their own material presence or immanence. While Owen is silenced, as it 53

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were, by the import of his own visual abstractions, the silence of his workmates figures a motif I will return to in Chapter 8: the ordinary citizen’s encounter with the abstract image and the question of what happens in it. The novel’s aesthetic also involves a collage effect using graphic material to evoke the politics of signs and stimulate a critical perception of everyday forms deadened by habit: a rates bill and a demand letter; a list of decorating materials; song lyrics; newspaper extracts; advertisements and posters. The implied worker–reader finds in the novel a blank Rushton and Co. time sheet, encountered each week and awaiting completion. It is crucial to their livelihood and in that sense unseen, completely embedded in the life-world, yet now transposed by an aesthetic that might be called abstract, or that abstracts in a new way, so that its strangeness and potential to be otherwise might be glimpsed for the first time: ‘EACH PIECE OF WORK MUST BE FULLY DESCRIBED, WHAT IT WAS, AND HOW LONG IT TOOK TO DO’ (RTP 496). The question of aesthetic abstraction’s relation to critical consciousness is, however, also implicit in Frank Owen’s identity as an artist. As both Raphael Samuel and Tristram Hunt have suggested, Owen aligns with a late nineteenthcentury tradition, to which William Morris is central, dedicated to ‘the civilization of socialism’ (RTP xxviii) and the pursuit, through economic equality, of the higher goal of access to artistic culture. Art could seem to belong to that same intellectual culture which, as in Jonathan Rose’s account, made working people suspicious of and defensive regarding the abstract difficulties of Capital and of Marxist critical discourse in general. As Samuel puts it, ‘a lot of socialism could be seen as displaced artistic activity’, and the same could contribute to ‘a tremendous sense of distance between socialists and the poor’, the sense of a ‘spiritual elect’ residing in a complex of bookishness that entwined thought and art (Samuel 1988: 58, 60). Tressell presents this as a dilemma in which politics is compromised by a commitment to artistic creativity and its relative autonomy, when Owen agrees to take on the painting of a decorative frieze in Moorish style for the drawing room of The Cave. The foreman, Rushton, approaches Owen as ‘a bit of a hartist’, the excess ‘h’ denoting art’s implication in a higher social order to which Rushton feels deference is due. Owen takes little persuading, and becomes so consumed with the pleasure of the task and with ‘thinking and planning how it was to be done’ that ‘the question of profit was crowded out’; he offers to charge for his time only if the drawings are suitable (RTP 137, 142). When it comes to art for art’s sake, then, Owen himself becomes the philanthropist (‘He loved Art for Art’s Sake,’ a fellow artisan reflected of Robert Noonan [RTP ix]). If the socialist thought of Ruskin and Morris could be associated with art’s autonomy, what might be the import of abstract visual art in the early twentieth century for a post-Marxism? Tressell’s novel begins to ask how art’s abstraction might relate to the struggle for abstraction as emancipatory 54

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thought. It suggests the potential of the mechanical reproducibility of text and image for inhibiting thought, yet also shows how abstracting things from their social contexts and into an artwork stimulates consciousness through the strange and the new. Could it, then, be said that Owen’s black squares and rectangles, didactic as such, touch on an entirely different order of aesthetic abstraction? Let us note that Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist painting Black Square was first exhibited in Petrograd in 1915. Offered in the spirit of revolutionary transformation, the painting had, Malevich maintained, freed art from the tyranny of subject matter and the oppression of common sense and utilitarian reason (HW 173). Where Tressell’s images are inked shapes in a mass-produced print text, Malevich’s easel painting was exhaustively worked over and therefore deeply textured. T. J. Clark recalls Michael Fried standing before Malevich’s White on White paintings and exclaiming, ‘God! I was wrong about those pictures . . . I thought they were extremist gestures, and they really are paintings!’ (quoted in Clark 1999: 268). Did the visibility of the brushstroke rescue Malevich’s canvas from the ‘extremist’ denial of individual expression per se? Yet Clark resists those critics who claim that Black Square is ‘not a square really, but a shape with its own subtle inequality of sides’ and so on; ‘It is a black square’, he retorts, its squareness being ‘the root cause of its undecidability’ and its blackness the sign of Nothing (285). The flat, painterly abstraction of Black Square was precisely, Clark contends, the mode of a politics seeking to rob the world of ‘false appearances’ and, in the words of Malevich, to free it from ‘the attempts of men to grasp it as their own possession’ (quoted in Clark 1999: 285). So ‘extreme’ was this version of a utopian aesthetic that, Clark notes, it immediately provoked opposition from within the revolutionary left it purported to speak for. How abstract, removed from signification as well as representation, might visual abstraction be before it ceased to be usable for the purposes of critical thought? The parallel is tentative, yet Clark’s point about the sheer recalcitrance of Malevich’s black square leads me back to Tressell’s squares. These have the undeniably didactic function of representing statistical entities, the capitalists and the wage-workers of England circa 1911. As such, the force of their abstraction is their analytical capacity. But the black squares are also black squares, abstraction in the process of being reconfigured as a-signification, in the manner of an alienated and inalienable strangeness. Consider, then, the aspirations for abstraction of Malevich’s colleague El Lissitzky, also at work in a Soviet Russia, as characterised by Clark: ‘an eternal war between the discursive and the immediate, the total image and the fragile assemblage – between signs with names attached to them . . . and others still floating in the ether of nonsense’ (Clark 1999: 254). On the cusp of aesthetic modernism, Tressell’s novel is a curious prefiguring of the debates that lay ahead in Marxist aesthetics over the abstractions of critical thought and of art knowledge. 55

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Brecht and Lukács Bertolt Brecht’s work, critical and creative, undoubtedly pursued the educational imperative towards abstraction as critical thought that we have seen in Tressell. The preoccupation of Brecht’s work was the question of how art might perform this educative role. What Tom Kuhn and Steve Giles call Brecht’s ‘new art of cognitive realism’ meant, in Brecht’s own terms, ‘making possible the concrete and making possible abstraction from it’ (Brecht 2003: 207; Adorno et al. 2007: 82). Brecht contended, for example, that Percy Shelley’s polemical poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1819) laid a greater claim to realism than the fiction of Balzac because it ‘better enables us to make abstractions’ (Brecht 2003: 226). The 1938 essay in question, however, fails to explain what this means: valuing Shelley’s realism as a quality of breadth, Brecht allows the poem only to speak for itself via two hugely extended extracts. The principles of Brecht’s own dramatic art of Epic Theatre get us at least a little closer to what the possibility of abstraction signified: ‘It is entirely possible that writers will be more successful in stimulating the reader’s ability to abstract – which is so important for grasping societal processes – if they do not stimulate the reader’s sensory capacities’ (Brecht 2003: 259). Implementing abstraction as a critical tool meant preventing the audience or readership from being drawn into empathy – the famous aesthetic of Verfremdung or effect of alienation. Aesthetic abstraction was a nascent phenomenon in Tressell’s context, an artist who died in 1911 and remained on the relative margins of metropolitan debate. For the Brecht of the 1930s, by contrast, cultures of abstraction were now well established; an art concerned with Marxist critical thought was now obliged to consider how an abstraction of non-representationalism mattered to it. In ‘On Abstract Painting’, a sharp, sardonic essay of 1939, Brecht assailed the political credentials of an abstraction whose origins lay in Malevich’s Suprematism or non-objectivism in revolutionary Soviet Russia. Brecht proceeded by feigning surprise that Communist artists should have ‘removed the motifs’ from their pictures: ‘You reproduce a mixture of colours and lines, rather than a mixture of things’ (Brecht 2003: 239). Surely, he argues, such a model of painterly abstraction or formalism was to be expected from the dominant culture rather than from ‘subservient spirits to those in power’? An artistic world of pure forms was appropriate only to those who did not need to signal the injustices around which class struggle was organised or to provide knowledge on the basis of which society could be transformed. ‘Things’ become the essay’s motif of contested value: the ‘things’ that Brecht saw abstract art removing infer not simply an objective physical world but, following Marx, the processes and relations in which people are bound up: ‘human beings’ are ‘also a part of’ these things’ (240). Art must ‘teach people to see things differently’, but avoid the full-blown perspectivism that would threaten to dissolve the very thing-ness of 56

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things. What is needed, Brecht maintains, is a vison enabling ‘correct’ analysis: not just ‘any old abstractions’, but only those appropriate to the specific thing in question (241, 229). Brecht then severely criticised what had become a settled language of visual abstraction, in a way that was more widely echoed in modernist discourses, as we shall see in the next chapter. To insist that ‘our seeing things differently is focused on things’ was, however, to indicate an alternative abstraction involving, as in Marx, a complex dialectic around ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’. This is exemplified in the critical argument Brecht had with Georg Lukács’s theory of abstraction as ‘reification’. Clearly drawn from Marx’s critique of the commodity form, Lukács’s theory also resonates with Sohn-Rethel’s later ‘real’ abstraction: under capitalism, abstraction becomes ‘a mode of concretisation’ (Bewes 2014: 1200), passing off its abstract forms and social relations as if they are things – or then, as we have seen in Sohn-Rethel, becoming real things. What, then, constitutes a ‘thing’ and what is abstraction’s relation to it? Lukács maintained that literary modernism reified two things together: the immediacy and particularity of experience exemplified by stream of consciousness, and the utter distinctness of each experiencing consciousness. In the first case, to abstract means to pass off ‘unrelated experiential fragments’ (Lukács 1963: 26) as more real than the continuities of historical consciousness registered in the realist novel; in the second case, ‘man’, Lukacs argues, becomes ‘as inexplicable to others as he is to himself’ because individual consciousness is abstracted from a consistent view of a common human nature within a social totality. In these ways, for Lukács, literary modernism was anti-realist and ahistorical. Brecht could not be entirely unsympathetic to Lukács’s position, as we glimpse in his complaint about ‘certain highbrow novels’ in which are found ‘psyches cut off from their environment’, ‘very complicated psychological constellations’ where ‘no causal relationships can be found’ (Brecht 2003: 249–50). In their ‘highly developed but sterile technique’, such novels for Brecht clearly signalled the same formalist dangers as abstract visual art. But where Lukács argued that the bourgeois historical novel of the nineteenth century was superior in its cognitive realism to the formalist preoccupations of modernism, Brecht retorted that to adhere to the literary form of an earlier period was itself the definition of an ahistorical formalism, ‘holding on to the old conventional forms, when confronted by the constantly new demands of the constantly changing social environment’ (214). The new cognitive realism of an experimental modernism, even if formalist in appearance, was a fully historical response; to misrecognise it as formalism was to be trapped in the formalism that obstructed formal response. In Brecht’s critique of Lukács we therefore find a shared commitment to critical realism, but a marked divergence over how art, and an art of abstraction, related to such realism. 57

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Fredric Jameson contends that ‘On Abstract Painting’ revealed Brecht to be ‘as hostile to purely formal experimentation as was Lukács himself’ (Adorno et al. 2007: 206). Yet Brecht’s own art and its ‘alienation effect’ would inevitably become associated with a modernism of abstraction, making it doubly important to define the kind of experimentalism that did characterise Brecht and drove his critique of Lukács. ‘Lukács could not have accepted Brecht’s advocacy of abstraction, for two main reasons’, argue Kuhn and Giles; these reasons reveal the way thought and art are entwined in Brecht’s abstraction (Brecht 2003: 206). First, Brecht was a structuralist in social analysis, uncovering the existence of functions and relations otherwise obscured by the appearance of individual human agency; we have seen in Raymond Williams how the perceived abstraction of this structuralism could remain a source of distrust and reproach. Second, Brecht’s art was ‘radically anti-empathetic’, obstructing emotional identification with the inner life of characters and their dilemmas by taking this external approach to patterns of behaviour (207). In the sense that epic theatre enacts these ways of thinking abstraction, Brecht’s was an abstract art. It was also anti-humanistic, but never overtly so. ‘Truth is concrete’ was the dictum seen, by Walter Benjamin, emblazoned above Brecht’s desk, and which contained a ‘quite extraordinary explosive force’ (Brecht 2003: 218). Speaking overtly in the name of the truth-as-concrete was certainly Brecht’s way of addressing human beings: realism was to be ‘demonstrated concretely, with reference to individual cases’, if a realist was to write ‘in such a way that he wants to be understood, because he wants to have a real impact on real people’ (Brecht 2003: 218). Yet ‘exploded’ by the force of realism would be the humanist forms that constrained real people, allowing them, through the abstraction that lay within or on the other side of realism, to see from the comparatively inhuman perspectives to which they were equally entitled. For Brecht the essence and value of the ‘popular’ was in sharp distinction to a superstitious and historically deceptive conception of ‘the people’ endowed with ‘unchanging characteristics’ and ‘hallowed traditions’ that included static forms of art (HW 502, 500). Whilst continuing to promote conversion and education – ‘People must recognise that a new type of learning is around now, which is critical, transforming and revolutionary’ (Brecht 2003: 235) – Brecht, like Althusser after him, strategically attributed to the proletarian or to ‘people’ a predisposition to ‘resort to’ and understand the new abstraction. The artist need not be afraid to produce ‘daring, unusual things’ for the proletariat: while cliquish connoisseurs of ‘high-flown stuff’ will object that “Ordinary people do not understand that”, the same people ‘will push these persons impatiently aside and come to a direct understanding with artists’ (HW 501). This politics of abstraction in education brings Brecht into interesting comparison with other artists on the modernist left in the 1930s. The Mexican muralist Diego Rivera noted in 1932 that the Russian avant-garde had ‘failed 58

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completely’ in its heroic struggle to have Cubism, Futurism or Constructivism accepted as the art of the proletariat (HW 423). Nevertheless, Rivera insisted, the proletariat thereby proved that an ‘ivory tower’ modernism rejecting accessible popular art was itself ‘not modern enough’ to be revolutionary. Fernand Léger, like Brecht, argued for a new painterly realism on the basis that realism changes with history, which in Léger’s own case meant an art that made new propositions about the relation between humans and machines. In a lecture published in 1936, Léger strongly endorsed the right to a stake in modernist art via a gradual emancipation from alienated work, providing thereby the time and the intellectual freedom within which ‘plastic beauty’ might be appreciated. For Léger, it was an insult that people who daily created the new in the changing forms of everyday language would be assumed to be unable to grasp the new realism of modernist painting since Cézanne (HW 502–5). Much earlier, in 1913, responding to the rise of Cubism, Léger argued that if this art was becoming more limited and specialised, it was only thereby the sign of progress in all human disciplines, enabling pictorial art to ‘gain[s] in realism’: ‘The modern conception is not simply a passing abstraction’, argued Léger, ‘valid only for a few initiates; it is the total expression of a new generation whose needs it shares and whose aspirations it answers’ (HW 205). What John Berger calls the ‘profound humanism’ of Léger’s materialist philosophy, deriving from machines and from the people who work them, calls up again a parallel with Brecht (Berger 2003: 29–30). An embrace of artistic abstraction in each is, at the same time, a testing of humanist perspectives and a welcoming of the critical necessity of the inhuman – Léger’s machinism and the alienation of Brecht’s epic theatre. For Brecht, echoing the early Marx, the struggle against formalism was also the ‘struggle for full humanity’, insofar as it was the reality of high capitalism to ‘neglect’ and ‘cripple’ the full development of humanity, leaving ‘one-sided, emptied human beings in its wake’ (Brecht 2003: 238). His essay ‘On Abstract Painting’ revealed the collusion of abstract art with this capitalist dehumanisation. Yet the fully human could in turn only be defended through the critique of a humanism that Brecht found sequestered within formalist abstraction. In his ‘Notes on the Realist Mode of Writing’, Brecht ventriloquised the views of those who would object to the ‘bleakness’ of an art that concerned itself with science or with a usefulness equivalent to science: Art is supposed to adjust humanity to the world, which is not to be reshaped. The world is over here, humanity is over there, humanity isn’t really in the world, the world has already been bought up, you can only rent a room, until further notice. What people need are images of humanity, of worldless humanity indeed, and what people don’t need are images of the world that make it possible to get a hold on the world. (Brecht 2003: 247–8) 59

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Abstraction as critical thought was precisely, for Brecht, what made it possible to get a hold on the world. The irony his satire points up is that abstract art, dispensing not only with things but with the human figure too, has been all too human in ‘adjusting’ to and retreating into a worldless humanity, a humanity ‘over there’. In relinquishing the possibility of reshaping that world, art’s humanism becomes a dehumanisation. By contrast, to pursue ‘full humanity’, Brecht’s own art of abstraction must broach the inhuman, cultivating alienation, while his essays sought to question and modify the vocabulary of humanist aesthetics from technological standpoints: writers become ‘design engineers’ or ‘literary technicians’, critically assessing the limits of previous literary constructions (Brecht 2003: 239, 250). The question for Theodor Adorno, who became a participant in the same debates, was of how far Brecht was prepared to go in this endorsement of the inhuman. Adorno Adorno’s answer was that Brecht’s work remained, in the abstraction that belonged to it, too safely tied to the human world. ‘Kant’, Adorno noted, ‘covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it’ (AT 197). If Brecht was incapable of this position, it is perhaps because of the paradoxical need to attract audiences, people, to a theatrical art of alienation. Brecht was, however, mistaken, Adorno argued, in his positivist conception of art’s potential: ‘Any artwork that supposes it is in possession of its content is plainly naïve in its rationalism; this may define the historically foreseeable limit of Brecht’s work’ (AT 27). Any discursive element or ‘“message”’ in an artwork will be overwritten by the excess that is that work’s autonomy. In the modern culture industry, art becomes ‘a natural reserve for irrationalism, from which thought is to be excluded’ (AT 336). Brecht’s ‘authoritarian’ style colluded with this, Adorno maintained, inasmuch as it was ‘intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates’; ‘art itself thinks’, and this thinking was necessarily elusive to a reader or viewer. ‘Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness’ (AT 242, 99, 243). ‘Art itself thinks’. In this, Adorno encapsulates the potential for Marxism of the new modernist abstraction, an abstraction in art and thought combined. It is also a sharing or distribution of the conscious agency that might have belonged solely to the human onto ‘art itself’, a phrase that underlines art’s autonomy. The reputation of Adorno’s final work, Aesthetic Theory, is as ‘a monumental effort to vindicate modernism’, the work of a thinker ‘with an unshakeable belief in art’s redeeming power’ (Wolin 1979: 106; Clark 1999: 337). Adorno only intermittently reflected on visual art; a reference to ‘what 60

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passes vaguement under the name of abstract art’ hints at the same dissatisfaction as Brecht’s with what had become a quasi-official formalist and humanist abstraction (AT 31). Literature, notably that of Samuel Beckett, and music were Adorno’s most frequent modernist reference points. We might better characterise Adorno’s relation to modernist abstraction, however, as an immersion in the principle of non-representationalism, not merely from his early formation in philosophical aesthetics, but as an accomplished musician studying under Alban Berg and attached to Arnold Schoenberg’s Viennese circle from the mid-1920s. It is well established that the central problematic for Adorno was modern art’s dual role as both the necessary mode of resistance to capitalist modernity and the product of it. An abiding sense of the contradictory work of abstraction for Marx is heard in this, or again in ‘It is evident that artworks can heal the wounds that abstraction inflicts on them only through the heightening of abstraction’ (AT 99). What is happening to abstraction in this formulation? As of Marx we ask how the force of abstraction can resist abstraction, so of Adorno we enquire if the abstraction that heightens and heals is the same as that which wounds. The earlier aphoristic essays of Minima Moralia (1951) give a striking example of this ambivalence over abstraction’s role in modernity: Amid the network of now wholly abstract relations of people to each other and to things, the power of abstraction is vanishing. The estrangement of schemata and classifications from the data subsumed beneath them, indeed the sheer quantity of the material processed, which has become quite incommensurable with the horizons of individual experience, ceaselessly enforces an archaic retranslation into sensuous signs. . . . In them representation triumphs over what is represented. (Adorno 2005: 140) As abstraction has become progressively reified as the entire mode of modern life, so its power recedes. Is this a qualitative shift, the displacement of an old abstraction-as-analysis (Marx’s ‘force’) with a new abstract network of relations? Or is it quantitative, a logical continuity by which the products of abstract data analysis inevitably mass into an estranged spectacle? Where we end up, at least, is that this spectacle now sounds like abstract art, ‘sensuous signs’ in which representation triumphs over the represented. I have identified above a ‘central problematic’ in Adorno, but to paraphrase in this way threatens, notoriously, to falsify or betray the nature of the difficulty in Adorno’s work. Beneath the compromising or even the impossibility of art within commodity culture for Adorno is a more extensive process of social reification through abstraction. Stefan Müller-Doohm suggests that Adorno was persuaded by Sohn-Rethel’s conception of real abstraction and the 61

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pervasive implications of this for all thought processes (Müller-Doohm 2005); a deeper sense that all utterance is compromised, inevitably including his own, thus shaped the nature of his writing. Intensifying this sense of compromise is the proposition of Aesthetic Theory that art, if it is art, can only be itself. We are back with ‘art itself thinks’, or with the autonomy of artworks defined in terms of ‘knowledge as nonconceptual objects’ (HW 781). Knowing well, from Marxism, of the dangers of fetishising or mystifying art, Adorno’s overriding critical impulse to explicate its importance is nevertheless constrained by the very theory of art at its heart. How is an aesthetic discourse on art possible? If Adorno writing about art is in question, so too, obviously, is writing about Adorno writing about art. Critical commentary has revolved around the question of whether or to what extent Adorno’s philosophy responds to the impossibility of aesthetics by actually trying to reproduce the very form of art’s autonomy. In Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno had already stated the denial of this tactic. A philosophy that tried to imitate art would, he argued, expunge itself: art and philosophy ‘keep faith with their own substance through their opposites: art by making itself resistant to its meanings; philosophy, by refusing to clutch at any immediate thing’ (Adorno 2000: 15). But Aesthetic Theory has been seen to give the lie to this. Motivated, Jay Bernstein argues, by the threat of the death of art’s sensuous particularity, Adorno allows philosophy to ‘become beholden to its other – art’ (Bernstein 1996: 7). While, Terry Eagleton suggests, there could be no question for Adorno of aestheticising philosophy, his most ‘ironic move’ was to deploy the impossibility of the aesthetic ‘as a device for renewing the tradition of which is it the last faint gasp’ (Eagleton 1990: 361–2). The result in Adorno, and notably in Aesthetic Theory, is a singular mode of writing – ‘atonal’, in Martin Jay’s characterisation of an ‘atonal philosophy’, significantly connecting its form with that of modernist music; ‘paratactical’ for the heroic translator of Aesthetic Theory into English, Robert Hullot-Kentor. If Aesthetic Theory’s form is its means of relating to an art of abstraction, then it is crucial to listen to Hullot-Kentor, who has grappled intimately with the text in producing its English form. He confirms, for one thing, that Adorno’s aspiration was to breach the ‘externality of aesthetics to art’ (AT xii). Aesthetic Theory was, Hullot-Kentor explains, to be ‘oriented not to its readers but to the thing-in-itself’, and this, not out of indifference to those readers, but as a means of realising for them the emancipatory or redemptive potential of art. What is the reader’s experience of Aesthetic Theory? Is Adorno doomed to struggle with the same fate as Marx, seeking to unveil and explicate abstraction in a way that is ‘too’ abstract? Hullot-Kentor’s term ‘parataxis’, proceeding by juxtapositional statements without any necessary linkage, is a way of describing what I would call the intransitivity of Adorno’s text. Both concern the withholding of the kinds of linearity and progression in argument that 62

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might be expected. Because the terms of art’s contradictions do not simply co-exist but rather explain each other – art’s necessity is its non-necessity, its damage from abstraction is its creative abstraction, its sensuousness is its conceptuality – Aesthetic Theory is perpetually wary or fearful of reifying one term over another. Eschewed are the kinds of development in argument that would allow paraphrase. The reader may feel, as Hullot-Kentor puts it, ‘a constantly looming sense of being caught in a vortex, as if there is no knowing whether one has been through a particular passage before, or if perhaps one has never left the spot’; the parts are so deeply constellated that ‘the slightest slackening of intensity threatens to dissolve the text into a miscellany’ (AT xxvi–xviii). This thing-in-itself textuality is exacerbated in Aesthetic Theory by its presentation in recalcitrant block forms that eschew paragraphing, sections or chapters. It will also seem a major irony that Aesthetic Theory’s reiterative quality is driven by an obsessive invocation of the words ‘art’ and ‘artwork’. This repetition of art as an abstract category is in inverse relation to the self-evidence of art and to its actuality. It is as if, faced with the impossibility of its being taken for granted or even of its existence, Adorno must reinvoke art at every turn in discourse, just as, for Hullot-Kentor, each line in the text ‘can and must take a decisively new breath’ (AT xvii). Art thus exists as a virtual entity, in the possibility of its existence and, as Martin Jay puts it, in ‘the possibility of something that might be gained in the future’ (Jay 1984: 78). Alternatively, for Richard Wolin, artworks for Adorno testify to ‘the possibility of the possible’ (Wolin 1979: 122). Later, in Part II, I will suggest that abstraction in the work of experimental literary modernism similarly evokes this sense of virtual reality yet actual absence. A strong idea of abstraction’s futurity or possibility inheres in its seeming impossibility in the present. Abstraction’s human appeal must be in experimentally breaking with the familiar and figuring the inhuman. The communicability of abstraction to other humans is at stake. Art’s autonomy in Aesthetic Theory is, strictly, not confined to modernism; yet everywhere in the text is the sense that modernist abstraction has emerged as the challenging limit-case of this autonomy, demanding engagement. In his introduction to The Inhuman, Jean-François Lyotard sardonically notes that Hans Robert Jauss’s attack on the supposed unreadability of Aesthetic Theory is made in the name, not just of ‘norm-bound public perception’, but of the human: ‘Be communicable, that is the prescription. Avant-garde is old hat, talk about humans in a human way, address yourself to human beings’ (Lyotard 1991: 1–2). The reason for the ‘social inefficacy’ of contemporary artworks was, Adorno contended, that ‘in order to resist the all-powerful system of communication they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the public’ (AT 243). 63

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We glimpse here the sense in which the abstraction of abstract art for Adorno becomes a historically specific ‘enigmaticalness’ or, more pointedly, ‘incomprehensibility’. Typically, such difficulty both is and is not an effect of commodity culture. ‘The abstractness of the new is bound up with the commodity character of art’; an equivalent of exchange-value is modern art’s ‘irritating indeterminateness of what it is and to what purpose it is’, as Adorno part-ventriloquises both popular and bourgeois frustration (AT 20–1). Yet the task of modern aesthetics is not to dispel this indeterminateness, ‘to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects’; it is, instead, to comprehend their incomprehensibility (AT 118). However qualified it may be, this, in the terms of Adorno’s negative dialectics, is a kind of affirmation. ‘The new is necessarily abstract: It is no more known than the most terrible secret of Poe’s pit’; the ‘shudder’ that Victor Hugo attributed to the poetry of Rimbaud was a mimetic reaction to ‘abstractness’ (AT 20). We could be forgiven for seeing in abstraction’s virtuality for Adorno a further staging of its disappearance. A residual fear of abstraction could even be said to linger in the aspiration for an aesthetics that might close the gap with its object. Why would it be desirable – or would it be possible – for aesthetic discourse to become identical with an object which is non-conceptual and communicates in and for itself? Could Adorno have possibly failed to foresee that the form of Aesthetic Theory would look exactly like philosophy’s attempt to expunge itself? The mimesis of the artwork’s autonomy in Aesthetic Theory does not, after all, convey the experience of art and runs the risk of conveying the opposite. Mirrored here is the question that haunts abstraction as a reproach: could there be a form of thought that is less abstract or not abstract at all? A form of thought that is really art? What would this thought look like? The fear of thought’s abstraction, whether as a tendency or an inherent quality, persists as a kind of fall into original sin. In the late aphorisms collected as ‘Messages in a Bottle’, Adorno reinstated a typically paradoxical humanism: ‘A humanity come of age will have to transcend its own concept of the emphatically human, positively. Otherwise its absolute negation, the inhuman, will carry off victory’ (Žižek 1994: 37). The human will need to fend off the abstract humanism that threatens it from within, in order to ensure it gets the inhuman it needs for its continuing sense of humanity, rather than the inhuman that will destroy it. Art, therefore, cannot remain interested in the human as it appears or is habitually taken to be, but can only be loyal to humanity through its inhumanity towards it, in order to reveal the inhuman, non-identical selves that we will not, but nevertheless must, know. Abstraction – as unreadable philosophy, as incomprehensible art – is the sign of this effort, even if as such, and even for Adorno, it must continue to go without saying. 64

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Negri Perhaps only in its expression as the most rigorous negation, in the clenched and guarded form of parataxis, could there be proof of any exuberant affirmation of artistic abstraction in Adorno. This makes the open break into affect of Antonio Negri’s embrace of abstraction in Art and Multitude (2011) all the more arresting. Negri chose the form of a series of letters to friends between the years 1988 and 2001 to develop his ideas about abstraction as the connecting term between art and the nature of post-industrial, late capitalist work at the new fin de siècle. Negri takes us back to an activist Brechtian concern both with the transformative potential of a popular art, and in a dramatically new way with the popular predisposition towards abstraction that might help realise it. The title of his work refers not to an art that is appropriate to the multitude, but an art that, through its abstraction, is multitude. Where Brecht’s case required a critical discrimination between abstraction as thought and as art, Negri assumes a decisive historical collapse of this distinction. ‘I love art’, he declares, ‘from the moment when it became abstract – from the moment when, in abstraction, it revealed a new quality of being: the participation of the singularities of labour in a single whole, which is, precisely, abstract’ (AM 3–4). The means of Negri’s arrival through Marxism at loving abstract art is my concern here. For Negri, abstraction describes the conditions of labour and human activity in the fin de siècle late-capitalist world – a ‘new figure’ of ‘intellectual labour, which is immaterial and affective – that of a labour which produces languages and relations’ (AM xi). This does not therefore coincide with the abstraction of Marx where, as Timothy Bewes has it, abstraction is closer to ‘the coming into appearance of labour as a distinct epistemological category’ rather than a quality of labour itself in modernity (Bewes 2014: 1202). Implicit in Negri’s account of immaterial labour are the tools of technocapitalism and their widespread social availability, though the letters emerge just before the rapid acceleration of digital culture. Transcending the industrial division of labour, these conditions hold the potential or potenza to realise Marx’s conception/aspiration of production as the fulfilment of human creativity beyond the market and towards Negri’s term ‘excedence’, where beauty and pleasure of living can be enjoyed beyond the utilitarian requirements of work. Once people, or the multitude as a mass of ‘singularities’, realise that this power of abstraction is in their hands, they will also realise its value as a mode of resistance: ‘Labour is all the more capable of producing an excedence of being when it is at its most abstract’ (AM 50). This then reverses the scenario in which abstraction-as-capitalism had ‘subsumed life’ or ‘taken away from us the concrete of life’; ‘today, the concrete and the singular are re-appropriating abstraction, commodity and value’ (AM 79). 65

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As personal letters, Negri’s propositions are openly emotive, carrying the air of wish-fulfilment or a leap of faith. The call is for immersion and embrace, an adventurous ‘plunging of our soul into the abstract’ (AM 9). Abstraction as reproach persists: we must still ‘live this dead reality’, notes Negri, enduring the ‘coldness’ of the world’s abstractedness and its ‘desert of passions’, and seek the ‘real’ within it (AM 9–10). The heady gamble or risk is that ‘the postmodern, this true abstraction of the real, has to be accepted’ (AM 10). Negri’s inheritance of the Marxian critique of abstraction is presented in the short 2004 introduction to the letters in the form of a personal predicament – the problem, in the late 1980s, of ‘how to get out a perception of society which saw it as entirely compressed by the capitalist mode of production’, a society or ‘world’ resembling ‘a piling up of abstract values which money and the mechanisms of the financial world were rendering interchangeable’ (AM vii–viii). This world, Negri confirms, was variously ‘becoming relentlessly more abstract’ or ‘had become completely reified or abstract’; sounding, in other words, like the triumph of ‘real abstraction’ with a vengeance, seamlessly combining the two critiques of abstraction as always-already immanent in the commodity at the outset of capitalism and as a quality of work and human activity that develops and intensifies within late capitalism. At the same time the predicament – ‘how to get out of a perception’ – is posed by Negri as a conceptual matter, implying an abstraction that has become so enveloping as to obstruct the imagining of agency or resistance. Negri is forced to wonder if his dilemma is a ‘simple lexical question’, a ‘question of vocabulary’: Let us summarise: the natural, the concrete and the abstract seem to become confused with each other; that which is abstract seems as natural as the image of its origin, which means that the abstract is natural to the nth degree. (AM x) It is hardly surprising to find Negri wondering thus about the disappearance of abstraction as a distinct keyword. The abstract and the concrete may have become blurred in the condition of postmodernity, but we have seen their condition of dialectical flux since Marx, while ‘nature’, as defined by Raymond Williams, is itself a ‘singular abstraction’ in which ‘the multiplicity of things, and of living processes’ is ‘mentally organised around a single essence or principle’ (Williams 1997: 67). Negri’s resolution is also conceptual, and connects with one of the most persistent points of debate around abstraction: the relation between the artificial and the natural. To follow what Negri calls ‘the rules of abstract artificiality’ (AM 69) is, then, to follow what has become ‘natural to the nth degree’. But if in late-capitalist postmodernity the abstract is what we have become, then this ‘second nature’ (AM 30, 48) constitutes nature as such: 66

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The abstract is our nature. The abstract is the quality of our labour. The abstract is the sole community in which we exist. Outside of the abstract there is only the indecency of a natural life which is already dead, of a religion which no longer has a sanctuary. (AM 11) What, then, of art, or abstract art? ‘Art and labour – both of them dominated by globalization, by the saturation of the experience of life with capitalism – have become abstract’ (AM 113). If art has thus been dissolved into abstract labour, Negri infers, it has also subsumed it, just as life is now in the process of subsuming the abstract. Once the new abstraction has superseded what Marx called, under the industrial division of labour, ‘the exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals’ (quoted in AM 39), and the appropriation of art as private property, art is freed up to be a new creative commons: ‘art is a collective work, its material is abstract labour’ (AM 33). If this is a demystification of art, then it is also close to re-enchantment in Negri’s fifth letter, on the subject of beauty: art is no longer ‘the product of the angel’ but ‘the affirmation – and each time the rediscovery – that all people are angels’ (AM 47). On this basis Negri is able to produce the semantic compression ‘art is multitude’; art traverses all singular bodies, a collective human impulse to creative production that is not to be reified or totalised by the definite article. Nevertheless and curiously, Negri’s adherence to abstraction as a term for this general condition, and his ceaseless affirmation of it, also connect with a more conventional, confessedly schematic ‘sketch’ of abstract art’s relation to phases of capitalist production and the consequent organisation of labour since 1848. The massification of skilled labour in the years 1848–70 corresponds to the rise of a critical realism in art; between 1870 and 1914, the intensification of the division of labour generates a moment at which the skilled worker realises that they can strive towards the self-management of production, and is accompanied by Impressionism, which promises that creation lies in the ‘dissolution and reconstruction of the world’ (AM 103). What we know as abstract art, then, Negri proposes, consists of two phases following the October Revolution of 1917. In a short phase up to 1929, Expressionist art heroically pushes ‘passion and desire to revolutionary extremity’, ‘violently’ appropriating the abstraction of labour in order to push it to its limit and overturn it (AM 42, 104). In a much longer subsequent period up to 1968, abstraction takes on a variety of more analytical and experimental forms, corresponding to the ‘pure constructive capacity’ of mass art (AM 105). Now on the cusp of the postmodernism with which it was Negri’s task in the letters to position himself critically, a series of questions about the fate of abstraction become necessary: How does an event come about? How can the passion and desire for the transformation of the here and now develop? How does revolution 67

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present itself today? How can the human being be entirely re-thought? How can the abstract become the subject of praxis? What kind of world does abstraction desire, and how does it desire it? What are the forms of life that correspond to this extreme gesture of transformation? (AM 105–6) I want to add the question: how does the question ‘what kind of world does abstraction desire, and how does it desire it’ arise, for a Marxist, in the name of revolutionary transformation? Negri’s historical schema leaves unanswered many other questions about causality and agency in the relations between artistic abstraction and labour. What we might say is that Negri’s affective embrace of post-industrial abstraction derives from qualities of hope and desire glimpsed in the more standard history of modernist abstract art. The desire that belongs to abstraction might free us, through modernism’s rethinking of the life that we call human. Negri considered the spirit of his letters to be ‘avantgardist’ in their acceptance of abstract, immaterial labour as irrevocable (AM xii). But this is a reminder too of his connection to the artistic avant-gardism of Brecht and Adorno and the nature of their respective, uneasy accommodations and alliances with abstraction. Brecht had to differentiate the tools of critical abstraction carefully from a formalist abstract art that withheld them behind a reinforcement of the division of labour. Adorno adhered to the highest of modernist experimentalisms yet could not deploy the term ‘abstract’ without invoking a certain tortured relation between the conceptual and the sensuous. In incorporating and exceeding each, art’s knowledge remained for Adorno strictly unsayable, impossible, except in the form of a philosophy, logically but not actually unreadable, which must endlessly reiterate that unsayability and impossibility. Negri unembarrassedly clings to a more literal avant-gardism, the modernism of an art ‘sending out patrols into unknown territory’ (AM 63). Considering the great abstract painters, Negri writes, ‘Abstract painting is a parable of the eternally renewed pursuit of being, of the void and of potentiality. We cannot stop halfway. The void is not a limit, it is a passage’ (AM 30). In his narrative of modernist abstraction, Negri could find ‘a true revolutionary passion’, a painterly abstraction that represents both the imprisonment of abstract industrial labour and ‘the very material for an alternative imagination’ (AM 104). Negri’s claims might be tested against a closer examination of the discourses on abstraction in visual modernism, which is the subject of my next chapter.

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3

ABSTRACT, ‘ABSTRACT’: MODERNIST VISUAL ART

The life of modern cultured man is gradually turning away from the natural: life is becoming more and more abstract. Piet Mondrian, ‘The New Plastic in Painting’ (1917: PMCW 28) There is no abstract art. You must always start with something . . . Nor is there any ‘figurative’ and ‘nonfigurative’ art. Everything appears to us in the guise of a ‘figure’. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by means of symbolic ‘figures’. Pablo Picasso, ‘Conversation with Picasso’ (1935: HW 508) It’s what I always come back to: the painter should devote himself entirely to the study of nature and try to produce pictures that are educative. Paul Cézanne, in the words of Joachim Gasquet (1991: 165) Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody. Piet Mondrian, ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’ (1936: PMCW 289) In 1980, the curators of the London exhibition ‘Abstraction: Towards a New Art – Painting 1910–1920’ borrowed a phrase from Robert Delaunay to argue that early modernist visual abstraction was not a style but a ‘“change of understanding”’ or ‘philosophical change’; they sought to examine ‘the process by 69

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which artists gradually evolved a vocabulary of abstract form’ (Vergo 1980: 12). ‘Vocabulary’ points in two directions here. Metaphors of language are commonly used to refer to the painterly techniques of abstract art and in this, perhaps curiously, to infer language as a self-referential rather than communicative system. Yet, as Leah Dickerman notes, modernist artists were also developing an actual discourse on abstraction. Dickerman refers to the ‘torrent of words’ accompanying early visual abstraction: ‘titles, manifestos, statements of principles, performative declarations, discursive catalogues, explanatory lectures, and critical writing by allies’, as if abstraction ‘made it more incumbent on the artist to write, and also to develop novel systems for the delivery of text’ (Dickerman 2013: 4). Abstraction constitutes a new model of intellectual work in which words supplement the application of paint to canvas. Visual modernism’s abstraction thereby becomes ambiguous, designating formal experimentation with the apparatuses of painting but also the intimate role in this of philosophy and understanding. In this chapter I examine the writing of abstraction in modernist visual art, broadening this enquiry out from the previous chapter’s discussion of the encounter with abstract art in Marxist critical thought. As previous chapters will suggest, however, the gradual evolution proposed by the 1980 curators is not the principal way in which I see a discourse on painterly abstraction emerging in modernism. The entire work of a writer–painter and key protagonist of abstraction such as Piet Mondrian might look like an unravelling of his early declaration that ‘the life of modern cultured man is gradually turning away from the natural: life is becoming more and more abstract’ – another gradualism, this time of abstraction in modern life (PMCW 28). But what does life becoming more abstract mean for Mondrian? Can this bear any relation to the immaterial labour of capitalism’s inexorably advance abstraction, as in Antonio Negri’s letters? What kind of correspondence between abstract life and abstract art might follow from Mondrian’s statement? I do not propose here, then, another history of abstraction’s gradual development in modernist art. Art-critical retrospects already posit a troublesome variousness in this kind of history – for Bryony Fer, an ‘abstraction . . . at war with itself from the start’ (Fer 2015: 225), while for Maria Lind, a ‘variety of versions of abstraction at play from the beginning: contradictions, rifts and exceptions are typical of abstract art, even within one and the same oeuvre’, typified by the persistence of dichotomies such as ‘ideal and matter, transcendentalism and structuralism’ (Lind 2013: 10). My suggestion is that abstraction as a mediation of the human and the inhuman plays in an indeterminate way across such multiplicities, bearing on three interconnected features. First, abstraction in visual art often means distinguishing the abstract from the ‘abstract’ – that is, the authentically abstract from the ‘abstract’ or ‘abstraction’ it had become, entities with scare-quotation marks firmly clamped, familiar yet imposter abstractions, always so-called. The distinction in part 70

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exemplifies my second feature: that the modernist discourse on abstraction is fundamentally educative, given that abstraction in painting requires explication. But given abstraction’s invisible and contradictory work, how do we understand such education? What of (my third feature) the profound paradox that the discourse on visual abstraction proposes the need for visual abstraction to speak only in and for itself? In the face of abstraction’s own, singular eloquence, the tumult of words may explicate only how not to know art through those words; abstract artists could be voluble about the ways in which they should not be voluble. Hence it will not seem surprising to find another eminent abstract modernist, Pablo Picasso, insisting in an interview of 1935 that ‘there is no abstract art’ (HW 508). Between Mondrian and Picasso, it seems, abstraction is everything and nothing. Picasso is associated with a lively anti-academicism, and we may read in his repudiation of abstraction little more than a time-honoured assertion of artistic practice over theory. However, his reflections on the figure are no simple denial of intellectualism; they propose to deconstruct the ‘figurative’/‘nonfigurative’ binary in Western art history and to consider how painting and thought (‘even in metaphysics’), via the figure, might henceforth coincide in an art that was labelled abstract. The artist is always stimulated and excited, Picasso contends, by ‘the idea of the object’; ideas combine with emotions to become an integral part of the artwork ‘even when their presence is no longer discernible’ (499–500). ‘Abstract’: Barr, Greenberg Picasso’s disappearing of abstract art is of a piece with the fortunes and vicissitudes of abstraction across Europe and in the United States by the mid-1930s, after three decades in which, as Herbert Read has put it, a ‘new will’ to abstraction had transformed artistic cultures (Read 1985: 25). It registers a question about authenticity that haunts the words abstract and abstraction in modernist visual art. In the English St Ives School, for Barbara Hepworth in 1937, ‘“Abstraction” is a word which is now most frequently used to express only the type of the outer forms of art’ (HW 395); for Ben Nicholson in 1941, thinking ‘About “abstract” art’ meant the insistence that, far from ‘abstract’ art being the withdrawal of the artist from reality (into an ‘ivory tower’) it has brought art once again into common every-day life’ (399); for Patrick Heron, it was ‘probably a misfortune for non-figurative art to have been labelled by the adjective abstract’ (Heron 1955: 183). Such studied and sceptical highlighting of the words helps to explain why Alfred H. Barr Jr in Cubism and Abstract Art, the influential primer accompanying the first American exhibition of European abstraction at MoMA New York in 1936, should declare that the adjective ‘“abstract”’ ‘shall be used from now on in this essay without quotation marks’ (Barr 1974: 11–12). Barr noted that it had become increasingly common to apologise for the word ‘abstract’, insisting 71

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instead that ‘abstract art today needs no defense’ and offering a historical survey in response to a ‘quickening interest’ where, ten years previously, the death of abstract art had already been announced (Barr 1974: 13). Yet Barr’s text retained strong elements both of defence and of an exercise in apologetics. Barr openly acknowledges the problematics of abstraction as a word, and concedes the risks of ‘grave simplification’ in using two binaries to organise abstract art’s complexity: the historical division between geometrical and biomorphic forms and schools, and the more theoretical division between ‘near-abstraction’ (painting that ‘abstracts from’ natural forms, where abstraction signifies thereby an act of withdrawal of features that are figurative) and ‘pure abstraction’ (painting that makes no reference to natural forms at all). Abstraction had, Barr argued, always required an effort of thought from its viewer/audience: ‘it is not yet a kind of art which people like without some study and some sacrifice of prejudice’ (Barr 1974: 13). Two instances underlined the difficulties: one, that while an abstract painting had become associated with intellectualisation, it was ‘really a most positively concrete painting’, an ‘immediate, sensuous, physical surface’; two, that the word ‘abstract’ varies between verb and noun – to abstract means to draw out or away from, but the noun abstraction is something already drawn out or away from (11). Soon after Barr’s account and despite seeking out higher theoretical ground, the early essays of Clement Greenberg announced ‘an historical apology for abstract art’ (HW 567). Greenberg’s subsequent reputation as the decisive theorist of an abstract modernism revolves, of course, around the neat and decisive formulation of the landmark 1960 essay ‘Modernist Painting’: ‘the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself – not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence’ (774). In the long approach to this, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939) analysed what, Greenberg noted, had become known as ‘“abstract”’ (567). An avantgarde had arisen in the 1840s and 1850s as the revolt of ‘advanced intellectual conscience’ against the new hegemony of a bourgeois capitalist social order. Once detached from this order, however, the avant-garde had retreated from experiment into the notion of an absolute art: the ‘genesis of the “abstract”’, Greenberg writes, was in this sense anything but a divine or otherworldly absolute (531). The following year, in ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Greenberg began to liberate abstraction from its quotation marks and to venture an evaluation on its own terms. Yet the same aura of apologetics lingered, Greenberg proposing to defend ‘the dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective” or “abstract” purists of painting today’ from the charge of a merely cultist attitude to art (554). Declaring himself someone ‘who admits the merits of abstract art without accepting its claims in full’, Greenberg saw Purism, the 1920s grouping led by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier against the perceived abstraction of Cubism, as an expression of solicitude towards art, yet 72

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one that set limits to which modernism had been obliged to surrender (558). As abstraction becomes a historical imperative that we are ‘forced’ to accept for the time being (‘there is nothing in the nature of abstract art which compels it to be so’), so the essay seems to corner itself into reflections on how abstract art might be ‘disposed of’ (560). We are on the way to the more defensive vocabulary of professional limitation in Greenberg’s 1960 formulation – ‘discipline’, ‘entrench’, ‘competency’ – where Caroline A. Jones finds Greenberg deploying, in the name of a democratic aesthetic of ‘eyesight alone’, the ‘detachment of the bureaucrat and the experience of the scientist’ (Jones 2005: 5). Abstraction is once again vulnerable to the habitual reproach of an arid, inhuman coldness and sterility. Yet this is not the whole story of Greenberg’s writing of abstraction. The historical avantgarde’s retreat into absolute art was also a determination to ‘keep culture moving’ (HW 531), and artistic reflexivity was signalled in the 1939 essay as the ‘chief inspiration’ of Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Kandinsky, Brancusi, and ‘even’ Klee, Matisse and Cézanne: it was, Greenberg asserts, the source of the ‘excitement of their art’ in its ‘pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc.’ (532). This affirmation of the defining flatness of abstract art has less to do with the dismantling or disappearance of material objects than with liberation from ‘that kind of space that recognizable, three-dimensional objects can inhabit’, echoing A. N. Whitehead’s critique of a Newtonian-realist epistemology predicated upon objects circulating within a space held to exist only as their repository. Such abstraction, Greenberg maintained, embraced ‘almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture’ (754), including Cubism as ‘still the only vital style of our time’. It aligned modernism with the Enlightenment project of ‘humanizing the world’ through scientific progress, ‘an all-pervasive conviction that the world would inevitably go on improving’ (570–1). This embrace of cultural vitality on behalf of abstraction, as a human activity capable of further humanising, makes a telling contrast with the hesitancies of Raymond Williams. Where Williams could or would not extricate abstraction from the critique that found it dehumanising, Greenberg’s left-cultural formation drew from the utopian rhetorics of early modernist visual art to propose abstraction as inspirational and exciting. Yet this did not exclude the customary reproach expressed in Greenberg’s sobering sense of the formalist and disciplinary limitations set by abstract painting. To read the 1960 formula is perhaps to wonder how anyone other than artists themselves might be interested in abstraction. In the field of painting, however, since the earliest days of modernism, practitioners had been taking on the responsibility of writing a utopian abstraction into being. This was precisely to try to generate inspiration and understanding around an art of form that could seem as inhuman as it was human. 73

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Writer–Painters of Abstraction: Kandinsky, Mondrian In Kandinsky and Mondrian, pioneers of a painterly abstraction that is often deemed ‘pure’, we find a writing of abstraction bound up from the start in resistance to public and critical hostility to the art. Early in his manifesto Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1914), Kandinsky imagined a ‘vulgar herd’ strolling in a ‘building’ whose walls are crammed with thousands of representational paintings, ‘bits of nature’ with their realist titles attached (Kandinsky 1977: 3). Despite holding catalogues, the spectators ‘pronounce the paintings “nice” or “splendid”’ and leave the gallery none the wiser about them. They return to their ‘business, which has nothing to do with art’, Kandinsky writes, having encountered a condition of art which is really, if paradoxically, ‘“art for art’s sake”’. This scenario, the question of what happens to people in museums of art, and in their encounters with canvases that might or might not be abstract, will resonate in a more sustained way in Chapter 8. ‘Modern artists are beginning to realize their social duties’, wrote Michael T. H. Sadler on becoming the first English translator of Kandinsky’s text: ‘They are the spiritual teachers of the world, and for their teaching to have weight, it must be comprehensible’ (Kandinsky 1977: xiii). Kandinsky’s combination of spirituality and social duty rested upon separating ‘abstract’ and ‘material’ as the twin poles of modern painting. Abstraction was largely defined by what Kandinsky meant, or failed to mean, by the ‘material’ of a comprehensive and nightmarish ‘materialism’ including, variously, business, religions that are ‘really’ atheism, democratic politics, economic socialism, the forms of the external world, realist painting and the practicalities of everyday life. Abstract painting was, by contrast, a re-emergence of the inner life of the spirit, the first glimpse of a Hegelian forward-and-upward movement promising awakening and emancipation. In Kandinsky’s writing it could both ‘strive’ and ‘creep’: there was a new ‘striving towards the abstract, the non-material’ across the arts (19), while the ‘abstract idea’ was ‘creeping into art’, having ‘only yesterday’ been scorned by the dominant materialism (30). Kandinsky nevertheless tempered his spiritual idealism with a pragmatic concern for ‘the human element’, which would be ‘excluded’ if artists pressed ahead too eagerly with abstraction’s ‘indefiniteness’: ‘Must we then abandon utterly all material objects and paint solely in abstractions?’ (27–8). The field of painting was poised between abstract and material forms, and artists could currently strive only for balance and harmony between them, ‘purely abstract forms’ being ‘beyond the reach of the artist at present’ (30). Yet abstraction remained a ‘natural’ advance, as ‘the organic form falls into the background’ (31). The seeming contradiction in Kandinsky’s abstraction, the natural defined as the decline of the organic, is to be noted: the ‘natural’ rejection of realism entails a ‘revolt from dependence on nature’ and ‘breaking the bonds that bind 74

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us to nature’ (46–7). The ‘real’ therefore remained in critical suspension, ready to be redeployed when, in the later 1930s, Kandinsky joined the general effort to unclamp abstraction critically from the inauthentic versions that threatened it. ‘Abstract Art’ (1936) became for Kandinsky ‘real art’, while by ‘Abstract or Concrete?’ (1938), ‘so-called “abstract art”’ should be ‘called “concrete art”’ (Kandinsky 1994: 832). Piet Mondrian had already, as we shall shortly see, coined the necessity of an art of the ‘Abstract-Real’. The closing utopian gesture of Concerning the Spiritual in Art projected abstraction as a new conjunction of art and thought: we are entering the age of ‘conscious creation’, the new spirit in painting going ‘hand in hand’ with the ‘constructive’ spirit of thought, ‘reasoned and conscious composition’ (Kandinsky 1977: 57). But what did it mean for Kandinsky to write this conjunction? Here are two instances from Sadler’s translation. [Painting] stands, in fact, at the first stage of the road by which she [sic] will, according to her own possibilities, make art an abstraction of thought and arrive finally at purely artistic composition. (28) We stand and gaze fascinated, till of a sudden the explanation bursts suddenly upon us. It is the conviction that nothing mysterious can ever happen in our everyday life that has destroyed the joy of abstract thought. (50) Beneath Kandinsky’s striking affirmation of ‘joy’, these statements render ambiguous the nature of ‘abstract thought’ and its relation to the mystery that abstract art can reveal. What is it to make art an ‘abstraction of thought’? How does the art that abstracts from thought relate to the joy of thought as abstract in itself? Kandinsky presented a heroic narrative of abstraction’s inexorable advance, so that revolutionary rupture could combine with evolutionary gradualism: ‘I founded abstract painting. I painted the first abstract picture in 1912’; ‘through this new capacity, conceived under the sign of the “spirit”, an enjoyment of abstract (= absolute) art will come about’ (Kandinsky 1994: 476, 381). But, as in the examples above, this advance is, to an extent, undone by his writing of it and abstraction’s textual disposition towards disappearance into the folds of the contradictory human relationship with the natural and the unnatural. Piet Mondrian elaborated a similarly utopian-educative conception of abstract art as ‘Neo-Plasticism’ in the varied forms of essays, statements and ‘conversations’ between 1914 and 1943. ‘One must learn to see AbstractReal painting, just as the painter had to learn to create in an abstract-real way,’ Mondrian wrote in 1919, while in 1926, ‘art continues to evolve and manifest its trend towards the abstract’, and ‘the best each of us can do is to 75

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help it become better understood’ (PMCW 77, 198–9). A decade later, contributing ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’ to Circle, the new international journal of abstract art, the urgency remained. Mondrian complained that chaos and confusion still surrounded the modern movement; having not written for some time, he welcomed the opportunity to ‘clarify a little the content of art’ (PMCW 288). The piece had been ‘very difficult’ to write, but ‘I think I have succeeded’. What might Mondrian have meant by success? Bryony Fer has theorised Mondrian’s writing, ‘all essence and universal principles’, as a kind of contrary sublimation of a painterly practice of excess, eccentricity and intuition (Fer 1997: 35). She affirms its exploratory manner, not just as a public statement of ideas but ‘a means of figuring out what he was doing’, producing ‘a strange, almost hypnotic effect which may in some ways be analogous to speculative thought of religious contemplation but yet not reducible to it’ (35, 47). Fer is right to draw attention to something singular in Mondrian’s writing, and her ‘hypnotic’ resonates with the vertigo effect that writing abstraction can create. Mondrian’s essays are characterised by a patient and declarative, gently recursive monotony in their perpetual re-approach to clear definition. ‘The new plastic can be called abstract . . .’, he had first argued in his first published work in 1917. Alternatively, from ‘Neo-Plasticism: The General Principle of Plastic Equivalence’ (1920): Neo-Plasticism has its roots in Cubism. It can equally be called AbstractReal painting because the abstract (just like the mathematical sciences but without attaining the absolute, as they do) can be expressed by plastic reality. In fact, this is the essential characteristic of the New Plastic in painting. (PMCW 137) The ‘can be called’ of these gestures matters. Just as abstract art for Kandinsky was both ‘real’ and ‘concrete’, so Mondrian experimented in colonising abstraction with its seeming others. Abstraction becomes ‘“construction”’ in 1926, or in 1929 the ‘“morpho-plastic”’ (here scare-quotation marks are already in place), and as late as 1942–3 Mondrian could still speculate that ‘we (could) can entitle Abstract Art with the name New Realisme’ (PMCW 201, 223, 367). In pursuit of the ‘essential characteristic’ of Neo-Plastic, the reader is offered the synonym that Neo-Plasticism ‘can equally be called’ Abstract-Real. Yet the synonym is unsteadier when abstraction is also ‘expressed by’ plastic reality – that is, when plastic reality is a vehicle for rather than identical with it. The slippage continues when Mondrian migrates the real from its hyphenated mooring with abstraction to become attached to plasticity – ‘plastic reality’. ‘Abstract-Real’ therefore becomes a means by which abstraction is always escaping in Mondrian, a Kandinskian rewriting of abstraction as paradox: 76

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repudiating the representation of nature is not a retreat into ideality, but its opposite – the ‘vital reality of the abstract’ (PMCW 136). This essential characteristic of the New Plastic as a painterly practice ‘is a composition of rectangular color planes that expresses the most profound reality. It achieves this by plastic expression of relationships and not by natural appearance’ (PMCW 137). Reality, that is, lies in the relationship of things and not in their thingness, a formulation that well expresses Neo-Plasticism’s origins in Cubism. Let us note, however, a certain rhetorical quality in Mondrian’s qualification of the real with words such as ‘profound’ and ‘vital’. The vertigo of Mondrian’s writing of abstraction consists, then, in a small group of mobile and interchangeable terms haunted by a suspicion of nonexplanatory circularity: Abstract plastic, as manifested in Abstract-Real painting (as the expression of abstract-real life), is on the one hand only a different vision of the natural, and on the other a determinate plastic expression of the universal. Similarly, abstract-real life itself is only another stage of natural life on one hand, while on the other it is conscious spiritual life. . . . Abstract-real life, then, by its very nature realizes its vitality as the plastic expression of the universal – whatever form it may take. It has manifested itself as such in Abstract-Real painting; and by Abstract-Real painting the characteristics of abstract-real life are made perceptible. (PMCW 55) Beyond the ‘success’ of definition, Mondrian’s writing of abstraction lacks the sense of an ending; the project is an obsessive ‘If Only’, definition perpetually displaced across its signifiers. Abstraction is both an entirely conscious intellectual enterprise in art, working towards comprehensibility, and a numinous or recondite affair, sustained by the affect of gentle declarative hypnosis, forever just beyond the reach of comprehension; it carries a weight of meaning, via an impression of weightlessness. As if in his own recognition of this, it should be noted that in De Stijl of 1919 and 1920 Mondrian also tried out the conversational formats of ‘Dialogue’ and ‘Trialogue’, submitting himself to imagine an interlocutor’s deep scepticism about the claims of abstraction and to the discipline of finding the best answer. The paradoxes of Mondrian’s writing of abstraction are similarly intense in their mutual implication of the human and the inhuman. Abstraction is a human attribute whose full expression entails its obverse – for example, the readily available notion that abstraction implies transcendence. ‘Art must transcend humanity’, he wrote in a 1914 sketchbook, ‘otherwise it would be of no value to man’; ‘Pure abstract art’, he wrote in the essay of that name in 1929, ‘reflects human nature but transcends it’ (PMCW 17, 224). Or, in a letter of 1914: 77

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When one does not describe or depict anything human – then, through complete negation of the self, a work of art emerges that is a monument of Beauty: far above anything human, yet most human in its depth and universality! This, I feel certain, is an art for the future. (PMCW 15) It is deeply and universally human, then, to transcend humanity. A major 1936 restatement, ‘Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art’ reveals therefore a sense of the human under strain: Abstract art is therefore opposed to a natural representation of things. But it is not opposed to nature as is generally thought. It is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but it is one with true human nature. (PMCW 293) ‘True’, if anything here, begs a question: human nature requires the denial of another, ‘animal’ part of our nature. Mondrian wants this to correlate with abstract art’s ability to express the deeper, collective, inorganic and inhuman nature that is veiled by a naturalistic art of appearance, so that it is truly human to invent an abstract art that allows us access to this deeper structural level of nature. Moments later, however, heedless of this true human nature, he laments ‘the dominating force of the individual inclination in human nature’, from which arises ‘all the opposition to art that is purely abstract’ (PMCW 295). Such opposition calls up the abstract artist’s educational and social duties. Mondrian satirises those ‘many’ artists ‘who imagine that they are too fond of life, particularly reality, to be able to suppress figuration’; ‘the mass’, he complains, ‘is conservative’, and horrified by a certain ‘conception of the word “abstract”’ as signifying something ‘ideal and unreal’ (PMCW 297). At the same time, those who ‘are concerned with the social life in general’ tend to make ‘no effort to know pure abstract art’ and thus do not realise its ‘utility’ (PMCW 298). In the face of this, abstraction emerges as a heroic autonomy: simply by existing, it ‘continues always on its true road’ (PMCW 297). But this, again, is no merely empty formalism for Mondrian. In abstracting, we reach our true human nature, which is to encounter and become inhuman. Plastic relationships express in painting ‘what all things have in common instead of what sets them apart’, the ‘plastic laws which in nature are more or less veiled’ (PMCW 77, 332). Hence the Painter could again explain the continuity of his Naturalistic and Neo-Plastic art in the terms of a decisive paradox: ‘Precisely for the sake of nature, of reality, we avoid its natural appearance’ (78). Abstraction is more real than Realism, more natural than Naturalism; in pursuit of the natural real, it registers the necessity of the unnatural. 78

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Worringer and the Inorganic I have suggested, of Kandinsky and Mondrian, that a certain disturbance between the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the inorganic and, by implication, the human and the inhuman occurs to abstraction in their writing of it. However, an extremely influential theorisation of abstraction’s relation to the inorganic had already appeared in 1908 in the unlikely original form of an obscure and initially self-published PhD thesis. Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1908) claimed a historical basis in the idea of a collective or racial psychology or ‘volition’. The ‘urge to abstraction’, Worringer proposed, arising in the art of ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ and advanced ‘Oriental’ cultures, is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world; in a religious respect it corresponds to a strongly transcendental tinge to all notions. We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. (Worringer 1997: 15) Worringer’s schema works on two historical levels, the universal and the particular. Abstraction and empathy are universalised as ‘the two poles of human artistic experience’ (45). But in the temporal dimension, the premodern fear of space had produced an abstraction seeking ‘resting points’ in two-dimensionality and repetition, geometrical regularity and the ‘simple line’, singularity of form rather than the blurry contextual relations of things. Eventually, this was offset, Worringer argued, by the tendency to empathy that had characterised Western art since classicism and the Renaissance, a ‘happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the outside world’ (15). Renaissance (and, by extension, Romantic) art, Worringer maintains, welcomed a complex, immanent natural world, embodying it in a mimetic aesthetic of three-dimensionality. In the book’s closing gesture, transcending or retreating from this complexity implies the embrace of the inorganic and unnatural, the latter ‘the hallmark of all artistic creation determined by the urge to abstraction’, and which is exemplified for Worringer, though ambiguously, in Gothic art (120). In Gothic, he has argued earlier, ‘the need for empathy abandons the sphere of the organic, that naturally falls to its lot, and takes possession of abstract forms’; in this, however, they are ‘therefore, of course, robbed of their abstract value’ (48). Here Worringer made an important intervention in abstraction’s relation to the natural, via the concepts of the organic and inorganic. Organism connotes the organisation of matter into forms which are pleasing to us, with which we feel empathy; however, organisms consist of matter, and the ‘structural laws’ of this matter are, strictly, inorganic. Worringer saw artistic abstraction as a means of transvaluing this inorganicism, even if abstraction as it emerges in 79

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the Gothic is ‘robbed’ by the gesture: ‘Man has transferred his capacity for empathy onto mechanical values’ (113). We sense, perhaps, the pull and push of abstraction here, the reproach of mechanism infiltrated by something suspiciously lively. In the Gothic cathedrals, for example, ‘matter lives solely on its own mechanical laws; but these laws, despite their fundamentally abstract character, have become living, i.e. they have acquired expression’ (112–13). Worringer’s thesis remained a highly speculative psychologistic concoction of assumptions and inferences, by which the ‘artistic needs of a people must have led it to linear-organic abstraction’ through inevitable association with its ‘current psychic state’ (57). Yet of undoubted strategic value to the possibility of new and affirmative discourses on abstraction was his work’s critique of the ‘one-sidedness and European-Classical prejudice’ of aesthetics and especially its concomitant, heavily anthropomorphised sense of communion with an immanent yet representable natural world from the Renaissance, ‘the great period of bourgeois naturalness’ (120), onwards. The grip of this aesthetic, Worringer insisted, left Western modernity ‘helpless’ to understand or evaluate the art of ‘early’ and non-Western civilisations. Alois Riegl’s founding theory of volition, from which Worringer drew, had been non-evaluative in this respect: epochal differences of artistic style were not the result of ‘lack of ability’ but of ‘a differently directed volition’ (9). A racialised cultural superiority may be suspected in Worringer’s schematic history, with abstraction arising for savage and primitive peoples ‘before cognition’, the ‘purely instinctive creation’ of a time when ‘intellect had not yet dimmed instinct’ (16, 19). Yet his claim that abstraction for ‘the civilised peoples of the East’ was ‘above cognition’ also carried an intellectual critique of Western rationality (16). In a fundamental sense, Worringer’s conception of abstraction worked to undermine the assumed value system of civilisational progress: ‘a causal connection must therefore exist between primitive cultures and the highest, purest regular art forms’ (17). Worringer’s ‘urge to abstraction’ therefore meant finding value and beauty in ‘the life-denying inorganic, in the crystalline or, in general terms, in all abstract law and necessity’. Abstraction offered a critical alternative to the human world’s heavy investment in an amenable organicism, confronting that conception of the human with its inhuman inorganic other. Even before his thesis reveals the schema of abstraction and empathy, the challenge is already communicated in Worringer’s methodological proposal that the work of art itself stands, ‘as an autonomous organism, . . . beside nature on equal terms and, in its deepest and innermost essence, devoid of any connection with it, in so far as by nature is understood the visible surface of things’ (3). To look beneath this surface was to find the reality of the inorganic germ-cell, inhuman and abstract. As I have suggested elsewhere, Worringer’s argument on abstraction opens out into a complex fluidity of relation between organic and inorganic (Wallace 2007: 241–4), and it is in this indeterminate space that new senses of artistic 80

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abstraction could come into play. Despite its entire preoccupation with premodern cultures, Worringer in his 1908 and 1910 Forewords was quick to note the topicality of his text – that is to say, its applicability, or even inaugurating role, in the new modernist abstraction. Worringer’s work indeed acquired a strong afterlife in the theorising of this abstraction. Barnett Newman in 1945 was dismissive, accusing Worringer of oversimplifying the relationship between naturalism and abstraction and finding ‘no substance’ in his universalistic psychologising (BNSW 92–3). But Newman, as we will shortly see, tended to be impatient with theorists divorced from practice, and wary of attempts at popularisation. Accordingly, Worringer was more eagerly taken up by those seeking to explicate and endorse the apparently inhuman challenge of aesthetic abstraction. By 1952, in The Philosophy of Modern Art, Herbert Read could still cite Worringer as his mentor; Read had translated Worringer’s second work, Form in Gothic, in 1927, soon after editing the posthumous art criticism of T. E. Hulme in Speculations (1924). Having met Worringer at the Berlin Congress of Aesthetics in 1913, Hulme had integrated his ideas into a set of provocations that ‘the humanist tradition is breaking up’ (Hulme 1949: 55). For Hulme, the ‘unconscious’ form of ‘very abstract conceptions which underlie our concrete opinions’ of human nature was now being exposed by a modernist art – which of course itself, to Hulme’s eventual confusion, was calling itself abstract (69). Eventually I will return to Herbert Read’s complex humanistic embrace of the inhuman through a life’s work in explicating abstraction. Cézanne’s Scraps of Paper The year Worringer completed his thesis, 1906, was also the year of Paul Cézanne’s death; it is therefore on the cusp of abstraction’s emergence as a discourse on modernist art. Cézanne, barely a writer at all, perhaps an antiwriter, has nevertheless generated intense debate about what it means to talk about abstraction in visual modernism, and about the relation of this abstraction to the human and natural worlds. The role of an artist as public intellectual and educator remained important to him, despite a disposition that differed greatly from the outward-facing pedagogies of Kandinsky and Mondrian. ‘It’s what I always come back to’, Cézanne is said to have noted: ‘the painter should devote himself entirely to the study of nature and try to produce pictures which may be educative’ (Gasquet 1991: 165). Under challenge – was he really saying that art should have a social function? – Cézanne hesitated – ‘Lord, no!’ (he also saw the artist ‘addressing an extremely limited number of individuals’ [211]); and yet, ‘educative for everyone; yes, I do mean that . . . So that everyone can express himself’ (165). Such ambiguities might be heard again in Piet Mondrian’s 1936 declaration that ‘Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody’ (PMCW 291). What difference might it make if such art was an art of abstraction? 81

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I want to see the question of abstraction as part of a narrative of ‘doubt’ and ‘difficulty’ that has come to characterise Cézanne’s project, to the verge of pathologisation, in biographical retrospect and criticism. Cézanne, Rainer Maria Rilke noted, ‘exacerbated the difficulty of his work in the most willful manner’ (Rilke 1988: 35–6); for Émile Bernard, such recalcitrance was the ‘suicide’ that arrested Cézanne on the path to the natural world he sought to paint – as Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘aiming for reality while denying himself the means to attain it’ (Doran 2001: 59, 164; Johnson 1993: 63). At issue was a lifelong commitment to painting as research, in Émile Bernard’s eyes an again self-destructive ‘enslavement’. The goal of réalisation in painting required a slow, painstakingly incremental approach yielding small and occasional hard-won gains wrought ‘laboriously’ and ‘through very long experience’ of daily painting in situ (LPC 332). For Gilles Deleuze, Cézanne was exemplary of the preparatory work required of the modernist painter facing the canvas, ‘invisible and silent, yet extremely intense’ (Deleuze 2004: 99). Ideas of the unprecedented beginning, the epistemological break, dominate the Cézanne corpus: ‘It’s so good and so frightening to sit down in front of an empty canvas’ (Gasquet 1991: 220); ‘Cézanne had to start all over again, from the bottom’ (Rilke 1988: 43). For Deleuze, this is the dilemma of any painter, battling with the ‘figurative and probabilistic givens’ that already populate the canvas. ‘I’m very interested in my research’, Cézanne could declare to his son, barely a month before his death (LPC 372). To think of Cézanne as a ‘painter–researcher’ (Lyotard 1991: 102) is also to raise the question of the relation of this research to intellectual work per se. In the absence of any sustained writing, the corpus of Cézannean theory is located in two forms: the collected letters, especially those addressed to the younger painter and acolyte Émile Bernard between April 1904 and September 1906, and a cluster of transcribed conversations which together constitute a constructed, re-imagined Cézanne (‘Use creatively’, advises Richard Shiff of this material, ‘and with caution’ [Doran 2001: xxii]). Rainer Maria Rilke helped to construct the image of Cézanne as an anti-writing painter, provoked by Bernard into efforts at ‘self-explication’ that were ‘extremely repugnant’ to the artist (Rilke 1988: 76). Cézanne was ‘almost incapable of saying anything’, Rilke observes. ‘The sentences in which he attempted it became long and convoluted, they balk and bristle, get knotted up, and finally he drops them, beside himself with rage’ (76–7). Nor is primary support for this view wanting: ‘I make a better job of painting than of writing, don’t I?’, remarks Gasquet’s Cézanne (Gasquet 1991: 164), while ‘Talking about art is virtually useless’ and ‘Don’t be an art critic, paint’ are the kinds of proscription that recur in the letters (LPC 339, 342). Bernard, Cézanne complained, was ‘an intellectual, blocked by the memories of museums, who doesn’t look at nature enough’; as such, one could ‘go on theorizing indefinitely’ with him (374–5). ‘I’m as much of an intellectual as you could wish’, he insists to Gasquet, ‘but I’m also 82

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a simple animal’, ‘playing the philosopher’ yet also wanting ‘to be as mindless as a vegetable’ (Gasquet 1991: 169–70). How is abstraction woven into the texture of Cézanne’s anti-intellectualism? Richard Shiff observes that ‘the meaning of “abstraction”, circa 1900’, was predominantly that of ‘intellectual excess’, though in a state that was ‘fluid and confused, an amalgam of contested notions’ (Doran 2001: xxx). Cézanne could certainly seem to reflect this predominant abstraction in the figure of the littérateur, to which he saw Bernard as being dangerously akin. One should, he warned, be ‘wary of the mind of the littérateur, who so often diverts the painter from his true path, the concrete study of nature, to waste too much time in abstract speculation’; more directly, ‘The littérateur expresses himself in abstractions while the painter gives concrete expression to his sensations, his perceptions, by means of line and colour’ (LPC 2013: 336, 339). Yet what Shiff sees as the fluidity of abstraction is also in evidence. At one moment, it is the work of the imagination, by which classical interpretations of nature were, in Cézanne’s eyes, rendered overly subjective: as he noted to Bernard of the old masters, they ‘replaced reality with imagination, and with abstraction which goes along with it’, rather than striving to ‘realize a concrete image of nature’ (Doran 2001: 162). At another moment, Cézanne labels the art of drawing completely abstract because of its neglect of colour as the mark of nature’s depth. In this mix of abstraction’s suspect qualities, then, we find suspect intellectuality, overactive imagination and impoverishment of the real. Nevertheless – ‘I’m as much of an intellectual as you could wish’. Cézanne’s anti-intellectualism was not, as it were, an anti-intellectualism. Behind the defensive reflexes, ‘a preoccupation with theory and with the status of theory filled his letters and his conversation’, writes Lawrence Gowing (Gowing 2001: 182). Even in his early days at the Académie Suisse in Paris, Gasquet records, Cézanne ‘resorted to interminable theoretical discussions with himself, which he enjoyed and from which he couldn’t be distracted’ (Gasquet 1991: 59). Gowing also traces in this a very different orientation towards language. Cézanne was ‘a precise user of words’, fascinated with them since the poetry of his youth and the satirical Dictionnaire du langage Gautique that he sent to Zola at the age of twenty. ‘Has any painter’, Gowing asks, ‘explained his artistic constitution more intelligently and exactly?’ (184, 195). Gowing opens out a way of seeing the letters not just as ephemeral and anti-intellectual but also as the distillation of an intellectual struggle with language. I want to channel these reflections on Cézanne, writing and intellectualism into the way two statements, now canonical in Cézannean and in modernist theory, began their life as discarded and crumpled pieces of paper. They include the first moment at which Cézanne used abstraction in a transitional sense that referred to his own art. First, Gasquet records an occasion upon which Cézanne was trying to explain how the painter’s eye, through a process of self-education 83

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in contact with nature, becomes ‘concentric’, apprehending the culminating point in any object encountered. Taking a crumpled scrap out of his pocket, Cézanne reads to Gasquet the substance of a letter to Émile Bernard. This letter has long been widely taken as the doctrinal basis of a painterly abstraction that was to be realised in Cubism: ‘treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone, everything put in perspective, so that each side of an object, of a plane, leads to a central point’ (LPC 334). In Gasquet’s account, the paper was thrown to the floor in irritation. Soon, however, Cézanne is struggling again, this time to explain the role of colour in his concept of sensation. Another scrap appears from the pocket, containing a pivotal new abstraction: So, old as I am, around seventy [actually sixty-six], the sensations colorantes that create light are the cause of abstractions that do not allow me to cover my canvas, nor to pursue the delimitation of objects when their points of contact are subtle, delicate; the result of which is that my image or painting is incomplete. On the other hand, the planes fall on top of one another, from which comes the neo-Impressionism that outlines [everything] in black, a defect that must be resisted with all one’s might. But consulting nature gives us the means of achieving this goal. (LPC 355) ‘Abstractions’ here signifies the way the world turns up for Cézanne, an application of colour to the canvas that is ‘caused’ by sensations colorantes, and that does not ‘allow’ him to delimit objects: for example, by outlining in black. A deficit is implied: the paintings are left ‘incomplete’, yet, by the same token, they are also free of the ‘defect’ of outlining. The paintings are incomplete, then, only because a sensation occurring in nature, in the relationship between painter and world, insists upon its rendering as abstraction. The importance of this tentative affirmation of an abstraction that occurs naturally appears more clearly in the light of an attempt to explain sensations colorantes some ten months earlier, where Cézanne had worried about reliance, ‘foundering’, and the giving-up of control: Undoubtedly – I am categorical – a sensation optique is produced in our visual organ that allows us to classify as highlight, half-tone and quarter-tone the planes represented by sensations colorantes. Light does not exist, therefore, for the painter. As long as you [we] pass inevitably from black to white, the first of these abstractions being a support for the eye as much as the brain, we flounder, we cannot achieve mastery, self-possession. During this period (inevitably I repeat myself), we turn to the admirable works handed down to us through the ages, where we find comfort and support, like the plank for the bather. (LPC 347) 84

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For Jean-François Lyotard, Cézanne’s singularity was that of the painter accessing sensations, or sensations colorantes, that are ‘hidden’ by ‘habitual or classical ways of looking’; he can establish them only ‘at the expense of an interior ascesis that rids perceptual and mental fields of prejudices inscribed even in vision itself’ (Lyotard 1991: 102). In the letter above, the ascesis necessitates recognising even the absolutes of black and white as abstractions, ‘a support for the eye’, that are disavowed by the experience of the sensation. Yet in the later letter, as we have seen, it is these sensations themselves that become ‘abstractions’. Two throwaway scraps with their awkward epistolary locutions register Cézanne literally coming to terms with a new realisation. Abstraction imposes itself on painting and in language; abstraction (Fr.) is a word that turns up and demands to join those other Cézannean keywords, sensations colorantes, réalisation, tache, motif, in which the struggle took place. As a painter–researcher, Cézanne noted the ‘intellectual exhaustion’ that follows from the ceaseless physical effort of painting as a search for ‘the one and only goal’ (LPC 353, 355). In this model of working in and through abstraction, Cézanne was determined to see no distinction between intellectual and physical in painting; yet as Gowing reminds us, Cézanne did not use words ‘casually’, the search for precision implying equally exhausting effort. As abstraction’s proximity to sensation suggests, Cézanne’s vocabulary works to undo the opposition between intellect and its various others: both terms suggest the involvement of the mind in nature, for the expression of which existing formulations are becoming inadequate. What was really meant, Gowing asks, by ‘sensations’ and ‘realization’ (Doran 2001: 184, 195)? Gowing’s English translations depart from the usual tendency to leave the Cézanne keywords untranslated and italicised in English-speaking contexts, as if in recognition of a singular, untranslatable charge. Jacques Derrida acknowledged such a charge in alighting on Cézanne’s promise to Bernard, ‘Je vous dois la vérité en peinture et je vous la dirai’, translated by Bennington and McLeod as ‘I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you.’ Around the words Derrida develops a sustained exploratory deconstruction of what it is that can be said about or around painting at all (Derrida 1987: 2). Will Cézanne ‘tell’ the truth verbally, or does the ‘in’ of ‘in painting’ signify a telling that can take place only in painting itself? The translation presented in Rilke’s memoir, ‘I will answer you through pictures,’ simply erases this ambiguity. Is ‘telling’ attributable to painting in a way that is comparable to words? Self-defeating paralysis and artistic suicide are, therefore, not the only possible readings of Cézanne’s verbal and intellectual struggle. ‘Only old residues block our intelligence’, he wrote to Bernard, ‘which needs spurring on’ (LPC 353). The struggle becomes a question of the inadequacy of existing terms rather than of Cézanne’s limitations, as commentators have noted. ‘Cézanne wanted something that was neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual’, wrote D. H. Lawrence, although he was, ‘like all the rest of us, so intensely and 85

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exclusively a mental creature’ and thereby living ‘wound round with the winding-sheet of abstraction’ (Lawrence 2004a: 211, 202–3). Maurice MerleauPonty expressed it as a quarrel with binaries: Cézanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, as if he were deciding between chaos and order. He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear; he wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He makes a basic distinction not between ‘the senses’ and ‘the understanding’ but rather between the spontaneous organization of things we perceive and the human organization of ideas and sciences. We see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with ‘nature’ as our base that we construct our sciences. (Johnson 1993: 63–4) Abstraction in Cézanne informs an intense conception of intellectual work that entwined painting with writing and science. Calling for the kind of change of understanding around abstraction that lay just beyond his life, Cézanne in the nature of his struggle also prefigured abstraction’s association with the difficulty of this change. This difficulty was also literally figured in his painting and in its reception. The abstraction of sensations colorantes made Cézanne’s painting appear to others unnatural, or as if wilfully ignorant of the established virtues and felicities of realist painting, seeming to forfeit the control or ‘mastery’ over the general composition that more conventionally conveys verisimilitude. ‘The painter’, writes Lyotard, ‘must not hesitate to run the risk of being a mere dauber’ (Lyotard 1991: 102). The Impressionists, Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘afforded a generally true impression through the action of the separate parts upon one another’, even though the canvas ‘no longer corresponded point-topoint to nature’ (Johnson 1993: 62); Cézanne’s recording of the sensations as they arrive, taking ‘point-to-point’ to its logical conclusion, risked architectural infelicities that could be taken as the failure of the picture. Is the inevitable conclusion of this, however, to call Cézanne an abstract painter? What kind of relationship might be traced between the abstraction that appears to Cézanne in his writing and his painting, and the development of a modernist art that called itself abstract? Émile Bernard exemplifies the instabilities of meaning that might obtain. On the one hand, Bernard argued that, in following nature, any artist must ‘be wary of limiting his work to repetitions or pastiches and of falling into abstraction and needless redundance’, warning that ‘all theories, all abstractions slowly dry up the artist’; on the other hand, he valued Cézanne as ‘a painter with a mystical nature because of his purely abstract and aesthetic vision of things’ and whose method is approved thus: 86

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‘The more he makes his painting abstract – after having begun it narrowly, true to the original, and hesitatingly – the more he simplifies it and gives it breadth’ (Doran 2001: 38, 52, 40, 37). In the more developed critical readings of Roger Fry and Fritz Nowotny, we see how Cézanne’s abstraction remains valued yet troublesome for the theorist. In his landmark study Cézanne: A Study of his Development (1927), Fry speculated on the process by which a painting ‘completely lacking’ in verisimilitude, Cézanne’s landscape Provençal Mas (now named Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque, c. 1883), came into being. In Fry’s writing, it is hard not to feel a familiar readerly vertigo: the actual objects presented to the artist’s vision are first deprived of all those specific characters by which we ordinarily apprehend their concrete existence – they are reduced to pure elements of space and volume. In this abstract world these elements are perfectly co-ordinated and organized by the artist’s sensual intelligence; they attain logical consistency. These abstractions are then brought back into the concrete world of real things, not by giving them back their specific peculiarities, but by expressing them in an incessantly varying and shifting texture. They retain their abstract intelligibility, their amenity to the human mind, and regain that reality of actual things which is absent from all abstractions. (Fry 1989: 56) ‘Sensual intelligence’ sounds like another way of dismantling the familiar binary of abstract and concrete, even if at the service of a ‘perfect’ harmonising of the ‘pure’ elements of space and volume in a ‘logical consistency’. Yet abstraction remains for Fry a deprivation and reduction of the actual; it must be ‘brought back into’ the reality that is absent from it. Is Provençal Mas, then, an abstract painting? Despite his affirmative view of its abstract world, Fry somehow needs to answer no, without implying that the painting simply restores objecthood. Even if abstraction is a quality amenable to the human mind, it is at the same time completely divorced from actuality/reality. Fry compromises, perhaps, with ‘incessantly varying and shifting texture’: these abstractions thereby ‘regain’ the real, whilst at the same time remaining un-really abstract. There is a sense that Fry wants to attribute abstraction to Cézanne’s painting but is prevented from doing so by what Jacques Rancière in a different context had identified as a prevailing ideology of the concrete. Abstraction therefore remained a peril to Fry’s Cézanne, despite the temptation of seeing it as the defining feature of his originality and modernism. In later works such as the paintings of female bathers, Fry argues, a longstanding ‘fear of the model’ led Cézanne to ‘fall back on’ general ideas and hence bodies as ‘almost geometric abstractions’ betokening ‘a kind of abstract system of plastic rhythms’ (78, 74). Abstraction in this account is cold and static once 87

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Figure 3.1  Paul Cézanne, Houses in Provence:The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque, c. 1883. Medium: oil on canvas. Dimensions: overall 65 × 81.3 cm (259 16 in × 32 in); framed 84.4 × 100.3 × 5.7 cm (33¼ × 39½ x 2¼ in). Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. © 2022. Digital image, Album/Scala, Florence. again. In the portrait of M. Geffroy, however, Fry notes a miraculous ‘concordance’ between ‘an intellect rigorous, abstract and exacting to a degree’ and ‘a sensibility of extreme delicacy and quickness of response’ (Fry 1989: 67). Qualities as much of thinking as of painting, these show abstraction within a hair’s breadth of its seeming opposite – a living sensuality, delicate and quick. Fritz Nowotny’s 1938 study Cézanne and the End of Scientific Perspective maintains the suspicion of abstraction we have seen in Fry, yet it builds on the formalism that is latent in Fry’s account. Christopher S. Wood sees Nowotny’s study of Cézanne as ‘the most disciplined extended exercise’ of a formal method of ‘Strukturanalyse’ associated with the Vienna School of art history originating in the turn-of-the-century work of Alois Riegl; its resemblances to structuralism, Wood suggests, constitute a distinctly ‘modernist way of seeing’ (Wood 2000: 52). Nowotny identifies the ‘molecular forces’ or ‘painterly microstructure’ of Cézannean abstraction, an obsession perhaps with the local application of paint to canvas and thus a ‘secret lack of composition’; this, he argues, led to the ‘stripping of meaning’ from Cézanne’s paintings (Wood 2000: 417, 419, 411). Even in the rendering of a bend in the road, such as in A Turn in the Road at La 88

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Figure 3.2  Paul Cézanne, A Turn in the Road at La Roche-Guyon, c. 1885. Oil on canvas, 25¼ in × 31½ in (64 × 80 cm). Purchased with the Tryon Fund, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. SC 1932.2.

Roche-Guyon (c. 1885), the effect of Cézanne’s cumulative departures from the ‘science’ of three-dimensional perspective robs the scene of the tension, curiosity or suspense (what lies beyond the bend in the road?) that should accompany it. The paradoxical appeal of Cézanne’s paintings as sensation is thus, for Nowotny, as it was to be for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a deadening of emotional resources. The ‘atmospheric content’ of a motif is diminished; the ‘life of perspective has faded away’; Cézanne’s is a ‘disenchanted world’ in which all romanticism is completely ‘eliminated’ (Wood 2000: 411, 414). In writing of ‘a pictorial space that no longer signifies an actual space accessible to empathy’ (414), Nowotny inevitably evokes Worringer’s familiar and founding distinction: if empathy is not in play, abstraction emerges as its other. Nowotny proceeds to characterise any Cézanne work as inherently amenable to examination according to ‘abstract, formalist principles’, a ‘pictorial structure of modulated patches of colour, infiltrated by a system of condensing colour that often crystallizes into a configuration of linear structural veins’ (415). Nowotny thenceforth finds himself in similar territory to Fry, wondering how these ‘abstract forms’ might relate to the project of a rigorous study of 89

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nature’s actuality that Cézanne is deeply committed to. Such forms and their ‘new pictorial space’ could ‘remain in the service of the imitation of objects’, but are they not, Nowotny muses, ‘especially’ suited to ‘the creation of an art detached from nature and abstract in its overall appearance’ (416)? The answer is that Cézanne’s art is ‘one of the purest and most significant examples of a constantly antagonistic combining of abstract, ideal form and the natural data of reality’. This constant antagonism, as an attempted resolution, mirrors Fry’s suggestion of an ‘incessantly varying and shifting texture’: in each case, how can abstraction inform a realism that is beyond imitation? Yet abstraction continues to be a peril that, according to Nowotny, Cézanne ultimately evaded: he ‘did not give in to the impulse toward abstraction’ and avoided ‘resorting to the abstract invention of form’ (416, 424). The greatest strength of Cézanne’s work is seen to lie, in a revealing aside, in the ‘struggle to achieve harmony’ between reality and formal abstraction, but only as long as ‘the role of abstraction is not overestimated on account of its significance for the art of the following period’ (423). Nowotny’s allusion here is to the art of Cubism and beyond, and it prompts a question that is never far from that of Cézanne’s abstraction. If Cézanne is an abstract painter, what does this say about his relation to Cubism? Is Cubism itself an art of abstraction? Across an immense field of commentary, the answer depends entirely upon how abstraction is going about its work in any given part of this field. Using an initially capacious definition of Cubism, Guillaume Apollinaire had projected the art of ‘new’ and ‘young’ painters who did not ‘limit themselves’ to subjects or proper names as secretly aspiring towards the purity of a new plastic art: ‘It is still in its beginnings, and is not yet as abstract as it would like to be’ (Fry 1966: 115). Channelling Worringer, T. E. Hulme in 1914 found in the ‘new art’ and its ‘geometrical character’ a ‘tendency to abstraction’, while ‘the art we are accustomed to is vital and organic’ (Hulme 1924: 81, 85–6). There would, Hulme asserts, be deniers of this tendency who will similarly deny that Cézanne’s art is a part of it, by insisting that his ‘simplifications of planes’ are the means by which he sought to give ‘a more solid kind of reality in the object’ (101). But as the American modernist sculptor David Smith noted in retrospect, ‘The term abstract was first used in reference to Cubism’ (Smith 1973: 37). One emergent consensus in the debate around Cubism’s relation to abstraction is that it provided a visual language for the development of an abstract art, but was not in itself an art of abstraction. ‘Cubism’, write Harrison and Wood, ‘was always at bottom a representational art, but in its autonomization of the picture surface and in its animation of that surface as a series of shifting planes, it seems to have offered the technical device which enabled theories of abstraction to be realized’ (HW 224). Embedded here are the assumptions that Cubism’s motivations were essentially realist, while abstract art divorces itself from realism. As Piet Mondrian noted in 1943, Cubism’s intention was 90

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to express volume, and thus remained wedded to three-dimensional space: ‘Cubism therefore remained basically a naturalistic expression and was only an abstraction, not true abstract art’ (PMCW 357). Where Georges Braque had thus underlined Cubism’s challenge to the debased abstraction of realism – ‘To be pure imitation, painting must make an abstraction of appearances’ (HW 214) – Mondrian saw Cubism itself as an extension of abstract realism, obstructing ‘true abstract art’: he reaches in the same breath for abstraction both as reproach (‘only’) and as utopian affirmation. A distinction is implied between abstraction as simplifying painterly technique and abstraction as an idealised projection; yet can Mondrian fully guard against the mutual contamination of these senses? Mondrian describes his own path to ‘true’ abstract painting in terms of the destruction, through line and colour, of the planes that generated volume. Mondrian is unusual in proposing that Cubism retains three-dimensional volume; more often, its use of the picture plane signifies a flatness that eradicates volume. But what price this distinction when, as we have seen in Kandinsky as well as Mondrian, the pursuit of this abstraction is itself, already, modernist painting’s claim to a greater or transcendent realism, susceptible to the dizzying Kandinskian formula ‘Realism = Abstraction, Abstraction = Realism’ (Kandinsky 1994: 245)? The suggestion of Cubism’s great champion and publicist Apollinaire in Les Peintres cubistes (1912–13) that Cézanne’s last paintings and his watercolours belonged to Cubism finds a later echo in Merleau-Ponty’s claim, in ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961), that Cézanne ‘already knew what cubism would restate’: that the external form, the envelope, is secondary and derived, that it is not what makes a thing to take form, that the shell of space must be shattered – the fruit bowl must be broken. But then what should be painted instead? (Johnson 1993: 140) In an earlier, remarkable essay, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ (1945), Merleau-Ponty had connected this dilemma to suffering, the suggestion of a pathology that had led, in turn, to the perception of Cézanne’s work as detached from human normativity. The artist’s tendency to anxiety, anger and depression, a general condition of morbidity suggesting schizothymia (an autistic variant of schizophrenia characterised by introversion), came to evoke, Merleau-Ponty suggests, a ‘loss of flexible human contact’ and a ‘flight from the human world, the alienation of his humanity’ (Johnson 1993: 60–1). Locked (on the assumption of this) into an obsessive concern with nature and colour, Cézanne’s paintings seemed to develop an ‘inhuman character’, a seemingly overt tendency to objectify the human, typified perhaps by the determination to paint the face as an object (61). Merleau-Ponty, however, also questions this humanist hermeneutic of suspicion, not simply for its failure to allow an affirmative view of Cézanne’s project, 91

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but also on the grounds of its limited account of the human/inhuman relation. ‘Left to himself’, looking at nature ‘as only a human being can’ allowed Cézanne, paradoxically, to ‘penetrate(s) right to the root of things beneath the imposed order of humanity’ (61, 67). In articulating what, through Cézanne, an inhuman intelligence, or a human intelligence of the inhuman, might amount to, MerleauPonty’s essays build on the recognition that what concerned Cézanne was very far from a willed ignorance as such – ‘“The painter is not an imbecile,”’ he quotes from Cézanne’s letters (66). Merleau-Ponty attributes to Cézanne something of Martin Heidegger’s critique of an instrumentalism that sees the world as standing-reserve, at the service of human interests: ‘We live in the midst of manmade objects’, which we come to think of as existing ‘necessarily and unshakeably’. Cézanne’s painting suspends the complacency of this instrumentalism, defamiliarising and deromanticising nature and its humans, who are as strange as if ‘viewed by a creature of another species’; it ‘forbids all human effusiveness’ and instead ‘reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself’ (66). In Merleau-Ponty’s revaluation of Cézanne, then, humanity consists in the ability to look beyond the human and its acquired exceptionalism, and to revalue the inhuman as a substrate upon which the human depends. Newman: Abstract Art, or an Art of Abstraction? In an obvious sense the work of Barnett Newman as writer–painter or painter– researcher offers a direct contrast to the Cézannean model. Abstraction in Newman’s discourse from the 1940s onwards is visible and public, direct and interventionist, accompanying an art that had decisively broken with representation. Yet I want to draw out the Cézannean dimensions of Newman’s abstraction: the paradox that something in his writing fits more readily with Cézanne’s non-writerliness, and that this obliqueness or ambivalence towards intellectuality is bound up in the imperative to think beyond humanism, or towards Merleau-Ponty’s estimation of Cézanne’s human inhumanism. Between 1940 and 1948, Newman interrupted his career in public art and teaching to take up what Mollie McNickle describes as ‘a life of unremitting mental effort’ (BNSW 137) that diversified into the study of botany and ornithology. Gradually returning to practice and curation from 1944 onwards, Newman signalled with the painting Onement I (1948) his emergence on to the public scene of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. A re-invention of artistic abstraction became the explicit preoccupation of Newman’s writing in this period, especially from 1944 to 1948. Key instances of this writing remained unpublished, including ‘The Plasmic Image’ (1945), an essay or excursus in twelve parts, drafted eleven times, that is exploratory of abstraction and crucial to Newman’s emergence as an abstract painter. In a moment of keyword analysis, Newman sounds the familiar anti-formalist note, complete with scare-quoting, that we have come to expect: 92

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The abstract art of our conventional abstract painters is a misuse of the word, for by ‘abstract’ these painters mean only ‘removed from nature’. They have never attempted or claimed to concern themselves with thought. Abstract art removed from nature has never implied more than a simplified art, an attempt to reduce objects and shapes to their fundamental patterns. . . . (BNSW 152) Newman insisted that abstraction had been and remained a term for thought – hence its misuse to refer only to the non-figurative in painting. But an abstract art that concerns itself with thought was to be the ground of what was radically new about the ‘new painters’ of Abstract Expressionism. Newman found himself obliged to make a distinction that was foundational, yet subtle enough to be the point of potential confusion: ‘The painter of the new movement clearly understands the separation between abstraction and the art of the abstract’; ‘there is a profound difference between abstract art and an art of the abstract’ (BNSW 139, 140, 98). Abstract art, ‘the formal abstraction that came out of cubist painting’, as Newman reflected in 1967, provided the new painting with its ‘language’ (BNSW 287). In ‘The Plasmic Image’, Newman had written: ‘The new painter owes the abstract artist a debt for giving him his language’; ‘Whereas the abstract painter is concerned with his language, the new painter is concerned with his subject matter, with his thought’ (BNSW 142, 143). Newman’s fine distinction between abstract art and an art of the abstract is typical of a linguistic scrutiny and self-consciousness in his writing. An ‘art of the abstract’ was meant to abolish the thought/art dichotomy, and to refer to an art that actualised this. But what is it for a visual language to become an art that is ‘concerned with’ thought? What is the outcome of this new relation between thought and art, either in writing or in painting? Like the eager Kandinsky and Mondrian before him, and the reluctant Cézanne before them, Newman is drawn by abstraction into linguistic labyrinths. Consider the following propositions from ‘The Plasmic Image’ concerning the work of the new abstraction: • • • • • •

by their abstract nature carry some abstract intellectual content able to express the most abstract thought art is a realm of thought that is put down on paper and canvas the creation of forms that carry or express abstract thought it involves thought, that it is the expression of intellectual content handling philosophic concepts which per se are of an abstract nature. (BNSW 140, 141, 143, 143, 149, 155)

‘Carry’, ‘express’, ‘put down’, ‘involve’, ‘handle’: Newman restlessly experiments with a grammar for abstract art as a vehicle for abstract thought, even as 93

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that art is supposed to instantiate rather than mediate thought. Perhaps, then, the immanence of thought to art is best conveyed to the reader in the concision of a word, or keyword. Hence, of ‘plasmic’: The new painter feels that these shapes must contain the plasmic entity that will carry his thought, the nucleus that will give life to the abstract, even abstruse ideas he is projecting. I therefore wish to call the new painting ‘plasmic’, because the plastic elements of the art have been converted into mental plasma. (BNSW 141) Plasmic emerges for Newman out of the perceived inadequacy of ‘plastic’ as the sign of abstract–purist art. Plastic, he argued, had come to signify some ‘other’, unnamed but highly valued physical quality of colour pigment in an abstract painting, taken for granted or ‘sort of understood, like a missing verb in a sentence’: ‘It is the inability to clarify what that something is that has created so much confusion in modern painting’ (BNSW 142), the ‘mistake’ at the root of abstract painting being to conflate personal artistic signature and objective existence. A purely formalist criticism, he maintains, is the result, in which paintings are ‘reduced to the elements that make them up’ (BNSW 151). This may not quite prepare us, however, for the physical essentialism of Newman’s ‘plasmic’ – plastic elements ‘converted into mental plasma’. In explaining how so-called primitive art best exemplified the distinction between plastic and plasmic, Newman writes: ‘The intention is for the colour, the stone to carry within itself that element of thought that will act purely on the onlooker’s sensibility to penetrate to the innermost channels in his being’ (BNSW 144). Newman insisted that, in contrast to purist abstraction, the abstraction of the new painting consisted in a subject matter. But if this matter is immanent to the artwork, imbued with the physical materiality of the plasmic, it thereby remained linguistically incommunicable. This constituted, for Newman in 1947, the painter’s ‘epistemological paradox’: ‘The basis of an aesthetic act is the pure idea. But the pure idea is, of necessity, an aesthetic act’ (BNSW 108). In the same year, Newman generated the word ‘ideograph’ as an alternative to ‘plasmic’, in the short catalogue Foreword to an exhibition, ‘The Ideographic Picture’, where his developing work was shown alongside examples of the so-called primitive art of Mexico and of Northwest Coast Indians. Three dictionary definitions preface the Foreword, between two of which there are tensions that go unacknowledged: the Century Dictionary has the ideograph as ‘a character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name’, while Encyclopaedia Britannica has the ideograph ‘representing ideas’ but making no reference to the role of any ‘object’. A brief contrast with the adoption of the ideograph as Chinese written character in the poetics of Ezra Pound may help illustrate this point of semantics. For Pound, 94

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the pictorial directness of the Chinese form short-circuited the vague and indirect, reproachful soul-sickness of abstraction in Western languages, abstraction being the method ‘of defining things in more and still more general terms’, such that to ask a European to define something was to find them receding from ‘the simple things’ they know into ‘a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstraction’ (Pound 1961: 20, 19). For Newman, the abstraction of the ideograph lay precisely in this same pictorial directness. As the words and grammars of abstraction continued to twist and warp their way around Newman’s writing, genuine contradictions could emerge. On the one hand, the ‘truly abstract world’ of the new American painters showed that they were ‘at home in the world of the pure idea’ (BNSW 163). On the other hand, taking his place in this company with his first one-man show in 1950, Newman firmly declared that ‘These paintings are not “abstractions”, nor do they depict some “pure” idea’; ‘They are specific and separate embodiments of feeling’, he continued, ‘to be experienced, each picture for itself’ (BNSW 178). Called upon in 1967 to account for an abstraction which had ‘been given all kinds of names!’ (BNSW 286), Newman’s requotation of a passage about the Kwakiutl artist from ‘The Ideographic Picture’ suggests a formula he was at least reconciled to: The abstract shape he used, his entire plastic language, was directed by a ritualistic will toward metaphysical understanding. The everyday realities he left to the toymakers; the pleasant play of nonobjective pattern, to the women basket weavers. To him a shape was a living thing, a vehicle for an abstract thought-complex, a carrier of the awesome feelings he felt before the terror of the unknowable. The abstract shape was, therefore, real rather than a formal ‘abstraction’ of a visual fact, with its overtone of an already-known nature. Nor was it a purist illusion with its overload of pseudoscientific truths. (BNSW 108) Newman claimed that the passage had been less about the Kwakiutl than about the ‘urge to be exalted’ that ‘modern man’ had forgotten. Yet we glimpse in it too an abstraction threatening to disappear in the overwhelmingly plain sight of Newman’s discourse on it. The artist’s ‘abstract shape’ is compromised by association with plastic language, which was elsewhere Newman’s term for an empty abstraction. The ideograph is meant to differ entirely, yet is out of definitional reach, indirectly related to the ‘metaphysical’ and heavily mediated by the ritualistic will (‘directed . . . toward’). It is a vehicle or carrier, but what it carries points in three different directions: living thing, abstract thoughtcomplex, awesome feelings. In determining what makes the abstraction ‘real’, the reality can be defined only by negation, originating neither in visual fact nor in purist illusion. 95

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Newman’s commitment to writing abstraction left such intractabilities of meaning transparently on show for his reader. Somewhere between the intensity of Cézanne’s words on scraps of paper and Adorno’s endlessly, paratactically revolving philosophy are Newman’s bold and earnest efforts towards an anti-theoretical theory of abstraction. In the face of this, abstraction’s difficulty comes to signify on a second, alternative level in Newman’s writing: that is, to refer to advanced intellectual sophistication itself, and the possession of it. This was rooted in Newman’s sustained endorsement of abstraction in primitive art, and it invites comparison both with Worringer’s critique of modernity’s superiority complex and with Louis Althusser’s insistence on the possibility of a quotidian (or proletarian), non-educated disposition towards abstraction. ‘The art of the Northwest Coast Indians’, Newman wrote in 1945, ‘is an abstract symbolic art of the highest sophistication’; ‘Shall we say’, he asked in 1946, ‘that modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level?’ (BNSW 75, 106–7). Accordingly, when this abstraction returns in modernity, to whom does it appropriately belong? It has been charged that modern art is abstract, intellectual. So are Einstein’s theory, the quantum theory, the cosmic theory. Yet they have captured the imagination of the world. No one claims they should be abandoned for the traditional theories of folk science. Of course, modern art is abstract, intellectual! It is the expression of man’s spirit. Shall we express that spirit with artificially posed nudes amidst studio trappings under a theatrical spotlight? (BNSW 67) The abstract, here tied to ‘intellectual’, is for Newman the natural or inevitable expression of human spirit. In invoking advanced science, Newman alludes to the dominant model of the Two Cultures obstructing this recognition: It is unfortunate that in art, unlike other fields of thought, artists have had to struggle for the status of men of thought, amidst constant pressure to reduce them to a position of inferior thinking. How much greater might not their contributions have been if they had been given the status and respect of our scientists? (BNSW 72–3) Modernist abstraction’s containment within a purist model of language further prevented it from being viewed as equivalent to science as a mode of advanced thought. But Newman was equally concerned with the rights of supposedly ‘simple’ people to share in a model of abstraction as intellectual complexity to which the distinction between art and science is anachronistic. À propos of Northwest Indian art again, those who believe, he wrote, that ‘“abstract”’ thinking, such as of non-Euclidean space, was permissible in science, ‘but reject 96

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any form of abstraction in the arts . . . should go to these works painted by healthy, well-integrated, simple Indians’; alternatively, ‘There is an answer in these works to all those who assume that modern abstract art is the esoteric exercise of a snobbish elite, for among these simple peoples, abstract art was the normal, well-understood, dominant tradition’ (BNSW 75–6, 106). Highly sophisticated thought in premodern societies was a common property embodied in an art whose abstraction modernity could no longer imagine: ‘We must educate ourselves to look at them through the eyes of their creators’ (BNSW 146). Like Cézanne, then, Newman endorsed an education in abstraction, but preferably without the educators. He could be withering about the burgeoning ‘Anglo-Saxon’ genre explicating modern abstract art to lay readers, as exemplified by Roger Fry and Herbert Read, whose rationalist ‘educational impulse’ assumed, he asserted, that ‘everything in the world’ could be made ‘crystal clear even to the average mind’ (BNSW 84). Newman’s critique was that this was simplification for simple people, rather than the radical idea that simple people could and did possess complex abstraction. Difficulty was part of this possession, not the thing requiring amelioration. Like Cézanne, Newman displayed a dedication to thought that was to the scrupulous theorising of an artistic practice that lay beyond theory. Newman’s artistic ideas too could confound the viewer (‘Very few people at the time could understand what he had to propose,’ writes Yve-Alain Bois of Newman [Bois 2013: 121]), as if, Cézannean again, the artist starts always from scratch, as if painting and its tradition had never existed. This, however, did not make it exclusive. In modernity, Newman maintained, if people are to reclaim the right to a common ownership of sophisticated thought, this would be as a complex education in unthinking, an intellectual understanding of the limits of the intellectual, as in an abstraction that embodied, through painting, the intellectuality of feeling, sensation, affect. In his own references to Cézanne, Newman glimpsed the parallels. He resisted the attempts of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and European commentary to present Cézanne’s art as simply continuous with the Western realist tradition. As he argued in another exploratory and unpublished piece, ‘The Problem of Subject Matter’ (1944–5), the radical break that Cézanne’s art represented was actually better appreciated by those critics who had maligned him. Cézanne went beyond the solidly Impressionistic realisation of colour in discovering distortion as a principle to embody the absence of line in nature: distortion was, in fact, Newman argued, ‘better science’ than that of the Impressionists, freeing art from the copying of natural appearance in order to better analyse what lay beyond it. When Newman later turned to the issue of sensation in Cézanne, it was to repudiate Thomas B. Hess’s idea that Cézanne had given ‘meaning’ to painting in the face of the purely physical sensationalism of Impressionism that had been revived in, for example, Rothko. For Newman, Cézanne’s ‘full dependence on sensation’, more than that of any Impressionist, was itself 97

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his contribution to meaning (BNSW 122). Here Newman modified a previous argument to assert that, while Cézanne did deny line in nature, he nevertheless ‘experience[d] the sensation of edge’, the pursuit of the ‘reality’ of this sensation constituting his life’s effort. Elsewhere, he insisted that ‘The world the European artists have created has always been tied to sensation’: that is, to the ‘material world’ of nature and sensuality (BNSW 162). In the peculiar twist that abstraction takes in this argument, the purist art of Kandinsky and Mondrian becomes the expression of this physicalism even in its most resolute pursuit of formal abstraction: for example, in depicting ‘the truest nature, the nature of mathematical law’ (BNSW 163). It was left, Newman claimed, to the new American painters to reverse the scenario whereby ‘Western art is a voluptuous art first, an intellectual art only by accident’ (BNSW 147), creating ‘a truly abstract world which can be discussed only in metaphorical terms’ – although, as we have seen, this seemingly pure intellectualism was also resolutely emotive and sensationalist at its core. Newman recognised in Cézanne the necessity and hence entitlement of the modern abstract artist to be an independent and original thinker. Cézanne affirmed for Newman that only by asking ‘what to paint?’ could the artist reach the true ‘purpose of painting rather than its mechanics’ (BNSW 82). Modernist abstraction therefore encompassed both painting itself and the simultaneous enquiry into what it is that the painter does. If the art of the first half of the twentieth century could be characterised as ‘“the search for something to paint”’, the immediate aftermath of depression and the Second World War brought this, Newman insisted, to the point of ‘moral crisis’ (BNSW 80, 287). In the context of a ‘world in shambles’, as Newman reflected some twenty years later, it proved ‘impossible’ to paint any longer in the standard forms of either realist or abstract representation – ‘flowers, reclining nudes, and people playing the cello’, or ‘a pure world of unorganised shapes and forms’ (287). A recognition of the inhuman seemed obligatory. Yet, reviewing the work of Polish constructivist sculptor Teresa Żarnower for a New York exhibition in 1946, Newman found its ‘defence of human dignity’ to be ‘the ultimate subject matter of art’ (BNSW 105). Sublime and Inhuman The dignified human inhumanism that Newman’s thinking shared with Cézanne may be theorised through its explicit connection with the sublime. In the essay ‘The Sublime Is Now’ (1948), Newman argued that modernism had aspired to the sublime as a reaction against the exaltation of Greek and Renaissance idealisations of beauty, yet had succeeded only in transferring these values to a search for formal perfection in its own terms – for example, in Cubism or in Mondrian. For Newman, the exaltation essential to the new abstract painting was an exaltation of the sublime, associated with ontological 98

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affect. The principal effect of this sublime – ‘what I have tried to do’ (BNSW 257) – should be, as described to David Sylvester in 1965, ‘that the onlooker in front of my painting knows that he’s there’. This sense of presence is, Newman contended, both ‘mystery’ and ‘metaphysical fact’; its intensity is best conveyed by Newman’s more frequent insistence that his painting was about the experience of time, ‘the physical sensation of time’ (BNSW 175). To encounter a Newman canvas should, then, be for something to take place. Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’ (1991) reflects on Newman’s essay within the context of modernism’s human commitment to the inhuman. For Lyotard, the ‘It happens’ of Newman’s paintings is characterised more by shock and privation than by consolation and plenitude; for it to be felt, the conventional sense of abstract thought plays no part. Lyotard’s phrases for this include: ‘That which we call thought must be disarmed’ and ‘Letting go of all grasping intelligence and of its power’ (Lyotard 1991: 90, 93). Yet, I have suggested, in Newman a whole corpus of writing and thought has been required to instruct the reader/viewer in how thought should be discarded in order to facilitate the ‘it happens’. Cézanne’s oeuvre, Lyotard suggests, was similarly a response to the question of what it is to paint rather than ‘that of a talented painter finding his “style”’ (102). Colour was Cézanne’s version of the ‘it happens’, a response at once in thought and in painting; his worry about colour’s insistence upon ‘abstract’ application, and the inability thereby to cover the canvas, prompts a defence from Lyotard: ‘But why should it be necessary to cover the canvas? Is it forbidden to be abstract?’ (102). Subsequently, Lyotard continues, abstract painting took up the task of ‘having to bear witness to the indeterminate’ that Cézanne could not help but find troubling; painters proceeded patiently to dismantle in practice a succession of the elementary requirements of painting that even they had theorised and defended in their own writing. We may see how far the inhuman is at stake in the sublimity of Newman’s abstraction by comparing Lyotard’s version of what ‘happens’ to the viewer in front of a Newman canvas with that of Peter de Bolla in his 2001 study Art Matters. De Bolla discusses Newman under his book’s broader proposition that a new ‘lexicon of emotion and feeling’ is needed to augment scholarly discourses on the arts; the ‘mutism’ frequently experienced in the encounter with an artwork attests to this lack of an appropriate language. Where Newman is concerned, de Bolla wishes to get past certain conventional ‘first’ responses; his own, ‘on first sight’, are that Mark Rothko paints for the eye while Newman paints for the intellect, and Rothko’s canvases suggest the ‘passion of our emotional lives’, while Newman’s ‘speak the propositional language of abstract thought’ (de Bolla 2001: 30). ‘Many’ first reactions to Newman’s painting Vir Heroicus Sublimis (see Figure I.1), de Bolla projects, are that it is ‘cold, almost inhuman, perhaps inhumane’, a direct result of the way abstract art in general 99

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is regarded: it is ‘inhuman’ because seen (again, ‘at first glance’) to erase all traces of an object world and of the human figure to whom that world is an object. De Bolla’s reference to abstract art’s ‘removal’ (39) of the human figure is conventional, implying that the figure is always-already in place, as one of the elements that populate the blank canvas. Having thus constructed abstraction’s inhuman threat, de Bolla’s account of his encounter with Vir Heroicus Sublimis works carefully to restore the human via the ‘serenity’ the painting generates. This is strongly reminiscent of Lyotard’s ‘it happens’ or Newman’s ‘he’s there’: ‘curiously enough’, de Bolla contends, ‘this abstract image constructs as intense a sense of presence, of the human form being presented to representation, as any painting I can think of’ (39). The human may have been displaced from the picture plane, but it resurfaces with greater intensity in the space in front of the canvas. Newman’s painting is devotional, and its sense of serenity and well-being ‘allows thought to breathe’ (53). Affirming the human quality of Newman’s abstraction in this moving way involves taking for granted the need to countermand the inhuman and the narrative of abstraction as lack that it rests upon. For Lyotard, querying a humanism whose lessons to ‘us(?)’ proceed ‘as if at least man were a certain value, which has no need to be interrogated’ (Lyotard 1991: 1), the value of Newman’s abstraction lies, by contrast, in its human affirmation of the inhuman, or of a conception of the human that is not humanistic. If abstraction sheds certain trappings of the human activity of painting, from the concept of beauty to stretchers for the canvas, from subject matter to space itself, this remains, for Lyotard, the painter’s affirmative intellectual work, to enquire into what the human activity of painting is. The sublime in Newman carefully avoids taking human subjects and their objects for granted, so that the encounter with the painting is an indeterminate visual event, announcing nothing except itself and the ‘wonder’ that there should thereby be ‘something rather than nothing’ (Lyotard 1991: 85). De Bolla in fact highlights an inhuman revisioning of the painterly scene in his own way, by suggesting that we learn to ask what it is that the painting knows, or what its way of knowing is, rather than what we know about it (de Bolla 2001: 52). I will return to this relocation of affect and knowledge from human subject to artwork, and its bearing on a changing sense of abstraction, in Chapter 7. But de Bolla’s account of Newman begs another kind of question. What are the conditions for the human subject to feel the serenity of Newman’s painting? Where is permission gained for thought to breathe? If ‘we’ need a new emotive lexicon for abstract art, who are we? Does an expanded understanding of the possible kinds of response need to embrace more people than the educated or academic critic? Newman, as we know, discerned a reductivism in instructional guides to modernism, whilst resolutely affirming that the highest intellectual sophistication could be a common social property. Such 100

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sophistication would involve a critical challenge to the tenets of humanism and a path to the revaluation of the inhuman in relation to it. Jean-François Lyotard reflected on the responsibilities of the abstract artist whose theory and practice might thus broach the question of the inhuman. The artist, he argued, should ask ‘what is painting?’, just as the philosopher asks ‘what is thinking?’ Neither question should be confused with ‘how can we make those who are not artists/philosophers understand our painting/ thinking?’: ‘The question of how to make others understand what thinking is is the question of the intellectual’ (Lyotard 1991: 128). While their responsibilities to the lay public should not be confused with the reflexive enquiry that defined their work, there was nevertheless an intellectual class to which both painters and philosophers also belonged. It made them, Lyotard concluded, ‘brothers or sisters in writing’ (128). Curious though this familial metaphor may seem, it is at least resonant in Barnett Newman’s sense of vocation, where the writing of abstraction is of scarcely less value than the painting of it. Where writing and its relation to thinking are at stake, however, Lyotard’s proposition about intellectual work overlooks their most obvious locus, in literary art. Newman said very little about the literary imagination, except in a sustained engagement with Joseph Frank’s influential critical essay ‘Spatial Forms in Modern Literature’ in 1945. Newman’s propositions on modernist literature were nevertheless typically bold and critical. The James Joyce of Finnegans Wake had, he asserted, reproduced the error of Picasso, Arp, Kandinsky and Mondrian in taking the easy option of destroying subject matter in favour of a ‘stylized abstraction’, in Joyce’s case using ‘pure word-sound’ to create ‘a puristic art that leaves us cold’ (BNSW 90). Joyce, Eliot and Pound had managed to escape from the ‘trite subject matter’ of literary tradition, but only by replacing it with either empty formalism or the ‘blind alley’ of a religious theme. In other words, modernist literature had not yet matched either the new or the primitive painters in finding a subject matter of profundity. As we have seen, such subject matter for Newman was immanent to its abstract form. In Part II, I want to examine three abstract writers, or writers of the abstract, unconsidered in Newman’s note on modernist literature, yet whose work is of the highest relevance to the pursuit of abstraction as intellectual work that Newman endorsed for modernist painting.

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4

‘IF IT CAN BE DONE WHY DO IT’: GERTRUDE STEIN

If you can come to think of a philosophy, apart from the intrication of your reason, leaving on your memory an abstract impress of its particularity as a perfume or a voice might do, you can begin to sort out the vital elements in Gertrude Stein’s achievement. Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 436) To be democratic, local (in the sense of being attached with integrity to actual experience) Stein, or any other artist, must for subtlety ascend to a place of almost abstract design to stay alive. To writing then, as an act in itself. William Carlos Williams, ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 547) If Gertrude Stein found abstract writing impossible, it is. Stephen Kern, The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction (2011: 171) Peers as well as critics have consistently recognised Gertrude Stein as an abstract writer. For fellow modernist Mina Loy, who, Stein noted, had ‘always been able to understand’, an ‘abstract impress’ lay at the heart of Stein’s work (Stein 2001: 145; Loy 2005: 436). Loy’s wonderful 1924 essay 105

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on Stein, however, approaches this idea tentatively – ‘If you can come to think, . . . you can begin to sort out . . .’ – registering the struggle to enrol the senses into a philosophy lying beyond the ‘intrication’ of reason. Perhaps the abstract impress was better encapsulated as a ‘radium of the word’, extracted by Loy’s Stein as the ‘Curie/of the laboratory/of vocabulary’, in the short poem, ‘Gertrude Stein’, that prefaced her essay (Loy 1997: 94). For William Carlos Williams, in 1930, Stein’s writing as ‘an act in itself’ was the place of ‘almost abstract design’, and the sign of a certain democratisation, that Stein, paradoxically, needed to ‘ascend to’ in order to stay alive. Yet with ‘almost abstract’, Williams, like Loy, hesitates, as if unwilling to commit Stein to the full consequences of what abstraction might portend. Michael J. Hoffmann’s 1965 study of abstractionism in Stein held that ‘The one area of common agreement about Gertrude Stein’s writings is that they are “abstract”,’ and that this relation to abstraction concerns ‘the emulation of the techniques of painting’ (Hoffmann 1965: 15, 176). The close analogy between Stein’s writing and abstract painting is a staple of criticism, one clearly encouraged by the preoccupation of Stein’s work with the emergence of Cubism and the artists and paintings with which she was intimate, in Paris and beyond, from the early 1900s. Mabel Dodge had written in 1913 that Stein ‘is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint’, Mina Loy suggesting that by 1924 Dodge’s view had already become a ‘custom’: ‘There is certainly in her work’, Loy wrote of Stein, ‘an interpenetration of dimensions analogous to Cubism’ (Dodge 1986: 27; Loy 2005: 433). As we have seen in Chapter 3, however, no easy relationship between Cubism and abstraction can be assumed. Loy finds Stein ‘Cubistically’ locating the planes of a scene and then breaking them up into detail, a reading of an analytical method that is firmly associated with the realist end of the Cubist aesthetic spectrum. As such, it is therefore far removed from a notion of ‘literary Cubism’ as the ‘art of indeterminacy’ or ‘jumble of words juxtaposed for their overall sound or appearance instead of their meaning’ that, according to Lisa Siraganian, literary critics assumed ‘from the very start’ to be Stein’s aim (Siraganian 2012: 28). Siraganian’s point is a reminder that the complexities of Stein’s relation to abstract art, and of what it really means to say that Stein was doing with language what Picasso was doing with paint, have often resolved themselves into a simpler question: how far can language be abstract when abstraction is defined – as, for example, by Hoffmann – as complete dissociation from ‘the complex object that is external reality’ (Hoffmann 1965: 15)? Hoffmann’s assumption is later shared by Stephen Kern, who contends that a ‘fully abstract text’ would be ‘one without sense’, in line with the orthodox view that sees Wassily Kandinsky’s Composition V (1911) as the first abstract painting, finally leaving behind any comparison with ‘identifiable objects in the real world’ (Kern 2011: 243, 167). For Marianne DeKoven, the ‘danger 106

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of calling Stein’s writing literary cubism’ is that it ignores the fact that ‘a painted shape, unlike a word, has only two potential degrees of meaning: referential or abstract’ (DeKoven 1981: 85). Reading a Cubist canvas involves distinguishing between, on the one hand, subjects that are recognisable though fragmented and multiplied across planes, in the way that Mina Loy described, and, on the other, shapes that are not representational and that therefore carry ‘no “readable” meaning whatsoever’ (86). Equally boldly, DeKoven can therefore declare that ‘Stein’s writing is never abstract’, though at the same time lifting Stein out of the binary formula altogether, ‘neither representational nor abstract’ (86, 94). That this is a possibility DeKoven allows for writing but not for painting is an issue I will return to in Chapter 7, where Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of the Figure in the work of Francis Bacon signals a different painterly abstraction emerging precisely out of the collapse of this binary. Hoffmann, Kern and, to some extent, DeKoven therefore present a Stein who approaches as closely as possible to an artistic abstraction that is ‘an impossibility, especially in writing’ (Hoffmann 1965: 176). Comparing Stein with John Cage, Hoffmann observes that even Cage’s music evokes associations with ‘the world outside ourselves’; it may be the closest approximation to abstract art, but ‘to be truly abstract a work of art must not exist. It must be silence or a void – and not the illusions of either of these’ (177). In Kern’s words, ‘If Gertrude Stein found abstract writing impossible, it is’; what can only remain to Stein is to write (though in a distinction that begs further explanation) ‘if not abstract, at least abstracted literary texts’ (Kern 2011: 171). Kern’s proposition is a reminder that Stein herself confirmed this impossibility. In the ‘Transatlantic Interview’ of the final year of her life, Stein looked back on a middle period of writing in which she assessed the ‘weight and volume’ of words, experimenting with their juxtaposition in a way that culminated in the long poetic composition Tender Buttons: ‘It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them’ (Stein 1990: 504). ‘Sense’ in Stein may be too easily incorporated into familiar and often unexamined arguments about a general unreadability and incomprehensibility, as in Ann Charters’s association of Stein’s commitment to theory and abstraction with a ‘lack of interest in “making sense” for her readers in most of her experimental writing after Three Lives’ (Charters 1990: xx). It is true that, on the basis of a highly specific rationale, Stein repeatedly declared that she did not write for her readers. Stein was, however, profoundly interested in presenting for consideration to those readers the processes by which sense in language was made and unmade, possible and impossible. In the terms of Piet Mondrian, but also as we have seen in the work of Cézanne, an artist of foundational importance to Stein, and that of Barnett Newman, an emergent 107

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art of abstraction-as-difficulty may not be made for anybody, but might nevertheless be for everybody. There is, then, an unwitting poignancy in the conclusions of Stein critics at the matter-of-fact end of the spectrum. No writer, Kern suggests, was closer to abstraction than Stein – sounding out its possibility, encountering its impossibility. What more arresting example of abstraction’s invisibility, we might say, than that the truly abstract work of art is one that does not exist? However, in a way that seems closer to affirmation, Stein tended to display a loss of interest as soon as something became possible. By possible here, we should understand a general integration into conscious and rational discourse – as in, for example, something being recalled by voluntary memory or described scientifically. Instead, Stein’s declared ‘ultimate business as an artist’ was the aspiration towards the creation of master-pieces which were, by definition, abstractions from all that was familiar or known. As the argument of this chapter progresses, I want to point up the transformation of im-possibility into a condition of capability and plenitude rather than lack, the productive, creative potentiality of abstraction as the figure or space for the pursuit of that which does not yet exist. For Stein, abstraction as a space for artistic experimentalism both was and was not comparable to the aspirations of experimental sciences in their own fields; what was certain was that, for Stein, as for Barnett Newman, art and science should be regarded as equal in the rigour and social respectability of their intellectual work. We need also to note that the meaning of abstraction in Stein is not exhausted by its association with non-representational art. Rather, the Stein critical field evidences the wider semantic instability of abstraction in modernism that I explored in Part I, and is usefully exemplified in Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel’s edited volume Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature (1988), an early marker in the growth of Stein studies since the 1980s. Across this volume, Stein appears either as a distinctly abstract writer, or as a writer distinctly opposed to abstraction. In the former case, Marianne DeKoven identifies ‘aphoristic abstraction’ as part of the ‘official myth’ of Gertrude Stein, while Ulla E. Dydo notes ‘disembodied and abstract kaleidoscopic patterns’ in Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation which infer a cutting loose from ‘the referential world’ (Neuman and Nadel 1988: 9, 54). Marjorie Perloff describes the same Stanzas as a ‘difficult set of abstract poetic compositions’ (61). Beneath these somewhat reflex attributions of abstraction to Stein a characteristic fluidity is at work: abstraction may be concentrated formulation (aphorism), artistic formalism as disembodiment, or (poetic) difficulty. Charles Caramello’s essay presents the clearest case against abstraction on Stein’s behalf, even as that case is seen to emerge out of what first looks like a real ambivalence. ‘On the one hand’, he writes, Stein chose ‘the concrete over the abstract and thus seemed devoid of ideas except those she derived from observing things’; on the other 108

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hand, she wrote ‘things that were analysis of that observing and of themselves as writing and that thus appear abstractionist’ (2). The keyword, however, is ‘appear’; the reproach of abstraction is implicit in the view that Stein perceived writing ‘not as an abstract phenomenon’ but as a ‘wholly concrete’ mode of theory that coincided with practice ‘notwithstanding its appearance of abstractionism’ – she was not ‘promulgating . . . an abstract metaphysics of writing’ (5–6). Nevertheless, Caramello’s conclusion that what is ‘exemplary’ about Stein as a theorist is the scientific training that made her an ‘anti-theoretical theoretician’ resonates clearly with what I have described in the previous chapter as the anti-writerly writing of an abstract aesthetic in Paul Cézanne and Barnett Newman, and I will return to it in due course. In what sense, then, was Gertrude Stein an abstract writer, a writer of abstraction? What might it mean to say so? In this and the next two chapters, in the cases of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett as well as Stein, I will see abstraction as bound up with the different kinds of pressure that each writer applies to the protocols of literary criticism itself. Stein is the first and most distinctive example of this challenge, and my response to her work is a way of coming to terms with Stein’s singularity amongst fellow modernists – of avoiding, as Steven Meyer puts it, ‘talking about Stein in a way that doesn’t reduce her to a version of some other writer’ (Meyer 2001: xix). How and in what sense has Stein earned this status as a unique case for literary criticism? My argument about abstraction’s centrality to Stein starts from a distinct sense of the way in which her writing makes itself less than easily available to criticism, requiring a reassessment of our critical methods and expectations. I approach Stein tentatively and obliquely, sidling up to her writing by stealth, as if catching it unawares or glimpsing it by peripheral vision, or through the eyes of others, or even those of Stein herself. When I arrive at the writing, I proceed by accompaniment, or by sharing Stein’s own, often-acknowledged sense of struggle. The critical task and its assumed distance are somehow deferred, whilst seeking a more amenable mode in which to engage. This is a way of saying that something happens to Stein’s readers and critics. Commentary becomes re-oriented in unexpected ways, wandering into new and riskier modes of ventriloquism and performance, putting on what Neil Schmitz has called ‘Gertrude Stein spectacles’ (Neuman and Nadel eds, 1988: 124). ‘When anyone writes about a painting what has he got after the writing’, declares Patricia Meyerowitz in 1975 at the outset of her Introduction to Stein’s 1931 How To Write (Stein 2018: ix). Meyerowitz nicely poses one of my key preoccupations in this book: the relation between painterly abstraction and the thinking and writing of it. But any reader familiar with Stein will also know that Meyerowitz’s sentence could have been written by Stein herself, right down to the absence of the expected question mark. 109

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A radical and creative uncertainty about what, literally, to do with Stein’s writing is at issue. Take, as a primary instance, the selection of primary material for quotation. How do we incorporate Stein’s writing into our own texts? In the Stein of the popular imagination, her work is the source of enigmatical pithy aperçus, commercialised versions of Loy’s nuggets of radium: let us say, ‘Rose is a rose is a rose’, or ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’, or ‘What is the answer? But then, what is the question?’. Conversely, the scale and repetitive density of Stein’s writing (‘opaque’ is a critical term frequently used) often leads critics to cite random selection as the most appropriate way of delving into her work. ‘Open the book anywhere you like . . .,’ invites Meyerowitz in her Preface, by way of pointing to the difficulty of Stein’s writing: ‘if you are unfamiliar with the work of Gertrude Stein’, she adds cheerily, ‘you will very likely give up before you have gone very far’ (v). A similar note is struck by Robert Chodat in his 2005 essay ‘Sense, Science and the Interpretations of Gertrude Stein’. ‘To grasp the problems at stake’, Chodat writes, ‘we need a sample text. I choose “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, written in 1923. To begin at the beginning: . . .’ (Chodat 2005: 583). Chodat sets out to examine how far Stein’s scientific interests might justify an experimentalism that had otherwise laid her open to ridicule and to charges of obscurantism and solipsism, and the stakes are indeed high: ‘nothing less than the nature and possibility of humanistic inquiry’ (583). Chodat quotes the first one 104 words of Stein’s text and on this basis declares his ‘opening gambit’ to be that the writing is sufficiently ‘tough’ in its deviation from linguistic norms to justify something of Michael Gold’s 1936 assessment that Stein’s work did not immediately ‘make sense’. Gold in the 1930s had also brutally described Stein as a ‘literary idiot’, with the clinical connotations that this unfortunate term carried at the time. My point, to reiterate, is that Stein’s writing declares a kind of textual integrity that problematises the extraction of quotable material. For Mina Loy, Stein had given us ‘the Word, in and for itself’, by way of demonstrating that ‘Modernism has democratized the subject matter and la belle matière of art’ (Loy 2005: 437). This might be extended to the potential usability of Stein’s texts and their resistance to the idea that certain parts might be more representative or crucially symbolic of the whole than others, as if to strike at the hermeneutic gesture itself insofar as this selects and translates primary material for the purposes of a secondary critical metalanguage. With what kind of possession does this leave Stein’s reader? Who might this reader be and how do they gain access to her writing? Stein’s work focuses such questions with a singular intensity, and I have lingered on them because I want to argue that this singularity, a certain mode in which Stein’s writing is only ever itself, is what we can begin to call Steinian abstraction. 110

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‘Elemental Abstraction’ In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein discusses the encounters of Matisse and Picasso with African art. Picasso, Stein asserts, is ‘effected [sic] . . . more in his vision than in his imagination’ by this art: In these early days when he created cubism the effect of the African art was purely upon his vision and his forms, his imagination remained purely spanish. The spanish quality of ritual and abstraction had been indeed stimulated by his painting the portrait of Gertrude Stein. She had a definite impulse then and always towards elemental abstraction. She was not at any time interested in african sculpture. She always says that she liked it well enough but that it has nothing to do with europeans, that it lacks naiveté, that it is very ancient, very narrow, very sophisticated but lacks the elegance of the egyptian sculpture from which it is derived. She says that as an american she likes primitive things to be more savage. (Stein 2001: 71–2) Here I will seem to contradict my previous argument by selecting a passage of Stein’s work in order to highlight a key phrase, ‘elemental abstraction’. Overtly, ‘abstraction’ is not a major visible preoccupation of Stein’s oeuvre, but in what follows I want to explore, through a process of unravelling, the ways in which ‘elemental abstraction’ might resonate across her writing. The unexpected turns of Stein’s logic are at work in the elaboration of this ‘definite impulse’. If ‘elemental’ implies a primitivist inflection, we quickly learn that this is not in association with African sculpture. In describing what the sculpture lacks, Stein’s terms, naiveté and elegance, are as surprisingly juxtaposed as its attributes, narrow and sophisticated. If an American likes primitive things to be more savage, does this count as a fey admission of the cultural stereotyping of primitivism, connecting with the assertion that the sculpture has nothing to do with Europeans? Such ethnic and racial premises around abstraction resurface later in Toklas. The ‘only two western nations that can realise abstraction’, Stein announces, are America and Spain; ‘in americans it expresses itself by disembodidness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual’ (100). In this mutual if unacknowledged understanding, Americans and Spanish are ‘abstract and cruel’, though the latter is to be distinguished from ‘brutal’; to elaborate, ‘They have no close contact with the earth such as most Europeans have. Their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction. And so cubism is spanish’ (100). What, then, is abstraction, for Stein, if it connects the disembodiment of machinery (and of a certain literature) with a ritual such as bullfighting? 111

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The elements seem to be in place for a critique that refers back to Marx and Marxism, the violence of abstraction cruel rather than brutal because it is action across a distance, mediating the directly physical, as in Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘tool’ of Enlightenment, liquidating its objects. Such a distance might be that interposed by machinery between the worker and his product, or the convention of ritual separating the bullfighter from the bull. Stein’s treatment, though, divests abstraction of its shame; however difficult it might be to ascertain her tone, it seems to transpose the familiar reproach of the cold and unnatural, ‘no close contact with the earth’, into a less moralised cruelty with an amused, even comedic edge. Despite its cruelty, abstraction as a collective attribute is something that can be put to advantage, its appeal attaching in part to a provocative sense of cultural belonging. Stein recalls Picasso’s disgust at what he saw as the brutality of some Germans’ attraction to the bloodshed of bullfighting, whereas ‘To a Spaniard it is not bloodshed, it is ritual.’ Later in the text she recalls the opportunity taken mischievously to annoy Bertrand Russell with American ‘disembodidness’. In a conversation about education at the country home of A. N. Whitehead and his wife, Stein claims to have defended the American education system from Russell’s attack on its weaknesses, including its neglect of Greek, by explaining that Greek was important to island cultures such as that of England but not to America, which needed instead Latin as ‘the culture of a continent’: ‘She grew very eloquent on the disembodied abstract quality of the american character and cited examples, mingling automobiles with Emerson, and all proving that they did not need greek . . .’ (165). As well as the quality of formal abstraction that she found in the native Spanish visual culture of her friend Picasso, then, abstraction was to be more openly celebrated as American, a disembodiedness ‘mingling automobiles with Emerson’ and typifying the ‘creation’ of the twentieth century. America as a crucible of modernity was a matter not just of democratic republicanism, ‘profoundly intensely and completely a republic’, but of the abstract ‘methods’ that accompany and inform this politics (Stein 2001: 167, 86–7), ranging from those ‘of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it’ to the literary techniques she discerns in Henry James, her definite ‘forerunner’ and ‘the only nineteenth century writer who being an American felt the method of the twentieth century’ (86–7). As Steven Meyer suggests, such Americanness was inscribed in the intellectual training that Stein herself had, albeit somewhat haphazardly, received. Meyer’s 2001 study, Irresistible Dictation, is another fascinating variant on an empathetic Steinian criticism, and I want to stay in dialogue with it for a few moments here. Meyer argues that the seamless blending of science and literature in Stein’s intellectual work owed much to the influence of mentorfriends such as William James and A. N. Whitehead, but was also grounded 112

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in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The turn towards a ‘natural history of the intellect’ in Emerson in the 1840s is cited by Meyer as an anticipation of critical challenges to humanist conceptions of the self. The more Emerson pursued an empirical interest in the human mind as singular and anomalous, Meyer explains, the less he could ignore the way that this subjective freedom and splendour were entwined with what A. N. Whitehead was later to see as a general interconnectedness of things. The mind is inseparable from organic and inorganic nature: human volition exists, but as an effect of systems rather than of an independent, exceptional self; such embeddedness allows the subject or organism to act on and modify its environment as well as being acted on or selected by that environment. While, Meyer notes, Freud and William James had attributed to Emerson a developed psychology and philosophy of the self, Emerson rarely used the term in his writing (Meyer 2001: 143). Whilst experimenting with a host of equivalent terms, Emerson’s reluctance to name the self was, Meyer argues, the restless strength of a psychology proclaiming that ‘“life only avails, not the having lived”’; to name the self would be to ‘kill it off, deactivate it, put it to rest’ (144). Paradoxically, then, this intellectual refusal to affirm the human self came to inform the very principle of American individualist selfhood; Emerson saw it as an abstraction of disconnection, but thereby independence, from extant conceptual and linguistic models, and a prioritising of human affiliation with the inhuman world. This made him, Meyer argues, a revolutionary literary paradigm for American poets and writers: with his ‘fragmentation of British literary models’ and ‘principled stand against “good form”’, he ‘began to break the hold England still had on the language of America’ (Meyer 2001: 143). In her US lecture tour of the mid-1930s, Gertrude Stein began to use the terms ‘human nature’ and ‘human mind’ in a way that was, Meyer explains, ‘as disembodied and abstract, even as undistinctive, as she could make them’, corresponding to the fact that, as she wrote later, ‘We use the same words as the English do, but the words say an entirely different thing’ (from Wars I Have Seen [1945]; quoted in Meyer 2001: 145). A newly abstract disembodiment of words, Meyer writes, ‘detached from the solidity of things, and from the British environment in which they had acquired their significance’, meant that ‘Americans and their words were relatively easily abstracted from their circumstances and might wander off in any direction, whether on the page or around the country’ (137). Meyer’s playfully Beckettian image of words wandering off in any direction is certainly a way of connecting literature with the new power of the automobile, ‘automobiles and Emerson’, in Stein’s abstraction. The mobility of words as ‘the thoughts of a disconnected, liberated self’ mirror the automobile as a symbol of American modernity, a ‘native strain of abstraction’ (Meyer 2001: 141, 137). Cars mattered profoundly to Stein, whether in the manner of 113

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their assembly-line production, their potential for individual movement (what Raymond Williams was to call ‘mobile privatisation’ [Williams 1985: 188]), or the patterns of traffic they generated. Stein would insist, Meyer reminds us, that in its abstraction the Fordist perfection of the assembly line was ‘even more fundamentally American than it was capitalist’ (137). Again, Stein eschews a Marxian critique of industrial production, choosing not to acknowledge the assembly-line dehumanisation that Meyer reminds his reader of – ‘the abstraction of the finished product from the assembly worker’, ‘the corresponding alienation of the worker from the product’ (137). Instead, American abstraction blends with the personal and playful joy that Stein undoubtedly derived from her own life with cars, leavening its cruelty. ‘She was much influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles’, records Toklas of the postwar period, following an extended account of Stein’s extraordinary driving feats and shortcomings (‘She goes forward admirably, she does not go backwards successfully’) during the war (Stein 2001: 223, 189). Toklas and Stein were decorated after the war for their mission to deliver aid to wounded French soldiers in the South of France, which had entailed an exhausting and perilous return trip from Paris to Perpignan. But in the postwar years, the car became a symbolic site of intellectual as well as humanitarian labour. In a writing phase of high productivity, Stein would work in the car while Toklas did errands: ‘She was particularly fond in these days of working in the automobile while it stood in the crowded streets’ (223). This was the abstraction of American words, then, in the abstract machine that was Godiva, replacing Auntie, the ‘little’ Ford truck of their heroic wartime expedition. Cars, as they come to infiltrate her metaphors as well as narratives, are a means by which Stein questions the ontological gap between human and inhuman, returning us to her ultimate artistic business: ‘As I say’, she writes in the lecture ‘Portraits and Repetition’ of the writing of human portraits, ‘a motor goes inside and the car goes on, but my business my ultimate business as an artist was not with where the car goes as it goes but with the movement inside that is the essence of its going’ (Stein 1971: 117). While there was movement inside, there was also movement outside, ‘the movement of the automobiles in the streets’. Juxtaposed with this in Toklas we find: ‘She also liked then to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune’ (Stein 2001: 223). If the rhythm of the language is derived from the automobile, then it is visual as well as aural. Stein wrote often about her interest in the way sentences ‘diagramed’ themselves, excitement being the tenor of this writing. ‘I really do not know anything that has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences’, the ‘really completely exciting thing’ of her school years and beyond – ‘the feeling the everlasting feeling of sentences as they diagram themselves’ (Stein 1971: 126). 114

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This aesthetic is echoed in the kinds of spatial perspective with which Stein’s work becomes associated. William Carlos Williams chose to highlight a different mode of automated travel: Stein’s ‘unlinking’ of words from their conventional relationships in a sentence made them, writes Williams, ‘like a crowd at Coney Island, let us say, seen from an airplane’, her pages similarly ‘like the United States viewed from an airplane’ (Loy 2005: 546, 548). As Meyer notes, the terms of this American abstraction were intimately connected to geography: She determined that the lie of the land in America, its geographical situation, was the plumb line of the mind – of Emerson’s ‘aboriginal self’. It was always seen as if from above, flattened out, whereas in other countries it took on the features of human nature and daily existence. America was thus uniquely transcendental, with the disembodiment of Americans and of their writing embodied, as it were, in the land. (Meyer 2001: 145) Stein was not, quite, claiming that American consciousness-as-disembodiment is essentialised by (‘embodied . . . in’) the American landscape in the manner of that ‘spirit of place’ elaborated, for example, by D. H. Lawrence in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1924), though here too there are consistent parallels in Lawrence’s attribution of abstraction to the American psyche, especially in his commentary on the development of democracy from Franklin through to Whitman (Lawrence 2003). Instead, abstraction for Stein has become a complex sign, variously inflected: geographical vastness and the many places in which the human body is absent; the ‘methods’ that have produced the automobile and the aeroplane; and ways of seeing that are disembodied and diagrammatic. Meyer does not shrink from suggesting the ideological limits of this vision: Stein might have found the essence of America in the fact that ‘there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is’ (from The Geographical History of America, quoted in Meyer 2001: 146), but she failed to acknowledge the history of dispossession and slaughter of ‘aboriginal’ peoples that informed this. Meyer’s phrase ‘the lie of the land’ thereby becomes an incisive pun. The broader intent of Meyer’s study is nevertheless not so much a focus on Americanness as on the ‘correlations’ of Stein’s writing with science. Stein’s academic formation, after an early life engrossed in literature, was in medicine and psychology, and it is hard to resist associating this with the assertion from Toklas that ‘Gertrude Stein, in her work, had always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose’ (Stein 2001: 228). ‘Simplification’ and ‘concentration’ point to what was accepted as the principle of abstraction, abstraction-as-reduction, in scientific method; Stein, however, is at pains to 115

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point out that a ‘pure passion for exactitude’ might not be as straightforwardly empirical as it sounds. As well as connecting this with poetry and prose, Stein’s statement occurs in a discussion of the art of Francis Picabia and Juan Gris. Two abstractions, from modernist art and from science, are being brought into proximity, in a way that questions any absolute division between them. Moreover, the question of relation between exactitude and abstraction highlights the fact that the ‘science’ for Stein arrived with its own philosophical critique already inbuilt, via William James’s tuition, A. N. Whitehead’s intellectual friendship, and the dialogue of both thinkers with the metaphysics of Henri Bergson. Stein insisted that her writing began where science ended: what she ‘completely learned’ from her tutelage by William James was that ‘science is continuously busy with the complete description of something’, leading her to the question: ‘If this can really be done the complete description of everything then what else is there to do’ (Stein 1971: 96). The profound fact that human discourse does go on beyond the scientific impulse was ultimately embodied, she continued, in philosophy, which ‘begins when one stops describing everything’. Speculation, a term close to philosophy for Whitehead, must urge ‘the doctrines of science beyond their delusive air of finality’ (Whitehead 1961: 159). Yet this power attributed to critical philosophical thought was itself – for example, in James’s radical empiricism – only at the service of a more rigorous pursuit of fact, or of a pure passion for exactitude, as we will further explore in Chapter 7. Mathematics, a science whose ultimate abstraction has become a truism, distils the complexity of what an ‘elemental abstraction’ meant for Stein. It was with characteristically unconcealed pride that Stein noted how her work had been ‘compared to that of mathematicians’, its symmetries seen as analogous to the fugues of Bach (Stein 2001: 228, 57). Exactitude was thereby only in a limited sense what was at stake. For Stein, mathematics signified movement, rhythm and pattern. The ‘rhythms of personality’ that Stein pursued in her literary portraiture are connected by Meyer to a ‘general science of mathematics’ that, for Whitehead, investigated ‘patterns of connectedness, in abstraction from the particular relata and the particular modes of connection’ (Meyer 2001: 184; Whitehead 1961: 157). In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead’s way of characterising pure mathematics as ‘the realm of complete and absolute abstraction’ was to imagine for his reader the distant human origins of number. The ability to compare ‘five’ to ‘three’ as groups, irrespective of the particular things they might contain, was, writes Whitehead, a ‘very remarkable feat of abstraction’ which ‘must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it’; ‘the first man who noticed the analogy between a group of seven fishes and a group of seven days made a notable advance in the history of thought’ (Whitehead 1927: 26). Whitehead insisted, however, on the necessity of submitting this human marvel to philosophical critique. The man who identifies fishes and days as ‘seven’ creates a new kind of fact, but we must beware of giving to that fact a misplaced 116

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concreteness; it remains a generalisation that continues to exist alongside the singular entities that are the fishes and the days. By comparison, ‘After all’, wrote Stein in ‘Poetry and Grammar’, the natural way to count is not that one and one make two but to go on counting by one and one as chinamen do as anybody does as Spaniards do as my little aunts did. One and one and one and one and one. That is the natural way to go on counting. (Stein 1971: 136) This may be faux-naif on Stein’s part, and surely liable to the reproach of being itself an abstraction – as falsification? – of how counting actually happens. Yet it is close to the spirit of Whitehead’s critique in raising for thought the paradox that there might be something artificial or unnatural about number, and therefore about abstraction, even as it is natural to the human mind in its development. It is somehow in the nature of science’s new generalised facts – say, ‘two’ or ‘seven’ – to ‘sink’, Whitehead suggested, in their very facticity, into abstractions (Whitehead 1961: 150). We are reminded again of one of the key paradoxes in abstraction’s work: it is natural for the human to produce artifice. Being human will always entail a suspicion of the intellection it naturally produces. Stein as an antitheoretical theorist connects here with Whitehead’s insistent view – though Marx’s too – that philosophy must use abstraction to critique abstraction, and with the fact that the overt keynote of the interconnected philosophies of James, Bergson and Whitehead was an anti-intellectualism. I will return to this subject in more detail in Chapter 7. We have come a long way, in any case, from the possibility of mistaking Stein’s ‘elemental abstraction’ for an attachment to primitive form. ‘Pretty Good Because It Is More Abstract’ Let us now edge closer to Stein’s experimental writing, by examining abstraction in a literary-critical context. As I have suggested, abstraction in Stein helps to explain the unique challenge her work poses to criticism itself. Mina Loy’s 1924 essay is a drama of critical engagement, an immersed and experimental debate with Stein’s writing and with the painterly precepts of Cubism. Loy presents a model of what it might be like to read Stein closely. Here, then, for a moment, in a sidelong glance, I want to look over Loy’s shoulder, reading Loy reading Stein’s prose poem ‘A Sweet Tail (Gypsies)’: ‘Gypsies’, it begins. ‘Curved planes. ‘Hold in the coat. Hold back ladders and a creation and nearly sudden extra coppery ages with colors and a clean gyp hoarse. Hold in that curl 117

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with the good man. Hold in cheese . . .’. A fracturing impact of the mind with the occupation, the complexion, the cry of the gypsies. Cubistically she first sees the planes of the scene. Then she breaks them up into their detail. Gypsies of various ages bring ladders for the construction of . . . something. ‘A clean gyp hoarse’. Here it, see it, attribute it, that voice? The occurrences of ‘Hold in’ impress me as a registration of her mind dictating the control of the planes of the pictures it is so rapidly and unerringly putting together; no, choosing together. ‘A little pan with a yell’, is a protraction of ‘The clean gyp hoarse’, accelerated, in her chase of sounds among solids by telescoping the ‘little pan’ with the animation of the gypsy holding it. Per contra in ‘Wheel is not on donkey and never never’, her reason disengages the donkey and cart from her primary telescopic visualization. (Loy 2005: 433) Loy’s reading modulates between snatches of critical exposition and a more immersive mode. The former includes the careful parallel with Cubist painting, of course, but also ‘impress me as a registration of her mind dictating’ and ‘telescoping the “little pan”’, and even with an attempt at naturalising the scenario, with gypsies bringing ladders for the construction of . . . something. Loy is not, however, content with a restaging of Stein’s mind in the act of composition or with translating or worrying over (‘something’) meaning – both forms of a conventional hermeneutic. Just as Stein incorporates a speculative propositioning or ‘choosing’, Loy’s is also a choosing in the manner of accompanying Stein’s text and provisionally opening up the poem through the same kinds of creative error that Stein practises (from, for example, ‘hoarse’ to ‘Here it . . .’). It is difficult to place Loy’s declarative lines beginning ‘A fracturing impact . . .’ and ‘Here it . . .’ as either critical or poetic; they partake of both. The run of ‘in her chase of sounds among solids by telescoping the “little pan” with the animation of the gypsy holding it’ suggests a rhythmic participation with Stein’s text. Loy provides her reader with glimpses of reassuring explanation without metalanguage, but a counterbalancing invitation to commentary as an act of accompanying invention or experiment. Reading is or might be an exchange or dialogue; only, perhaps, by participating in Stein rather than assessing from outside will we get the sensation of the writing, enter the process or, in Stein’s case, the ‘variety of her mental processes’ out of which, Loy insists, Stein renews words, ‘as if she had got them out of bed and washed them early in the sun’ (433). 118

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I turn now from Loy reading Stein to Stein reading Stein. The 1946 ‘Transatlantic Interview’ presented Stein with passages chosen at random from Tender Buttons, inviting her to offer assessments that were transcribed verbatim. The symbolic implications of this, not only for abstraction’s reputation for difficulty, but also for women’s experimental modernism, are worth pausing upon: a now-eminent modernist is required to account for a work written some thirtythree years earlier, the text being assumed to remain so problematic as to entitle the reading public or critic to this demand. Stein rises to the task gracefully, acknowledging, evaluating and contextualising failures and successes, as if the act of self-criticism were a natural accompaniment to her creative work. In each of these two extracts from the interview, Stein has recourse to abstraction. A WHITE HUNT A white hunter is nearly crazy ‘A white hunter is nearly crazy’. This is an abstract, I mean an abstraction of color. If a hunter is white he looks white, and that gives you a natural feeling that he is crazy, a complete portrait by suggestion, that is what I had in mind to write. [. . .] MUTTONS (excerpts) Mouse and mountain and a quiver, a quaint statue and pain in an exterior and silence more silence louder shows salmon a mischief intruder . . . A sign is the specimen spoken. A meal in mutton, mutton, why is lamb cheaper, it is cheaper because so little is more. Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction. ‘Mouse and mountain and a quiver’. Here you see I was wise enough not to hesitate and still I dominated. ‘. . . A sign is the specimen spoken’. You see also here you have a very good example. You take a paragraph like that and the values are pretty steady though this seems difficult to a normal reader’s understanding. This is pretty good because it is more abstract. (Stein 1990: 508, 512) Let us set aside for the moment the phrase ‘the values are pretty steady’. In each extract, abstraction is made to sound like an aim that has worked out for Stein. Her qualification of ‘This is an abstract’, ‘I mean an abstraction of color’, may call up the scenarios of visual abstraction which have been associated with Stein’s abstract writing. But the formulation suggests otherwise: an abstraction of colour is not a colour, but an abstraction of one. A circular and non-explanatory 119

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logic is presented – if someone is white they look white – along with the ‘natural’ feeling or suggestion that white signifies crazy. What exactly is the difficulty for the ‘normal reader’ that Stein anticipates? It may be that Stein’s poetic line does not aspire to be translated into an image: we are not meant to ‘see’ a (nearly) crazy white hunter in our imaginations, nor to see the colour white, but, as Stein subsequently explains, to see ‘a word relationship between the word and the things seen’ (Stein 1990: 509). As she continues a little later, à propos of ‘A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER’: ‘I try to call the eye the way it appears by suggestion the way a painter can do it. This is difficult and takes a lot of work and concentration to do it. I want to indicate it without calling in other things’ (Stein 1990: 509). The ‘other things’ excluded by this Steinian abstraction are, in fact, deeply embedded normative assumptions about the way language relates to cognition: the capability of language to evoke the non-linguistic, and hence to draw on a bank of knowledge rooted in memory. We are obliged to ask again, as Stein did of sense-making in language, whether it is possible for words to have the autonomy of a ‘word-relationship’ with things, and what they would look like if they did. The answer, effectively ‘the Word, in and for itself’ as Mina Loy characterised it, is that they would look exactly like, or be, Stein’s words. Such autonomy would be a condition of presence and plenitude, ‘complete’ and self-explanatory – clearly the condition that Stein was eagerly hoping to locate in her poem of over thirty years previously. In the lecture ‘Poetry and Grammar’, Stein explained this quest in Tender Buttons in terms of the inadequacy of the noun and therefore of the need to ‘replace’ names: ‘Was there not a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them’; or, ‘looking at anything until something that was not the name of that thing but was in a way that actual thing would come to be written’ (Stein 1971: 141–2). Aware that this quest might present abstraction as the most recondite of modernist experiments, Stein claimed clear and accessible precedents in literary history. Not only did Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass ‘really want[ed] to express the thing and not call it by its name’ but, in Stein’s fond recollection of reading As You Like It when very young, Shakespeare ‘had created a forest without mentioning the things that make a forest. You feel it all but he does not name its names’ (Stein 1971: 144, 141). Again, in Stein’s radical extension of this principle, certain sets of words do not represent white hunters, tumblers or mutton, but are immanent to them, creating the feeling without us noticing how. As Peter Nicholls has it, the things ‘provoke patterns of words’; he affirms that Stein sought ‘to abolish the lack on which a descriptive language is founded’ (Nicholls 1995: 208–9). If what Freud called the ‘serious use of words’ is thereby in some measure liberated from the repressive requirement to match up to that which lies outside of itself, so too Stein’s reader, Nicholls 120

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suggests, is allowed to ‘wander’ like the character of Melanctha in Three Lives, or like Steinian words, always on the point of migration. Wandering nevertheless is not quite adequate to the way Tender Buttons ‘seriously troubled’ Stein and the intense struggle in her poetry around ‘the ridding myself of nouns’ (Stein 1971: 141, 145). The struggle is recorded in the ‘Transatlantic Interview’, with Stein continuing to assess frankly the success or failure of the lines thrown at random at her. ‘MUTTONS’ works; it is ‘pretty good because it is more abstract’. The success of the poetry is thereby the predicament of the criticism; insofar as it ‘works’, it lies beyond critical commentary. Stein has been wise enough not to hesitate; she has ‘dominated’, but at the expense of disarming explication. A theory of abstraction thus requires the endless, patient explication of something which, if understood, must lie beyond this explication – Stein, in other words, as anti-theoretical theorist. We touch again on the role abstraction could play, as a term constantly under reconfiguration, in Cézanne’s and Newman’s respective aesthetics, and in Adorno’s requirement that we understand what it is for the modernist text to be incomprehensible rather than striving to render it comprehensible. Required to account for the success of ‘A sign is the specimen spoken’ or ‘Lecture, lecture and repeat instruction’ in evoking – if that is the right word – mutton, Stein struggles, and has recourse to assertion – ‘here you have a very good example’, ‘you take a paragraph like that’ – before taking refuge in the question of difficulty. Addressing the normal reader’s predicament leads, in the passage that follows it, to an arresting reflection on Stein’s own novelty and singularity within literary modernism. The work of James Joyce has been accepted and hers has not, Stein argues, because Joyce remained connected to the past, one of ‘the people who generally smell of the museums’ (Stein 2001: 512). ‘Tender Buttons’ reveals the complete and fundamental difference of her work to the hermeneutical contract that Joyce, however distinctively, upheld. ‘The past’ in Joyce may be figured as the multi-valent semantic depth of words, allusive in their connotations and full of the potential for new meanings always rooted in the recombination of those that exist. Tender Buttons proposes a way of encountering not only poetical words, but words in a broader sense, that may not be able to deny historical semantic depth, but does not assume either that this depth is superior to the word’s inherent self-sufficiency or (Loy) its quality of ‘radium’. Stein’s writing, however, is of not of one piece, and her commentaries make readily available another aid to framing and understanding what abstraction might mean within it. Stein repeatedly explains that Tender Buttons was a watershed between two phases of her literary work, variously characterised as the transition between ‘insides’ and the visible, external world (Stein 2001: 130), between people and objects, or between an aesthetic of (prosaic) excess and an aesthetic of (poetical) compression. It is clear that the prior phase, culminating in 121

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the dense and epic work The Making of Americans, presented a different modality of abstraction to that of Tender Buttons, even if it is not explicitly named by Stein as such. This is not abstraction as aesthetic autonomy, but as generalisation. Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Stein in his early, landmark critical survey of literary modernism Axel’s Castle (1931) is initially bewildered, hostile and almost but not quite dismissive: The Making of Americans abandons narrative to linger on its characters in ‘a curious abstract vein of generalisation’ that is repetitious, ‘queer and very boring’ (Wilson 1969: 192–3). Linda Martin much later sees the character of the younger David Hersland as ‘Stein’s most abstract character study’ because embodied only in ‘skeletally bare descriptions of David’s behaviour’ (Martin 2019: 59). I am sidling up again to the encounter with Stein’s writing, echoing the task of the lecture she called the ‘Gradual Making of The Making of Americans’. In fact, as in the ‘Transatlantic Interview’, Stein’s description of her novel falters, as if to confirm the art’s integrity. Stein can declare the principle of her novel, to ‘finally describe really describe every kind of human being that ever was or is or would be living’, but the essay’s exposition of it proceeds only in the manner of emotive assertion accompanying long, selected passages as exemplification – ‘Let me read you some passages to show you how passionately and how desperately I felt about all this’ (Stein 1971: 88). In something like this spirit of selection, here I venture my own, from The Making of Americans: A man in his living has many things inside him, he has in him his important feeling of himself to himself inside him, he has in him the kind of important feeling of himself to himself that makes his kind of man; this comes sometimes from a mixture in him of all the kinds of natures in him, this comes sometimes from the bottom nature in him, this comes sometimes from the natures in him that are in him that are sometime in him mixed up with the bottom nature in him, sometimes in some men this other nature or natures in him are not mixed with the bottom nature in him at any time in his living many of such men have the important feeling of themselves inside them coming from the other nature or natures in them not from the bottom nature of them. [. . .] Sensitiveness is in men and women of the independent dependent kind in men and women, in those having it they can have it in them that reaction is complete and poignant and quick in them so that they can have emotion as poignant in them as a sensation. This is in a way the foundation of my explanation. I am beginning again telling everything. 122

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How has any one sensitiveness in living? They have it in them as their way of being. Now let me see, I who am realising now sensitive being in the attacking kind of them, let me see if I can say this thing now in the time I am living. Each one I have been knowing having attacking being, having their kind of sensitiveness in them is remaining in my feeling, they are crowding now in my feeling, they all have it in them to have sensitive being of the attacking kind of being of the independent dependent kind of being in them. (Stein 2020: 105, 414) Abstraction in this writing is a fixating on ‘natures’ and ‘kinds’, modes of generalised human being. The first extract revolves around the concept of ‘bottom nature’, which Stein declared to be the organising psychology of her book. Yet alongside this implication, individual essence was the multiplicity or ‘mixture’ of other ‘kinds of natures’ in the individual. While, Stein reflected in the ‘Transatlantic Interview’, ‘my intention was to cover every possible variety of human type’ in The Making of Americans, it was also to register the alternative conviction that ‘every human being comprises the combination form’ (Stein 1990: 503). Meanwhile Stein works to transform abstraction through affect, declaring ‘a real feeling for every human being’ – ‘The surprises of it are endless’ (503). Feeling and surprise may be communicated to the reader of The Making of Americans via what Edmund Wilson refers to with suspicion as ‘some technique of mesmerism’ (Wilson 1969: 192) or the rhythmic patterns and patternbreaking of the writing. My examples find Stein concerned with types of people and their sensitivities in general rather than individual characters, yet we can still see how the ‘rhythm of anybody’s personality’ (Stein 1971: 105) might be set to work linguistically. ‘Of himself to himself inside him’ is a core that is subject to repetition but subtle repatterning, as, for example, ‘inside him’ becomes ‘in him’ becomes ‘with him’ or ‘inside them’. The comma splices give the rhythm its pulse but they are prevented from becoming predictable, slowing to a semi-colon at one point and quickening through the absence of punctuation in ‘living many’. In the second extract, later in the text, bottom nature has been abandoned to allow Stein’s voice to enter the frame and underline the provisional and exploratory attempt on sensitiveness. The typologies are in place, ‘independent dependent’ and ‘attacking’ kinds of being, but sensitiveness as a way of being complicates these and sets Stein the task of translating her feeling into a way for these to be described as co-existing, ‘in the time I am living’. Does this mode of criticism measure up to Stein’s writing or account for its singularity? It is not impossible to see how Edmund Wilson’s boredom or Linda Martin’s notion of skeletally bare description might be derived from the manner of vocabulary in The Making of Americans. Lacking the consistent unpredictability of word association of Tender Buttons, the terms of 123

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The Making of Americans may surprise only in their awkward qualities of flatness and colourlessness: ‘important feeling of himself’, ‘independent dependent’, ‘attacking being’. My close reading is left meekly drawing attention to aspects of rhythmic diversification without any real conviction that this coincides with the passionate aesthetic that Stein claimed as her motivation. It is surely natural for the critic to doubt the adequacy of their approaches to Stein, to suspect that some resetting or re-orientation is called for. What power does the writer have to dictate these critical terms? How does Stein ask to be read? ‘One must in fact go into training to get Gertrude Stein,’ wrote Loy (2005: 435). For William Carlos Williams, such training would equip the reader to move beyond a ‘dead criticism’ which ‘broken through might be a gap by which endless other enterprises of the understanding should issue – for refreshment’ (546). Stein’s ‘revolution’ was to make writing its own subject in an unprecedented way; but this was also to imply, Williams wrote, ‘humanity in a relationship with literature hitherto little contemplated’. ‘Humanity in a Relationship with Literature Hitherto Little Contemplated’ To explore the significance of Williams’s proposition for Steinian literary abstraction, let us move back to the significance for Stein of an abstract art. The swerve is made by Stein herself in the ‘Transatlantic Interview’: although the interview begins by addressing Sherwood Anderson’s assertion that Stein’s work was ‘a rebuilding, an entire new recasting of life, in the city of words’, she diverts attention from the influence of literature to the fact that ‘Cézanne was my great influence though I never met him’ (Stein 1990: 512). I return to that phrase from Stein’s auto-critique of Tender Buttons: ‘the values are pretty steady’. Stein anticipates the difficulty posed to a ‘normal reader’s understanding’ by the term ‘values’, which she derives from painting rather than writing. The art of Cézanne is important to its explanation. Of his effect on the writing of Three Lives (1909), Stein writes: ‘Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole, and that impressed me enormously’: After all, to me one human being is the same as another human being, and you might say that the landscape has the same values, a blade of grass has the same value as a tree. Because the realism of the people who did realism before was a realism of trying to make people real. I was not interested in making the people real but in the essence or, as the painter would call it, value. One cannot live without the other. This was an entirely new idea and had been done a little by the Russians but had not been conceived as a reality until I came along, but I got it largely from Cézanne. (Stein 1990: 502) 124

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While ‘values’ adverts to the relations of priority and subordination within the forms of a painting, Stein allows it to gather a more complex ethical texture by association with a broader principle of equality; she proudly asserts that one human being is the same as another, just as a blade of grass has the same value as a tree. Both William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy would see in this a radically democratic ontology. In Cézannean composition, ‘one thing was as important as another thing’; as Loy has it, ‘through Cezanne [sic] a plate has become more than something to put an apple on’ (2005: 437). I want to recall that the moment at which Cézanne, in the letter to Bernard of 23 October 1905, acknowledges blocks of colour sensation impressing themselves upon his painting in a way that shakes up compositional values, is also the moment at which ‘abstractions’ emerge anew in his writing. The abstraction that could, to contemporaries, look like amateurishness or distortion in his painting is characterised by Stein as a principle of empathetic levelling; in Lyotard’s terms, it found Cézanne allowing colours and their nuances to follow and associate with each other ‘through a demand which is their own and which has to be felt, where the thing is not to make oneself master of it’ (Lyotard 1991: 141). In Stein, what could look like a loss of interest in human distinctiveness – ‘I was not interested in making the people real’ – restores to the human a relation to the inhuman that is obscured by the anthropomorphic values or priorities of inherent in the codes of established realism. Stein, perhaps no more inclined than Cézanne to forego mastery entirely, was nevertheless led, Lyotard notes, to ‘respect’ words and their insistent independent life, in the same way that Cézanne respected the colour of paint and its insistence on abstract application (Lyotard 1991: 142–3). Stein’s brief account in Toklas of the art of Francis Picabia demonstrates the extent to which this radical equality of abstraction was not simply a matter of formal aesthetic value. Picabia’s lifelong work, she asserts, addressed the problem that ‘after all the human being is essentially not paintable’ (Stein 2001: 130). Stein compares Picabia’s problematic with a transitional period in Granada between the two main stages of her own work, her interest modulating from ‘the insides of people’ to ‘the rhythms of the visible world’ (130). Picabia, Stein writes, sought a painterly line that would parallel the physical vibration of a musical sound, thus ‘conceiving the human form in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it’ (227). The extension of this ‘vibrant line’ found a kind of ‘mathematical’ culmination, Stein argues, in Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Nude Descending the Staircase’. Curiously, the Mina Loy who ‘always understood’ had already characterised Stein’s work in these terms: ‘In Gertrude Stein life is never detached from Life; it spreads tenuous and vibrational between each of its human exteriorizations and the other’ (Loy 2005: 433). Loy hints at how far the question of life portraiture, of the human as ‘not paintable’, is bound up for Stein in the question of the interconnectedness of organic life as a whole. ‘Life’ is permissible as an abstract 125

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generalisation because it signifies a tenuous and vibrational connectivity; Loy wants to see Stein’s people as ‘exteriorizations’ of this network of human and inhuman forces. Moreover, just as Steven Meyer notes the likely influence of A. N. Whitehead on Stein’s understanding of mathematics as a ‘science of pattern’, so he finds vibration to be the common figure, in both Whitehead and Stein, for an organicism that was nevertheless ‘divorced from traditional notions of organic form’ (Meyer 2001: xviii). As Whitehead explained in Science and the Modern World, and as Stein found in Picabia’s struggle with human portraiture, there was a mode of vibratory ‘“change of pattern”’ (Whitehead), the unpredictability of whose deformations worked below the more familiar locomotion of vibratory organisms as ‘mere patterns in motion’ (Meyer 2001: 201). Picabia’s (for Stein) ‘vibrant line’ thus painted the human tenuously or ‘disembodied’, a term that we have already seen as important to Stein’s sense of abstract method (Stein 2001: 227). The line is a way of recognising the inorganic, inhuman forces that traverse the human and connect it to the rhythms of the visible world. As we will see in Chapter 7, when Deleuze and Guattari identify, and integrate into their thinking, a closely comparable entity in the ‘Northern line’ of Wilhelm Worringer’s theory of Gothic art, this line becomes a definition of abstraction in painting. ‘How could a thing if it is a human being if it is anything be entirely contained within itself,’ wrote Stein of her own dilemma around literary portraiture in the lecture ‘Portraits and Repetition’; ‘Of course it is, but is it and how is it and how is it and how did I know that it is’ (Stein 1971: 121). What kinds of thing are human beings? The internal autonomy of human identity is at once granted and denied, or in Loy’s term ‘exteriorized’, by Stein in this single gesture. As we have seen, Stein ardently took on the challenge of portraiture in the abstraction-as-typology of The Making of Americans, pursuing human ‘kinds’ in their plurality: ‘I knew . . . that is was possible to describe every kind there is of men and women,’ ‘whether they are Chinamen or Americans there are the same kinds in men and women’, and so on (Stein 1971: 92, 96–7). ‘Every human being comprises the combination form,’ Stein was still able to assert in 1946 (Stein 2001: 503). Yet she had also acknowledged the difficulty that set in about half-way through her epic novel: While I was listening and hearing and feeling the rhythm of each human being I gradually began to feel the difficulty of putting it down. Types of people I could put down but a whole human being felt at one and the same time, in other words while in the act of feeling that person was very difficult to put into words. (Stein 1971: 89) An initial and familiar mode of abstraction, generalising about humans, thus begins in Stein’s writing to be accompanied by a more protean-modernist 126

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abstraction signifying the elusiveness of the human, ‘very difficult to put into words’ and essentially not paintable. A realist aesthetic as it exists is inadequate to the vibratory patterns and deformations that implicate the human in the inhuman. As Stein puts it in her lecture ‘Pictures’, ‘resemblance’ in painting is a ‘pleasant human weakness’, but ‘very soon’ forgotten once the reality that ‘things change’ is properly apprehended (Stein 1957: 79–80). We are ‘back’, she notes, ‘to the life in and for itself of an oil painting’ (80). This notion of aesthetic autonomy is, however, as far as it could be from a purity of form detached from the material world. Stein’s lecture of 1936, ‘What Are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them’, is a conflicted yet decisive reflection on the transition that Stein had attempted in her art, and it underlines what this might have to do with what Catherine R. Stimpson has called Stein’s ‘freakish’ rupturing of ‘the precepts of Western humanism’ (Stimpson 1984: 301). Somewhat peevishly (‘There is a great deal of nonsense talked about the subject of anything’), Stein notes how, in preparing to talk about master-pieces, her thinking had over a whole summer become diverted into ‘a discussion of the relation of human nature and the human mind and identity’ (Stein 1971: 148–9). Again, a somewhat spectacular waning of interest in the human seems to occur. Identity, Stein contends, must exist insofar as ‘my little dog knows me’, but ‘essentially you are not that when you are doing anything’: ‘At any moment when you are you you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you you are not for purposes of creating you’ (Stein 1971: 149). Identity, whatever else it is, is a strictly retrospective category based on recognition and remembering. What happens in standard written and spoken forms, from lectures and letters to her own fiction in Americans, is that ‘identity would take the place of entity’, and ‘entity’, Stein insists, becomes unable to exist. I will return in a moment to the abstract quality of this ‘entity’. Human nature, meanwhile, defined by Stein as what is necessary to us and the things to which we are related, is similarly retrospective or common knowledge, as familiar to village dwellers as to ‘any writer that ever lived’, and can thus be taken for granted: ‘everybody always knows everything there is to know about human nature’: After all there is always the same subject there are the things you see and there are human beings and animal beings and everybody you might say since the beginning of time knows practically commencing at the beginning and going to the end everything about these things. (Stein 1971: 149) As a result, ‘human nature has nothing to do with master-pieces’ (151). Nature and identity may remain central parts of what we call human but they are de-prioritised by Stein in favour of the human quality of mind, as the 127

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source of the ‘creation’ that enables master-pieces. The mind is the familiar locus classicus of intellectual abstraction, of course, but Stein’s emphasis differs entirely from it. The mind is that which takes a leap beyond conscious intellect, into abstraction as involuntary creation, both an ontological condition of the human in ‘the act of doing anything’ (148), and artistic in its expression as a master-piece. The mind, for Stein, thus aligns the human with the abstraction of ‘entity’, a ‘thing in itself and not in relation’ (151), an event of being that happens only insofar as we are not conscious of it, but which is bodied forth in master-pieces. The master-piece is a codeword in Stein’s lecture for the work of art at its experimental extremity, or effectively for a modernist avant-garde. The masterpiece’s intimate connection with the leap into the event of being recalls Lyotard’s discussion of the sublime and its importance, not only in the work of Barnett Newman, but in Stein’s cherished predecessor, Cézanne. If Cézanne’s art, as Lyotard suggests, posed the question ‘what is (a) painting?’, the answer of the modern sublime is that it is to contest the generalised terror of the possibility of nothing happening, of experience failing to turn up. Newman’s abstraction, in its irreducibility and unreadability and in the intensity of our presence at or encounter with it, confirms that the event of being happens rather than the mere thinking of it. Something takes place, which by definition has not occurred before. Mina Loy identifies Being as the ‘absolute occupation’ or ‘austere verity’ of Stein’s work, at a time when Bergsonian durée was ‘in the air’ (Loy 2005: 432). We may therefore associate Stein’s involuntary creation with the high modernist trope of the experiential moment, a time out of mind: the Proustian or Joycean epiphany, or the Eliotic motif of ‘To be conscious is not to be in time’ and its variant forms in Four Quartets (Eliot n.d.: 192). In Chapter 7, I want to track this as a transformation of modernist abstraction itself, in the fortunes of the Proustian formula for this involuntary memory: ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ (Proust 1976: 231). But Loy’s focus on Being was also a way of approaching what made Stein singular amongst fellow modernists. Stein wished to ‘track intellection back to the embryo’, to analyse ‘the habits of consciousness in its lair’ – that is, to address the question, ‘“what would we know about anything, if we didn’t know anything about it?”’ (Loy 2005: 436). By now, we may recognise this as a variant on the question that haunts the critique of abstraction’s inadequacy. What would a form of thought that is not abstract look like? Would this thought be ‘concrete’? If so, how would it differ from its abstract counterpart? Loy has been led to the idea of an ‘abstract impress’ in Stein, and attempts to elaborate here: For the spiritual record of the race is this nostalga [sic] for the crystallization of the irreducible surplus of the abstract. The bankruptcy of mysticism declared itself in an inability to locate this divine irritation, 128

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and the burden of its debt to the evolution of consciousness has devolved upon the abstract art. (Loy 2005: 436) Loy’s prose registers a struggle, a struggle with Stein’s struggle, which in turn continues to revolve around the question of what abstract art’s abstraction means. Abstract is the term Loy must reach for, yet its invisible life works to unsettle the prose. Ambivalence surrounds the phrase ‘irreducible surplus’, Loy’s formulation allowing for the surplus both as a description of the abstract and as that which lies beyond the abstract, hinging together the abstract as thought and the abstract as that which lies before or beyond thought, elemental perhaps, or im-possible. Stein’s ‘uncompromised intellect’ (Loy) enables an abstract art that can imagine Being somehow beyond the thought-forms – human identity, human nature – in which it is long embedded. The master-piece must in this sense be radically new, both human and inhuman, possible but impossible: ‘if it can be done why do it’ (Stein 1971: 96). Yes, we might say, abstract writing is impossible, and the impossible character of Stein’s abstract writing proves it. In a curious moment in the ‘Master-Pieces’ lecture, Stein, like Loy, seems to fall foul of abstraction’s unconscious life – or, at least, to acknowledge the trouble it can cause. Regretting the fact that master-pieces are obliged to have beginnings and endings just like more quotidian works of art, she writes: ‘Everybody worries about that just now everybody that is what makes them talk about abstract and worry about punctuation and capitals and small letters and what a history is’ (152). ‘Everybody’ has become the generically human that happens also to take the exteriorised form of Gertrude Stein; here is Stein posing as the critic, and on our behalf, writing of her own worried preoccupation with the abstract. But it was not all worry. As I have tried to suggest, Stein’s transvaluation of abstraction was in the direction of affect and joyful affirmation. ‘Punctuation and capitals and small letters’ bring us back to the essential and unprecedented wordness of this abstraction. Across her main works on writing, How To Write (1931) and the lectures in the US and England from the mid-1930s, especially ‘Poetry and Grammar’, Stein did everything she could to persuade her reader that language was capable of being loved in an unprecedented manner. In ‘A Transatlantic Interview’, she looked back to her swift application of Cézannean compositional values to a ‘background of word-system’, and from this to a developing obsession with ‘words of equal value’ (Stein 1990: 502, 504). The structuralist resonances – a determining system, a flattening of hierarchy and value – are not difficult to hear as the kind of abstract modernism that could chill the sceptical Raymond Williams. Yet sentences, if diagramming themselves, were also the very substance of agency in writing: Stein often referred to writing as essentially a process of making them, and we remember, ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagraming sentences.’ 129

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Equally, when the value of language, like that of painting, is no longer the reference to something beyond itself – for example, as accurate scientific description and theorisation, or as vivid literary style – we are freed up to form singular attachments to its abstract elements: noun, adverb, comma, semi-colon, sentence, paragraph – the latter, for example, as Stein famously had it, in all its inherent emotion. ‘Articles are interesting just as nouns and adjectives are not’; ‘One other little punctuation mark that we can have feelings about and that is the apostrophe for possession’ (127, 129). No sooner do we acknowledge Stein’s flattening of values in language than we find value reinscribed in her eager declarations of interest and uninterest in the various parts of speech. It seems inevitable that this excitement about language’s autonomy should extend into an aesthetic based on words that ‘were not the words that had in them any quality of description’: ‘I became more and more excited about how words which were the words that made whatever I looked at look like itself were not the words that had in them any quality of description’ (Stein 1971: 115). This made words nothing else but the subject matter, emphatically oriented towards the world, whose equivalent in plastic art would, for Barnett Newman, constitute a new abstraction. Or, as Cézanne put it to Georges Rouault in 1906, the art he learnt in academies would be reworked ‘as soon as you’re able to observe forms and colours with love’ (LPC 358). Abstraction, for Gertrude Stein, in language and in painting, becomes a way of figuring the creative principle of a democratically inclusive intellect. It denotes the human capacity to take on the im-possible, not to repeat what has already been done but to guarantee an affirmative artistic answer to the question ‘Is it happening?’. Abstraction ensures that there is a conceptual space for the new to take place. It shapes the premise that we are not merely ourselves, or that we exceed ourselves, in the moment of creation, and that this creativity requires or should persuade us to suspend human exceptionalism, understanding value instead as distributed across our relations with the inhuman, both within and outside of bodies, transversal rather than hierarchical. What kind of thing, Stein’s abstract writing asks, is the human? What is its kinship, ‘elemental’ perhaps, with animals or automobiles, for example? What are the forms of art and thought that the human produces? Abstract visual modernism stimulated and inspired Stein to ask such questions, but in a way that presumed artists also to be thinkers, even if – or especially as – thinkers of the limits of thought. Thinking in the abstract, as Stein saw in the art of Cézanne and Picabia, presents the human as tenuous and vibratory, and yet possessing a kind of autonomy, comparable perhaps to the event of her realisation that ‘an oil painting is an oil painting’ (Stein 1957: 71). In ‘Pictures’, Stein showed how Cézanne’s work helped her to this curious circular realisation. The autonomous event of the painting is, in fact, the opposite of hermetically sealed. ‘(A) picture exists for and in itself and the painter has to use objects landscapes and people 130

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as a way the only way that he is able to get the picture to exist’ (150). Rather than effacing itself in order to mediate and re-present a prior world, art dismantles this hierarchy, drawing on everything in that world in order to realise its own existence. An oil painting is an oil painting, and the world is immanent to it. The human appeal of Stein’s writing, which she continually projected as a form of simplicity, depends upon this inhuman abstraction. Yet the success of Stein’s proposition was far from guaranteed – not, certainly, within the dominant cultural dispensation of hostility towards the sign of abstraction, against which Stein and her fellow modernists were continually obliged to struggle. Stein is conflicted, struggling constantly in her own writing, with an aesthetic that in matter-of-fact terms is self-defeating. But in this way, in turn, we see how abstraction in modernism is also beginning to accrue a more affirmative association with difficulty, a keyword for Stein, but as a difficulty-in-itself that need no longer be associated with the unevennesses of literacy that placed abstraction automatically beyond the reach of many. Stein discovers a way in which difficulty and struggle are not the antitheses of love and joy, or assuaged or alleviated by the latter, but might just, in some alternative dispensation, mutually constitute each other. Stein, however, I am going to suggest in the next two chapters, is not entirely unique in this, the writings of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett working in their own ways, obscurely but determinedly, towards a similarly affective transformation of the abstract. The singularity of Stein’s abstract-difficulty lay perhaps in signalling the possibility of as yet unimagined, impossible futures in thought and art. Commitment is required to this abstraction in Stein’s art; we cannot simply paraphrase, encapsulate or master it. Following Mina Loy, we must get into training, forego the critical distance of an alternative, reproachful abstraction, and instead echo or otherwise accompany Stein in an abstraction that, following William James, signifies radical openness to new ways of thinking and writing. It is one thing to grant or enact the autonomy of this abstraction, but another to know why it is necessary – the predicament, as D. H. Lawrence posed it, and as it is alternatively polemicised as well as theorised in Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment, of knowing ‘how not to know’ (Lawrence 2004b: 111). Let us conclude with one of Stein’s ways of saying this: It is not extremely difficult not to have identity but it is extremely difficult the knowing not having identity. One might say it is impossible but that it is not impossible is proved by the existence of master-pieces which are just that. They are knowing that there is no identity and producing while identity is not. (Stein 1971: 153)

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5

‘RESIST THE INTELLIGENCE ALMOST SUCCESSFULLY’: WALLACE STEVENS

The fatal problem with poetry: poems. Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry (2017: 32) There is a poetry of the abstract; if you do not like it, even if it is firmly rooted in the particulars of the world, you will not like Stevens. Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (1989: 46) Let us think about it and not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other. Wallace Stevens, letter to Hi Simons, 28 January 1943 (LWS 438) The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else it may be possible to create an acceptable fiction. Wallace Stevens, letter to Henry Church, 18 May 1943 (LWS 449) The world? The human as inhuman? That which thinks not, Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling? Wallace Stevens, ‘Things of August’ (CPWS 493) 132

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There is no denying the visibility of abstraction in Wallace Stevens. ‘Abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ are words so regularly offered up in the plain view of Stevens’s poetry and prose as to have already shaped a critical field. ‘Abstract’, maintains Edward Ragg, is ‘Stevens’ most unavoidable term – that part of the Stevensian rubric most requiring translation’ (Ragg 2010: 57). Ragg’s thought-provoking 2010 study, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction, encapsulates a critical preoccupation which includes, in the case of Charles Altieri’s work, two different attempts at addressing the question of ‘why Stevens must be abstract’ (Altieri 1985, 1989). Yet abstraction’s facility for disappearance haunts even these most attentive commentators. ‘Both Ragg and I’, writes Charles Altieri in Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity (2013), ‘think that Stevens uses “abstraction” in two fundamental ways, but neither of us is quite capable of keeping the differences in view’ (Altieri 2013: 253). Altieri’s ‘two fundamental ways’ probably refer to Edward Ragg’s argument concerning a change in the orientation of Stevens’s poetry toward abstraction from around 1937 onwards. Before this point, Ragg argues, Stevens’s references to abstraction are overt, and they tend to refer to ideas, such as ‘theory of poetry’ or ‘supreme fiction’, that help to ‘realise particular poems’. After this point, abstraction becomes gradually internalised in the poetry as a principle closer to aesthetic autonomy. These two ways of abstraction in Stevens correspond, clearly, to the main semantic divide that we have now identified in modernist abstraction: abstraction as the use of general ideas, transcendent in aspiration, and abstraction as a new aesthetic of immanence, antithetical to generalisation and transcendence. Ragg can even propose ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ as a poem that ‘critiques abstraction in an abstract space’ – in other words, that critiques the first mode of abstraction through the second (Ragg 2010: 60, 57). To Frank Kermode’s assertion that if you do not like the poetry of the abstract, you will not like Stevens, then, the riposte is that it may again depend on which poetry of abstraction is in play (Kermode 1989: 46). Implicit in Kermode’s critical prognosis is a certain sense that poetry will be inimical to abstraction, a prognosis that abides in subsequent criticism. To turn to Stevens after Gertrude Stein is nevertheless to feel restored to a closer planet in our critical universe – perhaps. Stevens’s poetry can be accommodated to a modernist aesthetics of verbal compression, Symboliste or Imagist, in a way that Stein’s writing resists: Ragg’s concern with ‘translating’ abstraction in Stevens is a reminder of how far Stein’s works seem to disarm a hermeneutic impulse such as this. The literary word, for Stein, is not involved in a transaction of exchange with other words: it does not represent, but is, something. Comparably, Stevens wrote that ‘A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words’; the need for words to express the truth of our deepest thoughts and feelings makes us ‘listen to words when we hear them, loving them and 133

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feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them’ (Stevens 1951: 32). There is a connection here with Stein’s capacity to love linguistic autonomy: if the ‘unalterable vibration’ of poetic words brings things into being that did not previously exist, such things might be the portraits found in Tender Buttons, linguistic things that do not bear any consistent translatable relation to a language that would claim to describe them as they are named – a long dress, mutton, a room and so on. But in evoking the power of the acutest poet Stevens seems to invite in turn the acutest criticism, an invitation scarcely to be found in Stein. Stevensian abstraction therefore calls forth a different critical approach to that elicited by Stein. In this chapter, forgetting about stealth and obliquity, I undertake close readings of particular poems, beginning with ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’ from The Auroras of Autumn (1950) – a poem whose title (Stevens: ‘Titles with me are, of course, of the highest importance’ [LWS 297]) immediately promises an answer of sorts to the questions we might want to ask about abstraction in Stevens. I also do some tracking of ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ across the span of Stevens’s writing, poetry and prose combined. In this, however, I want to hang on to a sense of the provisional and exploratory nature of much of Stevens’s writing, an idea floated in Frank Kermode’s view that Stevens may have published too many ‘practice poems’ (Kermode 1989: 46). Where abstraction is concerned, I suggest, Stevens’s poems are all perhaps practice poems. Edward Ragg finds the ‘curious’ and ‘unexpected’ in Stevensian abstraction; he re-examines the evolution of ‘what abstraction represented to Stevens’ and acknowledges that this means entering the arena of ‘conflicting debate around what the word “abstract” means’ (54, 13). ‘Let me show it to you unfixed’, wrote Stevens of what he called the nobility of spirituality in poetry, a conception that he knew, uneasily, to be old-fashioned or anachronistic (Stevens 1951: 34). Equally, having referred to the formation of the ‘supreme fictions’ that characterised human striving, ‘Let us think about it and not say that our abstraction is this, that or the other’, he noted in letter of 28 January 1943 (LWS 438). My argument will complement Ragg’s in two main ways. First, we should not underestimate the contradictory work that belongs to abstraction itself and helps to ensure why in Stevens it remains unfixed. But we also find Stevens’s art actively working on abstraction to produce something unprecedented. A level of readerly immersion is required, I suggest, to arrive at what it is to say something very obvious: that ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ are words in Steven’s poetry. Through this immersion the reader emerges with an abstraction singular to that poetry – a third thing, even, to supplement the two abstractions already identified. The struggle around abstraction in Stevens dramatises a relationship between the humanism that he was often self-consciously dissatisfied with, and the inhuman 134

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that he was compelled to broach and explore. ‘Sadly’, writes Ragg, ‘the tendency to equate “the abstract” with “the inhuman” has triggered the majority of misplaced charges of obliviousness on Stevens’ part’ (8). However, ‘this nominally “inhuman” side’, he continues, ‘assumes a different complexion . . . once a more imaginative ear is given to abstraction’. Charles Altieri intimates something similar in his challenge to those critics who have seen Stevens’s poetry primarily as a kind of theatre of philosophical debate, framed by the long-in-the-tooth distinction between mind and reality. ‘But suppose’, Altieri writes, ‘Stevens is after something quite different’ – the question of what kinds of evaluations might be made by the ‘lyric imagination’, once we have dismissed the idea of a poetry ‘mired in epistemology’ (Altieri 2013: 234). What if this ‘something quite different’ is abstraction in a new conjunction with imagination, and as such a way of re-imagining the relation between human and inhuman? In an essay that is self-consciously ‘forbidding’ in its refusal to entertain thematic or biographical approaches to Stevens, and which insists that Stevens’s positioning within a ‘humanist problematic’ is mistaken, the critic Steven Shaviro nevertheless desires to do justice to the ‘strange, fierce joy that radiates’ from the ‘affirmative movement’ of Stevens’s later poems (Shaviro 1985: 220). The feeling is important: like Gertrude Stein, though differently, Stevens elicits his own affective criticism. In this vein, I too will argue that Stevens’s repurposing of abstraction strives to render the intellectual revaluation of the inhuman exhilarating and beautiful. Yvor Winters’s 1959 judgement was that Stevens’s doctrine of the imagination is ‘an intellectual excitement engaged in for the sake of the excitement, but having no validity’ (Winters 1959: 35). But joy, excitement and beauty are not merely vehicles of abstraction in Stevens. There is a buzz about Stevensian abstraction that matters; something is going on in the poetry that moves, as Shaviro puts it, ‘in a different space from our usual critical paradigms’ (Shaviro 1985: 220). What is it that is going on, and what is abstraction’s role in it? What is the Ultimate Abstract Poem? The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract This day writhes with what? The lecturer On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe, And red, and right. The particular question – here The particular answer to the particular question Is not in point – the question is in point. If the day writhes, it is not with revelations. One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one Of the categories. So said, this placid space 135

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Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue, There must be no questions. It is an intellect Of windings round and dodges to and fro, Writhings in wrong obliques and distances, Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole Of communication. It would be enough If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now, Helplessly at the edge, enough to be Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense, And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy. (CPWS 429–30) ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’ begins with the immediacy of ‘this’ day and the urgency of a question: ‘This day writhes with what?’ The meaning of the question is itself ‘in point’. What is it for a day to ‘writhe’ with something? The word suggests the sinuous struggle of a living thing; we also note its proximity to ‘write’. How does this question relate to what follows? At hand is the lecturer, ‘composing’ himself (he calms himself for delivery; he puts a self together) for a subject that is oddly kitsch, its overblownness suggested by upper case: ‘This Beautiful World Of Ours’. Hemming and hawing suggest faltering indecision, yet in the sensuous context of alliterative rhythm and colour – ‘And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,/And red, and right’ – they become defamiliarised as part of a brief paean to the world’s beauty. Writhing, hemming, hawing – these, however, contrast markedly with the awkward prosaicism of what follows, clunky repetitions and qualifications of ‘particular’ and ‘question’. Is this the lecturer addressing the ‘particular question’?. Did he, in fact, pose the initial question? We cannot know for sure. If ‘the question is in point’ takes us back to the poem’s opening, the point is certainly not to provide a ‘particular answer’. The third stanza promises an elaboration on the writhing day, albeit provisionally (‘If’) and by negation, ‘not with revelations’ (‘The poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man’, wrote Stevens in Adagia – though ignorance in Stevens, as we shall see, is more than it seems here) (Stevens 1990: 187). Instead of answers or revelations, ‘one’ (we are now involved in the enquiry) ‘goes on asking questions’. Yet, with the next sentence, one runs aground. The referent of ‘That’ is as uncertain as the ‘categories’ of which there has been no previous mention. This is a moment of irritation and again-prosaic flatness. Something nevertheless follows from it, the change of a ‘placid place’. What or where is ‘this’ place? As we try to pick up sense again, ‘blue’, hitching up with ‘rose’ and ‘red’, suggests that 136

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the place is our world – a blue planet. The word ‘intellect’ prefaces a passage that invites paraphrase. There is something problematic about asking questions; they make us less able to see the world as blue, to appreciate its sensual immediacy. In what looks like a familiar trope of the interfering and unreliable intellect, ‘windings round and dodges to and fro’, it is surprising to find ‘writhings’ now in reproachful association with this intellect, assuming ‘wrong’ obliques and distances where previously the lecturer had been hemming and hawing the planet ‘right’. The issue, however, is not the intellect as such but ‘an’ intellect, perhaps the lecturer’s, though again we are not allowed to ascertain this. There is an alternative to this untrustworthy intellect, one in which we can be ‘fleet’, omniscient, ‘cloud-pole/Of communication’. The poem opens out into a final statement of yearning for the kind of epiphanic moment, ‘just once’, that this particular intellect might give; yet again it does so in a contradictorily prosaic manner, ‘middle’, ‘fixed’ and ‘complete’, rather than ‘Helplessly at the edge’. Such an epiphanic moment would be sensual immersion, ‘only in sense’, if the poem had not by now lost the lyricism that might have been able to convey sensation rather than merely refer to it. Instead, it subsides into the tame pun or shift of ‘in that enormous sense’, and finally to the pure bathos of ‘merely enjoy’. At the end of Stevens’s poem, a question reasserts itself. What is the relation of the poem to its title? In its elements of halting flatness and disappointment, the unsatisfactory oscillation between lecturing and poetry, ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ does not feel like the ultimate, abstract poem. Abstraction escapes again; it seems the ultimate poem must lie elsewhere. But where, and in what would its abstraction lie? Do we glimpse its lineaments in ‘And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe,/And red, and right’? Or in the notion of a day that writhes with life, or in writing as writhing, beyond the mere dodges of the critical intellect? Here I take up the poem’s clue, and that of Ragg, previously, to read abstraction as a principle of artistic autonomy or immanence, drawing perhaps on painterly abstraction. This would help prevail over the kitsch clarity of This Beautiful World Of Ours, or the poem’s stretches of all-too-prosaic language. But would that be right? The fleet condition of sense and intellect combined, collapsing space and time, might amount to such abstraction; yet the false and flat notes (‘middle’, ‘enjoy’) of its theorisation at the end of the poem somehow sap our confidence in its ability to be realised. In its failure to be the ultimate, abstract poem, ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ would, for the contemporary American novelist and poet Ben Lerner, fulfil the condition of poetry per se. For Lerner, individual poems will always fail to achieve the impulse of Poetry towards the transcendent or the divine, and this is what makes us ‘hate’ poetry, though with a hatred that is very close to love. Lerner reaches for the term ‘abstract’ to describe this condition, borrowing from the critic Allen Grossman the idea of any poem’s virtuality as an ‘abstract potential’ for a Poetic value that ‘no particular poem can realize’ 137

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(Lerner 2017: 14, 73). This, we note, is not the readily available association of abstraction with transcendence as such, but instead with a sense of immanent striving and failing to transcend. ‘Abstract’ means that the ultimate poem does not exist anywhere; ‘abstract capacity’ is a kind of virtual space, as in Lerner’s memory of being in a summer youth camp about to watch The Planet of the Apes in a theatre – a ‘little clearing’ in which art can happen and where ‘other worlds were possible’ (111–12). Lerner’s capacity to make such homely connections with poetic abstraction is reinforced in his book’s only overt reference to Wallace Stevens. ‘“Poetry is a kind of money”, Wallace Stevens wrote’: though ‘Money is a kind of poetry’ is what Stevens actually wrote, in the aphoristic form of Adagia (Lerner 2017: 110; Stevens 1990: 191). What Lerner is looking for in his misprision of Stevens is confirmation of the again-youthful, perhaps epiphanic experience he had had, this time on the opening of a hypermarket in his home town of Topeka. Lerner channels Marx on the commodity in this scenario of ‘the affect of abstract exchange’, its sublimity and ‘capital’s lubricity’ captured in the immense store’s young and uniformed roller-skating staff, Lerner experiencing the same kind of energy that he was later to see as ‘integral to poetry’. Albeit ‘in a perverted form’, poetry, Lerner argues, reproduces the feeling of fungibility, of ‘being a tentative node in a limitless network of goods and flows’, where ‘relations between people must appear as things’ (Lerner 2017: 110). Like Gertrude Stein, Lerner here skirts close to Marxism’s critique of capital as abstraction and alienation, only to swerve towards an invigorating affect that can be won from abstraction’s impersonality. Even in its ‘perverted’ capitalist form, abstraction carries a liberating charge, the abstract flow of capital; this may amount to dehumanisation, relations between people appearing as things, but is a charge or force of no less human origin for being so. We are told from our youth, Lerner notes, that poetry is uniquely connected to the human; we are all poets ‘simply by virtue of being human’, our poetic abilities ‘in some sense the measure of our humanity’ (15), increasing the tragic sense of bitterness that attends the realisation that any individual poem must fail, and must be held in a certain contempt because of this. But in its inevitable failure the poem, even the quintessentially awful one such as William McGonagall’s on the 1879 Tay Bridge disaster, may energetically aspire towards, or abstractly shape, the negative imprint of an imagined ‘human community that persists across time’ (41). McGonagall, Lerner argues, ‘succeeds by failing’ (42), because striving and failing is a shared human condition. Lerner reads all of the poetry he ‘hates’, including McGonagall’s, with a fond attention to its shortcomings, because only this will allow us to glimpse the ultimate abstract poem that we will never actually find: 138

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Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poem – no such thing – a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean. (Lerner 2017: 14–15) Let us merely add, for now, that a version of this is glimpsed in Stevens’s poem ‘A Primitive like an Orb’, also from Auroras of Autumn: ‘We do not prove the existence of the poem./It is something seen and known in lesser poems’ (CPWS 440). The abstract space of the poem for Lerner, and for Stevens, is therefore quite distinct from Henri Lefebvre’s conception of the featureless, uniform space of capitalist modernity that enables domination (Lefebvre 1991). This ‘place for the genuine’, a conjunction between the abstract and the genuine, represents capacity and potential that, existing nowhere, is virtual rather than actual, but no less real for being so. We are on the margin again here of a formula, ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, first found in Proust, that will feature prominently in the next chapter (Proust 1976: 231). However, if there are two abstractions in Stevens, the claim to be the ultimate abstract poem might equally be made by ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942) (henceforth ‘Notes’). It has proven difficult not to read this poem as a theoretical manifesto statement speculating at length on the mutual necessities of artifice and belief. The first of its three sections begins with the imperative title It Must Be Abstract. J. Hillis Miller’s 1965 reading of Stevens as a ‘poet of reality’ in ‘Notes’ strives to pre-empt any further enquiry into what this abstraction means. Tied to the poem’s opening example of the sun as ‘first idea’, it is ‘the power to carry the image of the very thing alive and undistorted into the mind’, closely related to the way Stevens uses the word ‘idea’ in its ‘original meaning of “direct sense image”’ (Hillis Miller 1965: 248). Here are the opening stanzas of It Must Be Abstract: Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it. Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire. 139

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How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images . . . (CPWS 380–1) Through Hillis Miller’s commentary we see Stevens trying to spring ‘the idea’ from the trap of idealism. As an imprint on the senses, the sun is neither solely a human ‘invention’, nor a scientific fact, nor the creation of a god. It is neither purely physical nor purely mental, but the paradox of an ‘inconceivable idea’. These definitions through negation are significant: as Alain Badiou suggests of the Stevens poem ‘Description Without Place’, an art of abstraction might occupy a world that ‘does not obey the common law of separation between real thing and appearances’ (Badiou 2014: 81). Nevertheless, for Hillis Miller, abstraction in Stevens also remains, as it were, abstraction, where this signifies the general capacity for ideas; it is ‘the power man has to separate himself from reality’, though not, thereby, to ‘twist’ reality into ‘some unreal mental fiction’ (Hillis Miller 1965: 248). Direct recourse is made to Stevens’s essays, where, in The Necessary Angel, he writes of the power of the poet to ‘abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his abstraction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist’ (Stevens 1951: 23). The poet must abstract himself (sic) from millennia of human interpretation in order to see the sun in its first idea, forming a more direct and unmediated relation with the sun – the power to carry the image of the very thing alive and undistorted into the mind. Abstraction’s contradictory work is manifest here. Carrying an image alive and undistorted into the mind is surely antithetical to the withdrawal claimed. As in Cézanne, so too abstraction emerges for Stevens as a kind of perplexity or conceptual struggle, worked through or ‘practised’, striving to think together the world’s inhuman materiality and the human perception that is a part of it – a ‘struggle with the inaccessibility of the abstract’, as Stevens observed of ‘Notes’ in a letter of 12 January 1943, an abstract which ‘does not exist, but it is certainly as immanent: that is to say, the fictive abstract is as immanent in the mind of the poet, as the idea of God is immanent in the mind of the theologian’ (LWS 434). In the uncertain epistolary locution of ‘certainly as immanent’, Stevens’s letter does not hide the struggle that ‘Notes’ stages at length. The sun-as-abstraction is an irredeemable paradox, an ‘inconceivable idea’, but a paradox whose complexity can be washed into ‘remotest cleanliness’ when a poem ‘refreshes life so that we share,/For a moment, the first idea . . .’, giving ‘a candid kind to everything’ (CPWS 382). This is the unalloyed pleasure of contemplating a world before the human: ‘the first idea was not to shape the clouds/In imitation. The clouds preceded us’, so that the poem ‘springs’ from the acknowledgement that ‘we live in a place/That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves’ (CPWS 383). The world neither belongs to nor is identical with us; perhaps we are not identical with ‘ourselves’. Yet such affect is 140

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precisely reliant on human artifice, ‘candid’ being rather dangerously close to ‘candied’, Stevens’s poetry undeniably flaunting the unalloyed pleasure of this artifice too. Abstraction resides in all of these possibilities, the artifice and its repudiation, the complexity of paradox and the simplicity of minimalist purity. As if the poem is wearying of its own effort, the sun becomes neither word nor idea nor thing but, curiously, ‘project’: There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be. (CPWS 381) This project – belonging to whom in particular? – connects the imperative to abstraction with difficulty, or with being ‘in the difficulty of what it is to be’. The project, we might say, is close to that of Gertrude Stein’s impossibility: as for Stein, so for Stevens, difficulty, an important word, is about how contradictions are thought, and the work that abstraction might do in thinking them. The difficulty of this difficulty, let us say, lies in becoming ‘ignorant’ enough to suspend causality and its subject–object relation, seeing the sun and knowing what it is in, rather than in spite of, its difficulty; becoming an ‘ignorant man’ (sic) is the aspirational height of this condition of knowing. Abstraction’s next appearance is in a parallel with vision that calls up, again, a connection with the Cézannean abstraction that was important both to Stevens and to Stein: It must be visible or invisible, Invisible or visible or both: A seeing and unseeing in the eye. The weather and the giant of the weather, Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air: An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought. (CPWS 385) We must see and unsee at the same time, seeing ardently whilst learning how not to see. In admitting the abstraction on to the canvas, the painter must ensure that it is not always-already seen through the lens of conventional realism. Stevens, Edward Ragg writes, ‘would have recognised how the term “abstraction” accompanied Cézanne’; more specifically, he notes the sense in which Stevens’s poetry is also difficult to ‘see’, dealing in the ‘in-visible’ (Ragg 2010: 117). The same difficulty of seeing – or, alternatively, of being liberated from the necessity of translating words into something seen – applies, of course, to the abstraction of Stein’s Tender Buttons. 141

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‘An abstraction blooded’ carries further paradox. Abstraction and blood are conventional antitheses. To feel the ‘mere’ weather or air is to rob weather of its status as a generalisation or abstract concept, to ‘blood’ it; yet thought itself, cold abstraction by convention, ‘bloods’ a man. Charles Altieri’s reading of the phrase – ‘It is thoughts that circulate; humans then respond to them by giving them a range of emotional colourings’, connecting this with Stevens’s realisation in the 1940s that poetry must ‘take on the qualities of an abstract art’ (Altieri 1989: 323) – does not quite capture Stevens’s suggestion that thought, and abstraction, are already in the blood. Things in the abstract in ‘Notes’ come to a head in the stanzas that open the final, tenth section of It Must Be Abstract: The major abstraction is the idea of man And major man is its exponent, abler In the abstract than in his singular, More fecund as principle than particle, Happy fecundity, flor-abundant force, In being more than an exception, part, Though an heroic part, of the commonal. The major abstraction is the commonal, The inanimate, difficult visage. Who is it? (CPWS 388) ‘Major man’ may be the least felicitous of Stevens’s many attempts to figure the ideal, free-thinking human being who becomes the exponent of abstraction, the searcher after supreme fictions. Edward Ragg argues that the search for such overtly abstract, because in this case generalised, terms for the thinking, philosophical figure reached a watershed with ‘Notes’, where they include the ‘highest man’ or ‘highest self’ and the ‘platonic person’. In ‘Asides on the Oboe’, they are ‘central man’, a ‘human globe’ or ‘man of glass’, the ‘man who has had time to think enough’, the ‘impossible possible philosophers’ man’ (CPWS 250). Such terms will seem increasingly unappealing or unamenable to a twentyfirst-century criticism sensitised to the privilege of white androcentric discourse. They are a reminder of the customary male gendering of abstraction as an intellectual power of universalisation. My point is that in the preceding three stanzas, and ‘Notes’ as a whole, Stevens works to unsettle such figures of authority, as abstraction seems to slip free of its own identifications. To be ‘able’ or enabled in abstraction is also to be happily ‘fecund’ or a ‘florabundant force’, terms suggesting a vital naturalism. It is also to be a part of the ‘commonal’. Both work against the grain of the opening line insofar as ‘the 142

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major abstraction is the idea of man’ is ghosted by the humanist reproach of turning people into abstractions. ‘Commonal’ may also be an abstraction, but it resists the opening line by finding expression, in the section’s last stanzas, in the particular, a man with an old coat and sagging pantaloons. With ‘inanimate, difficult visage’ it seems we are back with the difficulty of what it is to be, ‘inanimate’ countermanding the previous, organic vitalism. Abstraction may be affirmed, but only insofar as it is not resolved into the merely affirmative. Instead, we find it variously coloured, or tempered, by idealism, fecundity, the organic, the common, the inorganic and difficulty. ‘The Poems, Though Philosophical, Are Never Philosophy’ So far we have seen in ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’ and in ‘Notes’ the apparent visibility of abstraction in Stevens undone by different invisibilities: the infinite deferral of abstraction beyond any actual poetry; abstraction as ‘first idea’, abolishing the distinction between invention and reality, perception and object-world; and abstraction’s multiple determinations. In these ways, associations with difficulty and impossibility begin to gather around abstraction in aesthetic modernism. As we have seen in Cézanne and Newman, and in Stein, so abstraction in Stevens becomes bound up in the idea of an antitheoretical theory. What needs to be said is undone in the saying; we need to see through unseeing; we need to know how not to know. Abstraction (as nonrepresentational art, or as an art that challenges realist epistemology) emerges to challenge abstraction (as generalised thought and knowledge). However, as already indicated, we can map this dualism of abstractions on to Stevens’s poetry, and in order to move towards that third thing, the thing that abstraction becomes in Stevens, it is worth recording how the dualism overtly troubled and worried Stevens. This may be focused by the notion that Stevens’s work has an important relation to philosophy, where again Kermode has been suggestive. ‘The poems’, Kermode declares, ‘though philosophical, are never philosophy,’ complaining also of those critics who have risked turning Stevens into a ‘bore’ by falling into the ‘trap’ of treating the poetry as a vehicle for philosophical thought (Kermode 1989: 76, xvii). Despite what we know to be, as in Gertrude Stein, a formative immersion in William James and Henri Bergson, and an awareness of Whitehead’s significance, Stevens denied that his own philosophical thought was ever trained or systematic. His prose writings invariably implied this through a candid attempt to explain what poetry is and does. ‘(W)e are dealing with poetry, not philosophy,’ he complained to Robert Pack, who had argued in a paper that Stevens’s work did not ‘really lead anywhere’: ‘The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulate a system’ (LWS 863–4). This, from the last year of his life, had been a steady refrain in response to literary criticism’s aspirations to make philosophical connections with his work. Abstraction could 143

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here loom up as the threat of ‘destroying a poem by explaining it’: ‘I suppose that there is an abstraction implicit in what is actually on the page’, he writes to Hi Simons in January 1940 of the poem ‘Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons’, and that it would be something like this: everything depends on its sanction; and when its sanction is lost that is the end of it. But the poem is precisely what is printed on the page. The poem is the absence of the archbishop, who is the personification or embodiment of a world (globe) of today and tomorrow, among fireflies. The true explanation of this poem is not to expose its abstract shadow or double, but to expose the absence of the archbishop, etc. among the fireflies. (LWS 347–8) The shadowy ghost of abstraction here is clearly the way generalisation could pose as explanation; Stevens’s opposition here compares both with Leavis’s to the philosopher and Cézanne’s to the littérateur. Abstraction would be what happened to his poetry if he was not careful enough to avoid slipping into academic modes of thought. To confess in a 1939 questionnaire that ‘I indulge in a good deal of abstraction’ was to warn about what he elsewhere described as the tendency of younger poets to be ‘bedevilled’ by abstraction (LWS 302; Stevens 1990: 310, 215). ‘Actually, they are not abstractions’, he defensively self-corrects, about nascent fragments of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, having just described them to Ronald Latimer as dealing with his then-perennial preoccupation, ‘the relation or balance between imagined things and real things’ (LWS 316). Stevens, then, knew the danger, and held often to the reproach of abstraction. ‘Abstraction is a part of idealism. It is in that sense that it is ugly,’ he ventured in Adagia (1990: 187). In the poems that made up Owl’s Clover, in which Stevens sought to engage with the political reality of economic depression in America, ugliness surfaces in the form of ‘abstract man’, hitched to other social concepts that are or have become clichés, ‘evasions like a repeated phrase’ bearing ‘A meaning without a meaning’ (Stevens 1990: 95). It is difficult, however, to distinguish the accusation of cliché from the clichéd vehicle of the ‘sterile rationalist’ itself that Stevens proposes: ‘We have grown weary of the man that thinks./He thinks and it is not true,’ the verse complains (Stevens 1990: 96–7). To the extent that this is obviously didactic, it unequivocally voices Steven’s fear of abstraction. Noting that many readers found him didactic, he continues: ‘My own idea about it is my real danger is not didacticism, but abstraction, and abstraction looks very much like didacticism. It may be because the didactic mind reduces the world to principles or uses abstractions’ (LWS 302). Owl’s Clover, described by Frank Kermode as ‘an almost total failure’ (Kermode 1989: 59), was excluded by Stevens from his final Collected Poems of 1954. ‘The momentum of the mind’, Stevens sketched in a notebook, ‘is all toward abstraction’ (Stevens 1990: 204). Yet abstraction was by no means entirely 144

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a cause for reproach. A pronouncement in the essay ‘Imagination as Value’ resonates with a passionate idealism for a modernist art of the abstract: ‘The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. The achievement of the romantic, on the contrary, lies in minor wish-fulfilments and it is incapable of abstraction’ (Stevens 1951: 139). This excitement is to be clearly distinguished in its modernism from merely romantic passions. Reflecting in the immediate postwar on the relation of poetry to politics in American public life (‘Today, in America, all roles yield to that of the politician’), Stevens demanded for poetry ‘an increasingly intellectual scope and power’; it was ‘a time for the highest poetry’ (LWS 526). He could hence complain about a merely ‘professional modernism’, as exemplified by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting which had opened in New York in 1939: what made the painterly abstractionists there ‘minor’ in comparison to Kandinsky or Paul Klee was, Stevens complained, that their work failed to communicate any sense of theoretical underpinning (LWS 647, 762–3). How, then, might this square with the caution, expressed to Ronald Latimer in 1936, that ‘poetry must limit itself in respect to intelligence. There is a point at which intelligence destroys poetry’ (LWS 305)? A theory of the anti-theoretical is at work again. From Adagia: ‘The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself’; ‘The poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man’; but, in particular, ‘Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully’ (Stevens 1990: 199, 187, 197). If, as Judith Brown notes, the latter is ‘frequently and fondly quoted’, this includes Stevens’s quotation of himself, mirroring the phrase in the prose of Adagia and in the poem ‘Man Carrying Thing’ (Brown 2009: 36). But how do we read this Stevensian touchstone? The phrase has a curious ability to seem to say what it does not say: inviting the Romantic assumption that poetry should, at the last gasp, always resist rational capture, it is actually an insistence on poetry’s final appeal to the intelligence. There is evidence that this is a source of delight for actual philosophers, who can find that an anti-philosophical aesthetic is precisely that which is philosophical in Stevens, and hence use the occasion of writing about him to experiment with a tone of personal affect. In his distinctive 2005 study Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Simon Critchley ardently voices what Stevens has meant to him, yet admits to a ‘performative contradiction’ (Critchley 2005: 20) insofar as his two central claims – that Stevens’s poetry contains ‘deep, consequent and instructive philosophical insight’, and that such insight is best expressed poetically rather than philosophically – cannot be grounded except in poetry itself. In Alain Badiou’s short essay ‘Drawing: On Wallace Stevens’, a certain rupture between philosophy and the aesthetic licenses Badiou (twice) to call Stevens’s poems ‘very beautiful’, and this extends to the projection of a transformative politics literally hitched to the title of Stevens’s poem ‘Description Without Place’ (Badiou 2014: 75, 82). In the poem, and in the act of 145

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drawing, Badiou finds an idea of art as description that ‘has no immediate relationship with a real that would be outside the description’: It is an artificial thing that exists, In its own seeming, plainly visible, Yet not too closely the double of our lives, Intenser than any actual life could be. (CPWS 344) ‘(T)oday, maybe,’ Badiou continues, ‘we have to create a new trend of politics, beyond the domination of places, beyond social, national, racial places, beyond gender and religion. A purely displaced politics, with absolute equality as its fundamental concept’ (Badiou 2014: 81). This includes a definition of art that Stevens has inspired in Badiou: ‘a mixture of violence, abstraction and final peace’ (82). Positioned between the violence it has been and the peace it might become, Badiou, or Stevens-via-Badiou, presents abstraction here as an elusive third term between two clear antitheses, artificial yet plain, and intenser than actual life. In the remainder of this chapter I want to suggest that this is the intensity of a newly inhuman abstraction. The Glamour of Abstraction To argue this case involves what amounts to my own affective proposition about abstraction in Stevens, and it starts in close dialogue with Judith Brown’s 2009 study Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form. Brown makes the confessedly ‘preposterous’ suggestion that Stevens, the insurance-executive poet, is ‘a poet of glamour, devoted to the inhuman appeal of language and the aesthetic object’ (Brown 2009: 36). I too see Stevens as a poet of glamour, and a glamour closely associated with abstraction, which is also an association that Brown makes. In Brown’s illuminating account of glamour as a distinctively modernist aesthetic, glamour’s abstraction is a mode of cool detachment, mirroring the distancing from experience that Marx projected in the money form and the shift from use-value to exchange-value. Glamour, for Brown, is another version of the modernist sublime, a detached and ethereal quality releasing pleasure through an uneasy alliance of beauty with commerce and deathliness. Nevertheless, the pleasures of a glamour that feminises the abstract violence of modernity can float relatively free of their material base in money, presenting an alternative to what Brown sees as Theodor Adorno’s furious condemnation of the commercialisation of culture: as Brown puts it, ‘Glamour and commodity – yes, but not only, and not necessarily’ (13). Brown’s fine illustration of glamour in D. H. Lawrence’s depictions of industrialised communities reveals ‘the very queerness’ and complexity of this negative aesthetic: in Women in Love, the Brangwen sisters observe a ‘strange glamour’ or ‘glamorous thickness of labour and maleness’ in the miners, who 146

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bear ‘a look of abstraction and half resignation’ and whose voices have a deep resonance ‘like a machine’s burring’, as if belonging to ‘another world’ (quoted in Brown 2009: 14). The glamour of these voices, Brown notes, mingles with the violent technologisation that has required the men’s labour, yet suggests that they ‘may still emerge with a dignity imbued with beauty’ (14). My divergence from Brown relates very precisely, however, to the reproduction of a time-honoured reproach of abstraction in its cold and deathly inhumanness. Brown locates the glamour of Stevens’s poetry, its characteristic transformation of materiality into ethereal affect or pleasurable disappearance, in an analogy with Chanel No. 5: both the poetry and the perfume involve an aesthetic that ‘finds its ideal conditions in the clean (synthetic, cold, abstract) lines of high modernism’ (1). Stevens’s is a ‘chilled verse’, ‘elegant and abstract’ (23–4). Glamour, Brown confirms, ‘is cold, indifferent, and deathly; it relies on abstraction’, where abstraction is ‘the moving away from the object with the aid of the imagination into the unreal’ (5, 42). It is true that abstraction in Stevens draws on the metaphor of cold, as I will go on to show. But the glamour of this abstraction needs also to be revalued, modifying its temperature and destabilising the habitual reproach of abstraction. I start instead with the idea that Stevens’s poetry casts a glamour over two domains that it brings into relation: the natural world and the life of intellectual enquiry. Starting with the former, recourse to D. H. Lawrence here might instead be to the role of sensation in the early passionate life of Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers, not only in the ‘glamour’ of the love affair with Miriam Leivers but in its pastoral scenario, with birds singing and ‘Tiny buds on the hedges, vivid as copper-green’, that could constitute ‘a new, glamorous world’ (Lawrence 1992: 196, 174). The language of Stevens’s poetry casts its own ‘vivid’ allure (‘To give a sense of the freshness or vividness of life is a valid purpose for poetry’ [Stevens 1990: 184). Stevens’s natural world is selectively populated by sun, stars, summer and sea, elements that express a metaphorical affinity with the spaces and pleasures of adventuring in thought. Colours are primary or pure, just on the verge of being too bright to believe in – something akin to what Steven Shaviro sees in the later poetry as ‘a dazzling clarity in ceaseless agitation’ (Shaviro 1985: 220). ‘Can we live on dry descriptions?’, enquires ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’, in attending to ‘the colors/Birds and people of this too voluminous/Air-earth’ (CPWS 277–8). Stevens, then, is perhaps more willing than Lawrence to have this natural glamour coloured by its artificial counterpart; what Stevens famously called ‘the essential gaudiness of poetry’ (LWS 263) is not required to hide its artifice. ‘Messieurs,/It is an artificial world’ emerges from the ‘Academy of Fine Ideas’ (CPWS 252); ‘Man . . . fabricates by abstraction’, Stevens later garnered from Paul Valéry’s ‘Eupalinos or the Architect’ dialogue [Valéry 1989: xiii, 121]). This gaudy allure is what feels in Stevens like something with designs on us, something to sell. If abstraction is the invisible affect of commodity culture, and 147

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if money is a kind of poetry (or poetry a kind of money), the reader–consumer encounters something enticingly untrustworthy in Stevens’s poems, like the pull of a commodity we should not really want but do. We could call this packaging and marketing, as in the provocations that populate the titles of Stevens’s poems and which, as we have seen in ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’, may figure an uncertain or oblique relationship between surface and substance. What is really beneath the packaging? What Stevens packages, it seems, is that which should resist packaging: the natural world, but also the life of the mind. Stevens filled his poetry with references to the academy and its practices, by way of casting a ‘singular romance’ over intellectual life, ‘This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea’, the poems thereby haunted by ‘academies like structures in a mist’ (CPWS 256, 386). His titles place the academies in proximity with their characteristic activities – ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas’ – or figure intellectual activities themselves – ‘The Pure Good of Theory’, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘Six Significant Landscapes’, ‘A Completely New Set of Objects’, ‘Attempt to Discover Life’, ‘Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself’ – and ‘The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract’. The thing in Stevens that we should not really want but nevertheless do is abstraction, or to be abstract, a possibility presented to the reader in the varied forms of invitation, imperative or provocation. Being abstract stands for an artifice that is in vivid relationship with the natural world and, in a curiously welcoming or hospitable Stevensian way, with the difficulty that this creates. It becomes a term for his poetry’s peculiar combination of the gaudy and the plain (Critchley 2005: 20), glamour and meditative reflection, manner and the retreat from manner. We are invited into a struggle, which carries its own difficult pleasure. Knowing this abstraction can arise only from being immersed in Stevens’s poems and encountering ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ as words in poetry. As such, ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ are required to work for their living in a poetical way, or meet the fate of the prosaicism that makes reading ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ such a faltering experience. Stevens’s theory of the love of words as an act of listening to their unalterable vibration was not merely a metaphor for interpretation, but carried a literal dimension: ‘words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds’ (Stevens 1951: 32). Is it frivolous to suggest that the appeal of ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ in Stevens lies, in part, in their sound? In a touching retrospective essay, the critic J. Hillis Miller recalls hearing Stevens reading his poetry at Harvard around 1950. Stevens became ‘more and more carried away’, oblivious to his growing inaudibility, people leaving, and the clamour of ambulances and fire engines in the street outside. Much later, Hillis Miller writes, he took this experience into his own reading of Stevens, in a tendency to ‘murmur . . . like incantations’ certain lines 148

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‘where the sound of the words exceeds, or almost exceeds, their sense’ (Hillis Miller 2008: 24). Hillis Miller’s examples are Stevens’s ‘hoo-hoo-hoo’s, ‘ric-anic’s and ‘Hoy, hoy’s, where the poet most closely approaches the sonic anarchy of Dada. But the Stevensian words are also often prosaic ones – the ‘particular’s, for example, that I conveniently passed over in the second stanza of ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ (how to see them as part of a poetic texture?); or, in the poetry as a whole, the ‘abstract’s. Does this, to borrow from ‘Academic Discourse at Havana’, reduce ‘the function of the poet’ to ‘mere sound’ (CPWS 144)? Yet if Stevens is serious in his theory of the intensity of poetic language, no word may remain what, ironically enough, is sometimes called in everyday discourse an abstract counter, a mere placeholder of meaning. This theory of a sonic abstraction in Stevens cannot, of course, be proved, but only proposed, as part of the poetry’s glamour. My suggestion, contra Kermode, is that liking Stevens is about liking abstraction, and that Stevens’s effort to make that affection happen is under way through sensation, in the sound and glamour of his poetry. Re-acquainted with the word’s sound by its specific belonging in Stevens’s poems, and the glamour of this, the reader may, as in Mina Loy’s estimation of Gertrude Stein’s writing, experience it washed relatively clean and new. As in Stein, abstraction in Stevens is on the way to somewhere else or may be, as ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’ suggests, always-already somewhere else. If sound is one factor, temperature may be another. Edward Ragg notes the oscillation between ‘cool’ and ‘warm’ abstractions in Stevens, as one way of suggesting how this affect works. But ultimately this gauge is a rather-too-human measure of abstraction, and fails to identify abstraction’s potential in Stevens for the movement into description without place, beyond recognised scales. Here I want to resume a closer reading of the work or play of abstraction across Stevens’s poems. Cold and warm are, indeed, Stevensian elements. In ‘Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery’, a poem in which it is ‘too cold for work, now, in the fields’, the act of thought provokes mild satire at the expense of ‘man the abstraction, the comic sum’ (CPWS 151, 156). Part IV of ‘The Academy of Fine Ideas’ similarly evokes a winter cold ‘since December’ but one that is now, on a ‘feeble day’ in early April, beginning to thaw. Stevens’s persona wonders about the water in the lake:                          If, When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white Against the edge of the ice, the abstraction would Be broken and winter would be broken and done, And being would be being himself again, Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self, Black water breaking into reality. (CPWS 255) 149

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In a repeated trope, abstraction’s cold is also that of statuary and its idealism, the ‘marbles’ of the heroic figure of Xenophon in ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’ (henceforth ‘Examination’), for example, ‘like a white abstraction only’, a marble that is later ‘soiled by pigeons’ (CPWS 276, 278). What might it mean, however, to break abstraction and its winter? May there be an abstraction that remains, becoming something warmer, an abstraction that is no longer abstraction? ‘Examination’ explores this dilemma by using and dismantling the rhetoric of abstract, anthropomorphic heroism. The poem angles its way towards the sense that heroism need not be monumentalised but must instead be rethought so that the ‘highest man’ has ‘nothing higher/Than himself’, studying ‘the paper/On the wall, the lemons on the table’ but in this way conjoined with the elements, ‘Man-sun, man-moon, manearth, man-ocean’ (CPWS 280). ‘The hero is not a person’, not only because heroes are usually monumentalised, but also because ‘It’ (the impersonal is now important) ‘is a feeling./There is no image of the hero’ (CPWS 278). A difficult conjunction is being attempted, in which the hero is never more than a demotic ordinary, the highest self arriving at the man-man, yet existing thereby as potential or ‘feeling’: ‘It is a part of his conception,/That he be not conceived, being real’ (CPWS 279). In the poem’s final stanza, it is a moment of Stevensian bathos to encounter: ‘After the hero, the familiar/Man makes the hero artificial’ (CPWS 280). What is disappointingly ‘familiar’ here is the easy recourse to a reproach of abstraction as artificial; the ghost of a reproachful cold abstraction materialises again. We know, after all, that Stevens embraces artifice, and my argument about glamour has been that he wants to persuade us to love it. The lines traduce what the poem has otherwise said, which is something more difficult, as in the earlier formulation from stanza XII: ‘Instead of allegory’, which is, for Stevens, also a mode of abstraction, We have and are the man, capable Of his brave quickenings, the human Accelerations that seem inhuman. (CPWS 279) The familiar man is precisely one capable of unforeseen becomings, brave quickenings and accelerations that are human in seeming inhuman. ‘Paisant Chronicle’ resumes this enquiry, or struggle, in a more succinct way. The hero has now become ‘the major man’, contrasted with that ‘chronicle of humanity’ in which platitudinous abstractions about ordinary heroism are satirised through blank repetition: ‘All men are brave’, ‘Nations live to be admired by nations’ (CPWS 334) and so on. Of the major men, ‘that is different’; they are composed of reality but beyond it, ‘fictive’ and ‘artificial’ yet ‘created out of men’, ‘Nothing in which it is not possible to believe’ (CPWS 335). The ‘baroque 150

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poet’ threatens to reduce this major man into abstraction, seeing him ‘as still a man/As Virgil, abstract’. Invited by the poem to see major man for ourselves instead, however, we find him, in conclusion, ‘seated in/A café. There may be a dish of country cheese/And a pineapple on the table. It must be so’ (CPWS 335). This is the return of the old man in pantaloons, a figure of the abstract to confuse and confound expectations. It contrasts deeply with that in ‘A Thought Revolved’, a poem Kermode finds to be ‘deeply concerned with the abstract’ (Kermode 1989: 65). Here is the self-parodic poet, ‘striding among the cigar stores’, lunch and insurance thrown in for good measure, and denying ‘that abstraction is a vice except/To the fatuous’ (CPWS 185). The poet is also the ‘moralist hidalgo’, a figure of minor Spanish nobility without landed entitlement, seemingly reinvented by Stevens as the vaguely arriviste modern bourgeois, combining money and abstraction. This may be the abstraction of a ‘middling beast’, yet it is still ‘The true abstract in which he promenades’, the space of ‘One man, the idea of man’, walking where ‘the cloak and speech’ of Virgil (again figuring as a kind of ‘old’ abstract) have been ‘dropped’ (CPWS 185). The hidalgo is duly to reappear in the long, late poem ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ as both ‘permanent’ and ‘abstract’ (CPWS 484). Artifice and authenticity are not, then, irreconcilable opposites in Stevens; the persona of ‘A Thought Revolved’ is a gaudy figure indeed, yet also a searcher after this truer abstract, seeking to ‘outsoar’ possible adjectives and to ‘hymn’ ‘the struggle of the idea of god/And the idea of man’, ‘Happy rather than holy but happy-high’, a man ‘Of men whose heaven is in themselves’ (CPWS 185–6). The personae and attributes of abstraction shift restlessly in these poems, pointing instead beyond subjectivity, towards ‘human accelerations that seem inhuman’. Remembering ‘an abstraction blooded’, we might say that a palpable warmingup of abstraction, ‘This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea’, is one of the affective ways in which Stevens’s poetry persuades us to feel and hear abstraction differently. However, the very early poem ‘The Snow Man’ suggests that Stevens from the start demands a less familiar critical paradigm for abstraction than these more humanistic responses might provide. ‘The Snow Man’ opens with its own cool or cold imperative: ‘One must have a mind of winter’ (CPWS 9). It is a way of transforming the experience of an icy snowbound place in the January sun, as in beholding and hearing it: it is necessary ‘not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind’, but rather to feel the frost and snow with the environment itself, to ‘have been cold a long time’ (CPWS 10). Johanna Skibsrud argues, however, that the poem demonstrates poetry’s capacity for what Michael Eskin called ‘unsaying’ ontology, its ability to question, as well as to affirm, what it might mean to speak of human being at all (Skibsrud 2019: 103). ‘The Snow Man’ ‘negates’ the ‘coherent human subject’, Skibsrud argues, by releasing the human from the idea of 151

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simple presence and the concept of the ‘abstract transcendental subject’ that guarantees it (103, 106). The fifth and final stanza thus arrives at: . . . the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (CPWS 10) As Skibsrud puts it, Stevens here ‘resists merely re-branding “nothing” as “something” (and vice versa)’ (Skibsrud 2019: 106). The deft double negative shows how this ‘something’ can be resisted, and how a nothing can be, without being something; it thus offers an alignment with the ‘Nothing in which it is not possible to believe’ of ‘Paisant Chronicle’, and the ‘It is and it/is not and, therefore, is’ of ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ (CPWS 440). It is intriguing therefore to observe the play of abstraction across Skibsrud’s two readings of the poem. In the reading above, the poem is seen to critique a transcendent, and therefore abstract, human subjectivity; Skibsrud finds that ‘Poetic truth is processual: (I)t is not an abstract order of knowledge’, aspiring beyond the latter to an ‘actual, material’ potential, ‘a sort of “non-writing” that is also an ethics’ (105). In an earlier essay, however, observing that Stevens’s three postwar collections had been ‘criticized heavily for their increasing abstraction’, Skibsrud instead writes affirmatively that abstraction is supremely exemplified in the ‘nothing that is’ of ‘The Snow Man’ (Skibsrud 2012: 72). Taking ‘the reality-imagination complex . . . beyond its human scope’ (John B. Serio, quoted by Skibsrud), the poem, she argues, makes blankness into ‘a spaciousness as such’ (80). This space, the virtual space of poetry as figured perhaps by Ben Lerner, is also, for Skibsrud, a space that we can call abstract. It is entirely in keeping with abstraction’s contradictory work that there are two versions of abstraction in play here in Skibsrud’s sensitive readings, that which threatens Stevens’s unsaying of ontology and that which affirms it. We can in turn affirm both, by calling ‘nothing himself’ and ‘the nothing that is’ movingly abstract in their struggle to figure an ontology beyond human being, whilst noting thereby their undoing of the counter-abstractions of anthropomorphism. Why Bring in the Giant? Abstraction and the Inhuman The touchstone status of the following stanza from ‘Chocorua to its Neighbour’ is confirmed in Simon Critchley’s use of it as the epigraph to his study of Wallace Stevens: To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that, also, cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech. (CPWS 300) 152

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In their resonant balance, these lines demand to be read as a moving endorsement of humanism. We can only be human, but that is enough; it will ‘suffice’, as two poems from Parts of a World (‘Man and Bottle’ and ‘Of Modern Poetry’) put it of the search for an appropriate modern poetry (CPWS 238–9). In fact, it is ‘acutest speech’. ‘It Must Be Human’ is the section that never appeared in ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, yet which Stevens thought ‘for a long time’ of including (LWS 863). When Stevens set the spiritual nobility of his poetry against a ‘world of universal poverty’ (Stevens 1954: 152), it is hard not to hear a conspicuously moralised high modernist rearguard defence of the human against a barbarous modernity. In more practical and open manner, poetry’s nobility lay, Stevens insisted, in its ability to ‘help people to live their lives’ (Stevens 1951: 31). However, it does not go against the spirit of Stevens to say that this humanist hermeneutic is misplaced or misapplied. In the lines from ‘Chocorua’, a mesmeric effect is evident in the incantations of ‘human’, and by the fifth line, our conceptual grip may be loosening: what is the human, really? To speak humanly of human things may not be to speak of the ‘more than’ human; but just as ‘it must be abstract’, so the human abstract must be to speak of the inhuman, because the human is also this inhuman, and abstraction’s work is and has been to remind us of this. Harold Bloom detected a ‘considerable unease of spirit’ (Bloom 1980: 189) around humanism in Stevens’s musings in a letter of 12 January 1943: The trouble with humanism is that man as God remains man, but there is an extension of man, the leaner being, in fiction, a possibly more than human human, a composite human. The act of recognizing him is the act of this leaner being moving in on us. (LWS 434) The alternative to humanism’s deified man is a leaner extension, still human and yet, here, ‘possibly more than’. What is it, in that curious epistolary locution, to recognise this leaner being ‘moving in on us’? Four months later, Stevens wrote to Henry Church that ‘The chief defect of humanism is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else, it might be possible to create an acceptable fiction’ (LWS 449). This sense that it is possible to create an unknown and as yet undifferentiated space through art, a ‘spaciousness as such’ (Skibsrud), is that which might be filled by making abstraction an acceptable fiction. The human is absent from this space, or occupies it only in unprecedented conjunction with the inhuman. A glamorous or alluring abstraction is Stevens’s way of attracting his reader to the inhuman and its strange novelty, giving it a stronger appeal and/or sound than the human – in the form of another Stevensian touchstone, from ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, ‘a tune beyond us, yet ourselves’ (CPWS 165). In speculating on that missing section 153

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of ‘Notes’, ‘It Must Be Human’, Joseph Riddell in 1967 found ‘beneath the abstractions and impersonality and despite the philosophical distancing’ that the ‘place apart’ of Stevens’s poetry was ‘the place where we all live, in the human center, while trying to live beyond ourselves’ (Riddell 1967: 534). We might now say that the place apart is that of abstraction, allowing us to speak humanly of the inhuman that we also are. Let us consider what ‘The Latest Freed Man’ is freed from and how. Sitting on the edge of his bed at six in the morning, he has ‘just/Escaped from the truth’ (CPWS 204). The truth is defined, in a Steinian way, as what is already known or done: ‘old descriptions of the world’, ‘the doctrine of this landscape’. Instead there is the reality of the morning’s colour and mist, rain, sea and sun. But the man is also freed from the truth of himself. Doc-trines have doc-tors; we discover that he is a doctor, but released ‘To be without a description of to be’, just before the poem takes a typically Stevensian swerve: For a moment on rising, at the edge of the bed, to be, To have the ant of the self changed to an ox With its organic boomings, to be changed From a doctor into an ox, before standing up, To know that the change and that the ox-like struggle Come from the strength that is the strength of the sun, Whether it comes directly or from the sun. (CPWS 205) Humanistically, in the metaphorical change from ant to ox the doctor discovers strength. But the insistence of ‘to be changed/From a doctor into an ox’ calls up Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of becoming-animal, a condition of neither metaphor nor resemblance nor literal change. Becoming-animal registers the possibility of unforeseen change and difference, the possibility that we might be entirely other than ourselves, inhuman as well as human. The doctor both is and is not the ox. The ox is an ‘ox-like struggle’ to be freed from self-identity, a nothing that is not, and is: being an ox is ‘being without description’ (CPWS 205). The ox is an unprecedented thing encountered in Stevens’s poem, just as Alain Badiou argues: ‘What is a blue guitar? It is the poetical intensity of the thing “guitar” in the work of Stevens, in the artificial world created in language by Stevens’ (Badiou 2014: 80). The sun also exists ‘without a description of to be’, in a way that anticipates the abstraction of the first idea in ‘Notes’, ‘the difficulty of what it is to be’. Yet beyond ontological enigma or, as Shaviro puts it, the ‘peculiar’ double sense that the real is also the invented (Shaviro 1985: 223), the sun in Stevens is always also the originating source of material life on earth. Strength may come ‘directly’ or from the sun; it already makes up our bodies, an ontology of energy shared with the sun. ‘When was it that the particles became/The whole man . . .?’, asks 154

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‘Things of August’ in The Auroras of Autumn (CPWS 494). Stevens’s poetry is regularly fascinated with the material fact of particles coming together to constitute temporary wholes, thinking subjects, ‘composite human(s)’. This is the ‘rendezvous’ of ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’, from The Rock. The lighting of the first candle of evening signals a moment of togetherness and meditative calm in which ‘The world imagined is the ultimate good’ (CPWS 524). There is the possibility that ‘we’ is a couple, ‘a single shawl wrapped tightly round us’; in acknowledging this ‘very beautiful poem’, Alain Badiou seems persuaded that its final line, ‘In which being there together is enough’, even models a future politics of community. However, the poem is also soliloquy and internal drama: ‘we’ are the miracle of the self’s coalescence, by which ‘we collect ourselves,/Out of all the indifferences, into one thing’, the ‘intensest rendezvous’ ‘arranged’ by ‘the obscurity of an order’. To think in this way is ‘to forget each other and ourselves’, to think the human other than as a self at precisely a moment when that selfhood and its intelligence seem to be experienced most intensely. The answer of ‘Things of August’ to its question unsettles causality: it happens ‘In the presence of a solitude of the self’, An expanse and the abstraction of an expanse, A zone of time without the ticking of clocks, A color that moved us with forgetfulness. (CPWS 494) The poem sustains a fascination with the relation of intelligence to the ‘soil’ that is found in the early poem ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, where ‘Crispin’, a prototype of the Stevensian intellectual adventurer or ‘introspective voyager’ (CPWS 29), strives to ‘make a new intelligence prevail’ (CPWS 27, 36, 37). If the self is an abstraction, it is one of expansion rather than contraction, wrapping us into an involuntary Bergsonian durée beyond the human scenarios of time and place, yet one in which the agency or self-hood is fully a part of abstraction’s expanse. We may sit in a park and see ‘archaic’ forms and spaces, ‘giants of sense’ evoking the possibility of the ‘impersonal person’; ‘The world images for the beholder’, but the implications need to be posed as urgent questions: ‘The inhuman as human? That which thinks not,/Feels not, resembling thought, resembling feeling?’ (CPWS 493). The human may exist in this, but ‘never as himself’; we transcribe ‘A text of intelligent men/At the centre of the unintelligible’ (CPWS 495). In the face of the dialectic between the entirely everyday nature of this abstraction and its unintelligibility, Stevens showed an awareness of its potential inaccessibility – that is, that what obstructs the possible philosopher’s man, as fully as Marx’s industrial worker–reader, might be the possession of time enough to read and to think. In a letter of 1940, Stevens expressed his belief in ‘doing everything practically possible to improve the condition of the workers’ 155

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and ‘in education as the source of freedom and power’ (LWS 351). Even as it figures intellectual and artistic authority, Stevens’s poetry is fashioning their undoing, the democratic distribution of their privileges and faculties. There is the (impossible?) projection that everyone might became the philosopher’s man, and thereby, curiously, as a man-man, or a ‘Man on the Dump’ (CPWS 201). The philosophical corollary of this levelling is not, however, merely anthropomorphic: the ordinary person comes into possession of an ‘expanse’ of abstraction that equips them to think the inhuman. The preoccupations of Stevens’s poetry with the inhuman, mainly but not exclusively in the later work, comes, let us say, to ‘an abstraction given head’ (CPWS 443) in the inscrutable figure of the giant. In the humanist touchstone of ‘Chocorua’, Kermode notes that the words are the giant’s, and that ‘the giant is human’ (Kermode 1989: 93). But this is too easy; it would be more appropriate to ask, as Charles Altieri does in his discussion of ‘Large Red Man Reading’, ‘why bring in the giant’ at all? (Altieri 1989: 355). The range of the giant’s appearances and connotations across Stevens’s poetry can induce bewilderment. Ironically, in ‘Large Red Man Reading’ the giant is not named but, as Altieri proposes, is present as the collective experience of listening to speech and the practice of reading aloud, taking the reader to a ‘threshold’ at which modernism enters into a ‘commonal’ or common life. We have already seen the ‘giant of the weather’ and the giants of ‘sense’. In ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’, the ‘giant himself’ is a revival of the cosmological question of the sun’s power – ‘Of what is this house composed if not of the sun’ (CPWS 465). ‘Gigantomachia’ attempts to give a post-mythological anchoring, evoking the warring struggles of giants as ‘soldiers’, earthbound creatures of enhanced powers against the Olympian gods. The soldier in his mass identity becomes ‘the being that was an abstraction,/A giant’s heart in the veins, all courage’ (CPWS 289). When ‘Each man himself became a giant,/ Tipped out with largeness’, receiving ‘out of others’ ‘mask’, ‘spirit’ and ‘accoutrement’, the sheer capacity of gigantism feels more realised, as if acquired ‘from an inhuman elevation/And origin, an inhuman person’ (CPWS 289). But for this obscure, perhaps ‘practice’ poem, little noticed in Stevens’s oeuvre, the contradictory work of abstraction is too literal and didactic to take us far. In ‘A Primitive Like An Orb’, however, the giant turns up fully formed, muscular and of massive propositions, but also as the conception of the ultimate abstract poem, variously referenced as the ‘essential poem’, the ‘central poem’ and ‘The poem of the composition of the whole’ (CPWS 440, 442). The commonality of this wholeness is the actuality-as-potential of all existing poetry, the unity of poet and poem in ‘The joy of language, when it is themselves’, and a connection with the universe of earth, sky, trees, cloud, ‘The composition of blue sea and of green,/Of blue light and of green’ (CPWS 441–2). The condition of this abstract poem may, therefore, be real, but it is not actual; as we 156

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have seen, its actuality is only glimpsed, ‘seen and known’ in ‘lesser poems’. The giant is the need to have this theory of poetry embodied in poetic form; it is ‘on the horizon, glistening’, ‘not/Too exactly labelled’, while the individual poet is a ‘tenacious particle’ amongst other eager and desirous aesthetes – painters, lovers, ‘believers’ – who together constitute ‘the giant of nothingness, each one/ And the giant ever changing, living in change’ (CPWS 443). So why bring in the giant? ‘As we occupy that threshold’, writes Altieri of a practice of reading in ‘Large Red Man Reading’ that opens out into a more intense collectivity, ‘it is crucial to realize that the state we entertain is not at all abstract, in the old sense of abstraction’; it is ‘the elemental, returned to the most concrete of verbal activities’ (Altieri 1989: 356). ‘Giant’ signifies powerful, but ungraspable, capacity; it cannot easily be assigned in Stevens either to individual or to collective subjectivity. In what often feels like the awkward attempt to reconfigure heroism and leadership as qualities of the common, ‘giant’ perhaps suggests a potentiality beyond merely human exceptionalism. Towards the end of ‘A Primitive Like An Orb’, the human yearning for the ultimate abstract poem turns into this inhuman giant, an ‘abstraction given head’ (CPWS 443). No more than ‘major men’ is this a felicitous phrase, but it is soon undone to register the abstract possibilities inherent in nothingness and perpetual change. As Lisa Siraganian puts it, there is a sense, surrounding the uneasy cultural politics of these ‘central man’ figures, that Stevens is always wanting them to undo ‘imperialist and fascistic’ implications (Siraganian 2011: 355). Does the giant resist the intelligence almost successfully? Stevens’s project of inhuman abstraction is always ultimately a project of shared human intelligence, embodying in the giant the belief, henceforth infused into an affected, impassioned reader, that ‘everyone with an imagination can participate in the sensibility of major man’ (Altieri 2013: 250). This notion of a democratic imagination is a faculty of expanded intellect, something towards which abstraction as a poetic word in Stevens strives and travels.

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6

‘THE PROUSTIAN EQUATION IS NEVER SIMPLE’: SAMUEL BECKETT

Réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits? Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (1986: 263) What a relief the Mont Ste. Victoire after all the anthropomorphised landscape . . . Cézanne seems to have been the first to see landscape & state it as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with no velleities of vitalism, landscape with personality à la rigueur, but personality in its own terms . . . Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy, 8 September 1934 (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 222) What I feel he gets so well, dispassionately, not tragically like Watteau, is the heterogeneity of nature & the human denizens, the unalterable alienness of the 2 phenomena . . . God knows it doesn’t take much sensitiveness to feel that in Ireland, a nature almost as inhumanly inorganic as a stage set. And perhaps that is the final quale of Jack Yeats’s painting, a sense of the ultimate inorganism of everything. Watteau stressed it with busts & urns, his people are mineral in the end. A painting of pure inorganic juxtapositions, where nothing can be taken or given & there is no possibility of change or exchange. Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy, 14 August 1937 (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 540) 158

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As with Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, so it seems impossible to dissociate Samuel Beckett’s work from abstraction. A common proposition is to see that work as an inexorable approach to abstraction. So, for Peter Boxall, Beckett’s fiction moves from ‘the slightly bent realism of Dream and Murphy, through the increasingly abstract realms of Watt, the Nouvelles and the trilogy’; Tim Lawrence notes how this has long been seen as a matter of Beckett’s prose style, moving ‘from relative plenitude to one of abstract minimalism’ (Boxall 2015: 39; Lawrence 2015: 57). Steven Connor reports that Beckett’s oeuvre is ‘often said to have moved progressively away from the material world and its conditions, and to have withdrawn into various different kinds of subjectivism and abstraction’ (Connor 1988: 44). The association Connor identifies between subjectivism and abstraction recalls the role of abstraction in Georg Lukács’s critique of an ideology of literary modernism, where the retreat into the monadological self is also a retreat away from ‘the material world’. On this basis, Lukács was able to mount a heavily moralised critique of Beckett’s art in which abstraction, along the lines of a certain recognisable Marxism, is a mode of de-humanisation: Beckett’s Molloy presented, for Lukács, an image of ‘the utmost human degradation’ (Lukács 1963: 31). Yet Connor, in seeing Beckett’s art moving at the same time in a contrary direction, ‘towards an ever more intense awareness of the predicament of immanence’ (45), does not acknowledge the sense in which this contrary road also leads to abstraction. We have seen how immanence itself may become a defining characteristic of modernist abstraction, an aesthetic autonomy of paint or words that is also, and affirmatively, a form of materiality. It hardly seems surprising, then, for Erik Tonning, in his study of Beckett’s post-1962 works for stage and screen, to see abstraction as ‘indispensable’ to an understanding of Beckett’s work, yet ‘far from self-explanatory’ (Tonning 2007: 13). In the previous chapters I have implicated abstraction in the kinds of literary criticism that Stein and Stevens call forth. Beckett raises by a notch the issue of an appropriate criticism, through an overt and often beautifully funny resistance to the critical explication of his work. As Nina Power and Alberto Toscano suggest, a certain sense of illegitimacy or impossibility haunts the world of Beckett scholarship: it may be ‘impossible to assert anything at all about Beckett’ if every possible assertion has been anticipated and negated by Beckett’s writing itself, leaving critics with ‘nothing left to do’ (Badiou 2003: xiii). Simon Critchley notes Beckett always ‘pulling the rug out’ from under the philosopher, making his work ‘perhaps uniquely, resistant to philosophical interpretation’; as Jacques Derrida asked, by way of a surprisingly overt neglect of Beckett, how could a philosophical discourse on Beckett avoid ‘the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage’? (Critchley 2004: 165–6; and quoted in Critchley 2004: 170). An appropriate response might be Beckett’s reported exchange with Gabriel D’Aubarède in 1961, which I borrow here from S. E. Gontarski, concerning 159

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philosophy and the possibility that the existentialist preoccupation with being was the key to his work. Beckett: ‘I wouldn’t have had any reason to write my novels if I could have expressed their subject in philosophic terms.’ His reason for writing, then? ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I’m no intellectual. All I am is feeling’ (cited in Gontarski 2014: 2). This is a characteristic combination of mischief (especially the additional assertion that he never read philosophers because ‘I never understand anything they write’) and sincerity. Beckett was undeniably an intellectual, with a more institutional scholarly and academic formation than we find in either Stein or Stevens. He was immersed in philosophy (which he briefly taught at university) and aesthetics, and as his letters and diaries amply demonstrate, was fully attuned to the debates around modernist abstraction we have explored in Chapter 3. He knew, perhaps more than Stein and Stevens did of their own work, that as his art emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, modernist cultures were waiting to welcome that art as abstract. Beckett had an insider’s sense of why it was important to be an outsider, and could inhabit both positions, combining erudition and laughter and knowing why the one mattered as much as the other. Abstraction was also coming to be inside-outside, an official discourse of modernism yet in the process of being rewritten, as I have tried to show in Stein and Stevens, as something beyond itself. While there is certainly an extant critical field on Beckett and abstraction, then, there is always also Beckett, wondering what it is we are doing and why we think we should be doing it. What is it that we want to say about Beckettian abstraction, and what is our reason for saying it? In criticism’s characteristic search for keynote quotations, one such fragment has figured heavily, a reported comment made by Beckett in an interview with John Gruen in 1964, which Gruen then retranscribed for Vogue in 1969: I think that I have perhaps freed myself from certain formal concepts. Perhaps, like the composer Schoenberg or the painter Kandinsky, I have turned toward an abstract language. Unlike them, however, I have tried not to concretize the abstraction – not to give it yet another formal context. (Gruen 1969: 210) Perhaps we seize on this because it is not the Beckett of ‘All I am is feeling’, perhaps not the Beckett we expect at all, but instead one who is prepared to lay out his thoughts on abstraction in a way amenable to scholarly assimilation. Given the suspicion of the ‘formal’, we sense through Gruen’s transcription Beckett’s reluctance, in turn, to formalise his own position. Yet with regard to what Beckett meant or thought he meant by ‘abstract language’, a grounding in the experimentalisms of Schoenberg and Kandinsky is evident in his writings of the 1930s and 1940s. Trying not to concretise or formalise the abstraction 160

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was Beckett’s way of sharing the widely held suspicion of ‘abstraction’ – for example, as a pure art of unworldly formalism – as this notion was discussed in Chapter 3. However, to adopt the Beckettian injunction against interpretation risks the assumption that criticism is always of the imperialistic and hermeneutically suspicious variety. In his fine study of Beckett, Garin Dowd notes Jacques Rancière’s commentary upon literary criticism’s inherently problematic ‘presumption of a hermeneutic right’; philosophy in this way gets ventriloquised through literature, speaking in the name of what is otherwise a ‘mute utterance’ (Dowd 2007: 47–8). But what if there were a criticism, a mode of commentary on Beckett’s abstraction, for example, that consciously rejected the superiority of a metadiscourse, seeking instead to accompany the primary material in its own way? What would such a criticism look like? If it followed the lines of the Steinian ventriloquism I identified in Chapter 4, it would look and sound more . . . Beckettian. Dowd is sensitive to the slight of Beckett’s also notorious observation of the ‘loutishness of learning’ in academic criticism, regarding it as uncharitable. But ‘loutishness’, as I have suggested, emerges from Beckett’s own scholarly position, and is perhaps more affectionate than Dowd allows; it takes one to know one, Beckett implies. In this chapter I take Beckett as a critical thinker, one who started writing as a literary critic and who, as Mark Nixon has argued, saw art, including visual art, as an inherently critical activity (Nixon 2015: 84). Abstraction helps to shape this thought, as I track it across three texts: Beckett’s first publication, the 1929 essay ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico .. Joyce’; his ‘brilliant’ (Badiou 2003: 67) short book on Proust (1931, in Beckett and Duthuit 1965); and Three Dialogues, authored with Georges Duthuit in 1949. A transition is in evidence, from abstraction as critical reproach, to an embrace of abstract visual art in a mode of writing that calls to mind the associations that have been made, pre-eminently by Garin Dowd, between Beckett’s work and Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of an ‘abstract machine’. At the heart of this transition I place the Proustian formula for the phenomenon of involuntary memory with which Beckett directly engages in Proust: ‘réels sans être actuels, idéaux sans être abstraits’ or, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Proust 1986: 263; 1976, 231). Here we find abstraction in a subordinate position, further emphasised by Beckett’s prefixing of ‘merely’ to abstract as well as actual in his own translation of the formula. Yet Beckett’s adoption of the formula becomes, I suggest, part of a process by which it becomes transformed, dialectically, into a description of abstraction itself. This resonates into the argument of my next chapter, where I explore in more detail this transformation of abstraction in modernist philosophical thought. Not knowing is at the heart of knowing in this abstraction, as encapsulated in the Proustian event of involuntary memory, neither consciously evoked nor consciously controlled, yet intensely experienced and known. Freedom from 161

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intellectual abstraction and its implicit reproach becomes the condition of a new abstraction. Before my discussion of Beckett’s Proust, I deal briefly with Proust’s novel itself, to locate a sense, which Beckett apprehended, that the abstraction of involuntary knowledge necessitates a critical re-assessment of humanistic assumptions and the configuring of a new inhumanism. Desophistication Abstraction is prominent from the outset of Beckett’s ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico .. Joyce’ (1929), a critical excursion suggested by James Joyce as Beckett’s contribution to a volume on the Work in Progress that became Finnegans Wake. We may find, as Mark Nixon suggests, the manner of a ‘young academic’ not yet fully launched on his creative path (Nixon 2015: 74), yet the same academicism is also the target of a subversive comic energy, Beckett self-satirically performing as a literary critic. Abstraction is very much at stake: ‘Here am I’, Beckett laments, ‘with my handful of abstractions’, wary of the danger of identifications and connections that might be too neat and tidy (Beckett 2005: 1061). Most of his concern is with Vico’s philosophy of history, and he sticks gamely to the task of producing the extended paraphrase or ‘painful exposition’ (1066) that is necessary to show how it had influenced and infiltrated Joyce’s composition. Through this paraphrase, which is also a kind of ventriloquism, Beckett can seem to play along with Vico’s notion of abstraction as the highest achievement of human, civilised development. In Vico’s schema of the development of human society in three stages, the Theocratic, Heroic and ‘Human (civilized)’, the mode of language corresponding to Vico’s third ‘Human’ stage is, Beckett summarises, ‘Philosophical (capable of abstraction and generalisation)’ (1062), its superiority implicit in the supposed incapabilities of its superseded stages, Hieroglyph and the Metaphor: ‘before abstract terms, metaphors’; ‘barbarians, incapable of analysis and abstraction, must use their fantasy to explain what their reason cannot comprehend’ (1065). Language, then, develops out of an initial ‘inability to abstract’ (1066). Beckett at one point even showily demonstrates his own advanced facility with this abstraction, at Joyce’s expense, by reducing each of the four extant Parts of the Work in Progress to the ‘simple’ abstraction that organises it – Birth, Maturity, Corruption, Generation (1064). Vico’s theory of poetry, however, ensures that Beckett’s heart is not quite in this narrative of human progress towards abstraction. Language evolves via poetry to become ‘a highly civilised vehicle, rich in abstract and technical terms’, but this is precisely because poetry is ‘the first operation of the human mind’, without which ‘thought could not exist’ (1065). Poetry via Vico is ‘a prime condition of philosophy and civilisation’; as such, it is inferred as a form, as much as a prerequisite, of thought. In his and Vico’s reflections on ‘primitive minds’, Beckett sees myths as having a pragmatic value, the gods ‘terribly real’ 162

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out of the necessity of finding a form of understanding that worked. Through distinguishing this ‘direct expression’ from the separation of form and content implicit in the development of writing, Beckett is able to arrive at the similarly direct mode of Joyce’s writing in the Work in Progress, and at a statement now solidly fixed in the Beckett critical tradition both as a quintessence of modernist theory, and as a principle that was to shape Beckett’s own creative work: ‘Here form is content, content is form . . . His writing is not about something, it is that something itself’ (1067). In this modernist touchstone, drawn from Vico’s theory of premodern language, Beckett makes a direct assault on abstraction as a principle of oversophistication in language: ‘Mr Joyce has desophisticated language’; ‘no language is so sophisticated as English’ and, therefore, English is ‘abstracted to death’ (1068). To exemplify, he takes the word ‘doubt’, which, he argues, in comparison to the German ‘Zweifel’ and the Italian ‘dubitare’, ‘gives us hardly any sensuous suggestion’ of its referent. We are close here to a linguistic autonomy inviting comparison with Steinian wordness or Stevens’s ‘sound of words’. The paradox in Beckett, however, is that the essay heralds the fervent pursuit of a literature mischievously committed to calling language into disrepute. In fact, Beckett’s first published work leans heavily on an inherited abstraction-as-reproach, against which to highlight the necessary experimentalism of modernism, and that of James Joyce in particular. Beckett is resistant to abstraction as an allegorical or generalised meaning that takes up a ‘sophisticated’ distance from its subject. It is, however, a very different abstraction that matters to Erik Tonning in what he calls the coalescence of the Beckettian aesthetic standpoint: ‘the inescapability of the “rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object, and the “ferocious dilemma of expression” that follows from it’ (Tonning 2007: 14; quotations from Beckett’s Disjecta (1983) and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (1965) respectively). Tonning therefore examines the continuing applicability of ‘abstract’ and ‘abstraction’ to an aesthetic that overtly rejects it in favour of what Beckett famously termed ‘the road toward this, for me, very desirable literature of the non-word’ (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 520). Is this, then, the beginning of a singular Beckettian abstraction? Whatever we might say of the Steinian and Stevensian abstractions I have explored in the previous two chapters, these are emphatically not abstractions of the non-word. Proust, Involuntary Memory and the Inhuman Like its predecessor, Beckett’s 1931 Proust essay is performative, a tonally indeterminate display of extended paraphrase and ventriloquism, all ‘irony, parody and baroque erudition’ (Dowd 2007: 48). ‘The Proustian equation is never simple’ (PTD 11). To propose at the very outset that things never quite 163

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add up in Proust is to prefigure the essay’s later, but central, mathematical allusion or formula: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ (Proust 1976: 231); or, let us say, real ≠ actual, ideal ≠ abstract. This is Proust’s formula for the phenomenon of involuntary memory, the moment of epiphany or annunciation, in his epic novel. Beckett’s translated version – ‘real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract’ (PTD 75) – further underlines abstraction’s inferiority to the ideal just as actuality is inferior to the real. What, then, is important about the Proustian theory of involuntary memory, and what might it tell us about abstraction, for Beckett? S. E. Gontarski heavily underlines the proximity of the theory, and its formula, to Henri Bergson’s critical conception of time as durée and the related conception of intuition, one so marked that the key section of Time Regained, the twelfth volume of Remembrance of Things Past, in which the formula appears and is elaborated, reads, as Gontarski notes in quoting it at length, ‘like a paraphrase of Bergsonism’ (Gontarski 2014: 6). In this densely intertextual relation, Beckett’s Proust paraphrasing Proust paraphrasing Bergson, the connections between Bergson and his literary interpreters are invoked: Bergson had become Proust’s cousin through marriage and significantly influenced his thought, while Beckett had studied Bergson in order to lecture on him as a young philosophy tutor at Trinity College Dublin in 1930–1. How Bergson matters in the story of modernist abstraction is something I want to resume in the next chapter. The key Proustian episode occurs when, after several years in a sanatorium, the narrator has returned to Paris and is attending an afternoon party at the house of the Princess de Guermantes. In quick succession he experiences three intense and unwilled evocations of his past, prompted respectively by stepping backwards on to an uneven flagstone, hearing the sound of a spoon being knocked against a plate, and wiping his mouth with a starched napkin. These events break into a prior state of ‘lassitude and boredom’, a vocational crisis and loss of faith in the work of literature that the narrator needs to embark upon (Proust 1976: 221). On the way to Paris, for example, his imagination has remained steadfastly unstimulated by the sharp division between light and shadow on the trunks on a line of trees, glimpsed from a stationary train. Thinking as a result that his creative rapport with the natural world has gone, he hopes, but without conviction, for compensation in the observation of humanity. He has also called on his conscious memory for inspiration, but the failure of the resulting ‘snapshots’ is bound up in his own awareness of the inadequate concept of the ‘snapshot’ itself. He cannot therefore derive any consolation from Bergotte’s reassurance that, despite his illness, he has the ‘joys’ of the mind and of intelligence to fall back on: ‘How little joy there was in this sterile lucidity!’ he declaims, of the ‘cold observations’ of his ‘clairvoyant eye’ and ‘power of accurate ratiocination’ (222). 164

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Breaking into this state of anomie and disillusion is the triple moment of involuntary memory, each part ‘a fragment of time in the pure state’ bringing an intense, sensuously synaesthetic reaction and a ‘swelling with happiness’ (230). At the same time, however, it gives rise to an extended and paradoxical moment of reflexive modernist pedagogy, as the narrator seeks to analyse and understand the experience: ‘So I forced myself as quickly as possible to discern the essence of the identical pleasures which I had just experienced three times within the space of a few minutes, and having done so to extract the lesson which they might be made to yield’ (226). The narrator applies the powers of intellect he has discredited to affects or sensations which should, by their nature, be unamenable to them – ‘this time I was determined not to resign myself to a failure to understand them’ (223). Theorising the emancipation from theory, he falls back precisely on the power that had previously robbed him of inspiration. As the episode closes, he nevertheless continues to insist that writing ‘intellectual works’ is to be avoided at all costs: ‘A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has the ticket that shows its price’ (244). The artistic sense must be pursued to its absolute limit, for, in the words of a dire warning to modernists tempted to theorise abstraction perhaps, the many who do not possess it ‘may yet possess the ability to expound upon the theory of art until the crack of doom’. The overarching artistic irony is that this failure of imagination is itself the substance of the narrative’s imaginative account. Involuntary memory means, for Proust’s narrator, a movement or experience beyond ‘narrowly human purpose’ (231). Conscious memory selects only in a ‘utilitarian’ way what we need from the past, the intellect thereby making this past ‘arid’. The narrator spends time reflecting on the ‘vessels’ within which our ‘real impressions’ of the past might be preserved, or the ‘being within me’ which becomes the momentary occasion of involuntary memory. Yet these reflections do not encompass the more radical implications of the event. Despite occurring to or within human beings, involuntary memory also happens outside the human beings who might be held to experience it, as an eternal ‘essence’ that is neither solely past nor present but that is common to both (229–30). The purity of the fragment consists in being ‘in some way . . . extra-temporal’ and, as Beckett puts it, ‘it follows that the communicant is for the moment an extratemporal being’ (PTD 75). This sense of the inhuman human may be expressed by Proust’s narrator as a loss of belief in the self. Epiphanic moments do not enhance or ‘flatter’ him but ‘caused me to doubt the reality, the existence of that self’, in a way that is a liberation from the fear of death (Proust 1976: 232). At these moments of ‘resurrection’, in which the ‘distant’ but real scene very briefly prevails over the actual, ‘our whole self’ is assailed to the extent that it would lose consciousness if the actual did not quickly manage to re-assert itself. The whole self is thus held in tension with the threat to, or absence of, the self. At one moment, when the narrator 165

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comes to characterise the elements of inhuman autonomy in ‘that past sensation itself’, the effect is to perturb material reality: The marine dining-room of Balbec, with its damask linen prepared like so many altar-cloths to receive the setting sun, had sought to shatter the solidity of the Guermantes mansion, to force open its doors, and for an instant had made the sofas around me sway and tremble as on another occasion it had done to the tables of the restaurant in Paris. (233) Is this an actual event? Does it evoke a routine distinction between reality and imagination? Or does it differ entirely from the subject–object epistemology from which a realist novel starts? In describing the epiphany as a more profound ‘truth’ than that derived from the intellect, Proust may seem to pull back from the brink of this: involuntary memory is ‘life’ communicating against our will ‘an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract’ (239). In his essay, however, Beckett is critically alert to the anthropomorphism potentially harboured in spiritual, mystical or Romantic attempts on Proust’s part to gloss the strangeness and alterity of involuntary memory. Instead, Beckett prefers the inhuman lineaments of those human impressions and actions that, as Proust writes, ‘our intellect . . . could make nothing of . . . for its own rational purposes’ (227). The essay’s initial questioning of the Proustian equation gestures towards difficulty but also beyond scientific logic itself. A ‘literary artist’ – Proust, his narrator – must make the ‘concessions’ required by literary convention: ‘he is not altogether at liberty to detach effect from cause’ (PTD 11). Anticipating the psychological–realist objection that Proust ‘does little else but explain his characters’, Beckett proposes that the novel’s explorations are ‘experimental and not demonstrative’; Proust explains his people ‘in order that they may appear as they are – inexplicable’ (PTD 87). Proust’s impressionism consists, Beckett writes, in the ‘non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect’ (PTD 86). It would only, that is, be common sense not to see the world as common sense. In a wry footnote, Beckett’s own examples of non-logical phenomena are ‘a napkin in the dust taken as a pencil of light, the sound of water in the pipes for a dog barking or the hooting of a siren, the noise of a spring-door closing for the orchestration of the Pilgrim’s Progress’ (PTD 86). In his Proust, to see the world thus is also to see humans thus, in their obvious affiliation with the inhuman, newly strange to themselves. Proust’s ‘creatures’ are victims of Time just as ‘lower organisms’ are; the majority of Proust’s images, Beckett notes, are ‘botanical’, assimilating the human ‘to the vegetal’: ‘He is conscious of humanity as flora, never as fauna’ (PTD 12, 89). Proust’s men and women have ‘no 166

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conscious will’ and, as ‘human vegetation’, where conventional morality does not enter, are ‘shameless, exposing their genitals’; and if there is no will, so there can be no moralised impurity or collapse of will. Equally, there is no will because a self stable enough to possess or lose it is never long enough in place. We are other than what we were before ‘the calamity of yesterday’; the subject cannot obtain the object of desire because the subject has died, ‘perhaps many times’, on the way (PTD 13–14). Habit makes the impression of a continuity of self out of a succession of ‘treaties’ concluded ‘between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects’ (PTD 13, 19). For Beckett again to paraphrase Proust paraphrasing Bergson, life and identity are a process of unforeseeable becoming, where the future is, in another iteration of externality, ‘in store for us, not in store in us’ (PTD 15). When involuntary memory thus breaches the walls of habit and the ‘security’ of the ‘old’ or conscious ego falls away, the result is ecstasy, an ‘extra-temporal joy’, sustenance and delight, ‘the only genuine and fruitful pleasure that I had known’ (Proust 1976: 231): in Beckett’s terms, ‘waves of rapture’ (PTD 70). Beckett, however, need it be said, seems less interested in the rapture than in the complex Proustian amalgam of ‘cruelties and enchantments of reality’ that is our ‘first nature’ prior to the reign of habit. An enchanted reality may have ‘the air of a paradox’, but Beckett allows it in repudiating the greater artifice of two established modes of abstraction: an object’s generic or family identity (abstraction as generalisation) and its causality (abstraction as scientific method) (PTD 22–3). Once freed from these traps, the real is ‘isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance’ – an enchanted starting-point. Like Wallace Stevens’s latest freed man, this is also to be freed into a mode of being without description: Beckett saw Proust’s narrator on a visit to his grandmother as ‘present at his own absence’ (PTD 27). But for Beckett the enchantment is in extraordinary conjunction with its cruelty too. The moment of freedom signals ‘The suffering of being: that is, the free play of every faculty’; human suffering ‘opens a window on the real and is the main condition of artistic experience’ (PTD 20). It is a moment to return to how ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ works for Beckett. We may reflect on what Proust’s formula is tending towards. It must be possible for something to be, without being seeable or touchable in the world; it must be possible for a mental or imagined entity to exist without being detached from the world. The real has an ideality, ideality is real. The real–ideal conjunction is defined, as in Bergson’s ‘more’ and ‘less’, by negation – ‘without’. If the equation is never simple, it is because it designates an empty space that no single word can seem to occupy. Yet if the formula is designating the same kind of space as Wallace Stevens’s first idea, blending reality and invention, then we know that the word, in all its necessary unfixity and still trailing its ‘old’ associations, could become ‘abstraction’. Might this be true in and for Beckett too? 167

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In Proust, Beckett puts the word abstraction to work whilst gently disarming the critical charge that it carried in ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico .. Joyce’. In several references to conscious memory it continues to signal the reproach of intellectual distance or withdrawal, where the ‘act of intellection’ or ‘prejudices of intelligence . . . abstracts from any given sensation, as being illogical and insignificant, a discordant and frivolous intruder, whatever word or gesture, sound or perfume, cannot be fitted into the puzzle of a concept’ (PTD 71). However, as mere withdrawal or ex-traction, abstraction could be found equally in the ‘explosive’ action of involuntary memory (PTD 33). Of the ‘miracle’ of the epiphany that occurs in Proust ‘I think twelve or thirteen times’, Beckett writes that involuntary memory ‘abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what the mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal – the real’ (PTD 33). We are reminded of involuntary memory’s operation beyond ‘utilitarian, narrowly human purpose’, or at least of the paradox that what is necessary to narrowly human purpose must be replaced by what is necessary to the real – that is, the necessity of the unnecessary, or the excess, that goes beyond the human (Proust 1976: 231). On these terms the narrator’s experience in Mme de Guermantes’s library restores his belief in art and movingly enables him to rededicate to it; in Beckett’s terms, he understands the ‘necessity’ and the ‘brightness’ of art (PTD 76). But this is not merely restoration. To realise that involuntary memory and the effort to decipher it are no less than the ‘method’ of ‘the creation of a work of art’ is for the narrator to conceive of art in a radically altered way; he realises ‘the falseness of so-called realist art’, based on habits of conscious expression removed from ‘reality itself’ (Proust 1976: 239, 241–3). Difficulty is now uppermost, becoming the exuberant substance of the artwork rather than an obstacle to it. The artist has no conscious control over the arrival of the material, yet by virtue of this is also alone in working out how to realise it: ‘The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us’ (241). No wonder writers, Proust observes, will do anything to avoid writing, including trying to give it up altogether. ‘Authentic art . . . accomplishes its work in silence’ (243). This difficulty, however, connects, as it did for Newman and Stein, the artist to the scientist in the shared seriousness of their intellectual work, where impressions are for the artist ‘what experiment is for the scientist, with the difference that in the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes the experiment and in the writer it comes after the impression’ (241). It is for Beckett (who also quotes the above) to draw out, on Proust’s behalf, the fact that this new model of artistic intellectual work is modernism, and that Proust is already exploring its propositions about the inhuman. What could be more abstract than a post-realist art of silence, or of words minimalised, in 168

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which humans are present at their own absence? What could be more abstract than an art that insists on the human inhuman? Paraphrasing again, Beckett confirms that Proust’s narrator realises ‘more clearly than ever’ the ‘grotesque fallacy of a realistic art’ (PTD 76). Baudelaire’s theory of reality as ‘the adequate union of subject and object’ is invoked, only, however, to be quickly revoked on the grounds of its own intellectual abstraction. Involuntary memory cannot offer such glib resolutions of the subject–object relation as this unity ‘abstracted from plurality’ (PTD 79). How close the multiplicity of the self is to what André Maurois calls its ‘disintegration’ in Proust (Maurois 1962: 173) attests to this. Beckett sees it in the non-characterisation, in effect, of Albertine, whose ‘pictorial multiplicity’ will ‘duly evolve into a plastic and moral multiplicity, . . . a multiplicity in depth, a turmoil of objective and immanent contradictions over which the subject has no control’ (PTD 47). Or as Beckett chooses to quote directly: ‘“A being scattered in space and time is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of problems that cannot be solved . . .”’ (PTD 58). In tracing the conjunction between involuntary memory and experimental modernism, Beckett’s Proust begins delicately to prepare abstraction for a future with which his own art will become intimately associated. As both Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou discern, in showing himself to be ‘Proust’s student’ (Adorno 2019: 246), Beckett draws out the latency of this new abstraction. Adorno, drawing from German criticism of Proust, finds in the words of Ernst Robert Curtius a confirmation that Proust’s was not a psychological novel in the accepted sense: Proust does not ‘acknowledge the distinction between thinking substance and extended substance’ (248), but nevertheless tries to cling to the ‘physiognomy’ of objective character, ‘as though involuntary memory revealed the secret language of things’. But in Beckett, Adorno explains, ‘that becomes the physiognomy of what is no longer human’. Badiou denies that Beckett’s essay and its treatment of involuntary memory suggest merely an affinity with Proust’s conceptions of time and memory: for Beckett, Badiou maintains, involuntary memory ‘constitutes an experimentation with alterity’ (Badiou 2003: 67). But if such experimentation with alterity is the essence of a new, necessarily post-realist art, how did this register in Beckett’s engagement with the artistic abstraction that was by now fully in play? As I have indicated, Beckett’s immersion in visual modernism was plain and is already well documented. But abstraction points in more than one direction, at once an official language of modernism and the term of its own undoing, capable of expressing Beckett’s insiderness and his outsiderness. Towards Three Dialogues The intensity of Beckett’s engagement with the visual art of modernism is manifest in the musings of his unpublished discourses, correspondence and interviews 169

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across the 1930s and 1940s, as well as in pieces such as ‘La Peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon’ (1945) or ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’ (1948). Such writings contained the ‘bilge’ that Beckett saw himself producing in great quantities on the question of subject and object in aesthetics and philosophy (quoted in Nixon 2015: 76). ‘Bilge’ is Beckett’s comic, loutish distancing mechanism from aesthetic–philosophical discourse in its relation to the issue that preoccupied him: whether (to put it less economically than ‘bilge’) there was a way for art to be freed altogether from referential conceptions such as expression and aboutness, and into a realm of the unnameable event. To do so, it would help to get some distance from formal aesthetic–philosophical discourse itself. Where abstract painting was concerned, Jean-Michel Rabaté has summed up, in impeccably metalinguistic terms, Beckett’s position: he ‘refuses the historical narrative that presents modernism as an inevitable evolution in the history of painting, in a direct teleology moving from representation to abstraction’ (Rabaté 2014: 137). You can say that again, as the Beckett of ‘bilge’ might have put it. Rabaté is correct to align Beckett with the widespread distrust of abstraction as pure formalism that we noted in Chapter 3. Erik Tonning has revealed Beckett’s willingness, in his diaries, to clamp abstraction into scare-quotes quite as readily as his artistic and critical peers (Tonning 2007: 18, 13). The ‘abstractors of quintessence’ and their pure formalism made, Tonning argues, a ‘profoundly alien emphasis’ for Beckett; as he had argued in ‘Peintres de l’empêchement’, if abstract art proposed that art could simply free itself from the object, it was not art at all (18, 21). In his German diaries of 1936–7, Beckett’s antithesis to the ‘too intellectual’ painting of the Swiss artist Karl Ballmer, where ‘painting is abstract when reality is post sum’ (inessential, secondary)’ was the work of Dali and the early Italian primitives (quoted in Tonning 2007: 24). However, if this is the Beckett of and on the theory of abstraction in painting, it of course combines with the Beckett who manifestly took delight in the painting itself – a delight that fed the impulse to a theory that threw theory itself, and its expression, into question. The complexity emerges in comparing what Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Cézanne meant to Beckett. Three decades of interest in Kandinsky’s work date, as Tim Lawrence explains, from Beckett’s German travels of 1936–7, when he was aware of the Nazi condemnation of Kandinsky’s art as ‘degenerate’ (Lawrence 2015: 58). Beckett had seen ‘Träumerische Improvisation’ (1913) in 1937 and been deeply impressed by it. In tracing a ‘congruence’ between Kandinsky’s and Beckett’s writings, Lawrence suggests links between Kandinsky’s language for the internal logic of abstract compositions as an ‘interplay between forces’, and Beckett’s motifs of vision and cognition in fictions of the 1940s such as Watt, or the organising principles and stage directions of the later theatrical works. Lawrence’s essay is an important reminder that Beckett consistently encountered painterly abstraction as a written as well as a painterly thing; Beckett even translated from 170

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French to English Kandinsky’s short piece ‘Abstract and Concrete Art’, though his translation was unpublished. We can say, not only that the two shared the notion of abstraction as an artistic ‘internal necessity’, but that this extended to a common wish to place ‘ignorance in dialogue with abstraction’ and to consider, as I have begun to do with Beckett, the bearing that abstraction has on ‘the contradictory demands to think and not to think’: ‘This pursuit of a learned project to represent the unknown, freely and knowingly chosen’, continues Lawrence, ‘is central to Kandinsky’s theoretical and autobiographical writings, and it resonates with Beckett’s critical essays’ (Lawrence 2015: 68). Being thus familiar with Kandinsky’s writing, however, Beckett would also know that Kandinsky’s interest in the unknowing or unknowable was at the service of an entirely spiritual conception of experimental art. He might have read (in Kandinsky’s ‘On the Question of Form’, 1912) that abstraction or the ‘abstract spirit’ was a creative principle impelling evolutionary progress ‘forward and upward’, detained only (‘Abstract Painting’, 1936) by a ‘great mass of humanity’ that was retarded and therefore held ‘no sense for the spiritual future’ (Kandinsky 1994: 236, 786). ‘We, the abstractionists of today,’ Kandinsky announced in 1922, ‘will be regarded in time as the “pioneers” of absolute art’, living ‘perhaps centuries ahead of our time’ (481). Nothing, in other words, could be further from Beckett than Kandinsky’s pious heroism verging on bombast, and nothing perhaps more rebarbative for Beckett than the view, from Kandinsky’s short critical piece of 1938, that abstraction as technique had ‘grown in power, in expressive means, and in boundless possibilities’ (Kandinsky 1994: 832). The contrast may seem obvious but is worth stating: the wonder of Beckettian abstraction is its persistence in powerlessness, in the inexpressive and in the impossible. Woe betide any critic or philosopher who would try to turn this into a capacity. Tim Lawrence recognises this in astutely concluding that the choice of a knowing ignorance obliged Beckett in his criticism to explore the ‘space of impossibility’ beyond artistic plenitude (Lawrence 2015: 69). Let us turn by comparison to Beckett’s ‘relief’, in a well-known letter to Thomas McGreevy of September 1934, at seeing Paul Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire au Grand Pin in the National Gallery in London. The relief is expressed in an aggrieved outpouring about ‘all the anthropomorphised landscape’ of painters from the Dutch realists to Claude and Watteau or the ‘hyperanthropomorphized’ Rubens, ready-made for the ‘hiker’ (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 222), to which Cézanne was the riposte at last. Cézanne was, Beckett contended to McGreevy, the first to see and state landscape ‘as material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever’, and infused with neither vitalism nor personality, except a personality ‘in its own terms’ – an ‘unintelligible arrangement of atoms’ (223). Cézanne had managed to get beyond the ‘snapshot puerilities’ of the Impressionists, 171

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recognising instead his own presence as a ‘dynamic intrusion’ on something ‘by definition unapproachably alien’. Beckett expresses admiration and what we might even call excitement at ‘Perhaps . . . the one bright spot in a mechanistic age – the deanthropomorphizations of the artist’: Even the portrait beginning to be dehumanised as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbour a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself. (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 223) Beckett thus arrives in his own way at that aspect of the paintings that had perplexed Cézanne as a new abstraction; he joins a body of commentators sensing that something about this abstraction in Cézanne would not coincide easily with the human even as it involved a newly ‘dynamic’ role for the human presence in painting. We have seen Gertrude Stein’s reading of Cézannean ‘values’ and the transposition of these into writing; Georgina Nugent-Folan notes that Beckett as much as Stein drew eagerly from a Cézannean ‘atomised, deanthropomorphised’ landscape ‘free from imposed hierarchies’ (Nugent-Folan 2015: 90). In this aesthetics of a flat ontology for Beckett, but for Stein and for Stevens too, the human is as much in need of deanthropomorphisation as the material world and landscape. In a letter soon after to McGreevy, following up ‘the portrait beginning to be dehumanised’, Beckett noted that Cézanne’s ‘absence of a rapport’ and sense of ‘incommensurability’ related equally to ‘the life . . . operative in himself’ (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 227). The essential aloneness, the incapability of loving or hating and of being loved and hated in return, invite us to see Beckett’s abstraction as a narrative of loss and dehumanisation: ‘art is the apotheosis of solitude’ (PTD 64). Yet the Cézanne self-portrait is also Stevens’s latest freed man, severed but also released, as ‘being without description’, from individual ontology into the mutual participation of the human and the inhuman. The thinking of these together may be agonistic but also (as we dare to sense this in the ‘relief’ of Beckett’s encounter with Cézanne) exuberant with the promise of the free play of every faculty. ‘I do not see any possibility of relationship, friendly or unfriendly, with the unintelligible,’ he wrote, channelling his thought on Cézanne, to McGreevy, with loving, friendly warmth (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 2009: 227). Beckett’s responses to the paintings of Jack Yeats three years later show that the appeal of the inhuman may be transmitted (‘What I feel he gets so well’) as much in cultural identity and knowledge as in technique: Yeats renders Ireland’s ‘nature’, poised uncertainly in the letter between human and geographical, as ‘inhumanly organic as a stage set’ (540). We know how readily ‘inorganic’, a repeated term in his musings, might be accommodated with a language of pure 172

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painterly abstraction, as had been the case with Kandinsky. This ‘inorganic’, for Beckett, more plainly crosses the boundary between artistic and philosophical: it is about ‘the heterogeneity of nature and the human denizens’ and hence ‘a painting of pure inorganic juxtapositions, where nothing can be taken or given & there is no possibility of change or exchange’ (540). From his first critical essay of 1929 with its critique of abstraction as linguistic sophistication and aboutness, Beckett’s own abstraction, if we can now begin to call it that, relentlessly pursues whatever might lie outside of communication and expression, ‘change or exchange’. To propose again: the wonder of this Beckettian abstraction is its persistence in powerlessness, in the inexpressive and in the impossible. If this is an abstraction from communication and expression, it must also be an abstraction towards something else – though to say that the beyond of communication and expression is the beginning of something else might risk recuperating Beckett for the merely affirmative, and the game would be over again. We have, nevertheless, to start somewhere; and for Alain Badiou, this in Beckett means to start, like Plato, ‘from things!’ (Badiou 2003: xxxvi). Badiou ringingly declared himself ‘entirely opposed to the widely held view according to which Beckett moved towards a nihilistic destitution, towards a radical opacity of significations’ (55). Badiou’s labelling of linguistic–philosophical criticism of Beckett as a mode of sophistry reaches out to resonate with Beckett’s appeal for desophistication in language. Beckett, Badiou insists, though he might equally be characterising the Steinian aesthetic, ‘substitutes the question “how are we to name what happens?” for the question “what is the meaning of what is?”’ (55). The languages of the human and humanism have not served adequately or with distinction in this respect: as Adorno notes, in Beckett’s people we see at work the inadequate historical category of the individual: ‘the human being – the name of the species would not fit well in Beckett’s linguistic landscape – is only what he has become’ (Adorno 2019: 244). But having become is not the same as becoming. What if, as in Badiou’s characterisation, Beckett’s ‘poem of the tireless desire to think’ (Badiou 2003: 77) were to set about rethinking the inhuman seriously, an enquiry into the image of thought beyond the consolatory narratives of humanism to which communication and expression are central? Here the commentaries of Badiou and Adorno are in unison on Beckett’s ‘subtraction’, a term implicit in their effort to extricate Beckett from the frameworks of existentialism that he so resisted. For Badiou, Beckett’s method (we think again of Wallace Stevens’s freed men or snow men) is ‘a question of subtracting or suspending the subject so as to see what then happens to being’ (Badiou 2003: 108). For Adorno, Beckett subtracts from the misleading abstraction that is at the heart of capitalism and existentialism together: ‘the notion that one ought to be what one is’ (Adorno 2019: 243). In non-identity, ‘once the subject is no longer unquestionably identical with itself’, we arrive not just at 173

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the disintegration of the subject’s unity but ‘the emergence of something that is not itself subject’ (246–7). ‘Emergence’ suggests that what also unites Adorno’s and Badiou’s criticism of Beckett, spanning manifest differences in tonality, is affirmation. Badiou’s writing on Beckett constitutes a complicated ‘so what?’ to the self-denying injunctions that Beckett criticism declares: Beckett, Badiou insists, writes out of the human obligation to give utterance. Citing the ‘Know happiness’ of the end of Ill Seen Ill Said (1981), Badiou’s critical lexicon around Beckett, with its ‘happiness’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘magnificence’, may itself be unBeckettian, yet Badiou notes that ‘the resources of happiness are considerably greater when we turn towards the event than when we search in vain for the sense of being’, where ‘sense’ must translate as meaning as well as feeling (Badiou 2003: 55). Of the event, ‘It happens that something happens. That something happens to us. Art’s mission is to shelter these points of exception from which truth proceeds, to make them shine and retain them – stellar – in the reconstituted fabric of our patience’ (77). If this is Badiou’s way of being with Beckett, it is in poignant contrast with Adorno’s actual if limited acquaintance with Beckett and with the rumour that Beckett was less than happy with the tenor of the lecture that was to become, as ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, Adorno’s major contribution to Beckett criticism. Could this have been because the eventual essay’s very title affirms a hermeneutical idea against which Beckett’s art was a consistent struggle? In other words, that Adorno was trying too hard to understand, and not hard enough to accompany Beckett, even as ‘meaning’ was acknowledged to be exploded, so that understanding Endgame could ‘mean only understanding its unintelligibility, concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’ (Adorno 2019: 238)? What, then, is the relation between Beckett’s theory of existing artistic abstraction and the abstraction he was moving towards, the in-between state or space of ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’? Beckett saw that it was difficult for existing abstract art to escape, if that was what it was trying to do, from relations of any kind: no matter how hard the abstract painter tried, they would always end up ‘devant’ or in front of something, even if that something was the impossibility of painting (Lawrence 2015: 60; Rabaté 2014: 137). With this in mind, it is important to see what Beckett’s writing of abstraction had become, after two decades of literary-critical and art-critical work, in Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, first published in transition in 1949. Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit A bare paraphrase of Three Dialogues is distinctly possible: it is about the painting of Pierre Tal-Coat, André Masson and Bram Van Velde, and their relation to the precise question of an art that might lie beyond relation and 174

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representation, communication or expression. If the Dialogues are to convey anything about such an art, an art that might belie aboutness, it might help not to reproduce a simple manner of aboutness. What kind of text is Three Dialogues? We might best consider what the Dialogues are not, beginning with the sense in which they are not dialogues. While Beckett and Duthuit had sustained a rich dialogue about art in correspondence over a number of years, Three Dialogues is not a direct transcription of this discussion, but a drama between ‘B’ and ‘D’ in which ‘B’ at one point does not reply to D’s enquiry, at another exits weeping, and at a third point takes a fortnight to reply monosyllabically to D. Next, the Dialogues are neither art criticism nor about Tal-Coat, Masson and Van Velde, insofar as no painting is directly named and discussed. Part I, ‘Tal Coat’ [sic], refers to ‘these’ and ‘this’ painting, and Part II, ‘Masson’, to ‘these canvases’, but the paintings are absent to the reader, so that what is present is only the discourse on them. The openings of I and II, spoken by B, are enough to suggest that B and D are looking at paintings that the reader cannot see, so immersed in them as to begin in media res and in fragmentary or disembodied statements: ‘Total object, complete with missing parts, instead of partial object. Question of degree’; ‘In search of the difficulty rather than in its clutch. The disquiet of him who lacks an adversary’ (PTD 101, 109). Part III, ‘Bram Van Velde’, foregoes any such pretence of looking at canvases until close to its conclusion when, following the text’s longest and most stagey monologue (‘No, no, allow me to expire’), B enquires: ‘For what is this coloured plane, that was not there before. I don’t know what it is, having never seen anything like it before. It seems to have nothing to do with art, in any case, if my memories are correct’ (PTD 125–6). This suspension of the paintings’ presence is appropriate to an artist who, B argues, is ‘the first to submit wholly to the absence of relation’ and to admit that ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail’ (PTD 125). When the painting does finally turn up, B does not know what it is, except as an event, a manifestation of the Lyotardian sublime that ‘was not there before’. Again, the painting is absent or not seen; it is further unseen in that although the author can vaguely remember what art is, the painting does not correspond to it. What is it to ‘see’ something that lies outside of established frames of reference, or to see a painting that is not framed by any recognisable aesthetic? B’s response is a reminder of how the dialogue is dramatised and characterised. D is the one who appears closer to the discourse on art, who has not forgotten it. In Parts I and II, their exchanges have a sense of balance which nevertheless begins to be challenged by B’s adherence to an outsider’s subversive anti-aesthetic – a plane of the infeasible or of ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (PTD 103). D, the voice of orthodoxy here, objects that this is no 175

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help at all, ‘a violently extreme and personal point of view’. In Part III, the balance is dispensed with, as D directly interrogates B about his extreme position and Van Velde’s art as representative of it. D turns to mockery and exaggerated disbelief, B to mannered defensiveness, and we are led to realise that the possibility of an inexpressive, impossible art might best be debated through the mode of laughter. B is reminded, at the end of his monologue, that he was to deliver a second part of his argument, though D only reluctantly accepts that what B has thus far said qualifies as ‘thought’. Despite his faulty memory of what art once was, he remembers this ‘warmly’, but we have no idea if the discourse will continue or not – it ends on his merely being ‘mistaken’ (PTD 126). Conventional critical frameworks recede from view whilst reading Three Dialogues. Beyond the easily exploded idea that it is a transcription of a dialogue may be the suspicion that it is really a vehicle for Beckett’s own aesthetic: hence, for David Cunningham, ‘As Beckett himself says, approvingly, of Van Velde’s painting, in the Three Dialogues: “I do not know what it is, having never seen it before”’ (Cunningham 2005: 117). But B is not Samuel Beckett, so that no such approval is in evidence. As a work of art criticism, art in Three Dialogues is absent except as words that compel and compensate: the opening wordplay of ‘Total object, complete with missing parts’ presents us with no visualisable painting of Tal-Coat’s, but instead the philosophical conundrum of how absence can figure as presence. As a piece of writing about abstraction in modernist visual art, then, Three Dialogues again but uniquely shows abstraction’s tendency to disappear from view. The only way to speak of a painter who ‘does not pretend to paint’ is, at the very least, to be itching to be away at the earliest possible opportunity, to become silent, as D, reaching the height of his sarcasm, invites B to do: finish what he has to say about Van Velde, ‘Then go away’. B.– How would it be if I first said what I am pleased to fancy he is, fancy he does, and then that it is more likely that he is and does quite otherwise? Would that not be an excellent issue out of all our afflictions? He happy, you happy, I happy, all three bubbling over with happiness. (PTD 123) To speak of Three Dialogues here in terms of presence and plenitude rather than absence and lack might be to acknowledge the delightful happy laughter provoked by B’s outré excoriation of happiness. There is no metadiscourse; the stagey performance of theoretical monologue that follows argues for its impossibility. One way of putting this in terms of the story of abstraction in modernism is that Three Dialogues is abstraction-as-immanence rather than abstraction-as-transcendence. Something is happening, though we do not know in what kind of text it is happening; the text’s ostensible subjects, its painters 176

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and paintings, know no more about what it is that they make happen. Dowd refers to an ‘immanence of the critical and hermeneutic operations’ in Beckett’s literature, and considers this as a ‘collapsing of two abstractions (kenotic and rarefying respectively) into one, as well as being, simultaneously, their subversion’ (Dowd 2007: 75). To paraphrase Dowd, perhaps creatively: Beckett takes abstraction as lack and as purity, condenses them into a single form of writing, yet in the process, creates an alternative abstraction. In turn, Three Dialogues is what Dowd, referring to Beckett’s work as a whole, would call a text of becoming, or an abstract machine. Introduced in the conclusion of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, though referenced throughout, the ‘abstract machine’ is, in a moment of arresting ordinariness for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘opposed to the abstract in the ordinary sense’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 511). As Dowd discerns it, the abstract machine is what Beckett’s art anticipates and embodies as a mode or plane of writing. While drawing on an anarchic model of literature as a language minor to or at odds with language, a language defined by taking lines of flight from the known, abstract machines are also forms of writing that collapse categories and distinctions, especially between the philosophical and the literary, between thought and art. ‘Forms’ here is already an error because, as Dowd explains, the abstract machine is in abeyance from form; in fact, for Deleuze and Guattari, abstract machines ‘know nothing of forms and substances’ (511). We need to speak, not of what meaning the abstract machine contains, but of what it wants or does. Deleuze and Guattari forge a reconnection with the Proustian formula, recomposing this as: ‘Abstract, singular, and creative, here and now, real yet nonconcrete, actual yet noneffectuated’. Dowd’s gloss is that ‘The machines are abstract because the universes to which they give rise, and the novelty of thinking anew which they demand, cannot be represented as such’ (Dowd 2007: 14). Nevertheless, the abstract machine is both real and actual, yet distinct from that which is fixed or in operation. If abstraction in this sense is pure becoming (Stein: ‘if it can be done why do it’), it is not anywhere contained or touchable, yet manifest in the ‘assemblages’ that are new conjunctions. With Beckettian inorganicism in mind, we are reminded that the organism for Deleuze and Guattari is not a fulfilment of life but that which constrains or imprisons it. A vocabulary of lines, forces and speeds rather than vessels and containment presents life as ‘a complex relation between differential speeds’ (Dowd 2007: 80). Bodies are conceived as without organs so that their conjunction with other things can also be thought, bearing in mind that bodies themselves, as Wallace Stevens knew, are always temporary assemblages, bodies in process. Dowd notes: ‘So rigorous is the anti-hylomorphic disposition of Beckett’s writing [that is, its questioning of the causal relation between matter and form], so diligent is his affirmation of the writing plane, 177

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so salutary his subversion of philosophy’s traditional image of thought’, that its appeal to Deleuze and Guattari was inevitable (Dowd 2007: 75). Like Stevens’s Ultimate Abstract Poem, Three Dialogues proposes that the ultimate abstract artwork will always lie elsewhere, real without at any point being actual, yet everywhere generating actual paintings that aspire towards that abstraction and might even constitute the event of it. Gertrude Stein would recognise in it the ‘dream of an art’ that was obliged to stir ‘from the field of the possible’ and whose ‘hands have not been tied by the certitude that expression is an impossible act’ (PTD 112, 121). In the next chapter, I want to look in more detail at the legacy of this modernist impossible abstraction in the philosophical afterlife of the Proustian formula.

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7

WRITING LIVED ABSTRACTION: JAMES, BERGSON, WHITEHEAD, DELEUZE

True lived experience [le vécu] is an absolutely abstract thing. The abstract is lived experience. I would almost say that once you have reached lived experience, you reach the most fully living core of the abstract. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Seminar on Kant: Synthesis and Time’ (1978) I firmly disbelieve, myself, that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe. William James, Pragmatism (1981: 133) We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience: ‘O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee?’ A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (1985: 50) It is a mistake to suppose that, at the level of human intellect, the role of mental functionings is to add subtlety to the content of experience. The exact opposite is the case. A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (1961: 213) Let us guard against seeing a simple game . . . Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (2007: 86) 181

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We have seen how abstraction in Beckett might be abstraction in no ordinary sense. But with this reference to the abstract machine, how do we explain that further turn in abstraction’s contradictory work by which ‘True lived experience’ for Deleuze is now ‘an absolutely abstract thing’ (Deleuze 1978)? No longer cold, distanced, theoretical, abstraction for Deleuze becomes the definition of immersed and immediate, flowing and changing life. How does this happen, and what do we learn, about what we still want from abstraction, from the fact that abstraction lives on by figuring its seeming other, and even as a critique of itself? ‘Mainstream culture’, writes Alberto Toscano, one of the most assiduous chroniclers of contemporary abstraction, ‘still nurtures a certain hostility towards the “abstract”’ (Toscano 2008: 57). Toscano is discussing the strong revival of interest in A. N. Whitehead’s philosophy and Whitehead’s scrutiny of ‘our very culture of abstraction’, and reflects on the part abstraction might play in response to Deleuze’s call for a ‘superior empiricism’: (R)ecent conceptual production has sought to circumvent the customary reproaches against abstract thought by promoting concepts that are ever more vital, supple, pliant: flows, rhizomes, the virtual, scapes, the diagram, and so on. We could say that theory too – in a world where bases and superstructures have allegedly been swept away by currents both cultural and financial – has entered its phase of flexible accumulation . . . In a more or less explicit manner, this has meant rejecting two of the dominant features traditionally ascribed to the activity of abstraction and its products: rigidity and separateness. To put it in more figurative terms, it seems that today’s abstractions can no longer afford to be lifeless and detached . . . The cold abstractions of yesteryear must be replaced by what we would call warm abstractions. (Toscano 2008: 58) We will note, of course, the echo of the warmer abstractions of Wallace Stevens. Let me briefly juxtapose John Rajchman’s Deleuzian essay ‘Another View of Abstraction’ (1995), which takes up the Deleuzian call more explicitly. For Rajchman too, a major change is in the offing, attesting to the fact that ‘this world is what abstraction is all about’ (Rajchman 1995: 23). We no longer need to think of abstraction, for example, as the ‘dead’ terminus of a practice of painting that had exhausted the Greenbergian logic of its formal possibilities. But for this, Rajchman exclaims, ‘we need other, lighter, less morbid ways of thinking. To rethink abstraction, we need another kind of theory, another picture of what it is to think “abstractly”!’ (16). Rajchman argues that Deleuze provides two new ways of thinking abstraction: in philosophy, ‘empiricist’, ‘immanentist’ and ‘experimental’; in art, ‘chaotic’ and ‘formless’. 182

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These promise to merge abstraction as thought and as art, ‘a new way of doing art-connected philosophy’: In both cases, we find a departure from the view of abstraction as a process of extracting pure or essential Forms, emptying a space of its concrete contents, towards another kind of abstraction, and another sense of ‘abstract’: an abstraction that consists in an impure mixing and mixing up, prior to Forms, a reassemblage that moves towards an Outside, rather than a purification that turns up to essential Ideas, or in [sic] towards the constitutive ‘forms’ of a medium. For Deleuze, philosophy itself becomes a practice of this abstract mixing and rearranging, a great prodigious conceptual ‘And . . .’ in the midst of things and histories. (16) In this chapter I want to explore the modernist legacy of this seemingly startling transformation of abstraction. My emphasis throughout has been on the writing of abstraction, whether in the manifestos of modernist visual art, the experimentalism of literary modernism, or in the critical thinking and philosophies of modernity. In both Toscano and Rajchman, we may note, a consciously writerly quality informs their gestures towards a new lexicon for abstraction (while both, too, still have use for a scare-quoted abstraction, from which the new lexicon must, of course, depart). Toscano ventures a ‘figurative’ mode, drawing on a well-known refrain (‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’) from a François Villon ballad. Rajchman essays a looser yet more urgent, exclamatory mode with some surprising locutions. In Part II I suggested that in the experimental literary modernisms of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens and Samuel Beckett we see abstraction’s sea change stirring, pre-figured. I now want to explore this in the critical philosophies of William James, Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead, whose influence has already been felt at various points in the discussion. No study of abstraction in modernism could fail to consider these thinkers, yet I undertake the task not in Part I of the book, where the chronology of their influence on writers like Stein and Stevens might have been more apparent, but through late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century re-inventions of their work along the lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s transformation of abstraction. This is a distinct legacy of modernist abstraction in a mode of philosophical thought that, as Rajchman indicates, implicates art in its very texture. James, Bergson and Whitehead are also all noted for the innovatory manner of their writing of philosophy – for, in varying degrees, a personal, unacademic and deprofessionalised mode of address. Nietzsche’s writing was undoubtedly a major contributory factor in this discursive shift. Gilles Deleuze prefaced his first major work by referring to his predecessor’s search for ‘new means of philosophical expression’; Nietzsche saw that putting into question ‘the traditional 183

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image of thought’ could only mean the growing impossibility of writing philosophy in the accepted manner. ‘“Ah! the old style . . .”’, Deleuze playfully quotes without attribution, hoping his readers will recognise the allusion to the Hamm of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame: ‘Ah the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!’ (Beckett 1964: 29). Isabelle Stengers’s major work on A. N. Whitehead, bold and personal in style, announced itself in 2002 as participating in Whitehead’s ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (a phrase, as Bruno Latour notes, borrowed from Deleuze [Stengers 2011: xi]). It is important to distinguish these rhetorical aspirations from the idea of a plain and transparent communication that, as we saw in Chapter 2, JeanFrançois Lyotard regarded as collusive with a coercive humanist pedagogy, the ‘lessons’ that ‘humanism administers . . . to “us”’ (Lyotard 1991: 1). The journey in writing from William James to Deleuze, as a journey of how to address yourself to human beings, invites some reflection. James and Bergson adopted the mode of address of public philosophers, assuming the ability to communicate with a readership ranging from fellow philosophers to what was known, by Virginia Woolf but many others, as the common reader. Whitehead’s writing splits into two modes, the specialist address of Process and Reality and a more popular essayistic style in texts like Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas, though the two are never entirely mutually exclusive. Deleuze is perhaps always Deleuze; yet the co-written dramas of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus were clearly the introduction of a radically new, and actually plural, philosophical voice. Then, with, for example, the transcripts of the 1978 seminars, we hear Deleuze speaking to humans in a human way, a way perhaps crucial to the proposition that lived experience is abstract. Continuing the epigraph above, Deleuze even alludes to what does or does not happen in his heart: In other words, lived experience represents nothing. And you can live nothing but the abstract and nobody has ever lived anything else but the abstract. I don’t live representation in my heart, I live a temporal line which is completely abstract. What is more abstract than a rhythm? (Deleuze 1978) In the case of all four philosophers, the quest for a revitalised communication with the reader is bound up in the perceived urgency of a change in thought. What is difficult about this change is that it requires us to see that which is hidden in plain sight by habits of thought and language. It is difficult because it is in front of us, or in our lived experience, yet unseen or intangible. The dilemma, in other words, is the territory of modernist abstraction: the abstract painting we stand in front of, yet do not see; the ‘real’ abstraction of the commodity that is everywhere, yet invisible; the human being that is also 184

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inhuman, present at their own absence. The aim is not to assuage difficulty by translating it into simplicity; what is to be shared or made recognisable instead is the nature of the unrecognisable, the difficulty in its difficulty. What if a way of writing were to propose that abstraction’s difficulty might be communicable and available to all, or owned by all without translation, concession or condescension? Might this be an emerging human project for modernist abstraction itself? The paradox of this human project would lie in communicating Lyotard’s notion that what is ‘“proper” to humankind’ is ‘to be inhabited by the inhuman’, or Alain Badiou’s proposition that the universality of philosophy is to deal with ‘something that is not reducible to the human’ (Lyotard 1991: 2; Badiou and Žižek 2009: 74–5). Why Anti-Intellectualism? James and Bergson ‘I’m no intellectual.’ As in Beckett, so the cross-referencing philosophies of William James and Henri Bergson set out their stall against an ‘intellectualism’ whose defining characteristic was abstraction. In an essay written to mark the first French translation of James’s Pragmatism in 1911, Bergson contrasted James’s idea of reality as ‘redundant and superabundant’ with the habitual tendency of the rationalising intellect to constrain this excess: ‘our intelligence loves simplicity’, Bergson writes, and so, ‘to reduce effort’, in turn ‘insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labour’ (Bergson 2007: 177–8). A ‘dry universe’ is thus constructed out of ‘the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events’ (178). This description of abstraction as simplification and reduction is echoed in William James’s Pragmatism. In its ‘anti-intellectualist tendencies’, James insists that Pragmatism turns its back on ‘a lot of habits dear to professional philosophers’ – that is, from ‘abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins’ – and instead towards ‘concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power’, meaning ‘the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth’ (James 1981: 28). In this strident manifesto statement, we note that the reproach of abstraction is associated with what both James and Bergson alluded to as a professional philosophy of verbal solutions. Abstraction here stands for a kind of philosophical formalism, solutions internally fulfilling their linguistic co-ordinates, inviting comparison with Clement Greenberg’s painterly abstraction as a discipline evaluated only on its own criteria. But what is the alternative to a philosophy that uses language? The anti-intellectualist philosophies of James and Bergson make an appeal towards the elemental: philosophy might continue its business of writing and speaking, but what happens when you let the open air in? As Derek Sayer puts the case against the ‘violence of abstraction’ 185

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in Marxist theory, a priori theory must be replaced by ‘empirically-open categories which are analytically capable of letting the real world in’ (Sayer 1987: 147). Aware of the possibility that their new empiricism is compromised by philosophical discourse itself, James and Bergson oscillated between language as inherently abstract – ‘All human thinking gets discursified,’ writes James (97) – and abstraction as a specific operation performed within language, echoing a Nietzschean sense of the infirmities of rationality as these are embedded in the habits-as-rules of language. James cites the ‘odd distinction between substance and attribute’ – for example, the substance of this piece of chalk and the attributes of whiteness, friability and so on that are held to inhere within it; in similar manner, Bergson holds Aristotle responsible for the immovable logic that any subject must have a predicate attached to it (James 1981: 43; Bergson 2007, 53). In a way that recalls Beckett’s 1929 satire on linguistic sophistication, these are instances of what James calls the ‘perverse abstraction-worship’ of language. He explains via the word ‘winter’, where winter is abstraction-asgeneralisation, a name given to a certain number of days, a characteristic range of temperature and something that produces a tendency for people to wear warm clothes; as such, James notes, it is ‘a definite instrument abstracted from experience, a conceptual reality that you must take account of, and which reflects you totally back into sensible realities’ (118). Perverse abstractionworship occurs once this name, ‘taken from the facts’, is placed ‘behind our finite life’ as ‘previous and explanatory’ to it. To say that it is cold because it is winter is a ‘sham’ explanation embedded in the habits of language. The notion that to abstract is, specifically, for language to perform this kind of flip or reversal of logic is, as indicated in Chapter 2, a lasting narrative in the critical thought of modernity. A critique of the logic of science, informing a more general tendency to see science as the production of abstractions, is usually entailed. For A. N. Whitehead, the flip was ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Whitehead’s chapter on seventeenth-century science as ‘The century of genius’ is ironically titled, insofar as genius is defined as the success of a certain abstraction in gaining such a hold on the intellect and collective consciousness that no one seeks to question its status as natural and obvious. The ‘quite unbelievable’ Newtonian model of the simple location of matter in space and time involves the confidence trick of posing ‘high abstractions’ as concrete reality. But Henri Bergson had already written that this ‘“inert” world’ or cosmology ‘is only an abstraction’ (Bergson 2007: 74). Much later, N. Katherine Hayles found the powerful computing technologies of the late twentieth century similarly responsible for a version of the flip. From ‘the world’s noisy multiplicity’, a ‘simplified abstraction’ can be inferred, as the accepted basis of scientific procedure; this procedure becomes ‘ideology’, however, when ‘the move circles around to constitute the abstraction as the 186

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originary form from which the world’s multiplicity derives’ (Hayles 1999: 12). At stake, Hayles argues, is ‘privileging the abstract as the Real and downplaying the importance of material instantiation’ (13). William James confronted this operation with the briskness that we might expect from a practical pragmatism: it is ‘stupid to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime’ because all abstractions have their use; pragmatism ‘has no objection whatever to the realising of abstractions, so long as you get about among particulars with their aid and they actually carry you somewhere’ (James 1981: 18–19, 36). Bergson’s critique is more sustained, and potentially more ambivalent, because of its concern with the relationship of abstraction to material life. ‘To reason on abstract ideas is easy’ because it is natural to do so (Bergson 2007: 51–2); this natural status is confirmed for Bergson by the fact that abstraction is not unique to the human. Every creature, he argues, perhaps every organ or even ‘every tissue of a living being’, simplifies and generalises in order to operate within its environment: ‘Therefore it isolates the characteristic which interests it, going straight to a common property; in other words, it classifies, and consequently abstracts and generalises’ (39). The comparison with Marx is striking: where, for Marx, the abstraction of animality implied the reduction of the human to a simpler state, for Bergson it is the attribution of a complex cognition condition shared with the human. Bergson is cautious about the complete abolition of human exceptionalism: it is ‘probably’ the case that in all animals except the human, ‘abstraction and generalisation are actually experienced and not thought’. Animal behaviours – a cow stopping before a meadow, or a horse distinguishing between a stable and a granary – may be as close as it is possible to imagine to being driven by abstract ‘representations’ (39–40). But by the same token, the human tendency to abstract derives from animal ‘instincts and needs’ (40). What would it mean to say that, as well as the conscious abstraction that is unique to it, the human partakes in an abstraction that is experienced and not thought? What might follow from this idea of a bodily, instinctive abstraction, and what effect does it have on the concept of abstraction itself? In fact, it was James who could put the conclusion forcefully, declaring in Pragmatism his firm disbelief ‘that our human experience is the highest form of experience extant in the universe’ (James 1981: 133). In his later writings, Bergson regularly insisted that his work was neither unscientific nor intended to discredit science. As the necessary domain of abstraction, science did its own work in reducing the complexity of the world so as to make practical action in and on it possible – or perhaps, in critical thought’s familiar version of this, to make us, in Bergson’s phrase, ‘masters of matter’ (Bergson 2007: 25). Where the domain of metaphysics did its work was in realising movement, change or the process of becoming, a ‘continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty’ (85), a process that classical scientific analysis 187

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must always immobilise in thought in order to posit an inevitability that could be conceived only in retrospect. In this model of metaphysics, matter was not to be mastered; subjugation belongs to linguistic habits that conceptualise matter as inert. ‘Intuition’ is the key term offered by Bergson as a means of breaking through this habit, the ‘primacy of instinctive perception’ as Beckett put it, in a Bergsonian way, of Proust and the exemplification of intuition in involuntary memory (PTD 83). As intelligence is the human way of thinking through abstraction, intuition is shared, extra-human or inhuman. If it is ‘the metaphysical investigation of the object in what essentially belongs to it’, what in fact belongs to the object is that nothing inherently belongs to it; intuition knows the movement, change and exchange of matter across a world in which, as Proust and Wallace Stevens in their fascination showed, particles miraculously coalesce into humans – it sees this movement as ‘reality itself’, and immobility only an ‘abstract moment, a snapshot taken by our mind’ (Bergson 2007: 140, 22). But intuition is thus its own form of intelligence, or of abstraction, in fact, of a more reflexive or metadiscursive kind, ‘the attention that the mind gives to itself, over and above, while it is fixed upon matter, its object’ (62). Bergson insisted that the aim of intuition was to introduce precision into thinking about thought; not one line of what he had written associated intuition with instinct or feeling, he noted defensively. This, then, was a way of saying, with Wallace Stevens, that intuition resists the intelligence almost successfully, ‘court[ing] difficulty’ but never ceasing to be a mode of ‘reflection’ (1, 61–2), the difficulty being that the reflection is of that which precedes, exceeds or is other than conscious intellect and intelligence. What Elizabeth Grosz calls the ‘strange inventiveness’ of Bergson’s theory of intuition is laid down, she notes, in a struggle over definition at the outset of Matter and Memory (Grosz 2004: 163). Bergson determines to look at the world as if we knew nothing of the distinction between real and ideal that conventionally structures it. In doing so, we would come to see matter as an ‘aggregate of “images”’. In what follows, we glimpse a certain foreshadowing of the Proustian formula: Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images’. And by ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’ . . . [T]he object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it: the image it is, but a self-existing image. (Bergson 1991: 9–10) Bergson’s deployment of scare-quoting and italics denotes words stretching to that which they no longer are: ‘more than that which the idealist calls a 188

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representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing’. If matter is no longer a term for something simply located in time and space, where and what is it? This is the zone of indetermination addressed by real-ideal memory in Bergson, and by its successor, involuntary memory in Proust: ‘it still is, it is real’, explains Elizabeth Grosz, yet ‘not in us, just as perception is not in us’ (Grosz 2004: 175, 178). Elsewhere Bergson was not averse to openly voicing the human dilemma of such linguistic struggles – for example, with regard to the habit of thought in which subjects confront other humans as objects, as if ‘invariable and immobile while we consider them’: How can we uproot so profound an inclination? How can we bring the human mind to reverse its customary way of operating, beginning with change and movement, envisaged as reality itself, and no longer to see in halts or states mere snapshots taken of what is moving reality? The human mind would have to be shown that if the habitual movement of thought is practically useful, handy for conversation, cooperation, action, it leads to philosophical problems which are and which will remain insoluble, because they are presented backwards. (Bergson 2007: 54) The conscious voicing of this effort to show the human mind something radically different permeates Bergson’s writing. But essential to it, and despite his strategic denial of feeling, are the necessarily emotional and affective dimensions of a rigorous, intuitional philosophy of unforeseeable novelty. Intuition is emphatically not common sense, yet it gives an intellectual justification to seeing and feeling what is immediately there in the datum of experience and to the inevitable relevance of imagination and invention to this. Stevens’s abstraction as ‘first idea’ is again in play. In the essay ‘The Possible and the Real’, Bergson writes: Philosophy stands to gain in finding some absolute in the moving world of phenomena. But we shall gain also in our feeling of greater joy and strength. Greater joy because the reality invented before our eyes will give each one of us, unceasingly, certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged; it will reveal to us, beyond the fixity and monotony which our senses, hypnotized by our constant needs, at first perceived in it, ever-recurring novelty, the moving originality of things. But above all we shall have greater strength, for we shall feel we are participating, creators of ourselves, in the great work of creation which is the origin of all things and which goes on before our eyes. By getting hold of itself, our faculty for acting will become intensified. (Bergson 2007: 86) 189

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In the heightening of this rhetoric around great and greater joy and strength, the analogy with art holds a dual significance. The suggestion is glimpsed that art might constitute the requisite new philosophical language, revealing the ‘moving originality’ of things through its own powers of ‘invention’. In this, Bergson recognised the commonality of his philosophy with James’s pragmatism: ‘while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it is an invention’ (Bergson 2007: 183). Bergson is unsure whether the word ‘invention’ is James’s, but it is certainly his own. While ‘we invent the truth to utilize reality’, this is not to deny that reality has an independence nor to claim that the truth is arbitrary. Bergson draws us away from the purely pragmatic aspect of James’s thinking – we invent the truth we need – and towards its philosophical counterpart: a radical empiricism. For James too, to be truly, scientifically empirical must be to go beyond scientific (ordinary) abstraction and follow reality into the processes of change and becoming that lie beyond capture by existing languages. This is the territory of the aesthetic – for example, in Proust and Beckett, that of the language of involuntary memory as the basis of an experimental art. Bergson’s passage above, however, also subtly raises the question of access to this aesthetic, appealing for inclusivity and empowerment through a principle of shared creativity. ‘Each one of us’ may be released into self-creation; ‘getting hold of itself’, a comprehensive agency is enabled and intensified. What if ‘certain of the satisfactions which art at rare intervals procures for the privileged’ were not merely an analogy for the philosophical principle of creation, but pointed to the potential of actual art in a new dispensation of democratic creativity? As suggested in Part II, a certain as yet perhaps unthinkable sense of the demotic can be glimpsed in the experimentalism of Stein, Stevens and Beckett. What if the abstraction of this art were to become not its rare but its common property? What if it were no longer rare and exclusive to encounter the art itself? Bergson’s ‘joy’ would lie, again, in the common ownership of this difficulty, rather than in the amelioration of it. ‘Let us guard against seeing a simple game,’ he concludes, in a simple and human way (Bergson 2007: 86). Abstraction in modernism is therefore becoming available for a conception of the world no longer divided, by an ‘old’ abstraction, between human subjects and their objects. In this sense it is becoming associated with difficulty in a more open, but perhaps less easily capturable way. In association with Bergson’s ‘intuition’ and ‘invention’ or Stevens’s ‘first idea’, it offers to occupy the in-between space left open by the negations (‘real without’, ‘ideal without’) of the Proustian formula. Nothing is merely subjective or merely objective; everything exists in a manner that these such dualisms are inadequate to frame. The abiding concern for A. N. Whitehead, following James and Bergson, was of how to communicate this new abstraction by dismantling a common-sense ideology of science or ‘scientism’ (Bergson) held within the wider polity. 190

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Whitehead’s Feelings Whitehead’s major work Process and Reality begins with the intention of ‘rescuing’ the thought of James and Bergson from ‘the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it’ (Whitehead 1985: xii). This can be related to the way his philosophy continually posed abstraction as a central question; philosophy was the ‘critic of abstractions’ or ‘explanatory of abstraction’ (Whitehead 1927: 108; 1985: 20). Because we must use abstractions, we must be scrupulously vigilant about how we do so. Tolerance and intolerance become the keynotes: ‘the intolerant use of abstractions is the major vice of the intellect’ (1927: 23). While agreeing therefore with Bergson that the abstraction of intellect distorts nature through spatialising it – clock-time as against durée, for example – he did not agree that such a mode of abstraction was ‘an inherent necessity of the intellect’ (Whitehead 1978: 209). Clearly, then, Whitehead’s philosophy was also a theory of what intellectual work is or might be, seeking to build on the conjunction of intellect and emotion that he had found in James and Bergson. I have suggested that this effort is under way through the writing of abstraction in aesthetic modernism, shaping a new model of intellectual work. Whitehead’s concerns were also notably linguistic: philosophy ‘redesigns language’, he argued at the outset of Process and Reality, in the same way that a physical science redesigns the appliances it needs (Whitehead 1985: 11). However, alongside this instrumentalist view of philosophical language as ‘tool’ was something very different: ‘no language can be anything but elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience’ (13). In Adventures of Ideas, a reference to the ‘meanings miraculously revealed in great literature’ prefaces the following theory of language and of writing: Language is incomplete and fragmentary, and merely registers a stage in the average advance beyond ape-mentality. But all men enjoy flashes of insight beyond meanings already stabilized in etymology and grammar. Hence the role of literature, the role of the special sciences, and the role of philosophy: – in their various ways engaged in finding linguistic expressions for meanings as yet unexpressed. (Whitehead 1961: 227–8) Whitehead adopted a reverential approach to a literature whose reference points were impeccably classical, and did not venture into the literary modernism that surrounded him, despite the friendship with Gertrude Stein. Yet ‘linguistic expressions for meanings as yet unexpressed’ invites connection with the impossibilities of abstract writing that we have seen in Stein, Stevens and Beckett, where the ellipticality of language ensures an endless movement towards a new that is unexpressed or inexpressible. It also helps to explain 191

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the element of surprise (for Isabelle Stengers, freedom and wildness) that characterises his writing. This surprise may take the form of the scrupulously explained neologism – let us say, ‘prehension’ or ‘the superject’, of which more below – as part of Whitehead’s self-conscious and systematic effort to forge a new vocabulary of process. Or, it might be the sudden rupture of discursive texture – a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, or the proposition that Leibniz ‘tells us how an atom is feeling about itself’ (Whitehead 1961: 136). Consider, from Adventures of Ideas, this reflection on the axiom that bare sense experience must be at the root of scientific method: In this way, the exclusive reliance on sense-perception promotes a false metaphysics. This error is the result of high-grade intellectuality. The instinctive interpretations which govern human life and animal life presuppose a contemporary world throbbing with energetic values. It requires considerable ability to make the disastrous abstraction of our bare sense-perceptions from the massive insistency of our total experiences. Of course, whatever we can do in the way of abstraction is for some purposes useful – provided that we know what we are about. (Whitehead 1961: 220–1) Surrounding the ‘world throbbing with energetic values’ is a demotic subtext: only the finest intellects could disastrously ignore the richness of this readily available world. To the involved paradox that an intolerant intellectual abstraction in the form of empirical science has invented the idea of the strictly non-intellectual as the basis of experience, a ‘consistent reliance upon sensationalist perception as the basis of all experiential activity’ (Whitehead 1961: 210), Whitehead supplies a paradox in response: only a further, tolerant intellectual abstraction that knows what it is ‘about’ can give a true account of the throbbing world, the ‘massive insistency of our total experiences’. There is no simple, bare ‘sense’ or ‘sensationalist’ perception: Whitehead agreed with Bergson that ‘mentality’, through its established abstraction, ‘is an agent of simplification’ effected across ‘animal experience’ as a whole (Whitehead 1961: 213–14). It would then be a mistake, he noted provocatively, ‘to suppose that, at the level of human intellect, the role of mental functionings is to add subtlety to the content of experience. The exact opposite is the case.’ Mentality’s task is to derive more complex, non-simplified ways of framing how and why non-mentality counts or matters. For Whitehead, as for James and Bergson, there were, above all, ‘stubborn facts’ (Whitehead 1978: 129); but the stubbornness of these facts implies a complexity to which the idea of bare sense-perception is clearly inadequate. Bare facts, then, in order to be thought, require a vocabulary and an aesthetics of imagination and invention as well as empirical observation – again, an aesthetic of Stevens’s ‘first idea’. 192

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Abstraction is thus primed by Whitehead to suggest access to a world that is variously ‘throbbing with energetic values’ or, in a phrase borrowed from William James, ‘buzzing . . . amid a democracy of fellow creatures’ (Whitehead 1985: 50). Returning, like James and Bergson, to the confidence tricks of linguistic habit, knowing what we are about with abstraction means searching for an alternative to the structures of subject–object and subject–predicate. These forms, Whitehead explains, do an abstract ‘violence’ to ‘that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis’ (49–50). Whitehead’s writing, however, highlights the paradox that an intuitional, empiricist metaphysics offering to reclaim a lived experience beyond verbal solutions is even more obliged than usual to be scrupulously careful about how it does this in words. To read Whitehead is often to feel immersed in linguistic scrutiny. As in Badiou’s reading of Beckett, however, the ‘important question’ for Whitehead, as Steven Shaviro puts it, is ‘not what something is, but how it is – or, more precisely, how it affects, and how it is affected by, other things’ (Shaviro 2009: 56). While, that is, the invention of new terms in Whitehead feels systematic and precise, the terms have at the same time an ellipticality, referring to processes of meaning, always on the way to somewhere else. What might language look like beyond the structure of subjects and objects acting on each other, things doing things to other things whilst simply located in time and space? We are arriving at Whitehead’s key proposition that a philosophy of process and organism could only, intellectually, proceed through an ontology of collective, inhuman feeling. The feelings of the atom underline the importance of Leibniz’s philosophy of monads. Where Lucretius and Newton, Whitehead explains, asked the question, ‘What does the world of atoms look like to an intellect surveying it?’, Leibniz, Whitehead suggests, answered a different question: he ‘tells us how an atom is feeling about itself’ (Whitehead 1961: 136). Positivism predicates a material substratum where things are in a state of ‘bare realization’, merely the ‘passive’ or ‘vacuous’ recipients of their qualities, where vacuous is defined by Whitehead as ‘devoid of any individual enjoyment arising from the mere fact of realisation in that context’ (220). Leibniz’s gesture on behalf of the atom is not a call to imaginative projection so much as an alternative logic to this positivism: ‘self-enjoyment’ and ‘intrinsic worth’ are self-evidently properties belonging to a continuum or spectrum of life that includes the human. Despite ironically re-appropriating a term used by Descartes to distinguish the human from the animal, Leibniz’s ‘self-enjoying’ atom shows that Whitehead is not merely interested in extending the boon of feeling to non-human organisms. To remind us of Samuel Beckett’s passionate embrace of the deanthropomorphic in Cézanne and Jack Yeats, what Shaviro calls Whitehead’s ‘radical 193

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deanthropomorphising’ extends to the general feelings of the inorganic, so that ‘The “mental pole” [Whitehead] of an occasion contributing to the existence of a tree or a rock or an electron’ may be negligible, yet logically existent (Shaviro 2009: 28). The philosophy of the organism is also the philosophy of inorganic life, and both involve feeling. To clarify what this means for abstraction in Whitehead, let us return for a moment to the Proustian formula. In his brilliant essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin connects Proustian involuntary memory and its Bergsonian associations with the ‘aura’ of the work of art that is threatened by technological reproduction and ‘a society in which practice is in decline’ (Benjamin 1970: 188). The aura requires perception to be a reciprocal act: just as looking at someone carries the expectation that our gaze will be returned, so the aura depends upon the same relationship between the ‘inanimate or natural object’ and the human (190). If, Benjamin writes, invoking Novalis, ‘Perceptibility is a kind of attentiveness’, the attentiveness is mutual. ‘To perceive the aura of an object we look at’, Benjamin writes, ‘means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of the mémoire involontaire.’ While the epiphany, then, orients itself towards the subject, photography is ‘inevitably’ felt to be inhuman because the camera does not return the gaze of the subject. Reading Benjamin on the abstract scenario that is involuntary memory is very like reading Whitehead on prehension, a term that is elaborated across his writings and carries the weight of describing reality, as it were, without description – that is, in a way that is outside of subject–object and causality. Whitehead’s approach to the term constantly varies. ‘We certainly do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit cognition’, he writes, in Science and the Modern World, by way of introducing ‘the word “prehension” for uncognitive apprehension’, to distinguish this from conscious knowing even if the latter may be a part of any ‘unity’ of a prehension (Whitehead 1927: 86). In this, the link with involuntary memory is clear. Prehension, however, does not require a consciousness to be absent from. Always a unity or ‘prehensive unification’, prehension is a way of saying that any moment perception is not a one-way process emanating from a thinking subject but involves all elements in a collective participation or attentiveness. Things exist not in themselves but in and for the prehension. In Adventures of Ideas, prehension is ‘the general way in which the occasion of the experience can include, as part of its own essence, any other entity, whether another occasion of experience or an entity of another type’ (Whitehead 1961: 235). ‘Feelings’, Whitehead notes, ‘are the positive type of prehensions’, and subjects are not the only entities required to have these feelings. In Process and Reality, where prehension requires elaboration on a much greater scale, we encounter the proposition that as a ‘protest’ against the bifurcation of nature (subject/object, organic/inorganic), prehension is also a protest against the 194

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bifurcation of ‘actualities’ into ‘publicity’ and ‘privacy’ (Whitehead 1985: 289). Why, Whitehead continues to ask, must we insist on so many dualisms between outer and inner? Where ‘private’ signifies individual subjectivity, ‘publicity’ signifies a kind of structural reality, everything that matters to an occasion that is ‘beyond the fact in question’. But ‘publicity’ informs the term ‘superject’, which ‘arises from the publicity which it finds, and . . . adds itself to the publicity which it transmits’, and is proposed by Whitehead as the necessary alternative to the ‘misleading’ category of subject itself (222). To look at the commentaries of others on Whitehead’s prehension is to be reminded of the hermeneutical challenges around abstraction in the writing of Stein, Stevens and Beckett. For Steven Shaviro, Whitehead uses the term ‘for the act by which one actual occasion takes up and responds to another’ (Shaviro 2009: 28), an explanation prefigured by Isabelle Stengers’s suggestion of ‘a “taking into account”’, drawn from Whitehead himself. Of the action of someone stopping to pick up their coat before leaving the house, prehension ‘makes the operation and the production of reality coincide’. Stengers writes: ‘What prehends realizes itself in the process of prehensive unification, my hesitation “here”, my coat “there”, the threatening sky up above, and so on’ (Stengers 2011: 147). However, another passing observation is equally revealing: ‘It does not require explanation but must enable the exhibition of the common feature of all situations in which something makes a difference for something else . . .’. Stengers’s proposal to lift prehension out of explanation, having it enable an ‘exhibition’ instead, is an illumination of Whitehead’s use of language. We cannot ‘explain’ how a previously inert, inhuman world feels or attends on the same continuum as that of the human; this must instead be produced in a language that is always in process. ‘Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves’ (Whitehead 1927: 187). Within Whitehead’s inhuman, things know what to do, unified by prehension and feeling, even or especially as this knowledge is a form of involuntary cognition. The autonomy and attentiveness of things is mirrored in Benjamin’s aura and Proust’s involuntary memory, the equivalents of a world in which human subjects are no longer the only ones to (self-)enjoy sensation and cognition. Being vigilant about abstraction has now come to signify being unafraid to commit to a language of process and allusion rather than definition. This is the space too created by the Proustian formula, of absence and negation, ‘without’: things are real and ideal in a way that defies definition, without actually being so. In Process and Reality Whitehead supplies another variation on the formula: ‘The future is merely real, without being actual’ (Whitehead 1985: 224). ‘Strikingly,’ notes Shaviro, ‘this is the same formula that Deleuze (borrowing from Proust) uses to describe the virtual’ (Shaviro 2009: 98). But the formula is not quite the same; as we have seen in Beckett’s Proust, something is already stirring in it. 195

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‘Real Without Being Actual, Ideal Without Being Abstract’ How is the formula, abstraction = real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, arrived at? I want to propose now a graphic way of tracking this transformation, one that risks taking some liberties with the contexts and intellectual histories we might need for a keyword, in order to stress a fluidity at work.   1. Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Proust).   2. Real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract (Beckett).   3. By ‘image’ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing (Bergson).   4. The future is merely real, without being actual, whereas the past is a nexus of actualities (Whitehead).   5. Here again, Proust’s formula best defines the state of virtuality: ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ (Deleuze 1991: 96).   6. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’ (Deleuze 2014: 272).   7. Abstract, singular and creative, here and now, real yet non-concrete, actual yet non-effectuated – that is why abstract machines are dated and named (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 511).   8. The concept is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22).  9. It is a virtual that is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156). 10. The virtual is abstract event potential. Semblance is the manner in which the virtual actually appears. It is the being of the virtual as lived abstraction. . . . It is in no way an idealist concept. And it is in no way in opposition to actualism (Massumi 2011: 16). One of the first things we will notice in this pattern is that, in 5 and 6, from two of Gilles Deleuze’s earlier works, Bergsonism (1966) and Difference and Repetition (1968), the formula comes to represent the virtual. In his book on the virtual, social scientist Rob Shields uses the phrase ‘a continuum of soft oppositions’ to describe the relation of the virtual to a cluster of other terms across the work of Proust, Bergson and Deleuze (Shields 2002: 29). It is a way of characterising what might otherwise look like hard-and-fast distinctions: for example, as Shields asserts, that the virtual is distinct from both the concrete and the abstract. Through the lens of Whitehead’s philosophy of elliptical language in 196

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a state of becoming, it seems helpful to see such terms as on a continuum of soft oppositions. For example, in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (8 and 9), the formula stands both for the virtual and for ‘the concept’. Are the concept and the virtual identical for Deleuze and Guattari, as this implies? But, as we learn from Whitehead, it would be better not to think of the identity of words at any one point, but of what is happening to words or where they are headed. Let us therefore track a pattern by which involuntary memory becomes abstract – that is, from Proust’s formula, in which abstract meant simply an inferior alternative to the ideal, through Deleuze’s rebranding of the formula, and therefore of involuntary memory, as virtual, to Brian Massumi’s proposition that the virtual is ‘abstract event potential’ which, through something called ‘semblance’, becomes ‘lived abstraction’. We sense the approach to a full circle, abstraction travelling in or perhaps around the formula, from the initial reproach of pure form, to the nature of lived experience, located in the same involuntary memory whose formula initially condemned abstraction. Has abstraction somehow been rethought as its opposite, or is there a sense in which pure form and lived experience already co-existed within abstraction? We recall Deleuze’s heartfelt words from the 1978 seminar, that lived experience represents nothing. And you can live nothing but the abstract and nobody has ever lived anything else but the abstract. I don’t live representation in my heart, I live a temporal line which is completely abstract. What is more abstract than a rhythm? Like abstract art, lived experience represents nothing, but if life in its becoming follows or depends upon lines or rhythms, making living patterns or diagrams out of these, then lives are forms and both are abstract, ‘absolutely’ in Deleuze’s declaration. Deleuze and Guattari also, enthusiastically, found a model for this abstraction in the ‘Gothic line’ of Wilhelm Worringer, whose ‘finest pages’, they write, contrast the abstract with the organic (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 498). In Form Problems in Gothic, the sequel to Abstraction and Empathy, Worringer stressed the need to free Gothic from classical and Renaissance parameters of beauty and the aesthetic. When, instead, we examine Gothic on its own premises, we find a characteristic line embodying power or force rather than a formal beauty that would be anachronistic to it – ‘in the organic sense . . . expressionless’, but ‘of extreme liveliness’, working in spite of rather than in harmony with the stone (Worringer 1918: 47). But I anticipate, and will return to Deleuze on painting soon. A transformation occurs across the Proustian formula, then, from involuntary memory, to the virtual, to, in Massumi’s terms, an ‘abstract event potential’ 197

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which is also a ‘lived abstraction’. If we think of this not as a linear, successive change of meaning but as a non-linear flowing of meaning, a flow in more than one direction, then we are getting closer to the kind of language needed for a philosophy of inorganicism and of life as potential of unforeseeable novelty. The lived abstraction of the twenty-first century was already present in the pure formal abstraction of the modernism – something, in fact, that we have already been able to see in the complex dialogue between organic and inorganic in abstraction for Kandinsky and Mondrian, for example. Further, if, as I have suggested, the Proustian formula becomes or comes to stand for abstraction, this is not simply to say that the definition of abstraction has changed. Abstraction has become attached, rather, to the capacity for words to be fluid and to elude fixity, to name (without naming) but not define, that is instantiated in the formula. Precisely at the moment, however, when abstraction might seem to have been restored to previous incarnations of the merely self-reflexive – the ‘verbal solution’, perhaps, or the Greenbergian model of painterly discipline – let us note a Deleuzian caution issued on two occasions at which he is elaborating on the virtual. From Bergsonism, ‘We must take this terminology seriously’; from Difference and Repetition, ‘It would be wrong to see only a verbal dispute here: it is a question of existence itself’ (Deleuze 1991: 96; Deleuze 2014: 275). It would be a mistake to see virtual, real, actual, ideal and abstract as mere words susceptible to definition in the form of other words; these words help us to understand existence, where meaning does not apply, and therefore we need to take them more seriously. This state of non-definition is precisely that in which the new might be thought. But we must, nevertheless, and perhaps in a Beckettian sense, continue to use words and to write. What, then, does ‘virtual’ do and why is it so important, given that we see it as on the way to becoming abstraction? What is the word wanting or tending towards? The importance that Deleuze attaches to virtual also reflects its importance in Bergson’s early philosophy, and in his commentaries Deleuze can be reassuringly conventional, acknowledging the reader’s concern to know the nature of this virtual, to avoid vagueness or the confusion of it with other things. Here, then, is where he leans back on Proust and involuntary memory, to say that the formula ‘best defines the states of virtuality’. The virtual is the realideal. As in the moment of epiphany in Proust – or, let us say, in what we now call virtual reality – something real happens that can be differentiated from actuality; this something is ideal, yet it is not merely cut off from life and the world (the old abstract). As something real and ideal, let us recall from Chapter 5 Ben Lerner’s invocation of Allen Grossman’s idea of the ‘virtual poem’. As ‘abstract potential’, this is very real, because it is the idea of the poem that drives and animates poetic composition everywhere. No poem can actualise it; it is already real in its potential, as an ideal. In another sense, however, because the virtual 198

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is potential, it must give rise to actual poems, but only in a way that underlines their strict novelty and unforseeability. The reality of the virtual is that the virtual is inscrutable. In Deleuze’s affirmation of the Proustian formula, we realise a key term that the formula does not include: ‘possible’. For Deleuze, it was crucial that the virtual and its potentiality were not confused with the possible, and this distinction between the virtual and the possible aids in our understanding of how the virtual is real. ‘The possible has no reality (although it may have an actuality); conversely, the virtual is not actual, but as such possesses a reality’ (Deleuze 1991: 96). Things that happen are drawn from the pool of the possible; but these possibilities are only discernible in retrospect, when the thing has happened. The virtual is the logic by which this particular thing comes into being, the particular poem rather than another one; as Shaviro puts it, while ‘mere possibility’ is not ‘enough’ to make anything happen, the reality of the virtual provides ‘a sufficient reason for whatever happens’ (Shaviro 2009: 34–5). I call this a logic to avoid the temptation to mystify the virtual somewhat by presenting it, as in misleading readings of Bergsonian élan vital, as an autonomous life force, a temptation Shaviro is aware of but does not entirely avoid in his application of metaphor: ‘The virtual is like a field of energies that have not yet been expended, or a reservoir of potentialities that have not yet been tapped’; more appropriately perhaps, it is ‘a principle of emergence, or of creation’ (35). When we arrive at the coincidence of virtuality and abstraction in the Proustian formula – for example, in Massumi – we see how far the abstraction of modernity has travelled in the forms of tonality and feeling that are, in the thought of James and Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze–Guattari, inherent in what an inhumanism of the human means. Abstraction, too, can draw on Shaviro’s vitalist metaphors of untapped energy and potentiality, or of emergence and creation. In Deleuze, as John Rajchman argues, we find an abstraction concerned ‘not with extracting “information” from things . . ., but rather with finding within things the delicate, complicated “abstract” virtualities of other things’ (Rajchman 1995: 22). This is how we have seen abstraction being reshaped in the literary modernisms of Stein, Stevens and Beckett, a writing able to be intensely affirmative and prospective only because of its impossibility, against which the merely possible looks inert and predictable. It seems to be about a future or futures, and takes us back to Whitehead’s variant, ‘the future is merely real, without being actual’. As in the concept of prehension, and in Benjamin’s reading of involuntary memory, the virtual–abstract makes a creative disturbance in our sense of causality. Because the virtual is real in its potential, its effects are waiting to actualise themselves in the world, in processes that would look like causes. Whitehead’s virtual future, as ‘merely real’, is already there, if inscrutable; when it is actualised, it gives rise to things that become the past, a ‘nexus of actualities’. Just as, Shaviro argues, Whitehead 199

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drew on William James’s theory of emotions in which feelings and their bodily states are seen as identical rather than causal, so the virtual gives to effects a ‘strange precedence’ over causes in the physical world (Shaviro 2009: 58, 37). Abstraction in its Deleuzian form, then, becomes a way of believing in the world and in change. This is not a remote experience but a lived one, once it is actualised outside of the forms of the human and the organic that constrain thinking. The abstract machine is Deleuze and Guattari’s way of representing this creative inhumanism, the open machinic freed from the closed machine that had been the abstraction of an older order of things. But this abstraction did not have to wait for the twenty-first century and its translation into, for example, the immaterial labour of Antonio Negri or the activist philosophy of Brian Massumi. It was already there as a virtual future in the modernists that Deleuze and Guattari admired and who featured in their writing, Proust and Beckett as well as Kafka, Woolf and Lawrence, and in Paul Cézanne. The artist, Joachim Gasquet records Cézanne saying, is nothing more than a receptacle of sensations, a brain, a recording machine . . . A damned good machine, fragile and complex, above all in its relationship to other machines . . . But if he intervenes, if he dares to meddle voluntarily with what he ought merely to be translating, he introduces his own significance into it and the work is inferior. (Gasquet 1991: 150) This is provocative. Cézanne did not wish to be reductively materialist, to suggest that the human was mechanical (for this would surely have been an unfortunate abstraction), and he goes on to offer Gasquet a safer haven in humanism again: ‘The landscape is reflected, humanized, rationalized within me.’ But ‘Cézanne’s enigma’, as Deleuze and Guattari note it, remained: it was the nature of ‘sensation’, and ‘“Man absent from but entirely within the landscape”’(Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 169): that is, the human presence at its own absence, being without description, but thereby released, as Beckett had it, into the free play of every faculty. This free play, pre-eminently in the form of suffering for Beckett, is our prehensive or machinic experience of the inhuman. And how could this sensation not be human? Deleuze’s Cézannean Francis Bacon Let us take Gilles Deleuze’s study of the art of Francis Bacon (1981) as a final brief illustration of this chapter’s argument for the legacies of modernist abstraction. Deleuze’s book is almost as much about Cézanne as Bacon, and makes its case for a ‘Cézannean’ Bacon. Does this mean, to echo the question asked of Cézanne in Chapter 3, that Bacon is an abstract painter? Deleuze invites us into an answer in the affirmative for each artist. Yes, Cézanne and 200

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Bacon are abstract painters, but not in the way the world has come to understand abstract art, and not in a way that would be immediately recognised, perhaps, by either artist. In this sense Deleuze’s proposition is reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s distinction between abstract art and an art of abstraction: Cézanne and Bacon are not abstract artists, but they practice an art of abstraction. Just as philosophical abstraction has become transformed, so has the way we might call painting abstraction; in Deleuze, the two are fused into one. Deleuze writes of the ‘paths’ taken by Bacon’s art in distinguishing it from established painterly abstraction. First, Bacon painted the Figure, the kinds of human form or referent that populate his paintings, as a path between figurative and abstract art, in a way that dispenses with the need for this familiar dualism (that is, Bacon’s painting was never about the need to break with representation). In addition, Deleuze sees Bacon steering a path between two established modes of abstract painting: an ‘optical’ abstraction ‘of Mondrian’s type’, and a ‘manual’ abstraction like the action painting of Abstract Expressionism (Deleuze 2004: 108, 110). How, then, can Bacon’s art itself be seen as abstract? Let us go straight to the heart of this via Deleuze and Guattari’s redefinition of abstract art in general terms. ‘What then should be termed abstract in modern art?’, they ask in A Thousand Plateaus: ‘A line of variable direction that describes no contour and delimits no form . . .’ (2003: 499). ‘And this, first of all’, they continue in What Is Philosophy?, ‘is what makes painting abstract: summoning forces, populating the area of plain, uniform color with the forces it bears, making the invisible forces visible in themselves . . .’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 499; 1994: 181–2). Following Worringer, Deleuze and Guattari here reset the terms of ‘painting’s eternal object’ from form to force: as this is posed in the key concept of art’s manifestation as ‘percept’, ‘Is this not the definition of the percept itself – to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become?’ (1994: 182). Experimental modernism has played a notable role in posing this transgressive question. While Mondrian does it ‘by simple differences between the sides of a square’ and Kandinsky ‘by linear “tensions”’, Worringer held the theoretical key ‘from the depths of time’ – that is, the time of modernism – in the Gothic or Northern line, ‘an entire “visualised geometry”, rising to the intuition of mechanical forces, constituting a powerful nonorganic life’ or, in A Thousand Plateaus, ‘inorganic, yet alive, and all the more alive for being inorganic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 182; 2003: 498). But the percept also connects with Cézanne’s ‘paint the sensation’ or, ‘as Bacon will say in words very close to Cézanne’s, record the fact’ (Deleuze 2004: 35). Art’s abstraction, then, is to paint the forces by which things become and change, Whitehead’s prehensive networks of inhuman attentiveness as they become the lived experience of abstract line and rhythm of which Deleuze, in 201

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his 1978 seminars, spoke so passionately. Let us in turn register the tonality and feeling of the claims made on behalf of Bacon’s art in Deleuze’s study: Bacon’s Figures seem to be one of the most marvelous responses in the history of painting to the question, How can one make invisible forces visible? . . . Bacon, no less than Beckett, is one of those artists who, in the name of a very intense life, can call for an even more intense life. He is not a painter who ‘believes’ in death. His is indeed a figurative misérabilisme, but one that serves an increasingly powerful Figure of life. The same homage should be paid to Beckett or Kafka. In the very act of ‘representing’ horror, mutilation, prosthesis, fall or failure, they have erected indomitable Figures, indomitable through both their insistence and their presence. They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter. (Deleuze 2004: 58, 62) ‘Marvelous’, ‘intense’, ‘homage’, ‘indomitable’ and the arresting note of ‘laughter’: Deleuze’s intellectual case for Bacon’s abstraction, an abstraction seemingly comprehensively rethought, is also an affective case, an affective case for Bacon’s art. The parallel with Beckett is instructive (Bacon, by the way, declared himself bemused and amazed by analogies of his art with that of Beckett, who was ‘too intelligent’ and whose minimalism showed ‘the cerebral’ taking precedence over ‘the rest’ [Bacon 2010: 118]). Like Adorno and Badiou on Beckett, Deleuze seeks to rescue Bacon from a critical field bounded by anthropomorphist assumptions in which ‘figurative misérabilisme’ leads to moralised critiques of pessimism and inhumanity, as in the dismissals of Beckett by Lukács and Raymond Williams. John Berger reviewed Bacon’s painting first in 1952 and then again in 1972 and 2004: while finding his work fearless and remarkable, Berger moved from a sense of Bacon’s connivance with horror, to his ‘conformist’ similarity with Walt Disney in the static view that ‘man has come to be seen as mindless’, to a mute recording of a ‘pitiless’ world (Berger 2017: 341–52). The attribution of horror, violence, inhuman deformation and pitilessness to a Baconian commentary upon a barbarous modernity of warfare and inequality, or even the idea that Bacon’s art should be connected to these historical scenarios, is, however, as Deleuze’s account implicitly persuades, a kind of category error. The dis-figuration of the face in Bacon turns it into head and flesh, and suggests a play of forces in and on the body that connect it with the inhuman world and that world’s endless abstract virtuality. The human face or head may then be seen as a way of investigating the human world and the sensation that links it materially to the inhuman. This is not, Deleuze argues, a cold and bloodless abstraction: Bacon’s feeling is not a taste for horror but expresses ‘pity, an 202

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Figure 7.1  Francis Bacon, Miss Muriel Belcher, 1959. Oil on canvas, 74 × 67.5 cm (291 8 × 26½ in). © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2022. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. intense pity: pity for the flesh, including the flesh of dead animals’ (Deleuze 2004: xi). What if it is human to be inhuman, and the abstract provides the affirmative sense of inhuman that helps us grasp this? ‘I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughterhouses and meat . . .’, Deleuze quotes from Bacon (Deleuze 2004: 24), and Deleuze’s appeal is, in a sense, that we take Bacon at his word – which would be in his expression of empathy and pity, as well as in and through his painting. In writing the abstraction of Bacon and Cézanne, Deleuze leans heavily on Cézanne’s letters, and on the only kind of text Bacon (a passionate reader but resolute non-writer – ‘The same “temperament” as Cézanne?’, Deleuze wonders [Deleuze 2004: 43]) has made available to the world: the interview, and in particular the well-known interviews conducted, revised and enlarged by David Sylvester over a number of years. Primarily, Deleuze locates the ‘very general thread’ linking Bacon to Cézanne in these words of Bacon’s: ‘It’s a very, very close and difficult thing to know why some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system and other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’ (Sylvester 1993: 18). 203

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Bacon would not, of course, have identified the painting he pursued, of nervous system over brain, as abstract. Sylvester, from the very outset, probes whether Bacon had ‘ever had any desire at all to do an abstract painting’, and at one point receives the response that abstraction loses the tension that results from the subject’s desire to ‘report’ on reality (Sylvester 1993: 8, 60). Here is abstraction again as deficient formalism, ‘an entirely aesthetic thing’ for Bacon, ‘all on one level’ and ‘only really interested in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes’ (58–8). At other points, less dismissive of abstraction per se, Bacon could metaphorise his work as a tightrope or knife-edge between figuration and abstraction, and even suggest that the involuntary mark-making he sought could also be found in abstract painting. This does not quite prepare us, however, for the way that paint hitting the nervous system for Bacon becomes Baconian abstraction for Deleuze. His exuberant case for Bacon is a perhaps uneasy alliance of two modes of thinking abstract art. One is artist-oriented: the struggle with sensation in Cézanne and Bacon is a personal narrative about intention and technique, along with a disposition towards the painting of invisible forces, Bacon’s Figure ‘one of the most marvellous responses’. But Deleuze is also looking for a more difficult transition from artistic agency, through the definition of the ‘percept’ as the domain of art. Sensation occurs within the percept; as Peter de Bolla puts it in relation to Deleuze’s ‘“inhuman” philosophy’, ‘There would be “sensation”, then, but without the agent we commonly assume to “have” the sensation’ (de Bolla 2004: 19). ‘Percepts and affects’, Deleuze and Guattari assert, are not to be confused with perceptions and feelings (1994: 24). Art ‘preserves’, and is not dependent on its source after completion: the air in a photograph or painting ‘no longer depends on whoever was breathing it that morning’ (163). The work of art is ‘a bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects’, none of which belong to a human subject despite, at the same time, Deleuze and Guattari’s re-invention of these terms to re-approach creative practice and its reception. Percepts are ‘independent of a state of those who experience them’, affects ‘go beyond the strength of those who undergo them; together, they are “beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived’ (164). It is clear to see what the percept shares with prehension, as Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge this connection with Whitehead: ‘Even when they are non-living, or rather inorganic, things have a lived experience because they are perceptions and affections’ (154). Art is the means by which this sensation is demonstrated in an intensity of thought and feeling. Perhaps it will be unsurprising that at the heart of Deleuze’s account of Bacon is the Proust who made ‘the illegible force of time legible and conceivable’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 182), the Proust of involuntary memory. Bacon’s path between figuration and abstraction was, Deleuze insists, the same as that taken by Proust: involuntary memory is the Proustian Figure, an autonomous event of the abstract–real that combined two 204

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sensations, the past and the present, in the model of a new art that was irreducible to them (Deleuze 2004: 67). In Deleuze’s moving study of Bacon we are encouraged, paradoxically, to see Bacon’s paintings as more abstract, certainly differently abstract, than they might seem, and to see artistic sensation as belonging not merely to us but, abstractly, to the artwork itself, in a bloc of sensations. Each requires a way of thinking and valuing abstraction that goes beyond art to a philosophy of the inhuman that must, as a condition of its emancipatory power, make the human strange to itself. But who are ‘we’? Such propositions are, from a certain point of view – let us say it – rather abstract. What is it that happens when we look at abstract art, and who might experience this encounter? In the next chapter I look at the persistence and re-invention of these modernist concerns.

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8

STAGING MODERNIST ABSTRACTION: YASMINA REZA, JOHN LOGAN, LEE HALL

What do you see? John Logan, Red (2009: 9, 66) Do not let us deceive ourselves, the common man, such as we produce in our civilization, is aesthetically a dead man. Herbert Read, ‘The Fate of Modern Painting’ (1952: 63) Basically, we liked everything. Lee Hall, The Pitmen Painters (2008: 70) It represents a man who moves across a space and disappears. Yasmina Reza, ‘Art’ (1996: 63) ‘What do you see?’ (R 9, 66). A recurrent scenario in modernist discourses on visual art is the attempt to imagine what might be happening when the ‘average’ or ‘ordinary’ citizen gazes at a work of art. The scenario may be designed to raise broad questions about aesthetic education, and the nature of the artwork itself may be non-specific. But in the tendency for abstract art to be implied, we see how abstraction functions as a limit-case for questions of art’s intelligibility or unintelligibility. In this chapter I examine three plays that actually stage this scenario, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, 206

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as part of their exploration of the legacy of visual abstraction in modernism. First, let us look at how modernist art criticism prepares the ground. In the essay ‘Art and Life’ (1917), summarising the aesthetic revolution since Cézanne as ‘the re-establishment of purely aesthetic criteria in place of the criterion of conformity to appearance’, Roger Fry insisted that any such artist was inevitably ‘moving into a sphere more and more remote from that of the ordinary man’ (Fry 1981: 8). ‘In proportion as art becomes purer’, Fry argued, ‘the number of people to whom it appeals gets less’ (10). In ‘Art and Socialism’ (1912), Fry had anticipated the ‘violence’ of the misunderstanding between the true artistic community and the public, when the ‘average man’ becomes ‘extremely irritated by the sight of works which appear to him completely unintelligible’, not to mention ‘noxious and inassimilable’, to the extent that such art must undergo a process of ‘disinfection’ (49). Since the Victorian era the prevailing plutocracy had, he laments, produced a populace ‘whose emotional life has been drugged by the sugared poison of pseudo-art’ of the Victorian era, a condition of ‘corruption of taste’ and ‘emotional insincerity of the mass of the people’ such that, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw from a 1908 speech in Liverpool, ‘any picture that pleased more than ten per cent of the population should be immediately burned’ (44). Fry is no more sanguine, however, about the fate of visual art under the auspices of what might become a ‘Great State’ of bureaucratic Socialism. If the fortuitous circumstances in which great artists had been able to prosper were flattened out, the possibility of original, creative distinctiveness would be suppressed. Only remaining would be the inability of the ‘average man’ to identify genuine art as such, and this because of ‘two qualities’: He has, first of all, a touching proclivity to awe-struck admiration of whatever is presented to him as noble by a constituted authority; and, secondly, a complete absence of any immediate reaction to a work of art until his judgement has thus been hypnotised by the voice of authority. Then, and not till then, he sees, or swears he sees, those adorable Emperor’s clothes that he is always agape for. (46) Fry’s use of what might seem the wearily predictable yet still potent myth of the Emperor’s New Clothes is reapproached a century later in Dan Fox’s spirited polemic Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2017). Let us characterise pretentiousness as a mode of performance or thought that is provocatively specialist and innovative in a way that invites accusations of coterie-led difficulty and self-indulgence. For Fox, pretentiousness is ‘the engine oil of culture’ (Fox 2017: 121). Yet, insofar as experimental modernism has, he notes, been ‘bedevilled’ by ‘questions of class and access’, so the Emperor’s New Clothes fable emerges ‘time and again’ as ‘a conspiracy to dupe someone, a pretence 207

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designed to make the innocent . . . look stupid’ (114). For Fox, this ‘narcissistic paranoia’ tells us more about the fear and defensiveness of a culture than about the experimenters themselves, and he demonstrates how the conflict it assumes has followed us into the art gallery encounter of the early twenty-first century. In 2000, he notes, the broadcaster Andrew Marr characterised a couple in their twenties at the London Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize show as belonging to the ‘“modern tribe . . . of followers of contemporary art”’ (110). ‘“That couple I started with – the cool ones?”’, writes Marr: ‘“I hate them. It is time to elbow them aside and fill up the galleries with the rest of us.”’ Stagey or not, Marr’s hatred is something to be borne in mind. D. H. Lawrence’s 1929 essay ‘Introduction to These Paintings’ provides a version of the same aesthetic encounter, where ‘the rest of us’ are an ‘English Tommy’ and his mate, confronted with Botticelli’s Venus: ‘“Eh, Jack! come an’ look at this girl standin’ wi’ no clothes on, an’ two blokes spittin’ at ’er”’ (Lawrence 2004a: 191). However, Lawrence also imagines the ‘highbrow’, gazing at the Venus ‘in a sort of ecstasy’ and getting ‘a correct mental thrill’. Neither class position nor aesthetic education delivers the know-how to look at the painting - ‘They stare so hard’, Lawrence writes, ‘they do so want to see. And their eyesight is perfect’ – because, in the essay’s extraordinary assertion of the demise of visual imagination in modern English history, vision for Lawrence was, in a Blakean sense, an active imaginative faculty that included bodily or sensual awareness. Lawrence therefore follows Fry in seeing aesthetic deficit as emotional as well as epistemological: ‘The Modern Englishman has a few borrowed ideas, simply doesn’t know what to feel, and makes a silly mess of it . . . We know we ought to feel something, but what? – oh tell us what!’ (192). Lawrence does not use the term ‘abstraction’ to characterise modern and Cubist art, instead getting the concept of ‘significant form’ to do this critical work: for example, in his complaint that critics had effectively domesticated Cézanne’s art by ‘abstracting’ his apples into Clive Bell’s concept of ‘Significant Form’ (203). But the question of modern art’s intelligibility is implicit in Lawrence’s assertion that the materiality of Cézanne’s apple ‘made people shout with pain’, implying a direct relation between this discomfort and Cézanne’s lifelong fight against the ‘cliché’ of illusionist realist painting (203). So the viewer would be confronted, for example, with those gaps in the paint, through which the cliché ‘fell into nothingness’ (210). A contiguous essay, ‘Pictures on the Wall’, finds Lawrence thinking much more pragmatically about the kind of direct access to visual art that might address such deficits of imaginative vision. Various schemes are mooted, whether public (an Artists’ Co-Operative Society) or private (a Harrods Circulating Picture scheme), to ‘keep the public in touch with art’ (Lawrence 2004a: 262) - circumventing the gallery itself, staging the crucial encounter even within the domestic space. 208

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Clement Greenberg provides my next example. ‘Let us see . . . what happens’, Greenberg mused in ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ (1939), when the ‘ignorant peasant’ in Soviet Russia, one who may have gravitated to the city and thereby enlisted in the proletarian or even petty bourgeois class, stands in front of two canvases, one by Picasso and one by Repin, and is asked to state his preference. Greenberg draws on recent material in the Partisan Review in which Picasso’s ‘abstract technique’ had been likened to the folk art such a peasant may have been familiar with. Greenberg is sceptical that the said peasant would make such a connection, but is, in any case, confident that he would regard the kitsch narrative realism of Repin as of superior value. The painter will be ‘miraculously’ seen to reproduce images of life that it takes the labour-wearied viewer no ‘effort’ to recognise: ‘Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art’ (HW 546). A division of labour holds this response in place: the ownership of formal culture by the powerful ‘and therefore cultivated’ minority, and ‘the great mass of the exploited and poor – and therefore ignorant’. The Emperor’s New Clothes resurfaces, as the ‘common man’s’ scepticism towards experimental art may be ‘silenced by the awe in which he stands of the patrons of this art’. Yet Greenberg also observes that at a time of the breakdown of social order, ‘every man, from the Tamanny alderman to the Austrian house-painter, finds that he is entitled to his opinion’, and resentment may be expressed more openly, in the form of a fascistic suppression and destruction. Thus ‘kitsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the “soul” of the people’ (539). While, Greenberg speculates, the Soviet socialist State might conceivably attempt to educate the peasant in order to prefer Picasso (that is, it might ‘tell him that he is wrong’), this effort will be doomed to failure, in any society, until the conditions of working life allow for the ‘leisure, energy and comfort to train for the enjoyment of Picasso’. From Greenberg to Herbert Read. In a Paris lecture to UNESCO, published in 1952 as ‘The Fate of Modern Painting’, Herbert Read reflected on a report on the ‘Visual Arts in England’, sponsored in the immediate postwar by Dartington Hall and published in 1946, recommending the extension of State sponsorship of the Arts. Read figures his scepticism about this in what will now seem a familiar act of imaginative projection. Suppose, he writes, we have persuaded the ‘ordinary citizen of a paternal State’ to undertake ‘the pilgrimage of art’ and find him in a public art gallery, along with those other ‘dim, bored figures gingerly skating over waxed floors, drifting like chilled bees from one fading flower to another’: ‘can we believe’, Read asks, ‘that anything important is happening to them?’ (Read 1952: 63). The answer is that, provided this common man has undergone a normal education, he is ‘already deaf’ to the art that surrounds him in the gallery; he may have acquired some means of response – ‘the patter of appreciation’, ‘the accent of understanding’ – but ‘his aesthetic 209

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sensibility has been killed at school, probably before the age of twelve’; ‘do not let us deceive ourselves’, declares Read, ‘the common man, such as we produce in our civilization, is aesthetically a dead man’. Set within Read’s lifelong commitment to a transformative aesthetic education that incorporates abstraction was, then, the certainty of the common man’s aesthetic death, whether to the gallery or to the abstract art that would now lie in wait for him there. Read could be said to have addressed this tragic scenario in two main ways: through a psychology of artistic perception and technique made available to schools via Education Through Art (1943); and through the recursive effort to explain visual abstraction to a general reader in his many books of art criticism. In a postwar Britain striving for social cohesion, organisations such as the Arts League of Service faced, as Emma West puts it, a central dilemma: ‘was it possible to create or disseminate experimental work on democratic lines?’ (West 2020: 239). The League’s strategies included the immersion supplied by a ‘Travelling Portfolio of Pictures’, but also the ‘top-down approach’ (West) of a philosophy of modern art simple enough to be explained. Read’s cultural pessimism, and his own stated belief that experimental art and its appreciation were probably fated to esotericism, were thus reproduced here. As we have seen, Barnett Newman’s passionate resistance to such simplification followed from a conviction that abstraction, as instanced by pre-modern societies, might be commonly held in and for its sophistication rather than watered down for an intellectual division of labour inherent in capitalist inequality. As I have argued in this book thus far, abstraction is never simply a new artistic style. Abstract art and its discourses confront the varied forms of humanist consolation and interpretation, revaluing through experimental art and philosophy what we might mean by the inhuman. Modernist thinkers and artists, visual and literary, reconfigure abstraction for a democratic and inclusive, if virtual and im-possible, future that includes the thinking of a human inhumanism. But are the writing and the representation of this abstraction enough? How comprehensive is social access to these forms, and hence to a thinking of the inhuman through abstraction that they might foster? Three plays of the millennial period – Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’, Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters and John Logan’s Red, first performed in 1994, 2007 and 2009 respectively – suggest that the question of ‘What do you see?’ in the encounter with abstract art retains an irreducible symbolic significance for the possibilities of cultural equality. ‘Art’ The framing quotation marks around the title of Yasmina Reza’s play may well go unremarked; once noticed, the title appears in the light of Theodor Adorno’s proposition: ‘Art is as inimical to “art” as are artists’ (Adorno 2005: 214). The question of the possibility of art’s unironic authenticity is inherent 210

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

Figure 8.1  Paul Ritter and Rufus Sewell in ‘Art’ by Yasmina Reza at London’s Old Vic Theatre. Tristram Kenton/The Guardian. Photograph © Tristram Kenton.

in the play’s simple armature, as encapsulated by Serge: ‘I’ve bought a work of art which makes Marc uncomfortable’ (A 49). Serge has ‘ruined’ himself by paying 200,000 francs for a 1970s abstract painting by the artist Antrios. The painting, measuring 5 ft × 4 ft, is white with white diagonal lines. A long silence attends Marc’s first viewing of the purchase, in Serge’s flat, with the accompanying stage direction that ‘a whole range of wordless emotions’ plays across the men’s faces. We are looking at looking: in Serge’s case, looking at Marc looking, a scenario reprised when Serge introduces the painting to their mutual friend, Yvan, and ‘studies Yvan’ (A 12). On finding out the price of the painting, Marc’s response, ‘You paid two hundred thousand francs for this shit?’, ignites the play’s black comedy, charting the descent of the relationship of the three friends into violence, bitter conflict and a cruel blend of rejection and reconciliation. Art, in ‘Art’, matters, in the sense that abstraction and its surrounding issues can have dark and transformative effects on human lives. The painting’s abstraction carries a modernist charge. Marc is early defined by Serge in terms of an antagonism to modernism, ‘one of those new-style intellectuals, who are not only enemies of modernism, but seem to take some sort of incomprehensible pride in running it down’ (A 3). ‘New-style’ intellectual anti-modernism doubles here as anti-intellectualism: for example, in 211

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Marc’s resentment of the idolatrous way in which Serge refers to art, artists and to master-pieces in general, and his violent objections to Serge’s unironic use of the word deconstruction. Serge defends the painting on the grounds of the specialist aesthetic education that abstraction might call forth: it is a field that Marc knows ‘absolutely nothing’ about, requiring a ‘training’ or ‘whole apprenticeship’ which Serge does not blame Marc for not having (A 4, 14). Yet Serge also knows that Marc is far from ignorant about modernism, pointing out that Marc had previously introduced him to the work of Paul Valéry (A 44). From this position Marc wearily dismisses both modernist and postmodernist painterly practice, the elimination of ‘those old chestnuts’, ‘form and colour’, and ‘the values which dominate contemporary Art. The rule of novelty. The rule of surprise’ (A 21, 55). Instead, Marc’s aggression is directed at the social reality of ‘art’ within late capitalism as consistently undermining authenticity, whether of creation or of response. Serge, he notes in his opening monologue, is ‘keen on art’ (A 1); but what would it be for anyone, Reza’s play begins to ask, to be keen on art? Marc’s objection to Serge’s attachment to the painting is to the very possibility that such an attachment could be ‘genuine’ or, in fact, that it could even amount, as Serge willingly confesses, to a ‘love’ (A 44–5). As Marc maintains to Yvan, such attachment can be explained only by the ‘sheer snobbery’ of Serge wishing to be a ‘“collector”’ or a ‘great connoisseur’ (A 9–10). The abstraction of the Antrios painting intensifies this debate around artistic value. Points of comparison are provided. Yvan has a ‘daub’ above his mantelpiece which was painted by his father and is, we assume, displayed for reasons of sentiment rather than of artistic value; its presumed amateurism symbolises Yvan’s distance from the esoteric and rigorous aesthetic discourse of his more high-flying professional friends. Marc has a figurative landscape painting in his flat, a view of Carcassonne through a window, which Serge mistakes for Flemish realism. Marc sneeringly defends this painting’s apparent simplicity when Yvan argues that, as a ‘work of art’, Serge’s abstract, unlike the landscape, ‘has a system behind it’: ‘No, uh? Too evocative. Too expressive. Everything’s on the canvas! No scope for a system! . . .’ (A 17–18). Later, when Serge mistakes the location of the painting’s scene, his dismissal of Marc’s correction – ‘Same thing’ (A 37) – insinuates again that realist art will always fail to match the seriousness of abstraction. ‘Art’, however, wagers on the assumption that the audience will not automatically share Serge’s view that abstraction has earned its aura of seriousness. The play exploits visual abstraction’s reputation for difficulty or unintelligibility, suggesting the readiness with which such art might be bought in the name of acquiring a cultural capital founded on exclusivity. The Emperor’s New Clothes is again, somehow, in play. What does anyone see when they look at an abstract painting, and what would it be to tell the truth of this response? 212

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

Again, Marc’s knowledge of modernism allows him to read the painting’s internal aesthetic: he explains to Yvan, before the latter has seen it, that the white lines can be seen against the white ‘background’ because ‘There’s more than one kind of white!’ (A 7). But his simultaneous certainty that all modern art is fraudulent means being unable to resist the temptation to redescribe the work as ‘a white painting tarted up with a few off-white stripes’ when challenging Yvan to guess at the ruinous exorbitance of Serge’s purchase. Serge can only, it seems, have let himself be ‘taken in by modern Art’ (A 20). ‘Art’ thus dramatises the high moral and ethical stakes that surround abstract art, investing Marc, perhaps, with some of what Dan Fox calls Andrew Marr’s ‘ugly intolerance’, and exploring the dynamic between three close friends who have come to hate each other, it seems, because of an abstract painting. The responses of the three to Serge’s abstract canvas reflect the qualities of affection, integrity and trust that may or may not hold their interrelationship together. ‘Now when we talk’, Marc laments, ‘we can’t even make ourselves understood’ (A 53). This may be the lack of a shared language in which to talk about modern art (Marc has just been upbraided by Serge for implying that conceptual and abstract art are ‘the same thing’), but it is also about ethical and emotional miscommunication, as if to underline that an aesthetic discourse can never be technical or referential alone. Throughout, all three characters undertake a forensic scrutiny of each other’s claims, often focusing on the subtlest tonal inflections of intention. ‘It’s funny the way you say the artist’, notes Marc of Serge’s reverentiality, while Serge complains that Marc uses the word master-piece ‘in a kind of sarcastic way’ (A 24, 31). In what sense is the Antrios painting ‘shit’? Serge firmly sets up the boundaries of permissibility: you can say of the painting, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t grasp it’, but ‘you can’t say “it’s shit”’ (A 14). Marc, in turn, refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any attempt to defend the painting from his accusation, and is immediately on his guard against patronisation when Serge asks him to explain his criteria – ‘Who do you think you’re talking to? Hello! . . .’ (A 3). Yvan’s wavering attempts to defend the painting as a purposive work of art – there is ‘a system behind it’, it is ‘the completion of a journey’ or ‘part of a trajectory’ – are met by Marc’s insulting laughter (A 17–18); and when Marc extracts from Yvan an admission that he is ‘moved’ and ‘touched’ by the subtle colours in the painting, Marc insists, not only that Yvan is not ‘entitled’ to this response but also that he ‘doesn’t’ actually possess it. Yvan is ‘dazzled by what he believes to be culture, and as you know culture is something I absolutely piss on’ (A 35–6). Similarly, when Yvan ventures to suggest that he feels what Serge has called the ‘resonance’ of the painting, Serge denies this – ‘No, you don’t’ – on the grounds that resonance is an objective rather than subjective quality pertaining to monochromes only under natural light; when Yvan subsequently uses the term to describe to Marc his response, he is again rebuffed – ‘You felt a resonance? . . .’ (A 13, 19). Could Yvan be using this term in bad faith? Ultimately, laughter too is susceptible to such moral scrutiny: while 213

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Serge bemoans Marc’s ‘vile’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘real know-all’ laugh (A 4), Marc interrogates Yvan about the nature of Serge’s laughter, after Yvan has first viewed the painting with Serge. ‘It may have been a genuine laugh’, he concludes (to the laughter, we surmise, of the audience), ‘but it wasn’t for the right reason’ (A 17). Early in ‘Art’, Marc insists that what is ‘serious’ about Serge’s purchase of the painting is that it is ‘doing harm’ to him (A 9–10); later, he defines his hurt in terms of being replaced in Serge’s affections by the Antrios painting itself ‘and all it implies’ (A 9–10, 51). Serge affects incomprehension: to Yvan, ‘Do you understand what he’s talking about?’ (A 51). Yet from the outset, Serge himself has viewed Marc’s reaction to the painting in terms of personal injury to him – an ‘insensitivity’ comprising ‘tone of voice’, ‘complacency’ and ‘tactlessness’ (A 15). Serge does not condemn Marc for his lack of knowledge but for the lack of ‘warmth’ and sensitivity in his response to the painting. In these appeals to emotion and the senses, to physical and mental health, the play makes its symbolic appeal to the domain of the vulnerably human; and this domain is, above all, represented by the figure of Yvan, ostensibly the most suffering of the three friends, whose psychotherapeutic treatment cannot fully defend him from the perverse fate that he is about to suffer. Serge’s warning to Yvan is prophetic: ‘Don’t keep trying to smooth things over. Where d’you get this urge to be the great reconciler of the human race?’ (A 15). Yvan is the play’s touchstone for quotidian human virtue, the mediator who simply wishes to bring peace to his warring friends. He is tense, embarking on a new career in stationery and soon to be married to Catherine. In the play’s only extended set-piece, Yvan’s monologue painstakingly details the ‘major crisis’ that both step-mothers wish to have their names printed on the wedding invitations. The bathos of this scene seems to ask what possible relations could obtain between such everyday concerns and the aesthetics of a white abstract painting. The play proceeds to expose as clichés the tolerant stances on art endorsed by Yvan as a means of reconciling his friends: the view that Serge’s attachment to the painting is acceptable if it ‘makes him happy’ and is ‘not doing any harm to anyone else’, and the manner of his appeal for calm – ‘There’s no reason to insult each other, especially over a painting’ (A 10, 43). These efforts are profoundly misplaced. Serge and Marc, it seems, must fight: they are not the equals that Yvan wishes them to be, and they have every reason to insult each other – but especially, over an abstract painting. In their bitter conflict, what Serge and Mark nevertheless share is a language of moral seriousness about art; whilst each at various points bemoans the other’s lack of sensitivity and tolerance, the necessity of critique is actually what unites them in their intolerance, or critique, of tolerance itself. ‘Yvan’s very tolerant’, Marc also warns, ‘because he couldn’t care less’; Yvan’s claim is, accordingly, that he ‘didn’t like the painting . . . but I didn’t actually hate it’ (A 5, 17). Such indifference might not be so serious if it did not simultaneously express Yvan’s 214

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

attitude to his own life and fate: for example, in the forthcoming marriage. Asked by his mother if he is happy about it, he can only reply, ‘why wouldn’t I be?’ (A 19–20). Hence, attempting to separate his fighting friends after Serge has criticised and insulted Marc’s partner, Paula, Yvan is the slapstick victim who is punched and injured for his mediation. A painful blow to the ear only prefigures Serge and Marc’s more deeply injurious verbal attack on Yvan for his ‘neutral spectator’s inertia’, which not only seems to dictate his marriage but has ‘fucked up their evening’: ‘You’ve been piping up with this finicky, subservient voice of reason ever since you arrived, it’s intolerable’ (A 57). While the play’s conclusion sees Serge and Marc marking their ‘trial period’ of unity, if not reconciliation, in a bizarre act of pseudo-desecration of the Antrios abstract, Yvan is left broken, reflecting on the tendency to weep uncontrollably since ‘the evening of the white painting’, and lamenting the failure of the very reason with which he has been identified: ‘I can no longer bear any rational argument, nothing formative in the world, nothing great or beautiful in the world has ever been born of rational argument’ (A 62). In the mid-1940s, Barnett Newman’s withering critique of Roger Fry centred on books ‘for laymen, not for artists’ (BNSW 84). As we saw in Chapter 3, Newman located in his own painting and that of other leading Abstract Expressionists a model of abstract painting in conjunction with abstract thought, reserving for the latter a sense of intellectual adventure irreducible to common sense. In Reza’s play, Yvan, experientially closer to the fragility of reason, loses faith in the rationality of the ‘average mind’ he seems to embody; his humanity or humane-ness has been identified, in the end, with this discredited quotidian rationality. Serge, drawing on a familiar humanist currency, accuses Marc of shutting himself off from humanity, proclaiming that ‘At last you’ve said something approximately human’ when Marc expresses regret at upsetting Yvan (A 38–9). Yet, in the end, Serge conspires with Marc in treating Yvan inhumanely, a conspiracy in which the Antrios painting is also implicated. In a way that links modernist abstraction to the recalcitrance of Keatsian negative capability, the painting remains to tease us out of rational thought; there is, indeed, no ‘reason’ for Serge and Marc to insult each other over it, except for the unspoken pursuit of a model of abstraction as the virtual, an invention of the radically new. Abstraction thereby opens us to the fierce necessity of finding the inhuman in the human: in its final words, the play represents ‘a man who moves across a space and disappears’ (A 63) – unless this is to confer upon painterly abstraction more integrity than ‘Art’ is prepared to grant. Even in the conspiratorial, diabolic act of spoiling the painting, Marc’s drawing of a skier with a woolly hat on a downhill slope, there is fraudulence: Serge has known that the black felt-tip ink is washable, without telling Marc beforehand. Can the painting really be washed and cleaned in order to regain its abstract purity 215

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and authenticity, or were these qualities always-already merely mythological? ‘Art’ leaves such questions open. Red The cultural context of an American Abstract Expressionism for which ‘most of painting is thinking’ is directly evoked in John Logan’s two-hander, Red (R 16). Where, in ‘Art’, the encounter with the abstract canvas involves the buyer and his friends in a domestic space, in Red it occurs at the heart of artistic production, in Mark Rothko’s studio in New York City. The play covers the two-year period of Rothko’s painting of the murals for the Four Seasons Seagram restaurant and his eventual withdrawal from the commission, during which time he employs the fledgling artist Ken, who is in his twenties, as his studio assistant. By comparison with the openness and ambiguities of ‘Art’, Red conveys a circular resolution, framed by an identical opening and closing question-and-answer between artist and acolyte: ‘What do you see?’ ‘Red.’ Within this structure the narrative of Ken’s fiery relationship with Rothko unfolds. The ‘Red’ of the end of the play is not that of its outset, and the change encodes

Figure 8.2  Jonathan Groff, left, and Alfred Molina star in Red by John Logan, taken by Gina Ferazzi, published online 14 August 2012. Reproduced by kind permission of the Los Angeles Times. 216

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

a simpler sentimental or heroic charge than that of ‘Art’. At the final point of leaving Rothko’s employ, Ken has taken on and prevailed over his authoritarian mentor in their debates around the significance of modernist and postmodernist painting. This Oedipal drama is continually referenced both in Rothko’s treatment of Ken, even as he consistently denies the role of father-figure, and in the rise of contemporary artists that threaten to ‘murder’ him (R 48). The play sees Rothko dethroned, both personally by Ken, and artistically, Ken claims, by Pop Art’s banishment of Abstract Expressionism. Yet Rothko’s firing of Ken can be viewed as a final act of heroism in reverse, a self-sacrifice though which Ken can be released into artistic independence, to ‘Make something new’ and ‘Make them look’ (R 66). Throughout the play, an imaginary Rothko painting ‘hangs’ at the front of the stage, allowing the audience to observe the gaze of Rothko and Ken on the canvas as the Seagram commission takes shape. This act of looking is never self-explanatory. Before the nervous Ken can first answer the question, having just set foot in the studio, his response is subject to Rothko’s overwrought and contradictory control. He must ‘Let the picture do its work’ but at the same time ‘work with it’ and ‘meet it halfway’; he is told where to stand and how to lean, but also, somewhat more speculatively, to let the painting fill his whole field of vision, including the peripheral, ‘so nothing else exists or has existed or will ever exist’; he must be exact and specific, but also ‘sensitive’, ‘kind’ and ‘a human being’ because the paintings, as creatures in Rothko’s vision, deserve compassion and ‘live or die in the eye of the sensitive viewer’ (9–10). Only then may Ken venture his answer: ‘Red.’ Might the painting speak, mutely, for itself, or Ken see it for himself? The play presents dramatic stages in this struggle, including a set-piece in Scene ii which has the fledgling and master artists exchanging free associations around the ‘feeling’ or ‘emotion’ of red, while in Scene iii, Ken invokes the blood of his parents at the murder scene he had uncovered at the age of seven. By the point of the decisive showdown between them in Scene iv, Ken is able to issue the challenge to Rothko: ‘You ever get tired of telling people what art is?’ (R 51). Red presents a satire on high modernist heroic endeavour and the place of Rothko’s egotism and overweening righteousness within it. At first, this takes the comedic–pathetic form of an identification with painterly greatness: Rothko is caught intoning his association with Rembrandt and Turner (‘Oh my,’ Ken muses) (R 17–18). ‘You cannot be an artist until you are civilized,’ instructs Rothko, underlining all that Ken needs to learn from the corpus of humanities, literature and philosophy, as well as from the tradition of visual art, in order to acquire the necessary ‘seriousness’. Rothko’s recommendation of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung suggests an orthodox modernist canon of ideas, a modernism endorsing an uncompromising adversarial stance in practice. ‘We destroyed Cubism,’ Rothko boasts, ‘de Kooning and me and 217

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Pollock and Barnett Newman and all the others . . . We stomped it to death’ (R 18–19). Picasso is accused of becoming a charlatan, making ‘ugly little pots’ for money, even as his work had taught Rothko that ‘movement is life’, a principle he proceeds to demonstrate to Ken in the fine detail of his own paintings. More affirmatively, Rothko recalls the hours he spent in MoMA gazing at Matisse’s painting ‘The Red Studio’, tracing ‘everything I do today’ back to the encounter, ‘letting the painting work, allowing it to move’ (R 27). The supposed integrity of the high modernist enterprise is thus set against Rothko’s own critical versions of Adorno’s ‘Art’ or Greenbergian kitsch, which he finds in the idea of ‘overmantle’ paintings (R 35). In this scenario, ‘over the fireplace in the penthouse’, Rothko registers the familiar modernist condemnation of abstract art’s appropriation as ‘decoration’ (‘“orange?”’); he has overheard in the street his own paintings referred to as ‘Rothkos’, and launches into a rant against commodification and associated varieties of modern art snobbery. The Emperor’s New Clothes resurfaces: ‘“All those fuzzy rectangles, my kid could do that in kindergarten, it’s nothing but a scam, this guy’s a fraud . . .”’. The paintings will nevertheless be bought, Rothko bemoans, for investment. Rothko’s modernism forges a direct continuity between money’s appropriation of abstraction and the degraded aesthetic values of popular culture, where everything is ‘fine’ and ‘nice’ and ‘everyone likes everything’ (R 51, 10). As such rants succeed one another, Red, however, has a way of making us wonder if Rothko’s high modernist doctrine does not always include its own caricature. From the outset, when he lures Ken into admitting that he likes his canvas, Rothko unappealingly castigates his youthful counterpart for the failure to live up to serious critical values. Ken, he claims, reductively misreads Nietzsche, and continues to reduce modern painters to ‘adolescent stereotypes’ (R 45). He insists that Ken must not presume to ‘understand’ the great painters; the conditions for approaching and looking at such painting are severe and unyielding and always likely to be unattained, as in the Hebrew saying, ‘You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting’ (R 45–7). However, as Ken gains critical confidence and independence, it is the abstraction of the Rothko paintings, never otherwise made explicit, that he begins to invoke. In discussing the time and space needed to look at the paintings properly, Ken asserts that this is specifically because of their distinction from ‘representational’ paintings. The latter are ‘unchanging’ – the ‘Mona Lisa’ will always be smiling – while the abstract painting requires the participation of the viewer to activate and experience its ‘pulsation’. Rothko is visibly pleased with this response because it echoes his own view of the paintings as living beings who are ‘riskily’ sent out into the world requiring care and compassion: ‘they quicken only if the empathetic viewer will let them’ (R 21, 10). In such ways Logan’s play, like those of Reza and Hall, immerses its audience in the debate around modernist abstraction, the available modes of talking 218

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

about or looking at it. Intensely ritualistic scenes of actual painterly production are staged: the priming of a canvas by both men simultaneously (‘hard, fast, thrilling work’ [R 37]) or Rothko’s own painting, observed by Ken in awe. Rothko explains his layering technique, ‘like a glaze, slowly building the image, like pentimento, letting the luminescence emerge’, and continues to offer advice on how to look: ‘Look at the tension between the blocks of colour. . . . They exist in a state of flux – of movement’ (R 12, 19). Nevertheless, it again remains to Ken, in the showdown confrontation with Rothko, to remind the artist of an autonomy belonging to the paintings that he has forgotten in the process of instrumentalising them for the Seagram context. Rothko hopes the paintings will enact a kind of revenge on the wealthy diners, ruining the appetite of ‘every son-of-a-bitch who eats there’ (R 58). But Ken retorts that this early modernist avant-garde aspiration of épater le bourgeois is now reductive and anachronistic. Of Rothko’s canvases, Ken insists: ‘Art happened’ – an art, that is, difficult if not impossible to assign beyond itself, lying outside of scarequotations. It would be ‘too cruel’ to deny to these paintings the possibility of companionship offered by the empathetic viewer (R 59). By the time Rothko resorts to another, familiarly metaphysical rationale for abstraction, that of transcendence – ‘Their power will transcend the setting’ – his words, as a stage direction indicates, are sounding ‘hollow’ by comparison (R 59). It is in the significant presence of the ‘human’ that Red reveals a contradictory movement, seeming to encourage an understanding of Rothko’s abstracts and yet at the same time questioning the discourse of painterly abstraction that speaks for them. From the outset, Rothko positions himself, and by implication Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, as representatives of human value, urging Ken to ‘be a human being for once in your life!’ (R 10). Neither his enemies nor the diners in the Four Seasons restaurant are, Rothko claims, human; they are all, it seems, instances of modernity’s decline, confirmed in Jackson Pollock’s belief that there were no longer ‘any real human beings out there to look at the pictures’ (R 33). Instead, Rothko consistently speaks as self-appointed guardian of the human as a domain of complexity and vulnerability, vanity and tragedy. In the climactic confrontation of Scene iv, it falls to Ken to expose the arrogance, pretension and, ultimately, hypocrisy of Rothko’s position. Rothko, Ken notes, shares Pollock’s loss of faith, and hence deems no one human enough to look at his own paintings. Yet in two years of working together, Rothko has shown no interest in Ken’s life outside of the studio: ‘My friend, I don’t think you’d recognize a real human being if he were standing right in front of you’ (R 55). After this strong humanist thrust Rothko is left, as it were, with the transposition of feeling, care and compassion on to abstract paintings themselves. Only in this domain, it seems, does he either recognise or display orientations that we might want to call human or humane; Ken too has, after all, identified 219

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companionship and compassion as intrinsic to the relationship that the abstract canvas sets up with the viewer. Rothko has indeed, we want to say, treated Ken inhumanely. Yet there is something in Ken’s climactic tirade that is formulaic in its humanism as well as predictable in its dramaturgy. If the aesthetic that Rothko verbalises throughout the play has a hollowed-out quality, this may have as much to do with its failure to elaborate and give depth to the meaning of the human as it has to do with Rothko’s cruelty to Ken. ‘Human’ as a term in the play remains little more than an effect of Rothko’s egotistical rhetoric or, as Ken memorably puts it, the ‘talking-talking-talking-jesus-christ-won’the-ever-shut-up titanic self-absorption of the man!’ (R 54). How far or how persuasively does the discourse of the painting-as-subject compensate for this lack, or how far is it a last redoubt for a humanism radically unsure of itself? Something conversely inhuman, the autonomous abstract artwork or the art that ‘happened’, remains as the enigmatic, recalcitrant and creaturely alternative to these more routine modes of humanism and organicism. We might think here of a conclusion to Red lying somewhere below or beyond its actual one, suggested by Sean Pryor’s voicing of the position arrived at, in Marx’s early thinking, by the modern artwork, isolated from familiar human values but thereby also expressing its inalienable social content: ‘Here is a strange and inhuman object, art now says, more strange and more inhuman than any of your commodities, or any of you. Think now what it might yet mean to be inhuman’ (Pryor 2016: 558). The Pitmen Painters The main focus of Lee Hall’s two-act play The Pitmen Painters (2008) is neither on buyers or collectors, nor on the leading artists of abstraction, despite integrating these perspectives into its frame. Instead, the play concerns a highly distinctive collective identity: the history of the Ashington Group of painters between the years 1934 and 1947. The Group consisted of men (in the play, George Brown, Oliver Kilbourn, Jimmy Floyd, Harry Wilson and the ‘Young Lad’), all working miners, who, in taking a Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) Art Appreciation course, began to paint for the first time, eventually exhibiting in galleries in Newcastle and London, and gaining significant national recognition. The Pitmen Painters thus directly confronts the social division of labour in which, as we have seen for Marx, abstraction as a condition of thought is perpetually implicated; it does so through an exploration of the social function of art and the questions of aesthetic education raised by the Group’s emergence. As the Marxist pitman Harry voices it, a ‘basic division of labour’ normally excludes the industrial working class from the artistic creativity which should be ‘an inalienable human right’ (TPP 85). As the group is coming to consciousness of art, both in praxis and in theory, in mid-1930s Britain, painterly abstraction is the modernist legacy that lies inevitably in wait for them. 220

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

In an extended opening scene, the play builds its comedy out of the fact that the miners had originally wanted to take an economics course, which became ‘Art Appreciation’ when tutor Robert Lyon, an art historian, was the only WEA tutor available to them at the time. From this initial mismatch and ensuing scepticism, the comedy develops as a confrontation between mutually incomprehensible idioms that are at once and ingeniously class-based, regional, and intellectual and aesthetic. Lyon baffles the men with references to the phonetically rendered ‘Renissince’, until they realise it means ‘Renaissance’, and to Leonardo as the ‘acme’ of the Renaissance (‘I thought you said he was a painter’), while Lyon is silenced by Oliver Kilbourn’s question, ‘But ye de de art, divvint ye?’ (for the reader similarly unfamiliar with Northumbrian dialect: ‘But you do do art, don’t you?’) (TPP 9–11). From the impasse over fundamentals reached in this first scene, however, the miners begin to generate the terms of their own discourse on aesthetics. Unimpressed by the initial succession of ‘paintings of cherubs and all that’ presented by Lyon to exemplify the ‘Great Masters’, the men make their demands: variously, ‘we just want to knaa aboot proper art’, ‘we just want to be able to look at a picture and know what it means’, ‘all we want to do is to look at a picture and see what you see in it’ (TPP 13). As these questions cut straight to the heart of what it is ‘to look at a picture’, Lyon is obliged to unravel their further philosophical implications: it depends, reflexively, on what is meant by the meaning of ‘meaning’, or even, the feeling of ‘feeling’ (TPP 13, 16). Wry comedy is made here from the men’s exasperation that the tutor from Newcastle cannot even define his own basic terms. Yet in exposing contradictory positions on each side, the discussion sparks what is to become a gradual process of mutual enlightenment, disturbing the balance of power between tutor and student, as in Red. The men insist that the meaning of a painting must be as obvious and straightforward as the physical reality of the painting itself, to one who knows; yet the fact that they themselves cannot see or articulate the meaning suggests, in Harry’s words, that there must be ‘a secret behind what’s gannin’ on’ (TPP 14). Lyon insists that the meaning of a painting is never ‘self-evident’, and that art is about asking questions rather than providing answers, but in shifting the ground on to his own theory of subjective impression – ‘the point of painting is how it makes you feel’ – he is also obliged to maintain that ‘There’s no secret to art’, that ‘everything’s there in front of you’ (TPP 14). The Young Lad’s question – ‘Well, if there’s not a secret – how come we divvint knaa what’s gannin’ on?’- profoundly crystallises all of these issues. As I have suggested, any early twentieth-century consideration of what it is to read and interpret an artwork, and of the social structures supporting these, points inexorably towards the limit-case of painterly abstraction, which the play is approaching. In this first scene, nevertheless, the keynote remains mutual incomprehension; Jimmy Floyd’s response to Lyon’s insistence 221

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that meaning means understanding their own ‘emotional sensibilities’ is, ‘Has anybody any idea what he’s talking about?’ (TPP 15). Lyon’s only solution is that they must all create their own art. In successive scenes, the pitmen bring their work to class, projected on to screens for the audience as well as the men, and issues of the relation of form to representation spontaneously arise and are intensively discussed. Perhaps the ‘most of painting is thinking’ of Logan’s Rothko, and of Barnett Newman, is becoming the group’s most distinct realisation through praxis. Of the technique required for his first lino-cut, Oliver finds it ‘quite hard thinking about it inside out’ (TPP 19). Exaggerated and distorted features in their paintings lead to discussions of the relation between realism and symbolism: while Harry, drawing from his Left Book Club reading, raises the question of political symbolism (‘all art makes you think’), the Young Lad pitches in with Freudianism, ‘the things that are gannin’ on in yer heed that you divvint realise’ (TPP 19, 25). Harry laments the fact that their painting, including his own, is simply decorative, to be met with Oliver’s view that his picture works on multiple levels; Lyon ventures that artistic beauty is a mode of transcendence, but is met by Harry’s bitter repudiation of this idealism based on his experiences in the Somme during the Great War. In these discussions, Lyon sometimes attempts to guide the pitmen towards an appreciation of abstract form: art should not be judged on whether it is ‘factually accurate’, things ‘don’t have to be realistically depicted’ (TPP 20, 29). The changing balance of power with the tutor is, however, crystallised when the play directly stages the encounter with abstraction. The scene takes place in Rock Hall, the mansion of the wealthy patron Helen Sutherland, where the miners are introduced to her collection of modern art; Sutherland has previously visited the class and admired the pitmen’s work, following her friend Lyon’s growing estimation of its value. As an overture, they view Henry Moore’s sketch of ‘A Woman Reclining’ (1933), Lyon opining that he prefers Moore’s earlier figurative work: ‘I find the move towards abstraction a bit of a dead end’ (TPP 54). While Sutherland has been indulgent towards George and Jimmy’s responses (‘But it hasn’t even got a face’) to the sketch’s abstraction, she dismisses Lyon’s more expert evaluation with a withering irony that evokes abstraction’s potential for elitism as well as the insiderism of their own relation to art: ‘That’s because you are a middlebrow provincial realist’ (TPP 54). After the unsatisfactory nature of these exchanges, a more searching examination of the encounter with abstraction is called for, and the play changes its optic for this purpose. The painting viewed is one of a series of white reliefs that the British artist Ben Nicholson produced through the 1930s. It is again projected for the audience to see at the back of the stage, with the lighting dimmed to make the slide more luminous. This time, however, the actors look 222

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

Figure 8.3  The Live Theatre Newcastle and National Theatre co-production of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters, presented in the West End by Bill Kenwright at the Duchess Theatre (2011–12). Photograph by Keith Pattison.

‘intently out front as if they are before the painting’, allowing the audience to be direct witnesses to their gaze (TPP 55). The gazing at the gaze of ‘Art’ and the ‘What do you see?’ of Red become the ‘what’s gannin’ on?’ of Hall’s play. Helen Sutherland first takes up the instructional or explicatory role, as if to represent the ownership of the discourse on abstraction as well as of the painting itself. When Jimmy Floyd complains that he does not know what the Nicholson painting means, that he thought ‘everything had to mean something’, Sutherland offers up formalist solipsism – it does not ‘mean’ anything in the traditional sense, the painting is just what it is – along with abstraction’s potential for event or experience: ‘It means here you all are, looking at a formal arrangement someone’s made’ (TPP 55). Oliver Kilbourn then acts as a translator between Helen and Jimmy, although his explanation is not, in effect, an accurate characterisation of what she has said, resembling more closely the theory he may have imbibed from Lyon: ‘she means the meaning is internal to the person looking at it, . . . The meaning is an internal thing.’ When the Young Lad complains that ‘there isn’t really anything there’, he receives from Sutherland a Kandinskyian explanation of absence as the paradoxical presence of the numinous or spiritual; Oliver, however, again interjects to point out 223

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that the painting is also a carving, that the circle is not in fact stuck on to the square. The men are now fascinated by the craftsmanship of Nicholson’s piece as a physical object, and all examine it more closely. The way is then paved for Oliver to disagree openly with Sutherland, countering her formalist metaphysic – ‘it’s the sheer purity of the piece that really sings out’ – with his own materialist formalism: ‘I know they call it abstract art, but . . . it’s concrete’ (TPP 56–7). He is able to explain to his mates the fact, relatively hidden perhaps in plain sight, that squares and circles are in the real world, just as the painting itself is. Hall, it seems, cannot resist the irony of presenting the admission of Robert Lyon that ‘It’s rather lost on me, I’m afraid’ (TPP 58). This scene therefore develops the emergence of Oliver Kilbourn as a leading protagonist in the group, revealing his talent both as a painter and as a thinker, the most adept of those who may now have travelled some way from Herbert Read’s ‘aesthetic death’. He is the subject of Helen Sutherland’s offer of a stipend to leave the pit and become an artist, the rejection of which constitutes the most dramatic instance of the play’s multi-dimensional analysis of the theme of patronage. His sympathetic understanding of abstract art is a significant part of this process, clearly outpacing the ‘rather lost’ Lyon over the Nicholson relief. His chance meeting at Rock Hall with Ben Nicholson himself potently symbolises a shifting politics of the aesthetic: Oliver is able to express his admiration for ‘the more abstract work’ whilst admitting that ‘I couldn’t get it at first’ (TPP 88–9). Oliver’s grasp of abstraction nevertheless retains a familiar sense of the concept’s ambivalence: when, at the culmination of Act I, the pitmen voice the collectively transformative effect of seeing the work of Van Gogh in London – an experience, they claim, through which they become a group – it is he who points out with approval that the room painted by Van Gogh is ‘not an abstract room’ but a defamiliarised enhancement of the everyday (TPP 71). Despite Oliver’s individual emergence, the trip to the London galleries at the end of Act I confirms the play’s concern with collective consciousness or identity and thus with the question of common or private ownership of art, an ownership which must include the art of abstraction and its discourses. The group energetically defend the formal values of Chinese art – ‘They just leave spaces’, ‘if there’s not perspective, nothing’s fixed’ - from Lyon’s objections that the paintings are primitive and formulaic (TPP 67, 68). Later in the play, and following the outbreak of war in 1939, a more pointed debate illustrates the continuation of the group’s critical discourse on matters of abstraction, albeit with an initially comedic tinge to the now familiar encounter with the canvas. The lights come up on an abstract painting being held by Jimmy Floyd – Jimmy’s ‘blob’ (TPP 94). Jimmy has been the play’s fool, both a figure and object of fun, the most uncomprehending and sceptical of abstraction and therefore the least likely of the men to engage seriously with it. Somehow, the scene 224

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seems to imply, Jimmy has come across a set of justifications for calling his painting ‘Preparations for Battle’ (the group have been tasked with producing paintings for the War Ministry): it is an ‘experiment’, ‘non-representational’, it comes from his subconscious and it says to him, ‘anticipation, war, approaching atrocities, the lot’ (TPP 94–5). This is Jimmy’s act of ‘challenging the very modes of representation’; the off-the-peg quality of this phrase for abstraction seems to confirm the men’s suspicion (‘Where’s he learnt this?’) that the act is also provocative and mischievous (TPP 96). Yet if it is such, exploiting the rise of painterly abstraction in 1930s Britain (‘Every bugger else is deing blobs’), it raises strategic questions about the politics and ownership of that abstraction. How is genuine painterliness to be identified? If abstraction is to be ‘learnt’, as has been the case for the group, why may it not also be deployed? To Lyon’s customary objection that the blob does not express ‘“you”’, Jimmy declares his right to correct this: ‘Oh, it’s alright if Picasso does a blob, or some posh bloke from London does a blob – but when I de one, it “doesn’t come from me”’ (TPP 95–6). In the ensuing argument about what constitutes ‘proper’ art and ‘proper’ artists, the more telling force of the group’s objections is that Jimmy’s use of abstraction has been derivative rather than transgressive, reinscribing a familiar hierarchy: in Harry’s words, ‘just mimicking a style which is actually someone else’s. It’s like doffing yer cap to the Lord of the Manor’ (TPP 97). Jimmy cannot challenge the modes of representation if his class does not possess them in the first place; as Oliver suggests, the professional artist has turned to abstraction because it is ‘Their job . . . to think about the way you can represent things’, but the decision does not override the significance of representation itself: context – Harry’s example of the ‘perfectly fine blobs in the Russian Revolution’ – dictates aesthetic choices based on meaning. The political tenacity of this debate exposes the relative inadequacy of Lyon’s ahistorical defence of beauty – ‘even abstract art must capture the inner beauty of something to be effective’ – and, when Harry unveils his more figurative painting of ‘The War Wedding’, it falls to Oliver to defend this as ‘not some abstraction’ but a meaningful representation of forthcoming loss. Equally, however, it falls to the Young Lad to offer perspective on a scene that begins with Jimmy’s blob and ends with Picasso’s Guernica. What the Young Lad hears in the debate is merely ‘arguing about art’, the critical argument around abstraction locked into a relatively formalist and idealised frame of reference. This is because he has torn from a library magazine an illustration of Guernica, showing how the ‘real artist’, overwhelmed by systematic human brutality, likewise tears ‘the whole lot’ up (TPP 99). Beyond mere beauty – ‘It isn’t beautiful’ - Picasso’s painting enters the history and ambience of the group as a sign of their now long and thoughtfully acquired acknowledgement of the potential of abstract experimentalism – ‘Everything 225

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ripped up, stuff stuck together, not white boxes or folk on their lunch break’ – to expose the failures and tragedy of the merely human (TPP 100). This tragedy is soon to be bitterly confirmed in the Young Lad’s death in action in the Second World War. Abstraction has played a crucial part in the vision of transformation that reaches an unembarrassed peak at the end of the play’s first act. After their London experience, and with images of the art they have seen flashing past, Hall stages a stylised and syncopated address to the audience, celebrating their realisation of modernist art’s capacity to ‘change things’ - not only vision, but their own subjectivity and its relation to power. Nowhere is the discourse here that of a liberation of or into the ‘human’, even though, ironically enough, the harsh and alienated working conditions of the men as miners might have suggested such a standard Marxist framework. Instead, Hall’s script at this point is intensely vitalistic – ‘It was about living’, ‘Art was about how you live your life’, inspiration as ‘breathing life’, ‘we felt a force’, the energy of ‘being alive’ (TPP 72–3). While the miners appear to be experimenting with evocations of religion and spirituality, I want to pause instead on Harry’s assertion: ‘Basically, we liked everything’ (TPP 70). This, as we surely know, is no indiscriminate attachment: the play has shown the pitmen to be fiercely critical from the outset, already educated (within the WEA and the Left Book Club, for example), and therefore in no sense passive recipients of Lyon’s course. Instead, Harry demonstrates that a critical and aesthetic education involves the capacity for sympathetic affirmation and emotional attachment as well as knowledge. It is important that the men know what it is possible to like, as well as to know and to critique, and this education of sensibility (including, of course, the previously disarming idea of painterly abstraction) is not necessarily either invidious or patronising within a society that has always unequally distributed such education. An education of sensibility, of feeling as well as thought, looks somewhat different when it is demanded from below, as it were; Harry’s ‘we liked everything’ is thus in a sense a direct riposte to the ‘everyone likes everything’ of a top-down culture of kitsch as characterised by Logan’s Rothko. Seeking initially from Lyon ‘what you see in a picture’, the group’s initially feisty resistance to his seeming highbrowism combines with a genuine respect for the authority of what it is he knows about art: they want to know this too, with a growing historical sense of entitlement, and they are highly attuned to even the slightest sense that Lyons might be withholding this knowledge from them. Such is precisely the kind of knowledge about abstraction that Herbert Read’s critical project pursued – a reminder that Hall’s Lyon is a loosely parallel figure, both being appointed to Professorships in Edinburgh. From the viewpoint of this politics of aesthetic education, the limitations of Lyon’s endorsement of an expressionist aesthetic on the men’s behalf, and thus 226

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Yasmina Reza, John Logan, Lee Hall

even of his consistent support and championing of the Group’s work, lie painfully exposed. After introducing the first public exhibition of the Group’s work, praising it as ‘remarkable’, ‘exceptional’ and ‘unique’, Lyon is taken to task by Oliver on the very grounds that Lyon feels are democratic and emancipatory: ‘anyone can paint’, ‘art is about expressing yourself’, and the fact that what is ‘special’ about the miners is how their shared experience is expressed in a common subject matter (TPP 83–7). ‘I know you don’t mean it badly, Mr Lyon’, explains Oliver, ‘but I think you have to be careful, don’t you – the assumptions you make – that they don’t actually end up patronising people or holding people back’ (87). What Lyon proudly sees in the men as exemplary is precisely not the answer to the damaging division of labour: ‘posh people’, as Oliver puts it, would not be valued for exemplifying the principle that ‘anyone can paint’, and it continues to exclude the men from striving for excellence and distinction on the terms that characterise serious art. With irony, it means they are obliged to adopt the Greenbergian insistence that art is ‘about doing good pictures’ (in Greenberg’s case, overriding any essential distinction between representational and abstract art) rather than about ‘expressing yourself’ (85–6): Oliver defends his integrity as a painter and, by extension, through the familiar elitist argument that ‘Some people can paint and other people can’t’ (84). Surrounded by these subtler forms of patronage, it is therefore impossible for Oliver to accept Helen Sutherland’s offer of a stipend, an offer made in the language of aesthetic autonomy and metaphysic – he ‘thinks like’ an artist, he is ‘sensitive to what makes art, art’, he has an ‘artist’s soul’ (TPP 62). In rejecting the offer, insisting that you cannot be an artist and be working class, Oliver must maintain: ‘I haven’t got the language’ (TPP 93). If both acts of The Pitmen Painters end with a false dawn, the second is most arresting in its sense of historical disappointment. The structure of Act II is to complicate and call into question the excited idealism of the Group’s discovery of its own identity and of the power of art to change life at the end of Act I. A twenty-first-century audience looks back to the eve of nationalisation under a Labour government in 1947, knowing the coming frustration of the Group’s hopes for a ‘completely different world’ in which ‘every bugger’s an artist under Clement Attlee’ (George) and ‘We make wor life art’ (Harry) (TPP 118, 117, 121). No academy or university was ever established in Ashington, nor did the common ownership of Shakespeare and Goethe transpire quite in the way that George at one point envisages. Lee Hall’s polemical ‘Introduction’ to the play more precisely updates this frustration of the belief that ‘real art’ is ‘communal and active’ and ‘not owned by anyone’ (TPP viii). The advances of the 1960s and 1970s towards art as fundamental to all lives ‘fully lived’ are now, Hall argues, being reversed. Globalisation of capital, media monopolies and deregulation of TV, but also the ‘huge creativity’ associated with the digital revolution and the ascendancy of the internet, have led 227

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to serious loss: ‘lives blighted by lack of understanding and whole swathes of people who are drip-fed ignorance’. The Pitmen Painters has presented a model of the common ownership of abstraction as thought and as art, a literal projection of abstraction as a paradigm in aesthetic education to take up the thread of Robert Tressell’s intervention in early modernism a century before.

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CONCLUSION: HERBERT READ AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION

The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears – and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case or tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory everyday life? Mina Loy, ‘Gertrude Stein’ (2005: 437) In 1956, Herbert Read wrote an Introduction to the ‘Critic’s Choice’ exhibition he had curated for the gallery of Arthur Tooth and Sons in London. In expansive as well as explanatory mode, Read found himself, as he had done for some three decades, justifying and defending ‘that extreme in contemporary art’ that was ‘misrepresented’ by the word ‘“abstraction”’ (Read and Thistlewood 1993: 167). To counter likely accusations of intellectualism, Read posed ‘directly sensuous and profound enjoyment’ – ‘I like this kind of art’. Dissociating his choices from ‘pejorative’ associations of abstraction with the ‘formalist’, the ‘pure’ and the ‘academic’, Read argued instead that to be abstract was to be more realist than to represent ‘the superficial appearance of objects’. He cited in support the aesthetician Ernst Cassirer, though he might equally have cited any of those modernist painters for whom abstraction was emphatically not ‘abstraction’: ‘To live in the realm of forms (Cassirer has said) does not signify an evasion of the issues of life; it represents, on the contrary, the realisation of one of the 229

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highest energies of life itself.’ Anticipating protests that this was indistinguishable from the aim ‘of every realist since Cézanne (if not since Masaccio)’, Read insisted that to follow Cézanne was to lead, ‘step by step with inexorable logic’, to the abstract paintings he had chosen for the exhibition. Herbert Read haunts Lee Hall’s characterisation of Lyons in The Pitmen Painters, and he has quietly accompanied much of the narrative of this book. Like Raymond Williams, Read knew something of the journey that the long revolution into education and democracy promised, in his case from a farming upbringing in North Yorkshire to becoming one of the leading art critics and public intellectuals in Britain. Unlike Williams, Read was a fervent champion of abstraction. The ‘Critic’s Choice’ statement connects a serious commitment to the civilising benefits of aesthetic education, born out of a lived experience of the barbarism of warfare (Read saw active service in the First World War), with an equally profound conviction of abstract art’s affective and intellectual value, realising ‘one of the highest energies of life itself’. We have seen too how Read, also in the 1950s, could somewhat dispiritingly pronounce the ordinary citizen to be ‘aesthetically dead’, an unpromising stance for an educationalist. Yet Read’s pessimism about the possibility of art in society ever expanding beyond a quasi-aristocratic elite of practitioners and critics acknowledged structural and institutional failure, and expressed the frustration of hopes that these structures and institutions might be revolutionised. Two instances will illustrate. In 1935, as an anarchist, Read addressed the Artists’ International Association of the Communist International, a meeting overshadowed by the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933 following the election of the Nazis in Germany, and by the turn against artistic experimentation within Soviet Communism. Here Read argued that ‘abstract art has a positive function’; it ‘keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art’ (HW 514). Looking back to Bauhaus and Weimar Germany, Read noted that in architecture and some industrial arts, this abstraction was already in social action. It was ‘the art of the new classless society’, predicated on the fact that ‘you cannot build a new society . . . without artists’. Abstract artists were therefore waiting to undertake ‘the great work of reconstruction’, in the meantime ‘perfecting their formal sensibility’. It remained henceforth a vocation for Read to ensure that abstract art was no longer ‘incomprehensible to the proletariat’ (HW 511). This, though, was a task, not just for writing, however untiring Read was in his explications of abstraction, but for an educational system. One of Read’s most enduring publications became Education Through Art, a psychological approach to art pedagogy that remained influential in British schools’ educational policy and practice from its publication in 1943 up to the relatively recent past. The title of the book’s final chapter is ‘The Necessary Revolution’, a revolution which 230

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must occur within the field of aesthetic education, and it begins with a reference to the Allied bombing of the German city of Cologne: It is the first day of June, 1942. The laburnum trees cast their golden rain against a hedge of vivid beach leaves. Everything is fresh and sweet in the cool early sunshine. I have just heard that during the weekend the biggest air-raid in history has taken place. (Read 1961: 302) Such events are the ‘vacillating background’ against which Read had written Education Through Art. He had sought to remind the reader of ‘“the importance of sensation in an age which practises brutalities and recommends ideals”’, building a theory that if the vividness of sensations is preserved and cultivated in children, ‘we might succeed in relating action to feeling, and even reality to our ideals. Idealism would then no longer be an escape from reality: it would be a simple human response to reality.’ Read’s quotation, ‘the importance of sensation in an age which practises brutalities and recommends ideals’, is from E. M. Forster’s 1941 Rede Lecture on Virginia Woolf, delivered just two months after Woolf’s death on 28 March, and published in May 1942, only a month before Read wrote his reflections on Cologne. Abstract art was therefore, for Read, a practical means of constructing a society of equality, a society whose arts education would also guard against the ‘insensibility’ that was a pervasive and ‘endemic’ disease of the human spirit. In his writing on abstraction, Read could be straightforwardly pedagogical and scholarly, offering definitions: ‘By abstraction we mean what is derived or disengaged from nature, the pure or essential form abstracted from the concrete details’, or ‘separated from matter, practice, or particular examples, not concrete’ (Read 1952: 88; 1960: 233). But his commitment to revolutionary social change and to the education of sensibility also entailed a strong antiacademicism, projected, in the essay ‘Surrealism and the Romantic Principle’, as the need for a ‘complete revaluation of aesthetic values’ (Read 1952: 118). ‘I am convinced’, Read wrote, ‘that the general body of existing aesthetic judgements are conventional’, consisting of dogmas ‘handed down by tradition or inculcated by education’. If we were allowed to open our eyes and ears to art and throw away the guidebooks, Read argues, the result would indeed be revolutionary: ‘Schoolmasters and professors would wander about helplessly like myopic men deprived of their glasses; textbooks would be irrelevant and teaching an impudent imposition’ (118). Here, then, it is the disempowered educators who are lost in the galleries, perhaps aesthetically dying. Read was not alone in the possession of a theory of the transformation of education along aesthetic, and implicitly democratic and emancipatory lines – a transformation, that is, not simply through aesthetic education, but through the aestheticisation of education. Read was familiar 231

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with the work of A. N. Whitehead and had written about him in the journal The New Age during the early 1920s. The final chapter of Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (the Lowell lectures of 1925) is entitled ‘Requisites for Social Progress’. On the nature of education, the resonances picked up by Read in Education Through Art are clear: ‘We are too exclusively bookish in our scholastic routine’, Whitehead argued, traditional educational methods being ‘far too much occupied with intellectual analysis, and with the acquirement of formularised information’ (Whitehead 1927: 254). ‘Habits of aesthetic appreciation’ should be at the core of education, rectifying the ‘disastrous error’ bequeathed by industrial capitalism: ‘the scientific creed that matter in motion is the one concrete reality in nature; so that aesthetic values form an adventitious addition’. We have glimpsed at various points in this book the role of Whitehead in shaping an abstraction in which the distinctions between thought and art, feeling and intellect, have vanished. This is the abstraction that philosophy needs as the ‘critic’ of abstraction; it seems unsurprising that, for example, Isabelle Stengers has floated the idea of Whitehead as ‘a Marxist without knowing it’, understanding the ‘domination of abstraction’ in the commodity form and pursuing instead the efficacy of abstractions that are not ‘intolerant’ (Stengers 2011: 136–7). And we have seen the implication of Whitehead’s abstraction in a theory of general organic and inorganic interconnectedness, a buzzing world where the same distinctions of affect and cognition fail to apply within a continuum of the human and the inhuman. It is appropriate therefore that Read in his humane educative mission, and with Worringer’s abstract inorganicism also behind him, should also have found himself in the domain of the inhuman. Here is a brief juxtaposition drawn from two essays in The Philosophy of Modern Art: Art is an organic phenomenon, a biological process. Like flowers and fruit, plumage and song, it is a product of the life-force itself. (68) The artist paints what he wants to see, a human or individual version of that inhuman abstraction called Nature. (73) In each of these essays Read insists on declaring that ‘art is human’; yet this is neither anthropocentric pride nor a complacent humanism. Art is also ‘organic’ and ‘biological, the uniquely human part of a natural evolutionary process, and in this sense an impersonal ‘life-force’. The second quotation seems to find the artist humanising this force, Read reaching for ‘inhuman abstraction called Nature’, where it is easy to hear a conventional reproach, even in the limited, Williams-keyword sense that ‘Nature’ is an abstract concept. ‘Inhuman abstraction’ points, however, simultaneously, in another direction for Read. 232

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Inhuman abstraction is the actuality of life forces, that which Deleuze was to re-invent affirmatively as the condition of lived experience. Alongside the happy humanised organicism, flowers and fruit, plumage and song, there was the inorganic and unnatural other. An essay on the sculpture of Henry Moore registered an unease with the available terms: Read complained that it was virtually impossible to speak, for example, of machines or of Constructivism in art, outside of a language ‘riddled with analogies and metaphors drawn from the organic world’, yet ‘the division that used to be made between the organic and the inorganic has been abandoned by science itself’ (Read 1952: 202). How could Read, for whom Nietzsche led to Worringer and Whitehead, fail to celebrate an inhuman abstraction, as a necessary expression of the human spirit as well as its material reality? His educative work recurrently touched on this: aesthetic education must cultivate an awareness, through abstraction, of what thinking the inhuman might mean. Any humanist perspective was incomplete without such an understanding of the inhuman, or could not be entirely trusted to deliver a full sense of what it is to be alive as humans and to value such life. What it had delivered instead, Read maintained, was the barbarism of war under the guise of humanistic ideals. Jerry Zaslove argues that Read’s ‘anarcho-modernism’ came closer than anything in British modernist culture to ‘a theory of cognitive autonomy that would in turn lead to a politics of solidarity with the tenants of the earth’ (Zaslove 2007: 62). In turn, we see how Cézanne was a founding element in Read’s story, demonstrating that the sensation we share with the inhuman world might naturally arise as abstraction. Cézanne’s goal of ‘realising his sensations’ had, Read wrote, restored a ‘primal rectitude’ to painting (1952: 24). Again echoing Whitehead, this meant the artist resisting the translation of the object in front of us into the linguistic concept of ‘chair’ (23), replacing this intellectual abstraction with the implicitly more tolerant one, aesthetically open to sensation, that led to the abstract paintings Read loved. I began this book with the question: what is it that we want from abstraction? We may be no nearer the elusive keyword entry, perhaps even further away. Herbert Read nevertheless crystallises the way abstraction’s contradictory work might play out across a life. Built into abstraction’s reproach, since Marx in my narrative, is the guilty awareness that all of its inhumanness is human. The experimental art and thought of modernism, in whose abstraction art and thought themselves are increasingly difficult to distinguish, draws on this reproach but is, I have suggested, on the way to somewhere else with abstraction: ‘Something’s doing’, as Brian Massumi puts it of William James’s radical empiricism (Massumi 2011: 1). Abstraction in modernism becomes our way of freeing the human from having to be the measure of all things, from having to be exceptional. In Gertrude Stein it is the impossibility of the masterpiece, in Wallace Stevens, being without description, or the nothing that is. It 233

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is Samuel Beckett’s relief – but Read’s too – at the ‘deanthropomorphisations’ of Cézanne, and the ability to take this into his own abstract-machinic writing. Abstraction may, in this Deleuzian sense, be lines of force and flight, Worringer’s Northern Gothic line as it takes off; but lines of flight are not merely flights of fancy. I have tried to show how modernist abstraction also moves in the direction of a sign for difficulty itself, Wallace Stevens’s sun as first idea, ‘being/In the difficulty of what it is to be’. Beware, Bergson reminds us, of a simple game, a game that is not possible when we follow the fortunes of Proust’s formula for involuntary memory from Beckett through to this century’s post-Deleuzianism. Thinking may always be difficult, but thinking why and how not to think more so. Abstraction, I have shown, becomes especially serviceable, or available, for the varied imperatives in modernism towards anti-theoretical theory: knowing how not to know, art as the non-conceptual object, the expression that there is nothing to express. Herbert Read’s educative work is one kind of response to the politics that inevitably accompany abstraction’s difficulty. Who is this difficulty for? Abstraction in art, but also perhaps in thought, is a limit-case that really puts what Raymond Williams called an unevenness of literacy on the line. Too often the reproach or the fear of abstraction is a way of saying don’t think too much (why, you might start thinking about the inhuman). Read’s efforts at transparency invited Barnett Newman’s ridicule, yet both Read and Newman opened out the possibility that it might be abstraction’s difficulty itself that is available to all or held in common. This is the radical equality that Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams found in Gertrude Stein, but also that Brecht, Althusser and Newman strategically assumed as a popular disposition towards the abstract. Why can’t each of us, Loy asks, scholar or bricklayer, do what modernism says and ‘realize being’, in a Cézannean sense, to think as well as feel it? What price the democratic highbrow, as Melba Cuddy-Keane discerns the idea in Virginia Woolf (Cuddy-Keane 2003: 33)? Why does this seem an impossible contradiction, or even a dangerous idea? Read showed in his 1935 address that he could sign up to a recognisably utopian strain of modernist abstraction that drew on its rationalist legacy – abstract artists as the builders of a new classless society. But perhaps just as radical was: ‘directly sensuous and profound enjoyment – I like this art’. As I have also suggested, modernism since Cézanne enables abstraction, no doubt implausibly, to be liked or loved. There is a line leading from ‘I like this art’ to the ‘We liked everything’ of Lee Hall’s pitmen painters, a universal tolerance built on understanding that might just lead to the peace that Badiou discerns beyond abstraction’s violence. Reza’s and Logan’s plays also push past the affront of the abstract canvas to invite the audience in to abstraction’s open question: you can have this too, intellectually and emotionally. Not only ‘what do you see?’, however, or even ‘what do you feel?’, but ‘what does this artwork 234

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know or feel?’ You are entitled to know about it, but also to know with it. The question of sensation’s out-thereness, abstraction as the Deleuzian Outside, is there in its difficulty – but what more appropriate question with which to address Gertrude Stein’s writing and to access the pleasure of it? It feels as if an outer limit of this new abstraction of affect is reached in Antonio Negri’s love of the cultures of immaterial labour and their basis in modernist abstraction, promising a new participatory quality of being. In this sense, perhaps, it is travelling too fast or too far. What happens or has happened to the training of the imagination in Negri’s new dispensation of abstract immateriality? As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak warns in her assessment of aesthetic education for the new century, globalisation ‘takes place only in capital and data’, and ‘Information command has ruined knowing and reading’ (Spivak 2012: 1). However challenging it was and is, we still, Spivak argues, need a disciplined imagination to be able to read symptomatically and see abstraction at the ‘secret’ heart of capital, the transformation of labour into the value or commodity form, the ‘real’ abstraction that is hidden in its reality. ‘Thus it is the role of the abstract – the spectral, if you will – that we must grasp rather than reject’; and this, via ‘aesthetic education as training the imagination for epistemological performance’ (193, 197). Yet this – aesthetic education as training the imagination for epistemological performance – is not a bad definition of what experimental modernism set out to do in its abstraction. To the extent that we still need to ask, as do ‘Art’, Red and The Pitmen Painters, what it means to look at an abstract painting, then abstraction remains a sign of continuing wider inequalities or unevennesses in accessing the tools of critical thought and the pleasures of aesthetic encounter. As Spivak warns, the challenges of addressing these inequalities in an era of digital globalisation are daunting, and different; Marx’s tools might still only provide us with the story of ‘freedom from’ (197). However, a ‘freedom to’ is the narrative of an abstraction I have tried to trace back, from the activist and immaterial philosophies of Deleuze and Negri, to modernist art since Paul Cézanne, but then back again to Karl Marx’s strenuous thinking of the ‘force’ of abstraction. Can we imagine a BLAST modernist manifesto for the early twenty-first century, one critically attuned not only to the new poverty of globalised inequality, but to the need to think our inhuman prehensive interconnectedness, before it is too late? Could its slogan be ‘Abstraction for All’?

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Jeremy Hooker, ed. Christopher Meredith, Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies, pp. 224–48. –––– (1999) ‘Driven to Abstraction? Raymond Williams and the Road’, Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays 5, 115–29. –––– (1993), ‘Language, Nature and the Politics of Materialism’, in Raymond Williams: Education, Politics, Letters, ed. W. John Morgan and Peter Preston, Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 105–28. West, Emma (2020), ‘“within the reach of all”: Bringing Art to the People in Interwar Britain’, Modernist Cultures 15:2, 225–52. Whitehead, A. N. [1933] (1961), Adventures of Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. –––– (1985), Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edn, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, New York: The Free Press. –––– (1927), Science and the Modern World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Raymond (1975), The Country and the City, St Albans: Paladin. –––– (1958), Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Chatto and Windus. –––– (1981) ‘Introduction’, in Three Plays by D. H. Lawrence, Harmondsworth: Penguin. –––– (1988), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd edn, Fontana: London. –––– (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. –––– (1979), Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London: New Left Books. –––– (1997), Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso. –––– (1989), The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney, London: Verso. –––– (1985), Towards 2000, Harmondsworth: Penguin. –––– (1983) Writing in Society, London: Verso. Williams, William Carlos [1930] (2005), ‘The Work of Gertrude Stein’, in Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Malden, MA, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell, pp. 545–8. Wilson, Edmund (1969), Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930, London: Fontana. Winters, Yvor (1959), On Modern Poets, New York: Meridian. Wolin, Richard (1979), ‘The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno’s Aesthetische Theorie’, Telos 41, 105–27. Wood, Christopher S. (ed.) (2000), The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, New York: Zone Books.

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Worringer, Wilhelm [1908] (1997) Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, trans. Michael Bullock, Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks. –––– (1918) Form Problems in Gothic, American translation, New York: G. E. Stechert. Zaslove, Jerry (2007), ‘Herbert Read as Touchstone for Anarcho-Modernism – Aura, Breeding Grounds, Polemic Philosophy’, in Reading Read: New Essays on Herbert Read, ed. Michael Paraskos, London: Freedom Press. Žižek, Slavoj, ed. (1994), Mapping Ideology, London: Verso.

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Index

Abstract Expressionism, 2, 5, 92–3, 201, 215, 216–17, 219 ‘Abstraction: Towards a New Art – Painting 1910–1920’ (exhibition), 69 abstract machine, 11, 161, 177–8, 182 activist philosophy, 11–12, 200, 235 Adorno, Theodor, 1, 48, 60–5, 68, 96, 112, 121, 131, 146, 169, 173–4, 202, 210, 218 Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer, 33–4, 112, 131 ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society1915–2015’ (exhibition), 6 alienation effect (Verfremdung), 56, 58 Althusser, Louis, 7, 22–3, 32, 33, 34, 43, 50–1, 96, 234

Altieri, Charles, 133, 135, 142, 156, 157 animal, 35–6, 38, 78, 83, 127, 130, 154, 187, 192–3, 203 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 1, 90–1 Aristotle, 186 Arp, Hans, 101 Artists’ International Association, 230 Arts League of Service, 210 Ashington Group, 220 Attlee, Clement, 227 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 116 Bacon, Francis, 12, 107, 200–5 Badiou, Alain, 140, 145–6, 154, 161, 169, 173–4, 185, 193, 202, 234 Bakhtin School, 27 Balibar, Étienne, 35 Ballmer, Karl, 170

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Balzac, Honoré, 56 Barr, Alfred H., 4, 71–2 Barrett, William, 2–3 Barthes, Roland 3 Bastiat, Frédéric, 40 Baudelaire, Charles, 169 Baudrillard, Jean, 45 Bauhaus, 230 Beckett, Samuel, 10–11, 28, 61, 159–78, 184, 186, 188, 190, 191, 193, 196, 199, 200, 202, 234 and abstract machine, 10–11, 177–8, 200 on Cézanne, 158, 171–2, 193 as critical thinker, 159–78 ‘Dante . . . Bruno . Vico.. Joyce’, 162–3 and the inhuman, 172–4, 234 involuntary memory, 10–11, 161–2, 164–9 language, 162–3, 191 and modernist painting, 158, 169–78 Proust, 163–9 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, 174–8 Bell, Clive, 208 Benjamin, Walter, 58, 194–5, 199 Bennett, Tony, 6 Bennington, Geoff, 85 Berg, Alban, 61 Berger, John, 7–8, 59, 202 Bergson, Henri, 3, 116, 117, 128, 143, 164, 167, 181, 183, 185–94, 196, 198, 199, 234 and animality,187 intuition, 164, 188–90 metaphysics, 187–8 science, 187–8, 190

time/durée, 164 virtual, the, 198 and writing, 183–6, 189 Bernard, Émile, 82, 83, 84, 86–7, 125 Bernstein, Jay, 62 Bewes, Timothy, 6, 7, 20, 43, 48, 57, 65 Blake, William, 39, 208 BLAST, 235 Bloom, Harold, 153 Bloomsbury, 29 Bois, Yve-Alain, 97 Botticelli, Sandro, 208 Bowie, Andrew, 5 Boxall, Peter, 159 Braques, Georges, 73, 91 Brancusi, Constantin, 73 Brecht, Bertolt, 50–1, 56–61, 65, 68, 234 Brown, Judith, 145, 146–7 Cage, John, 107 Caramello, Charles, 108–9 Cassirer, Ernst, 229–30 Cézanne, Paul, 9, 11, 59, 69, 73, 81–92, 93, 96, 97–9, 107–8, 109, 121, 124–5, 128, 129, 130–1, 140–1, 143, 144, 158, 170, 171–2, 193, 200–1, 203–4, 207, 230, 233, 234 Bacon, Francis, as ‘Cézannean’ (Deleuze), 200–1, 203–4 and Cubism, 90–1 and education, 69, 81, 97, 130 Fry, Roger, on, 87–9 Houses in Provence: The Riaux Valley near L’Estaque, 87–8 and the inhuman, 11, 91–2, 125, 158, 171–2, 193, 200, 233 249

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Cézanne, Paul (cont.) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, on, 91–2 Newman, Barnett, on, 97–8 Nowotny, Fritz, on, 88–90 and research, 82 and sensation, 84–6, 233 and the sublime, 99, 128 and writing, 9, 81–92, 96, 109, 125 writing abstraction, 9, 83–6, 93, 109, 125, 140–1 A Turn in the Road at La RocheGuyon, 88–9 Chanel No. 5, 147 Charters, Ann, 107 Chinese art, 224 Chodat, Robert, 110 Church, Henry, 132, 153 Circle (journal), 76 Clark, T. J., 55, 60 Claude Lorrain, 171 Colpitt, Frances, 6 commodity form, 12, 32–3, 37, 43–8, 50, 57, 61, 64–6, 138, 184, 232, 235 concrete, compared with abstract, 2, 4, 19–22, 41–3, 46, 48, 50, 53, 56–8, 65–6, 72, 75–6, 81, 83, 87, 108–9, 117, 128, 157, 171, 177, 183, 185–6, 196, 224, 231–2 Connor, Steven, 159 Constructivism (Russian), 2, 59, 233 Cremonini, Leonardo, 34, 43 Critchley, Simon, 145, 148, 152, 159 critical posthumanism, 1 Cubism, 2, 9, 52, 59, 73, 76–7, 90–1, 106–7, 111, 118, 208, 217–18 Cuddy-Keane, Melba, 6, 234 Cunningham, David, 176 Curtius, Ernst Robert 169

Dali, Salvador, 170 Dartington Hall, 209 D’Aubarède, Gabriel, 159 De Bolla, Peter, 4, 13, 99–101, 204 Debord, Guy, 45 Defoe, Daniel, 36 de Kooning, Willem, 217 DeKoven, Marianne, 106–8 Delaunay, Robert, 69 Deleuze, Gilles, 8, 82, 107, 181, 182–5, 195, 196–205, 233, 234, 235 on Francis Bacon, 107, 200–5 and the inhuman, 202–5 and lived experience, 181–3, 233 and the virtual, 195–200 and writing, 184–5 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 11, 126, 154, 161, 177–8, 183, 196–7, 200, 201 abstract machine, 11, 161, 177–8, 200 becoming-animal, 154 on Worringer, 126, 197, 201 Derrida, Jacques, 85, 159 Descartes, René, 193 De Stijl, 2, 77 determinate abstraction, 41–2 Dickerman, Leah, 4, 8, 70 Disney, Walt, 202 Dodge, Mabel, 106 Dowd, Garin, 161, 163, 177 Duchamp, Marcel, 125 Duthuit, Georges, 174–8 Dydo, Ulla D., 108 Eagleton, Terry, 18, 20, 21–3, 62 Einstein, Albert, 96 Eliot, T. S., 43, 101, 128 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 112, 113

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Engels, Friedrich, 51 Enlightenment, 33–4, 73, 112, 131 Epic Theatre (Brecht), 56, 58 Eskin, Michael, 151 Existentialism, 2 Expressionism, 27, 51, 67, 226 Fer, Bryony, 6, 70, 76 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 37 Forest of Dean, 8 Forster, E. M., 231 Fox, Dan, 207–8, 213 Frank, Joseph, 101 Freud, Sigmund, 113, 120, 217, 222 Fried, Michael, 55 Fry, Roger, 87–90, 97, 207–8, 215 Futurism, 59 Gasquet, Joachim, 82, 83, 200 Giles, Steve, 56, 58 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 227 gold, 40–1, 44, 46 Gold, Michael, 110 Gontarski, S. E., 159, 164 Gothic, 79–80, 126, 197, 201 Gowing, Lawrence, 83, 85 Greek art, 98 Greenberg, Clement, 8, 72–3, 182, 185, 198, 209, 218, 227 Gris, Juan, 116 Grossberg, Lawrence, 6 Grossman, Allen, 137, 198 Grosz, Elizabeth, 188–9 Gruen, John, 160 Hall, Lee, 12, 206, 218, 220–8, 234 Halliwell, Martin, 39 Hammond, Adam, 6 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 32

Harrison, Charles, 90 Hayles, N. Katherine, 37, 186–7 Hardy, Thomas, 22 Hegel, G. W. F., 43, 48 Heidegger, Martin, 92 Hemingway, Ernest, 3 Hepworth, Barbara, 71 Heron, Patrick, 71 Hess, Thomas B., 97 Hillis Miller, J., 139–40, 148–9 Hoffmann, Michael J., 106–7 Hugo, Victor, 64 Hullot-Kentor, Robert, 62–3 Hulme, T. E., 81, 90 humanism, 7, 10, 11, 27–8, 32, 33–4, 36–7, 39, 58–60, 64, 73, 77–8, 91–2, 127, 135, 153–4, 156, 162, 219, 232–3 Hunt, Tristram, 54 Huxley, Aldous, 3 Huxley, T. H., 3 Idealism (German), 5 ideograph, 94–5 immaterial labour (Antonio Negri), 8, 65–8, 70, 200, 235 Impressionism, 67, 86, 97, 171 inhuman, 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 30, 47, 58–60, 64, 73, 77–8, 91–2, 98–101, 114, 131, 135, 152–7, 162, 165–9, 172, 185, 193–4, 200, 202–4, 210, 215, 220, 232–3 inorganic/inorganicism, 11, 13, 35–6, 78, 79–81, 113, 126, 143, 158, 172–3, 177, 194, 198, 201, 204, 232, 233 intuition, 188 involuntary memory, 164–9, 188–90, 194–5, 198, 199, 235 251

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Jackson, T. A., 49 James, Henry, 112 James, William, 12, 112, 113, 116–17, 131, 143, 181, 183, 184, 185–7, 190, 191–2, 233 and anti-intellectualism, 185–7, 191 and science, 116, 190 and writing, 183–5, 193 Jameson, Fredric, 58 Jauss, Hans Robert, 63 Jay, Martin, 62, 63 Jones, Caroline L., 73 Joyce, James, 101, 121, 128, 162–3 Jung, Carl, 217 Kafka, Franz, 28, 200, 202 Kandinsky, Vassily, 2, 73, 74–6, 81, 91, 93, 98, 101, 106, 145, 160, 170–1, 173, 198, 201, 223 Kant, Immanuel, 47, 60 Kermode, Frank, 132, 133, 134, 143, 144, 149, 151, 156 Kern, Stephen, 105, 106–8 Kierkegaard, Søren, 2 Klee, Paul, 73, 145 Kuhn, Tom, 56, 58 La Châtre, Maurice, 48 Langer, Suzanne K., 3–4 Latimer, Ronald, 144, 145 Latour, Bruno, 184 Lawrence, D. H., 23, 39, 85–6, 115, 131, 146–7, 200, 208 Lawrence, Tim, 159, 170–1, 174 Leavis, F. R., 20–1, 26, 144 Le Corbusier, 72 Lefebvre, Henri, 139 Left Book Club, 222, 226 Léger, Fernand, 59 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 192–3

Lenin, Vladimir, 51 Lerner, Ben, 132, 137–9, 152, 198 Lind, Maria, 70 Lissitzky, El, 55 Logan, John, 12, 216–20, 221, 222, 226, 234 Loy, Mina, 105–7, 110, 117–21, 124–6, 128–9, 131, 149, 229, 234 Lucretius, 193 Lukács, Georg, 28, 29, 48, 57–8, 159, 202 Lyotard, Jean-François, 1, 63, 82, 85–6, 99–101, 125, 128, 175, 184, 185 McCarthy, Margaret, 49 MacColl, Ewan, 49 McGonagall, William, 138 McGreevy, Thomas, 158, 171–2 McLellan, David, 35 McLeod, Ian, 85 McNickle, Mollie, 92 Malevich, Kazimir, 2, 55, 56 Mallarmé, Stephane, 23, 24 Marr, Andrew, 208, 213 Martin, Linda, 122 Marxism, 6, 7, 8, 18, 20, 21, 23, 33–4, 51–68, 112, 114, 138, 159, 186, 220, 226, 232 Marx, Karl, 7, 32–50, 65, 138, 146, 155, 187, 220, 235 Capital, 32–3, 34, 43–6, 47–9, 50, 65 Early (‘Paris’) Manuscripts, 34–9, 49 Grundrisse, 34, 36, 39–43, 49 The Poverty of Philosophy, 39 Masaccio, 230 Masson, André, 174–5

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Massumi, Brian, 11, 196, 197–8, 199, 200, 233 Matisse, Henri, 73, 111, 218 Maurois, André, 169 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 82, 86, 89, 91–2 Meyer, Steven, 109, 112–16, 126 Meyerowitz, Patricia, 109, 110 Miró, Joan, 73 Mondrian, Piet, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75–8, 81, 90–1, 93, 98, 101, 107, 198, 201 money, 40–1, 43–7, 50, 51, 53, 66, 138, 146, 148, 151, 218 Moore, Henry, 222, 232 Morris, Meaghan, 6 Morris, William, 54 Mousley, Andy, 39 Mullan, John, 27–8 Müller-Doohm, Stefan, 61 Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), 4, 71 Nadel, Ira B., 108 Negorestani, Reza, 1 Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian), 75–6 Neuman, Shirley, 108 New Bergsonism, 12 Newman, Barnett, 4–5, 9, 81, 92–101, 107, 108, 109, 121, 128, 130, 143, 168, 201, 210, 215, 218, 222, 234 and education, 97, 210 ideograph, 94–5 and the inhuman, 98–101 intellectual sophistication, 96–8, 210, 215 Kwakiutl Indian, 95–7 on modernist literature, 101 Onement I, 92

plasmic, 92–4 and sensation, 97–8 and the sublime, 98–101, 128 Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 4–5, 99–100 on Worringer, 81 and writing, 9, 92–6, 101, 109 Newton/Newtonian, 73, 186, 193 Nicolaus, Martin, 43 Nicholls, Peter, 120–1 Nicholson, Ben, 71, 222–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 183–4, 186, 217, 218, 233 Nigro, Roberto, 42–3 Nixon, Mark, 161, 162 Northern line (in Worringer and Deleuze/Guattari), 126, 197, 201, 234 Novalis, 194 Nowotny, Fritz, 87–90 Nugent-Folan, Georgina, 172 Orrom, Michael, 27 Osborne, Peter, 3 Ozenfant, Amédée, 72 Pack, Robert, 143 Peat, Alexandra, 6 Perloff, Marjorie, 108 Picabia, Francis, 116, 125–6, 130 Picasso, Pablo, 9, 69, 71, 73, 101, 106, 111–12, 209, 218, 225–6 Pinkney, Tony, 24, 27, 28 Plato, 47, 173 Poe, Edgar Allan, 64 Pollock, Jackson, 5, 218, 219 Pop Art, 217 253

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Postmodernism, 66–7 Pound, Ezra, 4, 7, 24, 25–6, 94–5, 101 Power, Nina, 159 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 39 Proust, Marcel, 11, 128, 139, 158, 161, 163–9, 177–8, 188–90, 194–5, 196, 200, 204–5, 234 Pryor, Sean, 220 Purism, 72–3 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 170, 174 Ragg, Edward, 133, 134, 137, 141, 149 Rajchman, John, 11, 182–3, 199 Rancière, Jacques, 7, 42, 87, 161 Read, Herbert, 13, 71, 81, 97, 206, 209–10, 224, 226, 229–34 real abstraction, 7, 33, 46–7, 57, 61–2, 66, 184, 235 Rembrandt, 217 Renaissance, 79–80, 98, 220 Repin, Ilya, 209 Reza, Yasmina, 12, 206, 210–16, 218, 234 Ricardo, David, 37 Riddell, Joseph, 154 Riegl, Alois, 80, 88 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 82, 85 Rimbaud, Arthur, 64 Rivera, Diego, 58–9 Romanticism, 5, 39, 79, 145, 166 Rose, Jonathan, 49–50, 54 Rothko, Mark, 5, 97, 99, 216–20, 222, 226 Rouault, Georges, 130 Rubens, Peter Paul, 171 Ruskin, John, 54 Russell, Bertrand, 112

Sadler, Michael T. H., 74 St Ives Group, 2, 71 Samuel, Raphael, 54 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 28 Sayer, Derek, 31–2, 185–6 Schmitz, Neil, 109 Schoenberg, Arnold, 61, 160 science, 37–8, 48, 59, 73, 78, 86, 89, 96–7, 108, 112, 115–17, 126, 186, 187–8, 190–2, 233 Scrutiny (journal), 20, 21 Serio, John B., 152 Shakespeare, William, 120, 192, 227 Shaviro, Steven, 135, 147, 154, 193–4, 195, 199–200 Shaw, George Bernard, 207 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 56 Shields, Rob, 196 Shiff, Richard, 82, 83 Simons, Hi, 132, 144 Siraganian, Lisa, 106, 157 Skibsrud, Johanna, 151–2, 153 Smith, Adam, 37 Smith, David, 90 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 7, 33, 46–7, 57, 61–2 species–being/species–life, 35–8, 173 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 12–13, 235 Stein, Gertrude, 9–10, 105–31, 133–4, 138, 141, 143, 149, 154, 160, 163, 168, 171, 172, 173, 178, 190, 191, 199, 233, 234, 235 and African art, 111 and America, 111–15 and cars, 113–14 on Cézanne, 124–5, 128–31 and Cubism, 106–7, 111 diagram[m]ing, 114

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master-piece, the, 10, 127–9 Mina Loy on, 105–6, 117–18 on Picabia, 125–6 and science, 115–17 self-criticism, 119–23 and Spain, 111–12 Works: ‘A Sweet Tail (Gypsies)’, 117–18 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 111–12, 114–15, 125–6 The Making of Americans, 122–4, 126 ‘Poetry and Grammar’, 117, 120 Tender Buttons, 107, 119–21, 124 ‘Transatlantic Interview’, 107, 119–21, 123, 124, 129 ‘What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few Of Them’, 127, 129 Stengers, Isabelle, 12, 184, 192, 195, 232 Stevens, Wallace, 10, 132–57, 160, 163, 167, 172, 177, 182, 188, 190, 191, 192, 199, 233, 234 on Cézanne, 140–1 first idea, 139–40, 143, 154, 167, 189, 190, 192, 234 giant, the, 156–7 glamour, 146–50 and the inhuman, 152–7 philosophy and, 143–6 Works: ‘The Auroras of Autumn’, 155 ‘Chocorua to its Neighbour’, 152–3, 156 ‘Examination of the Hero in a Time of War’, 150 ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’, 155 ‘Large Red Man Reading’, 156–7

‘The Latest Freed Man’, 154, 167, 172 ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, 139–43, 154 Owl’s Clover, 144 ‘Paisant Chronicle’, 150–1 ‘A Primitive Like An Orb’, 156–7 ‘The Snow Man’, 151–2 ‘Things of August’, 132, 154–5 ‘A Thought Revolved’, 151 ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’, 134–7, 148–9, 178 Stimpson, Catherine R., 127 structuralism, 23, 26, 32, 39, 58, 88, 129 sublime, the, 98–101, 128, 146, 175 Suprematism, 2, 55 Sylvester, David, 99, 203–4 Symbolisme, 23 Tal-Coat, Pierre, 174–6 time, 26, 46–7, 99, 128, 137, 155, 164–9, 186, 189, 191, 193, 204 Toklas, Alice B., 114 Tonning, Erik, 159, 163, 170 Tooth, Arthur, and Sons (gallery), 229 Toscano, Alberto, 31–2, 46, 159, 182–3 Tressell, Robert, 8, 51–5, 228 Turner, J. W. M., 217 Valéry, Paul, 4 Van Gogh, Vincent, 224 Van Velde, Bram, 174–6 Vergo, Peter, 70 Vico, Giambattista, 162–3 Villon, François, 183 Virilio, Paul, 4 255

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virtual, the, 11, 63–4, 137–9, 152, 182, 195–200, 202, 210, 215 Vološinov, V. N., 28 Wallace, Jeff, 18, 80 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 158, 171 Wellek, René, 21 West, Emma, 210 Whitehead, A. N., 4, 5, 12, 13, 37, 73, 112, 116–17, 126, 143, 181, 182, 183, 184, 186, 190–5, 196–7, 199, 200–1, 204, 231–2, 233 and aestheticization of education, 231–2 fallacy of misplaced concreteness, 37, 186 and feeling, 191–5, 199–200 and the inhuman, 13, 193–5, 201 mathematics, 4, 5, 116–17, 126 prehension, 194–5, 204 and writing, 184, 191–7 Whitechapel Gallery, London, 6 Whitman, Walt, 120 Williams, Raymond, 6–7, 12, 17–23, 26–30, 32, 39, 48, 58, 66, 73, 114, 129, 202, 230

and class, 17–18, 29 and culture, 18 ‘Beyond Cambridge English’, 26–30 Culture and Society, 17–18 Keywords, 6–7, 12, 18, 24 Marxism and Literature, 19–23 and modernism, 19, 24, 26–30 Williams, William Carlos, 105–6, 115, 124–5, 234 Wilson, Edmund, 122, 123 Winters, Yvor, 135 Wolin, Richard, 60, 63 Wood, Christopher S., 88 Wood, Paul, 90 Woolf, Virginia, 184, 200, 231, 234 Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), 220–1, 226 Worringer, Wilhelm, 79–81, 89, 90, 96, 126, 197, 201, 232, 233, 234 Yeats, Jack, 158, 172–3, 193 Zarnower, Teresa, 98 Zaslove, Jerry, 233 Žižek, Slavoj, 33, 46 Zola, Émile, 83

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