Articulations of Anarchist Modernism

223 Pages·2007·0.86 MB·English

Articulations of Anarchist Modernism: Putting Art to Work

Carrie R. Matthews

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill
2007

Approved by:
John McGowan
Eric Downing
James L. Peacock
Linda Wagner-Martin
Donald M. Reid
©2007
Carrie R. Matthews
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT

Carrie R. Matthews: Articulations of Anarchist Modernism: Putting Art to Work
(Under the direction of John McGowan and Eric Downing)

This dissertation connects literary modernism’s treatment of time to the historical and
theoretical framework of anarchism. I show that anarchism’s identification of time as a
political problem informs modernist experimentation with temporality and that we should
look to literary texts’ conceptualizations of time to understand the relations of modernist
genres like the prose poem and avant-garde manifesto to political concerns. By situating the
work of Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara in juxtaposition to André
Breton’s surrealism and in a historical context that has been largely obscured, I am able to
delineate an anarchist modernist poetics. This anarchist modernism proposes a specific kind
of work for the artwork that counters three conceptions of literary modernism: as uncritically
embracing newness and novelty; as indicative of a division between art and life; and as
concerned with the individual genius over and above collectives.
My project reads literary modernism’s appropriation of the manifesto and
development of the prose poem as formal experimentation yoked to inherently political
sensibilities. As modernist genres, both the prose poem and manifesto look back to
nineteenth-century Paris and a historical context of failed revolution in important ways. Yet
while scholars routinely hear echoes of the 1848 Communist Manifesto in aesthetic
manifestos’ call for revolution, few discern the complementarity between the Baudelairean
prose poem and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s anarchist analysis of 1848.
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My work argues that as genres, prose poems and manifestos come apart at the seams,
even bleeding into one another. Yet as two ideal types of literary modernism’s attitude
towards time, prose poems and manifestos offer a historically viable and theoretically useful
way to clarify two very different politics of time, one of which-- the anarchist modernist
retemporalization of form found in Baudelaire, Stein, and Tzara-- has not been widely
explored. My contribution to this area of scholarship is to offer a counterpoint to neo-Marxist
readings that privilege the genre of the manifesto, futurity, and international revolution
through a perspective that prioritizes the prose poem, artworks that work with and in the
present, and a transnational task of re-infusing temporality with difference.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation owes too much to too many, and I cannot thank everyone who
should be thanked here. Caveats aside, I am most indebted to five people: to John McGowan
and Eric Downing, perhaps the most popular dynamic duo ever among campus comparatists,
for generously giving their time, energy, and tolerance to this protean project, likely for a
much longer duration than they had initially anticipated; to my parents, Jane and Carl
Matthews, for unwavering support, no matter how much they must have wondered what on
earth I was doing; and to Jim Peacock, for volunteering to read anything, anytime, in any
form (or lack thereof) and insistently liking it all.
I also thank Linda Wagner-Martin for her generosity in serving on the committee of a
graduate student she had never taught and for sharing her knowledge of Gertrude Stein
scholarship with me. And Don Reid was exceptionally kind in jumping across departmental
boundaries to join my committee at the ninth hour. I benefitted from his charitable reading of
this project, and subsequent incarnations of this project will be better for his gentle criticisms.
Rania Chelala, my dear friend and longsuffering roommate for the bulk of this
dissertation’s writing, deserves special thanks for her unlimited tolerance, many, many,
kindnesses, and remarkable enthusiasm over the last three years. Heather Klomhaus Hrács
and Regina Bartolone kept me grounded and well-wined and dined throughout my entire
graduate-school career, and Kara Getrost, Will Nolan, Julie Wilson, Margaret Swezey,
Heather Epes, Gigi Taylor, and Julie Flowerday have been wonderful interlocutors as friends
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and colleagues. Vicki Behrens and Kim Abels deserve special mention for providing a great
work environment for a dissertator at the Writing Center and for their personal kindnesses
and encouragement, as do Megan Granda and (yet again!) John McGowan at the Institute for
the Arts and Humanities. And finally, I thank Barbara Johnson for her support and thorough
spoiling over the years, and my technically apt sommelier brother, who helped me through
computer formatting glitches, furnished the celebration cabernet, and grew up so that I didn’t
have to.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Prose Poems’ and Manifestos’ Politics of Time ……………………………..1

Chapter One: Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: From Artwork to Putting Art to Work…………22

I. Converging Diagnoses: Baudelaire and Proudhon on the Failures of 1848………..26

II. Translating the Problem of the Mass: Proudhon to Baudelaire………….…………29

III. The Prose Poems’ Diagnosis of the Attenuation and Aestheticization of Time……33

IV. Art’s Work as Solution: Baudelaire and Foucault……………………………….....47

V. Art’s Work in the Prose Poems: The Value of Aesthetic Encounters………………53

VI. Art, Experience, and the Politics of Deformation……………………………..…….65

Chapter Two: Gertrude Stein Authors Collective Time…………..........................................68

I. Becoming and Repeating: Fleshing Out the Present………………………………...72

II. Open Time: Incorporating Entities and Forces in Expression……………………….76

III. Authoring Time Collectively: Nations……………………………………………...85

IV. The Fashionable Free Exercise of Habit: Gertrude Stein Eyeballs Utopia………….97

V. The Difference of Democratic Time……………………………………………….108

Chapter Three: Keeping Time in Play: Tristan Tzara Spreads the Word (Dada)………….113

I. The Avant-Garde Manifesto as Liturgy……………………………………….…...115

II. Bergson’s Gospel of Temporalization and Creation………………………………124

III. Thou shall not do x and thou must do x: Anarchist attitudes as values……………130

IV. Dada as Event: Against Ætiology………………………………………..………...143

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Chapter Four: Redisciplining the Manifesto: Breton’s Surrealist Vanguard……………...152

I. Political Praxis I. Executing Dada in Paris………………………………………...158

II. Political Praxis II: Breton Lays Down the Law…………………………………...163

III. The Problem of Conjoining Art and Revolution…………………………………..179

IV. ‘Existence is Elsewhere’: Surrealism’s Flight from Social Time…………………192

V. Coda: Surrealism and the Terror…………………………………………………...202

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….206

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INTRODUCTION

Prose Poems’ and Manifestos’ Politics of Time

This study takes two assumptions for granted, one about politics, the other about art:
that “all politics… centrally involve[s] struggles over the experience of time”1 and that
aesthetic endeavor can furnish us different experiences of time, can alter our temporality or
time-sense. To a large degree, the time of modernism/modernity has been evaluated by
literary critics and theorists as something to escape, to somehow get outside of, or to get on
the right side of. As collective signifiers for a variety of artistic movements, the terms
“modernism” and “avant-garde” use temporal categories to organize our perception of
artworks during a particular (if contested) period. The choice of terms is symptomatic of a
historical impasse, the question of whether moderns’ time-sense emphasized the hellish
repetition of the new or imminent revolution. Yet how does one escape time, being stuck in
the modern or constantly worried about being on the right side of it, as with the avant-garde?
Following the work of Peter Osborne, Andrew Benjamin, and David Cunningham,
among others, I try to articulate another option within modernism, a project not of escape or
revolution but of retemporalization, of an art that redisposes of time, altering our relations to
it and within it. As Osborne and Benjamin point out, the “horizon of expectation” possible at
a given time has a political valence, as does the doxical character of time during a period
moment. Benjamin states starkly, with another Benjamin in mind, “This positioning of time
[“the premise that historical time is inherently chronological and reciprocally that chronology

1 Peter Osborne, Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), 200.
is the temporality proper to the unfolding of history”] is in the service of one political
position rather than another.”2 My study grows out of an interest in the ways art might re-
shape our experience of time and specifically in how particular political sensibilities
animated literary modernism’s formal innovations. What work can an artwork perform to
alter a period’s temporality? In the case of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, and through
transatlantic modernism at the end of two world wars, what temporalities did artists confront,
and how, beyond withdrawal and attempted revolution, did they seek to engage and alter
them?
I investigate texts and writers at the heart of even the narrowest of transatlantic
canons to suggest that the politics of time at issue in their texts trouble common
characterizations informing our critical apprehensions of the field(s) of modernism and the
avant-garde. My readings of Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Dada, and Surrealism not only
displace the long-problematic oppositions between new and old, individual genius and the
urban masses, and aesthetic and political production, they demonstrate each pair’s conceptual
or processual interrelation within texts. Stereotypes of modernist temporalities emphasize
extremes, a rush to the new and revolution, or a hermetic retreat into aestheticism, or a futile
longing for a lost past, Eliot’s fragments shored against ruins. Thus, in terms of literary form,
modernist studies frequently coalesce around the avant-garde manifesto, the escapist pastiche
(Pound) or pure formalism of lyric, often analyzing texts in conjunction with political turns
to Marxism or fascism. These stereotypes elide much temporal complexity, the
interpenetration of concerns about form, history, and experience, and give rise alternately to a
murky continuum or overdrawn distinction between the realms of modernism and the avant-
garde.

2 Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), x.
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