Matches, in Our Time

The first of two major new works collected in Carla Harryman’s new book of “literary nonfiction,” Adorno’s Noise, begins by eliding two otherwise remote passages from Minima Moralia: “If normality is death then regard for the object rather than communication is suspect” (Harryman 21). Equally spirited by Adorno’s negative dialectics–a Hegelian counter-pointillism meant to ameliorate the devaluation of subjective experience in Marxist and Freudian categories–and the aphoristic, indeed noisily lyric, style of Adorno’s prose, Harryman entertains the most dissolute promise of the opposite in “Regard for the Object Rather Than Communication Is Suspect”:
 

I wonder if it would be the case that if normality were not death, regard for the object would be purely an entailment of belief and communication would in turn become the object of thought. This may seem a bit mad as well as inappropriate content for a meaty essay. Bear with me for a little while. You and I will go on an excursion together and discover something along the way if we’re lucky. If we are not lucky, neither you nor I will be worse off than when we started. I can’t guarantee this but it is something I believe with enough confidence to proceed to the next sentence. The next sentence is not a death sentence.
 

(Adorno’s Noise 21)

The kind of improvisatory churning of antitheses that Adorno’s most radical utopian dictates–in particular his initially liberatory extension of Fourier’s critique of the commodification of gender norms–and the syllogistic force of dialectical thought are pitched as an aesthetic problem unresolved and yet still legible in the language of critical theory, the same problem that famously worried the question of writing poetry “after Auschwitz.” Modernity’s most rank expressions of positivist enlightenment genius pose the historical problem of “normality” in the wake of “defeated Germany,” to which, in Adorno’s assessment, only “a thoroughly unsatisfactory, contradictory answer, one that makes a mockery of both principle and practice” is available; is it not then barbarism to entertain the thought that “the fault lies in the question and not only in me” (56)?

 
With her alternative formulation, Harryman provides amply the “rigor and purity” of which Adorno speaks in his section on “Morality and style”:
 

A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result . . . . people know what they want because they know what other people want. Regard for the object, rather than for communication, is suspect in any expression: anything specific, not taken from pre-existent patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion. . . . Few things contribute so much to the demoralization of intellectuals. Those who would escape it must recognize the advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.
 

(Adorno 101)

Quite literally appropriating the question of what remains an appropriate response to modernity’s twilight produces an “essay” form that matches, in our time, the beleaguered “rigor” Adorno’s friend Thomas Mann spoke of when he wrote, “in order to read you, one should not be tired” (qtd in Jäger 128). It’s not enough to say that Adorno’s Noise is citational, and not exactly accurate to say Harryman writes like Adorno. While these observations may be “true,” it’s only because they are tautological, logical coincidences that define normative forms of exposition and “rigor.” Harryman’s writing is full of wry humor and critical attentiveness, by turns lapidary and bombastic, sometimes maddeningly self-conscious, but in a thoroughly motivated, astonishingly informed manner. When Harryman cites Adorno, it is transformative. She renders him elliptical. Adorno himself worried about this nascent quality which, in postmodern American poetics, becomes a virtue; the apology that forms a substantial amount of his dedicatory preface to Minima Moralia posits the aphoristic texture of what follows as a revision of Hegel’s proto-Fascistic denial of the “for-itself,” the defining trait of the aphorism’s pithy concision. Harryman’s book begins with a tiny treatise on the “cell of meaning,” the “in-itself” of language: “A might be an abbreviation for something inside itself, inside A,” which, “[o]nce exposed, [grows] out of proportion to the language that [has] ushered it into the brain of someone else and now it is mushrooming” (Adorno’s Noise 5).

 
How this disproportion takes shape makes Adorno’s Noise an important object lesson in literary form. That the poet’s primary skill or duty should be the imitation of life–of human action, perception, and emotion emulsified and expressed–is a notion that has only recently been challenged with sufficient seriousness. The same notion justified the expulsion of the poets from the good society in Book X of the Republic. Even in light of the Aristotelian correctives of catharsis and irony in the Poetics, the Platonic theory of imitation concerns dramatic representation, a context fully pertinent to Harryman’s oeuvre (she co-founded the San Francisco Poets Theater in 1979, an important venue for the development of West Coast language writing). Harryman has long written within and about the contamination of mimesis by capitalist ideology; it is both the leitmotif and the textual condition of her estimable body of writings, which duly violates the values of such market categories as genre, topic, and plot. Ostensibly a book of essays, Adorno’s Noise is distinctly imitative, not so much a sustained reflection of (or on) Adorno, but rather an example of poetic imitation that honors the distinction between influence and appropriation. This sort of imitation counts as something more than homage and just short of collaboration. Among signal works such as Robert Duncan’s Writing Writing: Stein Imitations and Benjamin Friedlander’s Simulcast, Adorno’s Noise points to a new imitative mode. In the latter, this point is rather obvious, because it is both discussed and itself imitated (being self-referential in the sense that the best essays are expository and demonstrative). Harryman’s book ponders how we acknowledge an author or text as a resource that is alive to us–as a catalytic agent and not an inert inheritance. The poetics of imitation arises with the fact that what sets such writing in motion also inhabits it; the writer suffers and celebrates an observer’s paradox, is “tinged with its prior potent identity” (Harryman, Adorno’s Noise 22).
 
At least since the Romantics’ recycling of etiological narratives and the high modernist “poem including history,” there have been two primary reactions to the ethical failure of mimetic impulses: taking refuge in a prosthetic voice, and denying the veracity of such idealized adequation. In either case, imitation has been out of favor in all but a few creative writing classrooms. Amazingly, Harryman shows no trace of such deadlock, borrowing freely and creating beyond the bland aspiration to originality. For her, and especially for this book, imitation might signify more than the fact of intertextuality. It seems to be a historical principle. Of course, history is a textual affair, a matter of record (the book’s epigraph is from Barrett Watten’s Bad History: “Fill the measurable time with indeterminate noise to show we are not happy about being figured in advance”). But where Schoenberg signified to Adorno the denouement of history’s grand march, Harryman reads Sun Ra. The “noise” she attributes to Adorno implies the contingencies of “being figured” between contemporary events and the mythos that would explain them. “Adorno was attracted to, in fact relied upon, mimesis,” Harryman writes in the last piece collected here; “Did I desire him even after he forgave me for faking the orgasm?” His hypothetical forgiveness would have stemmed, one gathers, from the “eleg[iac]” character of the orgasm, “an escape hatch in the negative dialectic” (Adorno’s Noise 179-180). Here, Harryman translates the disjunctive but wholly appropriate utterances of ecstasy homophonically–“low light lit little tick flea migrant sip pissy wit twill twill low will piano”–as if language itself were coming (Adorno’s Noise 178). At the same time she injects herself into the student protests of 1969 that radically upended Adorno’s status as a guru of leftist critique, even and especially his efforts to adjoin sexual liberation and the struggle to stop the oppression of women in the capitalist matrix:
 

If I had been among the students in Frankfurt, would I have opened up my leather jacket and showed him my breasts in a parodic manner, in solidarity with a leaflet that proclaimed “Adorno as an institution is dead?”
 
Direct socialization is structurally determined by the patriarchal or Oedipal family, so the gender politics of parody is hopeless if you want meaningful social change. In this story however the people live and Adorno dies. Yet I am convinced that I would have refused to think of Adorno or any individual as an institution and instead would have removed myself from the scene . . . I would have underscored my subject position as a mirror of the fragile component of the social sexual contract.
 

(Adorno’s Noise 179)

In this passage and in an earlier piece in the collection, “Just Noise,” we see a response to Adorno, who wrote in Minima Moralia, “Imagination is inflamed by women who lack, precisely, imagination . . . Their lives are construed as illustrations” (169). Doing history might entail a dizzying sonic representation of “Orgasms” under a heading culled, again from Minima Moralia, which, in context, reads, “Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic. For its idea, sexual union, is the opposite of slackness, a blessed straining, just as that of all subjected labor is cursed” (Adorno 217). If Adorno as a hypothetical object of imitation comprises a character in her story, it’s difficult not to see the subject of imitation to be Harryman herself, the same character of her notorious send-up of the solipsistic seductions of artistic and entrepreneurial techne, “In the Mode of.” Masturbating in front of the modernist nude or making an exhibition of oneself, Harryman’s animation of the ostensible history of modernism’s caddy wake is exhilarating to read, even if it’s now somewhat familiar.

 
Adorno’s Noise sustains the humorous and nuanced gender-play of Harryman’s earlier work, though to sometimes disquieting extremes. For example, “Beware of Seeking out the Mighty” plays the syntactic template, “in writing a poem she is not writing a novel in writing a novel she is not writing an essay” and so on, far past the initial wit of the genitive negation (89); “Just Noise” is reprised with a tribute to Jackson Mac Low and linked to a quasi-concrete poem, “Inverse / Mirror,” and together they perhaps sacrifice too much in the recombinatory procedure, especially when what’s in question is the corruption of “the imagination” in the gendering of class politics (57-61). The cacophonous tone achieved in “Just Noise” is pursued elsewhere in the book with deft responsibility.
 
What’s more, the “noise” subverts the hierarchical distinction between form and genre–to the point of folding her own texts into the structure, including a passage from her unpublished play Performing Objects–and the table of contents alone is so intricate as to make terms like “chapter,” “section,” and “essay” redundant. One wants to fall back on that most inclusive category: poetry. The once reputed antithesis of noise, poetry recommends the figure of musicality that defines the ostensive lyricism of all we tend to hold under that rubric. Without rehearsing Adorno’s formidable theoretical investment in atonality, worrying his prudishness where jazz is concerned, nor collapsing into a similitude, there is something uncanny in that the lyricism of Adorno’s Noise serves as the basic thrust of many of the book’s arguments. Rob Halpern’s back-cover blurb claims that the book “reinvents ‘the essay as form.'” His point is not as tendentious as your typical blurb, as it illuminates the way the structural and generic contrivances of this book collude atonally. Writing of a very different kind of book by a similar, younger poet–Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News, a book whose reinvention of lyric’s means and materials he claims points “toward a radically different kind of negation,” perhaps toward a revision of Adorno’s dialectical schema, the tenets of which render lyric a form of barbarism–Halpern recuperates the notion that the lyric’s “fundamental is address to a world from a place within the world.” Barbaric or not, this is necessary “because neither of these [worlds] can be known or given in advance” (50). Hence the brand of and motivation for lyricism in Harryman’s book–one must qualify the observation that it is not a collection of lyric poems by sounding off the infinitely ostensible status of the essay, a word which means “try” and is more about drives and motives than about accomplishment and structure.
 
The “worlds” of Harryman and Adorno are mutually constitutive, so to address one from the other is to denude them with the very force of the language, to construct and deconstruct them –and this is the problem that gives the book thematic consistency. A truly breathtaking example is the long chapter, “It Lives in the Mimetic,” which takes up the work of Robert Smithson, Kenzaburo Oe, and William Blake. Smithson’s notion of “waning space” is first used to describe the structural peculiarities of Oe’s novel Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! What emerges from the aphoristic mini-essays that comprise it is an imitative cultivation of the claim Harryman made of her own work in one of her first books, Animal Instincts: “I prefer to distribute narrative rather than deny it” (107). Eventually, what “lives in the mimetic,” the subject and its stories, lives not in a space dwindling under the weight of its denial, but in a “transitional space,” and marks the turning point of the chapter:
 

… even if writing is reading, to parrot another writer and word copiest, Kathy Acker. But the reader who writes may be a reader of things other than text. She locates her resources, which may also include a window and soft air. She abandons herself to a project and her projections. She conflates the potential legibility of a person with the potential legibility of written description.
 
I enter you here–as you and a fiction.
 

(Harryman, Adorno’s Noise 153)

This sort of conflation is introduced in the aforementioned “regard for the object,” marking the etiological opportunities and existential vulnerabilities that the poetic, the lyric, mimetic, and dramatic construct, in the right hands, derive. Harryman’s “resources” come by way of echolocation, or imitation reconceived as a fictional cosmos. “[S]trange planets beyond those orbiting our own are now available to ascription.” And since “the world is bigger than it was before,” those mild honorifics we ascribe to the worlds available as such, words, enter our purview (Adorno’s Noise 21).

 
The prose of “Regard for the Object” has such agility that the momentum eases the many discursive flights, such that an otherwise discontinuous set of asides exudes something somber, ethically fraught, and perfectly germane to the violence of globalization’s latest implosions. Here is where Harryman parts ways with Adorno; in Harryman’s hands, the negative dialectic reads as a series of virtual connections rather than the staid resolve its various articulations exude. The objects in question morph from starlight to a hand basket to a corpse, each being “reassigned by the action” of the writing, and also, of course, by the intimations imitated from a meshwork of sources, including the mind of the reader–one’s own regard. Just as Pluto’s identity as a planet was “eradicated by edicts,” so the “wishes” that transpire between the subject, subjects, and objects “glue up that which we are not” in as much as their communicative “resona[nce]” hides, in fact reverses, our physical contiguity beneath their discretions (Adorno’s Noise 22, 24-5). With allusions to Katrina and Iraq, Harryman discloses the finally cosmological ambition of the neoliberal idealist: “Extremists believe my heartbeat exists because the doctor has put her ear to the heart and your freedom exists because I have been profiled” (Adorno’s Noise 25). And in “Lesson,” a title even more cloying than any in Adorno’s book, neoconservative ambition is lampooned in a global battle royal that reads, though tongue in cheek, like The Rape of Lucretia in a cover version by Wolf Eyes. The noise is all that survives that or any analogy, for the mimes can be taken literally: “I give up you are going to be on top forever” in “the protective armor we now both share” (Adorno’s Noise 47-8).