Making Simplicity: Expressive Force and the Roots of Open Form

The poets of Donald Allen’s era-defining postwar anthology The New American Poetry developed practices of open-form composition out of formal principles that Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams had first transposed into literary art from abstract painting at the turn of the century. My dissertation, Making Simplicity: Expressive Force and the Roots of Open Form, argues that this lineage of artists, from Picasso through Robert Duncan, is defined by their use of non-representational techniques of composition to access an elusive but profound mode of perceptual intellection that I call expressive force. The avant-garde’s discovery both of expressive force and of the means to access this mode of experience through cultural production, I claim, resulted largely from artists’ contact with non- European ritual objects. The term ‘expressive force’ addresses a phenomenological mode common to both art and ritual, elucidating modernists’ well-known fascination with ritual objects while shifting analysis away from more reductive “primitivist” narratives. Offering a phenomenology of how perceived objects emerge relative to the body’s habit of giving shape to experience, expressive force defines perceptual qualities’ manner of self-display, their appearance as dynamic events rather than static attributes of substance. By concretizing other cultures’ own claims for the ‘numinous powers’ made publically accessible through ritual practices, force both extends the concept of modernist expressivism well beyond mere art-appreciation and establishes coherent grounds for treating aesthetic composition as a generative agency for new epistemologies, worldviews and ways of life./nMy first chapter distinguishes force from both signification and private affect through a reading of the interplay between diegetic and rhetorical registers in The Ambassadors. I argue for the centrality of force in Henry James’ late work by showing how the Jamesian sentence, in organizing dramatic import using hair’s-breadth tonal distinctions that supplant editorializing commentary, occupies another register irreducible to either rhetoric or diegesis. To grasp this register, I examine the methodological divergences shaping Johan Gottfried Herder’s and G.W.F. Hegel’s respective understandings of Kraft (literally “force”). Like Herder, Hegel regarded the perceptual discernment of force as a mode of knowing based in the senses, though his own rigorous dialectical treatment undermined Herder’s ambitions to base metaphysical claims on this mode, conceptually dissolving Kraft into a complex dance of logical determinations. More recently, Charles Taylor has argued for the ongoing pertinence of Herder’s earlier model of reason as besonnenheit or “taking awareness” to contemporary debates in the fields of psychology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. I argue that the phenomenological discernment of force both Herder and Taylor see as constitutive of human linguistic competence also proves essential to appreciating modernists’ efforts to transform culture. The interaction between lyric and discursive modes William Carlos Williams stages in Spring and All, for example, shows how the conceptual mind’s incommensurability with force necessitated newly participatory educational methods more congruent with force’s “transposition of the faculties.”/nTaking William Rubin’s controversial 1984 MoMA exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art as its point of departure, my second chapter seeks to explain how the fine arts became the repository of expressive force. Whereas Rubin treats ritual objects as artworks, I suggest that a deeper affinity between artwork and ritual object lies in their practical capacity to change how the body structures experience. Diverging from the cognitive approach of Levi Strauss’ structuralist analysis of ritual, I instead claim that the correspondences between the Durkheimian school and Bergson’s and Merleau-Ponty’s theories of motor intentionality provide a model of autotelic action in which ritual functions as a method for rerouting habitual circuits of action and perception. Ethnographic studies of ritual then allow us to track the fine arts’ historical emergence from a longer line of shared practices of cultural production grounded in expressive force. Recurrent ethnographic topoi such as mana and hau, which find a Kantian counterpart in the notion of purposiveness, provide empirical instances of how expressive force’s non-conceptual and proto-objective character can situate its distinctive quality of sensuous involvement as the basis of a new sociality./nMy third chapter begins by establishing how Picasso’s famous encounter with the Fang masks and reliquary figures at the Musee du Trocadero in 1906 transformed his sense of the painterly vocation. The objects’ influence on Picasso came to fruition first in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and later in analytic cubism’s self-confounding coordination of multiple illusionistic devices to lure and cancel visibility simultaneously, releasing visual perceptions from their fixation within schematized images. The crucial modernist concept of “form” thereby comes to refer to the point of integration—experienced precisely as force—at which determinate images give way to an expressive capacity in appearance as such, beyond mimesis. I then turn to Pound’s early experiments during his collaboration with the London Vorticist group, exploring the two technical resources that correlate with Picasso’s deployment illusionistic devices: the verbal ‘image’ and the temporal interval. Linking these formal resources to Spinoza’s principle of “intellectual love,” Pound retained the social critique in T.E. Hulme’s opposition between humanism and the religious attitude while jettisoning the anti-affective cast of Hulme’s dichotomy of vital and geometric art./nMy fourth chapter follows Pound’s efforts after the first war to transpose avant- garde ‘form sense’ into an extra-aesthetic basis for culture. Pound’s renewed work on The Cantos in the 1920s reconceived the work as a template for a new culture, transcending the circumscribed status of literature. Drawing equally from medieval theology, Provençal verse forms and Confucian ethics, Pound sought resources with which to ground cultural process in a synthesis of the experiential intelligence receptive to expressive force, on the one hand, with knowledge proper, on the other. The Cantos extended its incorporation of source materials into wide-ranging and, at times, incompatible areas such as history and economics in an effort to elide the gap between artwork and world. Of course, this effort proved disastrous when Pound’s ideogrammic method, in applying this non-cognitive intelligence to a disparate range of extra-literary phenomena, came to motivate both his involvement with Italian Fascism and his increasingly obsessive, anti-Semitic economic conspiracy theories. Despite his immense errors, I argue that Pound based his notion of paideuma, derived from Leo Frobenius’s work, on an enabling insight about how knowledge is always dependent on the oft-unacknowledged background of a pre-cognitive sensibility or “anschauung.” Only as expressive force could culture thus make knowledge’s background conditions visible./nChapter five traces the Black Mountain poets’ efforts to salvage from the Poundian project the resources for an American counterculture grounded in the experiential intelligence responsive to expressive force. Making open-form poetics the basis of their broader efforts at educational reform, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley initiated the ‘mimeo revolution,’ a proliferation of small press journals, and developed exploratory new arts-based curricula. Olson’s Black Mountain seminar, published as A Special View of History, re-envisioned Creeley’s concept of a “single intelligence” instantiated in poetic form as prefiguring a post-literate historical condition, recasting force as a matter of lived situations rather than objects. The new culture would develop around this production of situations, expanding the educational reform movement of the 50s into the 1960s’ diverse array of experimental forms such as Duncan’s cultural poetics of participation in The H.D. Book, Fluxus ‘happenings’ and McLuhanite media ecology’s claim of a return to acoustic space. This expansion of expressive force from poetics into the counterculture at large freed the paideumic sensibility from the ‘totalitarian’ facet of Pound’s legacy while extending its basic premise of a cultural renaissance achieved through new conditions of intelligibility./n“Making Simplicity” is designed to revise not only our understanding of the modernist artwork, but also of modernists’ encounter with non-European ritual traditions, often reduced to mere “primitivism.” Far from signaling a simple desire to produce exoticized representations of non-European cultures, artists’ interest in the implements of ritual practice originated in the way these objects reframed the act and problem of composition itself. The avant-garde’s challenge to art-as-such thus followed from artists’ realization that even Western categories of “art” had derived historically from the ritual practices that produced the objects found at the Louvre, the British Museum and, later, the Metropolitan Museum. At their most basic level, artistic composition and ritual both change the way action structures experience by yoking together means and ends into a single autotelic act. Theoretical concepts of the Durkheimian school concerning the pragmatics of elementary religious life, such as the profane and the sacred, Mauss’ techniques du corps and Levy-Bruhl’s “participation” therefore offer models of activities that affect the way the world shows up in the first place. These anthropological accounts give historical substance to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty’s fine-grained theories of motor intentionality’s decisive influence in shaping first-person experience. This strange relationship between action and perception, originating historically in ritual contexts, would come to characterize what became known among European groups as ‘aesthetic’ experience. In the end, I suggest, understanding how expressive force gets accessed within both ritual and artistic contexts can renovate our conception of the category of “form” that developed out of non- representational art. As the principle of integration through which force is brought forth within an artwork, “form” links cubism’s short-circuiting of illusionism to Ezra Pound’s Vorticist ideal of ‘primary form’ to Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan’s projectivist principles of composition by field, and beyond.

Advisor: Altieri, Charles
Blanton, Charles Daniel