Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Adorno
.. from ‘Negatively Capable Dialectics: Keats, Vendler, Adorno, and the Theory of the Avant-Garde‘ by Robert Kaufman (2001, Published By: The University of Chicago Press), that is very important to me.
‘…Insofar as the Keats-Shelley Question has been seen on the Left as a pivotal chapter in the aesthetics-and-politics story, it's the Left itself that's been split over whether the twins should be politically separated… …On the other hand is a whole line of Left criticism that finds Keats guilty, in his impulse toward the formal, of desiring to fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget the sociopolitical; he is found guilty too of seducing later poetic constituencies into chasing the formalist siren. The claim at bar (coterminous with what is today known as the "critique of aesthetic ideology")...’
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‘..Citing Adorno's "Valery Proust Museum" (from Prisms) and observing that Adorno's analysis of museum culture deeply informs her discussion, Levinson (Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style, 1988) shows how Keats all but stage whispers his intent to embark on culture-acquisitive museum field trips, and how the poems in turn project a kind of "museum space." For Levinson, Keats's great accomplishment is to have fashioned a second-order alienation whose "discourse [of] self-possession function of its profound structural dispossession," whose "disturbing self-reflexiveness ... brings out the difference between the subject and its internalized models, not their identity," so that "to 'overhear' Keats's poetry is to hear nothing but intonation, to feel nothing but style and its meaningfulness."
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’This whole topic gives a little of hope to a kind of poetry that reveals how alienated the self really is from the ideals or models it tries to internalize. So instead of Keat’s poetry making us feel like "Ah, this is who Keats is," the reader feels something more haunting: intonation (voice, tone), but it doesn’t resolve into a simple “message” or “identity.” It’s like overhearing a voice that’s trying to become something, a poet, a gentleman, a worthy person who is never quite at home in that role.’
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Keats sounds elegant, in control, self-possessed, but that voice is only possible because there’s a deep dispossession (loss, displacement, alienation) underneath it. In Levinson’s view Keats allows us, the readers, to feel what it means to reach for something that can never be fully grasped. This is connected to ideas in Freudian psychoanalysis (unconscious desire, self-fragmentation), or even Lacanian approach. Through Keats, we can experience the contradiction between: what we want to be, what society wants us to be, and what we actually are.
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' The palpability, the concretized sensuousness, and objectification of Keats's poetry comprehend the rendering of life's fullness into a fully realized art. Thick as life itself, this art exists to enrich, energize, and thereby transform social life. Curb your magnanimity; be more of an artist, rein in your voice, and load every rift with ore. Do this, Keats advises Shelley, and the art will do its work in by becoming part of-the world... ....Keats's ostensible setting of the art object .. toward loss of autonomous aura through extreme objectification, actually anticipates Adorno's formulation of an aesthetic'.
