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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details Modernist Objects / Objects under Modernity: a Philosophical Reading of Discrete Series Edwin Henry Frederick Hercock for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Sussex September 2014 / May 2015 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be submitted in whole or in part to another University for the award of any other degree. 28.05.2015 Summary This thesis is the first book-length treatment of the poems in George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934), providing a counterbalance to critical readings of Oppen’s work which have to date focused on work published after his return to poetry (i.e. from 1962 onwards). It is a philosophical presentation of the work which argues that the poems are themselves philosophical presentations of objects, and by those objects and that presentation, of the historical circumstances of those objects and the poems themselves. Its method is Adornian in three senses: first, it holds that literature is not only subject-matter for a (sub)subset of philosophy but a potential mode of participation within it; second, the philosophical writing with which the thesis puts the poems into dialogue is not a single authorship nor strictly aesthetic, but a broad range of writings by Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche (with a special emphasis on Hegel); and third, continual recourse is made to Adorno’s own writings on art and objecthood. After a brief account of the pre-history of Objectivism, of Oppen’s connection with Ezra Pound, and the circumstances of the work’s production and appearance, the poems are analysed in depth alongside more thoroughly institutionally validated works by, among others, Pound and T.S. Eliot. The main focus of these readings is on the physical objects represented: their nature, type, consistency, and the fact and manner of their presentation. These objects are characterised by their resolute materiality – their distinctive hardness and their uniform impenetrable surfaces. These properties are analysed from literary-historical, historical and philosophical perspectives, i.e. in the contexts of modernist hardness and its precursors; industrial production and the individual; and the causes and consequences, in thought, of the experience of bare materiality that the poems present. Finally it considers how the poems, as well as registering a particular mode of object experience, themselves seek to produce it. I would like to acknowledge the support of the following institutions and individuals: the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council; Professor Keston Sutherland, Dr J.D. Rhodes and Dr Daniel Kane, all at the School of English, University of Sussex; my UCU colleagues at the University of Sussex and across the country; the staff and fellows of the Kluge Center, Library of Congress; the organisers and attendees of the Cantos Reading Group at the Institute of English Studies, University of London; the staff of Senate House Library, University of London; Dr Ian Patterson and Dr Drew Milne; Professor Gregg Lambert and Professor Herman Rapaport; Professor Charles Altieri and my examiners Dr Michael Jonik and Professor Peter Middleton. for Stuart Hercock and Tora Olsson Contents Introduction 0.1 Methodology p. 1 0.2 Objects in Discrete Series p. 10 Chapter 1: The preface & preface poem 1.1 The Collection, its Preface, and the Wider Poundian Context p. 16 1.2 The Opening Poem: ‘what really was going on’ p. 28 1.3 Critique, Self-critique, Contact with the World p. 48 (Bourgeois Art and Bourgeois Thought) 1.4 Objects and the Opening Poem’s True Prefatory Function p. 76 Chapter 2: Industrial Objects and Industrial Perception 2.1 Uniform Impenetrable Surfaces p. 83 (a Prehistory of Modernist Hardness) 2.2 The Local History of Hardness p. 90 2.3 Externalisation and Relief: Objects Do Not Think p. 94 2.4 ‘Closed car’ (an overstatement) p. 111 2.5 The Local History of ‘Closed car’ p. 131 2.6 Craft vs. Industry p. 140 Chapter 3: The Object in Thought and Words 3.1 Silence and Non-Feeling: p. 150 The Semi-Appropriateness of Hegel’s Aesthetics 3.2 Facticity? p. 164 3.3 Sense Certainty: Hegel on ‘Thisness’ p. 177 3.4 Rocks, Sand, and Unrimmed Holes p. 185 Bibliography p. 199 Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and is not tied down for its realization to external sensuous materials; instead it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings. Yet, precisely at this highest stage, art now transcends itself, in that it forsakes the element of a reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought. (Hegel, Aesthetics) I noticed I still lacked something essential, something that in my long metaphysical studies I, as well as others, had failed to consider and which in fact constitutes the key to the whole secret of metaphysics, hitherto still hidden from itself. I asked myself this question: What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call “representation” to the object? (Kant, Correspondence) Introduction to Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art [delivered 1823-26, collected in German 1842] trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), Vol 1, p. 89 Letter to Marcus Herz, Feb. 21 1772. Correspondence ed., trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 133 1 Introduction 0.1 Methodology This thesis is a philosophical presentation of a series of poems: George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1934).1 It argues that those poems are themselves philosophical presentations of objects, and by those objects and that presentation, of the historical circumstances of those objects and the poems themselves. Both the collection – in its self-knowledge – and the thesis – in its reconstruction of that self-knowledge – are written in the wake of Hegel’s diagnosis, a century beforehand, of the capacity of artworks to think about themselves, which he gives in almost the same breath as he announces the end (in certain respects) of the possibility of art: In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.2 1A note on dating: Based on private communication with the author and others Rachel Blau DuPlessis concludes that a complete manuscript was in circulation as early as 1930. Selected Letters of George Oppen ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990) [hereafter Selected Letters], p. 371 n.6. The belatedness of the work’s publication would seem to be confirmed by the fact that in the Fulcrum edition (London: Fulcrum, 1972) the collection is dated 1929-1933 (p. 7), whereas the other collections are given their date of first publication rather than composition. In the New Directions Collected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1975) the contents page reads ‘Discrete Series (1932-34)’. In the last poem of his last book Oppen refers back to Discrete Series: ‘writing / / thru the night (a young man, / Brooklyn, 1929) I named the book // series empirical / series all force.’ ‘Til Other Voices Wake Us’ in New Collected Poems ed. Michael Davidson (London: Carcanet, 2003) [ hereafter: NCP], p. 286. 2 Hegel, Aesthetics Vol I, p. 11. The ‘respects’ Hegel refers to here are a) the loss of religious satisfaction in art and b) that ‘the development of reflection in our life today has made it a need of ours, in relation to both our will and judgement, to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular by them with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator.’ p. 10. 2 It is not that art’s ‘invitation’ to think about ‘what art is’ is punctual – it is not an automatic instruction to the viewer/reader/hearer to think about that regardless of the work’s particularity – but rather that art invites such consideration as a participant in a conversation: the work invites us to think about what art is or might be with respect to this work, its circumstances of production and the circumstances in which it is received; that is, that the works under consideration do some of that thinking themselves. I make frequent recourse throughout to another text written in the wake of Hegel’s identification of art’s ‘invitation to philosophical consideration’, and one which is also the richest source of thinking on art and objecthood: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

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