The Way Things Go: An Essay on the Matter of Second Modernism
Aaron Jaffe
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0816692033
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Buffed up to a metallic shine; loose fitting, lopsided, or kludgy; getting in the way or getting lost; collapsing in an explosion of dust caught on the warehouse CCTV. Modern things are going their own ways, and this book attempts to follow them. A course of thought about their comings and goings and cascading side effects, The Way Things Go offers a thesis demonstrated via a century-long countdown of stuff. Modernist critical theory and aesthetic method, it argues, are bound up with the inhuman fate of things as novelty becoming waste.
Things are seldom at rest. Far more often they are going their own ways, entering and exiting our zones of attention, interest, and affection. Aaron Jaffe is concerned less with a humanist story of such things—offering anthropomorphizing narratives about recouping the items we use—as he is with the seemingly inscrutable, inhuman capacities of things for coarticulation and coherence. He examines the tension between this inscrutability on the one hand, and the ways things seem ready-made for understanding on the other hand, by means of exposition, thing-and-word-play, conceptual art, essayism, autopoesis, and prop comedy.
Among other novelties and detritus, The Way Things Go delves into books, can openers, roller skates, fat, felt, soap, joy buzzers, hobbyhorses, felt erasers, sleds, magic rabbits, and urinals. But it stands apart from the recent flood of thing-talk, rebuking the romantic tendencies caught up in the pathetic nature of debris defining the conversation. Jaffe demonstrates that literary criticism is the one mode of analysis that can unpack the many things that, at first glance, seem so nonliterary.
third parasitic go-between beside “natural” innocence and “cultural” experience.64 Modernity’s critical machinery is relentless on this score, retrofitting second nature, hearing lake water lapping standing on roadways or pavements gray, and so forth. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is paradigmatic: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.65 The order of operations concerning comparison and reference, the superimposed experiential/perceptual sequence, is the
reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jaffe, Aaron. The way things go : an essay on the matter of
brow of Osiris— this breast of revelation an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light Jaffe.indd 85 04/11/2014 9:43:20 PM 86 T H E W AY T H I N G S G O strikes its significance The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence97 Mina Loy Loy’s poem—published in the celebrated November 1922 issue of The Dial that also launched The Waste
anything else. Indeed, it anticipates the very terms of the legal case brought only a few years later to contest import taxes levied against one of Brancusi’s space-age birds that seemed to resemble either some kind of kitchen utensil (a potato masher, supposedly) or a surgical instrument of mysterious utility (an x-ray tube, perhaps).98 Instead of the familiar ut pictura poesis analogy—poem mimicking painting, as it were99—the poem poses a critical legend. The modernist aesthetic event
Jaffe.indd 133 04/11/2014 9:43:26 PM 134 NOTES 10. Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 3. 11. Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out, 8. 12. In his response to Alain Badiou’s Handbook of Inaesthetics, Rancière points out that modernism (the regime described in the Politics of Aesthetics as the “mode of sensible being proper to artistic products”) arrives specially defined by its necessity for explication from outside—the modernist thing arrives intertwined, in effect, with the