Hey LL folks, picking up where I left my May 29 post, "The Old, the Contemporary, the New" with some reflections on literary history. As you'll read in this post, I think it’s important that we develop reflexes that enable us to critique our presuppositions about the histories to which our movement lays claim.

First, however, some review in case you didn't see the first post (or don't really feel like reading it): I derived the categories Old, Contemporary, and New from the editors' introductions to the first two issues of LL in which it was basically established that we are making "new" art here. Old art I called all of that which comes before us and affects what we are doing presently; it is what makes the New "inherently relational" to a history of art. The Contemporary I called all of that in the present with which we find fault, and against which we measure the innovations of the New. The New, of course, is what we are making here; according to our theory, it is unbeforeseen in the history of art.

As we reflect on what constitutes the Old, then, a passage from Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory:

"Tradition is not to be abstractly negated but criticized without naiveté according to the current situation: Thus the present constitutes the past. Nothing is to be accepted unexamined just because it is available and was once held valuable; nor is anything to be dismissed because it belongs to the past; time alone provides no criterion."

I like this quote because it eschews the logic of causality in our understanding of Tradition. "Time alone provides no criterion," or, put another way, the temporal situatedness of an artwork tells us little about its value. History is inherited but is also interpreted by its inheritors. This is why Adorno says, "Thus the present constitutes the past." And because the present constitutes the past, and not the other way around, we can critique the legacies of the past according to our political situation in the present. Reverence for the sake of being reverent is uninspired. We do not have to revere the value of past art just because it was held valuable at one time. Instead, we can compare it to the art of the present and evaluate it relationally. To reiterate, we can critique the value of past art if we evaluate its historical content and not merely its historical positioning. We must not reduce the whole of art history to a linear temporal progression from past to present.

Adorno's insight can lead us to a more mature understanding of the old literature before us. We do not have to admire the works of the various canons just because they are canonized. Neither do we have to make grandiose claims about the historical effectuality of certain canons on our current literary production.  This issue came up most poignantly in an email conversation among the LL editors about T.S. Eliot, where the claim was made that “The Wasteland” must be understood in order to understand the condition of contemporary art. While I certainly understand the reasoning behind this assertion, I also think we should be wary of making reductive statements about the effectuality of past artworks. T.S. Eliot is indeed a gargantuan figure, and “The Wasteland” a gargantuan poem, and there are certainly tropes, techniques, and thematic concerns passed down from modernist writers to writers in the present. But just as the modernists cannot be credited for representing the whole spirit of their age (as if there was nothing negated from their historical representation), neither can we claim that we know the exact historical conditions for the emergence of the New. Defining the Old will always be a conjectural effort. The condition of possibility for the emergence of the New is that something in the present will have always exceeded the potentiality of the past.

It may be that the affective dimension of art is the site of its truth. Artworks of the past still stir us now in spite of our ignorance to the contexts in which they were produced. We must therefore seek restitution between an artwork’s aesthetic dimension (what stirs us) and its historical legacy (the good or bad things it might recall for us). For example, how does a feminist rethinking of our literary history compare to the literary history we are imagining here at LL? Do our literary heroes elude a historical critique of masculism? Moreover, are we adequately attuned to the histories of non-Euroamerican literatures? In laying claim to a reified “Western” tradition are we being ethnocentric and exclusive?

Tradition is not passed along from the hands of past artists to current artists like an eternally burning torch. Fingertips are scorched in the passing, and sometimes, the flame is put out altogether. Perhaps Literary Laundry's singular mission is to breathe the smoke of a waning flame.

KMS