Taboo: The Real Modernist Aesthetic Made Real

This study traces an important part of a major theoretical development (if not the theoretical development) in contemporary Critical Theory by offering a brief discussion of those theorists and one exemplary poet who have inaugurated our ongoing curiosity about modernist allegory. Critics such as Robert Hullot-Kentor, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jerome McGann have already demonstrated at length the impact of modernist concepts of allegory on our reception of contemporary Theory and Poetics. My purpose here is not to repeat their arguments about the meaning of Walter Benjamin and T.W. Adorno's definitions of allegory, nor to make the case that Ezra Pound knowingly developed his own poetic according to their program. Rather, I wish to offer a discussion and presentation of the theory of allegory which demonstrates its origins in the profound interest in natural history that held modernism in its nascent grip. Meanwhile, even here, the relationship between allegory and modernism cannot be exhausted through discovering its origins in this formative philosophical climate. This is due to the fact that natural history was an absorptive and expansive term that allowed for refinement without reduction as it came to signal entire processes of cultural, linguistic, and aesthetic practice. At their centre, though, are a set of concerns that obsessively interested Benjamin, Pound and Adorno – the relationships that obtain between names, titles, fate, and taboo. Allegory is Benjamin's name for the sum of the processes that produce natural history. When fate allegorically critiques titles it demonstrates that history is not a linear triumphal process, but the realization that nature, too, expresses itself as history. Likewise, when names allegorically critique taboo, they demonstrate that history is constructed by nature. Adorno retains these concerns and offers a different understanding of natural history, leaving allegory's dialectical process intact, but pointed towards a new construal of the relationships that obtain between its terms. Allegory, hence, became the open-ended theory through which modernist art works are still being construed. This is to say that Benjamin, Adorno, and Pound are symptoms of those pervasive anxieties that were produced from the loss of what once were teleological understandings about the demarcation between nature and history. Hidden here is the loss of transcendental concepts that once made thinking about nature and history moot, secure in their teleological separation. Transcendental explanations had the capacity, through taboo, allegory, and language, to make their distinction explicable and manifest. Modernity asks us to lose that which teleological explanations have always been willing to lose, as if it were obviousness itself, the guaranteed distinction between nature and history.