Free! Indirect Discourse!

In the hope that there are interested readers and respondents, I'm making available an essay which imagines an encounter between the opposed aesthetic stances of Frank O'Hara and Theodor Adorno; that is, two thinkers whose moving and persuasive accounts of art have been absolutely indispensable to me, and who seem irreconcilable.

I wrote this essay with contemporary poets and contemporary poetry in mind (that is, I wrote it while thinking about you, about the claims of the recent past on you). In rough paraphrase, the essay theorizes forms of resistance and autonomy that do not depend upon negation and oppositionality as Adorno conceives it ( à la Beckett), and that do not require the kind of autonomy from the "culture industry" that may no longer be possible. It's a tendentious essay, purposefully so, and I welcome all forms of (civil) response to it. If there is interest in this piece, I will share other essays--on Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci, on Jeff Wall (just in time for his retrospective), and on Juliana Spahr and exception theory.

Having a Coke with Adorno and O'Hara (pdf)