2/8/16, 10:10 AM The Dialectics of Damage: Art, Form, Formlessness | nonsite.org Page 1 of 13 http://nonsite.org/feature/9500 nonsite.org - Feature - Issue #18 THE DIALECTICS OF THE DIALECTICS OF DAMAGE: ART, FORM, DAMAGE: ART, FORM, FORMLESSNESS FORMLESSNESS A REPLY TO JENNIFER ASHTON A REPLY TO JENNIFER ASHTON THEODORE MARTIN Is damaged art still art? There are two ways to approach the question. The first is ontological; it is a question of how much a work of art can be changed, damaged, or altered (the water- logged painting, the shattered sculpture, the abridged novel) and still be thought of as the same work. The other way to approach it is political: as a question of what it means for art to represent or reflect the damage—the compromise, concession, and instrumentalization—that is an inescapable consequence of its place in a market economy and a capitalist world. To put the question this way is to inquire into the conditions of an artwork that doesn’t pre-exist its damage, one that arrives already in damaged form;
T H E D I A L E C T I C S O FT H E D I A L E C T I C S O FD A M A G E : A R T , F O R M ,D A M A G E : A R T , F O R M ,F O R M L E S S N E S SF O R M L E S S N E S SA R E P L Y T O J E N N I F E R A S H T O NA R E P L Y T O J E N N I F E R A S H T O N
T H E O D O R E M A R T I N
Is damaged art still art? There are two ways to approach thequestion. The first is ontological; it is a question of how much awork of art can be changed, damaged, or altered (the water-logged painting, the shattered sculpture, the abridged novel) andstill be thought of as the same work. The other way to approach itis political: as a question of what it means for art to represent orreflect the damage—the compromise, concession, andinstrumentalization—that is an inescapable consequence of its placein a market economy and a capitalist world. To put the questionthis way is to inquire into the conditions of an artwork that doesn’tpre-exist its damage, one that arrives already in damaged form;
“totaled in advance,” to use Jennifer Ashton’s excellent phrase. Butthe artwork that is totaled in advance raises in turn a furtherquestion, which is whether it is possible to differentiate intentionaldamage from unintentional damage, the preemptive from theinevitable. Does art that takes up the unavoidable demands of themarket as its subject thereby somehow escape those demands? Oris the very point of art under such conditions simply todemonstrate its own impossibility in the face of the limitless reachof capital itself?
Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is either perfectly exemplary of the damagecapitalism does to art or paradoxically immune to that damage. It iseither a novel that overcomes literature’s enmeshment in themarket, or it is a novel that was itself written only because themarket solicited it. The difficulty of deciding which it is is what thisshort essay aims to think through. In “Totaling the Damage:Revolutionary Ambition in Recent American Poetry,” Ashtonargues that “10:04 imagines, in short, that instead of the work ofart being subsumed within the inevitable damages of capital, thedamages of capital are subsumed within it. …[W]e are looking at awork that has been totaled in advance. Its damage—the fact of itbeing totaled—is no longer understood as something that hashappened to it but as something that is—in the form of the novel—subsumed by it.”
In Ashton’s reading, 10:04 is a novel that has intentionally damageditself—exposed its market concessions, revealed its economiccompromises—because it knew that it would eventually end updamaged anyway. In that case, though, what can 10:04 really beshowing us other than the inevitability of damage, the unavoidablehorizon of capitalist instrumentality? While Ashton reads Lerner’stotaled-in-advance novel as one that overcomes its concessions tothe market by making them an intentional part of its form, I wantto ask whether her theory of damaged form has more complex,less salutary consequences for how we understand the fate of art ina time of capitalist crisis. What is there that prevents the work thatis “totaled in advance” from being nothing more than a record ofthe impossibility of avoiding damage, avoiding the market, andavoiding capital? What allows us to think that the role of art in adamaged world can be anything other than to remind us that thereis no longer such a thing as undamaged art?
For Ashton, these questions are resolved by attending to thedifference between being damaged and subsuming the damage; thedifference, if you like, between sabotage and self-sabotage. Theintentional self-consciousness of the latter, Ashton suggests, offersone solution to the structural inevitability of the former. In bothcases, however, the result is exactly the same: a damaged novel. Sohow can we tell what kind of damage we’re looking at? Thisquestion is raised most explicitly in 10:04 with respect to the NewYorker short story that Lerner published in 2012, and that becamethe basis not just for 10:04 but for the “‘strong six-figure’ advance”he was given in order to write it. The story was damaged fromthe start. The New Yorker editors “wanted a major cut…thesection I considered the story’s core.” The narrator of 10:04—alsonamed Ben—initially balks: “I wasn’t going to make a cut whoseprimary motivation was, on some level, the story’s marketability”(56). But then he does exactly that: “The next day my agent helpedme word my mea culpa…. The magazine was gracious anddecided to run the revised story quickly” (57). Of course, we arereading about all of this in a novel, as the experience of writing thestory and being forced to cut it is then folded back into thenarrative of 10:04, which includes the verbatim text of thepublished story. This is the “subsumption” that Ashton is talkingabout: the primal scene of Lerner’s capitulation to “marketability”reappears in 10:04 as a confession of that capitulation that doubles,Ashton suggests, as its negation (“insofar as it’s part of themeaning of the work, part of what the artist intends for it as awhole, it also becomes integral to the form of the work.” Yet there-publication of the compromised story within 10:04 may only befurther evidence of the novel’s compromise. 10:04 makes much ofits refusal to conform to the expectations of popular literary fiction.“‘Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces … ; make surethe protagonists undergoes a dramatic transformation’” (156), thenarrator’s agent tells him, all advice that 10:04 scrupulously ignores—except for one thing. “‘If they like it, fine,’” says his agent. “‘Butyou need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think.’” And soLerner does. What choice does he have, really? If the publishers“rejected it,” he reminds us, “I’d have to give the money back”(155).
What is the difference between the decision to allow the initial cutsto the story and the decision to include the butchered story in the
novel? How can we be expected to differentiate between the novelthat is compromised by the market and the novel that preemptivelymakes market compromise part of its form? To put it simply, theproblem here is that these two different literary forms—whichcarry two very different political connotations—look exactly thesame. The problem can also be rendered visually, like so:
These two pictures—or, two copies of the same picture (aphotograph of the poet Claude Roy taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson)—appear on page 135 of 10:04. The picture on the lefthas the caption: “Our world”; the one on the right: “The world tocome.” The question they pose together is: what’s the difference?The problem of difference posed by the utopian desire for adifferent future, a different world, is first raised in the novel’sepigraph: “The Hassidim tell a story about the world to come thatsays everything there will be just as it is here. …Everything will beas it is now, just a little different.” 10:04 is obsessed with theimperceptible differences that might constitute a redeemed future,an obsession communicated in part through the repetition of thatkey phrase from the epigraph, always just a tiny bit different:“Everything will be as it is now—the room, the baby, the clothes,the minutes—just a little different” (54); “everything is the samebut a little different” (109); “it was the same, only totally different”(133); “What if everything at the end of the book is the same, onlya little different?” (156). Yet the minor differences among these3
articulations of utopian difference distract us from the morecomplicated and possibly unsettling assertion of sameness, anassertion made most forcefully by the duplicate Cartier-Bressonphotographs. The world to come may be a little bit different; but itwill also be exactly the same. This raises what is essentially ahermeneutic dilemma: if the utopian future will look exactly thesame as our damaged capitalist present, how will we recognize thatfuture when we see it? The answer suggested by the twoindistinguishable photographs—just as it suggested by a novel inwhich the editorially damaged story and the formally redeemedstory are, in every way, the same story—is that it’s possible that wewon’t.
But if the problem of both the two photographs and the twostories is that they are aesthetically indistinguishable, the problemwith the narrator’s actual political beliefs, as they are articulated in10:04, is that they are frequently contradictory or irreconcilable.The content of the novel is, indeed, nothing but contradiction:between the political and the personal; between radicalism andliberalism; between the unrealized desire for collectivity and theincurable pathology of self-obsession. The narrator knows, forinstance, that he ought to resist “the conflation of self-care andpolitical radicalism” (46), then immediately conflates them: “Iwanted a child, wanted one badly” (47). Then he berates himselffor the conflation in a way that either overcomes the contradictionor doesn’t overcome it at all:
Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic—yourbathroom—into the commons leads you to redescribe thepossibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. …What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizingas offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch outhorizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionarysubject in the present and co-construct a world in which momentscan be something other than the elements of profit. (47)
Collective politics, transpersonal revolution, a world beyondcapitalist profit: sounds good! And yet something about the jargonhere (“transpersonal,” “co-construct”) seems suspiciouslyoverdone; the passage reads more like a parody of “transpersonalrevolutionary” politics—a phrase that no one who held this politicswould actually use—than an affirmation of such politics. Then, too,there is the neurotic, oscillating rhythm of epiphany that brought usto this point: the rejection of self-care as politics, the unconscious
desire for a child, the realization of the ideological poverty ofwanting a child in such circumstances. Where does it end? Actually,it ends with the child. The final pages of the novel reveal that thenarrator and his friend Alex have successfully conceived. TheUltrasound that confirms Alex’s pregnancy becomes yet anotherexample of a world that is “the same, just a little different” (thenarrator is reminded of his own earlier experience with anUltrasound, used to diagnose the enlargement of his aorta), whilethe collective damage of Hurricane Sandy, bearing down in theselast pages, devolves, through the flourish of metaphor, back intothe “private drama of the family”: “On the flat-screen hung high onthe wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs movingin real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull” (233).
The narrator wants a child but knows he shouldn’t want it; wantspolitical community but ends up with a child; imagines theecological and economic catastrophe of the storm to be a potentialsite for collectivity; then imagines that the real “coming storm” isactually his unborn child. The narrator knows very well whatpolitics he is supposed to have…but still, he can’t quite bringhimself to have them. Collectivity in 10:04 is thus there but notthere, always a little bit—if not totally—different from itself. Everymoment of political epiphany in the novel follows this formula,devolving into contradiction and self-negation. Consider the co-opthat the narrator belongs to, toward which he has, over the courseof three pages, at least three distinct attitudes. First, there’s theneed to demonstrate that “you weren’t foolish enough to believethat belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a nodein a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s populationwas largely made up of gentrifiers” (95). “And yet,” continues thenarrator, “I didn’t think the co-op was morally trivial. I liked havingthe money I spent on food and household goods go to aninstitution that made labor shared and visible and that you couldusually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evilconglomerates” (96). And yet, it is precisely the existence of theco-op—what with all those products that are, thank god, not“openly evil” and all that “produce [that] was largely free ofpoison” (96)—that has produced “a new biopolitical vocabularyfor expressing racial and class anxiety” (97). If the co-op is not“morally trivial,” in other words, that is because it reveals thetriviality of morals. The co-op does not simply make “labor shared
and visible”; it also makes the mere “visibility” of labor insufficientgrounds for the cooperative class politics that the larger economicstructures routed through the co-op work actively to disable.
10:04 is, in this way, a thoroughly contradictory novel: a novelabout contradiction that also makes contradiction the structuringsecret of its narrative form. The damage on display in the novel’smarket concessions (its inclusion of the New Yorker story at theagent’s behest) is reiterated at the level of the narrator’s beliefs,which only ever rise to the level of political compromise. There isthus clearly a parallel between the damaged form of the novel andthe “bad” or damaged “forms of collectivity” (108) that thenarrator must constantly settle for—forms that inevitably collapseinto their opposite: individual self-obsession, reproductive futurity,coupled domesticity. The novel that both is and isn’t damaged (thatsubsumes its own damage) spirals out into the co-op that both isand isn’t “morally trivial”; the cuts to the New Yorker story thatboth are and aren’t unacceptable; the “bad forms of collectivity”that both are and aren’t collective. This series of both/and’s showshow the novel is structured by contradiction: the contradictionbetween the commitments Lerner’s narrator wants to have (to thecollective) and the commitments he does have (to himself);between “art before or after capital” (134) and art during capital;between “the world to come” and the world we’re stuck with.
The literary form of contradiction is even visible in the novel’s ideasabout form. Form is the central term in Ashton’s reading of 10:04:the “totaled work” becomes a model for the “total work”—thetotalizing work—insofar as Lerner, according to Ashton, viewsaesthetic form as total, whole, unified. Such a view is born outmost prominently in the scene that follows the narrator’s first visitto the Institute for Totaled Art, having been emotionally moved by“those objects in the archive that both were and weren’t different”(more contradiction), as he walks home across the ManhattanBridge: “everything my eye alighted on seemed totaled in the bestsense: complete in extent or degree; absolute; unqualified, whole”(134). The wholeness or totality of the work of art—its unqualifiedform—is, for Ashton, what protects it from damage; or, moreaccurately, what transforms the work’s outwardly caused damageinto its own intentional formal choice. And yet the idea that thetotality of the novel’s form can fully contain and preempt its
damage is significantly complicated by 10:04’s own moreambivalent commitment to form; a commitment that looks, asoften as not, like a commitment to formlessness. If the Institute forTotaled Art is the place where Lerner raises the possibility of art asan allegory for totality, it is the narrator’s visit to Marfa, Texas toview the minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd that calls thatpossibility almost totally into question. “I had never had a strongresponse to Judd’s work,” the narrator admits;
I believed in the things he wanted to get rid of—the internalcompositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interestin modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcomethe distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects inreal space—I felt I could get all those things by walking through aCostco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s“specific objects” than any of the other objects I encountered in theworld, objects that were merely real. (178)
Lerner’s narrator “believe[s]” in the “nuances of form,” whileJudd’s sculptures are utterly formless, refusing not only certain“compositional relations” but also the very “distinction between artand life”; a refusal that the narrator rightly notes does not so muchelevate everyday objects into art as make erstwhile artworksindistinguishable from “any…other objects.” What structures thenarrator’s distaste for Judd is his antipathy toward Judd’s aestheticproject of refusing to distinguish artwork from object, art from life.
Yet this may strike the reader of 10:04 as a somewhat surprisingobjection for the narrator to voice—considering that it would seemto be precisely the “distinction between art and life” that 10:04itself is constantly trying to undo. “Part of what I loved aboutpoetry,” says the narrator, whose life is more or less exactly the lifeof Ben Lerner, “was how the distinction between fiction andnonfiction didn’t obtain” (171). This is the answer to the questionof why Lerner the poet has chosen to write a novel at all: becausehe is trying to write a novel as if it were a poem, which meanswriting a novel in which—as in poetry—the difference betweenfiction and nonfiction no longer matters. That’s exactly the type ofnovel 10:04 is: a book that continually reminds us of the fact thatwe are “reading [it] now” (194); a book whose narrator frequentlycomments on the process of writing “my book—not the one I wascontracted to write about fraudulence, but the one I’ve written inits place for you, to you, on the very edge of fiction” (237). 10:04is, in short, the novel being written by the narrator of 10:04, while
the book that readers of 10:04 are reading turns out to be a bookthat is more than anything about our own experience of reading it.
But why would a writer who believes in the “nuances of form”write a book so perilously close to the “edge of fiction”—aprecipice where the framing power of form, its singular capacity toseparate art from life, no longer obtains? The answer, in this caseat least, is: because that writer has changed his mind about DonaldJudd. The chapter set in Marfa climaxes with the narrator’stransformative experience of the sculptures at Chinati: “All thosewindows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, thedifferently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain ablurry image of the landscape within them—all combined tocollapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work hadnever had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York. At onepoint I detected a moving blur on the surface of a box and I turnedto the windows to see two pronghorn antelope rushing across thedesert plain” (179). The “power” of Judd’s work is its capacity to“collapse my sense of inside and outside,” to dissolve the distinctionbetween the artwork, where it is set, and what it reflects (and justso we don’t miss the fact that what art reflects is the living,breathing world, Lerner gives us the antelope). The newlydiscovered power of Judd’s minimalism, coupled with the narrator’sobsessive reading of Walt Whitman’s “bizarre memoir,” SpecimenDays—in which Whitman similarly strives to blur the differencebetween his “empirical person” and a “pronoun in which thereaders of the future could participate” (168)—ultimatelytransforms the narrator’s, and Lerner’s, sense of what kind of book10:04 should be:
I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’rereading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nornonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate mystory not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricatingthe past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures (194).
This is the point at which “the nuances of form” fully disappearfrom 10:04, replaced by the formlessness of “an actual presentalive with multiple futures”: a formlessness that is at once anindeterminate or as-yet-undetermined shape (“multiple futures”)and a refusal of aesthetic form (“an actual present,” “alive”). Thus“flickering between” fiction and nonfiction, 10:04 seeks to escapethe constraints of form—of art’s unmistakable difference from the
world at large—in order to imagine a literary work that hasbecome indistinguishable from the world, inseparable from “actual”life, invested in fortifying a “‘fantasy of coeval readership’” (93).The formlessness of 10:04 resides in this turn from “fabrication”(art) to actuality, a turn away from the enclosed or total form ofthe artwork and toward the world in which the work is being read.Thus, while 10:04 describes itself as “a novel” (a wordemblazoned, for instance, on the book’s title page), it might bemore accurate to think of it as a novel that desperately wants tonot be a novel—not just because it would prefer to be an essay ora poem (both of which are likely true in the case of 10:04), butalso because it would prefer not to be forced to mark off theformal or aesthetic boundary between literature and “actual” life.The novel that is “totaled in advance” appears here as the novelthat has crashed into the world.
Of course, considered in these terms, a truly formless novel is animpossibility; the very phrase “formless novel,” an oxymoron. Theliteralism of literature only goes so far. 10:04 thus remains, despiteitself, a novel; and as a novel, it is impossible to mistake it for “anyof the other objects” one might “encounter in the world.” Literaryformlessness is, at bottom, a contradiction in terms. The narratorhimself knows this, writing (interestingly enough, in verse) ofWhitman’s Specimen Days: “It’s among the greatest poems andfails / because it wants to become real and can / only becomeprose” (194). But what, in that case, is the point of 10:04’s ownimpossible desire to “become real,” its own fruitlessly prosaicpursuit of formlessness?
If literary formlessness is a contradiction, then what one discoversthrough it must be its opposite. The truth at the heart of theimpossibility of literary formlessness is thus not hard to state: it isliterary form. And if form is what the novel ends up affirmingprecisely through the work of attempting to negate it, then we canfinally understand why the novel as a whole is so formallycommitted to contradiction—to oscillation, vacillation, andambivalence. While the political dilemma of 10:04 is how toreconcile two opposing beliefs (are co-ops morally trivial or aren’tthey? is family a model of collectivity or a retreat from it?), thebook’s aesthetic dilemma is how to distinguish two seeminglyidentical forms: the compromised story from the subsumed one,
damaged art from redeemed art. But where contradiction is clearlya problem for the narrator’s compromised politics, it ultimatelyturns out to be a solution to the novel’s damaged aesthetic. That’sbecause the problem of indistinguishability is simply whatcontradiction looks like after it’s been resolved. The narrator’s self-contradictory politics are thus, in the end, also a lesson in thedialectical power of art—in art’s capacity to resolve contradictioneven (or especially) as art itself emerges out of the material, socialcircumstances of contradiction. The two identical photographs(one of our world, one of the world to come); the twoindistinguishable stories (the first a sign of capitulation to themarket, the second an attempt to “subsume” that capitulation): tolearn to tell the difference between them is to learn to see theseemingly imperceptible difference between the resolution ofcontradiction and the mere unawareness of it. Contradiction is aprocess. That process takes time—and that time makes all thedifference. It’s the difference, above all, between “art before…capital” and art “after” it (134). For Lerner, for now, it is thespecial power of aesthetic form—the identical stories, the doubledphotographs—to show us contradiction in the process of makingitself disappear. The more dialectical lesson of 10:04’s damagedform, though, is that the disappearance of contradiction is not thesame as—is, in fact, exactly the opposite of—its never havingexisted at all.
How can market concession be a version of art’s autonomy? Howcan damage be a version of repair? How can formlessness be akind of form? These paradoxes only make sense once we seecontradiction itself as a formal strategy for resolving contradiction.This is what it means for a novel that seems essentially to be onelong concession to market forces to be at the same time a thoughtexperiment in the eventual overthrow of those forces; for a novelthat “wants to become real” also to be a treatise on why novelsnever can. Like the emphatic “no” that the narrator knows was“just a moment in the dialectic of her yes” (57), formlessness is justa moment in 10:04’s dialectic of form: a rejection of form that isitself transformed or sublated back into form—the same kind ofform, but now also a little bit different. And so, too, is inevitabledamage (capitulation to the market) simply a moment in thedialectic of damage’s aesthetic formulation: its subsumption—asAshton puts it—into intended form. To say that formless = form,
that damage = restoration, is not to say something illogical. It is—as Fredric Jameson does when, at the end of The PoliticalUnconscious, he imagines “an imperative to thought in which theideological would be grasped as somehow at one with the Utopian,and the Utopian at one with the ideological”—to say somethingdialectical. The risk of this dialectical strategy for a writer likeLerner is that, in the end, we won’t be able to tell the differencebetween the two: between ideology and utopia, damaged art andredeemed art, a revolutionary novel (Ashton’s 10:04) and areactionary one (my 10:04). The reward, though, is that it teachesus to see indistinguishability itself as the product of a deeperantagonism, the sign of some underlying but unequivocalcontradiction. It reminds us that, under capitalism, there is nothingbesides contradiction. Thus, while Ashton sees this dialecticalprocess as being fully realized by the novel (“10:04 presents itselfas the achievement of this work”), I remain more ambivalent onthe topic. More precisely, I view the novel’s formal ambivalence asa sign of what it knows it can’t achieve; and I see the novel’scommitment to contradiction as an unsuccessful but not necessarilyunhopeful way of figuring the distance between the ambivalence itcan’t escape and the revolutionary politics it sincerely wants butmost definitely does not have. The contradictory form of 10:04—its narcissistic politics, its bad collectivities, its misguidedformlessness, its intentional damage—is, at best, a reflection of thecontradictions that structure life under capitalism; an ambivalentbut not imprecise depiction of what it means to live in a world thatboth is and isn’t on the cusp of change.
NOTESNOTES
Jennifer Ashton, “Totaling the Damage: Revolutionary Ambition in Recent AmericanPoetry,” nonsite.org #18.
Ben Lerner, 10:04 (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014), 4. Subsequent citations appear intext.
For a more sustained reading of this mantra, see Nicholas Brown, “Art after Art afterArt,” nonsite.org #18. For Brown, Lerner’s repeated invocation of the world to come (aworld that will be “the same, just a little different”) ultimately becomes a way to pinpointthe slight but central difference between the novel and its commodity character; that is,between what the novel “is trying to do” on its own aesthetic terms (namely, “assert itsautonomy”) and what the novel has to do to “meet certain market conditions.” Myargument in the present essay, by contrast, is that the difficulty of distinguishing betweenthese two options is in fact a serious and central formal problem for the novel, and that the
reason 10:04 makes indistinguishability such a central problem is that it functions as adialectical counterpoint to both the political contradictions that plague the narrator and theaesthetic contradictions that haunt the novel as a whole.
In Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), SarahBrouillette smartly grapples with an inverted form of this question: what happens if anassertion of art’s autonomy is itself what the market wants? “Even when it is critique, [art’s]anti-instrumental imperatives are exemplary, marketable, consumable, and often articulatedin a way that anticipates their suitability to what they contest. It is of course against this verybackdrop of the marketable antimarket gesture, of recognition of the service art can do towhat it contests, that the ideal of aesthetic autonomy becomes not a dead issue … but rathera vital concern for cultural producers all over again” (208).
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1981), 286-287.
