CHAPTER 9 EXPERIMENTAL WRITING R. M. BERRY When I began The Making of Americans I knew I really did know that a complete description was a possible thing, and certainly a complete description is a possible thing. But as it is a possible thing one can stop continuing to describe this everything. That is where philosophy comes in, it begins when one stops continuing describing everything. — Gertrude Stein, “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans” EXPERIMENTATION AND THE LIMITS OF PHILOSOPHY A philosophical criticism of literature aims to disclose not merely the historically diverse conditions under which literature has occurred, but those conditions we might call necessary or, following Wittgenstein, grammatical. That is, to inquire philosophically into experimental writing would mean to ask what is necessary to anything counting at present as an instance of this concept, to someone's calling 4 given practice or text “experimental.” And this inquiry becomes more compli- cated if, instead of treating the term “experimental” as descriptive only, we take it tocharacterize writing that achieves, or seeks to achieve, the seriousness and value200 GENRES of art. Can criticism still be philosophical if it depends on judgments that can no longer, as with Kant, look to a common human sensibility for their stabilization and ground? Nothing would seem more obvious than that experimental writing today appeals to no broad public. After the Second World War, the proliferation of radically dissimilar, mutually contesting, and often short-lived versions of the avant-garde, along with the absence of any widespread agreement about the artis- tic achievements of these versions, makes a philosophical inquiry into their neces- sities appear quixotic. It is some such worry that ‘Theodor Adorno expresses when he begins his Aes- thetic Theory (1970) with the remark, “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist” (1997: 1). For Adorno, the history of aesthetic experimentation has culminated in an impasse. Art's long struggle for its autonomy, for freedom from external constraints, was originally grounded on “the idea of humanity.” which provided an alternative to tradition and state sponsorship. However, as Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) recounts, the increasing tendency of modern society to conflate reason, understood as essential to humanity, with mechanistic rationality undermined this alternative. It then became “the idea of humanity” from which artistic experimentation must free itself. This made the task of philo- sophical aesthetics much more complicated. “Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art. That was possible so long as art itself was oriented to encompassing norms that were not questioned in individual works” (Adorno 1997: 334). In other words, artistic experimentation posed no serious challenge to philosophical reflec- tion as long as it limited itself to “test[ing] unknown or unsanctioned technical procedures” (23). Criticism could still look to established norms in assessing the results: “Fundamental to this idea of experimentation was the latently tradition- alistic belief that it would automatically become clear whether the results were a match for what had already been established and could thus legitimate them- selves.” However, with modernism, artistic experimentation meant “something qualitatively different: that the artistic subject employs methods whose objective results cannot be foreseen” (1997: 24). That is, not just the techniques but the aims themselves became experimental. It then ceased to be clear whether anyone— artists, critics, philosophers, museum curators, publishers, the public—was in 4 position to determine success or failure. Given such an anarchic predicament, how can we speak of necessity at all? For Adorno, there is a deep bond between the topic of artistic experimentation, espe- cially in literature, and the possibility of doing philosophy. If, as Adorno claims, the | modern tendency toward “aesthetic nominalism”—the belief that aesthetic con- cepts are extraneous and only individual art works are real—is not an accidental result of historical misunderstandings but “originates in a universal of art” (197° 201), then experimental writing would seem to mark conceptualization’s limit. T try to conceive its necessities, at least in any systematic way, might well mean repress it, making the crisis of art a crisis for thinking, too. Adorno’s famous WY.EXPERIMENTAL WRITING 201 cout of this impasse was “negative dialectics,” a theoretical practice that replaces the logical relations of identity and subsumption with a dynamic reciprocity of fancepts and their instances. For Adorno, the recognition “that objects do not go jnto their concepts without leaving a remainder” (2000a: 57), instead of invalidat- ing philosophical reflection, reveals its ongoing necessity. Only in art’s resistance to every preconception—that is, only in uncompromisingly radical experimenta- tion—is art’s universal structure disclosed. Aesthetic autonomy, art’s demand for freedom from external constraint, simply represents the individual work’s refusal to disappear into a prior understanding ofit. Instead of a limit case of philosophical reflection, artistic experimentation thus became Adorno’s paradigm: “The dialecti- cal postulate that the particular is the universal has its model in art” (1997: 202).