Modernity fragments and autonomizes the senses, each gaining new intensity

Evidence

Yet the other features of Rilke’s seductive strategy are finally just as suspicious as this one; not least the final, or fourth, moment, in which the preceding three steps are crystallized into poetic language as such; this is the emergence of a single sensory channel: euphony, which makes “language sing like a violin” (AR38), a well-nigh “phonocentric Eargod on which Rilke, from the start, has wagered the outcome of his entire poetic success” (AR55): “Possibilities of representation and of expression are eliminated in an askesis which tolerates no other referent than the formal attributes of the vehicle. Since sound is the only property of language that is truly immanent to it and that bears no relation to anything that would be situated outside language itself, it will remain as the only available resource” (AR32). It is odd to find this extraordinary musicality, familiar to every addicted reader of Rilke, described as an askesis. The word is designed to mediate between this formal peculiarity and Rilke’s religious thematics, which are in effect here both justified and acted out by the renunciation of all the other senses that Rilke is sometimes pleased to think of as sainthood. … Meanwhile the characterization also cuts deeply across the historical phenomenon of the reification and separation of the senses in modern times, and the subsequent autonomization of each, which thereby, as also, in modern painting gains an extraordinary new intensity. The new bodily sensorium has mostly been celebrated by readers (and writers) who have gained some historical sense of its novelty: phenomenology, and the more contemporary ideologies of desire, take their point of departure in this fragmentation that has happened to the body in modern times. DeMan’s peculiar perspective is therefore defamiliarizing in a way that can only be welcomed: coldly suspending the tempting richness of the new sense (euphony), he insists on its price and on everything that must be renounced in order for the sounds of language to become autonomous. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 555

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in style as periodizable — the autonomization of a single sense (euphony) parallels the autonomization of aesthetic form as economic appearance. — connects to: Modernity turned shock into the norm of lived experience — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 861; Under modern production, lived experience becomes representation and spectacle — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12