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THE GENIUS CONCEPT

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of geniusBarbara Will

HEGEL IN HIS AESTHETICS:

Genius is the general ability for the true production of a work of art, as well as the energy to elaborate and complete it. But, even so, this capacity and energy exists only as subjective, since spiritual production is possible only for a self-conscious subject who makes

such creation his aim.

SCHOPENHAUER

must exist in all men in a smaller and different degree; for if not, they would be just as incapable of enjoying works of art as of

producing them; they would have no susceptibility for the beautiful or the sublime; indeed, these words could have no meaning for them.

KANT

genius is both mechanistic and inexplicably free; it both givesthe rule to art and serves as the exemplary originality of the natural

endowments of an individual in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.

NOVALIS

I feel it within me, struggling A genius, feathers smouldering (ardiendo); As my sense and heart rise toward the Aether The body barely fetters (encadenar) me down.

Novalis"s genius is something more akin to a soul, a vital capacity that exists potentiallyin all humankind and that signifies the subject"s aspiration toward transcendence of thematerial, mechanical, or bodily world. Precisely in transcending rules and transgressinglimitations and boundaries, genius comes to stand in for the essential freedom of theindividual subject, or of the subject as Individual.

In a crucial sense, European Romanticism is unthinkable without the concept of genius;as Novalis suggests, the Romantic impulse -Making absolute-making universal- must betaken up by those who have the capacity to renew the world. The same could be said ofthe period of early twentieth-century modernism, which inherits many of Romanticism"sassumptions about genius but invests this term with new desires, anxieties and politics.What is immediately apparent in revisiting the notion of genius a century after theRomantics is the degree to which this notion continues to signify freedom, but a freedomfrom the practical context of everyday life, as from social engagement altogether. TheRomantics"insistence upon the capacity of genius or renew culture or society is given

over in high modernism to an emphasis upon the necessary detachment of the artist andthe art work from a culture and society marked by humdrum routine and the banalizedmarch of progress. In part, this developmetn has to do with a change in the perception ofgenius throughout the course of the nineteenth century, from a universal capacity to an

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embodied type, visibly and measurably distinguishable from non-geniuses through theevidence of discrete physical and mental characteristics: high foreheads, hormonalirregularities, enormous powers of concentration, a tendency to depression. thisconceptualization of the genius as a rare and unique personality would resonate deeplywith the aesthetic worldview of high modernism, with its emphasis on abstraction ratherthan mimesis, distantiation rather than engagement, on the liberation of Art and artist alike

from the formal and representational imperatives of a previous aesthetic tradition. Highmodernist discourses of creativity, originality, and authorial autonomy are thus mutuallyinscribed in ideologies of formal experimentation and aesthetic difficulty. As Peter Bgerhas noted in Theory of the Avant-Garde, the myth of the high modernist genius working insplendid though isolated freedom is inseparable from the formalist idea of modern art asautonomous, hermetic, and self-referential. Perhaps most importantly, the notion ofgenius for high modernism served as a key term in artiuclating an oppositional stancetoward one of the major developments of social and economic modernization from themid-nineteenth century on: the emergence of an enormous, literate mass that seemed tothreaten the very conditions of possibility of modern art. Modernism, Andreas Huyssen writes, constituted itself through a consciousstrategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consumingand engulfing mass culture. For an early twentieth-century writer like Ezra Pound, themasses signified conformity, contingency, banalization: everything to which the trulycreative artist was opposed. In opposition to the eminently aristocratic genius, themasses were neither unique, individual subjects nor did they show any tendencies towardtranscendence: Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits, hewrote in 1914, adding with proto-fascistic fervor, we artist who have been so long thedespised are about to take over control. The far more nuanced Virginia Woolf -unlikePound a vocal anti-fascist- nevertheless found herself firmly on the side of thehighbrows (as opposed to lowbrows or middlebrows) when chronicling the

reticulations of the so-called Battle of the Brows. Her often acute desire to project herselfinto the lives of others was counterbalanced by equally anxious descriptions of the Man inthe Street: a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff taking the reflectionof the things that individuals do, occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct ofhate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it. Other modernists felt that the onlyresponse to the threat of the masses was to withdraw onto an elevated and isolatedplane of creativity -the high jof high modernism. Nietzsche, arguably one of the principalsources for this modernist preoccupation with transcendence, locates the voice of thegenius in the demiurgic figure of Zarathustra: Let us live above them [the masses] likestrong winds... neighbours of the eagles, neighbours of the snow, neighbours of the sun.Their bodies and their spirits would call our happiness a cave of ice. The terms of this

passage restage the imagery of Romanticism -particularly the figure of the mountain-scaling visionary -by investing this imagery with a new anti-democratic thrust.Zarathustra"s predicament thus frames the distance between Romanticism andmodernism, as described by Robert Currie:

A romantic posits a higher order which is, in general estimation, a better world, and which can be attained. A modernist doubts, almost to the point of disbelief, that the higher order can be

attained; and he interprets the higher order in terms so ascetic, or even so objectionable, as to repel all but those who can rise to the

auterity of his creed.

The quintessential rendering of this high modernist credo is Mina Loy"s self-referentialApology of Genius, which begins with the elevated sentiment, Ostracized as we are with

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God, and manages to add racist imagery to the usual derogatory depiction of the masses(you turn on us your smooth fools"faces like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries). ForLoy as for her contemporaries, genial transcendence is no longer a possibility explored forits own sake, as it was for the Romantics, but a potential means of escape from thecontaminating rabble below. Yet this necessary withdrawal of the artist-genius from the social was also seen by

many modernists as having an important utopian dimension. Only in retiring from publicaltogether, as Clement Greenberg famously put it, can the avant-garde keep culturemoving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. In other words, the geniuswas required to extract himself or herself from the masses so that genuinely creativeworks of art could be produced which would in turn wrest a deadened populace from theirhabits and stupor. Only through turning away from the clichs and commonplaces ofsubjective and social experience could the genius effect the shock of the new. It is for thisreason that Ortega y Gasset would call for a dehumanized art, or that T.S. Eliot wouldannounce in Tradition and the Individual Talent: poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,but an escape frome motion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape frompersonality. Eliot"s interest in an objective or impersonal aesthetic is based on the beliefthat the authentic work of art can liberate society from what he saw to be the prevailingconditions troubling modern life: the masses and their assault on culture, the emergingvisibility of non-Western peoples and the politicization of women, the decentering oftradition in the wake of unpredictable and widespread changes in technology and culture.

STEIN 1930

One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius,of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the

same time talking and listening.

If this is for Stein the essence of genius, then what she means by genius isclearly something other than an extra-linguistic authorial presence or transcendental soul-with-wings. Here, the essence of genius is not an essence at all but a process ofdialogue, of unstable and shifting language play, of irreductible plurality. articulating thisprocess as the essence of genius serves to deconstruct both the centered, unitarysubject, and by making both contingent upon open-ended, multiple engagements that areimmanent within the text. Hence this essence, this being that can only be said to existthrough a perpetually shifting dialogic exchange. And the text within which this beingemerges could thus be described as an emergent phenomenon, a work in progresswithout beginning or end.