Abstract
This is a short (fragmentary) history of fragmentary writing from the German Romantics (F. W. Schlegel, Friedrich Hölderlin) to modern and contemporary concrete or visual poetry. Such writing is (often deliberately) a critique of the logic of subsumption that tries to assimilate whatever is singular and irreducible into totalities of various categorical or systematic sorts. Arguably, the fragment (parataxis) is the distinctive feature of literary Modernism, which is a rejection, not of what precedes it, but of what Max Weber called “the rationalization of the world” (or Modernity) whose aim is to keep everything, including all that is written, under surveillance and control.
Highlights
There is the objectivist tradition of romantic poetics that comes down to us from Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), for whom writing is less the work of an expressive subject than an arrangement of words that cannot be contained within any genre description, or within any binary relation, whether between subject and object, part and whole, identity and difference, digit and system, beginning and end.... [2]
The poems are made of fragments of found texts ranging from Aristotle’s Poetics to contemporary chaos theory but including as well street signs and other verbivocovisual events taking place on a certain day on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles
My favorite remains the poem with seven wheels—one of Celan’s most comic assemblies: ST
Summary
It is always prudent to begin with a distinction. On the one hand, there are ruins, citations, aphorisms, epigrams, paradoxes, remarks (Bemerkungen), notes, lists, sketches, marginalia, parentheticals, conversations, dangling participles. A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated [abgesondert] from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine [Igel] [8] Like pensées, they sometimes extend for several periods, as does his famous fragment on Socratic irony, with its cheerful defiance of the law of noncontradiction: In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply hidden. It originates in the union of savoir vivre and scientific spirit, in the conjunction of a perfectly instinctive and perfectly conscious philosophy. Elias Canetti: “Keep things apart, keep sentences separate [die Sätze auseinanderhalten], or else they turn into colors.” [11]
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