Inner Time (Adorno 126)

Adorno (page 126): What appears in the work of art is its inner time . . . . The link between art and real history is the fact that works of art are structured like monads.

This is beautiful thinking. But does time really pass in a work of art, even in works of duration like music and literature? Can a work of art refuse to be a unity and still be structured like a monad? Answer: It can only be a monad by refusing unison. Is a monad’s sense of time eternity? Yes. The monad in art has nothing to do with history and sociology; it is prophetic and hard to comprehend, like prime numbers. Which is more monadic, the nomad or the townsman; the boulder or the butterfly that lands on it?

Aesthetic Theory: Adorno 156

Adorno (156): "As long as art takes the form of works, it is essentially things, objectified in accordance with a law of form." Art work by Robert Smithson.

Response of PH:

Some laws of form are:
(1) To abide by one form only, remaining consistent throughout: monostich, haiku, imagist poem, blank verse.
(2) To marry several forms in one object: sonnet, masque.
(3) To seek the form of dissolution, from fragment to smaller fragment to photon.
(4) To establish duration: granite and epic rather than paper and lyric.
(5) To shift from one form to another (masque, modernist long poem).
(6) To seek intensity through volume (slam poetry, D.H. Lawrence) or lack of volume (Aram Saroyan, John Cage).
(7) New forms through new technologies (poetry machines, Flarf, Oulipo).
(8) New forms through new ideologies (Marxism : Constructivism = Freud : Surrealist collage).
(9) To express sincerity and belief (Romanticism).
(10) To express insincerity, disbelief, and even scorn (Swift and Nietzsche).
(11) To express lyrically by means of disbelief and a series of valuable emptinesses(Beckett).
(12) To seek form through formlessness (Mallarmé, free verse).
(13) To be monadic and nomadic (Mallarmé, Postmodernism).
(14) To be a solid, sensual fact, thus monumental (Rodin, Whitman, Milton).
(15) To be a chip off the old shard (early Clark Coolidge, appropriation and collage, minimalism)
(16) To contract what was large (bathos, parody, satire)
(17) To greatly enhance what was small (Niedecker, Williams, Moore)
(16) To seek unison and find difference (bad poetry, bad singing).
(17) To seek difference and find unison (good poetry, jazz).
(18) To suggest that it's all just a game (Oulipo, high artifice, collage).
(19) To repeat yourself endlessly (Gertrude Stein)
(20) Never to repeat yourself endlessly (Gertude Stein)