THE GENIUS CONCEPT

Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of genius Barbara 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 gives
the 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 potentially
in all humankind and that signies the subject"s aspiration toward transcendence of the
material, mechanical, or bodily world. Precisely in transcending rules and transgressing
limitations and boundaries, genius comes to stand in for the essential freedom of the
individual 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 be
taken up by those who have the capacity to renew the world. The same could be said of
the period of early twentieth-century modernism, which inherits many of Romanticism"s
assumptions 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 the
Romantics is the degree to which this notion continues to signify freedom, but a freedom
from the practical context of everyday life, as from social engagement altogether. The
Romantics" 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 and
the art work from a culture and society marked by humdrum routine and the banalized
march of progress. In part, this developmetn has to do with a change in the perception of
genius throughout the course of the nineteenth century, from a universal capacity to an
embodied type, visibly and measurably distinguishable from non-geniuses through the
evidence of discrete physical and mental characteristics: high foreheads, hormonal
irregularities, enormous powers of concentration, a tendency to depression. this
conceptualization of the genius as a rare and unique personality would resonate deeply
with the aesthetic worldview of high modernism, with its emphasis on abstraction rather
than mimesis, distantiation rather than engagement, on the liberation of Art and artist alike
from the formal and representational imperatives of a previous aesthetic tradition. High
modernist discourses of creativity, originality, and authorial autonomy are thus mutually
inscribed in ideologies of formal experimentation and aesthetic difculty. As Peter Bger
has noted in Theory of the Avant-Garde, the myth of the high modernist genius working in
splendid though isolated freedom is inseparable from the formalist idea of modern art as
autonomous, hermetic, and self-referential. Perhaps most importantly, the notion of
genius for high modernism served as a key term in artiuclating an oppositional stance
toward one of the major developments of social and economic modernization from the
mid-nineteenth century on: the emergence of an enormous, literate mass that seemed to
threaten the very conditions of possibility of modern art.
Modernism, Andreas Huyssen writes, constituted itself through a conscious
strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming
and engulng mass culture. For an early twentieth-century writer like Ezra Pound, the
masses signied conformity, contingency, banalization: everything to which the truly
creative artist was opposed. In opposition to the eminently aristocratic genius, the
masses were neither unique, individual subjects nor did they show any tendencies toward
transcendence: Modern civilization has bred a race with brains like those of rabbits, he
wrote in 1914, adding with proto-fascistic fervor, we artist who have been so long the
despised are about to take over control. The far more nuanced Virginia Woolf -unlike
Pound a vocal anti-fascist- nevertheless found herself rmly on the side of the
highbrows (as opposed to lowbrows or middlebrows) when chronicling the
reticulations of the so-called Battle of the Brows. Her often acute desire to project herself
into the lives of others was counterbalanced by equally anxious descriptions of the Man in
the Street: a vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff taking the reection
of the things that individuals do, occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of
hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it. Other modernists felt that the only
response to the threat of the masses was to withdraw onto an elevated and isolated
plane of creativity -the high jof high modernism. Nietzsche, arguably one of the principal
sources for this modernist preoccupation with transcendence, locates the voice of the
genius in the demiurgic gure of Zarathustra: Let us live above them [the masses] like
strong 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 gure of the mountain-
scaling visionary -by investing this imagery with a new anti-democratic thrust.
Zarathustra"s predicament thus frames the distance between Romanticism and
modernism, 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-referential
Apology of Genius, which begins with the elevated sentiment, Ostracized as we are with
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). For
Loy as for her contemporaries, genial transcendence is no longer a possibility explored for
its own sake, as it was for the Romantics, but a potential means of escape from the
contaminating 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 public
altogether, as Clement Greenberg famously put it, can the avant-garde keep culture
moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence. In other words, the genius
was required to extract himself or herself from the masses so that genuinely creative
works of art could be produced which would in turn wrest a deadened populace from their
habits and stupor. Only through turning away from the clichs and commonplaces of
subjective and social experience could the genius effect the shock of the new. It is for this
reason that Ortega y Gasset would call for a dehumanized art, or that T.S. Eliot would
announce 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 from
personality. Eliot"s interest in an objective or impersonal aesthetic is based on the belief
that the authentic work of art can liberate society from what he saw to be the prevailing
conditions troubling modern life: the masses and their assault on culture, the emerging
visibility of non-Western peoples and the politicization of women, the decentering of
tradition 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 is
clearly 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 of
dialogue, of unstable and shifting language play, of irreductible plurality. articulating this
process as the essence of genius serves to deconstruct both the centered, unitary
subject, and by making both contingent upon open-ended, multiple engagements that are
immanent within the text. Hence this essence, this being that can only be said to exist
through a perpetually shifting dialogic exchange. And the text within which this being
emerges could thus be described as an emergent phenomenon, a work in progress
without beginning or end.