Slovene Modernism [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 321-336]

SLOVENE MODERNISM
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linguistic bipolarity between "relations of similarity" and "relations of
contiguity") and the crossing over from linguistic to para-linguistic or
non-linguistic means of expression (collage, pictorial figuration, lettrism,
mathematical formulae, physics, chemistry, etc.).'7 While all of this signals
the conscious destruction of poetic language, it also represents the choice
of media which were more effective and hardy in the midst of dehumanized
civilization.
But upon closer examination of Kosovel's Constructivism, the process
of poetic destruction shows itself to be controlled and limited, as many
of Kosovel's works demonstrate. Linguistic communication still dominates
non-linguistic features and is semantically constitutive. Linguistic messages,
despite catachresis, are still semantically predominant and their connections
to para-linguistic or non-linguistic signs are more logical than hermetic,
so that one could not categorize them as asyntactic. Even the way the text
is laid out on the page is structurally planned and semantically centered.
In sum, within disintegration integration is still at work and the classical
ordering of things within the Modernist shattering of them. Moreover,
a very characteristic phenomenon is apparent in Kosovel's theoretic reflections: he chooses the concept of paradox as point of departure for his
thinking and poetics ("Paradox is the leap out of mechanism into life.
Paradox is alive like electricity... Relativity is the first step toward the
non-bourgeois...").8 Of course, this is still not the pure absurd, and
paradoxical relativizing or paradoxical ambivalence are still to be understood and categorized by logic, as oxymoron. Another example is Kosovel's
understanding of dissonance, which is not conceived as merely undetermined,
but must be understood in relation to harmony,l9 -thus essentially differing
from Stravinsky's definition in Poetique musicale, for example, which
conceived dissonance as a self-sufficient category.20 Finally, even Kosovel's
lexical choices are revealing. In the midst of the "depoeticized" texts appear
the expressions Human, Heart, Mind, Soul, Love, Beauty, etc., often capitalized, in fact. Strictly speaking, the "evacuation of the mind" transforms
itself continually into a new invasion of the mind, and anti-poetry turns
itself into poetry, into the "poem" which, in the strictest sense, Kosovel
still defends.2
The deeper reasons for this synthetic counterpoint within Kosovel's
radical 'Modernism are not to be overlooked. At work in the conceptual
background of his poetry or lyric subject are all three fundamental powers
of cohesion, which we discovered in Zupancic, but their inner nature is
changed in many ways. Now the social frame of reference has come to the
fore as a vision of total revolution, in fact, revolution as "optimal projection," as social, cultural, and moral redemption of humanity from modem
destruction. Kosovel's relation to Oswald Spengler, whose symptomology
of the crisis and destruction of European culture inspired Kosovel, is significant in this respect. But Kosovel was also repelled by Spengler's mechanical