no pessimism or negativity think positive stop negative thinking having pessimistic thoughts be positive and optimistic thinking makes you happy

Negativity, my fourth keyword from Questions of Poetics, is a rich term whose usage far outstrips its dictionary definitions or thesaurus synonyms. Searching for an image for this post, I encountered a raft of popular maxims on the disadvantages of negativity, on how negative thoughts, feelings, actions only hinder us in the quest for happiness, becoming a detriment to any sort of sociality or belonging. The first results for a Google Advanced Image search for negativity reveals: an image of a glass half full or half empty; “7 Signs That Someone’s Negativity Is Toxic“; a “no negativity” logo; a cartoon image of a fighting couple; “Don’t let anyone’s ignorance, hate, drama or negativity stop you from being the best person you can be”; “Good things happen when you distance yourself from negativity and those who create it”; a personal training manual for “Beating Negativity“; a cartoon image of three happy-faced “blocks” outweighed by a black, negative “block”; “5 Ways You Are Spreading Negativity Without Knowing It”; “How to Deal with Negativity (6 Mindful Strategies); “Negativity Is a Thief, It Steals Happiness,” and so on. While “the power of positive thinking” is as American as apple pie, this result shows nothing less than a cultural logic that forbids the expression of “negative” thoughts, emotions, or actions, insofar as they are seen as a threat to “our” forms of positivity. Negativity has become a social threat, a thought crime that may be punishable—a moment of social reinforcement that has everything to do with normalizing our current extreme circumstances. 

This is the exact opposite of the way I use the term in Questions of Poetics. Negativity is a moment of questioning and critique; as the key logical operator of the dialectic, from Hegel to Critical Theory, it is central to any kind of critical art practice that challenges assumptions of form, medium, genre, history, or person. With the “turn to language” of Language writing, negativity results in the radical particularity of avant-garde aesthetics; it is a motor of literary evolution that is not reducible to the positive history of period style. Negativity is fundamental to questioning and critiquing, and I go on to show how it is central to a range of critical art practices, from Language writing to sound poetry to noise music to conceptual photography. At the basis of this usage for the aesthetic is a questioning of positivity, originating in Hegel’s account of religion, for his time, as a false positive:

An example from Hegel’s biography clarifies his use of the negative in terms of the strictly cultural meanings of “positivity” in an early and incomplete project titled “The Positivity of Christian Religion.” “For Hegel,” his biographer writes, “positive religion [on analogy to ‘positive’ as opposed to ‘natural’ law] is any religion and its associated doctrines whose normative force depends on their being the established religion of a people. . . . Positivity, thus, in law and in religion, is that which relies only on the dictates of authority instead of those dictates that come from ‘thinking for oneself.’” Religion as ideology is connected to the form of the state (in Germany, states: there were many state formations of religion). Hegel’s perception of this connection—an immediate one of the nature of religious ideology as experienced within the cultural confines of German provincial life—led to his transposition of religion into reified spirit through the work of the negative: “What had been the ideal of ‘elevation to the infinite’ in love increasingly became a ‘positive’ religion based on the authority of a teacher and on a belief in a God who became increasingly and necessarily conceived not as an object of love but merely as a master who commands” (143), and thus to be contested. (167)

What we are witnessing now in America is precisely this: a state formation that “relies only on the dictates of authority instead of those dictates that come from ‘thinking for oneself’”—a positivity ultimately grounded in authoritarianism that transposes “love” (or any other conventional form of well being, good life, belonging, community) into “a master who commands.” The application of this insight—should it have “wide circulation in America”—might indeed change the forms and values of what we are now living, in truth a negativity turned into the positivity of denial. Critical art practice challenges this culture logic, and is one of many avenues to deny its normalization. Here is a short sampler of the way I use the term in the opening sections of chapter 6, “On the Advantages of Negativity”:

Negativity has a bad reputation, and it is only getting worse. With the rise of new materialist, object-oriented, and affect theories, there is a scarcely voiced but still audible willingness to sacrifice the politics of the negative—in its psychoanalytic, ideology critical, cultural studies, or critical theory variants—to an unexamined politics of the positive. (165)

Negativity calls into question all false positives: of the work of art as representing in a one-to-one manner the world that produced it, and beyond that of the misrepresentations of the world into which the work extends its negativity. Among the types and symbols of false positivity, the work of art enacts its criticality within and beyond its form. (165–66)

How might we seek to preserve the critical significance of aesthetic negativity, in relation to larger cultural logics, without falling back on the authorial, aesthetic, or formal limits of Adorno’s late work? One way would be to expand the boundaries of Adorno’s account of aesthetic negativity toward forms of cultural intervention or genres of art that he would not have recognized. (166)

In each of the following sections, I trace the negative in a specific genre of art—avant-garde poetry, new music, and visual art. . . . My goal is to show how aesthetic uses of negativity in avant-garde practices demand an expanded account of the work of art as a locus of engaged, critical, and transformative agency. (168)

The turn to sound as a cultural phenomenon is motivated through a dialectic of inclusion and alienation, belonging and opacity, which are effaced in sonic materialist readings. Two kinds of negativity are conjoined in the material text: cultural alterity and displacement and the deployment of radical experiment and linguistic difference. (170)

Just as [Robert] Sheer’s allegedly disloyal text unmasks the phoniness of “justificatory” discourses for the Iraq war, negativity in [Bruce] Andrews’s position confronts false positivity in [Bill] O’Reilly’s. . . . All O’Reilly wanted from Andrews was a positive affirmation that he taught the book because he agrees with its content, that he promotes its views, that he is a disloyal American—and this Andrews refused, in a signal instance of negativity, to give him. (171–72)

Negativity is rifted through the Flarf aesthetic at both aesthetic and cultural levels. Aesthetically, all the subtractive devices of Language writing are at play: the material signifier is everywhere. No intentional author could have meant this poetry, much less written it. But Flarf is equally positioned as a performative negation of the very media it takes its material from and is distributed by; in this, it combines Andrews’s political refusal to engage O’Reilly in falsely positive terms with the negativity of his inadmissible avant-garde poetry. (177–78)

Avant-garde and mass culture come together in a negative form of critique, which reveals in turn the advantage of a practice of negativity in communication that unmasks the false positives of the public sphere. In proposing a motivated relationship between avant-garde agency and mass-cultural discourse, I hope to have disclosed a common necessity for each: to remain conscious within a language of systematic denial. (179)

The epigraph is taken from my essay “Negative Examples,” in Constructivist Moment, chap. 6, which works through the framing assumptions of this chapter: “There is no one-size-fits-all negativity that derives from either logical or determinate negation”; 240.
1 The locus classicus is Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 225–26: “By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful,’ it criticizes society by merely existing.” On negativity in Adorno’s aesthetics, see Menke, Sovereignty of Art; and Nicholson, Exact Imagination, Late Work. [. . .]
4 On negativity in philosophy, see Gillespie, Nihilism before Nietzsche; Coole, Negativity and Politics; Hartley, Abyss of Representation; and Germerchak, Sunday of the Negative. As close as I would venture to a “foundational” account of negativity would be Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, 91–112. [. . .]
6 On negativity in critical theory, see Adorno, Negative Dialectics; Buck- Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics; Jay, Adorno; Jameson, Late Marxism; and Hammer, Adorno and the Political. [. . .]
10 One often sees a tendency, in radical formalist aesthetics, to identify only one kind of negativity that “counts”—that which aligns with formal devices of construction. Two kinds of negativity—of formal construction, of oppositional cultural logics—need to be brought together.
11 The Occupy movement, in this sense, pluralizes the forms and sites of negativity in a way that avoids static categories and keeps options open, within the framework of the “99 percent.” On the poetics of Occupy, see Watten, “Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia: From Leningrad to Occupy,” Ayers et al., Utopia. (249–51)

negativity, 8, 9, 10, 21, 99, 102, 165–199, 203, 207, 211, 219, 231n28, 249, 249n4, 249n6, 249n10, 254n7; in the 1960s, 51; in the 1970s, 79; and Adams’s Fiat Lux, 40; and Adorno, 74, 101, 165–168, 187–188, 234n2, 249n1, 249n6, 252n40; aesthetic, 8, 18–19, 165–168, 179–183, 187–188; and Andrews’s work, 171–176; in art, 148, 188–197; and the avant-garde, 77, 165, 168, 179, 198, 203, 227n31; and Cage’s Etudes australes, 179–183; and Creeley’s Pieces, 67; and false positives / positivity, 165–168, 171–172, 198, 199; and Flarf, 177–178; and Ginsberg’s Indian Journals, 47, 48–49; and globality, 234n4; and The Grand Piano, 128, 129, 131; and Harryman’s work, 98–102, 127; and Hegel, 167, 168, 203, 254n9; and material signification, 174–175, 176, 177; and the material text, 169, 170, 177; and new music, 179–188; and Nietzsche, 166, 198; and Occupy movement, 250n11; in performative poetics, 168–179; and period style, 226n10; and radical particularity, 74; and Silliman’s The Alphabet, 88, 97; and student radicals, 29, 230n17; and turn to sound, 19, 168–169, 170–171, 250n19; and Wolf Eyes, 183–187; and Žižek, 174 (286–87)

My nearly obsessional focus on the term negativity and what it can bring to a questioning of poetics or a discourse on art thus seems motivated—by its larger cultural logic: the unexamined turn to “positive” values that are motivated precisely by a denial of anything that may be perceived as “negative,” may it be immigrant children at the border to stockpiles of plutonium in North Korea. The criticism extends, however, to cultural intervention and poetic practice, as well—to the return to unexamined assumptions (of tradition and hierarchy, for one) that work to align one false positive with another.