Organic Unity in the Age of the Free Market: The Pragmatist Tradition and the Question of Frame

The article explores the evolution of the concept of organic unity – itself a species of organic metaphor consisting in drawing a parallel between a work of art and a living being – within the tradition of pragmatism, as exemplified in the writings of perhaps its most eminent proponent in the twentieth century, John Dewey. The overview is designed to provide a useful background for reading literary criticism by Kacper Bartczak, a Polish poet, essayist, and translator, who employs the concept of a ‘poem as an organism’ in the contemporary context of rising scepticism towards the idea of the autonomy of art that accompanies the decline of the modernist paradigm. It is suggested that the rupture in Bartczak’s pragmatist outlook – and the necessity, that he at a certain point acknowledges, of reconsidering the question of the frame – is associated with the pressure, only recently recognised, that the domination of the free market as a form of social metabolism exerts on the form of a poem, and, furthermore, that his later criticism can therefore be helpfully viewed in the light of Nicholas Brown’s remarks on the relationship between an artwork’s autonomy and the logic of the free market, and of Stanley Cavell’s notions of fraudulence and anthropomorphism.