mills

Gary Kamiya, quoted by Little Potato. I am hostile towards theory for many reasons, not least being its unintelligibility and its falsity, but I think this precisely exposes what is worst about it: it exists as a means for the suppression of the artist by those who claim to love art.

Indeed, I think most theory serves this role: masses of gnostic, oppressive, symmetrical, self-referential language smothering whatever natural and human life exists beneath it. Political theory: a means of subordinating the individual to the striking diagrams of some universal set of ideas and logic. Literary theory: a means for denying the import of the author (through the absurd ‘intentional fallacy’) and establishing narcissistic “readings” of “texts” that “explode” meanings and position the tracer of lexical lines as some kind of creator. Explode is a nicely violent word for it, too.

The very clever resent art just as we resent the world; we want to control it, reduce it, bring it to heel with our fine phrases and semicolons and footnotes. Thus we must establish that art isn’t what it claims to be but some secret cipher only we can decode, a hidden message about the sexual anguish of the painter or the unreconstructed bourgeosie sentimentality of the composer or the imperialism of the poet; just as we say to the world: you’re not really happy, with your false consciousnesses!

“Theory was clean and huge, like a memory, like heaven. Theory was power. Theory was war. And theory exalted the critic.” When reading Chomsky’s infamous assessment of literary theory -that it is all idiotic- one might wonder: how did it come to dominate our intellectual landscape? I agree with Kamiya: what exalts will win favor, and in a world dense with people eager to be involved with art but, unfortunately and undemocratically, without talent, there existed this need: to justify the labors of the academic and critical class.

Now we have an unending rain of essays on how Kafka’s Odradek is about sodomy and need of an army of graduate students to parse and respond to them in their own jargon. This is part of the academic-industrial complex! Complexity of language is their technique for obscuring how little is really being said, and I think many of the participants can even recognize how astray we’ve gone; but just as with the military-industrial complex, there are forces at work here that none can contain: ego, pride, student loan debt, etc.

Update: with apologies for the polemical nature of this post, I want to note that this is what I did with most of my education. I don’t mean to offend.

Duke Ellington, memorably stating his view on the problem of art’s relationship to entertainment. Clive James argues that it is not an idle lyric but an assertion of aesthetic philosophy made at the time when jazz began to mirror other arts of the 20th century in declaring that anything enjoyable was unserious. The contrast here, then, is between what swings –what can be danced to and whistled and enjoyed by most- and what requires cerebral engagement of a more seated sort: say, late Coltrane (a favorite of mine who comes in for much criticism in this essay). Ellington and James favor the former.

The latter, an obsession with formal considerations and technical problems in the visual, musical, and literary worlds, is the result of artists turning away from audiences and towards one another, or worse: towards critics and academia. That this inward-orientation, this preoccupation with art about art and concerned mainly with other art, has weakened the arts is obvious enough; what audience pays to be ignored? Who wants to watch artists discuss themselves, once the novelty of the formal invention wears off? I once used a simple test in evaluating any work: if an essay is packaged with it, pasted on the wall alongside or as a program before the performance, to explain why it’s not meaningless, the work ought to have been an essay and is in its present form meaningless. If an essay is needed to convey the point, convey the point in an essay! It’s cheaper and easier and better for the audience.

Hundreds of objections to this stance come immediately to mind, however: how low ought to be our denominator in judging intelligibility? How much erudition, education, sophistication, or even simple intelligence can we say is required before we say the piece is insufficiently apprehensible? In other words: whose capacity to dance sets the limit on what we can swing to?

The problem is highlighted by James’ bizarre attack on Coltrane:

“Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity…supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration… nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones.”

I adore James, but I could scarcely imagine anyone being more confused about the aesthetic interests of an artist than he is about Coltrane’s. Indeed, this is a perfect demonstration of an unfortunate fact: when someone draws a line in art’s history and says that beyond that point art loses its way, it is in nine cases out of ten merely a declaration of the speaker’s failure to understand. It is comparable to the derided declamation of the aging that this or that technology or style of dress is undermining social mores: it represents the point in history at which the speaker jumped off the train.

Art makes wrong turns; much of modern art (and much more of so-called ‘postmodern art’) is wretched, but most of art has always been wretched; it is just that now most bad art is forgotten. The consensus editorial filtering that takes place over time reduces the chaff of previous eras and makes it seem as though our own is populated by self-involved hucksters selling gimmickry as profundity. Hence the amusingly constant concern on the part of the elderly of every generation that nothing is as good as it was in the old days.

Ellington’s assertion is debatable, but it’s important too. I wish more artists would keep it in mind, even if just to override it after some internal struggle. But when I was eleven years old listening to Coltane’s Ole, nothing seemed emptily virtuosic or cacophonous about it to me; it had as much swing as anything I’d ever heard, and still seems to. Art’s progress requires that we learn to dance to novel rhythms, and I hope not to mistake unfamiliar music for swingless noise. (But I’m sure I will).

(Update: Topherchris feels that I have the swing whether or not it means a thing).

Although a bit vicious, Manohla Dargis’ piece on Jerry Lewis and his consolation Academy Award offers some fascinating observations about comedy; although there is no manifestation of this in my writing, I am told by real-life acquaintances that I’m “funny.” What I always wish to note for them is that the degree to which I am probably reflects a lamentable attention-seeking or need for affection, the “desperation” Dargis describes above. I’ve also heard comedy described by many, including Steve Martin, as a violent struggle for control: “I killed them,” “I died up there,” etc.

But no intersection of pathos and comedy is comparable to Lewis’ eternally unseen holocaust-clown magnum opus The Day the Clown Died. If you have never read about this film -which culminates in Lewis as a clown leading doomed Jewish children in a gas chamber- you should; it (unintentionally) expresses so much: themes of egomaniacal grandiosity, artistic hubris, comic desperation, deep cultural resentment, barbaric self-centeredness, insensitivity born out of personal pain, etc.

I hope to see it someday; it very much sounds like the worst movie that could possibly be made.

James Ryerson, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s college philosophy thesis (posted by the always-astute Greg Brown). This is a brilliant point.

I like Wallace very much, but I think any honest critical appraisal of his work must admit that this tension was not necessarily one deliberately enacted (and therefore performative, artistic, or creative), but indeed one he couldn’t escape; perhaps none of us can escape it in this era. The question then becomes: was it a strength or a weakness?

I don’t think that in admitting our favorite artists have weaknesses we do them a disservice; indeed, pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a hagiographical fiction that precludes real understanding of their work. That they struggled with foundational weaknesses is what made their art purposive; it is the source of much of it, I think.

At times, I felt that Wallace was very desperately attempting to overcome through co-option the problem of how “abstract thinking” and “theoretical paradigms” negate or subsume “basic truths,” but unsuccessfully. After some of his stories, it seemed clear that this problem cannot be overcome through co-option; discussing the intrusion of ideology, intellectualism, and theory into our art by introducing them into our art to “enact” the problem is like trying to calm ourselves by discussing how nervous we are: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I don’t know how this feature of our age can be overcome (if I did, I would be orders of magnitude smarter, and a writer); various tactics include the deliberate removal of theory from art leaving viciously irreducible corpses of prose, as in McCarthy, or the winnowing of the novel to only the most elegant shapes and sighs, as in Barnes or Kundera. I’m sure other tactics abound: lyricism, impressionism, minimalism.

But I think Wallace was right to recognize that most of these were retreats from the problem, and he was noble for choosing engagement instead; that such engagement sometimes weakened his fiction does not diminish the value of his efforts.

Jace Cooke, whose very interesting comments about Benjamin, intelligibility, and the use of “[a]mbiguity and separation of thought…like negative space, capable of insinuating a looming superstructure of hidden connection,” require me to retract, or at least stay, this judgment.

They also connect to a serious preoccupation I have about writing in general and this blog specifically. Few who write are not occasionally assailed with criticism, and in the past year I’ve more than once been chastised for pretentiousness (and, to a lesser degree, opacity).

Both charges are difficult to rebut, perhaps because I’m guilty; but there are also other problems:

• Pretension: It seems to be impossible to discuss many of the phenomena that interest me without striking others as pretentious; the subjects of this blog, for example, tend to be outside the realm of pop-discourse, and so are almost definitionally pretentious. I cannot help this, I don’t believe; there is no way to discuss, say Random Walk Theory and determinism without some finding the whole endeavor pedantic. If it’s pretentious to be interested in such subjects, I again plead helplessness; I like what I like; who is different?
• Prolixity: To the extent that some subjects which interest me have specific lexicons associated with them, I’m obliged to use the oft-mocked “ten dollar words” to consider or write about them. In general prose, however, I use whatever words I like; I can’t do very much about that, either, without falsifying my textual personality, and such falsification is not merely inauthentic but approaches pretension as a sort of simulation of self. Besides, words like “prolixity” are useful.

Cooke’s interest in distilling Benjamin’s thought into an essence intelligible to his grandmother is not only laudable but emblematic of the question posed by all forms of thought and expression which are not universally-accessible: can this be reformulated for broader comprehension without loss of meaning?

If it could, wouldn’t that mean it had been insufficiently clear originally? Isn’t maximally-intelligible communication the goal? When must that be sacrificed? What levels of profundity or specificity or density require the sacrifice of clarity?

Socialist Realists often said that music which couldn’t be hummed by the workers on the way out of the concert hall was “formalist affectation” (i.e., opaque pretension). Perhaps in my dismissal of Benjamin, I was projecting the insecurity that plagues me whenever I write: that I am performing a needlessly contrived, phony, polyphonic, cacophonous opus when a hummable ditty would do.

Note: And while this has been both pretentious and opaque, I cannot take credit for intentional self-referentiality in some post-modern orgy of hypertextual bricolage; I’m just tired.

Clive James on Walter Benjamin.

James’ brilliantly lucid, cogent, and comprehensive essays on various subjects from Louis Armstrong to Hegel to Raymond Aron to Leon Trotsky, have been one of my happier recent discoveries. I mentioned him previously here.

In his essay on Benjamin, he discusses the tragic intellectual figure more honestly than anyone I’ve yet read and gives me permission to finally admit something it is quite out of fashion to say: I not only don’t understand Benjamin, but don’t believe the fault is entirely mine.

While remaining sympathetic to Benjamin and frankly admiring his many talents -most notably a gift for examining the peripheral minutiae of life for their cultural meanings- James makes a strong case that Benjamin was mostly wrong: about Stalin and Marxism, certainly, and not just as exposed by history, about the relationship between art and reproduction, and about the theory of science that, as Popper would note, is not used or needed by scientists in any way.

Moreover, he argues persuasively that Benjamin is admired primarily for the reasons undergraduates often love Derrida: they understand him too poorly to do anything but fall prostrate intellectually before him and declare him a god. His suicide while fleeing the Nazis contributes a romantic air to his works, as well.

Most people, myself included, have a naturally arrogant and culturally solipsistic attitude towards thought: what they understand, they accept; what is just beyond their grasp, they may revere or reject based on aesthetics; and what they do not grasp, they declare “meaningless.” Ask an ordinary citizen about modern art and you’ll often hear that “if it doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t make sense.”

I have for years worried that my resistance to Benjamin’s ludicrously difficult and seemingly distracting style -a style which almost seems like a camouflage disguising obviousness or incoherence- was simply my ordinary vanity inclining me to believe that “if I don’t get it, it’s not worth a damn.”

But I don’t think this is the case any longer. James quotes Novalis: “To philosophize is to make vivid,” and on this basis alone I am comfortable abandoning my semi-annual efforts to appreciate Benjamin, whose prose makes vivid neither his subjects nor the esteem in which he is held.