mills

Clive James on Jean-Paul Sartre. I am not fond of Sartre, who defended Stalin long past the point when it was forgivable and whose language –as George Orwell noted- reflected his willingness to deliberately obfuscate the truth to arrive at fashionable ends. Making a show of his deeds after the occupation, Sartre “pretended to be brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre…lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense.”

Reading that sentence, I am closer now to understanding why James is a persona non grata in academic settings. Unafraid to suggest that Sartre was less a philosopher than a writer, and less a hero than someone living in terribly bad faith -to borrow Sartre’s language- James alienates those whose professional lives are invested in the exegetical treatment of the texts of the West (and who themselves may resent moral judgments of cowardice). Although he marshals substantial evidence to support his claim that because “Sartre’s autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know…his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose,” it remains hard to believe. Even when we read that Orwell and Revel considered him a fraud and his work devoid of meaning, we recoil: he is part of the canon!

I struggle in the same way with James’ dismissal of Benjamin, Derrida, and their ilk, and Noam Chomsky’s famous claim that these “theorists” were all empty charlatans creates a similar sense in me: simultaneous satisfaction that perhaps what seems to be nonsense, language tricks, gimmickry, regurgitation, and outright fraud might be just that after all (and not the sacred writing it is considered in academia) and a fear that maybe, Chomsky and James and I just aren’t smart enough to get what’s being said.

And this is a key point: no one who admits to thinking such writing is nonsensical will be taken seriously by those who maintain that we simply don’t understand it. But few who take expression seriously will claim that cultural ideas require such complexity of writing to communicate! I remain suspicious, despite Jace Cook’s excellent argument, that if something is obfuscatory, it is either through incompetence in craft or deliberate intent; and if the latter, something is being hidden (or perhaps it is that nothing is being hidden).

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.