the new aesthetic?

Source: new-aesthetic.tumblr.com via Joseph on Pinterest

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Perhaps you have already observed that in Casablanca, life is cheap.

***

A few days ago, theorist Ian Bogost published an article in The Atlantic that features this incredible section heading, written in the form of a command:

Take the existence of objects seriously.

That’s his tagline for “object-oriented ontology” (the ridiculous acronym is OOO), a collaboration between several academics that claims to be the beginning of a new movement in the humanities.

It’s not going to be the beginning of anything. It’s not affecting, and it certainly isn’t new. The idea is to transport ourselves, imaginatively, into the consciousness of things. Bogost is not hurting for lists of these things; a list punctuates nearly every point he makes. For example, he’s interested in the experiences of “airports, sandstone, koalas, climate, toaster pastries, kudzu, the International 505 racing dinghy, the Boeing 777 Dreamliner, the brand name ‘TaB.’”

By itself, this might be a little underwhelming, so Bogost positions his movement as an alternative to the “New Aesthetic,” a project currently underway at one site on Tumblr. He also claims that the “New Aesthetic” is a disappointment to seasoned aesthetes like himself, because it’s less ambitious and less kooky than Futurism, the pro-Fascist, machine-positive art that flourished briefly a few years before World War I. He cites an essay by Bruce Sterling in WIRED, writing that the Tumblr needs “a dose of good, old-fashioned twentieth century immodesty. Not naïve fascism or impulsive radicalism, but bigger eyes, larger hopes, weirder goals. Sterling shares this impression: ‘a heap of eye-catching curiosities don’t constitute a compelling worldview.’”

I like Sterling’s essay, which moves deftly between appreciations of what some of the new-aesthetic work accomplishes, and skeptical responses to the new-aesthetic’s overreaching claims. The only weakness of the essay is that, albeit to lesser extent than Bogost, he takes the idea of the New Aesthetic too seriously.

The New Aesthetic is a Tumblr, which means it’s somewhere between a blog, a magazine, and a gallery exhibition. The various posts fit together reasonably well. None of the ideas are new; if you follow indie music, you’ve been following this 8-bit video game aesthetic for almost two decades. Is it really possible that none of these writers own OK Computer? Because I am quite certain that Radiohead, the paranoid-but-fairly-conventional rock band who recorded The Bends, were popularizers, not pioneers. For example, there was that German band, I think called something like “Craft Work,” that claimed to be letting synthesizers speak for themselves.

I am perfectly happy to let artists tell themselves whatever stories their art seems to demand. Some artists believe themselves to be channeling the subconscious, like Salvador Dali. John Lennon thought his best songs were “the music of the spheres,” and that he was transcribing them, rather than inventing them. Sure. Sounds great to me. In the end, there’s very little difference between personal explanations, a la Lennon, and programmatic ones a la “the New Aesthetic.” They are what, in a creative writing class, one would call “prompts.”

Furthermore, because the Tumblr is inspiring and collecting good work, there’s really no point in firing off a political critique. The New Aesthetic doesn’t stand for many of my values, but that’s not its job; the photograph above would be enough to justify its existence. It’s a great photo. The advisory, with its frightening overtones of organized, routinized misery, is pressed right up against the lens. The overall depth-of-field and blurry background amplify this effect: the future is taking us somewhere — so says the snapshot — but where? Where does that highway lead to? Why the escalator, disappearing downward? Notice that the photo doesn’t even fit in very well with the pro-robot dicta of the New Aesthetics…and that’s to be expected. These artists won’t allow themselves to be constrained by their own chest-thumping; when modern artists start adhering to their own stated principles, that’s usually because their best work is over.

Back to Bogost. He can’t admit any of this, because as an academic who’d really like to be an artist, he’d like to believe that if somehow he can “win” the ideological debate, his own “object-oriented ontology” will have proven itself to be valid. But it will never be valid for two reasons. First, the proposal is staggeringly ignorant of science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, and all the other modern genres that have already produced broad traditions and beloved masterpieces doing exactly what Bogost thinks he’s invented — namely, speaking for objects, robots, and aliens. If he wants to speak for the robots, he’ll have to somehow improve upon Asimov. If he wants to speak for the trees, he’ll have to answer to the Lorax. And if he wants to beam down information about Mars, he’ll need to tell us something we and our water-sharers don’t already grok. There are even television commercials that ponder what a household mop ponders. In fact, there are many.

Second, the implied parallel with deep ecology is a joke. Deep ecology arose as a protest against our own destructive habit of thinking of the natural world as a storehouse of “resources,” to be vacuumed up at whatever rate we please. There’s nothing revolutionary about treating myself as the equal of my toaster, because the toaster manufacturer (and, ultimately, the society at large) already thinks of me that way. That’s what it means when capitalism assigns a monetary value to both people and objects. Pretending that my toaster has a song in its heart is, in this context, just a sentimental imitation of the advertisers I mentioned a moment ago.

All Bogost has really done is juxtapose things for rhetorical effect. Airports = sentiment (the arrivals gate, The Terminal) in the context of modernity. Sandstone = but I also care about nature! Koalas = I can has cute animals. Toaster pastries = unpretentious everydayness. Climate = but I also care about the environment! The International 505 racing dinghy = yeah, I eat Pop Tarts, but I’ve also been to Monaco. The Boeing 777 Dreamliner = dreams, and the futurism of the 1950s, which was so innocent and sweet. The brand name TaB = advertising is an art form, too. I’m not some boring Marxist!

I can just hear everyone at new-aesthetic begging Bogost to dictate to them how they can be more like Marinetti, or how many posts they can upload per day without exceeding his mental bandwidth limit. The irony is that even though the New Aesthetic seems cold, it’s not. It’s sensitive, just like OK Computer. It’s actually humanistic and sweet. It is full of panic and love and whimsy, because it’s a childlike aesthetic. Remember Radiohead’s mascot? It was a drawing of a bear; a freaky bear, definitely, but a bear nonetheless.

Bogost doesn’t realize that whatever he grew up loving is what he needs to promote, because otherwise, it may disappear into the archives. He thinks that he can be both archivist and hipster, and not only does that make him look silly, it spurs him to present quotes like this from Marinetti: “We want to glorify war.”

The new aesthetic does not look like Super Mario Bros. or Boeing’s version of The Aviator. I can tell you exactly what it looks like, and trust me, I wish it wasn’t the case. You can see it in No Country for Old Men, or in music videos from “Bad Girls” to “Part of Me” to “Human.” You can hear it in dubstep, or see a slicked-up version of it at any theater showing The Hunger Games. Tarantino’s been inhabiting it ever since Kill Bill. “That woman deserves her revenge…and we deserve to die.”

It is art that foretells numerous clashing ideologies — instead of a global war between two ideologies, a global situation of scarcity in which many small, regional wars infest every continent. I don’t mean some fantasy of scarcity, such as “peak oil.” I mean incremental changes, compounded by human overreactions. The art is dusty, and dry as high noon. Because it is so ideological and saturated with belief, it is noticeably psychedelic, but of course in a very different key than the psychedelic art of the 1960s. It is, incidentally, post-sexist, but above all it is martial.

If you can’t hear the new song, you should be glad. Winter is coming. There’s nothing wrong with asking Sam to play ” As Time Goes By,” once more, for old time’s sake.

On Writer’s Block and Responding to the Joker comments

Dear readers,

Happy Indian summer, everybody! Even if you’ve already headed back to school, or are working an eight-to-five, there’s a dreamlike haze to August, a feeling as though there’s still one or two chances to make good on the hedonistic plans you had for summer, and a suspension of crushing drudgery until the days get shorter and you have to go to those special clinics where the lights are “full spectrum.”

Personally, I’ve found it impossible to blog anything this August, at least until now. Partly that’s because of the goofy comments on my Batman post (exceptions: Daniel Roberts, va, Bill, tomemos). People, you can do better. Both here and at the Valve I’ve had people quoting at me some eighties comic wherein the Joker was declared “super-sane,” and it just makes me want to scream. Just because he’s an interesting villain and we’re interested in subverting normality doesn’t mean we can genially overlook the murders he’s committing. That’s overwrought, theoretical analysis obscuring basic facts, and it’s the most common way criticism shipwrecks.

When Heath Ledger died, he left behind him a small body of exceptional work, much of which will survive as classic (above all Batman and Brokeback Mountain). That is a wonderful thing to have achieved, though I am sorry he died so young. Since I did not know him personally, although I think we did party once at this club at like four in the morning but who can really remember because that night was CRAZY, that is as much as I can say about his death. It seems unlikely to me that a man who could become so many different characters was really driven over an edge by playing the Joker, any more than playing a gay character made him gay. Perhaps the reason that the idea of Ledger getting sucked into the movie is so compelling is that we get to express our anxieties about the ways we ourselves are saturated by films and imitate them.

The politics of the movie are determinedly centrist. It could be cause for liberal alarm that Batman is a self-directed vigilante, but unlike most Dirty Harrys, he has two friendly old concerned dads keeping him in check. In the next movie Jack Nicholson is slated to play his third dad and golf caddy. Between Batman’s spy system and Morgan Freeman’s concern about his spy system, you get the same sort of inconclusive, inoffensive political ping-pong delivered everyday by CNN and the New York Times.

The pathos of the film is that we want to root for the Joker, but we can’t: we understand the principle he represents, and feel in our bones the need for liberation and chaos and detonating the status quo, but people cannot die as part of that process. They cannot be turned from followers into victims — that doesn’t liberate them. So we are caught between hero and villain, hating the city itself and its systems of power…the proud, Gothic high rises of a city whose name has become part and parcel with Batman, “Baltimore.”

I highly recommend Daniel’s post, va’s fascinating comment, and Steven’s final moment where he announces that the sexual fantasies in Fellini movies are entirely realizable in real life. To which I say, if that’s not a good starting premise for a verité blog, nothing is. Certainly better than attacking the culture of teenyboppers, who are only out to “shake it” to savage primal rhythms before driving to “make out point” (their term for movie theaters) and who don’t think long attention spans are “groovy.” Have these kids even heard Vivaldi? That’s some “kickin” glissando, man!

Finally, a post that I wrote a fair while ago called “Zizek the Embarrassment” got quoted in The Nation, and The Nation refused to attribute it. It really got me down. Here’s a magazine that I’ve been reading since high school — that fills every corner of my parents’ house in neat, outraged piles — refusing to let any sunlight filter down to the netroots. I’m not a purist about this medium. Blogging doesn’t have to be cut off from the mainstream media. But unless it’s their blog, that’s how they want it. So these posts are for the questions that don’t have any answers, and for the grits when there ain’t enough eggs to cook, and for the hoods of the world misunderstood. Greenzo out.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stranger: Heath Ledger’s Joker

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.

***

It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.

I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.

In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.

What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?

***

I advise you to hire a poet.
-Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).

The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.

The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.

The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.

***

In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)

That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies

(x-posted to The Valve)

Amardeep Singh at The Valve drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long Sunday.

This is Deresiewicz:

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the “conflicts” still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

CR responds:

The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I’m mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn’t much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn’t a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I’d mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on “liberal bias” were front and center in the news [...] I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major.

Amardeep, in his post, links to a terrifically helpful report from 2001-2002 to ground his point that “theory” has not been responsible for the decline of the English major.

I am on my way to responding to a fascinating special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), edited by Michael Szalay and Valve contributor Sean McCann, entitled “Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren’t There,” and featuring Szalay and McCann’s own essay “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left.” So, in some ways, this post is a prelude. It is also a reflection on what it means to be apprenticing for a profession that Deresiewicz, an Associate Professor at Yale, thinks “is, however slowly, dying.” To put this in perspective, the job Deresiewicz currently holds is, for anybody in my position, more or less the pinnacle of their professional hopes ten years out.

***

Rather than letting “the decline of the English major” remain an abstraction, let me give some particulars of my own experience. When I was getting my B.A. in English, of my eight closest friends, five were either English or Comparative Literature majors; all had taken part in an intensive humanities program freshman year that included housing all the participants together. By senior year, there was absolutely no distinction between our academic work and the rest of our time. We were working on essays and theses about Henry James, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Samuel Beckett, and so on; we were writing our own manifestos, poems, and really long emails; we were drinking cheap vodka (or sometimes some new thing purchased with fledgling credit cards, like cinnamon schnapps) and watching Barfly, High Fidelity, or a student production of Dangerous Liaisons. I’d throw a party, my friend would sit cross-legged on the floor, soliloquizing about track 13 on Exile on Main Street and then disappearing home to write a story called “Rocket Queen.” A series of intensely heated arguments about Heidegger, conducted mostly at around three in the morning, led me to an independent study on Being and Time and my first real introduction to Continental philosophy and “theory.”

By 2002, one year after graduation, my girlfriend at the time had completed her M.A. in Slavic Literature at Stanford, with plans to write and direct for the stage; my other five friends had been accepted to graduate programs in English (Cornell, U. of Chicago), Comparative Literature (U. Penn), and Slavic Literature (UC Berkeley). I began graduate studies in English at UC Irvine in 2003.

Of those five people, one is still in graduate school doing literary studies; she is currently on the job market. My friend who majored in Slavic Literature, once he realized the kind of work he would be allowed to do (historicizing work on lesser-known Russian authors), switched to graduate work in computer science. The rest dropped out in order to attend law school.

When my roommate at Irvine, a new friend and a remarkable scholar, and yet another college friend switched from literature to law school in the space of a year, I remember telling my parents that the discipline had lost its edge. Nothing was “happening,” as we say, and young intellectuals were looking for other ways to have a social impact, or other careers to pursue while they worked on their own poems and novels.

In the four years since then, things have gotten much worse. This is particularly true in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger has continually sought to cut funding for higher education, but it is true everywhere in the United States. There are practical problems: increased fees and overhead costs, shrinking budgets for grants, less guaranteed teaching, fewer tenure-track jobs. This financial squeeze is one cause of a rash of damaging wars within literary studies, and academia more generally, that illustrate how desperate the situation has become.

For example, there is the spectacle of professors calling for the reform or elimination of tenure, using the same specious arguments that conservatives used during the first Bush Administration about tenured high school teachers; in essence, the idea is to treat teachers like salesmen working on commission. There are also media outlets like The New York Times calling for taxes on university endowments, then supplementing that with reminders that professors aren’t no better than anybody else, and shouldn’t be so uppity. At his blog Acephalous, Scott Kaufman took on the unenviable job of calling out K.C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who created a sensation by fearlessly exposing “political correctness” among fellow professors at Duke.

About a year and a half ago, at the Valve, I wrote:

The ideological differences between Badiou and Michaels, or Zizek and Michaels, are not trivial. (Neither are the differences between Zizek and Badiou.) I am not suggesting that the well-rehearsed disagreements between Lacanians and historicists can be easily overcome. Nonetheless, my belief in the projects of universalism and equality leave me out of patience with the refusal to recognize common ground.

I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Petulance,” from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain: “What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage” (673, trans. Woods). The great petulance follows the death of Mynheer Peeperkorn in Mann; for us, it has followed the death of the brilliant and charismatic figure of Derrida.

I now believe that the kind of reconciliation I hoped for in that post will not arrive, at least not without significant clashes coming first. It’s the nature of the blogosphere to invite articulate conflict, of course, but even so I’ve watched one conversation after another in which I participated, and which I thought were cordial dialogues about academia, quickly become bitter disputes. (I should add that in the time since that post, it has become clear that Slavoj Zizek can’t replace Derrida. His fatuous and repetitive lists of political “ironies,” e.g. that Whole Foods is just another capitalist organ, have begun to alienate even his most devoted followers.)

As things stand, there are basically four schools of thought about literary studies:

(1) Critical thinking and writing skills. Some academics believe that the primary value of literary studies is in teaching marketable writing skills, along with “critical thinking,” which is basically the ability to separate yourself from received ideas and representations, and fits with old Jeffersonian ideas about a democratic citizenry. These people are usually the most eager to sink literary studies into broader writing and rhetoric programs, and they like to try to reach students by using multimedia and the Internet (e.g. applying critical thinking skills to a YouTube video). Politically, they advocate a sort of deliberative centrism that in the United States reads as “Democratic.”

The biggest problem with this is that all humanities scholars are qualified to teach writing and critical thinking; these general skills have no special relationship to literary studies.

(2) Historicism. Considering historicism as a whole school of thought, one that has gathered momentum now independent of Michel Foucault and even Stephen Greenblatt, the project is a Marxist project that seeks to explain the material foundations for ideological products (i.e. literary works). There is some lingering regard here for the literary in and of itself, insofar as these literary critics believe that literature represents and preserves ideology in ways other artifacts do not.

This approach blurs the lines between history and literary studies, but the deeper problem is one of sensibility: this particular version of Marxism condescends to its subjects. Because historicism suppresses the counterfactual element in literature — imaginative leaps in excess of historical givens, and frequently opposed to them — it comes off as both pedestrian and pessimistic.

If this seems excessively harsh, consider how many historicist works center on claims about a) popular scientific errors of the time, b) wishful utopianism or progressivism, c) wishful literary solutions to real and perhaps insoluble problems, or d) secret sympathies between a narrative and the prevailing social hierarchy.

(3) The mandarins. This group represents the strange alliance between scholars who have disappeared into the labyrinth of theoretical debate, and scholars who have made aesthetics, in some “purified” form, their justification and refuge. It encompasses both spiraling Zizekian or Derridean ironies as well as Harold Bloom’s gasps of awe. This group mainly consists of academics who already have tenure, or other people in relatively privileged situations, and gets some support (at least on the blogs) from people outside academia who like to think of literature and philosophy as lofty, removed realms. Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” columns fall very much in this category.

(4) The militants. A group that no longer exists, and so will have to be invented. In Saint Paul, Alain Badiou writes in the prologue that “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure [on the order of Paul]—even if it takes the form of denying its possibility—called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of this century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant” (2).

I’m amused by Badiou’s notion of a widespread search: it brings to mind comic book scenarios of searching for a hero or a cure, and perhaps also the image of bloodhounds sniffing out a forest. In truth, no such search is really underway. The very idea is horrifying to professors most invested in teaching critical thinking, who see their job as teaching resistance to militancy and dogmatism. It is equally annoying to many other academics who believe that literature and philosophy are not the proper arenas for militancy, either because culture is ineffectual at producing radical change, or because it is a distant Olympus of intellectual pleasure.

What does it mean to speak of militancy within literary studies? It means passionate commitment to a way of living in the world, one that feels itself to be somewhat at odds with its own time. I love what CR has to say about the rise of self-censorship and phony irony during political discussions with students, but I am also certain that the answer is not just making extreme political statements. The vitality of contemporary popular music is based in part on its association with ways of living life: hedonism, excess, self-expression, community. The glamour that attaches to writing fiction and poetry gains similarly from our notion of that life: among recent critical successes, one might look at Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which is joyously concerned with the communities of bohemians and would-be artists in Mexico. This delight in the absolutism of living through art is equally there in Annie Dillard’s ascetic experiments in sharpened consciousness, and in Jonathan Lethem’s version of nerdy urban hip. When I think back on my engagement with literature and art in college, it was an essential part of a whole life I was living at that time. It is not merely that no major theoretical school has emerged since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, as Deresiewicz writes — it is also that one can trace the decline of that work’s meaningfulness in Butler’s persistent effort afterwards to detach her queer studies from the lived experiences of alternative lifestyles, alternative communities, and drag. It is really any wonder that our private conversations come to linger more on the films of Pedro Almodovar or on camp films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where drag is not merely the subject, but is also allowed to be present? Yet that arc repeats itself everywhere in the profession.

In short, militancy is another word for idealism, both in the sense of hopefulness, and in the sense of living according to ideas, taken broadly to include all forms of intentional representation. It sounds very adolescent, surely, and yet there is something strange in Deresiewicz’s complaint that “the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.” This isn’t true at all; the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by the condescending notions of adults about what makes something feel relevant to younger persons, as well as by our own preference for “sexy” topics, identity myths, and multimedia. In fact, the alienated attitude our students adopt derives from the distance we ourselves keep from the literature in question. Furthermore, education always defines itself in relation to youth: without its ardor and skepticism, there would be no Socratic dialogues, no Emile, nor any other treasure of pedagogy.

***

What the profession is experiencing now is less an absolute decline than it is a drop-off following an unprecedented boom in the 1960s; historically speaking, the 1960s were an anomalous period of extraordinary interest in literary studies. In my next post, I will examine how then-popular ideas about culture, identity, and experience created this boom, the backlash against those ideas, and why that backlash has finally led to the presently underwhelming state of literary studies and Continental philosophy.

A Little Something You Can Touch: HBO’s Wire and the Politics of Visual Media

(x-posted to The Valve)

Spend some on a little something you can touch. A new car, a new coat…it’s why we get up in the morning.
-The Greek

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.
-Marlo

Talking about The Wire, which most of the people I know do twice per day, is like repeating a mantra: Season 1 is the police station. Season 2 is the docks. Season 3 is the streets (or, more inaccurately, “politics”). Season 4 is public schools. Season 5 is the press — I haven’t even seen Season 5, but I must’ve heard that six times already. People talk about each season as though they were separate reports from the President’s Council: “Have you started Season 5 yet? Wait, you didn’t see Season 2?” The show’s schematic design encourages people to talk about it in ways usually reserved for non-fiction, with an emphasis on its structural critiques of one poorer-than-average city (Baltimore), and maybe a comment in passing about the show’s brilliant detective/fuck-up in residence, McNulty.

Yes, McNulty’s no angel, but the terms of the discussion are themselves interesting and relevant to the perspective of the show’s writers. The Wire, unlike (for example) The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, is a show written almost entirely from outside the consciousness of its characters. Whereas, in the case of Tony Soprano or Claire Fisher, we felt their highs and lows, inhabited their dreams, and saw how their psychic lives bled into reality, The Wire keeps its distance from the cast, and does a good job of representing the systems that contain them. This (not the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand) ought properly to be called the new objectivism, and it is a sign of the increasing dominance of visual representation (e.g. the television serial) as well as of a certain form of functionalist liberalism. I’d expect nothing less of a show whose very title substitutes media for persons, and I’m not critical of The Wire per se — rather, I think of the show as one of the best versions of a paradigm that should not be allowed to foreclose other ways of seeing.

***

First of all, The Wire did not exactly invent the drama of the insubordinate detective who bucks the front office to catch crooks. I’m reminded of the brilliant Dirty Harry parody in The Simpsons:

Chief: You busted up that crack house pretty bad, McGonigle. Did you really have to break so much furniture?
McGonigle: You tell me, Chief. You had a pretty good view from behind your desk.
Homer: Ah, McGonigle: eases the pain.
Chief: You’re off the case, McGonigle!
McGonigle: You’re off your case, Chief!
Chief: What does that mean exactly?
Homer: (yelling) It means he gets results, you stupid chief!
Lisa: Dad, sit down.
Homer: Oh, I’m sorry.

The dynamic goes all the way back to the formative years of noir, which has two particularly interesting features as a genre. First of all, from pretty early on, it had a very cozy relationship with film and television. Works by James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, and Mickey Spillane (among others) were adapted brilliantly for the screen. Film noir directors like Alfred Hitchcock worked with both film and television, and characters like Mike Hammer were used for both. Noir writing was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s journalistic prose, and emphasized action and things in precise, staccato sentences. It came of age during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and in fact in noir novels one can watch two things begin to fuse: the vicarious gaze of visual media, and a journalistic insistence on unvarnished facts.

Noir was also a genre filled with sins and dark lusts: crime, drugs, deviant sexuality, and whole ensembles of morally gray Machiavellis. It indulged our appetites but retained an antiseptic distance, suggesting more than it showed. The noir hero makes sense of this purgatorial darkness by accepting man’s sinful nature for what it is, and also by martyring himself through a pantomime of corruption. He drinks without getting drunk, kisses almost without changing his expression. He sinks to the depths, and yet the depths do not claim him; he is not aloof, but he does not succumb. He is, in fact, the personification of the camera, and a familiarly American notion of original sin grounds all the “facts” the narrating eye fearlessly reveals.

The best example of how the noir genre then transforms into a politics comes during the third season, when The Wire broaches the subject of legalizing drugs. A renegade major establishes “free zones” in three places in Western Baltimore, enabling drug addicts to purchase and use drugs without interference. The show’s perspective on this is pretty much in line with all the sound arguments for legalizing drugs: violent crime goes down, and some public health outreach becomes possible that would have been impossible before. While the mayor is debating whether he can sell the free zones to the public and the Feds, an aspiring candidate for mayor gets hold of the news and blows the whistle.

So far, so good. Somewhere, in the back of it all, you can hear David Simon saying “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d favor legalization too,” and I agree with him. That said, after watching the show for three seasons, it begins to dawn on you that you have no idea what’s drawing people to the free zones. You’ve seen the character Bubbles getting high maybe a dozen times, then nodding off — cut. You see McNulty and Bunk drinking Jameson until they fall down on the train tracks, and cut. You see the newly hired soldier in Barksdale’s army walking into the room with a prostitute, and cut.

It is critical to see how up-to-the-minute this strange marriage of invasiveness and incuriosity really is. On the one hand, we know everything the characters are doing — my point is certainly not that the show ought to be more vicarious. The show is called The Wire, after all, and despite being filmed during the heyday of the Patriot Act, the show never has the slightest twinge of guilt about any form of surveillance, including wiretaps obtained specifically by manipulating anti-terrorist statutes to aid an ongoing drug investigation. On the other hand, we only rarely understand why a character indulges in the vices that drive the show, just as it is presently fashionable to be frustrated and impatient with other causal theories of human behavior, such as psychoanalysis.

The synchronicity of journalistic objectivity, visual representation, and the privileging of plot (representation of action) over representations of consciousness ultimately produces functionalism: people are what they do, and they do what they do. If that sounds like circular reasoning, well, it is, just like Avon’s “No Marlo, no game.” “If people are going to do drugs, they might as well be able to do it safely without spreading disease or swamping the criminal justice system.” That’s true, but it’s possibly not as trenchant as Trainspotting, which begins and ends with a snarling (and famous) indictment of the alternative:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else.

At many points, The Wire can’t improve on a paternalistic version of laissez-faire: why can’t the drug trade exist in harmony with the world, like other trades? The pushers sell, the users indulge, and McNulty’s there listening in case things get out of hand. Whereas in The Sopranos, it was understood that the Jersey gangsters were a microcosm for capitalism, and the toll, the proverbial “cut” taken out of every life, was very heavy.

Arguably, The Wire is better as a narrative than The Sopranos, and it is much better than Six Feet Under. The plotting in Six Feet Under was horrible: a subplot about a missing woman that dragged on forever, pointlessly complicated medical drama, multiple drug-induced revelations, and petty (and ultimately boring) villainy. Furthermore, the show indulged a kind of histrionic American WASP self-concern in which nothing beyond the personal appeared to have any existence at all. That said, Claire Fisher’s gradual development into an artist was a credible version of a wayward and often invisible process of individuation. In her case, at least, something came of all that chaotic and destructive desire, in a process that involved both her and us in wrestling with interiority. When visual media have to do this, it tends to jam the narrative machine. Transpotting resorts to the voice-over. Both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under employed talky dream sequences and quoted extensively from Yeats, Wordsworth, and the Bhagavad Gita. It was often insufferable, though other directors like David Lynch can make the awkwardness charming. I’m ready to admit that The Wire may be more perfect for its medium simply because it doesn’t play around nervously and ironically with sermons taken from religious and literary texts.

I’ll end with two characters from The Wire‘s second season: Frank Sobotka and Ziggy. If McNulty symbolically martyrs himself on his debauches, Frank literally martyrs himself. He works himself to the bone, up to and including getting involved with every sort of illegal trading, in order to keep the docks he represents alive. He processes a huge amount of dirty cash but sees none of it, passing everything along to his men. He is a creature of such integrity that he actually worries his associate, a criminal boss known as The Greek. Meanwhile, every thing Frank tries to do is undone by Ziggy, his son, who goes even further into crime and then spends the money on fancy jackets and a duck with a diamond-studded collar. When Frank confronts Ziggy about his risky behavior, Ziggy gives a rather pathetic response about the decline of Baltimore’s industries. He’s sad that things aren’t how they used to be, and that’s why he goes into the union bar and sets fire to a hundred dollars. It’s a joke of a causal explanation, and yet Ziggy sees the hopelessness of the situation feelingly, in a way Frank cannot. Instead Frank just keeps going, trying to make it all cohere, until he winds up dead.

We have had a great deal of mysterious badness lately, within and without: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell describes Anton Chigurh as a “ghost” in No Country for Old Men. In the same film, another character says, “Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming.” Whether it’s the dry Texas plains or the Baltimore projects, the people who move across these places are ghosts to us: we see them, but we don’t know who they are. What makes Avon Barksdale turn out so differently from Stringer Bell? Why is Greggs driven down the same path as McNulty? What makes an Omar, a Landsman, a Royce?

I won’t ever know the answer. I’ll have to talk about bureaucracies, and I’ll have to ask people which seasons they’ve seen. But Ziggy? Alas, poor Ziggy! I knew him, readers.

Why Americans Did Not Watch The Oscars

(x-posted to The Valve)

The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through a series of painfully short and choppy montages) at films that reflected national fears, intoxications, and bouts of moral seriousness. Second, it’s a celebrity parade and fashion event. This year we didn’t need it. Why?

No Country For Women

At this particular moment, the filmmakers able to hold the aestheticist high ground are making Westerns and gangster movies (blatantly indebted to Westerns) without women. Petitpoussin already faced down this trend here, though she was content just to fire one shot, touch the brim of her hat, and move on in her quiet, laconic way. There Will Be Blood was so pathetically lopsided in this respect that it became farcical. In the final scene of the film, Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to achieve the iconicity of the word “rosebud” by having Daniel Day-Lewis give a speech about “drinking another man’s milkshake,” which means siphoning the oil from an adjoining piece of land.

If it was still 1988, then maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be a ridiculous speech. However, it’s 2008, and “your milkshake” and “my milkshake” irresistibly recalls the Kelis song “Milkshake”:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

All his life, virile Daniel Day-Lewis sits apart from women, and Paul Thomas Anderson exiles them from the frames, until the whole sexual life of the film is channeled into the gushing spurts of black oil and the oil merges with Kelis’s bizarrely euphemistic dirty talk. It’s sort of homoerotic, since it comes during an intimate moment between Day-Lewis and his enemy (a boy preacher), but the film has no idea what to make of that; mostly, it’s the inevitable return of the repressed.

It’s worth observing that one of most emotionally turbulent moments in the film comes through Kelis’s metaphor, since men without emotion were so central to 2007′s heralded films. Even Joel and Ethan Coen were guilty of finding this problem more interesting than it really is: grim lands demand grim heroes, money and death have a chill touch, and the masculine cult should be celebrated and condemned. Romance becomes the sterile, pre-pubescent romances of technology and treasure: Javier Bardem blows up a car and performs surgery on himself, Denzel Washington finds a good way to transport heroin, the fields are so rich with oil that Day-Lewis gets some on his shoe.

In fact, what emerges from the supposed aesthetic purism of this year’s nominated films is really the cowardice of the Academy. Superficially, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) is a pawn: the sum of his life’s ambitions amounts to choosing to work with one oil monopoly rather than another. Nonetheless, the film tries to minimize that truth, and compares unfavorably with Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis played a very similar character but the politics (and the little thug’s illusion of power) were the central point of the final act, not one rich man’s boring decline into decadence. The academy was too stodgy to award Gangs of New York an Oscar for Best Picture, preferring to wait until The Departed, which had about as much political meaning as a hair-dye infomercial. By the same token, when a film appeared that embraced the homoeroticism of the Western mythos, Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar went to Crash.

Julianne Moore, where have you gone? When Paul Thomas Anderson completed his real flawed masterpiece, Magnolia, Moore was there, giving an unforgettable performance as a gold-digger gradually discovering her feelings for her husband. When the Coen Bros. made the modern comedy classic The Big Lebowski, Moore was there as the painter and radical feminist Maud Lebowski, and it’s through her collision with the Dude that “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself.” In Children of Men, clearly the best picture of 2007, Moore was the leader of the insurgents who convinces Clive Owen to return to the cause. These films weren’t preachy or self-consciously politically correct about gender; they were simply realistic.

Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death — the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life. They are victims of the men around them, including Llewelyn, who puts their lives in danger while dreaming that he’s saving Carla Jean from continuing to work at Wal-Mart. The film almost manages to suggest that all the men — the “good” guys like Llewelyn, the bounty hunters, the suits, the police — are caught up perpetuating the machinery of death. But Carla Jean is still little more than Andromeda in chains, little more than Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, compared to Maud Lebowski or Marge Gunderson from Fargo. Confronted by this artificial wasteland of maleness, audiences were supposed to applaud; most of them just turned away. It was The Godfather without Kay, Casablanca without Ilsa.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that vitiated political commentary and lopsided representations of gender went hand-in-hand this year, but I don’t think so. The great political film of the year was Michael Clayton, and it owed much of its power to Tilda Swinton’s astonishingly believable villain. Female characters do not merely create possibilities for heterosexual romance and desire, or for (potentially sexist) outpourings of emotion. Without them, you cannot portray what Martin Heidegger termed “average everydayness,” the interwoven fabric of consummation and disappointment, luxury and poverty, birth and death, family and social life that gives rise to the political. Look at the examples from television — try to imagine The Sopranos without Carmela and Meadow. Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) is a better version of Daniel Plainview, in part because we see him interact with Trixie, Alma Garret, and the cripple Jewel. The hermetic world of men is also the American cult of the exceptional individual, taken to the point of feverish delusion and inimical to the common ground that political thought and work requires.

The unfortunate complement to these tough-guy films are the insular domestic dramas. They have incredibly weak male characters, mostly of the man-child variety, and take similarly improbable turns in order to be nothing more than twee celebrations of family. They’re love poems to America’s white suburbs with facades of anti-suburban hip. Last year, it was Little Miss Sunshine. This year, it was Little Miss Pregnant Sunshine. The Academy turned a blind eye to Quentin Tarantino yet again, but I’ll take The Bride or Zoë Bell over Juno anyday.

Fashion at the Oscars; or, Goodbye Red Velvet Carpet

One of the most interesting effects of the increasingly horizontal possibility of celebrity — reality television, celebrity bloggers, and so forth — has been the way it has redounded on traditional arenas and duties of celebrity. To the best of our ability, we now try to put ourselves in the position of celebrities, which means reacting to the phenomenon with the same ambivalence that they seem to feel. It’s no longer that we want celebrities to be flawed, human, and approachable — “grounded,” as the old compliment used to go — but rather that the process by which ordinary people with talent become famous is now our primary concern.

Think of how central Britney Spears’s story has been to the entire year in tabloid reporting. Her adventures this year were sold to us as a series of nightmares about custody and control. Britney’s out of control! Britney’s lost custody of her children! Various antagonists, including Britney’s mother, manager, and boyfriend, all took turns in the role of the morally dubious handler who seizes control of Britney’s life, particularly when she was forcibly committed to a mental health institution. They, in turn, would accuse each other of trying to control Britney, either directly, or through drugs, or by exploiting Britney’s insecurities and/or mental health problems. The reception of Britney’s artistic work was likewise transformed. For example, when Britney gave a terrible performance of the single “Gimme More” on the MTV Music Awards, viewers responded with comments like “Why can’t they find her a decent wig?” The anonymous “they” of this comment stands in for all of the people, of whom we are now fully aware, who find ways to manipulate Britney into being a marketable commodity.

The allure of the red carpet pre-show at the Oscars always had to do with our relationship to the stars: at their most distant and un-approachable, they were symbols of style. We still believe icons like Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn to have been stylish; even as television announcers gave us the names of the designers for each piece, we gave the stars credit for picking it out, and for exemplifying the glamour to which it alludes.

Three reality shows in particular — American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway — have de-mystified glamour to an extraordinary degree. (To some extent, the makeover shows have also contributed to this, but they are as much concerned with normalcy as with celebrity.) The dynamic of each show works to objectify glamour as something existing outside of any particular human being, to which any human being can aspire. The brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, Tyra Banks, and Tim Gunn is delicious for viewers in its cruelty, but is also meant impersonally. Glamour is not subjective; if it were, you could never teach it.

Therefore, it’s no longer possible to be much interested in what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet, because it’s no longer possible to attribute to them their own choices. If a celebrity is wearing something terrific, we understand that they have been guided to this choice by a series of handlers working with them. If they wear something terrible, we just wonder why they can’t get better advisors. It’s the same with the rest of the celebrity’s functions: while a dinosaur like Hugh Hefner might still have a reputation for throwing wild parties, a show like Super Sweet Sixteen makes it clear that party planners throw parties. The hosts merely afford them.

The dynamic has become the same sadomasochistic dynamic running through Britney’s story. For example, it was leaked to the press that the women on America’s Next Top Model were forced to go without food or sleep, denied ways of amusing themselves (like books), and generally put under unbearable strain. The show itself flaunted trials like having the models do photo shoots in icy water. Far from diminishing the show’s popularity, these revelations served to confirm what we already knew, which was that the process of becoming famous is a painful and violent re-education, with all the dramatic tension centered on what the wannabe accepts, and what she resists, and how, and for how long, all the while risking returning defeated to an ordinary life. Meanwhile, we are increasingly willing to watch specialists perform: dance coaches, karate coaches, personal trainers, stunt men and women, party planners, makeup artists, fashion designers. (My pick for movie of the year, Death Proof, is about stunt drivers battling an evil stunt driver.) It used to be that the red carpet was the stage for the individual accomplishment of taste. The depth of the image was the star’s own subjectivity. Now that we are conscious of the objective and cooperative process of producing style, depth is provided by interactions between people, insofar as each will or will not sacrifice themselves to the demands of the ideal. Anything less, for the contemporary viewer, is too shallow to do justice to the illusion.

The Talented Mr. Student: Books, Class, and “Passing”

(x-posted to The Valve)

It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Did I know you at Princeton, Tom? I didn’t, did I? -Anthony Minghella, The Talented Mr. Ripley

This post is a sequel to what I wrote here about teaching literature, and the relationship between literature courses and social class. Readers concerned about the fallout from the conversation may want to read the post here.

***

Over the past months, I’ve written a series of posts that refer obliquely or directly to the theorist Slavoj Zizek — in particular, to the short editorial pieces he has published that, taken together, call for the formation of a radical vanguard capable of forcing political change in the West. My first such piece was probably “Why I’m Not A Radical.” Now, here I am, in response to Dr. Crazy, writing from what commenter metaleptic termed a radical position. That, in a nutshell, is the political situation of scholarship and instruction in literature. We are bound to present radical possibilities to our students — radicalism of all kinds, not only the re-distribution of wealth — and yet every tradition has a celebratory literature. Literary works are often skeptical of political dogma, mass action, sudden change, and the alibi of righteousness. In many cases literature will represent grievances it cannot resolve, or will represent change ambivalently. Luther Blissett said as much in his excellent reflection on Chekhov:

I just finished reading Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for the first time, and upon completing it, I found myself stunned. I couldn’t articulate Chekhov’s message. He seemed to be saying something about the passing of the landed gentry, the rise of the middle class and serf, the end of one period, the beginning of another. But I couldn’t say whether Chekhov liked this or not.

It’s not clear to me, looking over the discussion that has followed my first post, whether “passing” for middle class is a topic Dr. Crazy would want to explicitly raise in the classroom. She did name it as one of her reasons for teaching literature, and other readers found her explanations persuasive. My critique of it summoned a number of defenders, including Sisyphus and Scott.

Put simply, passing is problematic. I am not dismissing it. I am not disputing the fact that the experience of higher education, as a whole, gives students incredibly valuable kinds of social and professional mobility. Literature courses help students become articulate and erudite, and, depending on their personal and professional choices, they might well be able to “cash in” on the possession of those qualities. Still, the discussion has to arrive at two questions:

1. What are the consequences, for the discipline of literary studies, of valorizing “passing” in a way specific to a certain demographic? Might the problems with passing require an ambivalent attitude towards it?

2. What do artworks themselves say about passing?

I believe, responding to the first question, that an unproblematic valorization of passing turns back the clock, leaving us once again on the cusp of the so-called “culture wars.” As for the second question, the best art on passing presents it as a decidedly mixed blessing. Literature courses have the capacity to present it as such. They need not resort to truisms about the privileges of privilege.

Here’s what Dr. Crazy wrote in the original post:

[I teach literature in order to] give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex, which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile. Most of my students do not come from families that discuss books over dinner – or art, or advances in science, etc. If they don’t learn how to have conversations about these things, they face a disadvantage when they leave college and enter the broader world. (I should say, I think this may be one of the most compelling arguments for the humanities in the context of higher education at my kind of institution, as it doesn’t matter what degree one has if one can’t hobnob with people from higher class backgrounds when one is done.)

Here’s my response: Working class people and the poor already have numerous vocabularies for discussing complex things. An uneducated person may not be informed about important current events, or they may feel uncomfortable dealing with certain kinds of useful and complex objects, such as older works of literature. An education is a valuable thing in those respects — does this even need to be said? At the same time, to use a well-established example, hip-hop has a complex vocabulary and a complex meta-vocabulary, and it did not arise as something imitative of white culture or middle class culture.

It’s not that certain ways of representing and describing the world became powerful because they were more competent to represent complexity; they became powerful because they were forcibly imposed. If you don’t make this crucial separation between, on the one hand, the historically contingent vocabularies that signify power, and, on the other, the formal capacity for complexity, then you lose sight of the reason to (for example) teach novels written in the vernacular. In her afterword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes:

My choice of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture. Thinking back now on the problems expressive language presented to me, I am amazed by their currency, their tenacity. Hearing “civilized” languages debase humans, watching cultural exorcisms debase literature, seeing oneself preserved in the amber of disqualifying metaphors—I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was thirty years ago.

Now, of course, I can understand all this immediately, without explanation; what I can’t immediately understand is the phrase from the novel, “Quiet as it’s kept,” which, accordingly, Morrison devotes much of the afterword to explaining. And why should I try to grasp it? Understanding that phrase won’t help me hobnob. It wouldn’t help any privileged person get along in the world, or rise to still-higher plateaus of comfort, except perhaps as fodder for hypocritical conversations of concern. Furthermore, it can only tell a person familiar with the world Morrison conjures something they already know. If upward mobility is the goal, this novel wastes everyone’s time.

Sisyphus writes,

Middle-class culture values doing things without an immediate payoff.

My response: not really, if the latest figures on credit card debt are to be believed. But more to the point, if a student is attending college at all, then he or she has some inclination towards long-term planning. Poor students do not need whatever Keats we throw at them in order to recognize the value of planning. If they didn’t know how to plan, they couldn’t begin to manage the schedules that Crazy and Sisyphus rightly attribute to them.

In response to my reference to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Dr. Crazy wrote:

When I talk about my students (themselves, for I have had students who’ve missed class because they were in jail on assault charges as well as domestic violence charges, or their family members or friends) and jail, or my own experience with family members who go to jail, I’m not talking about people who end up becoming activists and fighting the power, who will go on to write “indelible accounts of time spent in jail.” I’m talking about people who expect the person who has “succeeded” to bail them out, lend them money, help them move at least once every two years, and give them rides when it’s inconvenient.

This goes along with what she says about what her students lack:

The reality is that the majority of students who succeed in high school come from families where there is emotional if not material support for succeeding in school.

In other words, if you go on to become an activist, or if your family provides emotional-if-not-material support for your education, you aren’t working class. Whether or not you are poor is a function of whether your family values education; your class background depends on whether you become an activist. Sure, the behaviors and attitudes that Dr. Crazy describes are common enough, and they correlate to class, but to disqualify the alternatives is to distort the very meaning of class. It comes to mean apathy and vulgarity, rather than simply the fact of occupying a certain place in the American hierarchy.

The problematic definition of class continues here:

I’m not trying to make my students “more likably bourgeois” or, in fact, *more* bourgeois at all, as they are NOT BOURGEOIS.

There is a slippage here between the class “bourgeois,” and the attitudes and common culture of that class. The slippage didn’t originate with me — it’s inherent to the argument that by acting like a bourgeois, a person can eventually become bourgeois. Yes, Dr. Crazy’s students are not bourgeois, but she is trying to help them be “likably bourgeois” in their deportment.

Silencing and independence

Sisyphus writes,

There are so many ways to handle said problems, just as there are many different ways to interact with literature — and going off and figuring out some of those meanings for yourself, and working on your writing/argument/project until it seems good quality, those are the important things for students to practice.

Naturally, I’m in full sympathy with this, but it’s quite a different paradigm from that of social mobility. Social ease is about accomodating people — understanding their definitions of quality and figuring out the kinds of meanings they endorse, putting those ahead of your own. It is not a condition of independence.

I am accused of advocating silencing; Crazy writes, “If I try to give them a fighting chance for when someone responds to their perspective with a bunch of allusions to NPR and radical literature, it’s because without that, the only result would be in their silencing.” This is a strange accusation, given that the whole drift of Crazy’s concern with socialization is judicious silencing:

For me, my students should leave my courses able to have new kinds of conversations – not just conversations about their families or their jobs or money or the next project on the house or that the car needs to be repaired or even about which relative is in jail, which are the kinds of conversations that dominated my upbringing and which (it seems) dominate many of my students lives with their families and friends. (from a comment here)

It’s not that those things are superficial, but in a professional context, yes, those [other] conversations are to be avoided if one hopes to get ahead. (from the continuation at the Valve, here)

Authenticity and the limits of mobility

Is it on “delle Croce, just off the Corso”? You’re a quick study, aren’t you? Last time you didn’t know your ass from your elbow, now you’re giving me directions.
–Freddy Miles to Tom Ripley, from The Talented Mr. Ripley

I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.
–The Great Gatsby

[Morel] answered me in a curt, haughty tone. He had become a real ‘poseur’ and the sight of me, reminding him as it did of his father’s profession, was obviously disagreeable to him.
–Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Scott writes,

I’m talking about providing students with the tools required to reach the fringes of financial independence—not by aping the pretensions of imaginary middle class ideals, but (as Dr. Crazy wrote) to allow them to pass among its citizens and fool its gatekeepers. It is in this sense that I find teaching literature most subversive: all the supposedly indelible markers of class can be wiped from our souls with a little learning.

Actually, a little learning won’t do it. Differences of background are readily perceptible. Ripley can provide himself with jazz records, but he can’t give himself a whole childhood of skiing vacations. Moving a team of polo horses across the country marks the Buchanans out as aristocrats; spending the same amount of money puts Gatsby under suspicion of bootlegging. Morel can learn to play music, but he can’t get over his love of little phrases that seem impossibly gauche to Marcel. Dr. Crazy seems to think that if she can only provide sufficiently dramatic illustrations of poverty and hardship, the complexities of passing will disappear: the utilities were shut off when the family couldn’t pay! The parents are addicts! The relatives are in jail! In fact, these anecdotes only bring us face-to-face with the actual tragedy of inequality, and do nothing to prove that literature classes can solve the problem.

American literature might be describing as an entire national literature of passing: passing wealthy, passing white, passing straight, passing male, passing Gentile, and so on. The truth is that there are terrible limits imposed on our powers of disguise. Some of these limits are imposed by other people. Whether or not they see through us, they consciously and unconsciously impose tests upon us. The worst of it is that you can’t pass such tests by trying harder; Ripley knows more about jazz than Dickie Greenleaf ever will. Zeal is a result of tensions the natives don’t experience, and so is total disinterest. Allusions are just that — allusions, vague references. I don’t teach my students to make allusions; I have them analyze one play in depth at the expense of all the rest of Shakespeare. What’s more, you can pass with Dickie Greenleaf but not with Freddy Miles. Freddy Miles knows exactly who you are, and he will always hate your guts.

But far more important, really, than external constraints, and perhaps more interesting, are internal ones. You might be willing to move up on the social hierarchy, but are you willing to turn around and condemn the lazy poor? Are you willing, as a person of Jewish descent, to listen to apathetic and dismissive conversations about “letting the Arabs have Israel”? If somebody responds to your perspective with allusions to radical literature, is that engagement or a way of labeling and neutralizing you? In novels like Quicksand, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Invisible Man, the protagonists find that pangs of regret and rebellion seize them unexpectedly, and carry them kicking and screaming out of otherwise marvelous social circles. I say that this is “interesting” because, unlike intolerance and unlike creating gauntlets, it’s valuable. Nobody’s required to have a particular crisis of conscience, but out of these crises of passing have come some of the most important social critiques of our time. These critiques walk the line between different cultures, drawing on both (or all) but rejecting the unequal way the relationship between cultures is constructed.

Etiquette has two faces: it is a form of courtesy, and also a form of policing. Passing is both empowerment and entrapment. If passing was of vital importance to a particular student population, so much so that it became a primary lens for their whole educational experience, I could imagine building a wonderful literature course around it. It would, like any course, perform its share of socialization, and it would comprehend the desire to pass as other, but it would not settle the matter comfortably. That cannot happen until the injustice itself has passed.

Teaching Literature

(x-posted to The Valve)

Look, I realize that there is a serious danger inherent in only writing posts about teaching literature. It’s not all I do, it’s not something I want to do exclusively, and above all it doesn’t make for ideal blogging unless it is leavened with humorous posts on occasional topics.

Nonetheless, Dr. Crazy wrote such an odd post that I have to respond in brief. The inspiration for the post was great: why do you teach literature? A White Bear wrote in with some fascinating observations about how her students respond to literature; she has observed them relying on a phony positivity that tries to immediately neutralize texts by applauding them for being conventional, and then applauding them for being different. This leads to several interesting conclusions, such as a) AWB is back and you should read her, and b) it’s a worthwhile question for any teacher to answer. If you happen to be a teacher, perhaps you will answer it in the space provided for comments.

I teach literature because I love reading it, and I want other people to feel comfortable investigating it. My interest in literature stems from my interest in other people’s experiences of life. To me, it matters a great deal how other people perceive the world and their place in it, and how their speech encodes — often with such astonishing density — those amalgamated experiences and interpretations. If you happen to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, then you might agree that it succeeds in making the ordinary experiences of a bourgeois Frenchman matter. Bauby, the protagonist, has an unsatisfying love affair, struggles to converse with his father, suffers a terrible illness, and learns from an acquaintance who spent four years as a hostage in Beirut. Were it not for literature, I suspect we would hunger even more for honest characterizations of life. As Wallace Shawn once observed,

We live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other!

Literature steps into the breach. I confess, at this moment, to total indifference about how we handle the relief from this ignorance that literature provides. For some people, it is an ethical revelation. For others, it is merely interesting. For aspiring writers, works of literature enable acts of literary usurpation. Regardless, we have no other antenna so finely attuned to the aftershocks of experience. For many of my students, serious conversations about bodily, imperfectly comprehended life depend upon some knowledge of literature, and some appreciation for it. The rest of the time, etiquette and convention bar the way. Other forms of popular culture, such as movies and music, do related work. Nonetheless, writing retains its singular value because it is a solitary and largely atechnical enterprise. It does not require collaborators, unlike most films, nor does it require much by way of money, dexterity, or materials.

Dr. Crazy writes that she inspires curiosity; I want to focus on the kind of curiosity specific to literature, namely social or empathetic curiosity. She writes that it disrupts the consumer model of education; that’s true, but not because it’s impractical. It actually disrupts the entrepreneurial model of education, because it privileges solicitousness over selling. She writes that she wants to instruct students in fineness and complexity, chracterizing this as the accomplishment of depth. More accurately, it is the accomplishment of style.

In the end, Dr. Crazy writes that understanding literature makes students capable of conversing with the rich, and inspires them to make space for pleasure. Neither claim holds much water. While it would be nice if every rich family resembled the families in Match Point or Quiz Show, in fact most I’ve known resembled the Wilcoxes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. They awkwardly combined erudite, cultured conversation with patriarchal business sense, and even a certain impatience with culture.

As for the second point, my students are avid and self-aware consumers of pleasure, and it’s not my place to legislate what those pleasures should be. Naturally, literature has its peculiar joys, but so do things I often forego, such as early morning walks.

A White Bear writes, very wittily, that she teaches in order to plead with her students not to be suckers. I do love the salty, healthy skepticism that aesthetic training provides. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most often books make readers look like suckers. They bore their friends with the details of character and plot. They buy tributary, explanatory books with annotations or critical essays. They name various things after books or parts of books, including cats, computers, and their personas on the Internet. Whenever a reader is acting most naturally, minus the solemnizing accessories of a leather chair and a study, she looks like a dreamer, a fool, or both. Yes, that’s what I teach. It’s not always dignified, but it’s irreplaceable.

***

I have learned, via the Constructivist, that scholar of golf and Gojira, that I have the power to tag five people. My votes are for Scott, tomemos, Sisyphus, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects to respond, since I’d welcome posts covering other fields in the humanities.

The Return of the SoCal Bloggers: Tomemos, Uncomplicatedly, Girl Detective, Surlacarte

Dear readers,

Happy new year!

Blogging is a reflection of brick-and-mortar communities, and it creates and sustains new communities of its own. Discussions begin through blogging that could never have happened otherwise, and friendships and relationships begun through blogging have the potential to be life-changing. I’ve just returned from New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, my birthday present from petitpoussin. We met through blogging in the fall of 2006; one year later, she moved out from Hawaii to join me here in Southern California, by far the most significant and wonderful development of 2007 for me personally.

It delights me when the leisure of the holidays permits academic bloggers living here to return to their keyboards. Surlacarte is back with two excellent posts, covering the disappointing end-of-year music lists and his own list of 2006′s underrated albums. Yes, it takes a particular kind of mind to sum up 2007 by writing about 2006, and surlacarte has that mind. My own music post is coming soon.

Meanwhile, tomemos, girldetective, and uncomplicatedly have written a series of posts on feminism and vegetarianism, with tomemos suggesting some points in common between the two conversations. Here’s your roadmap: start with tomemos’s post “Don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan,” partly a follow-up to the recent debates at tekanji’s Shrub Blog mentioned in my earlier post. Tomemos has a very different take on the proceedings, and on Valenti and Friedman’s forthcoming book. Then check out uncomplicatedly’s response to tomemos, punningly titled “Making Friends With Salad,” and girldetective’s own version of and thoughts on the Night of Drunken Political Rebuke, “False Allies and Sexist Women.” Finally, tomemos responds in brief to both posts in “Omitofo.”

Vegetarianism is, in my view, a good way of life that I do not practice. The arguments in favor of it are immensely compelling: it is healthier, less cruel, and more ecologically sound to avoid eating meat, given the way most meat is produced and the overall environmental burden of sustaining a global human population exceeding 6.75 billion. With rare exceptions, I never buy meat at the grocery store, but I do eat what meat others cook for me, and I order meat dishes at restaurants.

I eat meat for three reasons: first, because of its aesthetic pleasures. Second, because I enjoy sharing that pleasure with other people, particularly when I am a guest. Third, because my schedule is prone to various disruptions — traveling first and foremost — and in those cases it is an inexpensive, convenient source of complete proteins.

Nonetheless, being vegetarian is eminently workable. Most reasonable people will accomodate vegetarian guests, and, as uncomplicatedly notes, so will most restaurants. There are, of course, other sources of good protein. Also, as vegetarianism gains adherents, the aesthetics of it are improving: petitpoussin is vegetarian, and for her birthday we went to a restaurant in Los Angeles that served better fake meat barbecue than I had eating real meat in the Deep South.

All that’s old news, and what is new in what uncomplicatedly and tomemos have written is very joyous: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself…” Yet I demur. Tomemos writes about deciding to eat fish tacos on his recent Mexican honeymoon:

In the end, though, I think this experiment ended up strengthening my vegetarianism. The fish tacos tasted good; they didn’t make me feel like I had been missing out on something amazing for fifteen years. At one point during our trip, I had a vegetarian tostada, and that was as satisfying a meal as anything else I ate in Mexico. Taste is possibly the most transitory aesthetic experience: even if you eat a meal that you remember for the rest of your life—and I’ve had one or two—it can’t make you want to live a different way. My feelings on eating meat are unchanged: for me, it is a moral issue, but not a moral absolute.

In her post, uncomplicatedly responded thus:

[Tomemos's final evaluation of eating fish tacos] was immensely reassuring, because it appeared that amazing things were happening on my family members’ plates [this holiday] and I was a little bit jealous. I’m sure they were great, but the truth was that I managed to eat pretty well.

In the grand scheme of things, the singularity of meat dishes is something one can forego. But that does not mean that it does not exist. The poached lobster and huckleberry venison I had in Mandalay Bay were amazing, and I see no justification for treating aesthetic pleasure so abstractly that I would be able to call a polenta strictly equivalent. It is very likely that what uncomplicatedly saw on those other plates was special indeed, and we can understand her jealousy without concluding that she should have bitten in.

Hindsight can lend a tidiness to excess, and reflection can corral it dialectically, and thank goodness — we might go out of our minds thinking about the possibilities of lives we didn’t lead, or for which we weren’t chosen because of lack of opportunity or talent. (For example, in my case, baseball.) There’s still the dust of Nevada on my shoes; Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, as much as anything, a book devoted to restoring to fantasy its chaotic and terrifying force by unmasking the advertiser’s illusion that Vegas can fit comfortably into American normalcy via the cognitive dissonance of “vacation.” But an unacknowledged source of so much of our curiosity about other lives is the sorrow of our historical and material finitude, and the double bind of decisions that entail sacrifice. We cannot avoid making sacrifices as part of the devoted act of choice — that is perhaps the very meaning of becoming who one is — but we are, as H.D. once put it, permitted to wonder.

In following this conversation, I am reminded again of Thomas Wolfe’s opening to Look Homeward, Angel, that each of us is the sums we have not counted. Uncomplicatedly writes engagingly about the experience of getting to know a chef by making a special request for a vegetarian dish, and there are plenty of other versions of that pleasure. This Thanksgiving, my family had to make a vegetarian turkey (the “Tofurkey”) for the first time in our history, and doing so was a lot of fun. However, it is also true that plenty of people find vegetarianism alienating, or simply don’t have the ability to provide a very good alternative to what they know. The former are legitimate objects of satire, as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but the fact remains that people enjoy communion. If you don’t drink, you can’t toast; if you don’t eat meat, there are certain dishes you can’t share. In my own nuclear family of three, being vegetarian would mean eating a separate dinner every night I’m home. Meanwhile, for one of my high school friends, being vegan and abstaining from alcohol meant that he was regarded warmly throughout his travels in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia.

Uncomplicatedly continues,

One summer in college, I lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. One afternoon, I was assigned the job of sweeping out the spider webs from the temple’s windows. “But won’t that kill the spiders?” I asked. The monk responded, “We avoid harming other creatures when we can, but sometimes we have to. It’s not our intention to kill the spiders, but we need to clean our windows. You should bow to the spiders, say ‘Omitofo,’ and pray that they get reborn as humans.”

What is strange about this response from the monk is how it echoes certain Native American rituals performed on the occasion of a hunt. The spiritual practice of apology, as a complement to a postulated need, can be directed towards acts or victims of any kind, up to and including human beings. Uncomplicatedly focuses on the experience of having actually unintentionally caused harm by eating shrimp, and so makes good use of what amounts to a confused iteration of “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs,” one that tries to sever intention from admitted consequence.

***

Tomemos is right, I think, to see similarities between the conversation about vegetarianism and those about feminism and other political work: it is again a question of recognizing the importance of what is singular and what must, at least initially, tarry with the negative. Careers are not equivalent to one another; suggesting that volunteering in New Orleans is right for everyone, as the Tipsy Crusader did, is a form of madness. At the same time, tomemos does lose a lot of direct political efficacy by working as a teacher of English, something that Rich Puchalsky pointed out in comments to my Valve post on the year in intellectual blogs. There is some horizon point where these different kinds of service converge, but the requisite disposition and skills are so different, and the experiential quality of the work so variant, that the truth is in the singular differences as much as in one’s general feeling of solidarity.

The problem with Yes Means Yes is not that there aren’t connections between rape and sexuality, but rather that the authors are at such pains to identify the two — even in their initial call for contributors — that they sound like nothing so much as academics who strain to put a political point on every piece of criticism they produce. They over-identify the two things, and do it probably for reasons similar to those that turn academics into pundits: unconsciously, they feel that the standard version of feminist sexual revolution has already been done, just as most literary critics worry that regular ol’ literary criticism is an exhausted genre. That said, tomemos is right that yet another act of generalization, whereby some critics of Yes Means Yes want to use the book as an opportunity to declare their separateness from a mostly imaginary faux-liberal status quo, can create needless dissensions among progressives, as opposed to the necessary divergence of vocation.

Girl Detective points out that the present connotations of the word “liberal” are partly an invention of the Right:

The definition of “liberal” is a matter of semantics, not policy; it depends on who you ask, and people fighting for the same causes may give themselves very different labels. If you support religious tolerance, social welfare, environmental protection, and the eradication of racism, but hate liberals and everything “they” stand for, then you’ve been duped by the Right’s misinformation campaign. Also, I’m sick of people who call themselves allies – male allies to women, white allies to people of color, first world allies to third world nations – but are more concerned with boosting their ego by yelling at fellow leftists than with actually developing any strategies for change.

I assume that, in most of the cases to which she refers, these leftist critics are thinking of Martin Luther King, who wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” these words:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

So, in response, one is obliged to point out that King aims his words against moderates, not against liberals. Throughout his letter, King stands behind the constructive foregrounding of tension over and against the “negative peace which is the absence of tension.” There is no way to banish negativity and tension — the woman who cornered girldetective had to become an object of rebuke in turn. Calls for solidarity always entail strong words against dissensus, and girldetective and tomemos rise to the occasion here.

King writes, “Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.” This, finally, is the spirit of my answer to what tomemos says about the transitory nature of gustatory pleasure, and the urge to live a different way. The aesthetic is a realm of exquisite tensions: between flavors, between lines of melody, between characters, between the different parts of a composed picture. It appears, not in the ethical determination to eat less meat, but in the scene that transpires between an unprepared chef and an inconvenienced patron, or in the moment of reflection occasioned by breaking a rule. It is inevitable that we should relax into the confidence of habit after the crisis has passed, but for me, to seek out the aesthetic is to beckon those pleasures to return, to feel break upon one’s consciousness what was still unguessed about life, and to experience in its bittersweet fullness the uncertainty that decides us, each to each.

Watching I’m Not There

(x-posted to The Valve)

Several nights ago, I had the pleasure of watching I’m Not There, the new Bob Dylan movie that excited everyone so much because of the prospect of seeing Cate Blanchett in drag, talking to Allen “David Cross” Ginsburg.

The film was initially a gigantic disappointment. I came away bitter about it, largely because I wasn’t prepared for the kind of experimenting involved. While I knew that Dylan would be played by several different actors, and assumed there would be stylistic differences between each thread, I was still looking for a biopic capable of explaining how Dylan produced so much great music. I have always loved origin stories more than any other part of grand narratives; Issue #1 is consistently my favorite. I like to study how people and their literary doubles become what they are.

Rather than give us any inkling into the creative processes at work in Dylan’s music, the film is really Dylan’s requiem, which is strange considering that Dylan is still alive. Dylan is a very obliging person, and when he wrote his own autobiography, Chronicles, he emphasized the intellectual friendships that struck him most, along with the claustrophobic places where he manged to land gigs, and the attics where he got access to old records. He writes about himself from the outside, in a practical fashion, drawing the easy causal connection between the period of hope and reckless apprenticeship, when he steeps himself in music and dreams, and the period (still to come at the end of Chronicles) of significance and celebrity.

The irony of almost every book or film about an artist is that, as much as the author wants to crawl inside the author’s head, we are still usually left with a work ethic and dime-a-dozen cultural obsessions. Lots of teenagers loved Nat King Cole as intensely as Ray Charles; when the camera in Control pans slowly across Ian Curtis’s bookshelf, we see a lot of books everybody in the theater has probably read. In order to ask the question of what made Dylan himself, without answering superficially by invoking passion and work, one has to enter the various dreams that his art echoed and magnified until everything about his life was blurry with dreaming.

My re-evaluation of the film came from a moment talking with my friend tomemos, who mentioned that all of the scenes with Richard Gere were performed with characters from The Basement Tapes (or, at least, with characters derived from the songs). Richard Gere makes a lousy Dylan. He’s too sad and hesitant to capture Dylan’s burning intelligence and wit, and too resignedly secular to show us anything about Dylan’s faith. Nonetheless, the character he plays, a version of Billy the Kid who is hiding out like Mortensen in A History of Violence, matters because Dylan undoubtedly thought of himself that way, as an outlaw with roots deep in the American soil. Gere is very convincing as someone Dylan wanted to be and perhaps thinks he attained.

More than one fantasy fills up the empty space of the ideal. Fantasies replace each other over time. For Haynes, Dylan is the sum of his fantasies — the fantasy of being black and young again, the fantasy of being a noble refugee with a history of violence, the fantasy of being a good and simple preacher, the fantasy of being the hippest cat, the fantasy of becoming the voice of his generation by forging its political conscience. Each fantasy was the slightly corny product of the times: the “scene” in London and in Warhol’s factory, the discovery of the blues, the war in Vietnam, the beginning and end of the rock era. In turn, each new fantasy changed Dylan’s direction and unwove the past fabric of his life. Wives, friends, audiences changed. In order to get inside Dylan’s head, Haynes measures the distance between who he thought he was at each moment, and what other realities gave that the lie. From that point of view, the scariest moments in the film are probably the scenes with Heath Ledger, where Dylan is seeing himself in an disturbingly flat fashion, as a harried professional, living out of a suitcase, trying to hold on to partial custody of his children.  It’s like that Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin dreams about getting out of bed and brushing his teeth.

Among the shards of every decade across which Dylan has spread his songs, these dreams have been preserved whole: the records, like I’m Not There, of the many people Dylan wasn’t, through whom he managed to survive a reality that would otherwise have suffocated him — and perhaps, without his eerie but courageous voices, more of us.