Two thoughts about biography

Theodor Adorno to Leo Löwenthal, 25 November 1942 (quoted by Detlev Claussen in One Last Genius, 5-6):

At bottom, the concept of life as a meaningful unity unfolding from within itself has ceased to possess any reality, much like the individual himself, and the ideological function of biographies consists in demonstrating to people with reference to various models that something like life still exists, with all the emphatic qualities of life. And the task of biography is to prove this in particular empirical contexts which those people who no longer have any life can easily claim as their own. Life itself, in a highly abstract form, has become ideology, and the very abstractness that distinguishes it from older, fuller conceptions of life is what makes it practicable (the vitalist and existentialist concepts of life are stages on this path).

Graham Harman on his blog, August 31, 2009:

Jung’s early family life was almost painfully pathetic: both the dynamics between his insecure and not-always-respected parents and the way he was treated by fellow students, not to mention little Carl’s unpleasant daydreams … [T]he little C.G. Jung started life as a bit of a clumsy and weirdly daydreaming oaf, with a grotesque love of blood, guts, and death. (One of his childhood homes was next to a waterfall, and he seemed to enjoy the assembling of the bodies of waterfall suicide and accident victims that regularly turned up near his yard.) He also liked setting small fires. All of this doesn’t sound like someone even I (who was very tolerant of all other children) would have wanted as a playmate, and in fact many other children were urged to avoid him by their unnerved parents. Jung’s major childhood event was being “sucker-pushed” to the ground by a schoolmate and undergoing fainting spells for a long time thereafter, which made his classmates laugh all the more. And then suddenly, he blossomed while in university.

This led me to some thoughts about biography, and about the running autobiography we all do when looking at our own lives while going along.

It seemed to me that Bair did a good job of picking out the most important events and character traits in the life of little Jung. And yet my first reaction was: “yes, but God, this childhood looks terribly painful in ways that Bair doesn’t emphasize enough.”

But then came my second reaction, which I think is closer to the mark: it doesn’t matter if Bair edits out much of little Jung’s internal suffering, because our own feelings about how our life is going are perhaps not the primary thing. Biographers can know us better than we know ourselves. (This was on my mind again last night when a new friend made a remark –complimentary in this case– that was completely at odds with my own self-understanding, as happens from time to time. And it’s always worth reflecting in those moments.)

In other words, none of us have privileged access to our own life stories. Not just occasionally, but quite often, other people understand our capabilities and limitations in certain areas better than we do ourselves. If someone were writing your biography, they would miss out on almost all the internal drama, and for that reason it might feel at first as though you were reading a fiction. But perhaps it’s your feelings about your own life that are the fiction. Your life is a real trajectory that can be completely misinterpreted by your feelings no less than by the remarks of outside observers. And this is why it would be great if everyone at birth were assigned a professional biographer to hand them their life story every five years or so. Just think of how helpful it would be to be able to see yourself from the outside, as an object. Lots of orientation would probably come from that exercise. It would probably be a lot more helpful than months of therapy, because sometimes all you need is an outside person to offer their perspective on which things are going well and poorly for you, not some trained expert to grub around inside your soul: after all, there may actually be less truth down there in the “depths” than in the simple orientations offered by an observer. Maybe we all need biographers rather than psychologists.

But we’re trained to think the opposite: that life seen from the inside is more important and accurate than life seen from the outside. We’re trained to think that “what matters is the question of happiness and unhappiness,” because this is placed in sterile opposition to a hollow alternative: “or otherwise, you will be left chasing empty status and success that brings no true inner fulfillment.” But this is a false dichotomy. A life can be meaningful even if it brings neither success nor happiness. There is too much pressure to be happy, too much pressure to be successful, but not much pressure to live meaningfully.

If you consider a list of the happiest people you’ve ever met, there is certainly something admirable about this state, but I’m betting you wouldn’t trade places with most of them. Some of the happiest people I’ve ever met live in a state of blissful and even willful ignorance, and to that option I would prefer a more difficult life spent in pursuing things of genuine value. The notion that the meaningfulness of life consists in a happy internal state seems to me like just the flip side of the notion that it consists in the pursuit of external social honors. Both of these options miss the fact that a life unfolds in a space that is not quite accessible either to society or to introspection. What I love about biography is that it comes closer than any other genre to probing that intermediate space between the social and the psychological.

Memento

"A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it. Too close to his intention, 'in his thoughts,' he forgets to say what he wants to say.

"No improvement is too small or trivial to be worthwhile. Of a hundred alterations each may seem trifling or pedantic by itself; together they can raise the text to a new level.

"One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish. Nothing should be thought worthy to exist simply because it exists, has been written down. When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it. Their richness and vigor will benefit other ideas at present repressed. Just as, at table, one ought not to eat the last crumbs, drink the lees. Otherwise, one is suspected of poverty.

"The desire to avoid clichés should not, on pain of falling into vulgar coquetry, be confined to single words. The great French prose of the nineteenth century was particularly sensitive to such vulgarity. A word is seldom banal on its own: in music too the single note is immune to triteness. The most abominable clichés are combinations of words, such as Karl Kraus skewered for inspection: utterly and completely, for better or for worse, implemented and effected. For in them the brackish stream of stale language swills aimlessly, instead of being dammed up, thrown into relief, by the precision of the writer's expressions …

"The thicket is no sacred grove. There is a duty to clarify all difficulties that result merely from esoteric complacency. Between the desire for a compact style adequate to the depth of its subject matter, and the temptation to recondite and pretentious slovenliness, there is no obvious distinction: suspicious probing is always salutary. Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style …

"Scepticism is called for in face of the frequently raised objection that a text, a formulation, are 'too beautiful' … The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all 'too beautiful,' but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly. But he who, on the pretext of unselfishly serving only the matter in hand, neglects purity of expression, always betrays the matter well.

"Properly written texts are like spiders' webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them …

"In the text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing."

— Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, 85-87

Determined by others

There's a very good piece in the new London Review of Books (online here) by John Lanchester about video games. It mostly focuses on their development as an emerging art form, their capacities for fostering creativity and agency, and other mildly optimistic stuff along Steven Johnsonian lines. But he also allows himself this passing dystopian comment:

Most games … are work-like. They have a tightly designed structure in which the player has to earn points to win specific rewards, on the way to completing levels which earn him the right to play on other levels, earn more points to win other rewards, and so on, all of it repetitive, quantified and structured. The trouble with these games … isn't that they're maladapted to the real world, it's that they're all too well adapted. The people who play them move from an education, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, to a work life, much of it spent in front of a computer screen, full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others, and for recreation sit in front of a computer screen and play games full of competitive, repetitive, quantifiable, measured progress towards goals determined by others. Most video games aren't nearly irresponsible enough.

Lanchester's adapting this argument from Steven Poole, who makes it in a somewhat more inflated, Adornian/Debordian way; and the whole thing deserves (and doubtless will receive) a more detailed sociological analysis. But still, point taken. I've had similar thoughts about the internet, in its interactive web 2.0 phase: on the one hand it involves us and lets us exercise our creativity (and, even better, reasserts creativity's social basis), but hasn't it made a lot of us a lot more addicted to doing supposedly fun things that look, from the outside, a lot like office work? And that can feel a lot like it too?

Also, did you know that "Nintendo began life in the late 19th century as a maker of card games"?

Panting After Panofsky - Pt. 4

At the beginning of this section (A4) Panofsky is still formulating, still more strictly, the difference between art theory and art history, now using the Kantian language of “duty”:

The duty of art theory is to define and develop the absolute antithesis of the fundamental concepts — the concepts that formulate artistic problems. Art theory does not incorporate an absolute antithesis of style-defining concepts equal to those with which art history operates. The fundamental concepts, far from separating the world of artistic manifestations into two hostile camps between which there would be no space for a considerable number of phenomena, simply describe the polarity of two regions of value that face each other beyond the world of manifestations and that are contrasted within the work of art in varied ways. (52)

Again, he insists on a strict separation between the concepts and terminology of history and that of theory. (Interesting that he uses the political/military metaphor of “hostile camps” — it would be interesting to know more about what he’s reacting against.) Thus far Panofsky has mostly talked in roughly spatial terms about history and theory — speaking of separation, distance, difference, etc. — but now he starts to talk more in terms of time (perhaps this attends a turn from the ontological to the methodological): “The contents of the world of historical reality must be grasped not with the fundamental concepts but starting from them. The fundamental concepts do not dare, as a form of grammaire générale et raisonnée, to classify the manifestations of art; their duty is rather … to offer an a priori legitimated catalyst from which a discussion of the manifestation may be constructed” (52-53) (I wonder if this would work as an anticipatory objection to structuralism? In some of its versions, anyway. Or it may just be the sudden French that makes me think this.) So what does EP mean exactly by “a priori legitimated catalyst”? I think this should be read along with “starting from them”: Panofsky is making a claim about methodological priority. The catalyst comes first, and sets us off on our adventure. “They [the fundamental concepts] shape only the formulation of artistic problems, not the potential solutions; they determine only those questions that we direct to objects, not the individual and unpredictable answers that these objects can offer us” (52-53).

It seems to me like Panofsky is trying to formalize aesthetic looking, without predetermining the final product of aesthetic encounter with an object too much. That is: we start with these very basic, fundamental problems (how does the artist solve the haptic/optic problem, and the surface/depth problem? etc.) which quickly become much more specific when we start actually examining an artwork, and trying to figure out what it’s doing. The fundamental problems will not be used, as terms, in our final analysis of the work, but if we don’t start with them, then what we’re doing is not really “aesthetic looking” at all. He wants to draw a line somewhere, and he decides to do it at the earliest possible moment, before the particular features of the work make matters more confusing.

(There’s a footnote on this page which baffles me a little but is definitely relevant to the question of what is or isn’t “really” aesthetics. Right after “they determine only those questions that we direct to objects, not the individual and unpredictable answers that these objects can offer us,” Panofsky adds: “This describes the principal difference between art theory, as I understand it, and so-called aesthetics and art psychology. By addressing fundamental problems, art theory does not ask the questions of philosophical aesthetics, which seeks to determine the prerequisites and conditions that have made the artwork possible a priori, and even less those of normative aesthetics, which claims to formulate the laws that works of art must follow; art psychology on the other hand enquires into the conditions in which the work of art, or the impression of the work of art, becomes real” (53). This position-taking is very helpful in understanding what he thinks his project is all about. For Panofsky, traditional philosophical aesthetics (everything in the line of Aristotle?) is too literal, effecting that short circuit from the concept to the artwork that he warns against everywhere in this essay: its implict presumption is, if we think hard enough, apply enough philosophy to this object, we will get clear about it. Panofsky says no way. “Art psychology,” on the other hand, would seem to be a more subject-centered (psychoanalytic? or phenomenological?) approach, making what the artwork does to the viewer the ground of philosophical discourse, rather than the problems the artist is trying to solve. This is also no good. We can’t discover what artworks really want to be doing — their Kunstwollen — by reasoning about them with traditional philosophical concepts, or by looking more intently about what they are already doing to us. If it helps, we could identify the first approach with Kant and Hegel, the second with Freud and Heidegger. NEITHER OF THESE WAYS OF THINKING GETS US ANYWHERE, WITH REGARD TO WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN THE ARTWORK.)

By this point Panofsky has pretty well made his claim for art theory’s autonomy: that it must formulate general questions, with which we begin, and which we cannot give up if we want to continue doing aesthetic looking. But now he turns to the specific tasks it takes on in relation to empirical research: “besides the fundamental artistic problems, with which all works of art have to deal, there are without doubt also individual artistic problems, which are solved only in a specific group of artworks, perhaps only in a single monument … [A]rt theory then must provide specialist concepts so as to support fundamental art-theoretical concepts and order them systematically; the individual artistic problems should be shaped to formulae and related to the fundamental problems” (53). This is where art theory has a role in a continuing discourse: after having laid down the inalienable system of concepts adumbrated earlier, it looks at what the art historian has actually come up with, the individual artistic problems, and comes up with new concepts to describe them which link up with the unassailable fundamental problems. It’s a little space for pragmatism, and thus for argument, within a larger scientific foundationalism. (Parenthetically, I think this is similar to how Adorno conceived social theory’s relation to sociology. Might be an interesting paper in here, about Master Theorists and their administrative genesis.)

Then Panofsky’s argument takes kind of a weird sociological turn, making a claim not just about how art history (the discipline) should operate but about how the history of art actually functions:

“The individual artistic problems emerge, almost as if following a Hegelian scheme, from the fact that all solutions of the fundamental artistic problems in the course of historical development become themselves the poles of a specific individual artistic problem. Further, the solutions of this individual problem again form the poles of another, even more specialist second-order problem, and so forth ad infinitum” (53)

The example he uses to illustrate this is a column: “if, under specific historical circumstances … the situation occurs in which wall and column join into an organic connection within one building, then a new artistic problem arises, which in relation to the fundamental problem has to be regarded as an individual problem. Such an individual problem can produce further specialized individual problems, in that its varied solutions … are themselves in dialogue with each other. In the same way, two different solutions of the fundamental artistic problems … can come to face each other as poles of a new contrast, which itself can be split into indefinite subproblems” (53-54)
What Panofsky wants to give us here, I guess, is an account of the genesis of styles. Everything kicked off, long ago, with the fundamental conceptual problems of haptic versus optic et al., and every time a satisfying solution is found that achievement forms the basis for a newer, more specific problem. So the problem becomes not simply to manifest some sort of art, but to make a column; then to make a Doric column; then to solve some specific problem within the Doric column, and so on, as he says, ad infinitum. What keeps this from being totally teleological or progressivist or whatever (Art just gets Better and Better!)* is that there can be multiple problem chains going on at the same time, and even interacting with each other: Doric columns don’t have to give way to Ionic, there can be both at any one time, and they can draw on each other’s solutions in order to help with their own specific problem, etc. (* Just how Hegelian is this? Not sure right now: the popular image of Hegel is of a pretty monolithic forward movement of history, but you never know.) And presumably chains can also come to an end, or get lost, through accidents of history as well.

This is all leading up to a very grand theory of art indeed. If we accept Panofsky’s scheme, then ultimately “ all individual artistic problems can be systematically linked with each other and finally — however particular and specialized (even singular) they may be — referred back to fundamental problems, and so from the table of art-theoretical fundamental concepts a coherently connected art-theoretical conceptual system emerges, which can branch out even into the finest specialist concepts” (54). We can keep our specialist, historicist, close reading/looking procedures, refine them however we need to in order to make use of them: as long as they can ultimately “refer back” to the fundamental problems, we can tie them in with every other artwork. But not, I think, by short circuit: by slow, careful relation of one style to another, back through the history of art, which can all in principle be made to form one coherent story.

How would this work, exactly? “How this conceptual system might be designed and used in practice is not possible to demonstrate here,” but all he’s concerned with here, he says, is refuting Dorner’s objection to “the possibility of finding fundamental art-historical concepts”; what Panofsky wants to insist is that, in theory, fundamental concepts are possible. There would still be a tremendous amount of work to do to show how, or that, they’re useful to art historians. So really his argument here doesn’t depend on the particular concepts he’s given (although he presumably does think they’re right), but on the very idea of a fundamental conceptual system. Therefore, he ends the section with three reasons that he thinks his concepts can “rightly be described as fundamental”:

(a) they are valid a priori and are therefore suitable and necessary for understanding all artistic phenomena;
(b) they do not refer to anything nonmanifest but to manifest objects;
c) they build a systematic connection with those specialist concepts that form their subordinates.

So, against a common sense objection that any fundamental conceptual system will be too abstract to apply to all artworks, Panofsky says: (a) as long as we get the concepts logically right before we move into the empirical arena, we'll have room to maneuver later; (b) my concepts are good because they refer to real visual experience; and (c) they are useful because they allow us to connect up seemingly disparate works and compare them.

(It seems like there might be a contradiction between “a priori” and “manifest” — doesn’t “a priori” mean “prior to experience,” and thus to manifestation? If not, I think Panofsky owes a fuller definition of manifestation.)

(There’s also an interesting footnote at the end here about form and content, but it has to do with Dorner, so maybe I’ll save it for the end and the excursus on Dorner.)

The Cultural Logic of Late Cynicism: Jameson on Bourdieu

Frederic Jameson's "How Not to Historicize Theory," in the Spring 2008 issue of Critical Inquiry, is primarily a critical response to the intellectual historian Ian Hunter's article "The History of Theory" (which I haven't read, though Hunter's response to Jameson's response in the same issue gives a pretty good idea of its contents). It's a pretty scattered piece, addressing itself both directly to Hunter and to all liberal critics of poststructuralist theory and Marxism. I won't go into the Jameson/Hunter controversy now, which honestly seems like old ground: liberal rationalist humanist Anglo-American empiricism vs. radical poststructuralist "Continental" Marxism. There are some good points scored on both sides, but essentially this is a case of two well-established intellectual traditions with no use for one another.

But, more interestingly for me, Jameson also takes the opportunity to assess, or rather attack, the growing influence of Pierre Bourdieu. (It seems a bit odd that Jameson waited to do this until Bourdieu was no longer alive; certainly the conjunction of the two would be more interesting than the pairing of Jameson and Hunter.) It's also a little surprising that Jameson dwells on Bourdieu at such length, especially since it seems clear that he is not intimately familiar with the oeuvre: he refers mostly to the very early Outline of a Theory of Practice, the very famous Distinction, and a handful of interviews, suggesting that he knows the "greatest hits" and the idée reçue of Bourdieu as the thorn in the side of the theoretical Left.

Jameson calls Bourdieu's work "the most complex rationale for anti-intellectualism today" and reads it as an attempt to "undermine and discredit all the ideologies in play in the intellectual market." I've noticed that Marxist critics tend to focus on the aspect of Bourdieu's project that's closest to their own: that is, the exposure of supposedly disinterested positions as determined by objective structures. What Bourdieu lacks, in their view, is a positive utopian program, or even a sociohistorical scapegoat like late capitalism. Thus he appears to them as a purely negative force, an exterminating angel who takes the Marxist decimation of liberal ideology a step further by applying it to Marxism itself. But Bourdieu doesn't want to "undermine and discredit all ideologies in the intellectual market," as Jameson suggests, though it sometimes seems that way (he is a pretty fierce polemicist). One could say rather that he wants to make us aware of ideologies — it might be better to say ideas — as something that can be thought of as being discredited, in part because they are not just ideas but products that circulate in a "symbolic marketplace," and which become commonly accepted not on the basis of logical, pragmatic or dialectical assessment alone, but also on the basis of a previously accumulated capital or prestige. This isn't in the service of undermining intellectual debate, but of making the conditions under which it is conducted more visible to its participants.

There are lots of other misreadings here. Jameson somewhat puzzlingly ascribes a very crude dualist understanding of society as composed of "two dichotomous social classes" (575) to Bourdieu, when in fact the latter's version of class structure is immensely complex, full of fractions, poles and cross-sections — indeed, his empirical and conceptual elaboration of the notion of class is one of the things Marxists should be happiest to take from Bourdieu, even if they reject everything else in his theory. Jameson also associates Bourdieu with "populism" (577) and "a sympathetic and even nostalgic evocation of the material lives of peasants and workers and, in particular, of their authentic relationship to their own bodies" (575), both of which would seem more germane to any number of Marxist critics (Raymond Williams, for example) than to Bourdieu, who despite himself was something of a cultural mandarin and who follows Lévi-Strauss in painstakingly recording the mystifications and inequalities of premodern agricultural societies.

Jameson also gets Bourdieu wrong on what he rightly calls "his most influential theoretical innovation, namely, the notion of cultural capital," a concept Jameson sketchily vulgarizes as "the social payoff for listening to Mahler rather than to pop classics like Tchaikovsky." This actually seems closer to John Guillory's underdeveloped idea of the American "ordeal of middlebrow culture" than anything Bourdieu has written. The point of cultural capital is not that people calculatedly acquire culture merely to use it as capital, but that culture, whether acquired consciously or unconsciously, happily or dutifully, inevitably refers back to its form of acquisition, which in turn works to classify us and determine our social ontology, whether we like it or not. (The related concept of misrecognition is crucial here: we think we have a mysterious connection with someone, when in reality we share the same habitus, the same class or cultural background.) The point Jameson presses home, though, is that Bourdieu's analyses overemphasize cultural capital "at the expense of the significance of the economic or of the infrastructure that serves as the base or tenor of the figure in the first place." Bourdieu was hardly inattentive to the operations of economic capital (particularly in his later, more directly politically engaged books like Acts of Resistance, which Jameson doesn't mention), but he didn't make them the basis of a historical theory, which is what really separates him from Marxism and what Jameson can't seem to get past. For Jameson, Bourdieu's emphasis on culture as a means of social distinction "tends to confirm so-called cultural intellectuals in their complacency about the significance of culture and to reassure them that to point to cultural capital is enough to exempt them from any further mention of capital itself" (576-577). Significantly, this is not really a criticism of Bourdieu himself but of his potential bad influence on other, presumably young and impressionable, intellectuals. This argument is strangely evocative of certain reactions to the current New Yorker cover scandal; it's as if Jameson were saying, "I mean, I get it, but what are the less enlightened going to think?"

There also seems to be a basic confusion about the historical dimension of Bourdieu's thought. Short answer: there isn't one. Jameson writes that "the emergence of a given champ or discipline must itself be theorized in terms of what [Niklas] Luhmann called differentiation, as a historical dynamic of modernity and capitalism, a process of the autonomization of specific differentiating practices and their emergent self-theorization; and in that sense Bourdieu's is only one of the numerous theoretical formulations that have sought to name and conceptualize this epochal development" (579). Except that Bourdieu, unlike Luhmann apparently, does not link his notion of autonomy of social fields explicitly to the rise of capitalism or to modernity, even while he borrows their terminology: he is, in fact, an old-fashioned Lévi-Straussian structuralist in his belief in deep social structures of behavior, among them the accumulation of capital and the desire for distinction, which are transhistorically present, behaviors which modern economic structures like capitalism can nonetheless either enable or control (and in Bourdieu's view they overwhelmingly favor the former). This foreign periodization is then extended by Jameson's reference to "the dedifferentiating movement of postmodernity [which] began to reverse this structural trend of modernism and thereby to throw a retrospective light on it. I want to suggest that in that respect theory is itself a form of thinking (and writing) that aims to focus the relationship-in-difference of the various autonomous fields" (580). Postmodernism (a term "rarely invoked in France," Bourdieu points out somewhere) is being made to do an awful lot of work here, and one questions whether the logic of late capitalism, if it exists, has really done anything to weaken the logic of practice, in practice.

Clearly Bourdieu is an unsettling presence for Jameson, as I think he is for many Marxists. Here's a passionately written but ultimately not very convincing portrait of the sociologist as knight of bad faith, which ironically might better serve to characterize Jameson himself:

An agonizing self-awareness shows up in virtually all of his works, nor is it redeemed by the incomparable reflexivity the sociologist brings to his situation, in 'distinction' from the relative detachment of his various garden-variety imitators. For populism is not an adequate squaring of the circle for confronting the Godel's law of social class (no foundational position outside the system) or of evading the ideological vision of society as one endless struggle for recognition that can never be resolved, a struggle that must last as long as human history itself, assuaged by no communist utopias let alone liberal Rawlsian ones. Such a conception of the social then ultimately condemns the sociologist to the same dilemma as that faced by the most implacable of social critics and satirists, namely, that of the satirist satirized, that of the position from which one is entitled to look down with glacial indifference at those interminable mortal struggles. It is a tragic sense of life Max Weber most memorably formulated when he characterized his own vocation in the words, "I want to see how much I can stand." (577-578)

I don't know about "agonizing self-awareness": "unwarranted self-confidence" might be more damaging as a description of Bourdieu's trademark tone. And Jameson's claim that Bourdieu fails to escape the contradictions of his position as an analyst of the social world, to be credible, would need to engage with Bourdieu's own concerted struggles with this dilemma (cf. Homo Academicus, passim). But again there's this sense of Bourdieu, and the sociologist in general, as an unfathomable nihilist, accepting the general Marxist critique of disinterested liberal reason but unwilling to drink the Kool-Aid on the dialectic. The real key here seems to be the phrase about "utopias," which I know is something Jameson's written a lot on recently, and the end of the essay attempts a reconciliation with Bourdieu (Hunter seems to have kind of fallen by the wayside), or really with the younger intellectuals Jameson feels he has influenced, by trying to see his empirical enquiries into institutions as a possible foundation for a new conception of Utopia, one that is relentlessly critical of commodification without imagining anything substantially different taking its place. Bourdieu's "cynical reason" is seen by Jameson as a "successor to Adorno's omnipresent positivism; perhaps we might say that cynical reason is a positivism with a mission, with a politics or even a metaphysics":

For if Adornian positivism was merely a taboo, an injunction to leave out the thinking of what is, cynical reason is a whole program for justifying this view of things. It consists in acknowledging that everything is a commodity; in viewing history, where it has any meaning at all, as a series of conspiracies motivated by interest; and finally in denying that anything else, any positive change, is possible (on the grounds of human nature). … The 1960s attacks on incipient commodification were powered by a vision of radically noncommodified social relations that seems to be unavailable today, rendering the critique of commodification at best a rather complacent affair and at worst a kind of implicit glorification. But perhaps it is time, if cynical reason is somehow historically unavoidable, for a Utopian reading of it … This is to say that cynical reason forces us into a more complicated conception of interest than we were obliged to have in an idealist or spiritualist age and not least into rethinking collective interest in new ways (that also reinvigorate the older notions of ideology) … Indeed, with the onset of what we call postmodernity and globalization, institutions seem to have taken the place of individuals or at least of our illusions of individuality, at the same time dispelling all the older categories of success and revolt or ambition and alienation. The suspicion of institutions has traditionally turned, not merely on bureaucracy as something unremittingly felt to be legalistic and inhuman, if not corrupt, but above all very precisely on their inevitably conspiratorial procedures … The Utopian dimension of institutions is however their collective existence and structure. Insofar as conspiracy theory celebrates this collective dynamic and seeks to replace the categories of individual agency with collective ones, it mark a first imperfect step in that direction. Cynical reason, meanwhile, while seeming to strip acts and events of their appearance of disinterestedness, might well pave the way for some ultimate awareness of collective self-interest as such. (580-582)

This actually reads like Jameson tentatively stepping out from under the Adorno umbrella and towards Bourdieu's camp (or champ), albeit reluctantly and with much rhetorical display. It amounts to an admission that what Adorno's negative dialectics were to the academy of the 60s and 70s — the guiding spirit of nicht mitmachen [not playing along] which Bourdieu himself has spoken of feeling in those days — Bourdieu's "cynical reason" may be to the 00s and 10s, a shift Jameson deplores but is willing to work with as part of his commitment to actually existing intellectual life. I'm skeptical, as ever, about the claims for postmodernism (as a creative or critical ethos) or postmodernity (as a historical or economic or epistemological state), but I think Jameson's right about the turn away from ideological and towards institutional critique having potentially beneficial effects for our critical generation's collective political sense, even if it sacrifices a good deal — even all — of the 60s vision of "radically noncommodified social relations" Jameson is nostalgic for.

Anyway… I'd really welcome responses from those of you who know more about Jameson than I do. He can be very hard to follow on the sentence-by-sentence level sometimes, so I'm afraid I may have missed subtleties of his attack on Bourdieu that a more experienced Jamesonian could illuminate.

Liberal Aesthetics

[Hi all — I found this draft of an essay in an old notebook from last year, typed it up, and am wondering now how I feel about it. Basically it's about why I feel uncomfortable with the usual liberal defenses of art in general, and "morally objectionable" (or "amoral") art in particular, and how I think we need better ways of defining the relationship between art and morality (not that I have any positive proposals on that score myself). If anyone feels like wading through it at any point I'd appreciate your thoughts. I'm not really thinking about publishing it or anything, it's more like a working-through-thoughts sort of a piece.]

LIBERAL AESTHETICS

Definition of Terms

By "liberals" here I mean a set of people whose subsets include: (a) people with liberal political views, (b) people who attended “liberal arts colleges” or have aesthetic and ideological dispositions represented by same (which includes many of the faculty and graduate students in the humanities at big research institutions with all kinds of political affiliations), and (c) people who do much of the work of appreciating and encouraging aesthetic culture on its own terms, who are interested in whatever the arts present us with to be interested in, and thus have a liberal attitude toward the field of art itself. Of course not everyone in the set meets every one of the qualifications listed above, but for the purposes of my argument here two out of three — or even a particularly strongly held version of any one — are good enough. (I should also maybe point out that I consider myself covered by all three.)

I take it that a main tenet of the “liberal” attitude toward art is that we should treat art-works as we would treat people: with tolerance, faith, respect, etc. (Both approaches, which were developed in the nineteenth century and refined in the twentieth, are responses to increasing cultural diversity, in the interpersonal and in the aesthetic spheres simultaneously.) In practice, this means that we allow art-works to represent people in ways we disagree with — ways we would not treat people or would not like to be treated.

For the liberal, then, we have a kind of moral responsibility toward art-works, but those works have no moral responsibility themselves: what they depict can be the worst of human behavior, or be unrecognizable as human behavior, and still be great art. Examples of this abound: books by the Marquis de Sade or Vladimir Nabokov, films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, paintings by Kara Walker, songs by Notorious B.I.G. or 50 Cent.

So, we treat art-objects as we would treat people insofar as we respect them, protect them, attempt to understand them on their own terms, and believe they have some value in themselves which is not merely the human use we want to put them to. But we treat them differently in not holding them morally responsible — not because they contain no moral content or have no moral agency (as is the case with a non-artistic object like a cup or a stapler) but because the moral contet is not strictly traceable back to a human subject. If Picasso were to say, “I hate women,” we could hold him morally responsible; if his art says it, or seems to imply it, we could still take offense, but to denounce it on those grounds alone — or even to argue with it — we would be accused of “missing the point.” Or speaking the wrong language.

Excursus on Entertainment

Entertainment is a little different, because it is assumed to have a more direct relation to sociology, and to “the culture.” Thus, if a Hollywood movie contains what seems to be a racist idea, we not only feel no compunction about saying so and objecting, but we treat it like an empirical datum in a larger investigation: one more piece of evidence that our society is (or can be) deeply racist. When we do this we are not treating the entertainment-object like a person in one way (i.e. we don’t respect its intelligence enough to seek a more complicated explanation of its utterances than “it’s a product of its culture”) — but we are treating it very much like a person in another, by holding it morally responsible.

A puzzle arises here: art, which is largely assumed to be of importance for its humanistic value, is in important ways less available to human understanding than so-called “entertainment,” which in being aesthetically debased, commercially compromised and thus subhuman(istic), becomes the true reservoir for human values and emotions.

It’s good that we allow ourselves to get angry at the television: but bad that, in the productions of mass entertainment culture, there’s no one specific individual subject to hold morally responsible. Who exactly are we angry at, when an idea we don’t like appears in a movie? The actor who says the line? The writer? The director? The audience, who tacitly accepts it, especially if they laugh or cheer? The distributor? All of these people share in a mass moral failing: which means, every moral failure in a piece of mass entertainment has the character of a conspiracy, or a systemic injustice. I had this feeling watching the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which Jeremy Davies’ previously pacifistic character finally shoots and kills a Nazi, for example, upon which the audience cheered. I felt disgusted, but I wasn’t sure who to be angry at — Spielberg? Davies? The audience? WWII? This is the sort of moral omnidirectionality that deranges activists and revolutionaries, turning them into paranoiacs; it's what makes cynics and nihilists (and certain types of art-lovers). It's also the play-form of our liberal sense of helplessness to many gross injustices and social problems even in the "real world."

Context-Expansion and Moral Conversation

The easy way out of this problem of assigning moral responsibility is to shift our contempt towards “the culture,” whatever that culture may be in any given case. It’s as if we were saying “the thing that really bothers me about this racist idea is not that it was expressed (that it exists) in the mind of an individual fellow human, but that it was found acceptable, both by the artists that produced it and the audiences that responded to it.”

Problems with this reaction:

1. It assumes that we have knowledge of the multiplicity of “cultural” responses — whether articulated or not — to a given moral lapse. Just because a statement or action has been allowed to pass does not mean that it has been “accepted.” This is exactly where the accounts of sociology can help, in showing how response to statements are determined by a variety of facts.

2. It lets the moral actor(s) off the hook, in ways that both deepen their crime (by making it symptomatic of a widespread societal sickness) and trivialize it (by taking it out of their hands and finding the true meaning of the action in a framework for which neither he nor anyone else can be held morally responsible). This is a signal problem with the logic of political correctness: as a moral reproof, it’s fairly light, since it basically amounts to saying: “You are using words that, in a context larger than the one you have in mind, are offensive.” This move of expansion of context is also a hallmark of deconstruction, and has roots in Freudian discourse I think.) But it’s also unusually enraging, both because it can be seen as condescending (“you don’t know enough to know what you’re saying”) and because it’s essentially unanswerable (except if you deny that any such larger context exists, i.e. that anyone could conceivably be offended). Most moral reproofs admit of objections on their own terms (???) but accusations of political incorrectness rarely do.)

For moral conversation, we need to conceive that both parties are sensible of the meaning and likely repercussions of their statements and actions, or at least that the meaning of one’s statement can be redescribed by the other with a minimum of context-expansion. But the corollary to this is that we cannot dismiss the other’s points by supplying a context — most often a “cultural context” — which explains or excuses them in ways the other would object to. (How do we know if they object? We ask them.) This is the rhetorical move common to liberals and conservatives, continental and analytic philosophers, etc.: filling in the story to help make sense of what seems like an unreasonable (or sometimes, too reasonable) point of view.

This “filling in the story” is also what we do with entertainment — fairly, I think. It’s a coping mechanism that helps us filter the extraordinary amount of media material we receive daily: we fit it into fixed ideas we have about “our culture.” But we act a little differently towards art. Perhaps because there is so much less of it in our lives (a situation that is entirely deliberate — most people intentionally limit their encounters with art, and this is by no means a bad thing), our concern is not to place it in the story of ordinary culture but to hold it apart — at first, at least. (The art-historicizing impulse, if it occurs, should kick in later, once the object has been humanly appreciated.) We want to see what this, just this, will tell us about our lives (I might add “just our lives”). We open it up not to a story about “culture” but a story about “life” (and yes, they’re really the same thing; but not in our minds they’re not).

This leads naturally to the auteur theory/glorification of the author in the liberal arts: for if experience of art is first and foremost a “human” (not a “cultural”) encounter, then we need a person on the other end. And understanding about ourselves will be a function of understanding about her or him. No such reciprocity is needed for the experience of entertainment (or popular culture, which I might redefine here as “art understood culturally”). (Of course, one could change one’s relationship to a work of entertainment simply by looking into it a little more deeply. This is what the Cahiers du Cinèma crowd did with Western directors like John Ford, for instance; and in doing so they made movies which perhaps were interesting to intellectuals (such as Adorno) for what they revealed about American cultural codes into works of art which were interesting for what they revealed about John Ford, and his artistic decisions. They changed the viewing of these films from a form of surveillance into a form of conversation.)

A conversation has a moral basis: we speak expecting to be evaluated, and listen expecting to evaluate. But it also, necessarily, suspends evaluation: I’m going to wait to judge what you say until I’ve given you the chance to explain it to me (or I’ve had the chance to explain it myself). Capital-A Art is like this kind of conversation in that we imagine it to be an encounter with another person who gets the benefit of the doubt; but it is unlike it in that we will happily suspend moral evaluation forever, as we will not in interpersonal situations. We respect the piece of art (or, if you like, the artist) enough to let it speak, and to give it time to justify itself; but we are satisfied (perhaps even more satisfied) if the justification never comes. Hence the contemporary approbation for art that is undecidable, ambiguous, that can be “read” and approved more than one way — and the ensuing tendency to theorize that all art is like this.

The Humanities and Disciplinary Non-Reciprocity

What is still more symptomatic is the attendant rush to judgment on the entire context that surrounds the art: as if art were necessarily a mystery, but the apparatus of culture were plainly transparent. This if, of course, an abuse of techniques and theories developed by sociology and Marxism to explain cultural phenomena which once seemed baffling and unexplainable (e.g. alienation, reification, reproduction of the social order, false consciousness, etc.) but which now have the worthy obviousness of academic clichés. But it’s an amazingly widespread and firmly entrenched abuse: to the point that anyone who wants to care about art, and to hold it apart from what might be term more generally “entertainment,” almost has to insist on this transcendental quality of art to escape theory; and on the capability of theory to explain literally everything else.

This may be part of what is isolating the Humanities, and English in particular, from other academic, and especially scientific, discourses: its eagerness to steal concepts from all over the disciplinary map to frame its discussion of what is ostensibly its subject (literature), coupled with an extraordinary resistance to allowing that subject to be reappropriated “reductively” by other disciplines to their own ends. (Exhibit A: English professors’ frequent hostility to the sociology of literature, and to moral philosophers who make use of literary examples, like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum.) In this way, the academic literary establishment is now more insular and quasi-religious than ever: it will absorb and scrutinize every datum the world throws up, while refusing scrutiny on other people’s terms.

Conversations with Conservatives

Such scrutiny might look like this: What is art good for? How does it benefit society? Do the assumptions that lie behind it make sense any more? Is it really worth devoting your life to? These are questions we as liberals are quite right to ask about the church or some particular political or social institution, but they now seem to us retrograde and unhelpful, even idiotic or philistine, when applied to art and literature. But they are, in fact, the very questions that will be asked, and answered, by conservatives who'd like to replace the kinds of "daring" or "avant-garde" art many liberals enjoy with something more morally responsible, and we are inclined to think, aesthetically debased.

There's a larger ideological issue here: have we, as liberals, since the sixties, invested more in people as they are (i.e. identity politics) and literature as it is (i.e. as it appeared as an institution in the postwar period) than in human possibility, or the possibilities of the human endeavor called literature? Ironically, perhaps, “progressive” politicians for the past twenty to thirty years have been more focused on safeguarding current freedoms (freedom of expression, the right to privacy, Roe v. Wade, affirmative action) than on advancing the liberal agenda any further. This is why the liberals sometimes appear today as the conservatives must have in the sixties: fearful, reactionary, pessimistic, unwilling to trust in the possibilities of the future.

And the liberal relation to art since that period shows some of the same tendencies: a burgeoning “avant-garde classicism” (comforting, in that it reiterates that sixties-era countercultural values are still a motivating force in art), a hardcore commitment to auteurism (in the form of ever more expansive and fulsome appreciations of “true artists,” retrospectives, etc.), and an accompanying skepticism toward all schools and movements trying to advance new aesthetics, which are all too often labeled "reactionary" or simply "retro." Presiding over it all is a sense that it’s not quite clear what art as a social practice is for — the inevitable outcome of a philosophy that strenuously maintains that it can be "anything" — but that it should nonetheless definitely be protected, at all costs.

This liberal attitude — of insisting on protecting what you refuse to define — is both sensible and kind of odd, if you think about it; and it must be particularly odd-sounding to people (let’s call them, paradoxically, conservatives) who find the overwhelming majority of this so-called art that is to be protected completely unpleasurable. And much of it, not to put too fine a point on it, immoral. Furthermore, how frustrating must it be, if you're a conservative who takes issue with a particular art-work, that not only don't liberal art-lovers share your feeling that this given piece of art is objectionable, but that they don’t even admit that morality comes into it — that art even can be considered objectionable? That these liberals will immediately launch into a defense of free speech, or condescend to you, or ridicule your response as unsophisticated? If they’re feeling particularly philosophical, they might explain that they just don’t see art in those terms — that, for them, art is valuable as an expression of human imagination (or maybe of the principled rage of the underclass) and, as ugly or repellent as it might initially seem, we art-lovers have a duty (they might not say “duty”) to try to understand it and see what it can tell us. To which you, if you’re feeling provocative, might ask: Well, why treat art this way and not people? Why spend a lot of time and energy trying to resolve why the word “CUNT” scrawled on a canvas is justifiable when you won’t look into my words (viz., that I find that canvas offensive) long enough to form a more coherent account than “he’s not used to it” or “she doesn’t understand”? Why does art get the benefit of the doubt and not audiences?

I would argue that we as liberals need to have a good answer to these questions — or a few good answers. We can’t just argue that they’re irrelevant. In trying to protect the aesthetic from the theoretical pressures of moral or political ideology, we risk perpetuating a more insidious ideology of practice. We need to find a way to defend art as art — that is, as a common human behavior fundamentally different from other kinds of human behavior, and learnable on its own terms — without recourse to any transcendental, uncriticizable category.

Big old lovable bear

Walter Benjamin called Theodor Adorno "Teddie." Cute!

Two Elegies for Delmore Schwartz

By two of his former students:

My House
By Lou Reed

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
my house is very beautiful at night

My friend and teacher occupies a spare room
he's dead, at peace at last the wandering Jew
Other friends had put stones on his grave
he was the first great man that I had ever met

Sylvia and I got out our Ouija Board
to dial a spirit, across the room it soared
We were happy and amazed at what we saw
blazing stood the proud and regal name Delmore

Delmore, I missed all your funny ways
I missed your jokes and the brilliant things you said
My Dedalus to your Bloom, was such a perfect wit
and to find you in my house makes things perfect

I really got a lucky life
my writing, my motorcycle and my wife
And to top it all off a spirit of pure poetry
is living in this stone and wood house with me

The image of the poet's in the breeze
Canadian geese are flying above the trees
A mist is hanging gently on the lake
our house is very beautiful at night

Our house is very beautiful at night
our house is very beautiful at night
Our house is very beautiful at night


A Momentary Longing To Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead
By Kenneth Koch

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posing for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.


It's striking how similar these portraits are, and how both of them express a Yeatsian desire to communicate with Schwartz's spirit. The difference is that Reed is successful in speaking to Delmore — even has him living with him in his house! – while Koch only longs for contact.

It's also interesting to think about how Koch and Reed both cast Schwartz as the epitome of "seriousness," a role he also often claimed for himself (as in 1938's "Father and Son": "My father … taught me to be serious"). And I don't think I'm stretching it to say that the concept of "seriousness" is key for both of them: Koch making an effort to alleviate the monumental seriousness of mid-century American poetry (or rather, as he claimed many times, to give it a new definition of seriousness), and Reed, when he wasn't just trying to get or stay famous, to bring literary seriousness to rock music. In doing this both take enormous risks (Koch of being called trivial, Reed of being called pretentious) which ultimately pay off in some of the most exciting art of their respective fields and eras, at least in this blogger's opinion. What's funny is that both could have derived inspiration for these respective missions — in which they are, as it were, tunneling toward each other from opposite directions — from the same figure, although in different decades and in different cultural circumstances.

In "My House," Reed is settling into his self-consciously "mature" phase, which entails not only writing literary lyrics but also withdrawing from New York City, settling down with a woman after a few decades of bisexuality, and reclaiming the literary heritage of seriousness he had jeopardized by making records like Rock'n'Roll Animal. Schwartz is thus invoked like a guardian angel at the start of the record: "a spirit of pure poetry" to guide his passage back into the land of critical prestige, not so much Dedalus to his Bloom as Virgil to his Dante.

Koch's poem centers even more obviously around the question of seriousness, the value of the seriousness of culture, which of course was a more of a live issue in the "late Forties" (cp. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I'll be trying to wrestle with next week) than it seems to us now. Schwartz, in the scene recalled, shows a 40s intellectual's cautious approval of popular culture ("Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture") which nonetheless must still be assumed to spring from a reputable highbrow source ("Walt Kelly must have read Joyce"). Schwartz's uncertainty about the cultural status of Pogo somehow fuses, heartbreakingly, with his uncertainty about his parents' past happiness; and the fact that he is putting either of these questions to a student is, in itself, somewhat sad. Koch, of course, can't answer either of these questions for him: only Walt Kelly and Schwartz's parents can, all of whom are, momentarily or permanently, absent.

But the important thing is not just that Delmore Schwartz was depressed and tortured while Koch is/was saner and happier; I want to resist reading the poem reductively, according to the "Modernism = grumpy and conflicted / Postmodernism = well-adjusted and jouissant" fallacy. The starting point, after all, is the fact that Koch now "want[s] to hear him tell me something sad but however true." Leaving aside any temptation to read biography into it (oh why bother: the poem was written in 2001; New York had been attacked by terrorists and Koch was dying of leukemia), we see that Koch is nostalgic for Schwartz's "rueful" perspective, his High Modernist values, though that nostalgia is as tentative and uncertain as Schwartz's appreciation of Walt Kelly once was. I'll stop myself from going any further than that, for now, but what I'm interested in is the way both works interweave a sympathetic portrait of Schwartz the man with Schwartz — who might also, if we want to push things still further, stand in for "the university poet" as such — the bulwark of seriousness and bearer of cultural capital.

Can we have our revolution and eat our Whoppers too?

Will the real American Left, please stand up?

From Peter Brooker's New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, The New Modern (which is surprisingly not really about fiction OR New York at all, but the multiple ideologies of a non-homogeneous and constantly changing Left throughout the 20th century, with writers and books as case studies sprinkled in). I really liked the section and really helped articulate some of what I've been thinking about:

On the one hand the New Left's enthusiasm for the new media and popular culture, its sympathies for minorities, its involvement in Third World and ecological issues, its "dispersed…multi-centered" narrative as Tallack describes it anticipated much that has become characteristic of the Left Agenda of the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, life within the all-embracing, ever-expanding walls of mass culture and American military and economic hegemony in this late capitalist phase has posed increasingly taxing problems of intellectual autonomy and political and artistic strategy. This was the problem raised in his own terms by Irving Howe, and more awkwardly for the New Left, by a figure such as Adorno and the School of Social Research whose critique of the Enlightenment and of mass society was being popularized on American campuses at precisely the moment this society was effecting a contrary erosion of distinctions between high and low culture. How could a hatred for US capitalism and a love of American culture coexist? Another, and in the US this has appeared to have a stronger appeal, was supplied by versions of post-structuralism, since this offered a simultaneous critique of false totalities (as of capitalism) and of violent hierarchies (as of high and low culture). Hence, latterly, we might think, the attraction of the vocabulary of deconstruction, whose metaphors of decentring and hybridity, of the borderline and the margin, so aptly describe the Left's attempt to sustain a critical position within and without late capitalism.

This is the second thing of Peter Brooker's I'm reading. I like him lots.

World Series

Georg Simmel's writing is full of ideas; and while it seems like you should be able to say this of any philosopher or theorist of note, I think GS gives an unusually strong feeling of an active mind deluged with possibilities, searching for at least a temporary way of disgorging them in a useful and convincing manner. His training was in Neo-Kantian philosophy, and he is unapologetically a systems guy, but he was just as firmly committed to the practice of cultural criticism, and to the development of what he termed a "German philosophical culture." To this end, he wrote about money, art, literature, clothing, women's liberation, space (paging Adrienne!), meals, and the history of philosophy — all of which makes him a perfect poster-boy for the intersection of Modernist literature (or, if you prefer, culture) and theory.

It also tends to make his essays rather messy, and of course Simmel's not traditionally one of the "master thinkers" of the 20th century (unless you ask Jeff Nunokawa); his methods and opinions are a little too idiosyncratic, and many of his conclusions are far too tied to the political and historical circumstances of his time and place (Germany during and preceding the first World War) to be usable in other connections. He goes in big for German nationalism, for one thing, and his conclusions about the differences between "male" and "female culture" are today not much more helpful than the average stand-up comic's. But despite all these flaws, he's a great and inspiring writer, I think, and, more perhaps than his contemporaries, seems like a Modernist himself in his passionate concern with culture from a slight remove, and always with a weird mixture of missionary zeal and caution.

Appropriately, then, I find the Simmelian concept that's having the most afterlife with me is that of the "cultural series," which he formulates most cogently in this passage from his 1911 essay "On the Essence of Culture":

"We are accustomed automatically to label as cultural values the great series of artistic and moral, scientific and economic achievements. Perhaps they all are; but they are certainly not so by virtue of their purely objective, as it were autochthonous significance. The cultural significance of any particular achievement is by no means equivalent to its significance within its own series as determined by its specific nature and purpose. For example, a work of art is subject to quite different criteria and norms when considered within the sphere of art history or aesthetics, than when its cultural value is involved.

"Each of these great series can be regarded on the one hand as an end in itself, so that each individual member of them constitutes a value which is proven directly by being enjoyed and giving satisfaction. On the other hand, they can all also be included in the cultural series, i.e. considered in respect of their significance for the overall development of individuals in society at large. Standing on their own ground, all these values resist inclusion in the cultural series. A work of art aspires only to perfection as measured by purely artistic criteria … Their contribution to the development of human personality, i.e. their cultural value, is a different matter." (43, italics mine)

This is an extremely useful encapsulation of the problems swirling around l'art pour l'art and the historical efficacy of art and literature which converge so noisily and excitingly in the Modernism of the 1910s and 20s. What's important here, for me, is not that Simmel synthesizes the approaches but that he insists on their fundamental incommensurability. Despite the enormous differences in their writing styles and philosophical allegiances, I actually detect a lot of Jacques Derrida in Simmel: a similar insistence on irreducibility, the impossibility of either incorporating art into culture "without remainder" or of separating the two spheres completely and conclusively.

Without digging too deep, I think it'll be obvious that Simmel's view of culture as a multiply divided sphere has resonance for the Modernists and their situations. Marianne Moore's "Poetry" comes to mind first: "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in / it after all, a place for the genuine." This is saying more than "most poetry is trivial, but some of it is worthwhile": it's saying, at least in its extended context, that "all this fiddle" is what poetry is, and that "the genuine" will never be found unless we can find it within the fiddle. Moore is perhaps more of a liberal humanist than Simmel, but like him she shies away from any claim that "reading poetry will make you a better person." What it will do is make you a better reader of poetry; and with that skill in your back pocket, you're on your own to hunt out the genuine. As Moore ends it: "if you demand on the one hand, / the raw material of poetry in / all its rawness and / that which is on the other hand / genuine, you are interested in poetry."

The distinction, then, is between "artistic and moral, economic and scientific achievements" — each of which we must preserve in their own distinctness from the others — and what these achievements are for, the use-value of culture as it were. One could say that Pound and Eliot's problem was that they tried to ignore this distinction, to collapse the multiplicity of cultural series into one epic narrative of civilization's decline (and potential rebirth), though I think Eliot was a lot more tortured by the aporia than Pound was.

Lastly, I'll say that part of why this "cultural series" idea appeals to me has something to do with the process of reading for Generals itself. Following the cultural series that is "Modernism" — let's leave aside the subseries "American," "British," and "French" for now — is not exactly equivalent to following that of "literature," or "history," or even "poetry." Each series includes some of the same materials, perhaps even with the same interpretations placed on them, but the important part is that they reach them and proceed from them in decidedly different ways. The path that leads to Eliot from "French Symbolism" is related but fundamentally foreign to the path that leads to him from "late Victorianism"; and what to make of the longer trajectory that gets us there from Dante, or the Metaphysicals, or, as Edmund Wilson suggests, from New England Protestantism? When dealing with such lengthy series — Derrida, or Mallarmé, might call them "chains" — it's probably best not to try to over-intertwine them, or lay them out parallel, for fear of distorting or destroying the integrity of the individual series itself. But in order for the act of criticism to be worth performing at all, there needs to be some kind of space where they can come together, or where you can put them together, at least provisionally. That space, for Simmel, is called "culture" (and for Habermas, the "public sphere"?). For us, maybe "theory."

Of course all of this (my pontification, not Simmel's) is to some extent graduate-student navel-gazing (hello if you've made it this far!): the thing is to get on with your work, learn as much as you can about context in the broadest sense, and use what seems relevant in any given connection (the pragmatist approach). But I guess what I want to affirm here is why Simmel is now sort of a hero of mine: he's a proud non-specialist who resists being a universalist, but is nonetheless far from a nihilist. (As a matter of fact, the other philosopher he reminds me of most is Nietzsche.) The problem for Simmel was that there was too much stuff in the modern world — too many material objects, too many people, too much knowledge, theory, art, culture; not too much because in and of itself excess is deplorable (that's more the Puritan consciousness as diagnosed by Simmel's mentor Max Weber), but too much for any individual subject, even a highly educated and "cultivated" one, to absorb for him or herself. (In this attitude we might see a hint of self-pity; Simmel can be read as sort of a Modernist Henry Bemis.) Thus he saw most trends in modern life and thought as a way to either screen out or superficially synthesize the overwhelming plethora of series existing all around us.

It's this awareness of plethora, and strange mix of caution and exhilaration in the face of it, that makes me want to put Simmel forward as the model for a kinder, gentler critical theory: one which does not insist on a forcing of connections across cultural fields, or anyway recognizes the eternal difficulties of such connections,* but which allows that these connections are possible and desirable, are something which all but the most blinkered and limited human beings will want to do. And which, along with whatever expert authority it claims for itself and its own interpretations, maintains a trust in the capacity of other people to make these connections for themselves, given proper access to a wide enough variety of series, and enough time.


(* I'm dancing around the figure of Adorno here, who strikes me in many ways as Simmel's evil twin. )