C.S. Giscombe's Emancipation of the Dissonance

The latest issue of Cincinnati Review is out, and it includes my essay "Emancipation of the Dissonance: The Poetry of C.S. Giscombe."  The essay surveys Giscombe's career, and starts like this:


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The title of C.S. Giscombe's book of prose poems, Prairie Style, calls to mind the school of architecture that first fluttered to life in the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; reached its flat-roofed zenith in Frank Lloyd Wright's work during the First World War; and passed out of favor after the mid 1920s. But if the title makes us try to draw an analogy between Giscombe's art and Wright's, it misleads us. A better analogy comes if we look to what the more advanced musical talents were up to while Wright was drafting blueprints in Oak Park. Consider Arnold Schoenberg's reflections, from the 1926 essay "Opinion or Insight," on the direction classical music had taken for composers of his generation. "Until our own time," wrote Schoenberg, "composers were always extremely cautious about how the succession of harmonies were arranged, at times even carrying things to the point of using only harmonies whose relationship to the tonic and their 'accessibility' to it (further underlined by convention) was easy to grasp." Harmonies were always structured in relation to a dominant pitch, and the attentive, or even semi-attentive, listener could hear the coherence of the music. Over time, though, "the proportion of elements pointing to the tonic became ever smaller, as against those pointing away from it," ultimately leading to what Schoenberg called "the emancipation of the dissonance" — that is, to a kind of atonal composition where dissonance "came to be placed on an equal footing with sounds regarded as consonances." Giscombe's Prairie Style is, in some significant sense, as atonal as the music of Schoenberg: it creates moments of coherence, but also welcomes moments of dissonance, when the expository eloquence of sentences and paragraphs falls apart.


Musical audiences often want to know just why a composer would abandon tonality, and composers in the atonal tradition have given a number of answers, many having to do with the hatred of cliché and the need to renew conventions. A deeper answer, though, and one more analogous to what I take to be Giscombe's motives, comes from one of the last great atonal composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen said that his refusal to give his compositions clarity, wholeness, and accessible coherence by subordinating the parts to a dominant tonality was in essence a reflection of his ethical stance. To take the elements of music and "use them all with equal importance," rather than subordinating some to others, was nothing less than "a spiritual and democratic attitude toward the world." Stockhausen would no more subordinate musical parts to the whole than he would sacrifice individual lives to an abstract cause, or expropriate one person's labor for the benefit of another. For Stockhausen, the emancipation of musical dissonance is, at a formal level, a kind of parallel to the emancipation of the oppressed in the world. It doesn't actually free anyone, of course, but it exemplifies a way of thinking that could have larger ethical implications.


Giscombe's emancipation of narrative dissonance has goals similar to those of Stockhausen, and gains a great deal of weight and significance by addressing questions of race via unconventional means.


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The rest of the essay (ending with a Duke Ellington quote I've wanted to use for years) is available in Cincinnati Review Vol. 7 #2, Winter 2011.

Nasty, Brutish, & Short — but Funny: Hobbes on Comedy

The leaves are dying, people, but the semester itself refuses to die, sprouting new, snarling dragon-heads of academic minutia like the Hydra of Greek legend just when I think I've finally put the beast down.  What to do, in such a situation?  Grade the papers, correct the galley proofs, and haul oneself to the meetings?  Hardly.  My usual plan involves popping on my noise-cancelling headphones and listening to bootlegs of old Mitch Hedberg comedy shows.  Maybe it's because of this that I've been thinking a little about the theory of comedy.  Or maybe it's that I'm scheduled to speak in February on a panel about wit and contemporary poetry at the Louisville conference on literature since 1900 (Joyelle McSweeney will be there talking about Harryette Mullen, and Mike Theune will have something to say about wit and poetic form, so don't let my presence put you off coming).  Whatever the reason, I've been thinking about the nature of humor, and have been having bit of a disagreement with that most unlikely theorist of humor, Thomas Hobbes.

Most people who talk about humor theory seem to break the field down into three different areas: incongruity theory, relief theory, and superiority theory.  Incongruity theory is pretty much what you'd expect it to be: the idea that humor comes from strange, unexpected juxtaposition.  Kant is one of the bigwigs in this area, claiming, in The Critique of Judgment, "everything that is to excite a lively laugh there must be something absurd (in which the understanding, therefore, can find no satisfaction)."  You know this sort of thing: since we’re talking about philosophers, let’s use an example involving that soft-handed tribe: Monty Python’s famous skit involving philosophers playing soccer:

You know: there’s no why to the juxtaposition: it’s just weird, inexplicable, and incongruous, and the understanding, questing for an explanation for the juxtaposition, can find no satisfaction.  I’m actually not sure the skit holds up all that well, since between the filming of the skit and our own time there’s been a considerable diminishing of the notion that crossing high-culture with pop-culture involves incongruity.  So if you didn’t laugh, you can blame postmodernity.  But you get the idea.

Much of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thinking about laughter also involves incongruity, albeit of a somewhat more specific kind: his famous notion (propagated by his best advocates, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White) being the idea of “transcoding” — of juxtaposing the high or sacred with the low or profane, especially when the low and profane involve bodily functions. 

Relief theory is probably best exemplified by Freud, who argued that humor involved violating social taboos, giving us a sense of relief by letting us say the unsayable.  Lenny Bruce-style profanity falls under this category, as do many gender or ethnicity jokes, which allow the presentation of forbidden stereotypes in the special context of comedy.  This sort of thing can, of course, go badly, badly wrong, as it did in Michael Richards’ career-ending n-word gaffe of 2006.  It’s because of the potential for it to go so badly wrong that I’m restraining myself from adding a couple of my favorite examples (one ending “but it’s always money with you people” and the other ending “no, man, I never found the head” and both bound to offend someone, that being the nature of taboo-shattering humor).

Thomas Hobbes looks at things differently: the author of Leviathan was the pioneer of the superiority theory of humor, which maintains that comedy and laughter are found in the “sudden glory” we feel when we experience “some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.”  There are certainly plenty of instances when this is true.  I remember taking a bunch of my student on a field trip to Chicago’s Millennium Park (it was for a class on the art and literature of Chicago I was co-teaching with an art prof, and we were doing a unit on public sculpture).  A couple of students took advantage of the early-September heat to walk into the reflective pool of Jaume Plensa’s Crown Fountain, a very postmodern, interactive piece of public art that encourages such things.  As the first student stood in the pool, she was blasted by one of the small jets of water that suddenly shoot up from the pool, getting pretty wet in the process.  Her friend thought this was hysterically funny — and it was, in a very Hobbesian way: suddenly, the observer, in her dryness and prudence, was superior to the soaked friend.  Just then, though, the laughing student got doused by one of the cascades that come from above, ending up much wetter than her pal, who hooted in appropriately Hobbesian derision at the fate of her hapless former mocker.  The unexpectedly superior position is the position from which we laugh.

Hobbes extends his theory a bit, too, saying that we can feel a “sudden eminency” not only with regard to others, but to our former selves: so, for example, if we were trudging along down a slippery, muddy hill, and suddenly started to slide down, but managed to maintain our balance and arrive quite suddenly at the end of the slippery slope, unsullied and no longer having to trudge tediously on, we’d laugh at our sudden unexpected superiority to our former position.

This is all well and good, but it’s far from exhaustive.  I’d like to propose an amendment to the Hobbesian theory, an amendment I’m deriving from two things that happened to my wife, Valerie, yesterday, both of which she found hilarious, and neither of which can quite be accommodated by the Hobbesian theory.

First, there’s the matter of Valerie’s morning commute.  She takes the mighty Metra train into Chicago every morning, but yesterday, due to some weird mechanical fiasco, the trains on her line were running very late.  She stood in the cold waiting for her train to arrive, but when it did, it didn’t stop.  Instead, in some attempt to get the commuter rails back on schedule, it blew by her at incredible speed, actually blowing her hat off her head.  This left her late and laughing at her predicament, with an emotion that could best be described as “well, fuck me, then.”  Something similar happened later in the day, when she returned home.  The sunroom in Stately Archambeau Manor is equipped with old-school blinds, the kind that roll down, and can be a bit temperamental, wanting to roll back up rather than stay where you’ve put them.  Valerie took a long time to carefully adjust and balance the blind so it would stay at the exact level she desired.  Then, as she turned her back and began to walk away, the blind rolled up at incredible speed, made a kind of Don Martin of Mad Magazine series of sound effects (FWAP FWAP FWAP, among others) and somehow, in defiance of the laws of God and physics, tore itself loose from its bearings, unrolling all the way to the floor like some kind of red carpet laid in front of a visiting dignitary, and finally cut loose from its roll altogether, drifting elegantly to the floor.  Shortly thereafter, the wooden roll itself dropped from the window, hitting the ground with a clunk and frightening the cat.

From my perch on the sofa this all seemed quite hilarious, in a strictly Hobbesian way: I hadn’t just invested my time in setting the blind just-so, so I was superior to She Whose Labors Had Come To Naught.  But Valerie laughed even harder than I did, once again feeling the humor of “well, fuck me, then.”

So here’s what I think was going on.  I think there’s a strange, pseudo-Hobbesian effect that comes into play when we experience a sudden sense of superiority not to someone else, and not to our former selves, but to ourselves in the present moment, a kind of doubled-consciousness.  Maybe the best way to get at it is to turn not to Hobbes, but to Jung.  Jung argued that one of the ways people deal successfully with difficult situations is to gain a certain detachment from their situation, without losing their sense of being within that situation.  Of the emotions produced by problematic situations Jung said “one certainly does feel the affect and is shaken and tormented by it,” but, he continues, “at the same time one is aware of a higher consciousness looking on which prevents one from becoming identical with the effect, a consciousness which regards the affect as an object, and can say ‘I know that I suffer.’”  So there’s the part of you that is upset at having fallen on your ass into the mud, with everyone looking on and laughing.  But, if you are able to develop a little distance, and not just suffer, but watch yourself suffer, you participate in the same Hobbesian sense of superiority, and laugh along with the giggling observers.  Sure, you’re humiliated.  But you’re also aware of your humiliated self as if from the outside, and you feel superior to the humiliation even as you experience it: you play a kind of emotional chord, with one note of suffering and one of the “sudden glory” of Hobbesian superiority.

We might call this the “well, fuck me, then” effect.  And, as a habitual faller-out-of-hammocks and dropper-of-meatballs-down-the-front-of-my-shirt, I can assure you, developing the doubled consciousness of the “well, fuck me, then” effect is a skill well-worth having.  It even got me through the second half of a speech I was giving in front of several hundred people after my glorious academic robes had been shat upon by an errant seagull.

Poetry, Politics, Obscurity

Despite what the picture may lead you to believe, I haven't been interviewed by Ed Murrow.  No, people, it was Johannes Göransson who did the interviewing.  Johannes is an interesting guy, and I think we're the only two people concerned with contemporary poetry who have lived in both Lund, Sweden and South Bend, Indiana.  He asked me about poetry, the public sphere, and the politics of obscurity, among other things.  Anyone fool enough to want to read my answers can do so over at The Argotist. They also have more interesting interviews, with Charles Bernstein, Iain Sinclair, Marjorie Perloff, and Andrea Brady, among others.

Hothouse Gorgeous: Two New Books!

Rejoice, people!  Simone Muench and Philip Jenks' Disappearing Address, a book of collaborative poem-letters, has just hit the bookstores.


Here are the comments I wrote for the book jacket:

“Dear Leatherface,” “Dear Danger,” “Dear Film Noir,” “Dear Chanteuse of the Abattoir for Young Girls” — if you loved Simone Muench’s Orange Crush as much as I did, you’ll recognize in these titles from Disappearing Address the return of her great animating idea: femininity excited by danger.  Muench collaborates with Philip Jenks here to return to the theme in a series of letters to villains from horror films, to abstractions, to icons of pop culture like Morrissey or the high school dance.  The exploded syntax of the letters makes for a kaleidoscope of the sublime and the mundane — Coca-Cola, Pop Rocks, and the Day of Judgment jostle one another in a kind of phantasmagoria.  There’s wit here — “Dear Nothing” begins “why’d you have to cut out & make everything come back,” “Dear Obtuse” begins “Be straight with me” — but the best of the poems revel in novel images and a diction for which the only possible term is “hothouse gorgeous.”

And here are some comments from various Distinguished Worthies:

As darkly luxurious and ferociously driven as either Jenks or Muench is singly, this hydra-headed address is passion squared, an uncanny vesper "scribbled to the abyss” intoned in a duet so tuned as to create a third even more intense, even more longing, even smarter, even sadder, even scarier voice. Though the Gothic cast — Morrissey, Michael Myers, a vampire, a deer on the North Dakota highway that appears like a recurring nightmare “jut-rotted…luring us to the wilderness,” — is glared at with fierce knowing (parlor games put the fun back in funeral here), the attention is sharp, without camp, and soul-piercing. —Robyn Schiff

This collaboration feels entirely seamless, as though it were not a collaboration at all but the work of a single, virtuoso poet with a very broad range of imagery and a finely tuned sense of how diction can coalesce varied materials.  There is some of the surreal bounce we expect of collaboration but very little in the way of bi-polar diffusion or poetic ju-jitzu contending egos can produce.  This is wonderfully contemplative work, and though it's hard to tell when Muench might begin or Jenks end, there is throughout, but particularly in the sequence addressed as letters to poets, a broadened set of concerns about poetry, especially, that these two poets seem to have negotiated in the act of joint (or should I say, mutual) composition. A genuinely wonderful collection. —Michael Anania

Two poets not only challenge each other  to write a poem, but challenge each other for the voice of the poem as well as its place and possession – speech and location being the double meanings of address. This vibrant, loving book opens with “Dear Dear,” an introductory address to each voice acknowledging the presence of the other in the poem and, through the collaboration, the action of each in the other’s processes and practice. The book then proceeds in a collection of epistles through numbered sections called “Rooms,” in which the poets confront or accommodate their co-existence. Collaboration is only one of the issues challenging the poets. Ronald Johnson’s epigram on the opening fly pages to “invite the eye/ invade the ear” sets the objective of an inextricable bond between eye and ear. The poets persuade each other whether the poem is going to be for the eyes, a descriptive narrative, or is the poem to be a performed event of itself, or will it have both?  The collaboration’s passage through seduction, co-existence, stand-off and outright hostility is echoed in poems about relationships, poems of loss, institutionalization, and some wonderfully fun bitchiness. This makes an exciting poetry of wild and rapid changes for the reader. The only poem without an addressee is “Haptics, Not Optics.” This is the best statement of both their arguments in one poem, and both artists perform his and her case slyly, beautifully as one. A moment that, for all its sadness, foreshadows the conciliatory calling of the names that ends the work and the address, “I”, reveals its fragments answering to the name.
—Ed Roberson

In other news, John Matthias' Trigons, from earlier this year, is now available in the United States.  Here's what Shearsman Press has to say about the book:

Trigons  derives its title from an obscure Roman ball game mentioned by Petronius in Satyricon. The word also has meanings in the fields of music, astrology, gemology, architecture, poetics, and comic book illustration, all relevant to this book that is sub-titled "Seven Poems in Two Sets and a Coda." Trigons shares something of the same spirit as Matthias's two most extravagantly inventive experimental sequences, Automystifstical Plaice and Pages: From a Book of Years. In an essay on Matthias's cycles and sequences from the 1970s through the present, Mark Scroggins has said thatTrigons explores the poet's "usual historical and literary obsessions, this time revolving much around the Second World War" through a series of surprising juxtapositions like that between the Nazi Rudolph Hess and his contemporary the English pianist Myra Hess, or the discovery made during the book's composition of yet another John Matthias, this one a British composer and neurophysicist" who becomes a shadowing doppelgänger in this book in which both music and neurology play a highly significant role. Trigons "shows no lack of the high spirits that have underpinned so much of Matthias's work, but its puns, jokes, and intentional incongruities are underpinned by a deep seriousness, a pervading sense that while history continues to produce connections in inexhaustible richness, it does so in counterpoint to a continual savage, tragic wastage of life and potential. Trigons moves quickly—indeed, leaving behind the careful concern for closure that has marked Matthias's earlier 'pocket epics'—and the poem seems at every moment to be on the verge of shaking itself to pieces with its own concatenated momentum, like one of Jean Tinguely's self-destructive kinetic sculptures. And this is not a quirk of Matthias's poetics: as the Englishman Haines says in Ulysses, 'it seems history is to blame.' Experiences of grace, of happiness, are ephemeral moments in the relentless, remorseless, temporal succession of heterogeneity that is human life and culture." In the end, the book manifests a "fierce impatience, a barely-concealed rage at the all-too-rapid movement of the human spectacle."

Both books can be dialed up on Amazon.  You know you can't live without them!

Dancing Like David Byrne: Apollo Performs Dionysus

A while ago I went a bit overboard in examining the phenomenon of the hipster in terms derived from Nietzsche's study The Birth of Tragedy. Long story short, my argument was that the hipster was, at the core, an Apollonian rather than a Dionysian figure — that is, a figure devoted to self-possession, critical distance, and individual identity, rather than being devoted to the loss of selfhood in an ecstatic fusion with others. The hipster doesn't want to, or is unable to, join in with large groups. He or she just can't quite surrender the self to the whole. But at the same time, I argued, the hipster also wants camaraderie and a sense of group-identity — wants, that is, some measure of Dionysian experience. This is why there is a recognizable hipster look, and recognizable hipster music and neighborhoods. But the hipster position is unstable: wanting to be part of a group but hating giving oneself over to a group is a complicated, fraught place to be. This is why we find hipsters hating on other hipsters for being hipsters: they yearn for group identity and despise it at the same time. Or so my story ran.

Today, though, thanks to some comments from Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, I've been thinking about a happier fusion of Apollo and Dionysus, a fusion to be found in the music of a band that meant a lot to me back in the 80s, Talking Heads, and the dancing of their frontman, David Byrne.

I've never quite been able to put my finger on the exact nature of the curiously affectless nature of much Talking Heads music. Certainly much of it comes from Byrne's singing, which is almost a kind of talking. He does little to give emotional quality to his delivery: dynamic changes are muted, there's little or no tremolo, and he doesn't run notes like an R&B singer. The flatness of delivery really stands out when you listen to the Talking Heads' cover of Al Green's "Take Me to the River" after listening to the original: Al Green glides into and out of falsetto, purr-growls like a cat, holds back and then releases energy, lets his words blurr at the edges, to where they become purely emotive sound. He even lets loose with a little James Brown at the end. In contrast, David Byrne mostly sort of narrates, with a slightly breathy quality. When he does go into a kind of falsetto, it isn't driven by passionate intensity, as in Al Green's falsetto of barely-controlled ecstasy. Rather, it seems like Byrne's read an instruction saying "insert falsetto here," and followed it, for no compelling reason. I don't mean that this is a bad thing — the affect of affectlessness is the genius of the band. This affectlessness comes across in the arrangement and instrumental performances, too. Talking Heads keep the tempo slow and steady, and you could pretty much set your watch by the drum beat.

But you didn't want to talk about music. You wanted to talk about dance. Okay! Consider Byrne's dance in the video clip above. The person who posted it to Youtube considers it "funny," and I suppose it is, in that there's a kind of incongruity to it, and incongruity is at the root of a lot of humor. But I'm interested in the particular kind of incongruity. On the one hand, the dance signals "performance" and "rock show" mostly by the largeness of the movements. This is stage stuff, giant, choreographed, and meant for a big crowd in a big venue to notice, focus on, and collectively get into — good Dionysian stuff. On the other hand, there's a kind of distance between the dancer and the dance: Byrne moves as if he's not emotionally committed. There are no Freddy Mercury operatics, there's none of that Mick Jagger sex-chicken strut. There's a sense of performance, but not performance of emotion. The excessive symmetry of the movements, their regularity, and the relative lack of energy all create a sense that the dancer stands above the dance, rather than enters into it and emotionally commits. All of this combines to put the idea of performance in quotation marks.

There are a number of ways one could talk about this. "It's defamiliarization," we might say, echoing Victor Shklovsky, "it's a way of highlighting convention by tweaking it a bit." True enough. But it's more than that. It's also a matter of taking a Dionysian ritual — the rock concert, where the audience sways, butt-shakes, and sings in unison, enjoying its togetherness and unity-in-fandom — and combining it with a kind of Apollonian self-reserve. We don't just lose ourselves in the performance, because the performer himself hovers a little above his performing self, and asks us to do so, too. We enjoy the loss of ourselves in the crowd and the music, but we also watch the front man hold himself back, and we emulate that. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the weirdness of this holding-back in the Dionysian context of a concert takes us a little out of the moment, and we stand back and analyze it, even as we participate in it. We get to be Apollonian observer-critics even as we also get to be Dionysian participants. It's no wonder Talking Heads was the intellectual's rock band: they let us worship our usual god even when we're in the realm of his rival, Dionysus.

Situationism and the Green Party

As someone once said, it's not easy being green, at least not in the United States.  Even here in Illinois, where the Green Party has had enough support to be an "established party," theoretically on a par with the Republicans and the Democrats, you run into all kinds of logistical difficulties when you try to support your party.  I'm not just talking about how difficult it can be just to get a yard sign from a party that has no money and few personnel.  And I'm not talking about the eye-rolling you get from Democrats who blame the Green's Ralph Nader for being the spoiler for Al Gore (for the record, I voted for Gore that time out).  And I'm not talking about the snickering of Republicans who figure you're some kind of birkenstock-clad deep-woods tree-hugger (my feet are too ugly for open-toed sandals, people, and I admire nature mostly on the Discovery Channel).  Nope.  I'm talking about the difficulties one runs into at the actual polling place itself.  Even with the Greens officially established in Illinois, and election officials legally bound to ask you whether you want a Republican, Democratic, or Green ballot, problems continue.  On several occasions  I've been told by election judges that there was no such thing as a Green ballot (not true).  Once, when someone behind me overheard this and asked the judge if the Greens were a real party, the judge told her that they weren't.  I don't think this was malicious: I think it just didn't compute, for this person, that there were more than two parties on the ballot.  I mean, a lot of people actually believe that the two-party system is constitutionally ordained, a permanent (if perhaps not always satisfying) part of the American political landscape.

And this brings me to why I think voting Green is a Situationist act.

Situationism — the movement we tend to think of as starting with the Guy Debord and the Situationist International in 1957 — had its roots about a decade earlier, in Sartre's essay "Pour un théâtre de situations."  Here, Sartre argued that what theater should do is, one way or another, to show "simple and human situations and free individuals in these situations choosing what they will be.... The most moving thing the theatre can show is a character creating himself, the moment of choice, of the free decision which commits him to a moral code and a whole way of life."  That is, theater, ideally, exists to break our sense of complacency and limitations.  It exists to kick us out of our sense that our hands are bound, and expand our sense of freedom and agency.  It's sort of down the same street as Brecht's thinking about theater: Brecht saw his own "epic theater" as something that, by breaking down narrative and the wall between the players and the audience, could wake people up from their spectator-stupor and make them active.  Sartre was a more conventional playwright than Brecht, but the goal was the same.  I mean, think of that moment in "Huis Clos" when the characters, who have been locked together in a room in hell, pull on the door and find, despite all their expectations, that it pops open.  They don't leave (out of fear, out of various psychological weaknesses that bind them to one another) and we, the audience, are infuriated.  We want them to go, and we're angry at them for refusing their own freedom.    We leave the show exasperated at their weakness and bad faith, and (ideally) we feel more fired-up about our own freedoms and possibilities.

That's the idea of the "situation" — it is the moment when we realize we are freer than we thought we were, and have more options than we thought we had.  This can be something very small ("I don't have to put up with that guy at work's bullshit anymore") or something large ("the King isn't really ruling by divine right — let's storm the goddam Bastille already!").  And whatever their disagreements with Existentialism may have been, the Situationists took the idea of creating such situations — not just in the theater, but in daily life — as fundamental.  Their main techniques were designed to take us out of pre-fabricated ideas and a sense of passive spectatorship. Consider détournement, in which one takes an existing cultural product (a comic book, say) and modifies it (replacing the dialogue with lines from Nietzche or something): we're clearly meant to get the sense that we are not mere consumers of culture, but can intervene in it.  Or consider the Situationist dérive, a kind of boundary-crossing ramble over a built environment, without respecting the prescribed uses for the various kinds of space.  This is meant to help us realize that we don't have to follow the ordinary paths, and use things as we are implicitly and explicitly told to use them.

So.  For me, voting Green is less about expressing a desire to save the trees and keep the water clean (though I believe those are good things to do) than it is about a desire to keep the Green Party on the ballot (you need 5% of the vote to do that in Illinois).  It's about creating an environment in which one realizes that the way things are now is not the way they have always been and must always be.  It's about creating a sense of expanded options.  It's about creating a situation.

Modernism and the Market

“He is one of those tormented spirits who seek in art the solution, not to the problem of success, but to the problem of their own being.” So said the critic Tadeuz Boy-Żeleński, writing about the great Stanizlaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. I know what you're thinking: “the great Stanizlaw Ignacy What-kee-what?” No, Witkiewicz isn't some hoax, or the latest literary persona projected by Kent Johnson's fervid imagination. Witciewicz — who also went by the name Witacky, as well as Witkas, Witkrejus, St. Witacky à la fourchette, Vitcatius, and Mahatma Witkac, among others — was a Polish modernist writer and painter, a prolific playwright, essayist, portraitist, and novelist, and a kind of eastern European Aldous Huxley, pioneering new explorations in drug-fueled consciousness (his specialization was peyote). Under-appreciated in his short lifetime, which ended with a tragic suicide while Hitler and Stalin were dividing Poland, he became an important figure to Polish intellectuals when he was rediscovered in the 1950s. If this were the 1980s, I'd say Witkiewicz was best known to American readers via Czeslaw Milosz's book The Captive Mind, which takes its premise about a magic pill that reconciled Europeans to the decline of their civilization from Witkiewicz's novel Insatiability, but since the end of the Cold War The Captive Mind seems to have slipped out of our collective consciousness. So I'm guessing Witkiewicz's works are terra incognita, even for people into the freakier forms of modernist literary and artistic expression. He was little more than a name to me until I started pawing through Daniel Gerould's Witkiewicz Reader, which has been sitting unread on my shelves for God knows how many years.


One of the best-known pieces in the book (if we can describe any of them as well-known outside of Poland) is the wonderful "Rules of the S.I. Witkiewicz Portrait-Painting Firm," a 1928 document lying somewhere in the territory between manifesto and business contract — a strange and little-visited country indeed. It's fascinating, because in it's strange, farcical way it shows the contradictory position of the modernist artist caught between two apparently irreconcilable forces: the power of the market to determine the nature of cultural production; and the assertion of the artist's necessary autonomy from all things save the dictates of his own imagination.


Even the title of the piece raises questions about the relation of art to the marketplace: a painter, after all, is meant to be an individual sensibility, but here the painter is presented as a firm, a collective business enterprise. In the text itself, we read about certain behaviors of the clients putting the firm in a bad mood, though, so there is some confusion about the nature of the business enterprise: is it a single, moody genius, or is it a business operation? It is both — because of the conflicting demands of artistic autonomy (be a genius! paint out of individual inspiration!) and of the marketplace (paint to order! produce something that sells, preferably on a large scale, and by systematic methods so as to guarantee quality and consistency!). As Witciewicz/Witacky/Witkas/Witkrejus/St. Witacky à la fourchette/Vitcatius/Mahatma Witkac knew, identity had to be plural and even contradictory under modern conditions!


The rules of the firm are quite precise, and include the following descriptions of the sorts of portraits produced:





The firm produces portraits of the following types:

1. Type A - Comparatively speaking, the most as it were, 'spruced up' type. Rather more suitable for women's faces than men's. 'Slick' execution, with a certain loss of character in the interests of beautification, or accentuation of 'prettiness'.

2. Type B - More emphasis on character but without any trace of caricature. Work making greater use of sharp line than type A, with a certain touch of character traits, which does not preclude 'prettiness' in women's portraits. Objective attitude to the model.

3. Type B + s (supplement) - Intensification of character, bordering on the caricatural. The head larger than natural size. The possibility of preserving 'prettiness' in women's portraits, and even of intensifying it in the direction of the 'demonic'.

4. Type C, C + Co, E, C + H, C + Co + E, etc. - These types, executed with the aid of CHO5 and narcotics of a superior grade, are at present ruled out. Subjective characterization of the model, caricatural intensification both formal and psychological are not ruled out. Approaches abstract composition, otherwise known as 'Pure Form'.

5. Type D - The same results without recourse to any artificial means.

6. Type E - Combinations of D with the preceding types. Spontaneous psychological interpretation at the discretion of the firm. The effect achieved may be the exact equivalent of that produced by types A and B - the manner by which it is attained different, as is the method of execution, which may take various forms but never exceeds the limit(s). A combination of E + s is likewise available on request.

Type E is not always possible to execute.

7. Children's type - (B + E) - Because children can never stand still, the purer type B is in most instances impossible - the execution rather takes the form of a sketch.

So there's the range: from Joshua Reynolds-style "prettified" idealizations, in the manner of the patron-driven world of eighteenth-century art, to the more "subjective" work of the contemporary genius, who offers us less mimesis and more of his own (sometimes drug-fueled) idiosyncratic vision. From Augustan prettiness to Romantic opium-dreams to Modern quasi-caricature, it's all there. But the important thing is that it's all a menu, a market-based system of ordering. The market makes all styles are available, even those of the self-absorbed dreamer, the figure we think of as ignoring the market. It's not the case that the producer of the paintings is totally disempowered in this system, though: in fact it is he who is dictating the terms of the contract.

Those terms include clauses designed to protect the delicate sensibility of the artist — a trait we think of as inimical to the demands of the marketplace. Here, for example, are some later clauses:

Any sort of criticism on the part of the customer is absolutely ruled out. The customer may not like the portrait, but the firm cannot permit even the most discreet comments without giving its special authorization. If the firm had allowed itself the luxury of listening to customers' opinions, it would have gone mad a long time ago. We place special emphasis on this rule, since the most difficult thing is to refrain the customer from making remarks that are entirely uncalled for. The portrait is either accepted or rejected - yes or no, without any explanations whatsoever as to why. Inadmissable criticism likewise includes remarks about whether or not it is a good likeness, observations concerning the background, covering part of the face in the portrait with one hand so as to imply that this part really isn't the way it should be, comments such as, 'I am too pretty,' 'Do I look that sad?', 'That's not me," and all opinions of that sort, whether favourable or unfavourable. After due consideration, and possibly consultation with third parties, the customer says yes (or no) and that's all there is to it - then he goes (or does not go) up to what is called the 'cashier's window', that is, he simply hands over the agreed-upon sum to the firm. Given the incredible difficulty of the profession, the firm's nerves must be spared.

Asking the firm for its opinion of a finished portrait is not permissable, nor is any discussion about a work in progress.

Inadmissable criticism likewise includes remarks about whether or not it is a good likeness, observations concerning the background, covering part of the face in the portrait with one hand so as to imply that this part really isn't the way it should be, comments such as, 'I am too pretty,' 'Do I look that sad?', 'That's not me," and all opinions of that sort, whether favourable or unfavourable.

The firm reserves the right to paint without any witnesses, if that is possible.

So we've got the isolation of the autonomous artist, alone with his genius, enshrined in the terms of a market-based contract: art is both autonomous and heteronomous (that is, based in a market system). Witkiewicz is out to have it both ways, or at least to point out how difficult the position of the artist becomes when he's supposed to be both autonomous and able to succeed in the modern marketplace.

Further clauses indicate the difficulty of the artist's circumstances under the double regime of autonomy and the market. Consider the following, and then consider how likely any client would be to agree to them, especially from a painter without great reputation:

The portrait may not be viewed until finished.

The technique used is a combination of charcoal, crayon, pencil and pastel. All remarks with regard to technical matters are ruled out, as are demands for alterations.

The firm undertakes the painting of portraits outside the firm's premises only in exceptional circumstances (sickness, advanced age, etc.) in which case the firm must be guaranteed a secret receptacle in which the unfinished work may be kept under lock and key.

The firm will, it seems, come to you. But only if you can replicate the private conditions of the autonomous genius, free from distraction, free from any input on form or medium, and any expression of desire for revision. You're the boss, Mr. Customer — just so long as we understand that the artist answers to no one.

In the end, there's an admission that the artist is not as empowered in the market as he might wish to appear: "Lacking any powers of enforcement," says Witkiewicz, "the firm counts on the tact and good will of its customers to meet the terms."

How, then, is the conundrum of autonomy and the market resolved? The artist becomes a kind of Blanche Dubois, and depends on the kindness of any stranger entering the studio with a checkbook.

Laureate du Jour

You know who's a good poet? Jesper Svenbro, that's who.

Notes on the Origins of French Literary Radicalism

During my first hour in the Hôpital X I had had a whole series of different and contradictory treatments, but this was misleading, for in general you got very little treatment at all, either good or bad, unless you were ill in some interesting and instructive way…. On the other hand if you had some disease with which the students wanted to familiarize themselves you got plenty of attention of a kind. I myself, with an exceptionally fine specimen of a bronchial rattle, sometimes had as many as a dozen students queuing up to listen to my chest. It was a very queer feeling — queer, I mean, because of their intense interest in learning their job, together with a seeming lack of any perception that the patients were human beings. It is strange to relate, but sometimes as some young student stepped forward to take his turn at manipulating you he would be actually tremulous with excitement, like a boy who has at last got his hands on some expensive piece of machinery. And then ear after ear — ears of young men, of girls, of negroes — pressed against your back, relays of fingers solemnly but clumsily tapping, and not from any one of them did you get a word of conversation or a look direct in your face. As a non-paying patient, in the uniform nightshirt, you were primarily a specimen, a thing I did not resent but could never quite get used to.
— George Orwell, “How the Poor Die”

I’m not sure what Zachary Bos has to do with “Republics of Letters,” the blog Dan Edelstein writes over at Stanford, but Zach recently included me in an email promoting Edelstein’s recent posts. In one of those posts Edelstein took up a position I usually endorse wholeheartedly — arguing that the idea of teaching literature as a national phenomenon is deeply flawed and limited. Edelstein’s got a point: I mean, teaching American Transcendentalism as if it were solely the product of American conditions (I’ve heard various codgers discuss Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in exactly these terms) has always seemed terribly blinkered to me. Certainly Emerson and Co. were just as much a late-blooming, provincial version of European Romanticism and German Idealist philosophy as they were the pure products of the American soil. Yet we persist in teaching French literature in the French department, and English lit in the English department where, generally speaking, it occupies a different wing of the curriculum than the American, postcolonial, and other Anglophone literatures. (One wonders if Edelstein’s solution — that English majors come over to the French department where he teaches for some courses — may be in some measure inspired by the frisson of fear running through language departments lately, a fear well justified by the recent philistine axing of all language departments other than Spanish at SUNY — Albany).

Anyway. While I generally endorse the position Edelstein has taken, I came across the piece at an unpropitious time. I read it over about an hour after getting off my commuter train, where my casual reading had been George Orwell’s Decline of English Murder and Other Essays, which includes the powerful little essay “How the Poor Die,” an account of Orwell’s 1929 stay in a French hospital for paupers, where he’d sought refuge during a particularly nasty episode of bronchitis. The essay makes much of the differences between the way English and French hospitals of the time functioned, and in it Orwell argues that all the advantage lies on the English side. The nature of the institutional differences seemed to amount to a difference in the degree to which individual idiosyncrasy was respected. Orwell could be quite critical of English institutions, but here he notes a sort of fundamental English decency, compared to a French institution where treatments were doled out in a one-size-fits all manner, by a medical staff that treated patients as standard units to be processed by a standard procedure administered by certified experts whose job was to go through the procedures, not tend to the individual needs — hence the feeling, expressed in the quote above, of being a specimen, not a person. The sense of disempowerment at the hands of a rigid, regulation-ridden system administered by merciless functionaries starts even before one enters the hospital ward, and is, to Orwell’s mind, distinctly un-English: “The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk,” he writes, “and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean.” (That the current hideous corporate fiasco we call the American medical system has become similar to this is worth discussion, but I’m headed in a different direction, and have had too much coffee to pause now).

What, you ask, does any of this have to do with the idea of national models for understanding literature? Well, this: while the idea of national literature is as full of holes as a rusted-out ‘67 Chevy truck fender, it does in some cases have merit. And this merit isn’t limited to the idea of a continuity of literary traditions within a nation (what Edelstein, giving due props to the idea he’s about to reject rejects, describes as the idea that “one must read Dante to understand Boccacio, Corneille to understand Racine”). No indeed. I mean, we can understand a great deal about a literary tradition by placing it in the context of the evolution of national institutions and cultural norms — norms of which I was reminded by Orwell’s piece.

In the case of French literature — and I’m speaking very fucking broadly here — I think we can only really understand the longstanding prominence of rebellious, experimental, and avant-garde literature with reference to two phenomena more prominent in French history than in the history of any other Western European nation: centralization and systematization. (Not that these are the only pertinent phenomena, but they’re big. Really big).

I suppose that if I had to live up to the standards of laying out a reasonably clear thesis to which I hold my students, I’d say my point is this: that much of the most canonical French literature since, say, Les Fleurs du Mal has been produced by people who assume all or some of the following: that culture and consciousness and subjectivity are so thoroughly governed that one must deliberately reject all structures and institutions to be free and authentic. I’d add, too, that the scale of this oppressive sense of things being governed comes about because of France’s particular social and political history (I know I first arrived at this thesis during one of my two-hour phone conversations with the poet Michael Anania, but I don't know which of us came up with it — probably that hybrid creature Archambnia).

Perhaps I can be forgiven for going no further back than the seventeenth century in my attempt to Explain All This in a Single Blog Post. It was in that century that Louis the XIII (well, really Cardinal Richelieu) began a series of reforms aimed at creating, from the patchwork of feudal realms, something like a unified political unit that could be called France. The process bore fruit during the 72-year reign of Louis XIV, who succeeded in forging a powerful national unity by reducing the near-independent feudal lords of France to his powdered and bewigged house-monkeys, gambling and tittering in apartments of Versailles while royally-appointed officials governed their lands and the King and his advisors crafted truly national policies that dominated the continental political scene. The situation couldn’t have been more different than what occurred in England at the time, when the English Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, and the Restoration of a chastened monarchy began a long process of devolving power away from centralized institutions (at the end of the period English financial reform, and the canny advantage aristocrats took of those reforms, led to a hybridizing of landed and financial elites utterly unlike anything that occurred in France, where centralized control of the aristocracy kept them much more separate from the bourgeoisie, with whose interests they eventually, and disastrously, clashed).

Anyway. We begin with French centralization — of politics, sure, but of other things as well. The black-hole level of gravity generated by the centralized court at Versailles meant that French institutional life, as well as art, letters, science, and much else became concentrated in the Versailles/Paris corridor. When the revolution came, it didn’t undo this centralization and return power to the provinces. Instead, the revolution meant the Englightenment-izing of centralized power: the rationalizing, encoding, systematizing, and standardizing of already centralized institutions. France became a highly regulated place under the revolution and, especially, under the Napoleonic regime, with its seemingly endless proliferation of petty officialdom, which was connected to the putting of the country on a long-term war footing, if I remember my lunch with the guys from the history department correctly. So you get highly regulated professions, standardized law, a continuation of the old, centralized royal way of administering art.

I’d offer, by way of an example of all this, the 1725 evolution of the old Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture (which served Versaille) into the famous Salon de Paris, which morphed in the 1880s into a professional outfit (i.e., an organization policed by approved experts in the field), the Société des Artistes Français. First came royal centralization, then an increasingly administered, standardized, and professionalized institution, which produced the (now generally sneered at) academic painting against which so many of the artists we now revere rebelled (by exhibiting in the then-reviled Salon des Refusés).

We can already see in the Salon des Refusés the spirit of rebellion against centralization and administration. There was, of course, a Royal Academy in England, but the painterly rebellions against it often took place within it (think of the Pre-Raphaelites, grubbing for R.A. wall-space and recognition while grumbling about the old guard). In this, as in so many other areas, English institutions tended to be less rigid, less theorized, and less powerful than their French counterparts. It takes (along with many other factors) a lot of constriction to produce an explosion like the one that occurred in French painting in the last decades of the nineteenth century. England — generally for better, but in this instance for worse — just didn’t have it, not to anything like the degree France did.

But we were going to talk about literature.

Okay, then. A few things that come to mind include:

— If you want to think about presciptivist poetics and the age of French absolutistism under Louis XIV, consider L'Art Poétique, by Nicolas Boileau-Boileau-Despréaux. This was the big, prescriptive thesis about how one ought to write poetry in Louis XIV’s France. In fact, he wrote it shortly after the sun king summoned him to Versailles to be the example for other poets. It had authority, people, of the sort you can’t get without the endorsement of a powerful and centralized political center behind you. Try being prescriptive about poetry in America today and see how far it gets you.

— The great nineteenth-century French littérateur Hippolyte Taine’s observations on the difference between English and French poetry in the mid-nineteenth century in his big-ass Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (four ponderous volumes, 1863-4). “The favorite poet of a nation, it seems, is he whose works a man, setting out on a journey, puts in his pocket,” opines Taine (in the van Laun translation). “Nowadays it would be Tennyson in England, and Alfred de Musset in France.” What’s significant about this? For Taine, it’s a matter of Tennyson being a poet of social consensus, and de Musset being a poet of rebellion against, and alienation from, a very different kind of society than that in which Tennyson found himself. “Does any poet suit [English, middle-class, capitalist] society better than Tennyson? Without being a pedant, he is moral; he may be read in the family circle by night; he does not rebel against society and life; he speaks of God and the soul, nobly, tenderly, without ecclesiastical prejudice… he has no violent or abrupt words, excessive and scandalous statements; he will pervert nobody.” Indeed, for Taine Tennyson’s poetry “seems made expressly for those wealthy, cultivated, free business men, heirs of the ancient nobility, new leaders of a new England. It is… an eloquent confirmation of their principles.” In contrast, Taine describes de Musset as writing in a country where all cultural life is centralized in the capital (in the French countryside “there are plenty of noblemen’s castles,” but “we do not find amongst them, as in England, the thinking elegant world,” which is exclusively in Paris). De Musset’s impetuous, sometimes scandalous, work, was loved by the alienated bohemians of Paris, shut out from the regulated professions. His “inner tempest of deep sensations” gave vent to their frustrations. Tennyson was a creature of his society; de Musset a rebel against his.

— Remember everything Walter Benjamin said about Baudelaire as an apache, at war with the wilderness of his city? That’s rebel stuff, from a man living on the margins of society. Baudelaire is haunted by religion (and needs to reverse it with his Satanic gestures); Baudelaire flirts with right-wing and left-wing modes of rebellion, and yearns for a space “anywhere out of the world.” His is outsider-rebel stuff, a turning against respectability and order. Tennyson he is not.

— I don’t think it’s an accident that Naturalism — the literary movement most dedicated to showing us how our actions are determined by social and biological forces larger than we generally know — has its greatest theorist in Zola, and its most consistent achievements in the French novel. These are people operating in an environment where one feels the squeeze of such forces reinforced by the power of systematic, regulating institutions.

— Rimbaud. Rimbaud. Rimbaud. I mean, the desire for a systematic derangement of the senses comes from somewhere, right? If you read Rimbaud’s very early verse, you’ll see it’s all about the restrictiveness of life, of schools, or church, or small town life, of his father’s military discipline. The running-off to peddle guns in Africa is really of a piece with the poetic derangement: it’s a Drunken Boat-like escape from rules, norms, and regulations.  I think the fact that so many in France felt a similar resentment of the governed nature of life accounts for his near-apotheosis in that country.  And for his popularity with young people everywhere (who tend to be subjected to power — until they get older and become both agents and objects of power, and drift from Rimbaud to The Wall Street Journal).

— André Breton’s Surrealism, with its identification of imaginative liberation and political liberation, shows us the urge to escape from social restrictions, and also the urge to escape from the restrictions of the alternative society proposed by the Communist Party. Watch him tapdance, in “Legitimate Defense,” trying to maintain the revolutionary stance of a party-line Communist and the notion that the imagination can’t be bound to the regulations of the Party:

Here… is the essential question he [the local Party czar] puts to us: ‘Yes or no — is this desired revolution that of the mind a priori or that of the world of facts? Is it linked to Marxism, or to contemplative theories, to the purgation of the inner life?’ This question is of a much more subtle turn than it appears to be, though its chief malignity seems to me to reside in the opposition of an interior reality to the world of facts, an entirely artificial opposition which collapses at once upon scrutiny. In the realm of facts, as we see it, no ambiguity is possible: all of us seek to shift power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat. Meanwhile, it is nonetheless necessary that the experiments of the inner life continue, and do so, of course, without external or even Marxist control.

Total revolution, revolution within the revolution, without end: this is the position of a man who has come to feel that the world is too governed, and the true and authentic life can only be found in the rejection of all institutions and all norms or forms or regulation.

— Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal — there’s a book where the only authentic people seem to be those who drop out of society utterly, the scavengers and beachcombers and lowlifes. When Genet imagines his mother as a detested beggar-woman, it’s a kind of abject-as-sublime moment: the outcast endures without (meaningless) status or (hypocritical) morals, and so becomes a figure for the one true fickering light of real humanity in the bogus and bullshitty world. Also, Genet likes showing us people in uniforms being corrupted — the revenge of the authentic outcast against the representatives of what is taken to be the falseness of an overly-policed society.

— I’m pretty sure we can see much of the formerly-fashionable French theory that so thrilled American grad students in the 80s and 90s in this light: Foucault analyses the invasive power of institutions; Kristeva dreams of a chaos bubbling up to disrupt language; Derrida seeks the contradictions of apparently regular systematic thought; Deleuze writes of “lines of flight” out of orderly thought (and of the superiority of Anglo-American literature, which he sees as less structured than France’s more philosophical literature).

Is that enough? Too much? Well, you get the idea. It’s not that other countries don’t have their of experimental, anomie-heavy writers, but there’s a particular preponderance in France, and I think that preponderance can be explained, in large measure, with reference to the combination of two phases of French history: the absolutist monarchy and the institutionalization of the Enlightenment in the wake of the revolution.

Someday I hope to get around to writing about the whys and wherefores of those moments when segments of the English and American literary worlds turn to the French tradition of anomie for inspiration (the English 1890s; the American academy of the late twentieth century). But it won’t be today. I have a train to catch, and some Orwell essays to read.