Small, Local Festivals: Calder's Mobiles and the Significance of Formalism

It's probably a sign of my irredeemable logocentrism that, when I started to think about how I could describe my recent experience visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art's show of Alexander Calder's mobiles, I thought not of any particular mobile, but of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay "Les Mobiles de Calder," from Situations III. The essay defines a mobile as "a small, local festival, defined by movement and nonexistent apart from it," which isn't a bad place to start. In fact, the word "festival" gets at a couple of important things about Calder's mobiles: firstly, it gives a sense of them as collections of individual elements, the way festivals are living collections of large and small events held together in some kind of relationship; and secondly, it gets at the joyfulness of the things — an emotion not prominent enough in discussions of art. The people at the MCA understand the joy of the mobiles — in fact, the name of the show is "Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy." But one senses a little hesitation, maybe even a little condescension, in the way some art-types treat the notion of Calder's joy. "Some scholars," says Laura Pierson in her piece on the show in TimeOut Chicago, "have criticized [Calder's] works as too playful or simplistic and devoid of layered meanings."

The idea that playful joy is somehow beneath us makes me sad, since it's often just a sign of deep insecurity, of people afraid that lightheartedness might be taken as a sign that one is insufficiently cynical/worldly/critical of late capitalism/intelligent/full of deep sympathy for the wretched of the earth. (Trust me: I'm an art school brat, I've seen this kind of anxiety in artists, critics, profs, and especially grad students since I could first toddle along to gallery openings, gripping my mom's hand, in the early 70s). The other idea Pearson mentions — that Calder's art is somehow without meaning — points to a strange thing that's happened to art (or, at any rate, to prominent art, and the prominent discourse about art) over the course of the last few decades. If I had to name the phenomenon, I suppose I'd call it either a failure to understand the significance of formalism, or a return to some elements of Victorian aesthetics.

Let's come at it this way: consider Alexander Calder's father and grandfather. Each was a sculptor of some prominence in Calder's native Philadelphia. The grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, made some of the best-known pieces of Philly public sculpture, such as the statue of General Meade in West Fairmount Park, and the giant William Penn on top of City Hall. The father, Alexander Stirling Calder, also did statuary for City Hall, and made the Witherspoon Building Figures. In short, both of these Calders were creators of the kind of civic, commemorative sculpture that pigeons like to shit upon in public spaces everywhere. These guys were skilled in making forms, but they weren't formalists. Instead, they were informed by an aesthetics that said form should serve meaning (in this case, meaning of a pretty straightforward kind: "Billy Penn founded Pennsylvania, and you live in Pennsylvania: be proud of your state identity, and trust in Great Men like Penn and General Meade, whose like will guide us, the masses huddled beneath these great, dignified statues, in the future" and similar patriarchal/establishment bullshit). By the time the elder Calders were making their civic sculpture this kind of aesthetic was already being challenged in London and, to a much greater extent, in Paris, but the news hadn't really hit Philadelphia in a big way, at least not those circles willing to commission public sculpture. So the elder Calders were very much parts of what we think of as the Victorian way of thinking about art. The grand old critic Richard Altick gives a good, brief summary of this way of thinking when he writes (in Victorian People and Ideas):

The age's criteria of acceptable art are usually summed up in the term 'moral aesthetic.' The idea that art should teach and inspire as well as give pleasure was not new; it was, indeed, older than Horace's dulce et utile. But seldom had it been as established as it was in this period…. Poetry and painting supplemented the pulpit if they did not actually replace it. The early and mid Victorian emphasis was thus upon theme rather than expression, upon intention and substance rather than technique. The more pleasing a style was, the better; but style should never be so pleasing as to distract attention from content.

This is art at the service of morality — more specifically, it is art at the service of paraphrasable, specific moral messages. It certainly isn't the autonomy of art for it's own sake: rather, it's the heteronomy of art for the sake of something else (the moral message). But things, as I mentioned, had started to change, even as the elder Calders were scrubbing the pigeon shit off their newly-unveiled statues of generals. Aestheticism, and later some strands of modernism, were (for hugely complicated social reasons) freeing art to be for itself, taking the emphasis off message, and allowing the emphasis to settle on form. So the modernist tradition that young Alexander Calder, the Calder of the mobiles, found when he went to Paris as a young man was all about form, and this made all the difference.

Think about materials. Unlike his father and grandfather — who used Serious Materials like bronze and marble, because these were the materials suitable to Serious Civic Significance — our Calder was free to use anything that pleased him formally. "I like broken glass on stems, old car parts, old spring beds, smashed tin cans, bits of brass imbedded in asphalt," he said, "and I love pieces of red glass that come out of tail-lights." Of course none of this feels particularly liberating to us now, since art schools have been preaching about the infinitely variable materials for art for decades. But for Calder, the use of sheet metal, bits of broken glass, coiled wire, and the occasional coffee can was a step away from the practices of generations of family sculptors. It was a realization, long after Kant had claimed that an emphasis on prestige materials constituted "barbaric taste," that form could be primary, and that amazing form existed in the humblest of places. A broken wine glass is, after all, an elegantly incomplete and asymmetrical set of curves. I can think of a couple I wish I hadn't thrown out.

Just as the notion that form was primary set Calder free with regard to materials, it also set him free with regard to subject matter. Instead of weighty civic themes, he took to subjects that pleased him. Not coincidentally, these tended to be subjects of visual fantasticness, not moralistic seriousness: his early Calder Circus, for example, was just that: a small model of circus animals, performers, and sets, which he'd sometimes animate for his friends. And the sense of the primacy of form also set Calder, among many others, free from any bond to representation. Sometimes his stabiles look a bit like elephants or flamingoes (the big one on Chicago's Federal Plaza is even called "Flamingo") and the mobiles can look like seals or spiders, but ultimately they're nonrepresentational. As Sartre put it, Calder's mobiles represent nothing in the world, nor do they try to convey messages, "his mobiles signify nothing, refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are, they are absolutes."

It's this sense of signifying nothing and referring to nothing but themselves that seems to have put Calder in the doghouse of the art world in the decades since his death in 1976. Nathan Carter, one of the younger artists influenced by Calder whose work is also on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art show, tells us:

When I went to art school in the mid-’90s, having an interest in Calder or anybody from that particular generation was completely taboo. Most work at art schools is being made in relation to philosophy and psychology or things like that. You’re more likely to have a discussion about like, Hegel, than about the way something looks."

This is interesting, and it points to what I would call either a failure to understand the significance of formalism, or the return of elements of Victorian aesthetics. I think the neo-Victorianism is pretty obvious: when Carter was going to art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Art (Boston) and at Yale, art was as subordinated to its discursive meaning as it had been for the Victorians. A 'moral aesthetic' was all the rage, and just like the Victorians Altick describes, artists were oriented to "theme rather than expression, upon intention and substance rather than technique." Oriented, that is, to Hegel or psychology, not to how things look. Some things were different from the Victorian moral aesthetic — the particular themes, for example, were likely to be intended as challenges to norms of race, gender and (more rarely) class, rather than the kind of urge to be one's supposedly better self that were the substance of so many Victorian works. But the orientation to social message, and to discursive, paraphrasable, specific moral messages, and away from form, was similar. Think of someone like Barbara Kruger or Martin Firrell, and you'll get one idea of how this kind of new-moral-aesthetic-driven of art can work. (I am not saying Kruger and Firrell are bad artists, by the way — far from it — merely that they seem to operate under what Altick called a "moral aesthetic" rather than a formalist one).

I suppose one reason this kind of message-based art came about was out of a sense that formalism was somehow meaningless (that whole "devoid of layered meanings" thing), and that meaninglessness was somehow a bad thing. The "somehow" often seems to have to do with moral or political reasons: the idea being that formalism is, by virtue of its refusal to subordinate form to message-making, a kind of moral or political vacuity. Art, in this view, exists for critique. There's certainly an uptightness about inutility and beauty here, again reminiscent of the Victorians (not that such uptightness is always a bad thing — Victorian uptightness created much of the world we live in, for better as well as for worse).

Anyway. This view of formalism has always seemed to me a bit naïve. I mean, think about what Sartre says about Calder's mobiles. They "refer to nothing other than themselves; they simply are, they are absolutes" — this is actually important stuff. If the mobiles don't serve any function except to be themselves, then they aren't means to any end, they aren't instrumental. They're autonomous — and this matters. It means they put us in a position where we aren't treating them as means to something else, some goal we want to achieve. We're distanced (relatively, if not entirely) from our normal habits of thinking of things in terms of how useful to us they are. This is a moral stance, and in some profound sense a political stance, too. In fact, it's a stance very much in line with what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno had to say in Dialectic of Enlightenment about the problem of modernity being the instrumentalization of everything, including ourselves. This kind of formalism works (because of and despite its unconcern with anything but itself) as an antidote to the instrumentalizing intelligence.

It's a different kind of moralism or politics than the message-based world of artists like Barbara Kruger and of the art culture that produced her. In a way, the 90s art-school/Barbara Kruger method accepts the premise that everything is rhetorical and instrumental, and tries to counter the rhetoric and instrumentalism of the powerful with rhetorical/instrumental messages of its own. That is, it counters one kind of propaganda with another. Formalism, in the Calder-as-seen-by-Sartre version, doesn't accept the idea of instrumentalism. Calder doesn't concede that everything is rhetorical, manipulative, and about achieving some end: he proposes a different way of experiencing the world, one where things aren't means, but absolutes in themselves.

So Calder's formalism is not without a moral dimension, though it is without a specific moralistic message. You could actually make a pretty strong case that the joyfulness of the work plays a role in the moral dimension of the work. Consider what Adorno says in his often-misunderstood essay "Is Art Lighthearted?" Adorno begins the essay with a quote from Schiller's Wallenstein about life being serious and art lighthearted. He then says that this attitude of Schiller's is typically bourgeois, in that it accepts the notion that most of life is alienating, but that we get compensated with free time where we can have some fun. The essay ends with the famous remarks about the difficulty of writing poetry after Auschwitz, and then makes a big claim that art in 1967, the year of the essay's composition, can only have very limited, qualified kinds of joyfulness, lest it show complicity with the culture industry's calculated, calculating high spirits ("the smirking caricature of advertising") or become merely "cynical" about the darkness of history. But there's a less-commented-upon middle bit, in sections two and three of the essay, in which Adorno makes the case for joyfulness in art. Check it out:

Still, there is a measure of truth in the platitude [from Schiller] about art's lightheartedness. If art were not a source of pleasure for people, in however mediated a form, it would not have been able to survive in the naked existence it contradicts and resists. This is not something external to it, however, but part of its very definition. Although it does not refer to society, the Kantian formulation "purposiveness without purpose" already alludes to this. Art's purposelessness consists in its having escaped the constraints of self-preservation. It embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom.

And he continues a little later:

What is lighthearted in art is, if you like, the opposite of what one might easily assume it to be: not its content but its demeanor… This confirms the idea expressed by Schiller, who saw art's lightheartedness in its playfulness and not in its stating of intellectual contents… art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings.

So: joyful form has a significance, as does the demeanor of the work of art, apart from any specific thematic content. The significance is the expression of an aspiration towards freedom from the ordinary constraints of life (including, I suppose, the constraint of treating everything in a utilitarian way, as a means to an end). I can't think of a better example of the kind of work being discussed here than Calder's mobiles.

We can even begin to see a further significance to the mobile's materials here. Consider Adorno's comments on Mozart from a little further on in the essay. Mozart, says Adorno, gives us a joyful, harmonious music, seemingly unconnected with the dark historical situation around him. But that very harmony is a kind of dissonance, precisely because it is out of whack with the unharmonious world around it. Mozart's "harmony sounds a dissonance to the harsh tones of reality and has them as its substance. That is Mozart's sadness. Only through the transformation of something that is in any case preserved in its negative form" does his music accomplish something significant, says Adorno. That is: the harmony of the music isn't saccharine, because we think of how unlike the world that harmony is. We don't only hear the joy of the music — the very joyfulness of the music reminds us of how the rest of the world doesn't live up to that joy.

Okay. On the one hand, we could concentrate on Calder's form here. That is, we could say that looking at the beautiful forms of the mobiles, and their graceful motions, provides us with a similar push-and-pull of harmonic joy and dissonant sorrow. We see the mobiles and are filled with their joyful harmony. But then we remember how the world is so rarely this happy and serene, and we can think of how heroically Calder works to overcome all of that unhappiness and give us this joy. But on the other hand, we could talk about the materials of the mobiles in this context. They're made, mostly, of sheet metal and rivets. These are materials we associate with industry, with factories and high-rises, as well as with the military, with warships and tanks. When we see them in the mobiles, we think of how Calder is out to negate the normal use of these materials as utilitarian means to gain money, or to kill. We see that he has accomplished what Adorno called "transformation of something [here, the military-industrial complex] that is in any case preserved in its negative form." It's all a matter of taking these specific materials and creating out of them joyful, harmonic forms.

This kind of significance of formalism seems pretty straightforward, but somehow it got lost in much of the thinking in art schools and in what we call the art world during those years when Calder and his generation were, in Nathan Carter's words, "completely taboo," and when the scholars to whom Laura Pierson points found Calder "devoid of layered meanings." And if you want layers, Calder's mobiles have got layers. I mean, we've barely scratched the surface in talking about a moral or political meaningfulness to the experience of their formal beauty. There are other kinds of significance, too.

Let's go back to Sartre for one of these other kinds of significance. Looking at a mobile as it moves slowly through the air, Sartre observes that "the movements of the object are intended only to please us, to titillate our eyes, but they have a profound, metaphysical meaning." This metaphysical dimension comes from the nature of the movement itself. As Sartre puts it,

In [Calder's] mobiles chance probably plays a greater part than in any other creation of man. The forces at work are too numerous and too complicated for any human mind, even that of their creator, to foresee all possible combinations. For each of them Calder establishes a general scheme of movement, then abandons it; the time, the sun, the heat and wind will determine each particular dance.

There's an order to the pieces, a harmony or dance, but it isn't a schematic one, or a predictable one. There is overt balance, but it is asymmetrical and ever-changing and not under the control of a guiding intelligence. The branches of the mobiles — sometimes setting one large object in balance with many small sub-branches and little objects, sometimes creating the illusion that things are connected where they aren't — are like systems opening up to little sub-systems, orders coming into being and then shifting into apparent disorders. Parts that seemed subordinate become important, elements that seemed to coalesce suddenly disperse. Sartre sees this as a kind of dialectic between arbitrariness and order, saying that while Calder's "one aim is to create chords and cadences of unknown movements" his mobiles are nevertheless

…almost mathematical combinations and the perceptible symbol of Nature, squandering pollen and abruptly causing a thousand butterflies to take wing and never revealing whether she is the blind concatenation of causes and effects or the gradual unfolding, forever deferred, disconcerted and thwarted, of an Idea.

Sartre sees the "metaphysical meaning" inherent to the pieces as a metaphysics that holds out the possibility of total disorder, or of total, Hegelian order. For me, though, the point of reference wouldn't be Hegel, but Gilles Deleuze. The evolving chords and cadences of the mobiles seem to echo Deleuze's rhizome, in that they create a structure in which things come together at odd angles, and in which we can follow lines of flight out of an apparently fixed order into something new. I mean, you could stand in the middle of the big room at the Museum of Contemporary Art and watch these combinations cohere and disperse with a big, open-mouthed smile on your face until the security guards begin to suspect you're tripping on something. The mobiles have that kind of metaphysics, layered on top of the moral or political significance that also comes in their joyful forms.

Since we're talking about metaphysics, I think the story Calder used to tell about one of the foundational moments of his way of seeing is important. One night, when Calder was a young man serving in the Merchant Marine, he found himself alone on deck at dawn, at precisely that moment when the sun and moon were balanced forces in the sky. On the one hand, the saw a dull, red disk of the sun, and on the other the bright, hard, cold whiteness of the moon. Around him was the featureless sea, becalmed, and on the deck beneath him nothing but a coil of rope. As he put it in his autobiography:

It was early one morning on a calm sea, off Guatemala, when over my couch—a coil of rope—I saw the beginning of a fiery red sunrise on one side and the moon looking like a silver coin on the other. Of the whole trip this impressed most of all; it left me with a lasting sensation of the solar system.

Three circles, each balanced in visual significance, but each entirely different, and all of them in some kind of large motion in relation to the others. The moment struck him, and stayed with him, and we can see in the coiled wires, and in the colored circles and blunted triangles of his mobiles echoes of this moment, when he seemed to feel most keenly something about the asymmetry and motion-inflected temporary harmonies of the world. There's a visual epiphany, an insight into the structure of the cosmos, in that moment, and it's a metaphysical insight Calder explored again and again. I think it matters, too, that this was a ship made of rivets and sheet metal, devoted to commerce and war and power — because this is the world that (to use Adorno's words about Mozart) is "preserved in its negative form" in the mobiles.

It's sort of amazing to me that things as profound and beautiful as Calder's mobiles could become taboo in art schools, and dismissed as merely decorative objects without significance. You'd have to forget a lot about how to look at things to come to that conclusion.

Cambridge Report

It's been a few days since I've been back from Cambridge, where I was speaking at a conference on the late, great Swedish poet-critic, Göran Printz-Påhlson, but it's been too much of a holiday weekend to blog. Since I've been back it's been nothing but sweating down the bike trails with Team Slow Ride, lounging in the hammock, trekking to the zoo with my wife and daughter, trying to get the beach sand out of my hair, and hanging with friends at the BYOB Mexican joint while they regaled me with tales of their trip to Thailand. And there were fireworks. But I'm back at the computer now, people, and there's no avoiding my comments on the Cambridge caper. Here, in mostly chronological order, are the Observations of the Intrepid Traveller.

Heathrow. It's not just jet-lag that makes Heathrow seem so strange. It's the category-defying nature of the place. I mean, first-world airports tend to be of two kinds: the sleek, modern, clean sort (think Chicago-O'Hare, or Amsterdam Schipol, or whatver they've built in China this week), or the overtly beaten-down and desperately crappy (think LaGuardia, or Rome's Fiumicino). But Heathrow sort of fakes you out. If you arrive at Terminal One, it seems sleek and modern enough at first, but as you make the long schlep toward the exit, it slips into a Frayed 1970s mode. Then, as you continue on and downwards toward the tube hook-up, you go through a short passage of Swinging Sixties Gone to Seed, before emerging into a long tunnel that sould be labeled The Museum of Decayed Linoleum, certainly dating from about 1950. Luckily, this is as far as I ever have to go, though I'm pretty sure that a hundred yards on I'd have found the original airport of Roman Britain.

The Frickin' Shire or Something. That's about all I have to say about the English countryside between London and Cambridge. Later, when I was having dinner with Andrea Brady, she called it "overtly benevolent," which seems about right. But something in her tone made me think she shared my view that it's all so pretty that it should be treated with suspicion. I mean, don't you sort of think the kindly old woman bringing you cider or scones will be screaming for your blood at night once the crowd has come to burn you in a giant wicker man in some holdover druidic ceremony? Maybe that's just me.

Cambridge. I lived in Lund, Sweden, which is also a medieval university town built around a big public square, so my first thought about Cambridge was "Lund, if Lund were populated exclusively by German tourists and guys who look like Stephen Spender in white linen suits riding bicycles." (As to the hazards of riding bicycles while wearing white linen, hold on. I touch on this more when I get to my meeting with a publisher). I did manage to get out of the academic zone, visiting poet Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns) in his house, which seems to be made up of several old row houses knocked together and filled to bursting with books. He proved beyond doubt that you can find very good Turkish food for a party of twelve in Cambridge on a moment's notice. He also proved how much one could accomplish before email, when he showed me the program for the first Cambridge Poetry Festival, an invention of his back in the seventies. There must have been eighty poets from all over. As a guy who's organized a few literary festivals, I can tell you there's an amazing amount of what may dad calls "ass-grind and agony" involved in putting something like that together.

The Conference: Afternoon. This was an interesting event, not just for what was said (and any event where the Sorbonne's very own Jesper Svenbro is speaking will be interesting for what is said), but for the nature of the event. As the Berengarten pointed out as he began his remarks, this wasn't just an academic event, though it was surely that. It was also a poet's event; and what's more, it was an event for family and friends of Printz-Påhlson, who'd turned up in force. The world needs more events like this: it adds a little gemeinschaft to the generally gesselschaft world of conferences.

The Conference: Evening Poetry Readings. Dinner at Clare Hall, at a long table of conference participants presided over by John Matthias. It was good to see John Wilkinson, whom I finally met earlier this year when I was giving a poetry reading in South Bend (which he has recently abandoned for Chicago). He's a charming guy, and I like that he's unbothered about how we've sparred a little in print about J.H. Prynne and those influenced by him. It was good, too, to finally meet Andrea Brady, with whom I've also had some fisticuffs in the pages of obscure quarterly magazines. She tells me there's less going on, poetry-wise, in Cambridge than there was a few years ago, though Justin Katko is there and going strong. I told her my story about being snubbed by John Ashbery, and asked if she'd ever been snubbed by a famous poet. "As a younger woman," she said, "it doesn't really happen." She was rather glamorous in a summer dress, so I took her point. After dinner came a series of readings, with a sort of astonishing range of poets put together by Matthias (the rationale being that "these are poets who knew and admired Printz-Påhlson, or who I am convinced would have admired him"): Clive Wilmer from Oxford, Berengarten, Jesper Svenbro, Matthias himself, my old colleague from Lund Lars-Håkan Svensson, Andrea Brady and John Wilkinson. I'm sure there were others, but I'm having trouble remembering (the chardonnay wasn't very good, but the soave sure was). It's the first time I've heard Wilkinson read, and it was a bit of a surprise. All the instruments agree about Wilkinson being one of the pleasantest, mild-mannered guys you're likely to meet, but he reads with a powerful, macho kind of aggression (the subject matter of his pieces, which he described as "de Chirico nightmares" added to this). The effect was similar to what I experienced when I saw Keston Sutherland read in Chicago some years ago. It makes one wonder if this was the common style of the group of poets who clustered around Prynne a while back. If so, it sheds a new light on a some comments Andrea Brady made about how it could be a bit alienating being one of the only women on that scene. Speaking of Prynne, he was there, wearing what appeared to be a red star pin on his collar. I wonder — given his popularity in China, has he been made into some kind of Chinese version of the Chevalier de Légion d'Honneur? Or is it a matter of expressing approval of the Chinese regime (one hopes not). Or maybe it's something else entirely. I didn't ask, since I saw Romana Huk across the room and wanted to say hello.

Non-Conference Things.. Other than wandering around gawking at the punts on the Cam, and having an entirely pleasant beer with an old grad school friend now with Cambridge's department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, there's not much to report except…

A Very Cambridge Moment. John Matthias, the wonderful Elinor Shaffer of Cambridge and of Comparative Criticism (sister to Sir Peter Shaffer, whose Amadeus you've seen twice), and I were waiting to meet with the president of a certain Cambridge-based publishing firm (no names, but it's not Chris Hamilton-Emery), who was late. As we sat waiting, the publisher, a dashing man in white clothes came tearing into the room, with a black, hand-shaped stain on his shirt. "Terribly sorry," he said, seeing us, but I can't shake your hands. He held up his own fingers, utterly blackened with oil, "typical Cambridge excuse: broken bicycle chain." It's not quite how things go with New York publishers, whose oiliness is in their souls, not on their fingers.

And so it was back to Chicago, with no time to meet with Michael Gregory Stephens and Katy Evans-Bush in London, as I'd hoped to do. There was barely time to hit the Harrod's in Heathrow to pick up a Paddington Bear for my daughter.

Counter-Cultural Poetics: Ed Sanders and History

Salted cashews, and my personal relationship thereunto, probably provide the best analogy for my experience of reading Ed Sanders's poetry. I know there are more sophisticated culinary pleasures than a can of cashews, but I can spend the whole evening with the simple pleasures of cashews and not want anything else, except maybe a bottle of Fat Tire and an episode of Tremé (I thought Wendell Pierce had peaked when he played Bunk Moreland on The Wire, but I was wrong).

I know what keeps me coming back to cashews — the (un)holy combo of salt and fat. But what is it about Sanders? Some of the charm is certainly the aura of the guy: he's the original bridge figure between the Beat generation and the hippies. He's smart and learned, but wears it all very lightly and without pretension. He knew everybody, and has stories to tell. He ran the old Peace Eye bookstore, played in The Fugs, and published the best-named literary journal of its day, Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts (its day, remember, was stuffier than ours, a time when the spirit of Robert Lowell presided over Serious Poetic Concerns). But that's really the Sanders of the short stories and semi-memoirs collected in Tales of Beatnik Glory, which I never quite managed to get through. The Sanders with the cashew-can allure is, for me, the poet. Just what is it that he has that I can't get enough of?

I think the quality in question has something to do with the combination of voice and subject in his books of poetry — a combination unusual enough in the main meteorological zones of our current poetic climate to be called counter-cultural.

One of Sanders' earlier books is called Investigative Poetry (also, if I remember correctly, the title of a course he taught at Naropa), and the title gives a pretty good sense of the main current of Sanders' poetry. He writes long poems that are investigations — into history, for the most part (as in his ongoing poetic history of America, with thick volumes named after different decades of the twentieth century, and a slimmer one devoted solely to the year 1968). Multi-volume projects involving the presentation of history in poetry are on the unusual side lately, and a full-scale biography written in poetry is even rarer (Sanders has written one about his longtime pal Allen Ginsberg called, appropriately enough, The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem). But it's not just the subject that makes Sanders an unusual poet: it's the way he uses language and form when treating those subjects.

Sanders's use of language and form are unusual by both the standards of poetry and of history and biography. Consider the historian and his cousin the biographer. Generally (and of course there are exceptions), these are people who write with an emphasis on objectivity — that is, they rarely draw much attention to themselves in the text, where the focus is intended to be on the information they present. The prose sends off signals by its style, of course, but those signals tend to be of a very particular kind: footnotes, citations, a restricted use of the more informal range of diction, and a certain non-first-person-y style — all of these things signify professionalism, and the adherence to the codes of conduct suitable for writers of the kind of history and biography that wish to be taken seriously as matters of record.

Then there's Sanders. His work includes reference to plenty of archival documents, some of which he has obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, and he shows remarkable knowledge about some of his subjects. But his style is nothing like that of the professional historian. Everywhere, he signals a kind of casualness (abbreviations, neologisms and nonce-words, profanity, low-range diction, exclamation points, digressions, what have you) making it clear that, while this is history or biography, this isn't being written in the mode of the professional historian or biographer.

Line breaks play a big role here: the very fact of them indicates we are dealing with something other than a piece of professional history or biography. Sanders' system of lineation is variable: sometimes he likes a clever enjambment, but not often. Sometimes he does something that looks like the triads of William Carlos Williams, but without the iambic beat that so often comes into play in Williams. Sometimes he breaks with syntax. It's generally not particularly musical, or terribly subtle. Here's an example pulled at random:

The Sandanistas nationalized some industries
& right-wingers around the world rolled their eyes
                                    in Domino-Theory dread

This isn't the line break as a way of measuring out metrical beats, rhymes, anaphoric repetitions, or any other sound unit, really. Nor is it any kind of clever e.e. cummings page-trick. If there's any function to the line breaks, here, it's probably the same function the ampersand has: as a way of saying "this isn't written the way professional history is written." The figurative language, too, though nothing fancy, serves a similar function — That eye-roll comment isn't quite the thing you'd expect from a professional historian like, say, Robert Caro, even though it's true enough. It's just a bit too casual.

So what's Sanders' game? I think, at some level too deep to have been a deliberate choice, he's actually working in the tradition Wordsworth justified in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and for much the same reason. Here's the opening part of Wordsworth's famous definition of the poet from that preface:

Taking up the subject, then, upon general grounds, let me ask, what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? to whom does he address himself? and what language is to be expected from him?—He is a man speaking to men...

When I teach Wordsworth, I like to show this bit to my students, and then, after we've established the "one of the guys" quality of the Wordsworthian poet, follow it up with the next part of the sentence: "He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind..." Woo! Hah! There's a 180-degree turn: the poet is one of the guys, but he's also, you know, better and special, and has a larger soul. There's the Romantic paradox, nor are we entirely free of it to this day. But the paradox of the Wordsworthian poet isn't what's interesting for a discussion of Sanders. What's important is that first part. Wordsworth is setting poets up as those-who-speak-as-whole-people, not those-who-speak-as-specialists. He doesn't want the poet to communicate the way people communicate when they write from their professional positions. A judge speaks of you in legal terms ("the defendant is guilty"); a physician speaks of you in medical terms ("you're going to have to reduce your intake of salted cashews, or your cholesterol will be elevated"); an accountant speaks of you in economic terms ("your deductions aren't high enough to justify an audit"), etc. etc. But the special role of the poet, in Wordsworth's view, is to speak not as, and not to, a specialist. He's a whole person speaking to a whole person.

This is actually a pretty common Romantic position, and it crops up in various permutations and combinations (Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man offer notes towards a program of cultivating the whole person, for example). But why, one wonders, would this emphasis on the whole person, on the man speaking to men, come about when and where it did?

It seems pretty clear that ideas like Wordsworth's came about as reactions to the move toward specialization in social roles (and therefore in communicative styles) in societies effected by the growth of capitalism. Specialization in economic function in England from the late eighteenth century on brought about enormous increases in productivity, but also brought about an anxiety about the effects of such specialization on individuals. Adam Smith, for example, worried about the effect of "a person's whole attention [being] bestowed on the 17th part of a pin, or the 80th part of a button."

The move to specialization was very real, and very rapid, and people (especially men) felt a real pressure to redefine themselves in terms of economic specialty. Here, for example, is what historians Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have to say about it in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850:

Moves towards masculine identification with occupation... can be discerned in official documents such as trade directories, where gentry status continued to be designated by 'gentleman' and 'lady'.... By mid [19th] century, middle-class men were beginning to be marked out by an occupational title which grew more precise and sophisticated. The evolution of the census follows a similar pattern. The early census, from 1801 to 1821, roughly categorized families as agricultural or in 'trade manufacture.' By 1831, families were abandoned and adult males were divided into nine major occupational groups.

Things of a kind that have become so established as to feel natural to us now (filling out a section of a form titled 'occupation,' for example, or asking, over little glasses of bad wine at some dire gallery opening, "so, what do you do?") were new, then, and on the rise. Wordsworth was looking, with whatever degree of success or failure, to define some discursive space against the rising tide of specialization.

It's a pretty radical vision that Wordsworth presents, in that it is very much against the socio-economic currents of his time. It's also a vision shared by Karl Marx, who foresaw, in the imagined post-revolutionary end of alienated labor, an end to the artistic specialist. In the world he dreamed of, Marx said, there "won't be any painters, but at the most men who, among other things, also paint" (I don't have this with me in English, but you can get the German original in Michael Lifschitz's edition of Marx's essays on aesthetics and letters, Über Kunst und Literatur).

So in the combination of voice and subject, there's a sense — a sense deeper than simple affiliation with Beatniks and hippies — that Sanders is a counter-cultural figure. His writing is, in its very warp and woof, set against the communicative norms of its time.

Then there are the norms of poetry — looser, more rapidly changing set of norms than those of the professional historian or biographer. Sanders work sets itself against the dominant conventions of this little demimonde no less certainly than it sets itself against the norms of the historian.

We live, after all, at a historical moment when the poet is very much a kind of specialist (I've written about this before). While Wordsworth resisted the incipient logic of specialization, a great many poets now, especially in the U.S. are creatures of that logic. They're specialists — often academic specialists, with an official job title indicating that they are poets, with professional publication expectations in the specialized field of poetry. I don't mean to say this is good, bad, or indifferent — I just want to note the fact. As Ron Silliman once put it:

The primary institution of American poetry is the university. In addition to its own practices, it provides important mediation and legitimation functions for virtually every other social apparatus that relates to the poem....Regardless of what we may think of the situation, the university is the 500 pound gorilla at the party.

Every period has some kind of role for the poet, and inevitably that role conditions style. Think of how Tennyson's late work was shaped by the simple fact that poetry, for his generation, functioned as a market commodity (this led him to narrative, and to High Sentiment, be it nationalistic, moralistic, or what have you). Or think of how the end of poetry as a viable market commodity led poets to a very different place (aestheticism, and later modernism).

I don't think it's a coincidence that, since the movement of poets into the academy, there's been an increasing emphasis on drawing attention to language and form. When the first wave of poets hit the beaches of academe under the banner of the New Criticism, they were much concerned with the poem as a matter of language and style, as opposed to, say, its content, or ability to lift the spirits and instill morality or whatever. One could supply a million quotes here, but let's settle for a short one, from W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley who wrote, in “The Intentional Fallacy,” that “poetry is a feat of style." This is how the poet (and critic of poetry) could be a specialist: he wasn't just someone who put ideas that more properly belonged in the philosophy or sociology or history department into verse (or who talked about such ideas when they showed up in verse) — he was a bona fide specialist in his own right, because he had something (style in language) he could claim as belonging to his particular expertise.

I know there are people out there who think that contemporary poetic practice is somehow the opposite of what the New Critics believed in, and I'm prepared for them to throw a dented can of old Spaghetti-Os or two at my head — indeed, I'm armed against it! But more recent waves of poets entering the academy have also shown an emphasis on poetry as a special kind of language, distinct from prose. (This wasn't always the case — as Roland Barthes argues in Writing Degree Zero, there are long periods in history when the continuity of prosaic and poetic language is seen as much greater than any differences). I'm sure the rapid and enthusiastic uptake of Language Poetry into academe had a great deal to do with the emphasis in such poetry on language that breaks the norms of communicative prose. This was a language special to poetry, and therefore something with an affinity to institutions based on specialization. And elliptical poetry, certainly the dominant form of our time and place, is to a great extent characterized by its insistence on not following the syntactic rules of prose. This is not to say that poets sit down and say "well, we live in a time of the poet-as-specialist, so I'd better write something that draws attention to the way it is different from prose, thus proving I'm a specialist." I'd say the process is subtler, and that shifts in how one writes based on the institutional and cultural conditions of poetry come about much like the shifts in people's accents: there's a long, slow, generally unconscious change in response to prevailing conditions, and suddenly one finds one has lost one's Canadian vowels — so richly redolent of the Scottish settlement of Canada — and replaced them with the band-saw nasal whine of the American midwest.

Sanders, of course, has little in his poetry that is different from good, clever, casual prose (though a lot that sets it apart from the prose of professional historians). Other than line breaks, there's little that signals affinities for the dominant modes of poetry in our time. So, in his prosiness, his syntactical ordinariness, he operates at a remove from the poetic culture of our moment and its main mode. He's counter-cultural in an age of specialization. I like that — it might even be better than cashews, Fat Tire, and Tremé.

Trigons in London!

I've been holding off blogging about Trigons, John Matthias' latest book, since I want to review it properly (if I ever dig myself out from beneath the papers and poems of the late great Göran Printz-Påhlson, which I've been editing for months). Those of you to the east of the Atlantic have a chance to get a taste of what Matthias' new work is like, though, at a reading sponsored by Shearsman Press later this month. Here's the official propaganda:


*****

We published John Matthias’ new collection Trigons a short while ago.

John is visiting the UK shortly and will give a reading at the University of Notre Dame’s London facility. Below is the official invitation to the event; if anyone wants to attend, please follow the instructions at the boom of the page.

Poetry Reading, Book Launch, Signing, and Reception
Notre Dame London Program Building
1-4 Suffolk Street
London SW1 Y4HG
(Next to the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square)
Monday, 21 June 2010, 6:15 p.m.

You are cordially invited to a poetry reading, book launch and signing by Professor John Matthias, editor of Notre Dame Review and author or twelve volumes of poetry, along with many translations, critical essays, and scholarly books. This reading is Matthias’s first in London for many years. His earliest British publications date from the early 1970s when he lived in Suffolk, Cambridge, and Little Shelford. He has been Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and is currently a Life Member. His recent books of poetry have been published exclusively by British publishers, Salt Publishing in Cambridge and Shearsman Books in Exeter. Carcanet Press has also just released an anthology, Five American Poets, including Matthias’s work alongside that of the four other poets of his immediate generation who attended Stanford University in the 1960s, Robert Hass, James McMichael, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky. A critical volume on these five poets written by Matthias’s former student Robert Archambeau, Laureates and Heretics: Five Careers in American Poetry, will also be available at the reading along with the Carcanet anthology and these books by Matthias:

Working Progress, Working Title, Salt Publishing, 2002
New Selected Poems, Salt Publishing, 2004
Kedging: New Poems, Salt Publishing, 2007

and especially the book just published that is to be celebrated at the reading and launch:

Trigons, Shearsman Books. 2010

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. The following are representative comments about Matthias’s work as a poet: “Robert Duncan: “Matthias is a Goliard…one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time”; Guy Davenport: “One of the best poets in the USA”; Robert Hass: “A powerful historical and geographical imagination”; Stand magazine: “A splendidly wrought mosaic of western culture and history shot through with personal inquiry and discovery”; Parnassus: “One ‘Briggflatts’ after another”; Times Literary Supplement: “Bursting with masterful intelligence”.

If you plan to attend this event, please notify the Notre Dame London Program Office by email or phone. london@nd.edu; tel: 020-7484-7811.

Did he forget to read the sign?

Research in the Humanities: Intellectually Central, Economically Essential, and Probably Doomed

Research in the humanities is, we are told, is in peril. One group of handwringers glances at a set of data about whose work gets cited in English departments, and tells us the humanities have become an intellectual backwater. Another set of worriers tells us that the humanities are helpless in the face of fresh demands to prove their utility. Neither group, though, knows how to read the data held in their trembling hands — data that, in fact, tells us that the humanities are both intellectually vital and of enormous (albeit indirect) social utility.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty sure there is no cause for optimism. The dark clouds looming on the horizons have nothing to do with any real intellectual or utilitarian deficiency on the part of humanists, though. No, those clouds come from the narrow-mindedness and, more importantly, the historical ignorance of those in charge of allocating research funding. The only good news for American humanists is that we’re not going to suffer nearly as much, or as soon, as our British colleagues, who must find a way to exist under a regime of odious knuckleheads who seem to be willfully set on the ham-fisted destruction of the only system of humanities research in the world that rivals, and in many instances exceeds, our own.

*

The first sort of worry — the fear that the humanities have become an intellectual backwater, incapable of producing important thought — comes from what I take to be a misreading of a set of data provided last year by Thomson Reuters’ ISI Web of Science (the data itself is from 2007, but it was disseminated by the Times Higher Education Supplement in March of 2009). The data consists of a list of the number of times different thinkers were cited in books of humanities scholarship. Here’s the list:

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) Philosophy, sociology, criticism 2,521
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) Sociology 2,465
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) Philosophy 1,874
Albert Bandura (1925- ) Psychology 1,536
Anthony Giddens (1938- ) Sociology 1,303
Erving Goffman (1922-1982) Sociology 1,066
Jurgen Habermas (1929- ) Philosophy, sociology 1,049
Max Weber (1864-1920) Sociology 971
Judith Butler (1956- ) Philosophy 960
Bruno Latour (1947- ) Sociology, anthropology 944
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Psychoanalysis 903
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) Philosophy 897
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Philosophy 882
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) Philosophy 874
Noam Chomsky (1928- ) Linguistics, philosophy 812
Ulrich Beck (1944- ) Sociology 733
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) Philosophy 725
David Harvey (1935- ) Geography 723
John Rawls (1921-2002) Philosophy 708
Geert Hofstede (1928- ) Cultural studies 700
Edward W. Said (1935-2003) Criticism 694
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) Sociology 662
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) Criticism, philosophy 631
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) Anthropology 596
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Political theory 593
Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) Criticism, philosophy 583
Henri Tajfel (1919-1982) Social psychology 583
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Philosophy 583
Barney G. Glaser (1930- ) Sociology 577
George Lakoff (1941- ) Linguistics 577
John Dewey (1859-1952) Philosophy, psychology, education 575
Benedict Anderson (1936- ) International studies 573
Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) Philosophy 566
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) Psychoanalysis, philosophy, criticism 526
Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996) History and philosophy of science 519
Karl Marx (1818-1883) Political theory, economics, sociology 501
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Philosophy 501

What, one wonders, gives cause for concern here? Well, according to Mark Bauerline, the problem is this: the list reveals the intellectual moribund nature of the largest swath of humanities scholarship, the work done in literature departments. Here’s what he says in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Literature departments make up the bulk of the humanities, but when it comes to humanities scholarship, literary thinkers and theorists and critics and scholars are overlooked for leading minds in other areas—philosophy, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology.

I don't know the criteria by which thinkers are placed in particular intellectual fields. I suspect it isn't particularly rigorous. Judith Butler, for example, is listed as a philosopher, but she is employed not by a philosophy department, but by the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature Departments of the University of California — Berkeley. Roland Barthes is listed as a specialist in criticism and philosophy, but his training was in classical literature, grammar, and philology, and his academic posts initially concerned lexicology and sociology. Later he held a chair in “Sémiologie Littéraire,” and his most-read writings are on literature and on popular culture. So when Bauerline lets out a plaintive cry about what he takes to be the “near-total absence of people who were trained in and inhabited literature departments,” one has to wonder just how merited that cry really is.

But to concentrate on the dodgy categorization Reuters sets up and Bauerline picks up is to miss a larger point: Bauerline makes the assumption that, because it draws on research in a wide range of fields, literary scholarship has become in some sense a backwater, a place that must look elsewhere for “guidance and inspiration” and that doesn’t originate ideas itself.

As another set of data reveals, though, it is precisely because of this drawing on interdisciplinary sources that humanities research has become of central importance to academic research as a whole.

Before we look at the data about the centrality of humanities research, and the role of interdisciplinary inspiration in creating that centrality, we should take a look at the other kind of worry about the humanities: the fear that it simply cannot justify itself in the utilitarian terms in which it is increasingly forced to justify itself.

*

If you want an example of the humanities being forced onto the Procrustean bed of utilitarianism, you’ll find the best example in Britain. “What?” you say in disbelief, “Britain? Didn’t U.S. News and World Report just tell us that four of the half-dozen best universities in the world are British?” Yeah. They did tell us that. And they might be right. But don’t expect that to last, at least as far as the humanities are concerned, if the British government has its way. The Higher Education Funding Councils, which are in charge of the vast majority of research funding in Britain, are well on their way to implementing a wretched piece of bureaucratic inanity called the “Research Excellence Framework,” administered by the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. Why is this wretched? Because, with all the arrogance of an administrator who thinks he’s bringing the “assessment of outcomes” to an insufficiently regulated field, the program demands the crudest, shortest-sighted kind of accountability. The REF demands, on penalty of a 25% cut in funding, that humanities departments show the impact of their research on the public and the usefulness of their research for industry. Showing the importance of scholarship for other researchers in the field, or even for scholarship in other fields, is not considered important. Rather, one must show that, say, one’s research on medieval history has, for example, been incorporated into the latest Robin Hood movie, and that it has added value (one assumes economic value) to that movie. And — get this — it is the department’s responsibility to A. bring its research to the attention of the public and of industry and B. prove that the research has had an impact on the public or industry. So not only will research have to be conducted with specific, immediately utilitarian ends in mind — departments will have to devote time, energy, and money to shilling their research, and will have to similarly expend resources tracking its immediate impact, and convincing the suits that this impact is of measurable worth. If this policy is implemented, it will be the end of a world-class system of academic humanistic study. It could bring serious research to an end, and, if it lasts for a decade, it could disrupt graduate education in the humanities to such a degree that Britain will lose its place at the forefront of the humanities for generations, perhaps forever. (If you want to grasp the full breadth and depth of the idiocy of the REF, have a look at Stefan Collini’s essay in the first issue of the Cambridge Literary Review, a shorter version of which appeared in the London Review of Books).

We in the United States are spared from the full force of this crudely utilitarian assault (not, as we shall see, to be confused with enlightened utilitarianism) not through any innate virtue on the part of our administrators. No, we are spared, to the degree that we are spared, by the decentralized nature of our academic system. As Frank Donoghue has pointed out in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, the American academy is under assault by many of the same crudely utilitarian forces the British face. But higher education in America is composed of a loose network of fifty different state systems, several relevant federal agencies, and many private and religious institutions of size and importance. In the U.K., the Higher Education Funding Councils play a greater role than any single American force. There are times when decentralization is a disadvantage, but this is not one of them. We’ll suffer a death from a thousand blows. The British humanists are being led to a guillotine.

Those who seek to defend the humanities against the crude utilitarianism that demands quantifiable evidence of the impact of humanistic research beyond the academy have, as a rule, not tried to answer utilitarianism on its own terms. Instead, they have appealed elsewhere, to notions of intrinsic value, or of the necessity of humanities for democracy, or the like. Have a look at the letters section of any recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement and you’ll see one kind of example or another. To get an idea of the kind of argument being made, you don’t need to look any farther than the title of the book Martha Nussbaum has written (with characteristic, Joyce Carol Oates-level speed) on the topic: Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

But here’s the thing: one need not change the terms of argument. There’s a perfectly good utilitarian argument for keeping the humanities well-funded. And it comes from the same very same set of data that refutes the idea that the humanities are a backwater because they draw on other disciplines.

*

Anecdotal evidence for the value of humanities research outside the humanities abounds. My favorite pieces come from “The Unintended Value of the Humanities,” an article Stephen J. Mexal wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Research in history and literary studies has also shaped the world of national intelligence. When the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the CIA) was established, in 1942, the director, William J. Donovan staffed his agency with humanities professors. More than 50 historians alone were hired to develop the OSS's analytical methods. These scholars adopted the framework of humanities research—the footnote, the endnote, the bibliography, cross- and counter-indexing—to give order and form to the practice of intelligence analysis. That, in turn, enabled the OSS to do things like compile a list of foreign targets in order of importance on less than a day's notice.

James J. Angleton, who became chief of counterintelligence for the CIA, understood that the interpretive skills he had cultivated by studying works of literary scholarship like I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism (1929) and William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) could help create new methods of intelligence synthesis and information management. Research methods developed by humanities scholars, in sum, essentially invented the science of intelligence analysis.

Great stuff! So great, in fact, that I demand someone write a novel based on these incidents, that said novel be turned into a movie, and that the movie be available on my cable service tonight. But anecdotal evidence is not the sort of thing with which to impress utilitarian administrators seeking evidence of the instrumental value of the humanities (or, more likely, seeking the absence of such evidence, so that they’ll be able to trim their budgets in these financially challenging times).

What one really needs to placate the utilitarian mind is something by way of quantifiable data about the importance of research in the humanities. Luckily, such data is in fact available, and from a source well-respected by suits everywhere: the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A group there has rigorously tracked the online patterns of scholarly journal reading (a process subtler than the mere tracking of citations), and created a chart of which academic disciplines influence researchers in other disciplines.

One result — no doubt surprising to some — is that the humanities turn out to be tremendously influential on virtually all other fields. They are, indeed, at the center of the map of influence. The article itself provides a deeply-detailed set of explanations, but the data visualization chart makes the point pretty clearly. The white and grey marks indicate what we think of as humanistic fields:

While the chart confirms there’s no direct link between humanities research and, say, manufacturing or genetics, it does show the influence of humanistic fields on economics, which in turn influences production research and through production research influences manufacturing; and it shows the influence of the humanities on ecology, which in turn influences things connected to genetics and, say, animal behavior. Fields that do have direct, instrumental impact on industry draw from the humanities (as the researchers put it, their data should “correct the underrepresentation of the social sciences and humanities that is commonly found in citation data”). This is not to say that non-instrumentalist arguments for the humanities like Martha Nussbaum’s are wrong. Rather, the data here shows that the influence of the humanities on more immediately utilitarian fields is very real. Along with any moral or civic arguments for the humanities, we have a very strong, very clear, very demonstrable utilitarian argument.

When Stephen Mexal writes about the Los Alamos data, he points out that “the graph suggests that the humanities act as a bridge among disciplines,” which brings us to another point: the intellectual vitality of the humanities. While Mark Bauerline looked at the most-cited figures in humanities books and despaired, we can see the interdisciplinarity as a sign of life. Indeed, it would seem that the humanities function as a place where ideas from different disciplines come together, and then follow new and unexpected paths into other fields. The humanities hold a vital, even central, place in the ecosystem of ideas, and if they suffer, everything suffers.

So: if humanities research funding dries up, we may not be able to show any immediate effect on specific industries. But there will be an effect on industry, since humanistic research effects virtually all other fields, and various fields find their way to influence upon one another through the synthesizing activity of the humanities.


A predictable consequence of reduced humanities research is that some innovations will never occur, and some instrumentally useful effects will never come into being. We just won’t know which ones. We quite literally won’t know what we’re missing.

*

One would hope that the utilitarian, administrative minds calling on the humanities to justify themselves would be satisfied with what the Los Alamos data shows, but don’t get your hopes up. We face two nearly insurmountable problems in getting these people to recognize the truth about the instrumental value of humanistic research. Firstly, there is the matter their shortsightedness (they are, remember, crude utilitarians, not enlightened ones); and secondly, there is the matter of their historical ignorance.

The shortsightedness is most clearly manifest in the British “Research Excellence Framework,” which can be counted upon to provide examples of boneheadedness in almost any context (it really is astonishing, and makes even our own most egregious acts of administrative cretinism, like the so-called “assessment” movement, seem only mildly dipshitty in comparison). The REF, we must recall, specifies that in order to be considered valid for funding, research must be shown to have an effect beyond an influence on other research. Intervening steps, by which innovation is diffused and ideas exchanged — steps such as those shown by the Los Alamos data — are too subtle for the REF. Furthermore, the structure of the assessment exercise is such that one has to show the direct influence, not of fields of research, but of particular pieces of research. While the Los Alamos data shows that the humanities have a wide influence, it cannot show that a particular humanistic article helps produce a specific industrial effect. There may be some people involved in the REF who think this is some kind of rigor, when in fact it is something else entirely. It’s roughly analogous to a government agency demanding that environmentalists trace the death of a particular shrub to the burning of a specific discarded tire, and refusing to believe that the burning of industrial waste has an environmental impact if such specific links can’t be shown.

The historical ignorance compounds our problems. It’s as if those entrusted with the future of the university research had no notion whatsoever of the history of such research. Since the Brits are leading the way in imbecilic policy, let’s treat this matter in terms of the history of British universities since their reform in the nineteenth century. Prior to university reform, there was little research of any kind done in British universities, which were devoted to the preparation of the clergy. Industries sponsored various kinds of research outside of the universities, generally with an eye toward its immediate instrumental value (the textile industry, for example, sponsored research on chemical dyes). But, as the historian T.W. Heyck makes clear in The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, this kind of research was, over the course of the nineteenth century, outstripped by the results of research conducted in German universities. The Germans were the first to adopt the modern research university system, in which disinterested research was conducted for its own sake by professionals unanswerable to industry, or to any norms beyond those of their professional field. As it happened, this kind of comprehensive, across-the-board, in-all-subjects, research happened to produce more powerful and far-reaching knowledge than the directly utilitarian research conducted on the British industry-sponsored model. The Victorian bourgeoisie reacted with the kind of intelligence and clear-headedness you’d expect from a class that was daily proving itself capable of global dominance, and set out to replicate the German model in Britain (hybridizing it, where necessary, with the existing model). The results were positive: once directly demonstrable instrumental ends were removed as a criteria for research funding, Britain began to emerge as the intellectual powerhouse it remains. And the results for British industry and public life were incalculably positive.

It’s the incalculable part that’s going to be a problem, I suppose. The current crowd of crude utilitarians at the helm of British higher education — and the similar crowd running our own more unwieldy, and therefore in this instance less vulnerable, system — don’t quite have the vision of the enlightened utilitarians who guided both of our countries into global intellectual and economic ascendancy. One wonders what the Chinese, whose universities are becoming better-funded in all research fields, think of the reduced vision of our leadership. Maybe someday their scholars will make a study of what became of our universities.

Of Schlubs and Tweedy Motherf*ckers: How Profs Dress

It’s been a while since I heard from the jittery fiend who calls himself Raskolnikov P. Firefly, a former colleague of mine long since gone AWOL into the wilds of the extra-academic world, but this morning I found what appeared to be one of his dispatches. Imagine my surprise to see it there, when I opened my box of crullers from the Dunkin’ Donuts drive through: a yellowed manuscript with several cigarette holes and the un-definable odor, something between curry and cat-piss, redolent of Rasko’s old office out near the Buildings & Grounds headquarters, the office he held on to until security removed him from campus after an incident too horrifying to report here in any detail. It seems his research interests have changed: while once he was concerned to catalog the rich twits of Chicago’s north shore, he has now returned to his academic roots, preparing the following document on the sartorial habits of the academic tribe. Behold and wonder.

***

An Aesthetico-Anthropological Prologomenon to Further Inquiry into the Clothing and Appearance of the Professorial Hominid: Preliminary Researches and Findings

By Raskolnikov T. Firefly, B.Sc., M.Phil. M.F.A., Ph.D., former life-fellow of Quisling Hall, by-fellow of the University of Saskatoon (retired), rector of discipline of the College of Pataphysical Medicine (removed), independent scholar (impoverished).

Methodology:

Lurking in the well-tended juniper bushes of land-grant colleges, squatting beneath the faux-gothic gargoyles of Californian technology institutes, rushing unapprehended through painfully air-conditioned corridors in brutalist concrete administrative annexes, and cadging untended tamales in cafeterias. Supplemental research from behind the dumpsters near faculty lounges, and, once, from behind that dieffenbachia you’re looking at.

Research Results:

The apparel and physical presentation of the professorial ranks in Anglophone countries (European funding not yet having been forthcoming, except from the ill-kempt nations of the Baltic coasts) can be classified into nine categories, each of which is correctly subdivided into two subordinate taxonomical categories. Viz.:

1. Vagrant

1.A. Mere Schlub

You have seen him in his rumpled cargo shorts and comic-book t-shirts, his filthy sneakers and his soiled athletic socks. In winter, you have seen him substitute filthy army pants or Carhart work trousers for said shorts. You have seen him dress up for formal events and funerals by throwing a stained and buttonless suit jacket or an unevenly worn corduroy jacket over his existing outfit. You have not seen him shave, for his is the freedom, the glorious autonomy, of the Man Who Need Not Impress. {Personal note scrawled in manuscript margin: “Attn.: Archambeau”}

1.B. Park Bench Sleeper

These are among the most distinguished of all academics, driven by monomania to attend to no matters but their research. Hence the filthy, unevenly buttoned Oxford shirts, frayed at the collar and encrusted with what we can only hope is nothing more offensive than well-aged youghurt. Hence the transcendence beyond mismatched socks to the sublime and rarified realm of mismatched shoes. Common in Chicago’s Hyde Park, near M.I.T., and in the common room of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Much awkwardness ensues at the formal Nobel receptions to which these figures, with some regularity, repair.

2. Aging Hipster

2.A. Low Hipster

Clad in work-shirts with embroidered name tags bearing words like “Bud” or “Mickey,” these are the professors you find hanging out on the foam-stuffed Swedish furniture in college radio station lounges. Do not call them by the names on their clothing, as these are never their actual names. Do not attempt to identify the band named on the tiny pin worn on the straps of their shoulder bags: you neither know of the band, nor can you pronounce its name, since it features an umlaut with an extra dot.

2.B. High Hipster

Diesel jeans? Nope, that was ten years ago. But the skinny jeans and bowling shoes worn by the high hipster prof did cost more than your car. So did the tight-fitting sweater and the oddly shaped glasses, which are the same odd shape as those worn by all architects, graphic designers, advertising copy writers, entertainment lawyers, entertainment accountants, entertainment actuaries, and entertainment podiatrists.

3. Sales Team

3.A. Stereo Salesman

Chinos. Golf shirt. All that’s missing is a nametag, really.

3.B. Insurance Salesman


These poor lost souls wear suits, or suit pants and a tucked-in Oxford shirt. The depths of their silent desperation are unfathomable, unless they are economists, in which case the depth of silent desperation exists in direct proportion to the gulf between their salaries and those of Wall Street bankers.


4. Tweedy Motherfucker

4.A. Dandaical Pseudo-Aristocrat

He probably teaches Irish literature, or possibly pre-twentieth century art history. He updates his Facebook profile picture with alarming frequency, but all pictures show his sneer of cold command. Cast a cold eye on him, horseman, and pass by.

4.B. Starring in His Mental Movie as “Professor”

Tweed jacket. Knit tie. Possible beard, possible Camelot-era Kennedy haircut. He walks abstractedly across the quadrangle, watching a movie that plays in the drive-in theater of his cranium. The movie is called “I am, at last, a professor.” The plot is like that of Pinnochio, who yearned to be a real boy. This is the only species of professor other than the Insurance Salesman to carry a briefcase rather than a shoulder bag (or the discarded plastic shopping bag of the Park Bench Sleeper).

5. Field and Stream

5.A. Manly Archeologist

His bald head is bronzed. His white beard is grizzled. His camp shirt is open at the neck, and his burly legs extend from beneath his khaki shorts like elegant oaken shafts. He could get away with a goddam ascot if he wanted to, because he is The World’s Most Interesting Man. You are not him.

5.B. Pudgy Birder

Failed example of subcategory 5.A., above.

6. Nun

6.A. Secular Nun

No one but she has so thoroughly mastered the art of the turtleneck beneath the plaid jumper. No one but she knows where such jumpers can be purchased. No one has more ergonomic footwear.

6.B. Actual Nun

Rarely seen outside of the microhabitat of South Bend, Indiana.

7. Real Estate Lady

7.A. Sleek Real Estate Lady

If you’ve seen those pictures of real estate agents on benches at bus stops, you know the type: grinning impossibly white grins from beneath impossibly blonde hair, wearing suits in bright red or canary yellow, these are among the few female professorial types to co-ordinate the color of their pumps with the color of their outfits. Many are former high school principals now teaching education. In fact, they may all be former high school principals now teaching education.

7.B. Bedraggled Real Estate Lady

Picture the a professor from the sub-category 7.A. above. Now picture several young children, and a husband whose sole contribution to raising said children consists of turning the channel to cartoons during dinner. Picture an unrevised dissertation awaiting revision, and a tenure clock ticking in the background, somewhere near the rapidly emptying vodka bottle. Now picture what has happened to her hair and outfit.

8. Flower Child (Advanced Years)

8.A. Big Ole Flowing Skirt Mamas

Common in theater departments and in programs devoted to the teaching of freshman writing. Hard-working and incredibly popular with students, these figures are somehow invisible to high-level administrators and those in charge of tenure and promotion.

8.B. The Jogging and Yoga Set

As they enter their sixties, they pass you with ease on the jogging trail, their gray hair somehow immobile in the wind. The wisdom of their selection of spandex is disputed, unless the professor in question is Martha Nussbaum. They will all outlive you. Yeah, you. You with the meatball sandwich and the Anchor Steam Ale.

9. Librarian

9.A. Tina Fey

I believe you know the type. Much that is black. Sometimes a pencil skirt. And those glasses. Those glasses…

9.B. Tragic Hipster Glasses

…those glasses that, if bent too far up in cat’s eye fashion, can go so tragically wrong.



***

At this point Raskolnikov’s notes seem to say something apologetic about stereotyping, but I have smeared the pages with donut crumbs and coffee, and his remarks are illegible. Perhaps, with a sufficient grant, I could begin a research program to decipher them.

Archambeau World Tour, June 2010 Update

You're probably exhausted from following the Archambeau World Tour 2010 motorcade, which has already ranged all the way from, well, uh, from South Bend, Indiana, to Chicago, Illinois. But fire up that VW microbus and get those Birkenstocks on — my management team, agent, lawyers, other lawyers, accountants and assorted hangers-on from the entourage have added another date, this one in Cambridge, England. Here are the official details from the good people at Cambridge:

Göran Printz-Påhlson Memorial Conference

Clare Hall, Cambridge
West Court
Monday, 28 June 2010

I would like to announce to all Fellows, Visiting Fellows, students, Life Members, and any other interested parties that a memorial conference and poetry reading for the Swedish poet, critic, translator and Clare Hall Fellow Göran Printz-Påhlson will take place on the evening of Monday, June 28th. Participating will be:

Jesper Svenbro (Sweden, and member of the Swedish Academy)
Lars-Håkan Svensson (Sweden)
Elinor Shaffer (Clare Hall)
John Wilkinson (UK and University of Chicago)
Clive Wilmer (UK)
Andrea Brady (US and UK)
John Matthias (US, Clare Hall Life Member)
Elaine Feinstein (UK)
Richard Berengarten (UK, founder of Cambridge Poetry Festival)
Robert Archambeau (USA, and editor of Printz-Pahlson’s English poems and prose)

All of these poets have Cambridge connections, and four of them have collaborated in the past with Printz-Påhlson on various projects. Ulla, Unn, and Finn Printz-Påhlson will come over from Sweden for the event. If you are in Cambridge this summer, or if you know people who will be there, do consider attending and encouraging others to attend. It is not necessary to know Printz-Påhlson’s work to enjoy the event. These are major poets and scholars, and they have never before all read together at the same venue before. Do spread the word. This is the schedule:

Afternoon: 4:00

1. Elinor Shaffer : Remarks on GP-P
2. Robert Archambeau: Progress report on GP-P's selected works in
English.
3. Jesper Svenbro: GP-P as translator and influence
4. Lars-Håkan Svensson and John Matthias: A reading of GP-P
poems in English and Swedish
5. Poems written for GP-P: Berengarten, Svensson, Svenbro,
Matthias, and anyone else who has written a poem
dedicated to Goran.
6. Closing Remarks: John Matthias

Evening: 8:30

A Celebration of Contemporary Poetry

Jesper Svenbro
Andrea Brady
John Wilkinson
Elaine Feinstein
Clive Wilmer
Richard Berengarten

Democratic Consumption, Servile Production: On Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate

Anish Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" is, to my mind, the most successful piece of public art in all of Chicago. It is also more representative of who we are, and how we live, than I imagine even Kapoor ever guessed it could be.

Universally referred to as "The Bean," it sits in a prominent position in Millennium Park, and is almost always surrounded by visitors who seem to really enjoy the piece. A giant, shiny, bean-shaped work of sculpture that gleams in the sun, its curved surface reflects the world around it: the dramatic skyline of Michigan Avenue, the sky, and the visitors themselves, who love to pick their images out of the reflected crowd as they approach the sculpture.

In some ways, "Cloud Gate" is a tremendously democratic work of art: unlike the statues of civil war generals and other Worthy Notables that dot the city, it doesn't revere a particular hero of war or politics or culture, placing him above the crowd: it quite literally reflects the people around it. And unlike the pedestal-mounted figures in Grant Park to the south, it doesn't tower over the people: it invites them closer, and even lets them crawl around underneath it. There's no "hands-off" quality to the big bean. It succeeds where what I take to be a totally misguided attempt at democratic art — Jackson Park's "Statue of the Republic," — fails, because it doesn't rely on a classical iconography that many of the visitors to the city's parks can't decode. What you see (yourself, your crowd, your city, bent into funhouse distortions or stretched out in a curving panorama greater than what one could see unaided) is what you get. And while "Cloud Gate" is modern in form, it doesn't alienate a lot of people, as do some of the great modernist works of public sculpture erected at the command of the first mayor Daley when he was out to show the world that Chicago was more than just the hog-butcher to the world. "Cloud Gate" is, in these ways, a very rare thing — a totally successful piece of democratic public art.

But here's the thing. All of the ways "Cloud Gate" is successful have to do with its consumption, with how visitors see it and interact with it and otherwise take it in. At the other end of the circuit, in the realm of production, it is very much a dictatorial/servile piece of art. Consider how John Ruskin describes the difference between the classical Greek mode of building, and the medieval or gothic way. The medieval craftsman was able to improvise, to add his individual form of expression to the edifice on which he worked. This may have come at the expense of the overall design, and it may have shown his own limitations — the craftsmanship of the whole production, made by many hands, would be uneven. In contrast, the classical Greek aesthetic subordinated the individual craftsman to the head planner, whose vision and expression dominated all others. "The Greek master-workman was far advanced in knowledge and power above the Assyrian or Egyptian," says Ruskin, "Neither he nor those for whom he worked could endure the appearance of imperfection in anything; and, therefore, what ornament he appointed to be done by those beneath him was composed of mere geometrical forms,—balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage,—which could be executed with absolute precision by line and rule, and were as perfect in their way, when completed, as his own figure sculpture." Perfect, high-gloss stuff, but the cost? Almost everyone who worked on the piece worked to a strict rule, unsung, without opportunity for individual expression, and servile to dictatorial commands from on high.

The way "Cloud Gate" was made is very much in this Greek mode that Ruskin describes. The thing is a miracle of engineering, but no engineer's name is credited — it is an "Anish Kapoor" artwork. And the people who actually built the thing didn't get to make any individualized contribution to the way it appeared. Given the technical requirements, I don't even think this would have been particularly feasible, and I'm not at all sure it wouldn't have reduced the aesthetic impact of the thing, and its appeal to audiences. (There are contemporary public art works built on Ruskin's gothic lines — the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt comes to mind, for example). But what I'm getting at is this: "Cloud Gate" was made in a hierarchical way, with a controlling intelligence at the top and subordinate, servile, intelligences carrying out the actual production.

So the work is democratic in the realm of consumption: bright, appealing, fun, and approachable. But at the same time it is servile in production, with an uncredited army of workers carrying out tasks that don't allow for their own individual expression. And this is how it becomes a representative work for our times. Late capitalism, after all, promises us all kinds of freedoms as consumers, and courts our favor in the realm of consumption, seeking ingeniously and tirelessly to give us what we want. But in the realm of production ours is an overwhelmingly hierarchical system, with freedom of action reserved for those in positions of authority, and real constraints put on the creative expression of those lower down in the order of things. I mean, take a look at what you're wearing — unless it's a Savile Row tailor-made suit, and if you read this blog, it isn't — it was made by the skilled hands and hard work of someone who had no input on how it looks, or how it is stitched together. From sweatshops to cubicles, the story of production is often much the same.

"Cloud Gate," then, is a mirror not just of the skyline of Chicago, but of the whole economy that skyline represents.


***

UPDATE May 26: Yesterday, as I slumped into the low-slung marshmallow that passes for a sofa in my colleague Dave Park's office, Park told me he'd read this post. "Yeah. He said, his eyes still fixed on a huge pile of papers (his research -- interviews with the people who staff the seemingly-doomed Vocalo public media project), "it was a good post. But the thing is, you know, that that democratic/servile thing is true of most pop culture." He's probably sort of right: if you think about how Britney Spears concerts have been produced, you see it right away: legions of the unsung carry out commands, have little or no creative input, and the adulation and credit don't go to them. I suppose what's interesting about Kapoor in this context is that he's part of a newish thing in high culture: the artist as a CEO of sorts. People like Kapoor or, say, Jeff Koons (should I say "the odious troll Jeff Koons"? Yes. Yes I should) don't follow the old paradigm of the artist as A. a big name but also B. a maker, a craftsman. There have been other times when this idea was at work: a lot of Renaissance paintings were made with unnamed apprentices doing the grunt work to the master's specs. But what's notable now is the industrial model of production taking root in the artworld. Those Renaissance apprentices did get to express themselves a bit in their handiwork, and they were expected to go on to make artworks of their own devising. The guys who burnished "Cloud Gate" are not. I'd have told that to Park, but he was busy shaking his head over the Vocalo papers, so I heaved myself off his sofa and legged it over to my office, thinking how it would be nice to have an army of anonymous assistants to carry out my whims. As it stands, I have only one.

Savage Aesthetics: Coherence and Ethics Then and Now

I can’t decide whether it’s David Shields’ courage I admire, or that of his publisher. You know Shields, I think, at least by reputation: after writing four novels, he’s having his moment of basking in the full glow of the media, promoting his manifesto-as-collage-of-quotations, Reality Hunger. It’s a collection of quotations from all manner of sources, plus passages he’s written, with no attribution given to any of the passages except in a tiny-print section at the back, a concession to his publisher and their lawyers. Shields’ attitude to the inclusion of this section is pretty clear: he’s added dotted lines along the left-hand margin, with a little picture of scissors: he’d prefer you cut the pages out, and have the experience of reading the book without any sense of who wrote what.

For those of us who live on the tiny moon of experimental poetry, none of this is really shocking: collage and the death of the author have been the air we breathe for some time. But on the larger planet of fiction published by New York conglomerates, where the atmosphere contains some trace elements of money and fame, Shields’ book has caused some trepidation (and on the great glowing sun of pop culture, he’d find himself in real danger of lawsuits).

Anyway: I’m glad Shields’ book is out there: someone needed to make a big, visible move in the direction of intellectual freedom at a time when property rights threaten to dominate in all creative fields. While some very sharp lawyers are at work on this, too, Shields has achieved the kind of notoriety around which people might rally. He’s caught some flak for taking his stand, of course. As he puts it, “numerous bloggers appear to think I’m the anti-Christ because I don’t genuflect at the twin altars of the novel and intellectual property,” but none of this seems to bother him. I like that.

For all of Shields’ admirable audacity, though, some of the things he says still drive me up the wall. It’s not the fact that he refuses to genuflect before the altar of intellectual property that bothers me: it’s his worship of another false idol, one which I suppose we could call presentism, or perhaps (following the poet and philosopher Owen Barfield), chronological snobbery. In History in English Words, Barfield defines chronological snobbery as the belief that, intellectually, “humanity languished for countless generations in the most childish errors on all sorts of crucial subjects, until it was redeemed by some simple scientific dictum of the last century.” While Barfield was thinking about early twentieth century scientism, the kind of chronological snobbery he describes seems to be an occupational hazard for a certain generation of guys who teach postmodernism — just as the equally boneheaded idea of American exceptionalism afflicts a certain generation of literary Americanists, and just as the utterly odious, ahistorical, notion of favoring "native species" rots the souls of the less-enlightened breed of eco-critics. (Am I going overboard? I am, I am. Forgive me, and think of all the lunches with colleagues during which, outnumbered and tongue-tied, I’ve sputtered in graceless frustration over my enchiladas).

Anyway. Consider what Shields says in the recent essay "Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps":

We live in a post-narrative, post-novel world. Plots are for dead people. Novelly novels exist, of course, and whenever I’m on a plane, it’s all I see everyone reading, but they function for us as nostalgia: when we read traditional novels, we get to pretend that life is still coherent.

Oooh. Argh. I mean, here’s a guy who thinks that life (and the art that represented it) were simple, coherent things, until our own time, when a great postmodern enlightenment broke like long-awaited sunlight over the stricken land. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be literary was sheer heaven. Now, in our enlightened age, even the casual airborne novel reader thumbing this week’s James Patterson title knows in his deconstructed soul that coherence of life and form are quaint things to be appreciated with nostalgia for the time when they were all that the simple groundlings knew, and all they needed. “Art, like science, progresses,” says Shields, leaving no doubt that he feels we’ve moved on from a naïve sense of coherent life and art and into something better, and more knowing. Listen carefully, and from far beneath Shields’ airplane a spinning noise can be heard from Owen Barfield’s grave.

It’s not that Shields is ignorant of literary history. When he writes about the freedom of authors to quote with or without attribution, and to creatively incorporate the work of other writers into their own creations, he appeals to a long tradition. As he says near the end of Reality Hunger, he’s “writing to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted.” But this sense of history is excruciatingly limited: Shields certainly seems to take for granted the notion that the past was a time when aesthetics were guided by a sense of coherence.

Of course there have been moments when the idea of coherence has been a predominant aesthetic principle. In antiquity, Horace’s idea of decorum was all about the fitting of parts to a whole; in the neoclassical theory of, say, Alexander Pope, coherence was one of the guiding principles of art, and his “regularized” edition of Shakespeare attempts to save the bard from roughness and irregularity. Coleridge’s notion of organic form is a very sophisticated attempt to reconcile the variety of art to a notion of coherence, and Coleridgean ideas entered the American academy under the New Critics. But this is only one side of the story. There’s a long tradition of art full of incoherencies and dissonances, and an accompanying set of aesthetic theories justifying and explaining such art.

Consider the greatest and most popular of nineteenth century English aesthetic theorists, John Ruskin. He despised what he saw as the oppressive regularity, coherence, and formal perfection of classicism and, in his famous ragbag of an opus The Stones of Venice held up against it his own version of gothic aesthetics. In one of the most famous passages of that work, he defines the qualities of mind and form that constitute the gothic in contrast to the classical Greek:

Formal Qualities of the Gothic
1. Savageness
2. Changefulness
3. Naturalism
4. Grotesqueness
5. Rigidity
6. Redundance

Gothic Qualities of Mind
1. Savageness or Rudeness
2. Love of Change
3. Love of Nature
4. Disturbed Imagination
5. Obstinacy
6. Generosity

There’s a lot to work with here, but since what we’re concerned with at the moment is the idea that incoherence as an aesthetic principle is not just a quality of our own times, let’s look at what Ruskin says about savageness as an aesthetic principle, and its relation to ornament. After going on for a while about the northern origins of the gothic, Ruskin moves on to an appreciation of the gothic relation of whole to part in a work of art (here he’s talking architectural as art):

If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely as an expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in some sort, a noble character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when considered as an index, not of climate, but of religious principle.

In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter XXL of the first volume of this work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament, properly so called, might be divided into three:—1. Servile ornament, in which the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect of the higher;—2. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers;—and 3. Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all. I must here explain the nature of these divisions at somewhat greater length.

Of Servile ornament, the principal schools are the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian; but their servility is of different kinds. The Greek master-workman was far advanced in knowledge and power above the Assyrian or Egyptian. Neither he nor those for whom he worked could endure the appearance of imperfection in anything; and, therefore, what ornament he appointed to be done by those beneath him was composed of mere geometrical forms,—balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical foliage,—which could be executed with absolute precision by line and rule, and were as perfect in their way, when completed, as his own figure sculpture. The Assyrian and Egyptian, on the contrary, less cognizant of accurate form in anything, were content to allow their figure sculpture to be executed by inferior workmen, but lowered the method of its treatment to a standard which every workman could reach, and then trained him by discipline so rigid, that there was no chance of his falling beneath the standard appointed. The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The Assyrian gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a legal standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave.

But in the mediæval, or especially Christian, system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God's greater glory. Therefore, to every spirit which Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, nor your confession silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.

Servile ornament is the realm of coherence, but the gothic is the realm of revolutionary ornament, the triumph of part over whole, an aesthetic that allows for imperfection in its celebration of freedom. Was this really what mediæval gothic was like? I’m no expert, and my go-to mediævalist has skipped town for Cambridge, but anyone who’s spent much time wandering around a period cathedral will know there’s at least a strong measure of truth to Ruskin’s view of the middle ages. And his views were deeply influential in his own century — on Preraphaelistism in visual art and literature, for example, and on the Arts & Crafts movement in ceramics, woodworking, furniture design, and architecture.

I don’t mean to limit this aesthetic of incoherence to Ruskin and the gothic, either. As Daisy Fried (who hipped me to Sheilds’ essay on Facebook) pointed out, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for example, also courts incoherence. As does the Romantic genre of the deliberate fragment, And the tradition continued in all sorts of ways throughout the twentieth century, from Dada to, say, the atonal serial music of a guy like Karlheinz Stockhausen. Anyway: the point is that this notion that the past was a time when aesthetic coherence was always lauded is false.

So Shields is a presentist, a chronological snob, at least in the essay in question. But what’s bothersome is not just his sense that he’s on to something new when, in fact, he’s not. It’s that the version of the view he offers is, in fact, a kind of reduction of stronger versions of the view offered in the past. Consider Shields’ reasons for championing an aesthetic of incoherence and multiplicity. He turned to such an aesthetic, he says, because he found the alternatives “predictable, tired, contrived.” That is, he wanted novelty. Okay. But that’s a pretty shallow rationale, especially when compared with some of the deeper thinking on the issue from thinkers predating Shields. For Ruskin, there’s an ethical quality to an aesthetic of savage incoherence. In his view, it is the way to honor individuality, and not just that — it is the way to accept the individual in all of his imperfection. And this ethical dimension continues in whole swathes of thinking about those kinds of art that eschew coherence. Let’s come back to Stockhausen for a moment. 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 ethical implications for those who appreciate it.

So: it’s not just that Shields sees novelty where, in fact, there’s a long historical tradition. It’s that his version of an aesthetic of incoherence in “Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps” is attenuated in the ethical dimension that was so thoroughly elaborated by earlier thinkers. Shields’ version of the aesthetic of incoherence isn’t a triumphant break with an impoverished past: it’s a pale echo of an old idea. It's weak tea that thinks it is nitroglycerine.